As a war correspondent, Dickey Chapelle talked her way onto the front lines of battlefields from WWII to Vietnam and revolutions in places like Hungary, Algeria, Lebanon and Cuba.
Unmistakable in her uniform of fatigues, harlequin glasses and pearl earrings, Dickey covered the world’s hotspots. She took photos under fire at the battle of Iwo Jima. She had herself “kidnapped” to embed with Algerian rebels. Captured reporting on Hungarian refugees, she spent nearly two months in solitary in a Budapest prison. She jumped with Marine paratroopers in Vietnam. Fidel Castro called her “the polite little American with all that tiger blood in her veins.” But well before she became a battlefield reporter, young Georgette Louise Marie Meyer dreamed of flying.
Growing up in the Milwaukee, WI suburb of Shorewood, Georgie Lou as her family called her, marched to her own beat. She spent her free time at local airfields, watching the aircrafts take off, talking with pilots and engineers, and, as often as possible, hitching a ride to fly over the heartland in small prop planes. She sold her first article, Why We Want to Fly to the U.S. Service Magazine at age 14.
Being nearsighted prevented her from becoming a pilot so she accepted an MIT scholarship to study aeronautic engineering at 16. Skipping tests to volunteer on relief flights bringing supplies to disaster areas, she dropped out and headed back to Milwaukee. When her mother discovered her affair with a pilot, she was shipped off to live with her grandparents in Florida where she landed her first job, writing press releases for Miami’s All American Air Races.
Those connections led her to a position in TWA’s publicity department where she met her husband, staff photographer Tony Chapelle. Enrolling in his class to expand her skills, he told her “If you can’t prove it happened with a picture, it didn’t happen.” Twenty years her senior, Tony was one of the Navy’s first photographers in WWI. When he headed to Panama to cover WWII, she followed him by talking the US Government into giving her press credentials for Women’s Day magazine.
It was there she honed her photographic style. She was determined to tell the stories of the men “brave enough to risk their lives in the defense of freedom against tyranny.” Her behind the scenes photos of the lives and deaths of these men helped humanize the horrors of war and landed her work from magazines that ran the gamut from Reader’s Digest and Seventeen to Life and National Geographic.
It was during this time she adopted the name Dickie Chapelle, said to be in honor of the explorer Admiral Richard Byrd who she met as a young girl in Shorewood. Even after her divorce it would be the name she would use for the rest of her life.
Fiercely patriotic (she stopped every day on her walk to elementary school to salute the flag) Dickey believed in the ideals of democracy. Speaking at an annual convention of the Girls Clubs of America, she told the gathering of young women her definition of Americanism: “I grew up in the heart of the United States and I believed that I could do anything I really wanted to do and I still believe it . . . because nowhere else in the world can (a woman) say I can do anything I want to do.”
That speech was delivered shortly before she became the first female American war reporter killed in action.
On the last of her many reporting missions in Vietnam, she was following a platoon leader who tripped over a wire triggering a bomb set by the Vietnamese. Shrapnel from the explosion hit her neck, killing her on the battlefield on November 4, 1965 at age 44. She was afforded full military honors and buried in her hometown of Shorewood. The Marines dedicated a memorial to her in Vietnam a year after her death that reads in part: she was one of us and we will miss her. In 2017 she was named an Honorary Marine.