Portrait of Myself by Margaret Bourke-White

Author:Margaret Bourke-White
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

“There he was, smack in the gunsight.” Even the silent Sergeant had become voluble. “I just pulled the trigger and peppered him till he reeled off and went down, tail over wing.” The Sergeant was too busy defending his quadrant to even mention over the interphone that he had bagged a Jerry. But the other crew members told me there was one startling unbelievable moment just two minutes from the target on the homeward stretch—at a time when communications are kept religiously clear—when they heard a voice, tuneful, wandering, and very strange. It was Sergeant Froelig on the interphone, singing.

During all this work with the U.S. Air Forces overseas, I was given extraordinary assistance. My accreditation was a unique one, as war photographer directly assigned to the Air Force, with the Pentagon as well as Life using my pictures. I was allowed to do everything I required to build up my picture story: photograph the early dawn briefings, go on practice flights, whatever I needed except the one thing that really counted. I was not allowed to go on an actual combat mission.

“To be a woman in a man’s world,” as people often phrase it, is usually—I have found—a distinct advantage. There are a few exceptions, and my present difficulty was a classic example. In a combat situation, men tend to overprotect, and no overprotected photographer, male or female, can get pictures by remote control.

In the early weeks of my work with the heavy bombers, no one from the press was allowed to go on missions. Then the ban was lifted, as it obviously had to be. There was not a whisper of a double standard in the directive, but as though written in invisible ink, it was there for all Air Force officers to read. Male correspondents who applied got permission. My requests got me nowhere. Yet I was fully qualified to cover a mission—perhaps more than they—not in the sense of woman against man, but because the Air Force was my explicit assignment, my special job and trust. I had to go on an actual combat mission. This was the heart and core of it all. On the first day the ban was lifted, two newspapermen flew the mission. They went in two different airplanes to the same target. Only one came back. This did not help my chances any.

There comes a time in any such impasse when one should stop begging for a while and give the problem a rest. I recognized this as the most tactful course and followed it. But the pain of leaving pictures undone which my magazine needed went very deep.

Then something loomed so spectacular, so tantalizing, that it overshadowed even the importance of going on a mission. I dropped my request and made another one.

The war was soon to open on another front with an invasion of the North African coast. This plan was one of the best-kept secrets of the entire war. On the American side of the Atlantic, few people knew; even my home office did not know.

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