Following the death of American photographer Dickey Chapelle killed during a patrol in November 1965, Catherine Leroy was the only woman photographer to cover the conflict in Vietnam as a war correspondent between 1966 and 1968.
The American wars of South-East Asia has given birth to a new generation of prominent combat photographers: such as David Douglas Duncan in Korea; Eddie Adams, David Burnett, Larry Burrows, Gilles Caron, Henri Huet, Philip Jones Griffith, Don McCullin, Tim Page, Kyoichi Sawada, and Christian Simonpietri. A predominantly male universe, and often openly ‘chauvinistic.’
With the noteworthy exception of Life’s Margaret Bourke-White who covered the War in Korea embedded with South-Korean troops and Dickey Chapelle, the first ever American female journalist and photographer to be killed in action covering an armed conflict — in Vietnam in November 1965, barely three months before Catherine Leroy’s arrival — , the handful of female conflict-photographers after World War II were mostly serving in the military. During the Vietnam War, women are present mainly as writers: Gloria Emerson, Michèle Ray, and Kate Webb. Women photographers only started showing up from 1969 on: the Anglo-Americans Sarah Errington, Barbara Gluck-Treaster, and Nancy Moran, and at about the same time as the French Françoise Demulder, Marie-Laure de Decker, and Christine Spengler.
Battle of Hué, January/February 1968
When the Têt Offensive broke out over the night of January 30-31, 1968, Catherine Leroy, then 23, had been covering the Vietnam conflict for almost two years as the sole woman conflict photographer.
The surprise offensive launched across South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army with the support of its local Vietcong allies culminated in the month-long Battle of Hué — one of the longest and bloodiest of the entire conflict. The important logistical and symbolic value of the former imperial city of 150,000 inhabitants was at stake. Both sides suffered tremendous casualties. The Americans finally regained control of the ancient city that was 80 percent destroyed. But historians agree that, while the US won the fight militarily, it lost the war politically, as domestic and international public opinion strongly shifted against Washington’s armed intervention.
Catherine Leroy was initially accompanied during the Battle of Hué by French journalist François Mazure. They were both taken prisoner and held briefly by North Vietnamese troops in the first days of the offensive, an event that led to her February 16 cover story on her imprisonment in Life magazine. Lesser known until recently is that she actually did travel back to Hué from Saigon, where most of her all-male colleagues were convinced that she was still basking in the glory of her amazing scoop. She would spend a week (February 15-20) covering the intense house-to-house fighting and photographed it mostly in color, an uncommon choice of film in a breaking-news situation. A number of her pictures were published as a ten-page spread in the May 14 issue of Look magazine. The editors used the photographs to publicly express, for the first time, the publication’s opposition to America’s military involvement in Vietnam.
The summer of her return from Vietnam, Leroy found herself unexpectedly assigned by Time Life to cover a rock festival in the middle of a field in New York State. Reintegration into a regular “civilian” daily life was proving difficult for her. It is likely that she was suffering from post-traumatic syndrome symptoms. She found herself thrust into a crowd of people her own generation who were ready to enjoy it all, music, love and more, and to attend what would become the most iconic event of the American counterculture of the 1960s: Woodstock.
Vietnam-type helicopters hovered over a gigantic human tide, dropping off bands and stars that would perform on stage: Joan Baez, Ravi Shankar, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin and other famous guests. She ended-up meeting among the immense, endless crowd a bunch of people she knew well: veterans from the Vietnam War. Hairy and bearded, they no longer resembled the heavily armed and helmeted soldiers she rubbed shoulders with for three years: her buddies were now rallying against the war and determined to let it be known. In the summer of 1972, she accompanied a small group of activists led by Ron Kovic, from California to Florida, in their protest against President Richard Nixon’s expected nomination to a second term at the Republican Convention in Miami, a journey recounted in “Operation Last Patrol.“ the film Leroy co-directed.
Fall / Liberation of Saigon, April 1975
In April of 1975, Catherine Leroy flies back to Saigon as soon as she learns that the North Vietnamese and National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam forces are heading for the country’s capital, the fall of which is expected at any point. She is witness to the flight of civilian populations as “enemy forces” are fast approaching; to the hasty burials of the last South Vietnamese soldiers killed in the war; to the panicked departure of American personnel still in the country; and to sporadic looting. She is present on April 30 when the first North Vietnamese and Vietcong columns enter the city and the young victorious soldiers mingle with local citizens, and when the “liberators” force their way into the presidential palace. General “Big” Minh, elected as the country’s last president two days earlier, surrenders. On May 8, North Vietnamese general Tran Van Tra gives a first formal press conference to local and international journalists still around, who are invited to attend the large victory parade to take place on May 15. The war is over.
Lebanon: The Civil War, 1975/82
In the 1970s and 1980s, Catherine Leroy travels all over the world to cover wars and other stories in Somalia, Libya, Kenya and Gabon in Africa and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan and China in Asia. Yet, it is in the Middle East that she will spend mostof her time: Egypt, Gaza, Iran where she covers the 1979 revolution and the return of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iraq, Jordan, and, naturally, Lebanon, a small country caught-up in an endless civil war the first half of which she will witness at great personal risk (1975 to 1982).
In June 1982, Israel launched “Operation Peace for the Galilee” in an attempt to put an end to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and invaded Lebanon all the way to Beirut where the PLO was then headquartered. The Israeli armed forces besieged the Lebanese capital for almost two months. A rain of bombs fell on the city, causing enormous damage and many casualties among civilians. Catherine Leroy was then freelancing for Time magazine. She and her colleague Tony Clifton, an Australian journalist from Newsweek, decided to produce together a book about the horrific events of that violent summer: God Cried recounted and denounced the Israeli invasion and its tragic consequences. The book generated a fierce and emotion-laden controversy following its publication a year later.
Catherine Leroy’s archive is currently being inventoried, appraised and in part digitized. The 1975 and 1976 images from Beirut shown here are part of the body of work that earned Leroy the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club of America in 1976 for “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.” She is the first woman to have won this most prestigious award in photojournalism.
Ten years into the Troubles, Northern Ireland, August 1979
In the summer of 1979 Catherine Leroy finds herself in Belfast on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the sectarian riots in Northern Ireland instigated by the traditional annual Protestant Orangist marches. The 1969 unrest culminated with the Battle of the Bogside in Derry, yet, it is Belfast that experienced the most intense and spread-out violence which led for the first time to the deployment by the British Government of the Army mid-August with the mission to counter the growing disorder surrounding the civil rights protests across the territory and restore order by building “peace lines” to separate Catholic and Protestant districts. These events marked the beginning of the brutal thirty-year conflict known as the Troubles that finally ended with the Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, on 10 April 1998.
A reunified Vietnam at peace, five years later, 1982
In the Fall of 1980, five years after the “fall of Saigon” and the liberation of the Vietnam from all foreign intervention, Catherine Leroy chose to return to a country reunified and finally at peace following a devastating twelve-year war won both politically and militarily against the massive American involvement. She will travel through the new-born nation for several weeks and discover with amazement Hanoi, Ha Long and Haiphong and revisit Con Thien, Danang, Vung Tau and Saigon now Ho Chi Minh city. Her lens captures the daily life on the streets of these cities but also disabled veterans and civilians and the remains of war, and lingers with the “children of the dust”, those Amerasian boys and girls roaming the streets of the former capital of the South, whose American GI fathers have long left the country, and them behind.