The war was a month old when, in July of 1941, the Germans first bombed Moscow. Bourke-White joined the throng in the subway, but after that she and Caldwell got a “raid pass” so they could stay above ground — at the American embassy, for example. One night she climbed out of the ambassador’s study window and set up her camera on the embassy roof. As she watched, searchlights beamed upward toward the oncoming enemy planes, and bombs began to fall. Suddenly she felt a kind of contraction in the atmosphere. Grabbing her camera, she climbed back in the window, dashed across the room and lay down, at which point every window in the house fell in. Glass rained down. Margaret’s helmet and clothing protected all but her fingertips, which were cut by flying splinters. Shaken, she picked her way down the grand staircase in the blackness, where she encountered Henry Cassidy of the AP and Henry Shapiro of UP venturing up from the cellar. Before she left at dawn, she posted a note pleading that no one sweep up the glass before she could return to photograph it.
Hotels were off limits during raids but, having given up on the embassy, Bourke-White resorted to various subterfuges to stay in her room. Sometimes the alarm came just as she had started processing her photos. She would dive under the bed, hoping the wardens would inspect and be off before the film, soaking in a tub of chemicals, was badly overdeveloped. Too big to crawl under the bed, Erskine would crouch behind the sofa and pull the bearskin rug over him.
Bourke-White described her nightly postinspection routine:
I would creep out on the balcony quietly so as not to attract the attention of the soldiers on guard in Red Square below, and place two cameras shooting in opposite directions so they would cover as much of the sky as possible. Usually I set two additional cameras with telephoto lenses on the wide marble window sill.... But I never operated all five cameras at once. My fifth camera I transferred to the Embassy basement. The possibility of being left without a single camera grew to be an obsession, so I took care to divide the risk.
Air raids affected people in different ways, Bourke-White recalled. One got hungry, or thirsty, or sleepy. As soon as the drone of the planes passed, she would drop off, right there on the windowsill beside her cameras. Then another wave of planes approaching would set off the antiaircraft, blasting her awake again. “I would start up to see the square below dancing with fireflies as the shrapnel tinkled down on the pavement. But as soon as the sound grew softer, I would be back in slumber on the marble ledge, my cameras, set for time exposures, still recording any streaks of light that might flash through the sky.”
Life accorded her the lead story in its September 1,1941, issue: the first photos of the bombing of Moscow released to the West. There was Ambassador Steinhardt attempting to work in a sea of splintered glass, the camouflage of Red Square, a downed Nazi bomber. Only three of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of night bombing photographs — a sequence she had risked her life for — appeared. Perhaps in the end they all looked pretty much alike.
In late July of 1941 Harry Hopkins, America’s Lend-Lease administrator, arrived in Moscow as President Roosevelt’s special envoy. Bourke-White knew Hopkins from a Hyde Park photo session, and she pleaded with him to arrange for her to photograph Stalin. Stalin had not given interviews to, nor been photographed by, the foreign press in years, but Vice Chairman Molotov, to whom Hopkins actually carried the request, may have felt it politic to please Mr. Lend-Lease. Permission was granted. Margaret put on her red shoes, tied a red bow in her hair, and went.
A small red-carpeted elevator took her up to the second floor of the old tsarist palace in the Kremlin. Just treat Uncle Joe like you would anyone else, she murmured, trying to calm her nerves. Ask him to sit down and chat. But when he actually appeared, stern and unsmiling, she said nothing at all, and set to work at once under her camera cloth. As the only other person at hand was the young interpreter, she started handing him flashbulbs and reflectors to hold at this side of Stalin’s face or that. “Soon Tovarisch Litvinov was changing flashbulbs with a single twist of the wrist as though he had done it all his life,” she noted later. “This amused Stalin and he began to laugh, and then I knew I had the expression I wanted.”
Bourke-White found Stalin different from what she had expected. Shorter, gray and tired, “like a man who has been stout but has recently grown thinner.” He was wearing boots and plain khaki clothes, without medals, and his hands, she noticed, were wrinkled. Before she left she summoned up her best Russian to tell him that on her first visit to the Soviet Union, nine years before, she had photographed his mother. Stalin made no response, but the young interpreter was impressed. “His very own mother!” he kept exclaiming.
Back at the hotel it was almost time for the nightly raids, and Bourke-White felt she could not risk developing these precious films in her hotel bathroom. With her chauffeur’s help, she carried her developing tanks and trays of solution down the stairs and stowed them carefully on the floor of the car. The alarm went off as she reached the American embassy, and she set up her laboratory in a basement bathroom. One by one she processed the irreplaceable negatives. She could hear the boom of the battery guns as she worked, and the long shrieks of the bombs. The embassy steward provided pins for hanging up the wet negatives, an electric fan to help them dry quicker, soup plates for the print developer, and a dust cloth of a reddish color to wrap the flashlight in so she would have more control over the developing time. By dawn a complete set of remarkable prints was ready for Harry Hopkins to carry personally back to America.
Although one would never have guessed it from official newsreels or Pravda, by late summer of 1941 the war was not going well for the Soviets. The Germans had taken 300,000 prisoners around Smolensk and another 100,000 at Uman in the Ukraine. Odessa, on the Black Sea, was under siege. If the correspondents knew of this, they dared not write it. When Erskine Caldwell joined the other correspondents at the Narkomindel, or foreign office, where Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs Solomon A. Lozovsky disseminated the latest official word, retreat was never mentioned. Erskine thought Lozovsky bore a distinct resemblance to Humpty Dumpty, and was amused at his colorful turn of phrase. The Germans were never merely “the Germans” or “the enemy”; they were “the bloodthirsty barbarians” or “Hitler’s gang” or “the beasts of Berlin.” Lozovsky was assiduous in refuting lies put out by the Nazi propaganda office and in matching German atrocity stories with more horrible ones of his own, always with the implication that the truth was more ghastly yet.
Still, anyone out for a Sunday stroll beyond the city proper could not help but notice men and women in the fields digging trenches and putting up tank traps. Moscow was being fortified.
* * *
Early in their Russian visit Bourke-White and Caldwell had struck a bargain with the Soviet authorities: if a trip to the front was arranged, they would be included. The editors of Life applied pressure at their end, too. Bourke-White’s photos were important to Soviet-American relations, they informed Soviet ambassador Oumansky in Washington. This was almost certainly true. The House Un-American Activities Committee had long been hunting out domestic Communists, and until recently most Americans had lumped the USSR with Germany as “the enemy.” Bourke-White’s photos of Soviet men and women as a hardworking, patriotic people were helping to turn that negative perception around.
In mid-September the press bureau notified Bourke-White and Caldwell just before midnight that a week’s tour of the central front would leave at 6:45 the next morning. Margaret was there early in her flaming red coat, which she turned inside out once they got to the firing area. The party included four other American and five British colleagues, one of whom was Charlotte Burghes Haldane, wife of the professor who had deserted Virginia Cowles in the trenches in Spain. In her book Shooting the Russian War, Bourke-White describes the others in some detail but never mentions Burghes’s name, and only her left hand can be seen in a group photograph at dinner. Margaret preferred to leave the impression that she herself was the only woman present.
More enemy planes followed them en route to Yelnya later that day. The road was a sea of mud — mud would prove the leitmotif of the week — and when their driver jerked to a stop and shouted for them to run for cover, they slithered through the mud toward a meadow. “We were lying in the largest patch of fringed gentians that I had ever seen,” Bourke-White wrote later. “The gentians were at a level with my eyes, and over this blue border I watched three great curtains of mud rise into the air and hang there shimmering.” She began picking flowers as an exercise in calm. The cars were covered with mire but undamaged, and soldiers tied boughs of trees to them. This leafy camouflage “made the war look like a back to nature movement,” she quipped, “which in a way it is.”
Smolensk, directly ahead, was still in German hands. They drove parallel to the front, and Bourke-White marveled at how, on approaching what looked to be an uninhabited little wood, they found that it lodged a whole community with telephones, dug-in tanks, and batteries. At field headquarters, while trying to ignore the continuous barrage of Russian guns directed over their heads, they sat down to a meal of quail, caviar, and champagne. During another picnic, equally dodgy, an accordionist appeared, and Margaret was pressed to teach the soldiers the latest American dance steps, despite her muddy slacks and earth-caked shoes.
Sleeping was a problem. The party lodged in tents or under thatched roofs, whatever served as shelter against the constant rain. One night they all slept together on the floor of a cottage, lying in ordered rows, their feet against the heads of the men below them. Erskine put Margaret’s sleeping bag against a wall with his own by her side. She woke up once to see a sentry, bayonet in hand, guarding them by candlelight. In the mornings she got up early and slipped out to photograph whatever she could find in the grayness. The soldiers’ faces under their dripping raincapes were varied — Ukrainians, Kazaks, Uzbeks, Siberians, Mongols. Using flashbulbs to augment the weak light, she would continue shooting until someone called out that it was time to get going, and admonished her not to hold them up again. Her sense of time was at odds with theirs. In the car Caldwell would produce some welcome tidbit salvaged from breakfast. Once, to her delight, it was the long drumstick of a goose.
At last they reached Yelnya. The armies had crossed and recrossed it in furious conflict; fifty thousand Germans were said to have died and been shoveled into their own trenches. The Russian loss was not divulged. To Bourke-White the battlefield called to mind the end of the world — a wasteland “as far as the eye could reach, channeled with trenches and littered with the remains of war... a torn sleeve, the piece of a boot, a tattered raincoat, a broken sword.” With the brick chimneys often the only segments of houses left standing, she thought Yelnya had a skeletal aspect, but she noticed that its inhabitants were already drifting back, hoping to live there somehow, at least until the town should once again be lost to the enemy.
On the final day Bourke-White was preparing to photograph when she was informed that the cars were about to head back to Moscow. The rain had let up, and she saw that at last she could shoot a roll that had a chance of turning out well. How could she leave? In time she would learn to control her emotions, but that afternoon — after having slogged through mud for a week and seen little but rain on the other side of her lens — tears won out. They worked in her favor. A sympathetic Soviet colonel sent her colleagues off for one last champagne supper and commandeered some soldiers to help her.
Bourke-White and Caldwell set out for home a week later. They traveled in a British convoy across the Arctic Ocean and south to Britain, and then flew by clipper ship to New York. Margaret’s photos from the Yelnya front would be her final scoop of the Russian war. Two weeks after that, with the Germans closing in on three sides, Stalin ordered that Moscow be evacuated.
11
Treading Water, Marking Time
The fall of 1941 was a time of waiting for an apparent inevitable. The war was two years old. Britain had suffered terrible bombing for more than a year, but except for the Lend-Lease program, America remained a silent partner. There were times when American reporters felt an unspoken reproach in the British attitude, and a consequent guilty response in their own. Correspondents on home leave found it difficult to reconcile their country’s continued disinclination to enter the war with the political realities of Europe as they experienced them.
The sudden switch of the Soviet Union from “their side” to “our side” meant a new ally in need of American war materiel. Roosevelt’s pledge of aid to the Soviets was hody debated. From the conservative-isolationist point of view, the new enmity between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany should be permitted to run its course, meaning if they wiped each other out, all the better. American military commanders worried about diverting equipment from U.S. troops, still inadequately supplied. Only gradually were Americans persuaded of the advantages of the trade-off: if our planes and guns allowed Russia to stave off the German army for even a few months, that army would be just that much weaker if our own soldiers were called upon to face it. And that “if was beginning to translate as “when.” By the fall of 1941, most Americans were reconciled to the near eventuality of war in their lives.
Dorothy Thompson was doing her best to promote that attitude. Her syndicated column, “On the Record,” carried by more than two hundred newspapers across the country, had tremendous impact. Three times a week she hammered away at the necessity for America to enter the war. She regularly took her message in person to the White House, or telephoned, or smuggled notes to FDR in the pockets of foreign dignitaries whom she just happened to entertain first. Extravagantly pro-British, she compared the May bombing of Westminster Abbey, the House of Commons, and the British Museum to the destruction of civilization itself, and concluded in sonorous terms: “The Abbey stands, the Museum lives, the Commons meet. Because the human will cannot be broken.”
That fall she crossed the Atlantic to satisfy herself as to the condition of her beloved ancestral land. The editor of the Sunday Chronicle, which carried her column, reserved three suites at the Savoy for a month and hired a coterie of secretaries to answer phones and mail and help arrange her schedule. This last was not easy. Besides obligatory visits to bomb shelters, munitions factories, hospitals, orphanages, and schools, Thompson addressed the House of Commons and “received” the leaders of the current governments-in-exile. At Plymouth she lunched with naval commanders whom, with American candor, she challenged to explain their badly botched campaign in the Mediterranean. Perhaps she asked the same of Churchill during the weekend she spent at Chequers; that conversation remained private, as did her tete-a-tete with the king and queen over tea at Buckingham Palace. On other days she joined Nancy Astor for lunch, J. B. Priestley for cocktails, H. G. Wells for dinner, and took in the cinema with Anthony Eden. Her departure was noted in the Court Circular. She was perhaps the closest America came to royalty.
Dorothy Thompson consulting with (left) Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk and (right) Czech army general Miroslav, Engla
nd, 1941.
UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN
Thompson’s busy schedule left little time for fretting over the final breakup of her marriage to Sinclair Lewis. In a recent letter he had noted that they had not lived together for more than four years, and spoke of himself as “an unwilling ex-associate” held “in bondage.” Dorothy was at first unmoved, but that fall she yielded and filed for divorce on grounds of “willful desertion.” As she had done fifteen years before when Josef Bard left her, she immersed herself in work. “Good old routine,” she had written then, “good old head that functions automatically at the sight of a newspaper.” She was forty-seven and that head was crowned in white, but the newspaper as the driving force of her life went unchanged.
No doubt American correspondents breathed a sigh of relief when Thompson sailed for home and they had London to themselves again. They were not a large contingent, although recently increased by two when Lael Tucker and Steve Laird arrived from Berlin. Lael and Steve were surprised to find themselves much in demand socially. Everyone was curious to hear what it was really like in Berlin. They “sang for their supper,” as Lael put it — and she had a way with a story. She might tell of a Nazi rally in which Hider marched down the aisle repeating “Heil Hitler” every few steps, followed by Goering, “so fat he had to swing one leg around the other,” Goebbels limping along, and the catatonic Hess. Or how in both Hamburg and Berlin the Germans had built a fake city out on the lake, with little streets and houses and lights, to decoy the bombers away from the city itself. Or how when she was in Berlin she had the feeling that “the Germans did not feel in their hearts that they were going to win the war. They were always saying, We’re going to win. We’ve won everywhere. How can we be defeated?’” But there was another side. “We’ll win and win and win until we lose,” a taxi driver she once encountered said.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 14
