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Three Important War Correspondents

Dickey Chapelle : a Reporter and Her Wor... (by Ellis, Frederick R.)
What S A Woman Doing Here A Reporter S R... (by Dickey Chapelle)
Famous War Correspondents (by Bullard, Frederic Lauriston)
National League for Woman's Service maga... (by Women's City Club of San Francisco)
A Journal of Impressions in Belgium (by Sinclair, May)

Natural diamonds are formed under high pressure and temperature. In the same regard, great expression and acts of human courage and talent often emerge from desperate, high pressure situations. A look back at some of the first female war correspondents shows they formed their own diamond-like sheen under some of the roughest pressures.

Though it was difficult, as always for those who invoke change, these women probably wouldn’t care to be compared to diamonds. It was about the work, not the acclaim. Speaking of the accounts that came from many of the correspondents of the Vietnam War, Martha Gellhorn said, “All the books are written with self-pity. Including the one by Michael Herr… All those books are about how terrible it all was for the journalists…. Okay, so we were fired on, just like everybody else in a war… it was an easy life compared to that of the Vietnamese.” These words came from a seasoned Gellhorn, over 30 years deep into her vast war correspondent career.

Gellhorn stated that one of the events that changed her was reporting on Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp to open. In a 1945 article in Colliers, she shared the story of all sorts of experimental murders the Nazi Germans conducted on their prisoners, from injections of malaria and limiting oxygen to tests to see how long the human body could withstand salt water up to the neck.

Everyone who witnessed the horrors knew them to be so horrific that folks back home would have trouble believing it. The surrealist photographer-turned-war-correspondent Lee Miller sent photos of Dachau to Vogue magazine with text that urged Vogue to publish the photos under the title “BELIEVE IT.” Miller worked for Vogue as a fashion photographer at the breakout of the war. Although she wasn’t granted access to the frontlines, she wanted to put her skills to better use. She got the chance after photographing the Blitz campaign over the United Kingdom.

Perhaps one of the most famous—and most insubordinate—female war correspondent was Dickey Chapelle. She constantly sought the front lines, even though she was restricted from doing so in each war she covered. In her autobiography What’s a Woman Doing Here?, she recounted an expedition on the Iron Curtain, embedded with refugee forces on a mission to provide medicine for refugee children:

. . . how could it have come about that I, an unarmed woman on an errand of no military significance at all, was computing odds on being administratively executed in a Hungarian cornfield? This submissive figure under a flapping headscarf in dripping overcoat and faltering boots … was me. Not anybody else. I told myself I was just a reporter, an onlooker, an observer. Not a participant in events at all.

Many war correspondents walk the path Chapelle paved; but, for women journalists in particular, she remains a bedrock icon.

By Thad Higa