By 1939, a new relationship with Surrealist artist and author Roland Penrose, whom she’d met years earlier in Paris, had brought Miller to London. At this point, the city was just beginning to weather the destructive effects of World War II. In the British capital, she met the editor of Vogue, Audrey Withers, whom Miller told of her desire to become a photojournalist. The two established a connection, and the magazine went on to publish several photo-essays by Miller, including 1943’s “Night Life Now,” which bore a sub-headline reading, “After dark drama of the work of the Women’s Services.” It comprised images of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, an all-female British Army artillery unit. Eventually, Miller’s images would help to transform the luxury-oriented fashion magazine, which at the time had found itself ill-equipped to meet the war-torn moment, into an outlet for serious news. As Hume explains it in Capturing Lee Miller, “Lee was seizing opportunity. So war was opportunity.”
Miller became accredited as a photographer with the American army through Condé Nast Publications in December 1942. Partnering with Scherman, a Life correspondent and an established war photographer, she embarked on her new venture.
In 1944, she was present for the battle of St. Malo, which saw the first use of napalm bombing. Later, she would also be present at the blitz, the chaos following D-Day, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of Alsace, and the U.S. military’s entry into Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, becoming one of only a few U.S. army women photographers at the time to see combat.
In 1945, Miller wrote to Withers, “I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them.” Sure enough, her images of war’s most gruesome forms of violence are among her most memorable ones from the era. In one photograph, a dead SS guard floats in sunlit water, incisively drawing contrasting the terror of carnage with the picturesque setting surrounding it.
At the time, whether willfully or not, few worldwide were aware of what took place in Nazi concentration camps. “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE!” Miller once wrote in a telegram to Withers, saying, “I hope Vogue will feel that it can publish these pictures.” Her photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau bear witness to various atrocities, and the acted as cold, hard evidence for disbelieving American and British audiences, who saw many written accounts of the war as propaganda. To the public, the American edition of Vogue from June 1945 printed Miller’s death camp photos, along with a direct message: “Believe It.”