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Margaret Bourk-White


doyler
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American photographer Margaret Bourke-White was the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941 she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression.

She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.

As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later in Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.

On January 22, 1943, Major Rudolph Emil Flack, Squadron and Mission Commander, piloted the lead aircraft with Margaret Bourke-White (the first female photographer/writer to fly on a combat mission) aboard his 414th Bombardment Squadron B-17F LITTLE BILL and bombed the El Aouina Airdrome in Tunis, Tunisia.

On this bombing raid, she describes the field of 130 enemy planes as "one bright orange flash". The navigator on this flight, Lieutenant Abraham J. Dreiseszun, ended up rising through the ranks of the U.S. Air Force to become a Major General.

In the spring of 1945 she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany with Gen. George S. Patton. After the war she produced a book entitled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.

 

 

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Here is Margaret's signature on a "short snorter," along with those of journalist Hubert Knickerbocker and actor/commando David Niven.Bourke.jpg.0892c292f8069d6e5b3058d2b94399ee.jpg

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