Alex Kershaw fails to note this in his rather inept and unsatisfactory biography of Capa, BLOOD AND CHAMPAGNE, though it is a good tale which Rick Atkinson scarfed up for his DAY OF BATTLE, THE WAR IN SICILY AND ITALY, 1943 - 1944.
When the Deputy Commander of the US Seventh Army arrived at Palermo, the Italian forces were anxious to surrender. In one of the sorts of oversights which so marred the US Army's campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, there were no translators available and the Italian General, Giuseppe Molinero, neither spoke English nor had any bilingual staff officers about. MG Eoff Keyes, an exceedingly capable officer, shouted about and came up with Capa and charged him to handle the negotiations. Capa was multi-lingual but spoke no Italian. Still, his command of French and Spanish (mainly vitrolic and obscene, according to Kershaw) enabled him to ease the Italian surrender.
This anecdote rather startles our understanding of things-as-they-were, of course: Palermo had been one of the major sites for Italian emigration to the US and it is difficult to believe that SOMEONE was not available who spoke some English: hell, the FBI had been returning Mafiosi to Palermo for the past decade and more after years of residence in the US. And, if we believe Hollywood, all that would have been necessary would have been to visit the nearest rifle squad, as EVERY US Army rifle squad is well known to have consisted of one Jewish kid from the Bronx, one Italian kid from Brooklyn, one moon-eyed farmboy, a grizzled sergeant, a flashboy from Nevada, and that guy from Iowa writing the Great American War Novel. Just revisit THE BIG RED ONE for an example done up well.
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