‘Now I owned a private war’: Lee Miller and the female journalists who broke battlefield rules

Evading detention and ‘the convenience question’, stowing away and sweet-talking soldiers, Miller and her cohort were able to deliver some of the most striking reporting of the second world war

In August 1944, the photographer and war journalist Lee Miller was sent to France to report on conditions in the newly liberated port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany. But, as it rapidly became clear, some intelligence wires had got crossed. Far from being liberated, much of Saint-Malo was still a violent war zone, with US soldiers under heavy fire as they battled to dislodge the occupying Germans.

At this point in the second world war, around 200 women had, like Miller, gained military accreditation with the allied forces. Yet as Miller well knew, none of them were meant to be reporting on scenes of actual fighting, since their brief was simply to write the “softer” stories of war, about hospitals, air raid wardens and civilian heroism. If Miller chose to remain in Saint-Malo, she would certainly be punished, yet it was too fabulous an opportunity for her to miss. “I was the only photographer for miles around,” she said, “and now I owned a private war.” For five exhilarating days, aided and abetted by the Americans and sometimes coming under fire herself, she observed and photographed everything.

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