The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  The great advantage of a uniform and an AGO card, Miller discovered, was access to areas that were otherwise off limits. She began with an upbeat story on American nurses, followed by a piece on Wrens in training, and another on ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) women who operated a searchlight battery in north London. On these last two she worked with David Scherman, a young Life photographer. They were immediate buddies, sharing the same irreverent humor and devil-may-care attitude toward danger. Lee had barely completed her shots of the beaming young ATS women in their heavy anoraks and boots when the battery came under enemy fire. Another night she and Scherman went down into the London Underground air raid shelters to photograph sculptor Henry Moore, who regularly went to sketch the people there.

  The compatibility Miller had with Scherman was all too absent when Vogue sent her on a job with Cecil Beaton. Lee thought Beaton conceited and, worse, anti-Semitic. One rather boozy evening she molded a small wax figure of him and stuck it with pins. When word came next day that he was on a plane that had gone down, she was filled with guilt; she had meant only to wound him, she said, not kill him. In fact, she had done neither. He had not been a passenger after all.

  Lee Miller’s photos during 1943 corroborated the resumption of full-scale German bombing, and Mary Welsh, returning to England from home leave in America, was startled at the gray faces and general weariness of her friends. All U.S. publications allowed their reporters regular, if infrequent, home leave. It was a time to rest and visit families, but also to get reacquainted with the home office. It was always a shock to reporters when they returned from the safe, privileged U.S.A. to the hardships of the war theater. While hardly comparable to the Blitz, the renewed bombing of London was a lot more disruptive than Mary had expected. Her earlier nonchalance vanished; when the Hyde Park guns let go during a dinner party nearby, she found herself shaking uncontrollably.

  Welsh and her Australian reporter husband, Noel Monks, who had been in the Pacific theater for most of 1942, were reunited in New York at Christmas. In London after the New Year, they found that the long separation had left both of them changed, and neither seemed inclined to address those changes. His leave over, Monks was sent to North Africa, and word drifted back about a pretty woman often seen with him. Mary shrugged. London was a Garden of Eden for a single woman, she said, apparently including herself in that category.

  After her joyful resumption of the profession of foreign correspondent in the summer of 1942, Sonia Tomara, New York Herald Tribune reporter for the China-Burma-India theater, had moved on to winter at an American advance outpost in the Naga Hills on India’s eastern border. The natives there had no alphabet and wore only loincloths, men and women alike, which had taken some getting used to. By the following summer, 1943, Tomara had continued her easterly course to relatively civilized Chungking. A new Japanese offensive was pressing westward — perhaps only to seize the rice harvest, but possibly with intent to seize the capital, as they had the old capitals of Peking, Nanking, and Hankow. Tomara stayed in the press hostel, and in the evenings, when the light inside was too dim to read by, she sat with other correspondents in the courtyard and talked of escape alternatives, just as she had done in Warsaw and Belgrade and Paris in the first year of the war. One could always flee over the old caravan trails, she said, although her colleagues preferred the Marco Polo route through Central Asia. In fact, that was the only land route still open, except for a circuitous course through Russia.

  But the Japanese advance fizzled, and early in August 1943 Tomara left Chungking. Leaving felt a bit like treason, she said, because the city had suffered so much. She moved on to the headquarters of the Fourteenth Air Force in southern China, where the monsoon season was in full swing, and where, when weather permitted, she hitched a ride in a bomber raid over Hankow. Scrunched down in the nose with the bombardier-navigator, she watched the shadows of the other planes on the ground below, and the bombs falling in clusters onto the airfield.

  (From left) Robert Pepp er Martin , Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Sonia Tomara, and Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, Chungking, 1943.

  UPI/CORBIS- BETTMANN.

  Tomara spent a month with the Fourteenth U.S. Air Force Forward Echelon. Every day she watched shark-nosed PADs zoom into the sky on their way to bomb more airfields, destroy more Zeros, blast harbors as far away as Hong Kong. “You do feel the war here at this airfield,” Sonia wrote. “When a mission goes out, your heart is twisted with anxiety.”

  Other women were on the move to other continents that summer of 1943. Helen Kirkpatrick went down to North Africa. Word of General McClure’s resistance to women in a combat area had sifted back to London, and Kirkpatrick began by treading very lightly around the Algiers press corps, but no one voiced an objection to her presence. From Allied headquarters on July 10, 1943, she forwarded dispatches on the invasion of Sicily, only three miles from the Italian mainland, by British and American forces. Within a week or two she reported that General George Patton’s troops had reached the capital, Palermo, and were poised to pounce on Italy itself. Italy’s withdrawal from the war might come sooner than anyone expected, Helen suggested. Indeed, in August Mussolini was arrested, King Victor Emmanuel was restored to the post of commander in chief, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio became prime minister. Badoglio was the very man with whom Eleanor and Reynolds Packard had shared a car during the Italian advance to Addis Ababa seven years before. Now he initiated secret negotiations and in September 1943 surrendered Italy to the Allies — which did not, however, mean that Italy was out of the war. German forces remained firmly entrenched there.

  That same fall Carl and Shelley Mydans were on the final lap of their journey home. The Japanese attack on Manila, the long months in the Santo Tomas and Shanghai internment camps, were behind them. At the neutral port of Mormugao, Goa, the Swedish exchange ship Gripsholm tied up beside the Tela Maru, and passengers filed slowly off one ship and onto the other in two great semicircles, one well inside the other. It was startling how the Americans and Canadians, thin and brown in their ragged clothes, Chinese straw hats on their heads and bundles and baskets in their arms, looked more Asian than the well-fed Japanese wearing the latest American styles and carrying shiny American suitcases. As they started up the gangway of the Gripsholm, Carl and Shelley paused for a moment to watch them, but then, as Carl wrote later, “hands reached out to help us aboard, someone said, ‘Come on home,’ and our composure crumpled and everything went out of focus.”

  Almost immediately they were offered a nearly forgotten delicacy — ice water in little paper cups. As they started across the deck, a tall American approached, introduced himself as a State Department representative, and held out to Carl what he passed off as “this old thing that I’ve never been able to work myself and I thought you might like to borrow for the trip home” — a camera, complete with film. “I saw him take a camera in his hands for the first time in nearly two years and watched his eyes light up,” Shelley wrote later to an editor at Life. “His fingers curled around it automatically and he started right off on the job.”

  The trip home, via Rio de Janeiro, lasted six weeks. As Mydans’s photos show, it was a recuperative time of food, rest, vitamin pills, and new clothes distributed by the Red Cross. But as the warm waters of the Caribbean gave way to the cold, choppy sea off Cape Hatteras, anxiety set in again. They had been gone so long. Could they regain their lives?

  On the morning of December 1, 1943 — almost two years since the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Philippines — the Gripsholm sailed into New York harbor. On deck Carl and Shelley watched the tips of skyscrapers rise above the fog. They were met first by officials, then by tearful family and friends, but what they later treasured most was the Life reporter they knew from the past, in full war correspondent attire, greeting them “with a wonderful casualness and saying, as though we’d never been away, ‘Better hurry. They’re waiting for you back at the office.’ “

  In the months that followed Shelley
and Carl Mydans picked up their lives with little difficulty. Both received their delayed accreditation, and Carl was assigned to a European post. Shelley planned to stay home, write a book, and join him later. On a soft April evening they stood at Penn Station saying goodbye — a picture Carl had shot many times — but when the train pulled away, he felt strangely unsure of himself. “As I headed back to another front in another land,” he wrote, “I was suddenly aware that so much of the strength I had always thought was mine, was Shelley’s.”

  18

  Slogging Through Italy

  In October Margaret Bourke-White flew into Naples soon after its capture by the U.S. Fifth Army. There was not much left of the city. Allied forces had bombed it through August and September, and the occupying Germans had blown up everything in the harbor before they withdrew, including the city water system. American troops entered to discover mines ready to explode at the flick of a light switch or at some arbitrary moment perhaps still a week away. Bourke-White found hundreds of families who had lived in caves for more than a year, hiding first from Allied, now from German bombs. There was no shortage of subject matter for her camera, but the pictures were not pretty.

  She was in Italy on sufferance. After her return home from North Africa earlier that year, she contacted the families of dozens of soldiers she had come to know during her time with the Ninety-seventh Bomber Group. Margaret carried messages from GIs to their families, even telephoned wives, mothers, and girlfriends to report on the general well-being of a loved one. But when her editors at Life approached the air force about her return to the war zone, they found that the top brass had no interest in sending her back. General Eisenhower charged that she had maneuvered herself into that bombing mission with the Ninety-seventh; he had known nothing about it and had not condoned it. Bourke-White “evaded PRO regulations, violated security and broke rules in other ways,” Life was reminded. Still, the military could not argue with the fine publicity her story had brought to the bomber command, and other branches of the armed services had requested similar attention. The army relented, and authorized a photo series on the engineering corps; less chance for violating rules on the ground, they said.

  In Purple Heart Valley, the book she wrote about her time in Italy, Bourke-White included photographs of the Naples harbor with its sunken ships, ghostly wrecks of buildings, and hungry children picking among the wreckage. She described how a thorough job of mine clearance had to be completed before the electricity could be turned back on, so that with the act of throwing the main switch, no hidden mines or time bombs would be activated. When the day came, a radio truck crisscrossed the city warning people to take to the hills. Margaret photographed the flood of ragged civilians carrying chairs, pots, babies — whatever was most important to them. She had cameras focused on buildings all over town, ready to catch any part of the city that might start to blow, but when at noon the main switch was thrown, nothing happened. Army officers went into the buildings and calmly turned on the light switches. Power had returned. The people came down from the hills.

  One side of her life in Naples that fall went unmentioned in Purple Heart Valley. Six months had passed since Bourke-White said goodbye to Brigadier General “Hamp” Atkinson of the Ninety-seventh Bomber Command; they had corresponded for a while, but were no longer in communication. In Naples, in need of a military pass from counterintelligence, Margaret applied to the commanding officer, Major Maxwell Jerome Papurt —Jerry to his friends, Pappy to his men. It was Papurt’s job to assess individuals quickly, and he did. When Bourke-White gave her name and occupation, his face lit up; he was full of praises for her work.

  Unlike the tall, lanky Hamp, Jerry was stocky, bespectacled and prematurely gray, charming and gregarious. He was also married, but that position was shaky, he implied — not so big a hurdle as to stop him in his pursuit of Margaret, which began at once. If he was a womanizer, he was also much more: at home, a university professor of abnormal psychology and director of a home for delinquent children; in the army, head of counterintelligence and the object of intense loyalty from his men. He admired Bourke-White’s dedication to her work and was fascinated by her zest for life while surrounded by death. As for her, she was chastened by the difficulty Life had had securing permission for her to return to the combat area, and was on her best behavior. There were two Margarets. The one with a camera in her hand could be a demon, but the other one — gay, mil of fun — could brighten drab army life immeasurably. In the evenings she and Jerry did those little romantic things they might have done in peacetime, like singing (off-key) together, or dancing in a leaky old ballroom. Within a month he was begging her to marry him. He had, he said, written to ask his wife for a divorce.

  But when the main action moved north to the mountainous area below Cassino, Bourke-White packed up her cameras and moved with it. She was quartered in a monastery with fifty monks. Her cell opened out into a vaulted corridor, like scores of identical cells inhabited by the brothers; at night she could hear them pattering about, visiting each other. The fourteenth-century cloister seemed unaffected by the war raging all around it, and she appreciated this island of sanity in an otherwise crazed world. The engineers camping in the neighborhood appreciated it, too, especially for the hot water available there in the mornings for shaving. They would drift into the central courtyard, fill their helmets and prop them up on the balustrade. “Buon giorno,” the friars would say, passing by with their kettles, and the lathered Yanks would reply in kind.

  Bourke-White could not very well wash in the courtyard, so by previous arrangement the CO would walk over early each morning, knock at her door to awaken her, then continue down the hall to a large stone cell fitted up with primitive plumbing. When it was empty, he would call out, “Coast’s clear!” and stand guard while she was inside. Her grooming completed, he would escort her to the senior officers’ mess tent for breakfast, after which the corporal assigned as her aide would load her cameras into a command car and climb in front. With Margaret and an officer in back, they would be off to that day’s destination to inspect, and photograph, the engineers at work.

  Their route one morning encompassed a newly completed Bailey bridge that spanned a gorge and was positioned so deep in the ravine that it could not be seen by German marksmen across the valley. The Bailey bridge was a wonder of invention; assembled in sections on one side of a river, it was then pushed across, some distance above the water, until its extremity found a safe landing spot on the far side. Bourke White’s party crossed the bridge and arrived at the work site; she took her pictures, and was about to begin a K-ration lunch when shelling was heard in the gorge behind them. The colonel and the photographer went to investigate.

  At the stretch of road before the bridge, they came upon men standing motionless in ditches, crouched behind big rocks, or lying flat in the shelter of an old ruined wall. Another shell whizzed across and sent a truck up in flames. The colonel slammed the jeep to a stop, and they made for the nearest ditch themselves. From its high protective side Margaret took pictures as the shells landed all around them. During a pause the jeep made it back to the work site, but the shelling continued all afternoon. The Germans seemed determined to knock the Bailey out; Bourke-White was all too aware that if they did, she could not get back to the monastery, and if they did not, she would have to cross that bridge while they were still trying. When the time came and they approached the bridge, they found it still in one piece, and they crossed without incident. A large open area on the far side was also within enemy range, but again nothing happened. Margaret was just beginning to relax when they hit a bottleneck. Bottlenecks were scary because they made for sitting targets, and as feared, a shell sailed over their heads. When traffic resumed, they saw ahead two soldiers lying on either side of the road, so quietly that Margaret thought they were asleep. Jeeps and trucks flowed steadily between them, and only when their own car reached that spot was she jolted into awareness: one man had lost half his head, the other h
is face.

  Bourke-White returned exhausted to her cell. In short succession the nightly ritual of two knocks on her door was repeated: first, an engineer and amateur photographer who had appointed himself to collect her mud-caked boots and leggings each evening and return them to her washed and dried in the morning; second, the CO come to escort her to the “plumbing.” Back in her dark cell, Margaret crawled into her narrow cot, and if she could ignore the flashes of light in her window, the barking of distant guns, and the image of a dead GI on either side of the road, she too might sleep.

  A quiet monastery cell, however primitive, would have seemed a lovely respite to Helen Kirkpatrick that fall of 1943. After covering action in North Africa, Corsica, and Malta for the Chicago Daily News, she continued north into Italy and joined an American mobile surgical unit on the Volturno. November was a month of constant rain and mud. She lived with the nurses in a tent; the latrine was “walled” by blankets, the top open to the elements. Hospital beds and operating room were also tented, and the enemy was just over the hill. A Japanese-American Nisei division in the area fought magnificently, leading to heavy casualties, and the wounded of both sides were brought in there. The staff was shorthanded, so when Helen was not actually writing her stories, she was helping out. “Amputations didn’t bother me — I could tolerate anything as long as I didn’t see the face of the man,” she said later. “It was then that the casualty became a person.”

  She had been there only a few weeks when a message arrived: she was to return immediately to Algiers. Her publisher, Colonel Frank Knox, had assumed the post of secretary of the navy, and was in consultation at Allied headquarters there. Still in her combat boots, Helen flew back across the Mediterranean, and barely had time to wash up and put on a clean uniform before she was whisked off to a fine villa where stewards in white jackets were passing around cocktails. It was not easy to go to a cocktail party straight from the mud of the Volturno, the wounded men and exhausted nurses, Kirkpatrick discovered. She hoped Knox would ask her about Italy, but he had not recalled her for conversation. He wanted her to return to London at once. Helen protested, but the colonel was firm. There were things she would need to do in London, he intimated, and made it clear the discussion was over. Early in December she went.