The orders came to Life war photographer Robert Capa in London from the United States Army in the last days of May of 1944: You are not to leave your flat for more than an hour at a time. Your equipment must be packed.

Capa was one of four photographers chosen to cover the first days of the United States Army’s massive assault on Hitler’s Europe; he had just enough time to hurry from his apartment on Belgrave Square to buy a new Burberry coat and a Dunhill silver flask. The need for bella figura had been at his core since his childhood in Budapest, where appearances and charm were means to survive.

Who didn’t trade stories about the mysterious Hungarian Jewish refugee with the mass of dark gleaming hair and velvet eyes? Child-like and beguiling, he was short and moved quickly, as if in flight, a cigarette invariably dangling from his mouth. His disguise was nonchalance. State-less, he glided through battle zones with a confection of papers. He was 30 years old and had already taken some of the most remarkable images of the century: the haggard faces of the Spanish Civil War, the plump air wardens serving tea in the London Underground during the Blitz, Italian children lost in the rubble of Naples.

As a child Capa wanted to be a writer; his best work has the intimacy of a storyteller’s gaze and passion. He would never cover any war in which he did not love one side and hate the other, noted his biographer Richard Whelan, but his compassion was not partisan. Capa’s special genius was to make himself invisible in the field while becoming conspicuously larger than life off of it. The helmet he carried through the 1943 Italian Campaign was inscribed “Property of Robert Capa, great war correspondent and lover.” No one ever disputed either claim. Leaving for D-day, Capa was determined to keep up the standard. “I was the most elegant invader of them all,” he would later write in his 1947 novel-memoir, Slightly out of Focus.

Rushing from his apartment early on May 29, Capa could not leave a note. Instead, he signed a blank check, on which he placed a large bottle of Arpège. The check was for his landlord, the perfume for his wartime love, Elaine Justin, a fragile strawberry blonde he nicknamed Pinky. She was recovering from a burst appendix outside London; Capa was not concerned about the lack of a proper good-bye. He chafed at the idea of permanence.

Besides his Burberry, he carried two Contax cameras. They provided some safety in the middle of a battle because he did not have to stop and look through the lens. He also carried his Rollei and Speed Graphic cameras, along with a telephoto lens, all packed in oilskin bags. At Weymouth, the sight of the harbor stunned him: thousands of battleships, troopships, freighters, and invasion barges mingled together—5,000 in all—the largest armada ever assembled. Capa was handed an envelope of invasion francs, a package of condoms, and a French phrase book that suggested he speak to the local girls by asking them, “Bonjour, mademoiselle, voulez-vous faire une promenade avec moi?”

He later made a joke about the book, but never about June 6, 1944. Capa’s 11 frames of blur and grit from D-day would become the collective vision of how it felt to be part of the “longest day,” the turning point of World War II.

‘D’ was army code for invasion day. In 24 hours, an elite assault unit of the United States Army, the amphibious 16th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, would storm the beaches below the cliffs of Normandy. The outcome of D-day, the largest naval invasion in history, launched 70 years ago this June, would determine who won the war. The presence of Robert Capa with an infantry division was considered a talisman of luck.