Lee Miller War Correspondent- Part II
During WWII (1939-1945) Lee Miller was, first and foremost, a fashion and lifestyle correspondent and photographer for the woman’s magazine, Vogue (U.K.). Between 1940 and August 1945, her work appeared in every issue of Vogue (U.K.) that was published between those years (1).
If Lee can be said to have had any sort of career, it would be primarily, and overwhelmingly, the fashion and lifestyle feature work she did for Vogue. Outside the four corners of Vogue, she also contributed several photos to Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire. This book was a slim volume of 80 pages with 109 photographs, 22 of which were contributed by Lee and 87 by other photographers. Lee also photographed Wrens In Camera, a 79 page book of photographs featuring women in the Royal Navy Auxiliary which was not published until after the war was over. Both books were propaganda efforts that arose out of the ongoing cooperation between Vogue (U.K) and the British War Department (2).
As narrator of her own chronology, Lee provides for the year 1944-1945 geographic and temporal parameters of where she was and what she produced for Vogue (U.K.) in Europe. This was between her arrival on August 13, 1944, (a point where the Allies already had complete air supremacy and approximately two million troops west of Paris) her return to Paris following Hitler’s suicide, (April 30, 1945) and the formal surrender of Germany a week later on May 8, 1945. During the nine months of Lee’s time as a correspondent in Europe, she contributed to nine issues of Vogue (U.K.) during the war, and two of which were after the war was over. As in previous “lives”, Lee’s portfolio of work was sparse (3).
A general chronology of Lee’s time working in Paris between 8/13/1944 and 3/15/1945 is as follows:
Saint-Malo 8/13/1944 – 8/17/1944 (4 days)
Rennes (Hotel Nemours) 8/17/44 – 8/27/1944 (10 days)
Paris (Hotel Scribe) 8/27/1944 – 3/15/1945 (est. 7 months)
Trips outside Paris:
Orleans/Loire Valley 10/15/1944 (1 day)
Luxembourg 11/26/1944 – 12/2/1944 (7 days)
Brussels (by air) 1/10/1945 – 1/16/1945 (5 days)
Colmar Pocket (by air) 2/29/1945 – 2/7/1945 (9 days)
A general chronology of Lee’s time in Germany between 3/15/1945 and 5/8/1945 is as follows:
Tour of occupied German cities 3/15/1945 - 4/11/1945
Buchenwald 4/11/1945 (1 day)
Torgau 4/25/1945 - 4/26/1945 (2 days)
Dachau (same day as Munich/ 4/30/1945 (1 day)
bathtub photo/ Hitler’s suicide )
From mid-March to April 11, 1945 it is difficult to track Lee’s travels. In late April 1945, Lee wrote to her editor Audrey Withers:
“Things move very fast, as you may be noticing and Lee, here, is either moving when she wants to stay put, or planted when she has itchy feet. I no sooner sit down to catch some digestion and eliminate some facts than the war has moved so far the Army HQ is in the next building – complete with brass buttons and police who wonder why your shoes aren’t polished or your pants pressed. Since I’m wearing the same trousers I wore when I left Paris six weeks ago – and my other shirt is lost, the only thing to do is keep moving forward. However, I never finish a story at that rate – as you may have noticed, too” (4).
During this period of a month or so, Lee hopped from one occupied and bombed German city to another with groups of Allied reporters spending very little time in any one place. With the exception of Cologne, which may have been a Public Relations Officer (PRO) temporary safe retention area similar to Rennes prior to the liberation of Paris.
In early April, Dwight D. Eisenhower wired London and Washington seeking help in unleashing the press corps to cover the waning weeks of the war and in particular, the concentration camps. In Paris at The Hotel Scribe, reporters as well as others throughout Europe had been funneling into Germany since mid-March, but now the U.S. Army was not only allowing, but encouraging the press to report en masse, and so they did travelling in clusters from one real or rumored news opportunity to the next.
Lee and her colleagues played bump and turn from Aachen to Cologne/Remagen, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Bad Nauheim, Nuremberg and other cities that were falling like dominos or which had been occupied for months. Cities were surrendering without an Allied commander even available to accept the surrenders. Lee and the other reporters enjoyed complete freedom of movement because the U.S. Army deemed it to be safe. By early March the Rhine River had been crossed and before the end of March, all four U.S. armies had crossed the Rhine at various points. The task at that point consisted of mop up operations with varying degrees of difficulty. In point of fact, no reporter was killed, injured or even at risk once Central Germany had been penetrated by the Allied forces.
An at a glance timeline is as follows:
[The dates provided are obtained from matching Lee’s articles with pertinent historical facts, geographic markers and distances of travel, holidays mentioned or U.S. military units or officers that can be verified. The start date may be off slightly, (Brussels is problematic) but the length of stays is to within a reasonable degree of certainty. The principal biographers of Lee, Antony Penrose and Carolyn Burke, have been referred to, but are of little assistance because as Penrose acknowledges in the footnotes to his compilation of Lee’s articles in Lee Miller’s War (2005), he has assembled and reassembled articles, used unpublished material, caption sheets, loose notes and other bits of diverse materials. Burke is vague about dates, usually using phrases like “late in January” (Colmar Pocket) or sometime in “mid – October” (Loire Valley). Lee’s articles are also of little help because she, or her editors rarely provided dates. The purpose of this graph is to establish with reasonable certainty, where Lee was and what she was doing while residing at The Hotel Scribe. An additional time line factor to note is that Lee’s articles were not generally published until six to eight weeks after events took place.]
It is a matter of fact, according to the reporting of Lee, that she spent 7 of her 9 months in Europe in the Hotel Nemours and the Hotel Scribe (also known as the “Silver Fox Hole”) in the comfort of the only hotel with heat and electricity in Paris (5). Lee was the only woman correspondent with a permanent residence at the Hotel Scribe and she had the added benefit of not having a daily, weekly or, effectively, any deadline. For more or less seven months, the front line of ‘Lee Miller’s War’ was the threshold of the Hotel Scribe.
Even accounting for Lee’s brief forays outside of Paris and taking into account the Vogue fashion and lifestyle reporting she did in Paris, one can only wonder what she did from day to day in the months between August 27, 1944 and March 15, 1945. During this time period Lee left Paris only to spend Christmas at home in Hampstead, London and in the previously mentioned visits to areas that had already been surrendered or abandoned without resistance in Orleans, Luxembourg and Brussels (6). The bulk of her time and work was spent on fashion and lifestyle photos and articles. These included subjects such as hair salons being powered by bicycles, Paris in the snow, an interview with the writer Collette (author of the book Gigi), coverage of the popular dancer, Fred Astaire, actress Marlene Dietrich, and a side bar on G.I. slang. Even Lee’s coverage of Paris after the Liberation bears all the characteristics typical of Vogue subject-matter. Lee’s Paris Liberation coverage is exclusively lifestyle coverage of fashion, art and her friends, Picasso, Paul and Nusch Éluard, Jean Cocteau and others. There isn’t any mention about the Liberation Parade by Charles de Gaulle, the attempt on his life, the murderous sniper attacks in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the skirmishes and tank battles of August 25-26, the Nazi revenge Luftwaffe bombing on the evening of August 26, or even the iconic march of the U.S. 28th Army Division through the center of Paris (fully battle ready) because the 28th Division was literally passing through Paris marching to Germany. The same is true with regard to her article about liberated Brussels which focused mostly on fashion and art.
Likewise, throughout her coverage of Europe, Lee only wrote once about a significant battle of the war and that was tail end of the collapse of the Colmar Pocket (7). Even with the addition of her witnessing the bombing of Saint-Malo, there are only these two articles that can be considered combat zone coverage. Yet, since 1985, Lee has been ushered into the company of women reporters for U.S. publications who were providing news of the war from the front lines meeting daily or weekly deadlines for their publications.
Although this conclusion sounds harsh, it is not. There is no basis to offer criticism of Lee’s work because Lee’s assignments for Vogue did not include frontline battles. Her beat was Paris, and her Vogue assignments were primarily war time fashion and lifestyle focused. The limited inclusion of Saint-Malo and the Colmar Pocket into Lee’s portfolio is not evidence of a deficit of war reporting but rather a surplus to her fashion and lifestyle reporting. Cecil Beaton and Toni Frissell both were Vogue fashion photographers that covered the war and they were identically credentialed, yet the war is merely a footnote in their biographies, as it should be in Lee’s, although, in Lee’s case, there is very little career to footnote.
It is often written that Lee was one of only a few women journalists credentialed by the U.S. War Department. This is in error as there were over one hundred. Lee was not even the only Vogue war correspondent recognized by the U.S. War Department. Mary Jean Kempner was the Vogue (U.S.) official war correspondent assigned to the Pacific Theater and recognized by the U.S. War Department. Frequently Kempner’s articles appeared alongside Lee’s but unlike Lee, Kempner did not cover fashion at all. She wrote for Vogue (U.S.) and, as such, her audience was also larger than Lee’s whose Vogue (U.K.) articles only appeared in Vogue (U.S.) on a few occasions. Kempner wrote from Guam, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Tokyo (after Japan’s surrender), Shanghai and other devasted areas of China. She wrote about Japanese attacks on officer’s barracks on Okinawa by Japanese soldiers in hiding after surrender, she also witnessed and wrote about Chinese cheering and greeting U.S. forces like Parisians at Liberation, (Vogue 10/1/45) prisoner of war camps (Vogue 8/1/45) hospital planes (Vogue 8/1/45) espionage activities (10/15/45) and more. Surprisingly in the coverage of Lee, there is never mention of her in relation to other Vogue counterparts covering the war in the Pacific.
Historically, Lee’s reporting had no impact or influence during the war. Likewise, it offers very little, if anything, of historical importance today. Lee’s achievements as a correspondent fall short for reasons of both her own personal “demons” as outlined in Lives and for reasons outside of her control.
In a letter to her editor Audrey Withers, dated August 26-27, 1944 Lee said:
“I won’t be the first woman journalist in Paris – by any means – but I’ll be the first dame photographer, I think, unless someone parachutes in” (8).
Lee’s competitive exclamation was characteristic of the pressure on journalists to make news, but one wonders why she was anxious to be first when every story she published was behind her competitors. It has been said that the first rule of journalism is that, “there is nothing as old as yesterday’s news” and Lee’s publication dates were not merely yesterday’s news, but last month’s news or even the month before that. This is but one among several reasons why Lee’s reporting was not recognized and without impact during the war.
It is well documented that Lee had a very difficult time writing and that her failure to make deadlines was systemic. Her inability to sustain focus and attention along with alcohol abuse, narcotics, severe depression and her other afflictions certainly contributed but Lee was also at a distinct disadvantage because she wrote for Vogue (U.K.), not for example, the New York Times, Boston Herald, or any of the Chicago/Philadelphia/Los Angeles daily papers nor a national weekly periodical like Colliers or Life. She wrote and took pictures for Vogue (U.K.) and anxious people in an anxious time, did not turn to Vogue for their news. At the end of the day, Vogue was a women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine and not a valued source of meaningful WWII news. In addition, Lee did not write directly for Vogue (U.S.) with its larger subscription and newsstand circulation of 200,000 (9). She wrote for Vogue (U.K.) with few of her articles appearing in the U.S. issues and several of them were published after Germany surrendered.
Vogue’s (U.K.) audience was further curtailed by hardships in the U.K. due to the war. Transportation restrictions and paper shortages forced Vogue (U.K.) to limit its pagination, shrink its dimensions and publish once a month rather than twice. It could not, in effect, take new subscriptions other than by death of a subscriber (10). As a women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine, Vogue (U.K.) had no particular urgency to publish war news and was certainly not in competition with the dailies and weeklies that beat them to the punch every time. Lee’s inability to get work done and meet goals was certainly compounded by Vogue’s absence of a “stop the presses” mindset. Vogue’s narrow target of middle to upper class English women interested in its fashion and lifestyle offerings did not serve as a draw to Lee’s work. Lee effectively had no voice, or more accurately, she had a voice but almost no one to hear it.
From a number’s point of view, Vogue (U.K.) was not a news competitor of any note. The daily circulation of any major U.S. newspaper was higher than Vogue (U.K) on any given day, let alone per week or per month. An article or photograph in The New York Times reached four to five million readers per day. When Margaret Bourke-White published a photograph in Life, it was seen by as many as thirteen million readers. Life photographers such as Bourke-White, Robert Capa and David E. Scherman could reach forty plus million readers per month. Similarly, articles by Martha Gellhorn were read by the two and a half million readers of Colliers during WWII and the same goes for other women war correspondents. Their work would be read by more people in a single publication than the entirety of Lee’s Vogue (U.K.) war articles (11). In the meantime, Vogue (U.K.) was pulping its recycled issues to obtain paper for their next edition.
An additional disadvantage to Vogue (U.K.) was that Lee was pretty much alone for war news as opposed to the U.S. major dailies and magazines that had correspondents and stringers across the world giving readers an additional reason to follow their publications. Of course, there were also the international new services like the Associated Press and the International News Service (INS) as well as the immense influence of radio broadcast companies such as CBS which was hosted by Edward R. Murrow and his team which included Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith and other future major television and radio broadcasters in the United States. For example, Lee’s article on the Liberation of Paris was published on October 15, 1944 but had already been broadcast live from the Hotel Scribe on August 26, 1944. Likewise, Lee’s work on Buchenwald was published after the war was over, but Edward R. Murrow broadcast his report about Buchenwald on April 15, 1945 (12). Radio did not hurt the U.S. weeklies and dailies, in fact, U.S. print and broadcast media at times were jointly owned and broadcasters often read from print sources to provide news of the war. The war coverage by Lee, however, was essentially window dressing for Vogue (U.K.) which itself was subsidized by the British War Department for propaganda purposes (13). The fact that every other woman reporter chased the action to Italy, China, North Africa or wherever it might be found to get their story published while Lee was confined to Paris for seven months certainly also contributed to the absence of impact of her reporting on her contemporaries. In journalism, unlike art, quantity and audience matters.
Although the foregoing contributes to the obscurity that engulfed Lee’s war, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t have mattered because, as in her other “lives” Lee did not produce enough to make a mark. Although quantity and quality are not always related, Lee was read in her day without notice or comment by her audience or peers during, not only the war, but in her lifetime. Notwithstanding Antony Penrose’s claim of discovery of a treasure trove in the “trunk in the attic” there is no hidden trove of war reporting here. At the end of the day, Lee’s contribution to journalistic war correspondence and WWII history was of note only for her eyewitness account of the bombing of Saint-Malo and her postmortem reporting of the Colmar Pocket. The remainder of what she produced up to mid-March, 1945 consists of a few typical Vogue photographs and lifestyle features before she left for Germany. However, even her work in Germany suffered for the additional fact that everything she covered in Germany was published after the war was over, and the deluge of reporting in all other media outlets washed over Lee’s miniscule reports before they even came up for air. This includes the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Dachau (14).
It is patently unfair to measure Lee’s work for Vogue with seasoned women reporters, some of whom had experience as war correspondents in Italy, Russia, China, the Pacific and North Africa and for a few as early as the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. This is especially true considering that Lee had written only once professionally for Vogue in a feature interview with Edward R. Murrow. However, although it may not be fair to compare Lee to other women reporters it is certainly fair and important to compare the myth of Lee Miller to the women who actually covered the war to establish Lee’s proper place (i.e. perspective) in the pantheon of women war reporters.
The very notion that Lee was a woman War reporter (with a “capital W”) in the same company of Martha Gellhorn, Marguerite Higgins, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Kirkpatrick, Mary Walsh, Virginia Cowles, Dixie Tighe, Ruth Cowen and others is, in a word, unwarranted.
As previously mentioned, the myth that cloaks Lee Miller as that of a daring front line war correspondent is generally unsupported. Even if one accepts that Lee’s accidental coverage of Saint-Malo and her report from the Colmar Pocket entitles Lee to a place on the team, her output puts her very low on the roster. The attempt since 1985 to merge her into the group of players on the field is ultimately an unfortunate effort to compare apples to oranges.
Lee received no War Department commendation as did Marguerite Higgins (New York Herald Tribune) who received it for her coverage of Dachau, no U.S. Military certification as combat photographer as did Margaret Bourke-White (Life Magazine), nor a journalist award for Dachau reporting as did Martha Gellhorn (Colliers). While Lee was covering fashion for Vogue in London on D-Day, Martha Gellhorn was aboard a hospital ship and landed as the only woman reporter with the troops on D-Day getting her story by carrying a stretcher with the wounded G.I.s. Unlike Lee, after Saint-Malo, she was not merely delayed from travelling to Paris, she lost her credentials and then flew to Italy where she joined a Polish fighting unit on the front lines.
Dixie Tighe (International News Service and New York Post) was the first woman reporter to fly on a bomber mission where she spent twelve hours hunting German submarines. Margaret Bourke-White also photographed aerial bombing missions in addition to being on a ship that was sunk by a German torpedo while she was en route to photograph the Allied invasion of North Africa. She was rescued by a lifeboat and continued on to record the invasion. Bourke-White covered the U.S. Army advance in Italy, the U.S. Air Force campaign in North Africa, the preamble to war in Russia and she was at Buchenwald as well as other concentration camps. Iris Carpenter (Boston Globe) attached herself to a French resistance group and accompanied them on night raids. Kathleen Harriman (International News Service) witnessed the aftermath and mass grave of 11,000 Polish officers massacred by Soviet troops in the Katyn Forest in Russia. Ruth Cowan Nash (Associated Press) was present for the liberation of Paris after covering military operations in Algiers and North Africa, England before D-Day, and with her colleague, Inez Robb, they were the first two women officially credentialed to cover the war.
Furthermore, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson (Chicago Times/ International New Service) and Ruth Cowan Nash covered the Battle of the Bulge as did Martha Gellhorn and they were also at the U.S.-Russian meeting at the Elbe River in Torgau. Lee Carson was the first reporter to enter Paris on Liberation Day and she also reported on Torgau, and witnessed the atrocities of the Eria Work Camps at Leipzig. Carson received the INS medal of honor in 1945. Iris Carpenter was fully accredited to accompany the 1st U.S. Army and covered the Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the Battle of Aachen which was the first German city to fall on October 21, 1944, less than two months after Paris.
A point of note is that Lee was never embedded with any U.S. unit although she applied and was rejected by the 83rd. Additionally, with respect to Lee’s delayed entry to Paris, Carpenter was also held back with Lee as well as Tania Long (New York Herald Tribune/New York Times), Ann Stringer (Columbia-Citizen’s Journal) and Catherine Coyne (Boston Herald) by U.S. Army Public Relations Officers. There were about a dozen women reporters held by the PRO at Rennes who missed the Liberation. Stringer, Kirkpatrick and Carson made the Liberation by embedding themselves with Allied troops. Lee and the others were allowed into Paris a few days later.
As Allied Forces progressed through and beyond Paris other women reporters continued their reporting on all aspects of the advance towards the German frontier.
Toni Frissell (Freelance/Life) photographed in the active combat zone of the Allied Siegfried Offensive in February of 1945, the Tuskegee Airmen loading ammunition for aerial combat and receiving cyanide pills as an alternative to captivity, scenes of the orphaned and displaced and she was the official photographer of the Red Cross in Europe. She was trained by Cecil Beaton as a Vogue photographer and she worked for Vogue before and after the war. Edward Steichen tried to recruit her for his WWII Pacific team but she declined.
Ann Stringer arrived with her husband, Bill Stringer, a Reuters journalist, shortly after D-Day. Bill Stringer was one of the very few journalists killed in the war. Ann Stringer came under enemy aircraft fire while reporting from Germany occupied territory and she was also at Torgau. She avoided the celebration and took a cargo plane to get her Torgau story to Paris and she beat the entire press corps in reporting about the link up of the U.S. and Russian armies as they closed in on the Third Reich. She also covered Buchenwald and Dachau with Lee and a horde of reporters, U.S. Signal Corp and a Hollywood recruited film crew (15).
Virginia Irwin (St. Louis Dispatch) also avoided the Torgau celebration and, with Andrew Tully of the Boston Traveler, convinced a U.S. Army Sargent to cross the Elbe River and drove with the Russians to Berlin for the final offensive at the Battle of Berlin. In Berlin, Irwin was exposed to constant artillery fire and street battles leaving the city littered with the dead and wounded as the Russians brutally exacted revenge on Germany. At the end of the battle, Hitler was dead, the Wehrmacht crushed, approximately 100,000 German soldiers killed, a quarter of a million wounded and 450,000 prisoners taken.
Helen Kirkpatrick (Chicago Daily News) covered the Blitz in London before going to Normandy. She was attached to the French Free Forces and accompanied LeClerc’s 2nd Armored Division into Paris at the Liberation. She received the U.S. Medal of Freedom, Légion d’Honneur and the French Medal of Gratitude. Clearly there were others, like Mary Welsh (Time) who covered Liberation Day and was in Notre Dame and witnessed celebrants of the mass machine gunned in their pews. Also Sigrid Schultz (Chicago Tribune) who interviewed Hitler before Pearl Harbor and openly defied Nazism in Berlin before the U.S. entry into WWII, Claire Hollingsworth (Chicago Daily News) who was the first correspondent to report the invasion of Poland and start of WWII to Britain in 1939 and so many others from Allied nations or who worked in other theaters of operations in the Pacific, Italy, and North Africa.
It should be noted that deliberately or inadvertently, there is often an attempt by writers to draw a distinction between Lee as photographer, correspondent or photojournalist. This is a distinction without a difference. Lee was not a photojournalist because a photojournalist is defined by the photograph telling the story as was practiced by Scherman and other Life photojournalists. Lee generally wrote articles to accompany her photographs which by definition makes her a correspondent, albeit one who was also a photographer.
Perspective requires that Lee may have a place in the batting lineup but, contrary to myth, she is not the first at bat or even in the starting lineup, neither is The New Yorker’s, Janet Flanner for many of the same reasons. Lee’s proper place in the lineup has been so exaggerated as to be false, and it is not accidental that Lee’s only recognition for her WWII reporting during her lifetime was simply a luncheon provided by her Vogue colleagues. But for Lives, Lee would enjoy the same journalistic fame today as Mary Jean Kempner which is to say, none at all. Thus again, the power of narrative over reality is that although with her Saint-Malo and the Colmar Pocket coverage, Lee arguably, played the game, but as in every stage of her “lives”, Lee never played any “game” long enough to make it out of the minor leagues. It is not criticism, but fact, to conclude that Lee wrote, photographed and published very little and was read and seen by very few.
There is, however, an aspect of Lee Miller that always revolves around the notion that, “But, she was there” be it Paris in the late 1920’s, New York City in the 1930’s or WWII in the 1940’s. For historical purposes, the more significant question should be, what did she achieve while she was “there”? The answer is inevitably the same – not much. It is foolish to pretend otherwise and, characteristically, Lee herself never did.
Footnotes:
(1) Haworth-Booth, Mark (2007)The Art of Lee Miller Yale University Press
(Lee’s status as a U.S. citizen protected her from the U.K. conscription of men and women which gave her an opportunity to fill the void when Cecil Beaton and other Vogue photographers were taken by the British War Department. With Lee and the help of U.S. Vogue photographers such as Horst P. Horst and John Rawlings the photographic needs of Vogue were met. After her last war contribution in July 1945, Lee embarked on a tour of post-war Europe but upon her return she eventually returned to her fashion and lifestyle work for a couple of years. Her appearances became more and more rare though and eventually her undependability resulted in her termination by Audrey Withers.)
(2) "The Ministry of Information and its various divisions negotiated with wartime publishers on the development, production, translation and sales of their publications and their direct and indirect propaganda value to the British war effort. The Ministry of Information was responsible for the allocation of paper supplies and rationing and its support was a key factor in deciding what could be published. Print runs were determined by paper rations calculated as a proportion of pre-war circulation figures, and such practical matters impacted on profit margins. In many instances, government ministries were also the principal source of revenue for women’s magazines placing adverts for wartime campaigns that were central to sustainable financial modelling. Ministry of Information officials had regular meetings with magazine editors who recognised their role in disseminating messages on the contribution women were making to the war effort. Women’s magazines were, therefore, one of the many agencies of persuasion operating at the borderline between propaganda and autonomous culture in wartime Britain." [Emphasis added]
Waller J, Vaughan-Rees M (1987) Women in Wartime: The Role of Women’s Magazines, 1939–1945 London: MacDonald Optima
Gorrara, Claire (2018) Fashion and the femmes tondues: Lee Miller, Vogue and representing Liberation France French Cultural Studies Journal 29(4), (pages 330–344) https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155818791889
(3) It should be noted that this article concerns Lee’s assignment to the War after SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) allowed women reporters in July 1944 to remain on the continent and not return to London after each assignment. Lee’s article on the USA Tent Hospital of (9/15/1944) is excluded because it was written before women were allowed permanent assignments such as the one Lee undertook on August 13, 1944 until Germany’s surrender. Likewise, her article on post-war Denmark is excluded.
(4) Penrose, Antony (2005) Lee Miller's War: Beyond D-Day Thames and Hudson Ltd (page 159)
(5) Burke, Carolyn (2005) Lee Miller: A Life. Knopf, New York (page 29)
Morris, John G. (1998) Get the Picture A Personal History of Photojournalism University of Chicago Press (page 89)
(6) Lee’s reasons for visiting Orleans, Luxembourg and Brussels are unknown, but it is worth considering that Lee wrote to Audrey Withers on 8/26/1944 that she tried to embed with the 83rd which she was fond of, and in particular the 329th Regiment. The 329th was Major Speedie’s regiment and he figured prominently in Lee’s photographs and text in her Saint-Malo article. He shared dinners with Lee and took time from his duties to provide Lee with tours of the area. After Saint-Malo, the 83rd moved to Orleans and Lee left Paris to visit Orleans where the now Lt. Colonel Speedie accompanied Lee to Orleans, and again he is referenced in her article on the Loire Valley. When the 83rd moved to Luxembourg, Lt. Colonel Speedie again escorted Lee and he is featured in her article on Luxembourg. These areas had been taken without resistance and Lee’s articles seem of little purpose. Lee and Lt. Colonel Speedie were close enough for Lee to ask him to meet Roland Penrose when he was on R&R in London and he did.
Burke, Carolyn (2005) Lee Miller: A Life. Knopf, New York (page 233, page 251)
(7) “Alsace...Out of the German Prison” appeared in Vogue (U.S.) May 1, 1945, the day after Hitler’s suicide as four photographs and a brief caption. Lee’s article “Russians and Americans: Historic Meeting in Germany” was also strictly a photographic piece with only three photographs appearing in Vogue (U.S.) June, 1945 after Germany surrendered.
(8) Penrose, Antony (2005) Lee Miller's War: Beyond D-Day Thames and Hudson Ltd (page 65)
(9) Vogue marketed its circulation to advertisers as a half greater than its actual 210,000 subscribers and newsstand buyers, believing women to pass along their copies to their daughters. In a memo by Condé Nast to advertisers dated May 23, 1940, Nast wrote: “In a word, VOGUE is today giving its advertisers 300,000 circulation comprising of 200,000 of the key “mothers” of the United States ranging in age from 25 and up, and 100,000 of the key daughters of the United States from 25 down. This 100,000 of “daughter” circulation although not a single copy of it is credited to VOGUE in ABC figures, actually exists as value to the advertiser just as though these 100,000 young women had gone to the newsstands to purchase VOGUE.” “ABC” is the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United Kingdom [Emphasis added].
Condé Nast Archive, New York.
White, Rachel Roseborough (2019) Graphic sensations: Vogue and the politics of the body, 1930-1945 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/112152
(10)"The circulation of government policy through fashion magazines explains how and why the British government might keep the presses of British Vogue running and refuse materials for other publications when it imposed severe austerity measures. In February of 1940, Britain issued its Control of Paper Order, which forced publishers to use a little more than half—60 percent—of what it had consumed from August 1938 to August 1939. Withers recalled in Britain that a member of parliament complained that a paper quota had been declined for one periodical while it had been freely given to that “pernicious magazine, Vogue."
"British Vogue transitioned from a bi-weekly to a monthly issue in September 1939. The magazine had to lop an inch off the top and off of the side margin of its material body in 1942 when publishers were tasked to further slash consumption from half to a third of 1938-39 levels. Audrey Withers lamented that these alterations were a type of bodily violence. She wrote in a letter to Lee Miller about the physical changes to the magazine: “I am sorry [Vogue] should be so mutilated.” In light of shortages and restrictions, the magazine became a more treasured object in Britain. Because of paper restrictions, no new subscribers could be added to the roster. As Withers exclaimed, “Until [a reader] died (it was inconceivable that anyone would give it up), no new subscriber could be taken on.” Thus women would, in lieu of having their own subscription, receive copies from friends.”
Withers, Audrey (1994) Lifespan: An Autobiography Peter Owen (page 57)
White, Rachel Roseborough (2019) Graphic sensations: Vogue and the politics of the body, 1930-1945 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/112152
(11) Shea, Jerry World War II in Life Magazine Advertisements Western Connecticut State University Archives and Special Collections https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/world-war-ii-in-life-magazine-/background
Circulation figures for Vogue (U.K.) during WWII are not readily available but they have been contacted and, if the information is provided the figure will be updated. In the meantime, it is reasonable to calculate the Vogue (U.K.) had circulation well below the two hundred thousand of Vogue (U.S.). The Audit Bureau of Circulations ltd (ABC) reported in 2022 a circulation of only one hundred ninety thousand for Vogue (U.K) and, by way of additional comparison, the ABC reports the following circulation figures for the start of the war (1939) in the U.K. for newspaper and magazines:
Newspaper Dailies
Daily Express 2,510,219
The Daily Mirror 2,500,000
Daily Mail 1,532,683
Magazines
Picture Post 1,300,492 (A U.K. imitation of Life Magazine)
Lilliput 216,562
https://www.abc.org.uk/product/2214
Adam Matthew Publications http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/popular_newspapers_world_war_2_parts_1_to_5/abc-net-sales.aspx
(12) Edward R. Murrow on April 15, 1945 implored his audience to “believe what I have said” about Buchenwald. This echoed the sentiment of Eisenhower that the concentration camps had to be extensively reported to ensure that people would believe that atrocities that had occurred. Murrow’s words were echoed by Lee much later when she cabled her report “Believe It” to Vogue.
(13) Waller J, Vaughan-Rees M (1987) Women in Wartime: The Role of Women’s Magazines, 1939–1945 London: MacDonald Optima (pages 122-23)
(14) Dachau and Buchenwald
A “strawman” aspect of Lee’s myth is her coverage of Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. The horror, cruelty, inhumanity and emotion that surround these events bring a gravitas to Lee’s work by its very subject-matter but pulling Lee’s work out of 1945 into the present brings a uniqueness to her work which is incorrect. The record of her colleagues, at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen and thousands of other concentration, slave labor, extermination camp and ghettos yield documentation that overwhelms Lee’s work to the point of reducing Lee’s photography to the typical, not the unique.
This is not to say that Lee’s photographs were not horrible or even soul crushing. It is meant to convey that Lee’s work was buried in a landslide of identical photographs and coverage that inundated the world’s news outlets before Lee’s copy was published. Any notion that Lee’s photographs are unique is quickly dismissed by a visit to a Holocaust museum, a search online of Signal Corps photographs such as by Paul Averitt, Getty images or archives of the newspapers and magazines of the era. It is immediately apparent that photographers photographed “as is” what they witnessed. Piles of bodies or bones are recorded, SS troops that were machined gunned by U.S. troops after surrender, the emaciated dead and dying victims of Nazism, dead SS soldiers beaten to death by liberated prisoners and bodies of SS soldiers pulled from the waters of a moat leave no room for creative nuance, surrealistic or otherwise. Lee’s photo of a floating dead SS soldier may have been one of the Nazis killed by U.S. troops. The hoard of civilian and military photographers were all effectively documenting a crime scene.
Lee and Scherman drove from Nuremburg to Dachau the day after the liberation of Dachau and, that same day, went to Munich (Hitler’s bathtub). It was also the day of Hitler’s suicide. In the few hours they were at Dachau they recorded with other correspondents and photographers, the misery that was Dachau. Unfortunately, neither Lee’s nor Scherman’s nor anyone else’s photographs are stand out, they were, to Germany’s shame, the norm for Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and the thousands of other atrocities of the Third Reich.
(15) Prior to the U.S. entry into the war, General Eisenhower encouraged Hollywood directors to bring their skills and experience to the war effort. George Stevens, a major Hollywood director, volunteered for European coverage and John Ford to cover the Pacific which also saw Edward Steichen and his team. Film directors and news journalists, were called the Special Coverage Unit (SPECOU) as part of the U.S. Signal Corp and under the control of SHAEF. George Stevens was at Dachau with a team of forty-five cameramen, sound operators, assistant directors and major writing talent including Irwin Shaw and William Saroyan. The film of Dachau and other concentration camps were later used for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum We Will Show You Their Own Films: Film at the Nuremberg Trial Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/we-will-show-you-their-own-films-film-at-the-nuremberg-trial