Dickey Chapelle Under Fire by John Garofolo

Author:John Garofolo [Garofolo, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-87020-718-1
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2015-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Newly reinstated as a war correspondent, Dickey quickly set out to reestablish ties with the military. She actively promoted herself as the “Bayonet Border Reporter” and by her own account covered more than thirty fighting forces by 1959, including conflicts in Algeria, Cuba, Lebanon, and, later, the Dominican Republic.

In 1956, while on assignment for Life magazine, Dickey traveled to Austria to report on the uprising in neighboring Hungary. The Hungarians were revolting against Soviet occupation, and war had broken out between Hungarian freedom fighters and the Russian military.

Dickey knew the Russians were executing reporters as spies. And she did more than simply document the uprising—she brought penicillin into Austria for the Hungarian refugees crossing the border. Dickey recognized something familiar in the faces of the refugees fleeing the war—they reminded her of the villagers she had seen on Okinawa, traumatized by conflict.

While transporting penicillin with two Hungarian companions in December 1956, Dickey was captured by a Russian patrol and turned over to the Hungarian secret police, who imprisoned her in Budapest for almost two months. She spent most of that time in solitary confinement, with numerous interrogations under the constant threat of execution. During her captivity Dickey considered whether her work was worth the danger. Was one photograph of a freedom fighter delivering penicillin to a doctor worth being imprisoned or killed?

In the end, she decided, “The answer to the question was simply yes. I believed the picture I’d been trying to make would have moved someone who saw it to provide new aid to the freedom fighters.”

The Hungarians had hoped to execute her. But Dickey had cleverly tucked her small Minox camera into a glove and dropped it out a car window when she was taken prisoner. Without a camera or film to prove Dickey was a spy, and with mounting pressure from the United States, the Hungarian government convicted her of illegal border crossing and let her go.

Dickey was now known to rebel leaders around the world. During the 1957 Algerian war against France, rebellion leaders from the Algerian Federation of National Liberation smuggled her into Algeria so she could help them tell the world their side of the story. Dickey photographed the war from the rebels’ point of view and observed the trial and execution of a young Algerian traitor. When Dickey asked the Algerians why they had chosen her, she was told that no one else would go.

In 1958 Reader’s Digest sent Dickey to cover the revolution in Cuba, where she had unfettered access to Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and their inner circle of revolutionary forces. At the time Dickey believed the Castros were legitimate freedom fighters trying to overthrow the authoritarian, US-backed Batista government. Little did she know that upon winning the revolution, Castro would institute his own authoritarian government and repress millions of Cubans for decades. Dickey later became a supporter of the US-based anti-Castro movement, although her photos of that effort never received the same attention as her photos of the revolution.

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