The photograph was taken during the crossing or immediately upon landing on the Normandy coast as part of Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. Jack Lieb, as a war correspondent for the Hearst newsreel, was aboard a sea-based element of the 82nd Airborne Division and documented the landing phase in color as one of the few eyewitnesses to do so. The landing ships visible in the image (LST and LCT types) belonged to the massive Allied fleet assembly that put troops and materiel ashore at Utah Beach—one of five sectors of the invasion front. Lieb’s 16-mm Kodachrome footage represents rare color documents of an event that has otherwise been preserved almost exclusively in black and white.