Born in Seattle on May 15, 1921, Huston "Hu" Sears Riley grew up on Mercer Island in a house built around 1905 by his architect father. By all accounts a quiet and modest man, Hu became the face of the D-Day invasion when a photo of him struggling in the surf to reach the Normandy beachhead appeared in the June 19, 1944, issue of Life magazine. Taken on June 6, 1944, by renowned photojournalist Robert Capa, the blurry image showed a determined soldier, half-crawling, half-swimming to the shores of Omaha Beach, pushing his lifebelt ahead of him. Although Capa’s photo was hailed for depicting unflinching bravery in the face of chaos, it would take 50 years to confirm the man’s identity. After recovering from the D-Day assault, where he was wounded four times, Riley was sent to North Africa and Sicily, and then fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded again. After the war, he returned to Mercer Island, married, and became a representative for sporting-goods manufacturers. Active in local veterans’ affairs, Riley died on October 2, 2011. A decade later, a cove on the north shore of Mercer Island was officially named Riley Cove in honor of the decorated war hero.
The Longest Day
Huston Riley, known as "Hu," was born in Seattle on May 15, 1921, to architect Howard Huston Riley (1890-1950) and his wife Veta Bernice Burkholder Riley (1890-1963). He had two older sisters, Marjorie ("Molly") (1917-1998) and Patricia (1920-1988). His father purchased property on an unnamed cove on the north end of Mercer Island and built the family home around 1905.
In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, Riley enlisted in the 82nd Airborne Division. During training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he injured himself in a practice jump and ended up transferring to the infantry. On July 1, 1942, he shipped out of New York to Scotland, where he received additional training, and on October 16, left to participate in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily.
On June 6, 1944, Riley was a private first class serving with Company F, 16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, when his unit was deployed in the first wave of the D-Day invasion in Northern France. Some 34,000 soldiers landed on Omaha Beach that day; by the end of the day, 2,501 American soldiers had died. Dropped 100 yards from the beach, Riley jumped out of his boat into water that was over his head and promptly sank, weighed down by his rifle and other gear. In a letter written to World War II magazine in June 2004, Riley described what happened next:
"I was not getting anywhere trying to walk, so I squeezed the release on my life belt, and I shot to the surface like a cork. I was bobbing on the water like a big bird, a hell of a target. I removed the life belt and pushed it in front of me … The landing craft must have taken a direct hit from the shore batteries, as all I could see was a bunch of junk and bodies everywhere … The tide was almost in when I reached the beach. Since I was very wet, it was a real struggle to try to get up and run. I ran in a half crouch, but I was hit in the shoulder close to the neck with a burst of automatic weapons fire. Two fellows grabbed me by the arms and pulled me to the base of a bluff. One was a buck sergeant from E Company and the other was a photographer with a camera around his neck and a press insignia on his shoulder. All I could think of was, 'What in the hell is this guy doing here?' Then he ran off into the water to a landing craft" ("The Man Behind the 'Face' Remembers D-Day").
The photographer was Robert Capa (1913-1954), who by his 20s had established an international reputation as a fearless war correspondent, covering conflicts in Spain, China, and now Europe. Capa took about 100 photographs that day, but the one that featured a blurry soldier, half-crawling, half-swimming to reach the beach would go on to become one of World War II’s most iconic images, representing one of the most pivotal moments of the twentieth century. The photo, published in the June 19, 1944, issue of Life magazine, is one of the few surviving photographs of the invasion that day taken from the beach. Some believe that Capa’s photo, known as "Soldier in the Surf," inspired the opening sequence in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 award-winning film Saving Private Ryan.
Riley was wounded four times that morning. Despite his injuries, he considered himself lucky, since only about one-fourth of the soldiers in his company survived the invasion. As he recalled five decades later. "It was a miserable day. It was tough to see [soldiers] strewn around, not living. That was a … bloody mess" ("The Soldier in the Surf"). After recuperating from his injuries at a hospital in England, he later fought in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was wounded again. He received three Purple Hearts for his combat heroism.
Photojournalist Robert Capa
The life of war correspondent Robert Capa (1913-1954) could not have been more different. Born Andre (also spelled Endre) Friedmann in Budapest, Capa left Hungary at the age of 17, settling in Berlin. The rise of Hitler forced the young Jew to move to Paris and then to New York, where he changed his name. As a photojournalist, Capa covered the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s (accompanied at one point by writer Ernest Hemingway) as well as the Chinese resistance to the invasion by Japan in 1938 and the London Blitz in 1940-1941. Capa had shot for Life magazine since 1938. "From Italy alone, he had produced eight full-length stories and had distinguished himself in the slaughter at Anzio. But Life paid him only standard rates, and, despite his fame, in the spring of 1944, Capa was still struggling for a long-term contract" (Vanity Fair).
In 1944, he was one of 18 photographers given credentials by the U.S. Armed Forces to cover the D-Day preparations and invasion. During the landing, he was dropped close to the beach and waded ashore with the first wave of soldiers, carrying three heavy cameras through waist-deep water. Capa spent only 90 minutes ashore but it was enough time to capture the famous photograph. "Suddenly, from the boil of the red ocean, Capa caught the face of a young, helmeted soldier under fire, manning his position half submerged, with the eerie towers of German obstacles behind him. Capa raised his camera and caught what would emerge from Omaha Beach as arguably the iconic image of the war. 'I didn’t dare to take my eyes off the finder of my Contax and frantically shot frame after frame.' Then his camera jammed. In front of Capa, hundreds of men were screaming and dying, body parts flying everywhere" (Vanity Fair).
Capa shot an estimated 106 frames on Omaha Beach. They survived because he carried the film with him off the beach rather than entrusting it to military personnel. Despite the care he took, a photo-lab assistant destroyed most of the images when, in his excitement, he set the drying-cabinet temperature too high, melting the emulsion right off the film. Only 11 frames were saved, including "The Soldier in the Surf."
Despite the terrible loss of the negatives, what followed next was a mad dash to deliver the remaining images to New York in time to meet Life’s print deadline. The film was flown to Washington, D.C., where the images were cleared by censors and then couriered to New York. "Just after Life’s Saturday close, the editors cabled, 'Today was one of the great picture days in Life’s office, when Bob Capa’s beachlanding and other shots arrived.' ... The accompanying story told how Capa had gotten his shots: 'Immense excitement of moment made Photographer Capa move his camera and blur the picture'" (Vanity Fair). In another twist of fate, the original negative was lost soon after the photograph appeared in the June issue.
In 1947, Capa received the Medal of Freedom and co-founded the photography cooperative, Magnum, a long-held dream of his, that same year. In the early 1950s, he accepted an assignment to cover the struggle in Indochina that would eventually turn into the Vietnam War. He was killed on May 25, 1954, when he stepped on a land mine in Thai-Binh, Indochina.
Identifying the Soldier in the Surf
It took some 50 years to confirm the identity of the soldier in Capa’s photograph. Until the 1990s, it was thought to be Edward Regan of Atlanta (although Riley’s mother, Veta, said she recognized her son immediately after seeing the photo). Military historians and university professors weighed in over the years. One breakthrough came when historian Lowell Getz, a former University of Illinois professor, determined that Regan had landed on Utah Beach, not Omaha Beach.
What did Riley say about all this? "It was me. I remember swimming in and pushing my lifebelt in front of me" ("The Soldier in the Surf"). When he realized that Regan was getting credit as the man in the photo, Riley sent a letter and his picture to Life, which were printed in the magazine’s Letters to the Editor section. Years later when traveling back East, Riley looked up Regan. "We each still felt certain that we were the guy in the photo, but we talked for some time and had some good laughs" ("The Man Behind the 'Face' Remembers D-Day").
After the war, Riley returned to his life on Mercer Island. On September 18, 1948, he married Grace Charlotte Fillinger (1923-2018) and the couple had two children. He graduated from Seattle University and started H & R Sales, a business that represented several sporting-goods manufacturers, which he managed for the next 35 years. He was active with Mercer Island’s Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and was a board member of the Mercer Island Historical Society. He returned to Normandy just once and was able to experience Omaha Beach under dramatically different circumstances. "I walked down to the same place I came in on … It was kinda nice. It brought back memories" ("The Soldier in the Surf").
Naming Riley Cove
Riley died on October 2, 2011, at the age of 90. Two years earlier, he attended a Mercer Island City Council meeting in which council members discussed a proposal to name a body of water between the Roanoke Inn and Luther Burbank Park as Riley Cove. The 60-acre cove on the north shore of Mercer Island had been home to the Riley family for several generations. The proposal passed by a vote of six to one. Nonetheless, it took more than a decade for the Riley Cove designation to be approved by state and federal authorities. On October 26, 2021, Washington’s Committee on Geographic Names approved the name change, and the following year, on July 14, 2022, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names followed suit. Riley Cove was entered into the nation’s geographic names repository to be used on all future state and national maps.
On June 6, 2023, a dedication ceremony was held at Lincoln Landing, with a reception that followed at the local VFW Hall. Speakers included Mercer Island Mayor Salim Nice, councilmember Wendy Weiker, and Mercer Island attorney Rob MacAulay, who had put forward the initial proposal to name the cove. A memorial plaque with information about Hu Riley was installed near the bay with the famous "Soldier in the Surf" photograph prominently featured.
