Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists in WWII

War correspondents accredited to the US Army in the European Theater, 1943. Left to right: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long.

Women reporters and photographers covered this war from the front, against the steady resistance of a military establishment that was slow to credential them. They filed from North Africa and the Pacific, from the Italian campaign, the liberation of France, the fight into Germany, and the opening of the camps. Marguerite Higgins walked into Dachau with the 42nd Rainbow Division on 29 April 1945. Lee Miller photographed Buchenwald and Dachau. Margaret Bourke-White made the images of the Buchenwald survivors that ran in Life.

The women who reported the war

Martha Gellhorn

1908 to 1998

American war correspondent for Collier's Weekly.

Denied accreditation for the Normandy landings, Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship, crossed the Channel, and went ashore at Omaha Beach with a stretcher party on the night of 7 June 1944, one of the only women to reach the Normandy beachhead during the invasion. She had already covered the Spanish Civil War and went on to report conflicts around the world for the next half century.

Lee Miller

1907 to 1977

American photographer; war correspondent for British Vogue.

Miller was one of four women accredited as official photographic war correspondents with U.S. forces. She documented the siege of Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris, and the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945; her images ran in the June 1945 American Vogue under the headline Believe It.

Margaret Bourke-White

1904 to 1971

American photojournalist; Life magazine staff photographer.

Bourke-White was among the first American women accredited as war correspondents and the first authorized to fly U.S. combat missions. She accompanied Patton's Third Army into Buchenwald on 11 April 1945 and her photographs of the survivors are among the most widely reproduced images of the camp's liberation.

Marguerite Higgins

1920 to 1966

American war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.

Born in Hong Kong and educated at Berkeley and Columbia, Higgins persuaded the Herald Tribune to send her to Europe in 1944 and was reassigned to Germany in March 1945. She reached Buchenwald within hours of its liberation and on 29 April 1945 entered Dachau with the 42nd Rainbow Division, where she and a colleague accepted the surrender of the SS guards on the gate before American troops arrived. The Army awarded her a campaign ribbon for her work that day. In 1951 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, for her coverage of the Korean War.

Dickey Chapelle

1919 to 1965

American photojournalist; National Geographic and other outlets.

Chapelle was accredited to the Pacific Fleet and became its first credentialed woman photographer at Iwo Jima in 1945. She went ashore at Okinawa in defiance of orders barring women from combat areas, was confined to a Navy ship, and lost her credentials; she was later killed by a land mine in Vietnam in 1965.

Tania Long

1913 to 1998

American war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

Born in Berlin to an Irish father and a Russian mother and schooled across Europe, Long joined the New York Herald Tribune as a foreign correspondent in 1938 and reported from Germany, France, and finally London, where she covered the Blitz from September 1940 onward. She joined The New York Times in February 1942 and is thought to be the first female reporter to follow the Allies into Berlin, going on to cover the Nuremberg trials alongside her husband Raymond Daniell, head of the Times's London bureau.

Researched and written by Erin Faith Allen · Fortitude Research

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