Dickey Chapelle jumped out of planes, marched through the jungle and survived enemy prison—redefining what it meant to be a woman on the front lines. MsReads via Narratively
ickey Chapelle took the pliers from her guard’s hand, applied the tongs to her own index fingernail, and twisted until it stung.She had seen enough mangled hands of refugees fleeing Hungary’s brutal Communist regime to know how they did it. But back then she had been a reporter interviewing those lucky enough to escape capture in Vienna. Now she was a prisoner in Budapest’s infamous Fö Street Prison.
Circling toward the flooded landscape of Worcester, Dickey had no idea how the plane was going to land to deliver its supplies. The co-pilot motioned for her to trade places with him, and she saw the answer: It wasn’t going to touch down. The co-pilot pushed the crates out of the aircraft, and she watched them spiral end over end, a classic airdrop delivery.and from that moment, it appeared her fate was sealed. She would be a journalist, and a daredevil, too.
Photographing the wounded Marines evacuated from Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Dickey got her first glimpse of war. But it wasn’t enough. She needed to show the world the front lines. By the time Dickey left, Ostroff writes, the Marines had taken to calling her “our girl,” a compliment she would never forget.ivilian life was not as accepting. Her assignment editors, Ostroff writes, thought that many of her grisly depictions of battle were “too dirty” to print. Others didn’t even think she had taken them, since they believed no woman was capable of getting photos of firefights.
Chapelle sits and drinks coffee with the FLN Scorpion Battalion Rebels in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, 1957. Though Tony hadn’t done much on their trip other than complain about his ailing health, back in New York he found the strength to resume his near Olympic philandering. As a friend of the couple recalled to Ostroff, “Dickey would go to work at eight-thirty in the morning and Tony would have somebody in bed with him by nine o’clock.”
But she couldn’t stay forever, and she never did manage to sell the story. In New York, bills waited that she couldn’t pay, along with Tony, who, more jealous than ever, started showing up at her building to scream at her from the stairwell. Dickey hired a lawyer to file a restraining order and veered toward a nervous breakdown.
Documenting was no longer enough. Dickey felt she had to do something more. On the night of December 5, 1956, with her camera, two guides and a backpack full of penicillin, Dickey crossed into Hungary. Ten miles beyond the border, she was arrested at gunpoint and taken to Fö Street Prison. Twenty days later, she stood before a judge, fearing the worst. Miraculously, her sentence came down as 50 days in prison, already served. Back in the United States, her undying patriotism erupted in front of the throng of journalists reporting on her release. “Thank God I’m an American!” was the only thing she could think to say.he had been committed to her cause before, but now Dickey had a score to settle. Injustice anywhere wasn’t safe from her camera or her pen.
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