The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  The Women Who

  Wrote the War

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Ever Since Eve: Reflections on Childbirth

  First Encounters: Meeting with Memorable People

  Word People

  The Women Who

  Wrote the War

  Nancy Caldwell Sorel

  Arcade Publishing • New York

  Copyright © 1999 by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sorel, Nancy Caldwell.

  The women who wrote the war / Nancy Caldwell Sorel. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 1-55970-493-4

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Journalists Biography. 2. World War,

  1939-1945—Photography. 3. War photographers—United States Biography. 4. Women journalists—United States Biography. 5. Women photographers—United States Biography. I. Title.

  D799.U6 S563 1999

  940.53’082—dc2199-16177

  Published in the United States by Arcade Publishing, Inc., New York Distributed by Time Warner Trade Publishing

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Designed by API

  BP

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For my sisters, Suzanne and Virginia,

  my daughters, Jenny and Katherine,

  Madeline, Suzanne, and Maria.

  Also for Leo, and always for Ed.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  A Note on the Foremothers

  1. The Groundbreakers

  2. Cassandras of the Coming Storm

  3. Apprentices in Spain

  4. The Lessons of Czechoslovakia

  5. One Thought, One Holy Mission: Poland

  6. Waiting for Hitler: The Phony War

  7. Fleeing France

  8. Braving the Blitz

  9. Working Under the Swastika

  10. Margaret Bourke-White Shoots the Russian War

  11. Treading Water, Marking Time

  12. China Hands

  13. Facing the War That Is Our War Now

  14. Women Behind Walls: Manila, Siena, Shanghai

  15. Learning the Rules, Dressing the Part

  16. Women on Trial: North Africa

  17. Touching Base on Five Continents

  18. Slogging Through Italy

  19. New Women Come Over for Overlord

  20. D-Day

  21. Trekking North from Rome

  22. That Summer in France

  23. Liberating Paris

  24. Crossing the Siegfried Line

  25. The Battle of the Bulge

  26. Penetrating the Pacific Barriers

  27. Iwojima

  28. Of Rain, Ruin, Relationships, and the Bridge at Remagen

  30. The Month of April: The Advance

  30. The Month of April: The Camps

  31. The Longed-for Day

  32. “It Is Not Over, Over Here”

  33. Women Winding Up a War

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  It is my deep regret that of the many correspondents I interviewed for this book, so few are here to read it now. Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank and Tania Long Daniell in particular became friends and offered me their experiences and insights over an interval of some years. Catherine Coyne Hudson, Eve Curie Labouisse, Shelley Mydans, Lael Wertenbaker, Iris Carpenter Akers, Lyn Crost Stern, Virginia Lee Warren Bracker, Mary Marvin Breckinridge, and Faye Gillis Wells were generous with their recollections. Annalee Jacoby Fadiman, Betty Wason, and Bonnie Wiley wrote from distant locations, and Patricia Lochridge recorded her story for her sons, who forwarded it to me. I also talked with male reporters, including Philip Hamburger, Carl Mydans, Harrison Salisbury, and William Walton, and corresponded with Allan Jackson, Lawrence LeSueur, Colonel Barney Oldfield, and David E. Scherman. Edith Iglauer Daly and Ruth Gruber did not report the war but knew many who had. I am immensely grateful to them all.

  I wish to thank Frederick Voss, Historian/Curator, at the National Portrait Gallery; Margaret E. Wagner, Special Projects Coordinator, and Irene Ursula Burnham, Director of Interpretive Programs, Library of Congress; also Fern Ingersoll and Barbara Vandergriff at the Washington Press Club Foundation and National Press Club. Eva Mosely, Kathy Kraft, and Wendy Thomas at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, were consistently helpful. I am indebted to Emmett Chisum, Research Historian, and Jennifer King at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; Jim Gallagher, Library Coordinator, George H. Beebe Communications Library, and Margaret Goostray, Director, Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, at Boston University; Harold L. Miller, Reference Archivist, at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Amy Hague, Assistant Curator, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; Carolyn Davis, Special Collections, George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University; Diane E. Kaplan, Archivist, Yale University Library; Nicole L. Bouche, Manuscripts Division, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Elaine Felcher, Archivist, Time-Life; and Bob Medina at the New York Times.

  Gathering photographs for this book was not an easy task. I express my appreciation to Antony Penrose, Lee Miller’s son and biographer, and Carole Callow, Archivist, at the Lee Miller Archives, Chiddingly, East Sussex, England; also to Barbara W. Brannon, Curator, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress; Marie Helene Gold, Photograph Coordinator, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Beth Zarcone, Laura Giammarco, and George Hogan at Time-Life; Alan Goodrich, Audio-Visual Department, John E Kennedy Library; Dan Fuller, Visual Materials Archivist, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Camille Ruggiero at AP/Wide World Photos; and the staff of the Corbis-Bettman Archives.

  The New York Public Library deserves a special vote of thanks; I all but lived there for several years, and could never have written this book without its voluminous resources and attentive staff.

  I greatly benefited from the editorial observations of Ann Close, Byron Dobell, and Sara Blackburn. I owe much to Kirsten Bakis and Carole Spector for long hours spent transcribing tapes, and for research aid provided by my daughter Katherine and my loyal and tireless friend Helen Levacca. I also wish to recognize the effort on my behalf of Sonia Tomara’s family, especially Tatiana de Fidler but also Blair Clark and C. Bassine; of Patricia Lochridge’s son Steve Bull; of Catherine Coyne’s sister-in-law Beatrice Coyne; and Marjorie Avery’s good friend Kathleen Scott. Margaret Wolf’s contribution to the Margaret Bourke-White story is much appreciated.

  I am grateful to my agent, Irene Skolnick, for her blessed persistence and her devotion. My editors, Richard and Jeannette Seaver, are wise and wonderful; Jeannette’s critical acumen and ready enthusiasm have been especially welcome. Tim Bent, Cal Barksdale, and Phillipa Tawn brought their individual expertise and good fellowship to this endeavor.

  Finally, I would not have made it through the nine years spent on this book without the unwavering encouragement of my friends. Robert Kotlowitz, Dorothy Gallagher, and Richard Snow read the manuscript and offered their insight. Daniel Okrent at Time-Life, Peter Nichols at the New York Times, Neil Hickey at the Columbia Journalism Review, and Ben Sonnenberg proved valuable intermediaries. I am especially grateful to my husband Ed, who supplied the saving gra
ce of daily laughter. Other friends, and family, were simply there, with abiding support and affection, and I thank them all.

  Prologue

  World War II was a great, tragic, drawn-out epic with a huge cast of characters. War correspondents were a tiny part of the whole, and women war correspondents — fewer than a hundred in all — comprised a fraction of that part. Most serious American journalists, male and female, wanted a piece of this story that was soon to cover much of the globe; the women were as determined as the men, although at the time few newspaperwomen had made it from the society desk into the newsroom. But the robustness of the American press was in their favor, with many more daily newspapers, news periodicals, and wire services than there are today, and with news bureaus in every capital of importance. Women benefited from this comprehensiveness if only because it left room for them. More than twenty-five newspapers, about the same number of magazines, eight wire services, and five radio networks employed women directly as war correspondents.

  Although there was much that was common to the experience of all women correspondents, I was always struck by the variety of their perspectives. The longtimers often felt themselves participants in the action — understandable for someone dodging shells while taking notes, or typing a story during a bombing raid. Personal danger tends to blur one’s vision. It also tests one’s courage. Several women were close to fearless, others perpetually scared, most somewhere in between. They may not always have coped cheerfully with the lack of amenities, the endless rain, the cold, colds, foot blisters, aching limbs, and worse, but they all coped. It was essential to their pride that they not admit to small defeats.

  Every woman felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status. Every woman, at one time or another, had first to buck the system before she could do the job her editor had sent her to do. Discriminatory treatment by generals or denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters were tougher to handle than adverse physical conditions. Fortunately, as time passed, military attitudes softened, and the majority of male colleagues were always open-minded and supportive. Often the danger lay in their being too sympathetic. Most male reporters were married, and rough moments shared with a feminine colleague could trigger a new but fragile alliance.

  In spite of varying perspectives, there was much that united the women in these pages. All exhibited a kind of basic curiosity, an enjoyment of adventure, and a gutsiness without which they would not have lasted beyond the first week. I found no one inured to the horror of what she had witnessed. Barred from press briefings until late in the war, women reporters began by writing of the less combative side of the conflict — of the daily heroism of the medics, the miracles the doctors performed, how caring (even when bone-tired) the nurses were. They wrote of the young wounded far from home and of civilian victims close to home — families torn apart, old people cold and tired and homeless, mothers desperate for food for their children, children hungry and hurting and afraid. In some ways frontline reporting, which opened up for many women in the final months of the war, was easier. But both could be heartbreaking.

  This book is not only about what the women saw and reported in their dispatches; it is also about that side of their lives they did not write about — their relationships with colleagues, buddies, lovers; what kept them sane in bad moments (or, alternatively, drove them crazy). And finally it is about how the war changed them, because, of course, it did. It gave them their breakthrough as journalists, their chance to prove themselves, and it allowed them to live more intensely than most of them ever would again. Experiencing the war through their eyes, hearing the urgency in their voices fifty-odd years later, I became their advocate, their champion. Theirs was a special opportunity which they themselves viewed as an honor, and their country was honored by the way they fulfilled that task.

  When, after a modicum of preliminary investigation, I determined to write this book, my first thought was, how was I to locate women from a half century before, most of whom had never been famous, no longer bore the last name under which they had written, and, if still alive, might live just about anywhere? And if I did find them — women ranging from their late seventies to mid-nineties — was it not unconscionably intrusive to barge into their ordered lives with demands on their time and memory?

  I had gathered a list of names (which in time would multiply several times over) and, just on the off chance, I looked them up in my Manhattan telephone book. I found two! That the first was within walking distance seemed a good omen; I called and, yes, this was the Irene Corbally Kuhn who had reported from the Pacific in the 1930s and, yes, she would love to talk with me. The next morning suited us both. She awaited me in the doorway of her small apartment in Greenwich Village, and the first thing she did was to give me a hug. The second was to talk, at length, with obvious joy.

  This was the beginning. What evolved was a relationship with a rare group of women that I will always count one of the high points of my life. I carried my tape recorder into a Sutton Place apartment overlooking New York’s East River, a sprawling Westchester house on a lake, a sunny tidewater home on Cape Cod, a retirement cottage in Williamsburg, Virginia, two large old homes in Washington, D.C., a simple country house in New Hampshire, and an even more modest one in a small Maryland town. One correspondent, down from Ottawa, met with me in the unexpectedly homey Park Avenue apartment of Clifton and Margaret Truman Daniel. Everywhere I was welcomed. Often my questions elicited a response on a subject that had been half buried for many years, and that in turn jogged another recollection, and another.

  After our initial taping, I occasionally met with one or another of “my correspondents,” as I had begun to think of them, for lunch, or over a drink at a hotel bar. At the same time I was acquiring their stories, available in college archives around the country, at the Library of Congress, or on microfilm at the New York Public Library. I read them avidly, sprinkling paragraphs here and there throughout my rapidly growing manuscript. The stories offered access to women no longer alive — missed opportunities I have never ceased to regret. In time the manuscript grew to unwieldy size, requiring that half the original roster of reporters, and some whole areas of the war, be cut. The reader is perhaps relieved, but I mourn those women whose experiences I can no longer share with you.

  The first women to cover war at the front on a par with men, the correspondents on these pages opened the way to new professional possibilities for women in journalism. They fought for and won the right to do their job on their own terms. Other battles for equality of gender they left for the women who would follow. It was a step-by-step process, and enough for them that they had established a single and irrevocable point of no return.

  A Note on the Foremothers

  The women in these pages were not first-generation American war correspondents. They had honorable predecessors, few in number but deserving recognition. Margaret Fuller, named European correspondent for the New York Tribune by editor Horace Greeley, covered the Italian uprisings of 1848 and the long bombardment of Rome by the French army. Cora Taylor Crane, Stephen Crane’s wife, sent accounts of the Greco-Turkish war of 1897 to the New York Journal. Young and lovely Anna Benjamin, her bulky box camera slung over one shoulder, became the first female photojournalist when she covered first the Spanish-American war for Leslies Illustrated Newspaper and then the Philippine insurrection for the New York Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. In August 1914, when the Germans invaded Louvain, Belgium, Mary Boyle O’Reilly, who happened to be there, dispatched stories of fire and devastation for three weeks to the Boston Pilot. Early the next year, armed with credentials from the Saturday Evening Post, best-selling author Mary Roberts Rinehart talked her way across the Channel from England to Dunkirk and sent back dramatic accounts of the German bombardment.

  The career of Henrietta Eleanor “Peggy” Hull would span both world wars and reflect difficulties women encountered in the field. Reporting from Valdahon, France, in 1917 for the El Paso Morning Times, Hull desc
ribed American doughboys learning to use trench mortars, a dispatch that prompted American generals to deny her farther access to forward press camps. When she resorted to stories of the little things in the lives of the common soldier, popular with the Stateside papers, it was her fellow reporters who demanded her removal. Peggy returned home without having witnessed a battle, but her claim as a reporter of the Great War (and subsequent coverage of American troops in Vladivostok) led to her accreditation as the first American woman war correspondent.

  The Women Who

  Wrote the War

  1

  The Groundbreakers

  In the early 1920s three American women, young then and unknown to each other, seized a chance at a reporter’s life and never turned back. Each appreciated the rarity of her opportunity, her great luck, and gave back in kind. Their successes, both before and during the coming war, would prove pivotal in beckoning other women into the field.

  Dorothy Thompson, Curtis syndicate

  The oldest child of an English-born Methodist clergyman, Dorothy Thompson grew up in small towns in western New York. Her mother died when she was eight, and she rebelled against her stepmother’s conventionality. As a scholarship student at Syracuse University, she was remembered as unusually articulate in class discussions, but also for monopolizing conversation and for the intense attachments she formed with other women students. She was tall and slender, with clear blue eyes and early indications of what would become a commanding presence. After three years of work with the women’s suffrage movement, Dorothy went to Paris as a publicity writer for the American Red Cross, and from there to Vienna, where she supplemented her Red Cross duties by becoming a stringer for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Freelance submissions were for women a time-honored means of entry into the newspaper world. Hearing that her firsthand account of an attempted coup by Emperor Franz Josef’s grandnephew had impressed her editors, she applied for a salaried position, and rushed off to the paper’s Paris office to present her case. In person Dorothy could be magnificent. She got the job.