“ARE YOU A WRITER or a photographer?”
Twenty-five-year-old Georgette Louise “Dickey” Chapelle wasn’t sure how to answer the question. The only direction her editor at Fawcett Publications had given her when she told him she wanted to report on the women of the Pacific War was, “Just be sure you’re first someplace.”
She told the navy press liaison officer that she had worked as both a writer and a photographer.
“You can’t be both,” he replied. “On operations, you may use radio facilities if you are a writer, or your camera if you are a photographer. But only one.”
Dickey didn’t think she’d heard him right. Had he just said “operations”? That word, Dickey was quite certain, implied combat. But the military did not allow women reporters to cover combat. If she broke the rules, she would certainly lose her accreditation—her official permission to report on anything related to the war. Perhaps she could find a way to bend the rules instead of breaking them.
Dickey Chapelle, 1942, self-portrait. Wisconsin State Historical Society, Image #64787
She asked the officer how many accredited women reporters the navy had already sent out. There were a few, he said. And how many accredited female photographers?
“Never heard of one,” he answered.
“I’m a photographer, then,” said Dickey.
“Very well,” he replied. “And just where was it you wanted to go?”
“As far forward as you’ll let me.”
The female military personnel in the Pacific—the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) and the WACs (Women’s Army Corps)—had gone as far as Honolulu. So that’s where Dickey went via plane from California, on February 19, 1945, along with a group of navy flight nurses just out of training.
During this trip, Dickey heard the name Iwo Jima for the first time. The copilot, climbing back to speak to Dickey and the nurses, told them the Americans had just landed there. A few days later, Dickey was standing in front of the teletype machine in Oahu watching the reports come in from Iwo Jima. “There was not one,” she wrote later, “that did not tell of fresh disaster. Whole outfits [units of fighting men] were being … decimated, destroyed.”
Someone in the room said that “the Corps” wouldn’t be able to take this much longer.
“What Corps?” Dickey asked.
“Marine Corps,” he answered. “Maybe there won’t be any more Corps after this.”
Dickey had a sudden, chilling thought: Was the United States losing the war?
“I was certain of one conclusion,” she wrote: “there was in all the world at this moment only one story: the men fighting and dying on Iwo Jima.”
Dickey wanted to get closer to that story. She and the nurses traveled from Hawaii to Guam, where the teletype printer in the correspondent’s room was directly linked to a ship just off Iwo Jima. Dickey watched as one communication clicked in: INCOMPLETE CASUALTY REPORTS INDICATE THAT FOR ONE OUT OF TEN AMERICANS WHO CHARGED ASHORE HERE THERE HAS BEEN NO SUNRISE. THEY DID NOT SURVIVE.
“Poetic, isn’t he, this morning?” muttered one correspondent. Those numbers, he said, would certainly be censored; most Americans would never hear about this enormous loss of life.
Another report clicked in: AN UNCONFIRMED RUMOR IS SWEEPING THE SHIP THAT THE FLAG HAS BEEN SIGHTED ON THE TOP OF THE HIGHEST POINT OF THE SAVAGELY CONTESTED SOIL.
A discouraged correspondent in the room said it must be a bad joke.
The teletype machine began again: IT HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY CONFIRMED THAT THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES NOW FLIES FROM MOUNT SURIBACHI HIGHEST POINT OF THIS VOLCANIC ISLAND.
The depressed atmosphere in the press room was instantly transformed. The battle was by no means over, but claiming the island’s highest point—and a concentrated area of Japanese defenses—was significant, strategically and symbolically; it was the first time during this war that the United States had raised an American flag on Japanese soil. “Now that I was sure it was all right for a correspondent to show emotion,” Dickey wrote, “I wiped my eyes with my knuckles.”
On the following morning, Dickey was headed for Iwo Jima aboard the USS Samaritan, a hospital ship as long as a city block, four decks high, and painted white with red crosses.
Because the purpose of the enormous ship was so clearly identified, Dickey was surprised when they were all drilled for possible enemy attack. Weren’t hospital ships off-limits? Dickey was even more surprised when she awoke the next morning to the announcement, “A Japanese bomber type aircraft has just began a run on this ship…. We are the target. All hands take cover.”
The photographers at Iwo Jima had no doubt that a photo of the US flag flying on top of Mount Suribachi had tremendous potential to inspire Americans to stay behind the war effort. But there were actually two US flag-raisings and two major photos. After someone complained that the first flag was too small, it was taken down and immediately replaced with a larger flag. Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who had climbed up the mountain to photograph the first flag, got there just in time to photograph the second flag-raising. The photo was so dramatic—and became so famous, much more so than the first photo—many people mistakenly thought it had been staged for Rosenthal’s benefit.
Photo of the first flag-raising on Iwo Jima; US marine Jimmy Michels in the foreground. Louis R. Lowery, USMC, courtesy of Betty Michels McMahon
The pilot’s first bomb landed too far away. As he came in for a second attempt, an American destroyer shot him down.
After they anchored off Iwo Jima, Dickey watched the “shapeless dirty bloody green bundles”—that is, the wounded—being carried aboard. “Some part of my mind,” she wrote, “warned me that if I thought of them as people, just once, I’d be unable to take any more pictures.” But she had to take pictures: she was the only photographer on board. If she didn’t, “the story of their anguish would never be told since there was no one else here to tell it.”
She forced herself toward one of the stretchers. She hadn’t yet looked into the face of a wounded man except through a camera lens. She put her camera down and looked straight at this man. Both of his legs were partially destroyed, and covering his mouth was a cardboard tag that read “urgent.” Dickey moved it so he could breathe more easily.
He tried to smile his thanks. Dickey asked him how he felt.
“I—feel—lucky.”
Dickey asked him why.
“Because—I’m here. Off—the beach,” he answered. He told her how the medical corpsmen carried him three miles after he was wounded. “Makes a guy feel lucky.”
“After that,” Dickey wrote, “I looked squarely at each Marine as I photographed him. As the hours passed, I learned that the one thing almost every man who could talk said was just what Martin had said: I’m lucky. I am alive. I am here.”
The USS Samaritan held a dangerous secret: severely wounded Japanese prisoners were being taken on board. This was extremely rare: most Japanese military men fought to the death whenever possible, which was why the fighting on Iwo Jima was so fierce and why so many Americans were being killed there. The medics threatened Dickey with jail time if she told anyone about these prisoners. That is, they warned, if she didn’t get killed in the riot that would surely occur if the secret got out.
Wounded men aboard the USS Samaritan. Dickey Chapelle collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, Image #85407
The medics tried to bring the Japanese on board when they would not be seen by any of the wounded Americans, especially those who could walk. But their plans went very wrong. Suddenly 20 wounded American marines were standing on the gangway while behind them on the deck, in plain sight, laid out on stretchers, were several wounded Japanese prisoners.
Dickey watched as a young medic grew pale with fear. “The situation was so unlikely,” she wrote, “that at first the Marines did not grasp it.” She lifted her camera. “It was suddenly heavier than it had ever been before. A voice hammered inside of me, Please God … no! I don’t want to take this picture.”
A large marine wearing a bloodstained jacket, his left arm in a sling, moved quickly toward the nearest Japanese soldier.
Dickey saw one of the medics move too, a pistol in his hand. But the marine was closer. “His hand,” Dickey wrote, “went toward his hip where his trench knife was slung. Then the hand came away from his dungaree pocket. Out of it he took something long and white.”
It wasn’t a knife. It was a cigarette. “The wounded Marine put the cigarette between the wounded enemy’s cracked lips and wordlessly lit it,” wrote Dickey. “When he saw the jerky stirrings under the blanket that the man was powerless to move his hands, the Marine squatted on his heels and with an air of boredom removed the butt, waited impassively till the Jap had blown out the smoke, then gave him another drag.”
“From the head of the gangway came a rasping voice, ‘Okay, okay—move!’”
The wounded marine stood up, walked away, and didn’t look back.
Dickey then visited a crude tent hospital where doctors struggled to save lives with very little equipment. As she took pictures, she noticed one seriously wounded marine watching her. He finally spoke.
One US marine, Patrick Caruso, said that his opinion of the Japanese changed after fighting them at Iwo Jima. “We had a gross misconception of the enemy before we encountered them,” he said. “They were not jokes; they were not inept. We hated them enough to kill them, but we did respect their ability. I often thought that if we had to go to war again, I would want them on our side.”
“You don’t have a gun,” he said.
Dickey told him that correspondents didn’t carry weapons.
He offered Dickey his trench knife.
“Here, you take it,” he said. “Where I’m going I won’t need one.”
He watched as she fastened the knife’s leather sheaf to her own belt. Then he said, “I feel better about you now.”
Dickey stumbled out of the tent quickly; she didn’t want the marine to see how much his gesture had moved her. Outside she met two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, surprised to see a woman. After explaining who she was, the lieutenant asked her where she wanted to go.
Once again, she replied, “Far forward as you’ll let me.”
Dickey could barely control her excitement when the lieutenant agreed to take her to “the front.” She would soon be taking photos of the most important, most violent battle of the Pacific War.
So she was puzzled when, 40 minutes later, he stopped the truck in a desolate, quiet area of volcanic ash ridges. This was the front? She climbed to the top of the empty ridge, took some photos, and left.
Back on Guam that evening, Dickey discussed her day with Barbara Finch, a more experienced war correspondent. Barbara was surprised the front had been so quiet.
“Tell me every sound you heard,” she said.
“A tank fired once,” Dickey replied. “A man shouted … and there were wasps and I could hear the shutter of my camera click.”
“There were what?” Barbara asked.
“Wasps, I guess. Insect noises anyhow.”
Marines climbing a ridge on Iwo Jima (photo not taken by Dickey Chapelle). Attributed to Louis R. Lowery, USMC, courtesy of Betty Michels McMahon
Barbara smiled. “I don’t think we’ll file that the entire front was wholly inactive today, after all. And—I guess somebody will have to tell you. There is-no-insect life on Iwo Jima. It’s a dead volcano.”
“You mean, those weren’t—”
“They were not wasps.”
Dickey had come under direct Japanese sniper fire.
A few weeks later, on April 1, 1945, Dickey accompanied the large fleet of US ships headed for Okinawa. She was the only nonmedical female in the entire fleet and the only reporter on her hospital ship, the USS Relief.
After the men had disembarked, the nurses—and Dickey—waited on the ship for the casualties—who didn’t come. After several days, none of the 60,000 Americans—the initial invasion force—had been fired on. What were the Japanese up to?
Dickey wasn’t content to find out secondhand. She managed to get verbal permission to go ashore, just for the day. Her stated mission was to photograph blood deliveries and transfusions in order to help Americans back home understand the importance of blood donations. If no blood-related work was occurring on the ship, Dickey would look for it at the nearest field hospital.
When Dickey stepped onto the shore, she realized two things. First, she had again fulfilled her editor’s request to be “first someplace”: she was now the first woman reporter to set foot on Okinawa during this battle.
Second, she knew she was in trouble. When the driver of the amphibious tractor dropped her off, he told Dickey he would be unable to return for her that evening; the increasingly strong winds were whipping up the surf.
But a few hours later, more than bad weather kept Dickey from obeying orders; the Japanese started to fight. Sniper fire on land and mass kamikaze attacks on the US fleet offshore by waves of Japanese planes made it too dangerous for her to even consider returning to the ship.
When the commanding officers at Okinawa learned there was a female correspondent onshore, they were united in their disapproval; they assumed the marines would needlessly get themselves killed trying to protect her.
But for the moment, they couldn’t do anything about it. Dickey was basically left on her own to try to make the most of her situation.
The kamikaze attacks stunned her. “No experience in combat which I have ever known,” Dickey wrote later, “is quite like standing before kamikazes, feeling the incredible relentless paralysis at the sight of a fellow human being in the dive which must inevitably end in at least his own death.”
Dickey also found her way into a crude field hospital, where a man with a serious chest wound waited for an operation. “Anybody would know,” she wrote later, “a human being couldn’t breathe with such a wound. But the Marine was breathing.”
She offered to hold a flashlight during the operation; anything brighter might attract the attention of Japanese snipers. Two hours later, when the operation was finally over, Dickey’s arms wouldn’t stop shaking. She looked at the wounded marine, now breathing more naturally. “How can he stand it?” she asked aloud to no one in particular.
“Oh,” the surgeon replied, as he tossed an empty bottle of blood into the trash, “the limit of human endurance has never been reached.”
When it was considered safe enough, Dickey was escorted back to the ship under armed guard. She was stripped of her accreditation. The army put her on a plane for her home in New York City, where her editor wouldn’t even publish her photos, claiming that “the wounded looked too—dirty.”
Despite all these discouraging events, Dickey was convinced she had become a war correspondent. She was determined to find a way back to “the front,” preferably with the US marines.
She was with them when she died.
After spending several decades traveling around the world as a successful photojournalist, Dickey landed in Vietnam to report on the war there. On November 4, 1965, while on a patrol, the marine just ahead of her tripped on a wire attached to a mortar shell and a hand grenade. A piece of shrapnel from the explosion hit Dickey in the neck and severed her carotid artery. She died within minutes, becoming the first female American correspondent to be killed in action.
The Japanese used kamikaze (“divine wind”) suicide attacks—small planes carrying explosives flown directly into an enemy target—increasingly toward the end of the war, but in the greatest numbers and with the most effect at Okinawa, where they sank 30 ships and damaged many more. Most of the kamikaze pilots feared their impending suicide flights less than the ostracism and family shame they would receive if they didn’t accept their mission. And all were promised that their souls would enjoy eternal honor at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. While their example was used to inspire Japanese civilians for the impending ground invasion, kamikazes had a damaging psychological effect on the Allies, who viewed these attacks as chillingly personal.
The news of her death “passed like wildfire” through the entire marine company. A group of marines personally escorted her remains back to the United States. In the year after Dickey’s death, marines built a dispensary in South Vietnam and dedicated it to her. A marble plaque outside read, “To the memory of Dickey Chapelle, war correspondent, killed in action near here on 4 November 1965. She was one of us and we will miss her.”
While conducting the dedication ceremony, marine corps general Lewis Walt recalled a conversation he had with Dickey shortly before her death. When she told him she was going on patrol the following day, he warned her to “be careful and to keep her head down.”
She replied, “When my time comes, I want it to be on a patrol with the marines.”
LEARN MORE
Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action by John Garofolo (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015).
“Legendary War Photographer Dickey Chapelle Back in Focus” by Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 17, 2014, www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/legendary-war-photographer-dickey-chapelle-back-in-focus-b99371912z1-279644882.html.
War, Women, and the News: How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover World War II by Catherine Gourley (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007).
What’s a Woman Doing Here? A Reporter’s Report on Herself by Dickey Chapelle (William Morrow, 1962).
Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II by Penny Colman (Random House, 2002).
