The Women who Wrote the War Read online

  In her next dispatch, cabled from Rumania, Tomara reported the dwindling strength of the Polish army. Mere manpower was no match for motorized forces. The summer had been dry, and the German tanks rolled easily across the flat farmlands. Much of the country was occupied by the end of the first week of September; by the second, Polish troops were demoralized. Conditions were “distressing beyond words,” she wrote — the army exhausted by rapid marches, entire regiments mowed down by machine-gun fire.

  On September 15 Tomara crossed back into Poland, to the border town of Zaleszczyki, where members of the diplomatic corps had alighted after vacating Warsaw. They told stories of skies never free of German bombers terrorizing the people — not only bombing but diving low over roads and towns and machine-gunning troops and civilians alike. There was no food to be had anywhere, they said. Tomara described this final refuge as “a picturesque town with wide streets and pretty white houses buried among orchards.” Flowers bloomed in the gardens. It was crowded: the British ambassador and his retinue were squeezed into three rooms, and the French ambassador was still hunting quarters. The foreign office shared a house with the press office, with cows and hogs in the courtyard and almost no press reports. “The population of the town is bewildered at all the government and diplomatic cars that have invaded the streets,” Sonia wrote. “Most of the cars are covered with heavy dust and some have been riddled with bullets from German machine guns.”

  This bucolic respite was brief. Two days later, from the Polish-Rumanian border, Tomara filed her final report:

  September 17, 1939. This morning the Polish government learned that, with the Germans still attacking from the west, Russian troops had driven in from the east. It was decided that the fight could not continue against such a formidable array of armies. No resistance has thus far been offered to the Russian troops. They walked into Poland today without firing a shot and were seen marching side by side with the retiring Polish Army. It was learned here on excellent authority that the Russian move was made in full agreement with the German government.

  Tomara stood by the Kuty bridge and watched the long line of cars crossing the river into Rumania. Only soldiers and persons with diplomatic passports were allowed across. Polish planes flew over in formation and landed at the airfield; the planes were requisitioned by the Rumanian military, but the pilots, wearing civilian clothes, left at once for France.

  It was the end for Poland. That night the border closed. The war had lasted seventeen days.

  6

  Waiting for Hitler: The Phony War

  There is a maverick in every group, someone who looks at a situation from a different perspective than everyone else, and among the women reporting in Europe immediately after war was declared, that odd-woman-out was Janet Flanner. Unlike those who were doing their best to solidify their positions abroad, Flanner decided to return home. She had threatened this move twice before; each time the New Yorker had pleaded with her to stay, and she had relented. But this time she held firm. She was not a “news reporter,” she explained. Her kind of writing required an openness to investigation and quiet surroundings for careful rewriting, for the weighing and judging of every phrase. This was not possible in a Paris where shops hid behind protective shutters, women carried vegetables home from market in their gas masks, and golden September days were punctuated by air raid sirens and trips to the shelters. As Hitler’s armies advanced across Poland, Janet and her friends — Solita Solano, Noel Murphy, and Margaret Anderson, founder of the Little Review — sat mesmerized around the radio at Noel’s farmhouse in Orgeval. At nightfall they walked in the garden, looked up at the stars, and wondered when they would all be together again.

  All four women were American with American passports, but only Flanner and Solano, who had fled New York together nearly two decades before, contemplated return. Anderson would not desert her companion, the French singer Georgette Leblanc, who was suffering from cancer, and Murphy would not leave France and her work with Anne Morgan’s organization American Friends of France, which J. P.’s daughter had started during World War I. That left the wrenching choice to Flanner. Quitting her Paris post did not mean resigning from the New Yorker, only shifting her position there, and returning to America with Solita did not signify a preference for her over Noel. But in honesty Janet had to acknowledge that she was abandoning Noel in a country now at war with a strong and malefic neighbor, with all the potentialities that entailed. How long America would remain neutral, how long Noel’s passport would protect her, were questions no one could answer.

  Indicative of Flanner’s ambivalence was the fact that she paid the rent on her rooms at the Hotel Saint-Germain-des-Pres through April 1940. She and Solano headed for Bordeaux, a city of transit for some fifteen thousand U.S. citizens and thousands more from other parts of the Americas seeking passage home. In what would be her last New Yorker piece from French soil for nearly five years, datelined Bordeaux, September 24, 1939, Flanner described the influx of weary evacuees, often low on money when long-expected ships never arrived. Few people had reservations; most simply went, registered, paid the fare, and waited. Flanner and Solano waited three weeks — not bad, really. Gertrude Stein wrote them to “come back to us soon,” and Janet replied that she would, by January, only half believing it, and knowing Stein didn’t believe it either.

  Back in the United States, Margaret Bourke-White watched the progression of events in Europe with alarm. Those circled areas on the map of Czechoslovakia that the Nazi on the train had labeled “German territory” had become just that — along with the rest of Czechoslovakia, and now Poland. She and Erskine Caldwell had tried to arrange for their Jewish interpreter to emigrate to America, but were unsuccessful.

  Ever since their return, Caldwell had been pressing Bourke-White to marry him. She was unconvinced. “Both much too used to looking out after ourselves,” she noted at the time. “Can’t help but feel that he wants me to change a lot.” In fact, he both did and didn’t — he wanted Kit, as he called her, to be a traditional wife focusing on their marriage instead of her career, but at the same time he was proud of her talent and accomplishments, and knew she would be miserable without her work. Fifty years later he would have been in company with other men in the same situation; in 1939 he knew none. But he knew that he loved her, and knew, or said, that he literally could not live without her. In February they flew to Reno where a marriage license could be obtained at moment’s notice, as if once the decision were made, it had best be acted upon without delay. On the plane the bride drew up a prenuptial contract. Among its terms: all quarrels were to be settled before midnight, Erskine was to be polite to her friends, he was never to attempt to keep her from her work, and he must try to control his moods. The groom made no demands. Both of them wanted a child, or thought they did, and during the first year of their marriage they invented a fantasy child, a daughter whom they called Patricia.

  By the fall of 1939, however, there was no hint of pregnancy, which to Bourke-White meant there was no reason for her not to take an assignment from Life to go to England. Great Britain was technically at war, although during that period of the “phony war,” contact with the enemy was minimal. Bourke-White was excited about a recent breakthrough in news photography: a cable-photo system from London that enabled photographs to cross the Atlantic with amazing speed and accuracy. But she arrived in the capital to discover that Life already had two photographers in the area. They worked together on a photo-essay on the London blackout — worked night after night, often all night — but in the end only one picture of Margaret’s was used.

  In December 1939 Bourke-White left for the Balkans, widely expected to be Hitler’s next target. From Rumania she reported that the populace was jittery. Cameras were all but banned. There was no way to photograph unobtrusively; to shoot unaccompanied by an official chaperone was to invite arrest. Moving on to Turkey, she found once again that another Life photographer had preceded her. Margaret began to feel that the ma
gazine no longer appreciated her. She wrote her husband that she did not like squandering her time and talent, and Caldwell agreed. He was deeply jealous of the hold Life had on her, of the loyalty the editors demanded as a matter of course. He hated that she had written into their marriage contract that he was not to interfere with her assignments. She had been away five months, and he wanted her home.

  She returned, and resigned from Life.

  War broke out in earnest on April 9,1940, when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. No woman reporter was in either country, but as luck would have it, Betty Wason happened to be in Sweden, and she seized the opportunity as a gift from the Norse gods.

  Betty Wason, CBS

  Native of a small Indiana town and graduate of Purdue, Elizabeth Wason carved out a career in the middle of the Depression when a woman was lucky just to land a job. She began broadcasting in Cincinnati, moved on to New York, and after two years of working and scrimping, left in 1938 for Europe — with only the dubious encouragement of Transradio News to place stories on a “pay as used” basis.

  It was a gutsy move for a young woman of twenty-six, barely five feet tall, fluent in no language but her own, who lacked contacts and had never done straight news reporting. In 1938 the place to go was Prague, so Wason went to Prague, and stayed on after the Nazi takeover to write of the formation of the new government. Later she accompanied Hungarian troops when they repossessed that piece of Czechoslovakia that had once been Hungary. She had the good fortune, or clairvoyance, to be in Rumania when the leader of the fascist Iron Guard, Corneliu Codreanu, was murdered, and in Rome during Neville Chamberlain’s visit with Mussolini. Transradio News was pleased with her copy, but the paychecks were never quite enough to support her, and she returned home discouraged. After a stint on the New York daily PM, Betty determined to try Europe again. She booked passage, but before sailing dropped by CBS, where the news director suggested she see their correspondent William Shirer in Berlin. She did, and afterward checked in with him regularly.

  That was how Shirer knew where to reach her when the Germans marched into Denmark and landed troops in Norway. His call was doubly welcome: nothing newsworthy was happening in Sweden, and Wason was down to her last krona (about twenty-five cents). As the Germans bombed Oslo, the Norwegian king fled with his government and took refuge in a village. In short order Betty located a man from the Swedish legation who had evacuated with the royal party, and interviewed him. In her retelling of his story, the Swede happened to be standing by his car outside the house where the court and government were staying. Spying a German plane, he promptly blasted forth with his automobile horn.

  Down the road ran King Haakon, Crown Prince Olaf, the British and Polish ministers, and all the other government officials. They had to stand waist-deep in snow beneath fir trees while bombs crashed.... An hour later the second alarm came. This time the plane used machine-gun fire, and the court and visiting ministers fell flat on their faces with bed sheets, which they had yanked off the beds hurriedly in their departure, spread over them for camouflage.

  CBS was impressed, and hired Wason as a stringer at a hundred dollars a week.

  Her next challenge was to cross the frontier into Norway, where matters were not going well. The British, French, and Polish forces that landed along the coast to aid the Norwegians were ill equipped and defenseless against constant attack by air. On a daring sortie of her own, Wason managed to elude the border guards, cross into Norway, and hitch a ride on a truck across the mountainous terrain. Frightened, she experienced her first air raid, hiding in the woods amid the intensive bombing and machine-gunning. Later she managed to piece together a cohesive story from talking to wounded British soldiers, and was wondering how to return to Sweden to get it on the air when she ran across seasoned reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Leland Stowe, now with the Chicago Daily News. With his melting smile and shock of white hair, Stowe could be very reassuring. Together they set out for Sweden, convinced they had enough material to prove that the Allies had irretrievably bungled the campaign. Hitching rides and, when the vehicles foundered in the snow, slogging along on foot, they reached the Swedish border, and Betty made it to Stockholm in time for her broadcast. Stowe admired her grit and spirit, and felt as bad as she did when atmospheric conditions prevented her broadcast from going through.

  CBS proved less supportive than Stowe, however. In time there were complaints about her voice: too young and feminine, lacking the required authority. Would she please find a man to read from her texts? Wason felt betrayed, especially when the man she found, Winston Burdette, was offered a contract. But despite all her efforts and her very real success, there was no appeal — not with an almost entirely male company like CBS, not in 1940 when there was neither the fact nor the expectation of equality between the sexes.

  The debacle of Norway’s defeat in April 1940 sealed the fate of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In Parliament for the debate, Helen Kirkpatrick reported that the Commons jeered him wildly, and that Chamberlain was shaken and gray. Candidates for the office narrowed to the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, and Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty. The lot fell to Churchill.

  By then Kirkpatrick had been made “official” in the London bureau of the Chicago Daily News. On a recent visit to the United States, she had accepted an invitation to speak in Chicago. Before her talk she dropped in at the paper’s home office. Foreign editor Carroll Binder, a strong ally, introduced her around. Later Helen recalled how editor Paul Scott Mowrer sat turning his pencil over and over. “I like your stuff,” he said in his usual taciturn manner, “but we don’t have women on the foreign staff.” Their next stop was the office of the publisher, Colonel Frank Knox, who repeated the now familiar litany of exclusion. At that point Binder, no doubt frustrated, entered the fray: “Colonel, you know UP is trying to get her.” This little fantasy was as much news to Kirkpatrick as it was to Knox, but it had the desired effect. “Well, we can’t have that,” the colonel said. “Let’s have lunch.” By dessert the matter was settled, and word went out to other women in the field: THE BARRIERS ARE NOT IMPREGNABLE!

  When on March 23, 1940, Kirkpatrick sailed back to Europe on the Manhattan, she discovered Dorothy Thompson on board. Someone took a photo of them at the rail together, which Helen treasured because she admired Thompson. With her new legitimacy, Helen wanted Thompson to respect her, too, and she found it gratifying that in Rome the British minister gave a cocktail party for her. She could ask him to invite Thompson, and then take pride in being able to introduce her to Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law. After years of diatribes against Hitler and the Nazis, Thompson was very much the grande dame of the interventionist viewpoint in America, and Kirkpatrick was pleased to appear a not inconsequential figure herself.

  Thompson was about to set out on what she called “a swing around the hot-spot circle.” In fact, she was not nearly so blase as that term implied; she worried that she was getting in over her head, that the trip was being too frivolously undertaken. At the Vatican she begged Pope Pius XII to exert all his influence to keep Italy neutral in the coming conflict, but the pope only smiled. The Catholic Church, he said, was not so powerful as Miss Thompson thought, which she took as yet another indication of defeatism. From Rome she traveled to Ankara, Bucharest, and Belgrade, increasingly dismayed by the fatalism and resignation she encountered.

  Sonia Tomara, who ran across Thompson in Bucharest that spring of 1940, shared her impression. Now serving as the New York Herald Tribune correspondent for all of southeast Europe, Tomara was responsible for reporting from Budapest to Turkey, and even made a tour through Ankara and Asia Minor into Syria and Palestine. Her bags were always half packed. Belgrade was her favorite city. The Simplon Express (London-Paris-Istanbul) met the Orient Express from Berlin there in the Yugoslav capital; cars from the warring countries merged into one train, and one could read the newspapers of both sides on the same day. In Belgrade correspondents stayed at the Serp
ski Krai, an old-fashioned hotel on the park with a porter who spoke a little English and always called Sonia “my lady.” The bar was crowded with reporters and members of the Allied and American diplomatic corps; the German press drank elsewhere. Cy Sulzberger of the New York Times, Edward Kennedy of the AP, Sam Brewer of the Chicago Tribune, and Tomara all had rooms on the same floor and breakfasted together. She was also in touch with Italian newspapermen she had known in Rome. It was clear to her that none of the Italians in Belgrade liked their allies the Germans.

  Austrians were different, however. Whenever Tomara was in Budapest, Heinrich von S., an Austrian who spent most of his time on his estate in northern Hungary, went to see her. They had met on a train between Vienna and Bratislava and discovered they had many interests in common. They belonged to enemy camps, but that was of little import in Budapest, Sonia said. They dined in fine restaurants and talked of the Europe of the past. And of the present — Heinrich brought her news of what was happening in Vienna, Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

  In time Tomara moved along to Rumania. In Bucharest the bar of the Athenee Palace was the gathering place for correspondents. They were a sizable contingent, and apprehensive; a common pastime was mapping out avenues of escape in case of a German attack. The writing of dispatches became a science. There was no official censorship, but their phones were tapped, their desks searched, and copies of their stories scrutinized by the propaganda ministry. Those who made a slip were asked to leave the country at once.

  Tomara was still in Bucharest when the Germans invaded Norway. She spent much of her time with Sam Brewer of the Chicago Tribune, Ed Beattie of UP, and Walter Duranty of the New York Times, hovering over the radio, following the course of the battle on the BBC. Listening as well to the German stations where broadcasts were all of Nazi victories, Tomara and her colleagues refused to believe the reports. Before long, however, they noticed that the same news they heard out of Berlin one day would appear on the BBC the next. The Deutschlandsender reports of German advances and Allied defeats were accurate; the BBC simply postponed the truth. Surrounded by many Germans there at the Athenee, Sonia and the others felt the shame of the Allied defeat.