Probably the most famous picture taken by the French photographer Catherine Leroy, who has died of lung cancer aged 60, is a graphic image of a young American marine in Vietnam in 1967, his hand pressed to a fallen comrade’s chest, gazing upwards, mouth open in a gasp as he realises the man has died.

But the picture that perhaps shows her style better is of a gently smiling 12-year old Palestinian girl facing the camera in Beirut in 1982. She wears a headband that supports two glittery hearts. Her smile is so sweet that you do not notice – until the second or third glance – that her right arm has been blown off at the elbow by an Israeli shell, and ends in a black plastic stump.

This was what made Leroy, and other great war photographers like Don McCullin, so different from the herd of freelances who made good money – and reputations – in the wars of the second half of the 20th century. In a war the easiest subject to find is a bleeding corpse. The real genius is to take a picture of a living person, without a drop of blood showing, and record the suffering in a single human face.

Leroy was born in Paris, went to conservative Catholic high schools, studied music and thought she might become a classical pianist. But in 1966, aged 21, “I bought a one-way ticket to Saigon, and flew off with $150 and a Leica. I wanted to be a war photographer, but I had never heard a shot fired in anger.” On arrival, she did what every tyro did; she went to the Associated Press office, where the legendary photo editor Horst Fass listened to her story, reached into his bottom drawer, plonked three rolls of black and white film in front of her and said, “If you can get anything I can use, I’ll pay you $15 a picture”.

Leroy made a lot more than $15. Her photographs from that period have become classic war pictures. Death and destruction in combat zones, wounded and dying soldiers, and one remarkable series, taken when she was briefly captured by the North Vietnamese during the battle for Hue in 1968, of the then mysterious enemy with the title, A Remarkable Day in Hue: the Enemy Lets Me Take His Picture.

Leroy stood just 5ft tall, and when fully loaded with pack, boots and a tangle of cameras, was carrying close to her bodyweight of 85lbs. She was one of the first to prove that women could not only work out of offices in war zones, but could tough it out in the field with the strongest soldier. People like her opened up the field for the stream of women who now write and appear on television from every battlefield in the world.

Leroy fought with, and abused, her editors. She always sympathised with the men in the field because she had been in battle alongside them – and had the scars to prove it. She was hit by a mortar burst while with the US marines in 1967; her chest was ripped open, and the piece of shrapnel that should have killed her was only stopped by her Nikon. She said that she thought the last words she would hear were, “I think she’s dead, sarge.” Her notoriously obscene English was learned from the same marines.

As war ended in Indochina in 1975, Leroy moved on to Lebanon, where the civil war was just beginning. In Beirut during the climactic Israeli siege of the city in 1982, photographers did not have to go to war, the Israelis brought the war to them. Leroy’s best pictures there were of the living – a father with his daughter holding a frame because her leg has been blown off; a young fighter cradling a kitten; crippled and demented patients abandoned in a mental hospital repeatedly bombed by the Israelis.

Beirut was the high watermark of Leroy’s career as a combat photographer: I was there for Newsweek magazine and we documented our experiences in the book God Cried (1983). She later turned to fashion photography, especially in Japan, and would suddenly appear, clad entirely in some black Yoji Yamamoto creation, wearing black wrap-round sunglasses and looking like a tiny and very lethal Ninja. When even those jobs ended, she moved to Los Angeles and opened Piece Unique, an online website trading in used haute couture. She died in hospital a week after her cancer was diagnosed.

Leroy would have had a wry appreciation of the fact that her stunning pictures of the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut could be used today to illustrate the current bombardment. After her death the veteran AP reporter Richard Pyle recalled that during the first Beirut conflict, sitting by the hotel swimming pool in the smallest bikini in the Arab world, Leroy suddenly said in her Inspector Clouseau English, “Alors Ree-char, zees ees all bool-sheet.” Her photographic archive says otherwise.

· Catherine Leroy, combat photographer, born 1945; died July 8 2006