Search results
Dickey Chapelle, one of the first female war photographers, risked her life to capture history on world stages from Iwo Jima to the Vietnam War.
- Overview
- TAKING TO THE SKY
- A LIFE OF WAR
- VIETNAM’S FINALE
- LEGACY ON THE FRONT
Dickey Chapelle was one of history's most fearless conflict journalists—and the first American woman to die on the job.
Photographer Dickey Chapelle holds her equipment while on assignment in Vietnam. She had already reported on dozens of conflicts by the time she landed in the war-torn nation.
The 36 hours before Dickey Chapelle leaped off a tower with the Screaming Eagles were terrifying. She was 41 years old and parachute jumping for the first time. But fear never lasted for the pioneering war correspondent, and she quickly proclaimed it among “the greatest experiences one can have.”
1 / 10
1 / 10
With dozens of operations under her belt, Dickey Chapelle was one of the most experienced correspondents covering Vietnam. In a story for National Geographic, she photographed how the war was fought on the water. Here, South Vietnamese soldiers man a gunboat on the Mekong Delta.
A fast-talking Midwesterner, Dickey Chapelle was born Georgette Meyer. As a child, she took her nickname from her hero, Arctic explorer Admiral Richard Byrd, and dreamed of being a pilot or an aerospace engineer. At age 14, she sold her first article to U.S. Air Service Magazine, titled “Why We Want to Fly,” and at 16 she enrolled in MIT along with six other female students that year. Six years later she married Navy photographer Tony Chapelle—then 40—who soon became her reporting partner.
“Be sure you’re the first woman somewhere,” an editor in New York advised early in her career.
Hear Dickey Chapelle
In this Overseas Press Club broadcast from 1964, Chapelle discusses her experiences documenting some of the "toughest" stories in the world.
And she did. In 1942, Chapelle became one of the first women correspondents accredited by the military in WWII—an accreditation she quickly lost after accompanying the Marines onto Okinawa Island in defiance of a ban on female correspondents going ashore in combat areas. By the end of the war, she’d already written nine books, mostly about women in aviation, and had found work as an editor at Seventeen magazine.
Left:
Chapelle once wrote that the story she reported again and again was of “men brave enough to risk their lives in the defense of freedom against tyranny,” and this frontline perspective made her a legend at a time when there were few female journalists in newsrooms and fewer on battlefields. She was used to being a novelty in the offices of generals and within Marine units. Sometimes being underestimated worked to her favor: She sold a book on military training to her editor by performing the entire Army fitness test in his office.
1 / 6
1 / 6
Dickey and Tony Chapelle traveled the world documenting efforts by relief agencies to alleviate suffering. In India, they photographed a community development project to improve life for villagers, including this first-grader learning the Hindi alphabet.
Dickey and Tony Chapelle traveled the world documenting efforts by relief agencies to alleviate suffering. In India, they photographed a community development project to improve life for villagers, including this first-grader learning the Hindi alphabet.
Photograph by Dickey and Tony Chapelle, Nat Geo Image Collection
The war in Vietnam had split American public sentiment, and each dispatch from Chapelle prompted a flood of emotional feedback to National Geographic' headquarters in Washington, D.C.. “From Geographic I expect information, not propaganda,” wrote one reader after her story on the American airborne troops. Nuns from the Holy Family Hospital in South Vietnam disagreed, describing it as “one of the most realistic accounts of what is really happening over here that we have read.”
Maybe Chapelle got tired of the slow and selective way National Geographic covered the war. In May 1965, she told editors she was frustrated to see two weeklies had scooped her on a story about the naval wars that she’d filed first. “Anyway I finally figured out something I could do about it,” she wrote. “I just went to work for one of the weeklies.” She was on assignment for the National Observer—and National Geographic was still sitting on her story—when Chapelle died.
On November 4, 1965, Chapelle was covering the second day of Operation Black Ferret, a Marine search-and-destroy mission near the coastal city of Chu Lai. The Associated Press sent a photographer to follow her and the previous day she’d bet him that her unit would be fired on before his. She lost that bet but told him she’d win the next.
It was nearly 8 a.m. when she walked through the camp and fell in line with the patrol group. Moments later, a blast shook the camp. The unit had walked into a trap: a grenade wired to a mortar triggered by a tripwire on the path. Chapelle was hit in the neck by shrapnel and died on the floor of a helicopter evacuating her to the hospital.
Memorials were held by enlisted men and foreign correspondents in Saigon. The Marines gave her full military honors. (Just last fall, at the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association’s annual dinner, Chapelle was made an honorary marine.) When the news reached Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, one major reported that “everything came to a halt.”
“She ventured where angels and men twice her size and half her age feared to tread, not with any aura of bravado but simply because she felt that if a newspaper or radio chain hired her to cover a war, it deserved war coverage, not a rewrite of a headquarters mimeographed handout,” fellow correspondent Bob Considine wrote in a tribute for the Milwaukee Journal. “Dickey was one heaven of a woman.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Occupation. Photojournalist. Years active. 1941–1965. Georgette Louise Meyer (March 14, 1919 – November 4, 1965) known as Dickey Chapelle [1] was an American photojournalist known for her work as a war correspondent from World War II through to her death in the Vietnam War. [2]
- American
- 1941–1965
- Photojournalist
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nov 25, 2023 · Tragically, Dickey Chapelle's life was cut short on November 4, 1965, when she was killed by shrapnel from an exploding mine in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. Her death was a stark reminder of the ...
One of the first American journalists covering Vietnam, Georgette “Dickey” Meyer Chapelle made seven jumps with Vietnamese Airborne troops, came under fire repeatedly, and marched 200 miles through jungles in the fall of 1961. Blond, petite, and hailing from a sleepy suburb outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dickey might have seemed an unlikely ...
Dec 26, 2015 · In 1965, photographer and writer Dickey Chapelle was killed in Vietnam, becoming the first female American journalist to be killed covering a war. In the new book, "Dickey Chapelle Under Fire ...
Mar 4, 2017 · Published March 4, 2017. Georgette Dickey Chapelle, a freelance photojournalist and the first American female war correspondent to be killed in action, was a trailblazer. She overcame gender ...
