Survivors at Buchenwald

22 January 1943

First woman to fly a combat mission, in a B-17

Attached to the US Army Air Forces in North Africa, she flies in the lead aircraft, Major Rudolph Emil Flack’s B-17F of the 414th Bombardment Squadron, on the bombing of the El Aouina airdrome in Tunis, Tunisia. She is the first female photographer and writer to fly on a combat mission.

22 February 1943

An article in Life on the sinking of the Strathallan

Life runs her article “Women in Lifeboats” on the sinking of the British troopship SS Strathallan, bound from England to Africa: torpedoed in the Mediterranean, she shared a lifeboat with the Irishwoman Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s chauffeur and secretary, and became friendly with her, though Eisenhower himself disliked her. On the Life staff she was known as “Maggie the Indestructible.”

spring 1945

Photographs liberated Buchenwald

She arrives at the Buchenwald concentration camp and photographs it. She later said that using the camera was almost a relief, creating a slight barrier between her and the horror in front of her.

spring 1945

Through collapsing Germany with General Patton

In spring 1945 she travels through a collapsing Germany with General George S. Patton; before that, accompanying American troops in Italy, she repeatedly came under fire in areas of fierce fighting.

1946

Goes to India to photograph the independence struggle

Life sends her to India to document the country’s struggle for freedom. In her photograph of Gandhi she expressively places the spinning wheel, a symbol of Indian independence, in the foreground.

1947

Records the violence of the partition of India

She becomes one of the most effective chroniclers of the violence that erupted at the independence and partition of India and Pakistan: streets littered with corpses, the dead with open eyes, refugees with vacant stares. Her photographs of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home in Mumbai are known equally well in India and Pakistan; she also photographed Gandhi and Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.