Although Paris was declared an “open city” on June 11, 1940, and was entered by German forces on the fourteenth, many French clung to the belief that their armies would regroup and fight on. Churchill flew to Tours in a last-ditch attempt to persuade French premier Paul Reynaud not to make a separate peace with Germany. The prime minister returned to London with no commitment as to what course the French would choose.
Under those circumstances, Virginia Cowles and her party in the Chrysler were not surprised to find ordinary French citizens uninformed. On Sunday, June 16, they stopped in a tiny village cafe where the proprietress, a matriarch of seventy-eight, hovered over them. She was not depressed by the news from Paris, Virginia recalled. “All her life she had been troubled by the Boches, but in the end things always came right. She could remember the war of 1870, for she was eight years old at the time. In the war of 1914 her sons had fought, and today her grandsons were at the front.” Cowles and her colleagues could not bring themselves to tell her that at that very moment the French cabinet was discussing whether France should capitulate.
In Bordeaux that Sunday thousands of people milled about the town, tired, tense, with nowhere to go. All talk was about the cabinet meetings in session. The word “armistice” began to appear in press reports, accompanied by categorical denials that France would ask for one. The evening communique informed reporters that Reynaud had resigned, that Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, hero of the last war, would succeed as premier. Petain was eighty-four years old.
Sonia Tomara reached Bordeaux with her sister in a truck packed with French sailors. On Monday she was in a cafe about noon — there was nowhere else to go if one had nowhere to sleep, she said — when word came over the radio that Petain would speak. There was a dead silence. Nobody moved as in his old voice he spoke of his own sacrifice, of the heroism of the troops and the plight of the refugees. Then he said, “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that we must try to stop the fight.” People looked at each other stunned. “It’s armistice,” a woman said. “It’s defeat,” a man corrected her.
Within a day or two most American and British correspondents left Bordeaux for England. Sonia Tomara remained to settle affairs for Irina, who was stateless, and to help the Herald Tribune Paris correspondent John Elliott, who was on crutches from an accident suffered at the front. On a straw-covered upper floor of a building they pounded out their stories. Tomara carried them to the censor, returning with food, which they ate with their fingers. In time, at the request of the Herald Tribune, she made her way through Spain to Portugal where she embarked for New York.
Well before then the others had congregated at Le Verdon, the port at the mouth of the Gironde, where the SS Madura lay in the harbor taking on hundreds of unexpected passengers. It was a perfect June day. Virginia Cowles described the white sand glistening in the sunshine, the tall pines bordering the beach, a hundred boats at anchor in the harbor. The Madura was a small British passenger-cargo ship that had left East Africa for England on what was scheduled as a three-week trip, but which already had lasted two months. The ship was almost within reach of the Channel when the order came for the captain to backtrack and pick up refugees at Bordeaux. Designed for two hundred passengers, the Madura had taken on eight times that many by the time it weighed anchor. Mary Welsh and Noel Monks shared an air mattress with another couple on the starboard side. Cowles, encamped on the top deck with the Fleet Street contingent, estimated there were some sixty journalists aboard.
Cars and other items had been abandoned at quayside, and each passenger was limited to one piece of luggage. The captain had had no opportunity to replenish the food supply, but adequate rations existed for a breakfast of tea and bread for all and a dinner of a little meat, some rice, and a potato. No submarines were sighted. When they put in at Falmouth thirty-six hours later, they were met by a troop of motherly women who passed out lemonade and sandwiches along with reassurances to the tired travelers that now they were in England, everything would be all right.
* * *
By June 25, 1940, hostilities had ceased. Under the terms of the armistice, France became a divided state: the north under German occupation, the south under putative French control. Premier Marshal Petain set up office in the town of Vichy, a name previously connected with healthful waters and a thick potato soup, now to take on the connotation of collaboration with the enemy, disgrace. Vichy France was the France that sold out. But there was another France — some of it in Britain with General Charles de Gaulle, some of it primed to go underground. That would be the France that survived.
8
Braving the Blitz
The ink was barely dry on the armistice agreement of June 25, 1940, when the Germans sent their first bombers over England. The war came home to American correspondents that day; no longer need they fly in and out of various capitals seeking it. Facing England along the North Sea and Channel coasts were Norway, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, all under Nazi domination. It was chilling if one had time to ponder it, which none of the women did. Observing their British sisters with their daily courage, their proficiency in handling jobs long the province of men, they would have felt guilty admitting to leisure or fear.
Early summer 1940 was a time of settling in for the long haul, both physically and psychically. They were few in number by now, anyway: Virginia Cowles and Mary Welsh, just back from France on the Madura, Helen Kirkpatrick, who had remained in England, and Tania Long, come over from Berlin after the fall of Poland.
Tania Long, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times
Tania Long grew up in Berlin with her Russian-born mother and English father, who served as financial correspondent for the London Economist and the New York Times. As a brown-eyed child of eleven, Tania was sent to boarding school outside Paris; she loved Paris, and later continued her studies at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In Paris she met a young American. “I did everything too early,” she recalled, “got married at eighteen, had a child at nineteen.” She found life in New York fascinating, American politics as well, but her conservative husband did not concur in her admiration for President Roosevelt. “I have to think for myself,” she told him, but he did not see why. The marriage foundered, they separated, and Tania (by then an American citizen) needed a job. Journalism was the only profession she had observed at close hand, the only work that interested her. She had no real experience, but the Newark Ledger offered a low-level opening with promise of advancement. Tania hired a housekeeper to care for her son and took the job.
Tania Long, London, 1941.
AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS.
While over the next two years Tania grew to love reporting, she worried about her parents’ welfare in Nazi Berlin. In the summer of 1938 she sailed for Bremen, but disembarked at Southampton to join her father who, although clearly ill, had gone to London to urge a strong stand against Hitler. After Munich the political situation appeared to normalize, and Tania sent for her son, but the family had barely settled down together in Berlin when her father died. At twenty-five she found herself the only wage earner for a family of three in a country she felt she knew no longer. Under Nazi regulations none of her father’s estate could leave Germany, and Long realized that without it they could not get by in New York. They had no choice but to remain. It was then she learned that Ralph Barnes, Berlin bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, was looking for an assistant. The job required fluency in English, German, French, and if possible Russian; Tania had all the credentials.
She was grateful for the presence of Sigrid Schultz, although that old family friend appeared to have lost the gaiety and effervescence Tania remembered. Certainly the Berlin of 1939 was no longer the civilized capital of her childhood. “Hitler’s storm troopers stood about on street corners glaring at people,” she recalled. “On the night Hider returned after the takeover of Czechoslovakia, there was a parade to the eerie light of flaming bowls of oil, with searchlights playing in the s
ky. The whole atmosphere was awful.”
More ominous yet was that first night of the war, September 1, 1939, in Berlin. From the Herald Tribune office opposite Goering’s air ministry, Long watched a modest crowd of townspeople standing solemnly in front of the chancellery. “People whispered to one another,” she recalled. “There was no bravado. We all expected Armageddon from the skies. The first night we expected British planes would come; we thought the Germans would go after London. Instead they practiced their bombing by dropping bags of flour on Goering’s Air Ministry. We could hear them drop and see the white bags exploding.” She and bureau chief Ralph Barnes had spent the night on the floor of the office to be ready to handle the news, an unnecessary precaution as it turned out. There had been no news.
With the outbreak of war, Long sent her mother and little son on to England and requested a transfer there herself. Accordingly, when Ed Angly of the New York Herald Tribune asked for reinforcements for the London bureau, word came that “a girl from Berlin” would arrive soon. This was not what Angly had in mind, and he complained to Raymond Daniell, London bureau chief of the New York Times. “Don’t let them palm off any second-raters on you,” Daniell advised him. “Besides, you don’t want a girl. This is a man’s job.”
Daniell’s attitude — that a “girl journalist” was automatically second rate — was the accepted one, but before Angly could head her off, Tania arrived. Ray met her in the fall of 1939 at a cocktail party for correspondents going off to France, and ran into her again on the station platform. Feeling guilty about his advice to Angly and depressed at being left behind in England, he invited her to lunch. Across a small table at the Savoy Grill they found they had much in common, including that both had once worked on the Newark Ledger. They liked the same people, the same books, the same places in New York. They laughed a lot. By the end of the meal, Daniell felt a lot better about not going to France.
As he told the story later, Tania was soon the confidante of all his troubles. When in the spring he came down with pneumonia, it was she who bullied him into seeing a doctor and dropped by every day to check on him. “She was the same with everyone,” he said, clearly hoping otherwise, and indeed Long tried to keep things on a friendly basis. Besides his position as head of the competition, Daniell had a wife and two children back in the States. By that time her own son was also there; after sending him with her mother to Ireland where she could visit them regularly, Long worried that even Ireland was not safe and shipped them on to New York. She felt it was the best solution, right in line with the British government’s plan to send several hundred thousand schoolchildren to Canada and the United States.
That summer of 1940, after France fell, Long and Daniell spent more and more time together. Early bombings were concentrated on airfields and coastal defenses, and with London still spared, they walked for hours through the parks or picnicked in the country. At the Cafe de Paris to hear an American Negro band, they sat on the balcony and looked down at the dancers, men and women of all ages in every variety of attire from evening to battle dress. That night the sirens began. No plane was sighted, and antiaircraft guns circling London remained quiet, but Tania felt the war closing in.
The most visible sign appeared over the English Channel where Royal Air Force Spitfires and Hurricanes battled the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts, Junkers, Heinkels, and Dorniers almost daily. This uneven struggle (RAF fighter pilots were far outnumbered) became the core of what was called the Battle of Britain. Germany’s aim was to gain absolute air superiority; for the British, it was simply to survive.
During August and September of 1940 Helen Kirkpatrick and Virginia Cowles often joined the press contingent at Dover. The town was only twenty cross-Channel miles from the nearest German air base, and the lobby of its Grand Hotel on the waterfront became the scene of heightened journalistic activity. Cowles noted the town’s brave attempts at normalcy, the busy little roller skating pavilion next to the hotel with its gramophone blaring music out over the sea as if there were no war. But at any moment alarms might sound, and a red flag raised from Dover Casde signal pedestrians to take cover. As the music stilled, the faraway drone of planes could be heard.
In August Cowles and Kirkpatrick spent several days in Dover with fellow correspondent Vincent Sheean and David Bruce of the American Red Cross. They would climb to the top of Shakespeare Cliff about a mile from the town to view the battle. Later Cowles described the experience:
In front of you stretched the blue water of the Channel and in the distance you could distinguish the hazy oudine of the coast of France. Far below were the village houses glistening in the sun and the small boats and trawlers lying at anchor in the harbor... and above all this, twenty or thirty huge grey balloons floating in the blue, flapping a little like whales gasping for breath.
You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats. All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts. You could see the flash of wings and the long white plumes from the exhausts; you could hear the whine of engines and the rattle of bullets. You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky.
Kirkpatrick witnessed the great battle of August 15, part of Reich Air Marshal Goering’s Operation Eagle, meant to designate a new and (he hoped) decisive phase of battle for the Germans. Many Britishers objected to radio broadcasters’ reporting the event as if it were a prizefight, but in fact, Helen said, that was exactly how it appeared:
You have no feeling of carnage, such as you might have watching an infantry battle. Walking about on the cliff above the shore, with its rows of neat gardens below, under the warm summer sun and the bright blue sea beyond, with the butterflies fluttering about and the gulls making heathenish noises, it is impossible to feel that this is actually bitter war going on overhead.
After one such afternoon Helen and her colleagues took the late train back to London. Waiting outside the Dover station, they watched the approach of a new wave of enemy planes so low they could see their markings. One was hit by a tracer bullet and went down in flames. The train, when it arrived, was blacked out, but at each stop they got out for a moment to see “a searchlight combing the beautiful, moonlit sky.”
By early September the big story was Churchill’s warning that a German invasion was imminent. Virginia Cowles and her buddy “Knick” Knickerbocker drove down to Dover to be on hand for what was dubbed Invasion Weekend. Soldiers were instructed to sleep with their boots on, and people went to bed expecting to hear church bells toll the worst by morning. But nothing out of the ordinary happened. On Monday the boot order was reversed, and Knick and Virginia drove back to London. As later became clear, the Luftwaffe had not achieved the superiority Hitler considered a prerequisite for invasion, and a large number of barges, transports, and torpedo boats jammed into French and Belgian ports had been sent to the bottom by RAF night bombers and heavy gun bombardment across the Channel.
Instead of covering the arrival of German ground troops on English soil, the correspondents reported an accelerated Battle of Britain in the skies. On a typical day, Air Marshal Goering sent 1,300 planes against England. Britain had only 170 fighters to put into the air; by day’s end 26 had been shot down, but once again the RAF had endured. This might have been thought cause for rejoicing, but the pilots were the country’s idols, each one a national hero. Each loss was mourned. Earlier in the conflict Cowles, again with Knickerbocker, drove to the airfield where the 601 Squadron was stationed. She wrote of sitting at dinner with thirty “handsome and brave” pilots who, when they got the signal, were in the air in sixty seconds. A few weeks later she returned to find only three still there.
Cowles had a particular connection with the 601 Squadron. The unit had been formed some years earlier by young fliers of sufficient means to provide their own planes. T
he attendant glamour was increased by the rumor that the men gave their girlfriends the squadron emblem — a flying sword — set in rubies and diamonds. The previous fall Virginia had visited the 601st, not as a journalist, but as a friend of squadron member Aidan Crawley. She did not disclose whether she was the recipient of a flying sword talisman, or whether the plane Crawley piloted was his own — only that he was a Socialist candidate for Parliament and met her that day in his blue uniform with a thick book of economics under his arm. Crawley’s plane was shot down over Libya early in the war, but he would survive, and wait out the next four long years behind the barbed wire of a German prisoner-of-war camp.
It was Cowles who first glimpsed the bombers heading for London. She and a friend had gone for the weekend to the country house of the elderly publisher of the Sunday Dispatch. The weather was warm and sunny that seventh of September 1940, and they were having Saturday tea on the lawn when a barely perceptible drone of planes grew to a deep full roar. “We made out a batch of tiny white specks, like clouds of insects, moving northwest in the direction of the capital,” she wrote. “Some of them — the bombers — were flying in even formation, while the others — the fighters — swarmed protectively around.” They counted more than 150 planes. The steady drone continued all night; whenever Virginia woke up, she heard it.
Meanwhile in London, Mary Welsh and her husband Noel Monks were at the movies when a notice appeared on the screen: “An Alert Has Sounded. If You Wish to Leave, Walk, Do Not Run, to the Nearest Exit.” The feature then resumed. The sound of sirens could be heard outside, but Mary and Noel remained in their seats. When they left, they were surprised to find that all the buses and taxis had vanished, and they were forced to walk the two miles home. “That night,” Mary wrote later, “began the Luftwaffe’s long nightmare Blitz on London.. .. For the succeeding fifty-six nights, without surcease, London shuddered and burned.”
The Women who Wrote the War Page 11
