The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  What she liked best, without doubt, was the camaraderie with the flight crew: squatting on the landing strip for a lunch of rice and tea, attacking a dinner of fried eggs and warm beer in a small Greek cafe in Kunming. Gellhorn adored adventure, and she liked associating with men who showed purpose and took chances. “I doubt if there were ever any other pilots like those,” she wrote in her Colliers story. “They were immensely proud of their fantastic little airline. And I think they were in love with their kind of flying, the man and the machine off on their own against the Japs and the weather and the mountains and the landing fields.” She seemed half in love herself, with the pilots, with their life.

  By her return to Hong Kong a few days later, the CNAC junket had begun to contrast sharply with her husband’s sedentary existence. To report a war was to go to the front, she reminded him, recalling Spain. Hemingway acquiesced. But this was not Spain, he reminded her, and this front was not a short walk from their hotel. The Canton front was closest; they would go there.

  In Namyung they picked up two Chinese escorts — Mr. Ho, reasonably competent, and the good-natured Mr. Ma, who did his best to keep his charges happy in an unhappy situation. It was cold, it rained, there were mosquitoes. Gellhorn tried for objectivity in coverage, but the dark humor of their situation kept sneaking into her account. In an old Chevrolet they jolted along roads that could not be discerned as roads for all the boulders and rivers of mud. They boarded a rusty Chris-Craft towing a sampan on the North River and took roost among the coiled ropes on the sloping roof. “A line of men, women and children, like dark, straining statues, pulled the tow-rope of their sampan and slowly moved the heavy barge forward,” Martha wrote. “They chanted to time their effort, and the sound came as a rising and falling wail across the water.” With evening the mountains were silhouetted blue-black against the greenish sky. Still on their perch, they dined on rice and tea, with a little whiskey in hot water from their thermos for dessert. Hemingway fell asleep. Only Martha lay awake to count the times they ran into sandbars (five) before the tow rope wrapped itself around the propeller and they pulled into a mosquito-infested sampan village to wait out the night.

  Gellhorn’s introduction to “the Chinese army in action” came the next day in the form of a platoon of wet soldiers waiting for them on a mud bank. Stable coolies in large conical straw rainhats held the bridles of seven undersized horses and a normal one (for Hemingway), men and animals all shivering from the cold. The ground was “a mixture of grease and glue,” Martha noted. “The rain came down in sheets. . . . The procession jolted forward in sodden silence. We were starting for the Canton front.”

  Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway on their way to the Canton front, Chin a, spring 1941.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY.

  The problems intrinsic to covering this war were each day more evident to them both. For one, China was huge, which they had known but not appreciated; when eventually they reached the Seventh War Zone, it turned out to be the size of Belgium. The weather was consistently awful. Wet through, huddled beside a coal brazier, Gellhorn would take notes while with great enthusiasm a general regaled Hemingway with the details of his division. The war itself was stagnant. Although there had been thirty clashes on that front and two major Japanese offensives, the Chinese line had stayed the same. Each regiment remained in place and built up a life around the training ground and athletic field, classrooms and barracks.

  Another problem was lack of sleep. Many nights were spent on plank beds, shivering in the wet clothes they had ridden in that day, listening to the hacking, phlegmy cough of their escorts. Tuberculosis was rampant in the Chinese army. Martha always remembered the single day it did not rain and they walked in the clear cold up and down gentle hills where peasants plowed their muddy fields behind water buffalo. But the people they passed were “stony-faced, exhausted by life, and also marred and scarred by unimaginable diseases.” This was the reality of rural China. “Soldiers always look like sad orphanage children,” she jotted down in her notebook. They were inadequately clothed, housed, and fed, like the peasants they lived among.

  At last they reached the front, “to the extent that the Chinese had their machine guns on these hills and, three kilometres away, the Japanese had the same,” Gellhorn reported. Special maneuvers were scheduled. She and Hemingway watched through field glasses as Chinese troops simulated an attack on the Japanese positions. That night there was entertainment. Seated on chairs beside the general, surrounded by eighteen hundred squatting troops, they watched a series of plays presented by the Political Department. It was buffoonery pure and simple, as inauthentic as the morning’s pretend attack, but the audience laughed and applauded, and the honored guests found themselves laughing, too.

  On the following day they turned the horses back toward the river. Gellhorn rode, she recalled, in the rain, with her head down like her horse, both of them nodding wearily At their last stop, the 189th Division headquarters, banners of welcome awaited them along with a grand farewell lunch of local delicacies. Hemingway was called upon to respond to many toasts with yellow rice wine. No reporters — perhaps no other foreigners — had ever come there, Martha mused, and she could understand why. The front was simply a place where two armies lived closest to each other. They built their barracks and schools and trained their troops. The soldiers on both sides were completely cut off: there were no furloughs home and hardly any mail, which could not matter, since how would illiterate peasant parents write a letter, or their illiterate sons read it, anyway?

  Late that spring of 1941 another American journalist arrived in Chungking. Annalee Whitmore traveled from California to Hong Kong by freighter, and then caught the usual CNAC night flight over the Japanese lines. Nothing was ever quite “usual” with Annalee, however. As a child she had watched her father build and then race planes; she described these private spins to the CNAC pilot, and he (who had flown the Prince of Wales around the world) invited her to copilot, which had the advantage of putting her next to him rather than back with the money bundles. Whitmore was dark-haired and pretty, with a quick mind and a stimulating presence; no doubt the pilot found her at least as exotic as the prince. In an attempt to prolong the encounter, he made an unscheduled landing at Kweilin to show her the famous pointed hills. It was dark, the little plane got stuck in the mud and had to be dug out next morning, but eventually it sailed back into the sky and then jolted down again onto the little sandbar landing strip in the middle of the Yangtze.

  Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, Liberty, Time-Life

  By the time Annalee Whitmore, another Stanford graduate, came out to China, she was already a flourishing screenwriter, the youngest in Hollywood, cowriter of the hit movie Babes in Arms (Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney). MGM rewarded her with a seven-year contract, and a golden career seemed in the offing. But Whitmore had not been editor of the Stanford Daily for nothing, and she found the prospect of seven years of Hollywood fluff when the real world was falling apart unendurable. What she really wanted was to go to China. The Readers Digest agreed to send her, but she failed to get the requisite permit from the State Department. Then word surfaced that Mel Jacoby was back from Chungking. Annalee remembered Jacoby from college — nice-looking but standoffish was what she recalled. Perhaps he would know how permits were obtained.

  At the bar on Wilshire Boulevard where they arranged to meet, Whitmore at once recognized that this elegant, assured, darkly handsome man was no longer the quiet student of her memory. Jacoby was not only attractive and, as it happened, wealthy, he was also knowledgeable about permits: it was all a matter of providing a solid reason for going to China. Henry Luce was looking for a Chungking representative for United China Relief, Jacoby said, and John Hersey, whom he knew from Chungking, had been sent west to find the best person for the job. Mel arranged for Annalee to have dinner with Hersey, after which, as Mel predicted, Hersey recommended that Luce hire her for United China Relief. Whitmore had her entree to China, and to her d
elight Jacoby was about to return there himself. To be where Mel was had assumed high priority with her. She saw him off on the Pan Am Clipper; coincidentally, or perhaps not, Henry and Clare Boothe Luce were also aboard. Somewhere between San Francisco and Hong Kong, Jacoby was hired as a correspondent for Time.

  Annalee Whitmore with Melville Jacoby, the Philippines, 1941.

  WALLACE KIRKLAND/LIFE MAGAZINE. © TIME INC.

  In Chungking, Whitmore worked directly for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who fortunately for the new representative of United China Relief had gone to Wellesley and spoke perfect English. She was a dominating presence. It amused Annalee that Madame felt herself above the law, even laws she herself had devised, but she was no more arrogant than the movie moguls Annalee had known in Hollywood, and she grew rather fond of her. Perhaps because Betty Graham, still pining after Mel, lived at the press hostel, Annalee did not move there. Instead she settled into the seedy but romantic Chialing House, and it was there that she and Mel had dinner every evening — until she moved into the mission compound, which had a better chef, and they dined there.

  Whitmore was conscientious about her work with United China Relief, but all her friends in Chungking were journalists, and she may have hoped that in time Luce would move her, too, into the Time Inc. fold. She was careful to give Madame Chiang no cause to complain.

  Reporters from magazines with wide American readership always visited Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Shelley Smith and Carl Mydans went, so that Mydans could photograph them for Life. “Being a radical young person, I had her down as a dragon lady,” Shelley said later. “And him likewise. She was beautiful, immobile in her face, but they came across, in Carl’s pictures, too, as very hard people.”

  Martha Gellhorn’s reaction was much the same after she and Hemingway were invited there for lunch. Madame was still beautiful, she recalled, charming to Ernest and civil to her. The general, straight-backed and impeccable in his plain gray uniform, talked of articles that appeared in the Western press to the effect that the Communists’ armies were necessary to the war against Japan. They were not, Chiang insisted. Gellhorn was not taken in. She felt instinctively that “these two stony rulers cared nothing for the miserable hordes of their people.” Never one to mince words, Martha asked Madame outright why China did not take care of the lepers, forcing them to roam the streets and beg. Furious, Madame declared that the Chinese, humane and civilized unlike westerners, would never lock their lepers away from other mortals. Ernest, Martha recalled, acted with perfect decorum, saving his laughter until they had departed.

  Both couples, however, were impressed by Chou En-lai. Smith and Mydans went to the tiny room where he sat writing reports in brush stroke for Mao in Yenan. Although Carl’s photographs depicted Chou in a frayed suit and unshaven, Shelley recalled him as very good-looking. Perhaps it was his clear eyes under heavy arched brows. Gellhorn also recalled his “brilliant amused eyes,” and that they laughed at the same jokes. For the first time she felt at home with a Chinese. They knew little about him at the time, she said, but “he sat in his bare little room, in his nondescript clothes, and he was somebody ... the one really good man we’d met in China.”

  At the request of the home office, Mydans, Smith, and Mel Jacoby visited the Yellow River front. It was a saga they never forgot. They planned to fly to Lanchow, travel by bus over the Six Dishes Mountains to Sian, then go on to the front by horseback. On paper it sounded reasonable, even fun. Martha Gellhorn would have assured them it would be neither.

  A large crowd of Chinese also waited for the bus that bright morning in Lanchow. They huddled protectively around their collection of bedrolls, basketed chickens and ducks, and small valises. When at last the bus — a high, square, wooden affair — drove up hey poured inside. Those who could not enter fast enough by the door climbed through the windows, pulling their belongings after them and occupying every inch of space. The Americans watched helplessly. Fortunately, a plump young man in the uniform of a minor government official arrived, informed them (in English) that he had been sent to see them safely to Sian, and explained the situation (in Chinese) to the other passengers. Room was made for them.

  The bus soon reached its top speed of fifteen miles an hour, and streams of fine dust sifted upward through cracks in the floorboard, covering everyone with a kind of cornmeal yellow. At one point the gasoline tank dropped off, and the other passengers, nodding deferentially, indicated that Mydans and Jacoby were the ones to fix it. Later it was also up to them to knock out the spark plugs, clean them, and pound them in again. As the day wore on, other repairs were made, and the next day was the same. Only when they had to produce their identity cards at a government checkpoint did their fellow passengers learn they were journalists — not, as their escort had indicated, American fliers come to fight for China, and a nurse.

  Shelley remembered the whole expedition as horrendous. There was tea of a muddy variety, but hardly anything to eat. At a village headquarters they mounted little Mongolian ponies and trotted along behind an artillery regiment. She could not keep up, fell off her pony, and hit her head. When she came to, an old woman was standing over her. The crone led her to a nearby cave and wiped her forehead with a damp and filthy rag, meant as a kindness. At last the others came in search of her. At the Tungkwan city gate, they dismounted and followed a shoulder-high communications trench to an outpost where the Yellow River makes a hairpin bend. There they gazed across at the Japanese, who obligingly lobbed a few shells across.

  Although she did not know what to expect, Shelley had thought there would be some kind of action. There was none.

  Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway left: China in April 1941. Martha was glad to leave, and not only because she had developed “China rot” on her hands and had to smear on a vile-smelling ointment and wear big cotton gloves. China had quite simply overwhelmed her. She admitted that Hemingway had been more game, even gallant, considering that it was she who had dragged him there — “nagged him into this horror journey” was how she put it. She had matched him in Spain, where courage and endurance were the standards of measurement. But China was a whole different world. So many people, so little food, so much disease. Her U.C. “saw the Chinese as people, while I saw them as a mass of downtrodden valiant doomed humanity,” she said.

  They parted in Rangoon, where even Martha, who loved heat, suffered and Ernest was like a “beached whale.” He flew home, but she had two more stories to do — Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, and Singapore. Carl and Shelley recalled seeing her there. The city was highly civilized, and Martha blossomed. Her hands healed, her hair was clean and shiny blond again. She dined out in lovely homes where “the legendary silent-footed Oriental” waited table and fresh caviar was a staple. Two Scots regiments were stationed at Changi, and you could drive out to hear retreat on the bagpipes at sundown before cocktails at the officers’ mess, and later “watch the moon rise over Singapore harbor and all the tiny black islands on the flat, moonlit sea.”

  Of the other Singapore, where the Chinese, who comprised three-quarters of the population, lived — the Singapore of tin mines, hovels for the miners, and kampongs on rubber plantations — Gellhorn wrote little. It was perhaps too close a reminder of the China she had left.

  By fall 1941 most American reporters were leaving Chungking. It was almost impossible to circumvent the censorship, and besides, action was moving elsewhere — to the British harbor at Singapore and the American air bases in the Philippines. Mydans and Smith were posted in Manila now, investigating the island defenses for Life; Mel Jacoby was also there, sending “mailers” to Time and broadcasting for NBC. Back in Chungking an air raid flattened the press hostel, after which the bombing faded. The Japanese, too, were occupied elsewhere.

  In November it was rumored that Japan was planning an attack, probably soon, probably on the Philippines. Mel Jacoby sent a message to Annalee Whitmore, still in Chungking; come to Manila and marry me, it read, but come now —
later will be too late. Annalee resigned from United China Relief and with two baby pandas in tow, a gift from Madame Chiang Kai-shek to the women of America, flew CNAC to Hong Kong and took the China Clipper to Manila. The wedding took place at once, with Carl and Shelley as best man and matron of honor, and the bride in “a wild little nylon knit with palm trees and ukuleles on it,” she recalled. Honeymooning at the Philippine mountain resort of Tagatay, the newlyweds fed and photographed the baby pandas in Annalee’s care before placing them on what would prove the final clipper ship to fly out of Manila.

  On the last day of November 1941 the two couples attended what was billed as the biggest American social event of the year — the annual celebration of the Army-Navy football game. Long tables had been set out on the lawn and a giant scoreboard erected, but the Time Inc. contingent noted that many chairs remained empty. A major alert prevented most navy men from attending, and the usual play-by-play account fell through when broadcasting was cut off. There was music, but few people danced. By early morning, when news sifted through that in Annapolis Navy had won, officers in Manila had been called to their posts and ships had quietly sailed off into the night. Later Shelley and Carl recalled how people just sat there at the tables, looking out over the dark sea where, somewhere, the Japanese fleet was moving, and now their own as well.