‘First to the Front’ Review: A Leading Lady of Journalism

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escorts, was to convey the importance of blood donations back home. This immediately endeared her to everyone, “from the shiniest brass button to the dirtiest grunt boot," as Ms. Rinehart puts it.

However, her success in capturing the action, despite orders to stay on the hospital ship, resulted in her press credentials being rescinded. Few of her pieces were published. After the war, she persuaded the Quakers to send her on an extended trip to Eastern Europe to photograph families, and particularly children, traumatized by war and its outcomes—starvation, homelessness, sickness.

Within years, prestigious publications such as National Geographic were using her photos and stories. In 1956, while covering the Hungarian Revolution, she was captured and jailed for six weeks, including five in solitary confinement. The experience left her psychologically wounded and turned her hostility toward totalitarian regimes into a fierce determination, Ms.

Rinehart writes, “to beat back the tide of communism" and tell “the stories of others fighting for their freedom." Chapelle’s mission would lead her to embed herself with the Algerian rebels in their fight against French rule, and with Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army in the Cuban Revolution. One editor tagged her the “bayonet border correspondent" since she was usually among the first at the front. By 1961, she was reporting on the American forces’ efforts to repel the Viet Cong.

By the time of her death in 1965, she had grown exasperated by what she saw as the inability of U.S. military leaders to understand guerilla warfare, and the CIA’s complicity in the illegal expansion of the war. But military censorship prevented her from reporting about her outrage.