The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  On her last night in Nuremberg, Cowles went with a correspondent from Paris-Soir to hear Hitler speak.

  The stadium was packed with nearly 200,000 spectators. As the time for the Fuehrer’s arrival drew near, the crowd grew restless. ... Suddenly the beat of the drums increased and three motorcycles with yellow standards fluttering from their windshields raced through the gates. A few minutes later a fleet of black cars rolled swiftly into the arena: in one of them, standing in the front seat, his hand outstretched in the Nazi salute, was Hitler.

  Hider climbed to his box in the grandstand amid a deafening ovation, then gave the signal for the political leaders to enter. They came, a hundred thousand strong, through an opening in the far end of the arena. In the silver light they seemed to pour into the bowl like a flood of water. Each of them carried a Nazi flag and when they were assembled in mass formation, the bowl looked like a shimmering sea of swastikas.

  The crowd grew silent when Hitler began to speak, Cowles continued, but the drums continued their steady beat. His voice thundered out into the night, punctuated by cheers from the multitude, some of whom swayed back and forth chanting “Sieg Heil” as if hypnotized. Tears streamed down people’s cheeks. The drums quickened their pace and grew louder, and Cowles, always so brave, began to feel frightened, as if they were actually in the heart of the African jungle.

  When at last it was over and Hitler stopped speaking, she found that, inexplicably, the magic seemed to vanish. The small figure climbing back into his car looked dull and unimpressive. “You had to pinch yourself to realize that this was the man on whom the eyes of the world were riveted,” she wrote, “that he alone held the lightning in his hands.”

  From her position as Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, Sigrid Schultz was among the many correspondents who flocked to Berchtesgaden to report the first meeting of Hitler and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In a strident and lengthy monologue, Hitler reviewed his plans for Czechoslovakia. Sigrid noted that his agenda had expanded from the mere annexation of the Sudetenland. Now he demanded all of Czechoslovakia.

  All through September Schultz’s byline dominated the front page of the Chicago Tribune and, via its press service, other American papers as well. If there was envy in the ranks, it probably went unvoiced, as everyone knew how favorably Colonel McCormick viewed his lady in Berlin. Meanwhile, that lady reported that at the second conference, Hitler increased his demands. The Czechs, backed by France, rejected them. Britain mobilized its fleet. Hitler issued an ultimatum ordering the Czechs to begin evacuation of the Sudetenland by 2 P.M. the next day, but then backed off and requested instead that Chamberlain come to Munich.

  Chamberlain accepted the reprieve and went.

  The itinerary of the prime minister was of particular interest to Helen Kirkpatrick who, along with Victor Gordon Lennox and Graham Hutton of the Daily Telegraph and the Economist respectively, had recently begun producing a weekly foreign affairs publication. The Whitehall Letter was sent to embassies in Britain and elsewhere opposed to the policies of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and was cabled to subscribers in America. Having gravitated to London and severed her connection with the Herald Tribune European edition, Helen was able to give the Whitehall Letter her full concentration. Her take-home pay was negligible, but her inclusion in the triad of editors meant she was considered a serious writer, that her political acumen was recognized — i.e., that she was moving forward in the field of international journalism. (The same could be said of Virginia Cowles, whose unsigned Sunday Times articles on Spain were quoted in the House of Commons by Lloyd George until he discovered that the “eminent authority” was an American woman.)

  Balanced on the roof of a parked car at Heston airport, Kirkpatrick had a clear view of the prime minister’s return from the Munich conference. He stepped out of the plane, “a beatific smile on his face, waving a piece of paper in one hand, clutching his umbrella in the other,” she wrote, and described the cheering crowds that lined the London road and packed Downing Street. “Tomorrow the war was to have begun,” she continued, but no, here instead was Neville Chamberlain with a promise of “peace for our time.” Did he really believe that? she asked herself. Did all the people who cheered so wildly believe it?

  Young and idealistic, Kirkpatrick felt strongly about Munich. “The Czechs had one of the best armies in Europe at the time,” she recalled later. “The British and the French had a pact that obligated them to go to their defense. The British sold out the Czechs.” At the time Helen was covering for a friend, the diplomatic correspondent of the Sunday Times. “It gave me a marvelous insight into how news was manipulated,” she said. “I worked very hard. I would see Roland de Margerie at the French embassy and then I would see Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador, and later I would talk to people in the Foreign Office, and anyone at Number 10 Downing Street who was available. Then I would put together the piece for Sunday’s paper.... But I discovered that after I had done so, the editor would take it around to Number 10 and edit it to suit the Prime Minister.”

  From her room at the Hotel Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris, Janet Flanner worked hard at capturing, with requisite New Yorker objectivity, French reactions to the events at Munich. Her own predominant response was relief. She had spent an anxious summer; after visits to Salzburg and Vienna, she had traveled with Noel Murphy along the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border, where great concrete roadblocks and long stretches of barbed wire fencing portended imminent trespass. Back in France, she sat huddled by the radio at Noel’s farmhouse in Orgeval, comparing French, English, and German versions of Hitler’s vacillating plans. When he announced German military occupation of the Sudetenland and France began to mobilize, they stocked up on staples like sardines, sugar, and brandy and stored gasoline in champagne bottles. After Munich they sorted and burned much of their correspondence and buried Janet’s collection of gold coins and Noel’s family silver. Not until the participants at Munich departed for home did they return to Paris.

  In her Paris letter of October 2,1938, tided “Peace in Our Time,” Flanner described how the French press had learned details of the Munich meeting only after Prime Minister Chamberlain spoke before the House of Commons:

  Up to that time, Paris knew only that the problem of saving Prague had been replaced by the problem of saving democratic Europe . . . that communiques communicated nothing since nothing was known ... that war seemed imminent. Now all the French know is that there is peace. In their curious calm, they don’t want to know anything else. It is the only thing worth knowing; that and the new knowledge which is exciting the whole population of Europe today — that statesmen can think everybody’s way out of war.

  Although she herself had never known war, Flanner shared the beliefs of her French hosts who had known all too much. She wanted desperately to believe there would be no war, and not only because of disruption to her own life. She viewed herself as a civilian writer who wrote on peaceful subjects, not a hard-nosed journalist who covered whatever came along and took all the risks that that entailed.

  Always magnetized by the trouble spot of the moment, Virginia Cowles meanwhile decided to return to Prague, much to the distress of the young airport manager who had helped her board the flight to Paris only the week before and could not believe she was back. Neither could her buddies “Knick” Knickerbocker and John Whitaker; they greeted her as if she were an apparition. All the French and English correspondents had left the day before, they said. The frontiers were closed, trains no longer ran, phone wires had been cut. They hoped she’d brought enough clothes for a year, in particular more appropriate shoes than those little high heels she was wearing. In her hotel room that night she found a gas mask on the pillow and a card, “Compliments of the American Embassy.”

  On the afternoon that President Eduard Benes was to broadcast to the nation on the results of the Munich conference, Cowles joined other foreign journalists in Knickerbocker’s room overlooking the big square. A youn
g Czech secretary came in to translate. The speech was little more than a matter-of-fact statement about the decision to partition the country. “Our state will not be the smallest,” Benes said in closing. “There are smaller states than we shall be.” Cowles noticed that the translator was weeping too hard to continue. From the square below came the solemn music of the Czech national anthem, the people standing stiffly at attention as if they had not fully grasped the meaning behind the words.

  About midnight Knickerbocker, Whitaker, and Cowles drove out of Prague on their way to the Austrian-Czech frontier to cover the crossing of the German army into Czechoslovakia. It was a dubious undertaking, but if her friends were going, she would not be left behind. At the village of Oberplan a crowd of Sudeten mountain folk — tough, wild-eyed, and armed — barred the way, and escorted them to the town hall. A heap of freshly murdered Czechs lay on the pavement. The Americans were led to a small upstairs room where their papers were examined by the local Gestapo; they were denounced as spies, sentenced to execution, then guarded with tommy guns until the arrival of the official agent from the Reich at dawn. The latter, impressed by the term “foreign journalist” on their passports, ordered their release. With “a great show of huff as outraged Americans,” Whitaker wrote later, they then demanded, and got, an apology from the local Gestapo, after which that “cool little cucumber” Cowles demanded enough gasoline to get them back to Prague.

  Later, in London, Virginia encountered Chamberlain at a small dinner party. During conversation in the drawing room afterward, she was brought up short by his question, “Tell me, did you find that the Czechs had any bitter feeling towards the English?” She was so astonished that she could not think at first how to reply, and it was a few moments before she could regain enough composure to describe the square in Prague, Benes’s speech, and the weeping people.

  Martha Gellhorn also returned to Prague. She had been there in the spring, again in the summer, and now it was fall. Her “Obituary of a Democracy,” which she wrote for Collier’s, began:

  On all the roads in Czechoslovakia, the army was going home. You would see them walking in small groups or alone, not walking fast and not walking well, just going back from the frontiers as they had been told to do. Once in a while you would see a company, with its officer leading, marching along; but not the way an army marches to war. People would stand on the side of the road and watch them in silence.

  There was more, largely on the futility of the country’s brave preparations for a battle that never happened. Martha closed her piece with the leave-taking of Eduard Benes and his wife to the citizens of Prague. “They stood along the curb and waited for this man who was a symbol of their state and their freedom,” she wrote. “When he passed they bowed their heads as people do for the dead.”

  The following February, in Cuba with Ernest Hemingway, Gellhorn began a novel based on her Czechoslovak experience. In A Stricken Field the heroine, Mary Douglas, a long-legged blond American correspondent not unlike herself, free to come and go as she pleases, returns to Prague after the annexation and tries to reconcile it with the city she has known. Her colleagues inform her that concentration camps have already been set up in Czechoslovakia, that German Socialists, Communists, and Jews who had thought the country a safe haven are in real danger. Mary locates her friend Rita, survivor of an earlier camp, who has since managed to make a new life for herself. Rita asks her for help, and Mary responds in terms that Martha often used herself in a similar context:

  It’s like war, Mary thought, people ask you to do something, there is very little time, they have to trust you because there is no one else handy. . . . She knew she would always say yes, when she was asked for help, because she did not feel she had a right to her privileges: passport, job, love. She only felt she was lucky and lucky and luckier than anybody could be, and you had to pay back for that.

  Like her fictional heroine, Gellhorn actively tried to ease the refugee situation. The frontiers had closed. New refugees coming into Prague from the Sudetenland “with wild eyes and stunned, exhausted faces” were given twenty-four hours to return. While Martha was in Prague, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees paid a two-day visit and “didn’t see a single refugee,” she noted scornfully. In the novel Mary goes to his hotel (just as an outraged Martha had done) “and saw him and pounded the table as always and shouted and pleaded and explained.” The commissioner agrees to try to obtain a stay for the refugees. Mary (again like Martha) escorts him about and makes introductions and argues her case, but it is hopeless. In the end there is nothing anyone can do.

  The fictional Mary Douglas’s week in Prague is over. She has failed to help the refugee situation or save her friend Rita. But she has given some good advice to a few persons and has found a way to smuggle an important document out of the country. The compassionate woman has won out over the merely competent writer, and that, Gellhorn seemed to be saying, was as it should be.

  5

  One Thought, One Holy Mission: Poland

  By the spring of 1939 few correspondents in Europe believed that a larger war could be avoided. The question had become not “if” but “when,” and for American women “how” — how to position themselves to ensure their right to remain and report the war when it happened. This was no problem for Sigrid Schultz, entrenched Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, or Eleanor Packard, wife of UP bureau chief Reynolds Packard in Rome, or even Virginia Cowles, with friends in high places and herself firmly ensconced at the London Sunday Times. Dorothy Thompson assumed that her stature would guarantee her regular forays to the Continent. But Helen Kirkpatrick sought firmer journalistic ground under her feet than the Whitehall Letter provided.

  This coveted stability came unsolicited from Bill Stoneman, London bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News, who knew her, valued her insights, and enjoyed her company. In her just-published little book This Terrible Peace, Kirkpatrick predicted that the present accord would fail, an assessment that provoked a furious response from Prime Minister Chamberlain’s staff. Stoneman, however, was impressed. He was also shorthanded, and asked her to help out, hoping to negotiate temporary assistance into a permanent position. But Helen’s talents were less obvious to Colonel Knox, publisher of the News. While London begged to hire her as a regular, Chicago held fast to its rule: No women on the foreign staff.

  In the meantime Kirkpatrick watched the German takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. Appeasement died, she wrote, “a sudden, swift and agonized death. Chamberlain was angry, extremely angry with Hitler. It was a personal and bitter anger, for Hitler had wrecked all Chamberlain’s plans, destroyed his chance of greatness, and forced upon him the alternative of retiring ignomin-iously or fighting.” As Helen had warned in her book, Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” proved a figment of his own imagination.

  The one publication never shortsighted about hiring women on its foreign staff was the New York Herald Tribune. Had not Margaret Fuller served the New York Tribune a century before, and later Anna Benjamin the same? Now there was Sonia Tomara, already a valued member of the Herald Tribune staff, primed to become a major foreign correspondent.

  Sonia Tomara, New York Herald Tribune

  Sonia Tomara came from the Russian aristocracy. “A dark, rather mysterious young woman who wrote brilliantly” was how CBS’s Robert St. John described her. Her childhood had been divided between her family’s villa on the shores of the Black Sea and her aunt’s estate near Moscow. She always felt herself plain, and grew up painfully shy, uncomfortable among women, happier in the male world of intellect and drive. Her primary influence was her father, a scholar and a rebel against the tsarist regime; her best friend was her gentle older brother, whose life she closely shared. When World War I prevented her from studying in England as planned, she insisted on enrolling at Moscow University to study chemistry.

  With her father an unrepentant socialist nobleman, her mother’s family liberal bourgeoi
s, and her fellow students leaning toward Bolshevism, Tomara at first welcomed the Revolution of 1917. Having idealized the masses, she was bewildered by the violence, the lack of moral discipline, and the eventual rejection of all cultural values. That fall the Bolsheviks seized power. Her aunt’s Moscow house was in the line of fire, and for a week Sonia was marooned inside. When at last she ventured out, “blood was still running in the gutter and dead men lay in grotesque positions.” The worldly goods of everyone of her class were confiscated, and food was scarce. Sonia, still in her teens, and her younger sister Irina decided to leave Moscow for the family home at Sukhum on the Black Sea, in spite of the civil war raging in between. Attempting to cross from Red territory to White, they were captured, imprisoned, and charged with spying. Sonia was condemned to be shot at dawn, but a sympathetic Red Guard had them released. It took two perilous months, much of it on foot, to get home. There she melted into the calm, still peaceful life until, restless “to plunge again into the thick of things,” she left.

  Sonia Tamara, 1942.

  AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING.

  Her second odyssey was no less eventful. Working as an interpreter in a British military mission, Tomara watched the old Russian world — her world — die. In the years ahead she never saw anything worse than the civil war she witnessed then, when villages “passed from the hands of one party to the other, their inhabitants decimated by both, their houses burnt in reprisal, their harvest looted or ruined.” She watched typhus spread among rich and poor alike, saw wounded men freezing to death and women carrying dead children, heard of punishment and torture at the hands of the victors — whoever the victors were — until at last the territory occupied by the Whites dwindled to nothing and all their people had to take ship and flee. It was then Sonia heard of the death of her beloved brother, one more casualty of the war. On March 20, 1920, on a coal ship with four thousand other Russians, she sailed into exile.