Last night after I had finished my book, I remembered a photograph that I had seen a few years ago.
My friend J9 and I spent an afternoon at the NPG, wandering around the Lee Miller exhibition. Millar was a Vogue model, turned photojournalist. At the outbreak of World War II, she wanted to be were the action was, but the British army would not let female photographers go into the field. So she took photos of London’s bombed-out buildings and war-damaged streets. Millar made it to France a month after D-day, and persuaded her editor to allow her the (bizarre?) role of Vogue’s war correspondent. British Vogue published hundreds of Miller’s graphic war images over the next few years. This included her photographs of the liberation of Dachau and of Buchenwald, which she sent back to London with a telegram stating ‘I implore you to believe this is true’.
It is the images of women during World War II that I remember from that exhibition. And the picture above is the one that in a way, haunted me. It is of the ATS searchlight crew in Hendon, a team of smiling young women in wool coats. They seemed to be having such a fun adventure, and I could imagine their evenings flirting with the GI’s (as my Gran had done). According to the exhibitions description of the photograph, the Hendon searchlight was machine gunned a few nights after the photo was taken. Many of those women were killed.
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