Mixed emotions were not unusual with the correspondents either. From London Tania Long reported to the New York Herald Tribune of RAF bombers sweeping across Germany to attack Berlin. “A full moon lit up the sprawling city,” one dispatch read. “The raiders circled high over the German capital picking out their targets . . . the large gas works on the Danzigerstrasse ... the railway yards near the Tempelhof airport... the Lehrter Station just a mile north of the Brandenburger Tor.” These were familiar landmarks to Tania; she had known them from childhood. She also knew that the gasworks on the Danzigerstrasse were in a poor section of Berlin, that a bombardier’s aim was not always right on, and that the next day those women and children who survived would be sifting through the rubble for salvageable possessions just like in London’s East End.
But Long lost all sympathy for the other side when her story was not of British bombs but of German torpedoes. One such concerned a Canada-bound ship torpedoed by a German submarine. A heavy gale was blowing at the time, and only a few of the lifeboats lowered onto the dark sea were able to stay afloat. Seven children were saved, Long reported — seven out of ninety children who only a few days before had said goodbye to their parents, just such a goodbye as she had said to her own son, now safe.
Sympathy for the enemy was not Sigrid Schultz’s strong point either. In 1940, while still Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, Schultz took on a second job. William Shirer had interviewed her one evening on CBS, and officials at the Mutual Radio Network heard the broadcast, were impressed by her grasp of Nazi politics, and hired her at once. Later they discovered there were drawbacks. Sigrid’s information was superb, but her on-air delivery was often rushed, and she was known to stumble or break into giggles. But she was always there, often with stories no one else had.
Schultz and Shirer would broadcast sequentially, and late at night: news broadcasts were always live, and timed for the EST evening news. That placed them simultaneous with the RAF raids, which the two newscasters would watch from Rundfunk Haus with distinct pleasure. After their scripts were approved, they had to cross an open courtyard and descend a flight of steps to reach the wooden shed studio. One night, with explosions providing the only light and flak falling like rain, Schultz was hit in the knee by a piece of shrapnel the size of an egg. She stanched the blood and willed herself to ignore the pain during the broadcast, but it was maddening to hear later that bombs had knocked out the transmitting system just before she went on, and her broadcast was never heard.
Not long after that night, Schultz began preparations to leave Germany. Her instructions from Chicago Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick were clear: if ever she felt herself in real danger, she should arrange to go at once. She had brazened her way through many difficult moments in her sixteen years as bureau chief, but recently matters had taken a definitive downward turn. There was reason to believe the Nazis were aware of her passing along some information, and she knew how adept they could be at rigging accidents. As it was, people set little traps — her neighbors, for example, always trying to catch her in an air raid infraction. In Berlin Diary William Shirer wrote that Propaganda Minister Goebbels wanted to get rid of her “because of her independence and knowledge of things behind the scenes,” and added that perhaps no one else had revealed so much of what was really happening in the Third Reich.
After she put in for an exit visa, the Nazis found various reasons to delay her departure until pressure was exerted by the American embassy. Schultz never forgot her ride out of Germany on the night train to Basel early in 1941. Officials had warned her that if any more stories similar to those by the mysterious John Dickson appeared in the Tribune, they would know where they had come from. As it was, she carried several stories out in her head — such as the recent decision to do away with not only the crippled and handicapped and insane but others, ill but not incurable, because for every three sick persons, one healthy one was needed for their care. Hitler considered that a waste of national strength.
Schultz traveled through Switzerland, Vichy France, and Spain. Her shrapnel wound had not entirely healed, and in Spain she contracted a severe case of typhus. It was weeks before she could go on to New York.
Sigrid’s old friend Tania Long also returned to the United States on home leave early in 1941. Tania had booked passage from Portugal on the Excambion; predictably, New York Times bureau chief Ray Daniell was also taking home leave and sailing on the Excambion. After eleven days of bad weather the ship, coated with ice, sailed past the Statue of Liberty into New York harbor. It was an emotional moment. Hungering for her little son, concerned about her mother, Tania could turn all her attention to them, but Daniell had the less happy task of convincing his wife that he was by now hopelessly in love with someone else, and wanted a divorce.
Back in Berlin, Lael Tucker and Stephen Laird were finding German censorship increasingly onerous. At first Tucker had reported the facts straight as they were offered, with just enough innuendo that an intelligent editor could read the truth between the lines. But an alert censor had caught on, and after that she was watched, which made her feel unsafe.
Sigrid Schultz had managed to get out before anything happened to her, but several other American reporters were spending time in jail — anywhere from a few hours to months. Everyone’s telephone was tapped, and the Nazis were known to keep dossiers on all of them. Lael and Steve could not help but wonder what theirs contained. That spring of 1941 they filed for exit visas, and then waited ten anxious weeks for them to arrive. Not many Americans were left by then, and the few who were felt vulnerable. But the Gestapo always came at dawn, Lael said, so whoever made it to breakfast knew that he or she had one more day anyway.
By this time the Nazi flag flew over most of Europe, and where it did not, the reason was usually that Hitler, preoccupied with Britain, had yet to send in his army. Greece, for example.
Greece became Betty Wason’s story. She had left Stockholm in the spring of 1940, after CBS replaced her with Winston Burdette, the man she had recruited to read her scripts when CBS complained of her “too-feminine voice.” The Balkans were her next stop, but Betty did not enjoy living among people who viewed resistance to the Axis powers as futile. Besides, Burdette showed up there too, crowding her once again. A Harvard graduate and reporter on the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Burdette would later prove to have been a member of the Communist Party and a spy for the Soviets, but nothing of this nature occurred to Wason at the time. She moved on to Istanbul, city of intrigue. There she found herself under suspicion: the British thought her a Nazi spy, the Russians a British agent. The Turks believed that at the very least she was more than a reporter and asked her to investigate an Englishman they had doubts about. Betty refused, and left for Greece.
The war in Greece was a two-act drama: the first against the Italians in the fall and winter of 1940-41, in which the Greeks prevailed, and the second against the Germans in the spring of 1941, won by Hitler. Wason covered both for CBS and as a stringer for Newsweek. The Italian campaign took place almost entirely in Albania, where life at the front was harsh but the soldiers gallant and helpful. When regular transportation was unavailable, they found her room in the cab of a truck. She spent the night in an empty ambulance or sitting up on a crowded train, but usually she just laid her sleeping bag on the floor with the soldiers and her fellow reporters.
As winter advanced, Wason reported Greek soldiers returning from remote areas having gone four or five days without food. She described overcrowded frontline hospitals where men lay for days in their mud-soaked uniforms, where medical supplies were minimal and the casualty toll was rising. The planes Britain sent were far outnumbered. Always there was the nagging reminder that however successful the Greeks might be against Mussolini, the real question came down to what Hitler planned to do.
Betty ' Vason, Athens, 1941.
BETTY WASON PERSONAL COLLECTION.
Hitler’s plans did not become clear until the winter of 1941
was almost over. By then Wason had settled into press life in Athens, marred only by CBS’s renewed insistence that she find a man to read her material on the air. A young secretary at the American embassy had been drafted. Betty was not happy about this, but at least “Phil Brown” (his radio pseudonym) had no designs on her job. They broadcast daily on events such as the arrival of British and Commonwealth land forces, including Anzacs, “tough Australians with wide-brimmed hats pulled rakishly over their eyes, New Zealanders with simple, easy manners who charmed the Greek girls.” They also reported Greek hopes for their Olympus Line defense — mountaintop fortifications dating back, it was said, to the ancient gods.
“Phil Brown” was not the only pseudonym in Wason’s life. She had become romantically involved with a British counterintelligence agent, introduced as “Norman Smith” although in fact he carried three passports, “flipping through them so I could see the pictures but nothing else,” she said. She called him simply “X.” Early on, perhaps when he decided she was, after all, merely a reporter, he admitted that her name was on a list given him to investigate before he left England. He pointed out her “indiscretions” — mere adventures from her viewpoint — which had aroused suspicion in British intelligence circles. For a little while “X” was part of Betty’s life. Spring was upon them. As Sonia Tomara had commented the previous spring, it helps to be in love in wartime.
On the first Sunday in April 1941 air raid sirens sounded continuously. Wason turned her radio dial to London to learn that Germany and Greece were at war. All day the streets were a frenzy of activity, but with evening a hush fell over the city. Betty heard the drone of approaching planes, saw them head for the harbor at Piraeus, and felt as much as heard the thud of bombs. Rushing to one of the various censors who had to approve her copy, she passed a group of Anzacs sitting on some steps. As the bombs fell, they began to sing, first “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” then “Coroido Mussolini,” a boastful song about how the stupid Duce found he had made a mistake when he tried to conquer the Greeks. They had no song about Hider.
Covering the German bombing attack on the outskirts of Athens was not easy. CBS requested five broadcasts between 2 P.M. and 3 A.M. for which six separate censors must approve the scripts. The on-air timing was exact to the second, like 11:46:10 or 18:48:15, at which moments Phil Brown would begin to read Betty’s script, and she would sit nervously in an adjoining room, watching the second hand on the studio clock, “worrying about seconds while the world crashed around us,” she said later. Afterward, from her terrace, she saw flashes from the bombs light up the pillars of the Acropolis. Each day she consulted maps posted at the newspaper offices showing the rapid German advance; people crowded around to stare at them in disbelief. The Luftwaffe was equally effective. Wason lived near RAF headquarters, and it seemed that every day another of her new flier friends was reported missing. On a day when eighteen British planes were shot down, Betty ran across one of the pilots in a cabaret. “The Germans are boasting it will take them only two weeks to reach Athens,” she told him. He conceded that was probably right.
The Olympus Line broke; there were rumors that German troops would arrive in the capital on the Orthodox Easter, but they did not. Occasionally Betty’s RAF friends came to see her, bringing canned goods to share for lunch along with stories from the airfields that she could use in her broadcasts. One flier volunteered to take her to Cairo in his Gladiator, but when he saw she was considering the offer, he backed down. “You had better not depend on me,” he said. “Probably none of us will get out of here alive.” Betty recalled that “X” had urged her to leave earlier, “because when the end comes, it will come in a hurry,” but she had ignored his warning.
The end came on Friday, April 25, 1941. The censors were dismissed. There would be a “final broadcast” on Saturday, which had to be cleared by the military governor himself, a harassed man with little time to read a Greek translation of the script of an American woman’s last broadcast home. But Wason was now recognized as a “friend of Greece,” and people tried to help. In the early hours of Sunday morning she and Phil Brown completed their task with no assurance that the monitors in New York would be listening. Afterward, she went home to bed.
Awakened at seven by the sound of German artillery, she turned on the radio. A voice was advising the citizens of Athens to keep off the streets and to offer no resistance. Inexplicably, the Greek national anthem — the “Hymn to Liberty” — followed. When she looked out the window, she saw the swastika flying from the Acropolis.
The denouement to Wason’s private Greek tragedy lasted about another month. Whatever the information the Germans had on her, they no longer allowed her to broadcast, which mattered little since nothing she wanted to say would have passed the Nazi censors. Every afternoon she served tea in her apartment; her RAF friends were gone, but her Greek neighbors would drop by with the latest rumors. Conversation revolved around obtaining food and the rampant inflation. Even when goods were found, few could afford them. Occasionally men appeared at Betty’s kitchen door with a few eggs to sell, or a little cheese, which she would guiltily purchase, knowing that already there was famine among the poor. By June 1941 dying of starvation was not uncommon.
Her own situation was becoming precarious. Back when the foreign press could safely leave, she had incautiously remained — how could a professional journalist leave in the middle of a story? But it was crucial to get out before America became involved. After that, she would become a hostage of war. Only when German correspondents in the United States received orders to depart were the few American journalists still in Athens permitted to leave. Wes Gallagher of the AP, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, and Wason flew out from Athens together on a regular Lufthansa plane. In Vienna they were detained as suspected spies until their identities could be verified. Shuttled through a succession of jails, they were then taken by train to Berlin under Gestapo guard. Weller and Gallagher were released, but Betty was held another week “for reasons never divulged except that the police wanted to know more about me,” she said. At last Harry Flannery of CBS intervened, and the Gestapo allowed her to go.
Back in the United States and looking for work, Wason was once again rebuffed by CBS. They wanted you when they needed you; no other conclusion was possible. She turned to print journalism, and began a book about her Greek experience. Long before Miracle in Hellas was published (1943), America was at war.
10
Margaret Bourke-White Shoots the Russian War
When on June 22, 1941, the Germans tore up the nonagression treaty and attacked the Soviet Union, Margaret Bourke-White was there, overjoyed at finding herself in the hot spot at the right moment. Back with Life after her defection of the previous year, she was there under its auspices, in company with her husband, Erskine Caldwell, reporting for PM. The trip had not been easy. As Lael Tucker and Stephen Laird had discovered the year before, one approached Berlin and Moscow from the east — the Far East. Bourke-White and Caldwell flew with six-hundred-plus pounds of luggage (including five cameras, twenty-two lenses, three thousand peanut flashbulbs, and four portable developing tanks) from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. From Chungking, the wartime capital of China, they advanced in little hops, with successions of bad weather days spent in towns they had not known existed. Margaret estimated that of the month-long trip from Hong Kong to Moscow, only twenty-four hours were spent in the air.
After their arrival in Moscow early in May, however, the situation improved. Caldwell was much admired in the Soviet Union for his tales of class oppression in a capitalist society, and Bourke-White’s two previous visits to Russia had produced pictures that accentuated what was healthy and positive in Communism. The usual barriers — to free movement, to cameras — collapsed before them. They could travel about, and Margaret could photograph, almost at will. Even when she happened into a church during a service and started shooting what most people thought no longer existed in that atheistic society, no one stopp
ed her. But most of her photos — of students at their books, the editors of Pravda, a soccer game — lacked drama. War is nothing if not dramatic, and the German attack provided the scoop of a lifetime — an “opium dream” of an opportunity was how Margaret put it.
Stalin, a supremely secretive man, had chosen to ignore the plethora of intelligence reports warning that Germany was about to attack. By nature he accepted nothing at face value: Britain and the United States must have their own reasons for spreading such rumors, and Hitler was determined to provoke him. Stalin refused to provide the Nazis with like excuse of provocation. The nonaggression treaty with Germany had allowed him time to build up his military prowess and train new generals, most of the old ones having been executed in his purges. Time was Hitler’s gift to Stalin; even when his informants in Switzerland pinpointed the exact date of the invasion, the Soviet leader forbade his troops to deploy to battle positions.
By special permission, Bourke-White and Caldwell were visiting the resort town of Sukhum (where Sonia Tomara had grown up) when news of the outbreak of war reached them. They spent the day driving with their translator from one collective farm to another to gauge the people’s reaction. Soviet citizens knew nothing of the expectation of invasion. That the German army had taken up the offensive against them left them confused and anxious. Their assumed ally had proved false; who would side with them now? About dusk the Bourke-White party reached a large citrus cooperative on a hill. Loudspeakers were mounted in an orange grove, and a Russian translation of the speech Winston Churchill had made earlier that day in Parliament blared out of the amplifier. Great Britain, avowed the prime minister, would stand with the Soviet Union against their common enemy. Margaret saw tears of joy streaming down the farmers’ cheeks.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 13
