The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  That same month, December 1943, Sonia Tomara covered the Teheran Conference for the New York Herald Tribune, then moved on to Allied headquarters in Algiers. From there she, too, turned her attention to Italy, a country that bore little resemblance to the one she had known nine years before when Mussolini was riding high, ordering troops into Ethiopia, shouting from the balcony on the Piazza Venezia that Italy must assume her rightful stature among nations. The Italy of the winter and spring of 1944 had no stature at all — it was overrun by foreign troops. Pushing up from the south were American (including African- and Japanese-American), British, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, Free French, French Moroccan, and Polish regiments. Facing them from the north, grudgingly relinquishing a village here, a moun-taintop there, were the Germans.

  Tomara began the New Year of 1944 with an optimistic assessment: the American Fifth Army was only six miles from Cassino, which was seventy miles from Rome — how long could that take? As it turned out, with frigid weather conditions and fierce enemy resistance, achingly long. Near the end of January, when she reported the landing of thousands of Allied troops at Anzio, only thirty-two miles from Rome, it was hoped that real progress might be made. But again, nothing was easy. Tomara’s dispatches revealed that two days after the Anzio landing, nine German divisions — a hundred thousand men — moved in for counterattacks. Advance there, too, was slow and cautious.

  Margaret Bourke-White’s final Italian assignment, early in January 1944, was to do a series on the medical corps. She began with the Thirty-eighth Evacuation Hospital near the ridge of hills that bordered the Cassino valley. It was hard to photograph such suffering close at hand, but the surgeon encouraged her: it was important for people at home to know what their boys were going through. Her first subject was a young soldier with a hole in his throat and chest and a wound in his stomach; to keep him from drowning in his own blood, the surgeon was siphoning it out from his lungs through a tracheotomy tube and returning it to him through intravenous injection. Margaret thought it impossible that he would recover, but she was assured that he would. The photos Life selected gave folks back home a close-up view of their wounded GIs, but the dominant perception was one of mud. Nurses emptied pails of water from leaky tents and slithered through a morass of slime to the “powder room.” A convalescent private waded to the mess tent in muddy boots. All were models of cheerful endurance — Life’s kind of Americans.

  More dramatic were the photos taken at the Eleventh Field Hospital. By chance her arrival there coincided with an attempt by the Thirty-sixth (Texas) Division to make an assault crossing of the Rapido River as part of a plan to open up Highway 6 to Rome. The Eleventh fought in front of the American heavy guns and within aim of German guns controlling the heights. On Margaret’s first night a number of shells landed in the hospital area. One shell scored a direct hit on the mess tent. The electrical system went out.

  In Purple Heart Valley Bourke-White described how she and her aide made their way to the operating tent where work was continuing by flashlight. She photographed the doctors and nurses in their surgical gowns, muddy boots, and battle helmets attempting to repair the young bodies. At intervals a warning whistle or scream would break the quiet and everyone would drop to the floor, only to jump up and go back to work the minute the bang of the exploding shell was heard. Casualties kept pouring in. Blood supplies ran low; members of the hospital staff began volunteering theirs, and truck drivers were called in to give a pint before hurrying back to work again. Margaret photographed one recipient, a soldier from Texas with two crushed legs. He would not be one of the successes: in the early hours of the morning he begged the nurse to cover the feet he no longer had, whispered, “I’m so cold,” and died.

  “Watching death so close before my eyes,” Bourke-White wrote, “I had forgotten the wholesale screaming death being hurled from the mountaintop.” The shelling began again, and back in the nurses’ tent the exhausted women spent the rest of the night rolled in blankets under their cots. Next morning Margaret accompanied a medic to an ambulance relay point where more wounded were waiting. As the jeep headed out toward the enemy-held mountain, the sun broke through the clouds. “Everything was so still, so pure,” she wrote, “it seemed impossible that from this same mountain such hell could have gushed forth the night before.”

  The American assault lasted for three days, and a thousand Texans died. Her assignment finished, Bourke-White returned to Naples. Major Jerry Papurt was still there; she had spent several weekend leaves with him, and he never ceased assuring her of his love. They talked of her next trip to Italy, the war’s end, a life together. Then she got on a plane and flew home. Her negatives and notes routinely traveled to the Pentagon in an army pouch and were developed there by the signal corps, or by Life technicians under military supervision. Only those that passed censorship went on to New York. Unaccountably, the pouch containing the film of her time with the Eleventh Field Hospital vanished. The less dramatic evacuation hospital negatives were there, but not the ones of medics operating in battle helmets by flashlight, nurses diving for the floor at the burst of a shell, a young Texan receiving blood transfusions in both arms. Bourke-White, who had risked her life to get those shots, stormed about the Pentagon, but they were simply gone. She always thought of that loss as her wound, and Papurt’s letters about how she had become a legend in Italy, how stories of her courage were being told and retold, only partially consoled her.

  That fall and winter of 1943-44 Martha Gellhorn left her disgruntled husband behind in Cuba and returned to the war zone. She went first to England, then moved down to Italy. Although she made repeated attempts in her letters, she could not persuade Hemingway to join her. He insisted that scouting for enemy submarines off the Florida coast was more important, but Gellhorn did not believe that was the real reason. One explanation for his reluctance was that he had mythol-ogized his earlier war experiences in France and Spain and was now a prisoner of his own myth. Also, although he was only forty-five, it was not a trim, energetic forty-five. At thirty-five, Martha had recently completed a new novel and was ambitious to resume her war correspondent career. “I would give anything to be part of the invasion and see Paris right at the beginning and watch the peace,” she wrote him from England.

  By February 1944 she had made her way to Naples, where she arranged to accompany a French transport officer returning to the French sector of the front. In an open jeep, the wind blowing snow and hail in their faces, they circled up a mountain. “The French held these mountains and opposite them, on higher mountains, were the Germans,” Martha reported in Colliers. “The mountains to the right were occupied by the Poles, and to the left, around Cassino, were the Americans.”

  In March Gellhorn moved over to the American sector, where she ran into her old friend Virginia Cowles. For more than a year Cowles had served as assistant to American ambassador Winant in London, but she missed reporting and had recently returned to journalism. Aside from a visit she had made to the Hemingways in Cuba early in 1942, Virginia and Martha had seen little of each other. Now, just as they had done in Madrid during the civil war in Spain, they visited a hospital together. With her remarkable ability to picture a scene in such detail that the reader felt he was there, and then put that scene in a larger perspective, Gellhorn wrote:

  It smelled of many things, of men and dampness and old blankets and ether and pain. . . . War, which is such a large and incomprehensible and impersonal affair, becomes very personal indeed inside a hospital, for at last it is reduced to its basic materiel, the human body. You speak to the wounded who look at you, assuming that they may want company. You try not to let your own health shout down at them; and you try to keep your face and your voice clean of pity, which nobody wants.

  When they returned to their jeep, Cowles remarked that at least it had been nice and warm in the hospital. What more was there to say?

  Still in Algiers that winter of 1944, Sonia Tomara envied her female colleagues like Gellhorn
and Cowles in the war zone. From press communiques at Allied headquarters she described how the Germans had again failed in an attempt to dislodge the Americans from the Anzio beachhead. Put another way, that could be interpreted to read that the Americans had failed in repeated attempts to advance inland from the beachhead. As for Cassino, although it was hardly more than a ruin, pockets of German troops remained in rocky hideouts above the town, firing away with their mortars.

  At last, in April 1944, Tomara left Algiers for Italy. She celebrated Easter with two hundred soldiers of the American Fifth Army clustered around a makeshift altar high on a rocky ledge. They had climbed the hill before sunrise while the mist still lay below them, careful not to step off the narrow path for fear of mines. Beneath them was the great Garigliano valley; on one side Sonia could see a thin strip of sea, and on the other, through the haze, the mountains. Thick-trunked olive trees sported silvery leaves, and wild anemones peeped from between the rocks.

  The Germans were no more than four hundred yards away. Occasionally shells whizzed over the heads of the men, but for the most part it was still. An army chaplain of German background from Nebraska, speaking into a microphone, welcomed both Catholics and Protestants of the German army and wished them a “joyous Easter.” Loudspeakers wired to the microphone carried the sound to mountain dugouts and low into the valley. The chaplain read from the twenty-eighth chapter of the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, first in German, then in English. A little camp organ had been hauled up on muleback, and a nurse from the evacuation hospital sang an Easter hymn and “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah. Then the Catholic chaplain said mass, while the Catholic soldiers knelt and received communion. At the designated time, the service was over. The big Allied guns resumed firing. It must have been an emotional morning, even for hardened soldiers on the line, but as usual with Sonia, the writing was spare and the drama underplayed.

  Later that spring she reached Cassino. “At last I’ve seen with my own eyes the front I’ve been writing about,” she reported to the Herald Tribune. She traveled the southern front, observed the enemy’s positions, listened to the whistling shells and learned to distinguish a departing from an arriving one. She visited American, British, New Zealand, and French troops, and sat at lunch as the guest of a French colonel with a Polish officer on one side, an American on the other, and a Scot in kilts directly across. As a Russian-French-American herself, she was impressed by the internationality of the campaign, while unsure of Allied success. “No invader has ever taken Rome from the south,” she reminded her readers. Hannibal had learned that the hard way, as had the Hohenstauffens, and Napoleon. “After seven months of campaigning on Italian ground we are still bogged down. And it tears your heart as you drive through ruined hill towns or see a two-thousand-year-old Roman bridge destroyed by bombs.”

  One night at the front Tomara watched as the full moon through the narrow silver leaves of olive trees lit up “thousands of brown tents camouflaged in groves and thousands of brown trucks rolling up and down the road. In daytime you could see shells piled in neat rows under blooming peach trees, and tanks seeking cover behind the walls of a peasant’s pink house.” She described the devastation of the Allied line:

  It begins in the marshy Garigliano plain, once conquered for cultivation, but which will have no harvest this summer. It is cratered by shells, and the roads through which we have to carry supplies are repaired at night and covered with metal net to permit trucks to pass. Beyond the plain are hills, whereof we hold only a few.... I have visited Ornito, where dugouts cling to the rocks and where the men are short of water, which must be hauled by mule. On the crest the Germans are twenty yards away and every time we hurl grenades queer shadows creep in the darkness over the rocks. They may be Germans’ or ours. Both sides need prisoners for information and this is the way to get them.

  As for Cassino, Tomara concluded, it was all one had heard of it, and worse. The plain below it was dead, the earth shriveled; the once picturesque little villages approaching the town were heaps of rubble. Sonia saw one wall of a church still standing, bells rocking gently, but there were no people to call to prayer. Many of the olive trees were cut cleanly in two. Cassino, when she reached it, was hidden by smoke. It seemed to be burning, she wrote, “yet nothing is left there to burn. Guns thudded continuously. Our own shells passed over our heads. The roads were deserted.”

  For Allied troops and the press that covered them, the Italian campaign had another year of rain and cold and mud to go, but for women reporters there were none of the internal obstacles encountered in North Africa. In Italy the women took care of themselves, even when living with the nurses placed them between their own heavy guns and the enemy. Margaret Bourke-White’s little foray across the Bailey bridge under enemy fire, and a risky jaunt into Cassino that Martha Gellhorn attempted in company with several male colleagues, remained undetected by the higher authorities. In truth, the battle for Italy provided about as much danger and discomfort as any reporter of either sex would want to cope with. The real conflict between military discipline and the goals of the press would come with the Normandy landings ahead.

  19

  New Women Gome Over for Overlord

  Early in 1944, in anticipation of an imminent cross-Channel invasion and campaign in northwest Europe, code-named Overlord, newly minted American women war correspondents set out for Britain. Editors of major newspapers, impressed by stories under feminine bylines in the New York Herald Tribune and Chicago Daily News, began to consider whether they perhaps had been neglecting an important angle of war reporting. Local papers boasted a high circulation among women whose husbands or sons were overseas, but military strategy and tactics made the average woman’s eyes glaze over. What these women wanted was news of how their men were doing. Martha Gellhorn’s assertion that the basic materiel of war was the human body was exactly how most women thought of it.

  Accordingly, editors who a year before had summarily dismissed the idea of sending a woman to cover the war were reassessing their position, and wire services that had thought token female representation adequate were beginning to see advantages to having a woman in each area of combat. Competition was a factor, too, in cities like Boston and New York with rival local papers: when one hired a woman on its overseas staff, the other knew its readers would demand the same. The trend was far from universal, however. Editors on small or more traditional papers still relied on picking up a woman’s story from one of the news or wire services.

  Space does not permit an accounting of all the American women who came over to Europe between the fall of 1943 and the end of the war. The five included here arrived before the Normandy invasion, and are representative in that all were serious reporters, anxious to prove that they could carry out their mission and that their editors’ faith in them was not misplaced.

  Virginia Irwin, Saint Louis Post-Dispatch

  Perhaps the most determined was Virginia Irwin of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. A midwesterner, she was a successful feature writer who covered a wide field, everything from marriage and divorce (both of which she had tried) to opera, theater, national political conventions, and Hollywood (vacationing there one summer, she returned with twenty-one columns). Her articles were fast-paced, funny, provocative. After Pearl Harbor she added serious pieces about women’s role in the war, and was sent to WAAC training areas to gather information firsthand. In the summer of 1942 she traveled across the country interviewing manufacturers, plant managers, and women workers for an eleven-part series on women in the war industries.

  Irwin had requested assignment as a war correspondent early on, but the Post-Dispatch relied for war news on wire and syndicated news services. They had no plans to maintain any war correspondent, certainly not a woman. Virginia was not one to give up easily, however, and in mid-1943 she asked for, and was granted, a leave of absence to join the American Red Cross overseas. The ARC operated more than fifty “clubs” throughout Britain; the
y provided meals, recreation rooms, and anywhere from five to several hundred beds in hotels appropriated for the duration. Irwin was first assigned to a large club near an airbase (where the young fliers referred to her, age thirty-six, as “Mom”) and later moved on to London. Needless to say, stories regularly made their way back to the Post-Dispatch.

  By early 1944 when that newspaper first seriously considered sending its own war correspondents to Europe, such appointments were harder to arrange. Some areas were virtually closed — Italy, for example, where only replacements were accepted. Accreditation could be slow; security clearance seldom took less than six weeks. There was the problem of “priorities” in getting a reporter passage. But the Post-Dispatch requested, and the War Department approved, accreditation for two correspondents, one of whom was Irwin. Her proximity to the action was a major reason for her selection, which surprised her not at all. It was all part of her plan.

  Lee Carson, INS

  Had there been a prize for glamour, it would have been shared by Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter. An INS Washington reporter for several years, Carson had been labeled the capital’s “best-looking woman correspondent” by Newsweek. She had a perfect oval face, shoulder-length titian-hued hair, well-arched eyebrows, and a pinup girl figure. Army khaki hid her curves, but the skirt fell just over the knee, and a woman with long and lovely legs had an advantage. Lee was regularly accused of crossing hers and batting her lashes to get a story, but that was the standard complaint of male reporters when a beautiful woman was part of the competition.