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The Documentary: D-Day Dames

The Documentary: D-Day Dames: D-Day Dames

Picture: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long, Credit: Lee Miller Archives

06/06/2014 GMT

D-Day Dames

BBC World Service - The Documentary, D-Day Dames, D-Day Dames

The American women reporters determined to cover World War Two

The American women reporters - such as Martha Gellhorn, Helen Kirkpatrick and Lee Miller - who were determined to cover World War Two

In spring 1944 American women war correspondents gathered in London in anticipation of the D-Day invasion. Women were not allowed to report from the front line, although that did not stop Martha Gellhorn. She returned to London as her marriage to Ernest Hemingway was ending - he had met his next wife, also a war correspondent - in the Dorchester hotel in London as he waited for the invasion to take place. But it was Gellhorn, who hid on a hospital ship across the channel, who went ashore and wrote a dramatic account of it – she was subsequently disciplined by the authorities as she had no accreditation. 
 
Other women, such as Helen Kirkpatrick witnessed Eisenhower's return from the front as she reported from D-Day headquarters. After D-Day itself, women reporters gradually started going to Normandy, such as Lee Miller, who filed dramatic photo-journalism accounts for British Vogue from a field hospital and then found herself on the frontlines of the siege of St Malo. The women followed the troops across Europe, arriving in Paris for its liberation in August.  It was a key moment in the history of women war correspondents. 
 
Lyse Doucet recounts their stories with archive audio, readings from their articles and letters, interviews with relatives and their biographers. She explains how the work of women war correspondents has changed since then.

(Photo: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long, Credit: Lee Miller Archives)

BBC World Service

Lyse Doucet recounts the stories of American women war correspondents in London for D-Day.

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