The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Lee Carson, Lond on, 1944.

  UPI/COREBIS-BETTMANN.

  Whatever the faculty at Smith College thought they had prepared Carson for, it was not a job as “stunt reporter” for the Chicago Daily Times, which she took right after graduation. Her first assignment was to report an automobile race from behind the wheel of a contending vehicle, regardless of the fact that she barely knew how to drive. She lost the race but won attention and, before long, a post as White House correspondent for INS. As would become clear when she went through three jeeps in a week in the Ardennes, the nerve she displayed in that race never left her. Nerve was a valuable commodity in war reporting, for men and women alike.

  Iris Carpenter, Boston Globe

  A reporter who would share the Ardennes experience with Carson was an Englishwoman who signed on with the Boston Globe. Iris Carpenter, daughter of a wealthy movie magnate, started out at eighteen as a film critic on a small publication and then moved on to Lord Beaver-brook’s Daily Express. Blond and blue-eyed, with near perfect features, she looked more like a film star than a journalist. After she married and had two children, she resigned her position to give more time to her family, but with the outbreak of war, priorities changed. She was summoned by the Ministry of Information and put to work broadcasting for the BBC. Her husband, at the time of the retreat from Dunkirk, piloted the family yacht back and forth across the Channel, retrieving soldiers. During the Blitz, five German planes were shot down over the family estate in Kent, and part of her own house shattered.

  Before long Carpenter discovered that more than her house was shattered. Her marriage was in similar disarray. “My husband had found another woman,” she said later. “If he wanted somebody else, then that was that. I went to war and forgot him quite deliberately.” It was the stiff-upper-lip response to a not uncommon wartime occurrence. Like others before her, Iris saw that work would be her salvation. She setded her children with her sister’s family and moved up to London. With the demands of the BBC, the Ministry of Information, the London Daily Herald, and now the Boston Globe, there was little time for brooding.

  Colonel Barney Oldfield, Ninth Army press officer, who saw a lot of Carpenter once she reached the Continent, remembered her as a gracious, sympathetic person who put her troubles behind her. “She could get interviews from anybody,” he said. “She was so svelte, animated, and, well, gorgeous. In all that mud and drabness, she made men who saw her think they were dreaming, and if they weren’t, they started to do so.”

  Marjorie “Dot” Avery, Detroit Free Press

  Both Marjorie Avery, known as Dot, and Catherine Coyne came to Europe with a straightforward, adaptive approach to war reporting. Avery’s journalistic apprenticeship consisted of a year covering fashion in Paris for the New York Herald Tribune. From there she moved to the Detroit Free Press, where she reported for, then served as editor of, the women’s page. She was small and slim with a helmet of sleek, honey blond hair and an addiction to crazy hats. Her position placed her close to Detroit society, where she developed the tact and forbearance requisite for one in frequent contact with the grandes dames of the auto industry. In private life Dot was known for her soirees and her expertise with exotic curry dishes and delicious salads. It was a pleasant mid-western life, and her colleagues were surprised at her decision to trade it in for a war correspondent post. The Free Press hierarchy was much opposed, but they agreed to a six-month trial, beginning in the fall of 1943. Avery’s column, “London Diary,” would appear on the women’s page, and she should approach her work with the aim of providing a light complement to the “important” stories written by Free Press male reporters or taken from the wire services. Avery didn’t mind. Her strength was in feature stories. She would comply with grace, write as they desired — just let her go.

  Marjorie Avery, London, 1944.

  DAVID E. SCHERMAN/LIFE MAGAZINE. © TIME INC.

  Catherine Coyne, Boston Herald

  The last to arrive, in the spring of 1944 only a few weeks before D Day, was Catherine Coyne. Coyne had graduated from Boston University in the same class as Spanish Civil War reporter Frances Davis and Life photographer Carl Mydans. “The brightest and most fun-to-be-with of them all” was Carl’s memory of her. If Catherine was more fun, it was perhaps because she was more relaxed, less driven than others in the field. Tall and slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, she broke into journalism by writing for a trade paper in cemetery monuments. She later applied for a post as a stringer for the Boston Herald, and in time was added to their regular staff. It was a leisurely career progression.

  Coyne was possibly the only woman whose war correspondent post simply fell into her lap. At a time when the list of applicants was already lengthy, the Herald managing editor bluntly asked her one day how she would feel about covering the war. Iris Carpenter’s stories had already begun to appear in the Globe, and the Herald’s female readership was asking why they, too, could not have a correspondent of their own sex. Coyne was startled at the query, but answered in the affirmative, which prompted a second blunt question: how soon could she go? Passage was said to be unavailable, but perhaps could be arranged if she could leave at once. In New York the passport bureau was persuaded to cut its waiting time, the British embassy came up with a visa, and Lord & Taylor provided a uniform. In two days she was off.

  Cather ine Coyne, Lond on, 1944.

  CATHERlNE COYNE PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  She traveled on the flagship of a convoy with four USO women and five thousand soldiers. “There was nothing glorious about going off to war,” she wrote in her first dispatch to the Herald. “The pier was gloomy, almost deserted, as groups of pack-laden soldiers marched all through the night toward the gangplank that was the bridge between the safety of home and the uncertainty of war on foreign soil.” Coyne knew it was those very pack-laden soldiers that her readers wanted to hear about, and about this beautiful ship that was their first home-away-from-home, with its scrubbed deck and vast kitchens. The problems of serving so many meant there were only two meals a day, she wrote, and while she and the USO women sat down with the officers, the enlisted men ate from their mess kits, standing.

  Ruth Cowan, Normandy, 1944.

  SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE COLLEGE.

  On the third day out a message was delivered from President Roosevelt. “It was received soberly,” Coyne observed, “for it pointed out that ‘never were the enemies of freedom more tyrannical, more arrogant, more brutal.’” But except for those few moments when the men pondered the words of their commander in chief, they were seldom serious. She described them always laughing and joking, coltish, forever locking arms and legs for wrestling, and as she wrote she imagined how their mothers and grandmothers would be smiling and nodding in recognition.

  With the invasion of the Continent in the offing, the arrival of new women correspondents did not escape the attention of the old hands, who for the most part adopted a wait-and-see attitude. They were too busy themselves to pay much attention. Helen Kirkpatrick, for example: when Colonel Frank Knox, her boss on the Chicago Daily News (and now secretary of the navy) had mysteriously sent her from Italy back to England, it was to take her appointed place on the correspondents’ committee to plan press coverage for Overlord. There were four on the committee — three men, for magazines, wire services, and radio, and Kirkpatrick for newspapers. Her presence there was a signal honor. The committee met once a week with SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) personnel, including censors, and discussed how many reporters could be accommodated in the first wave of the invasion, how copy would get back to press headquarters, what kind of censorship they should expect. It was not their job to select the correspondents who would go in the first wave, nor was it their decision that none would be women. That unpopular call was made by the top command.

  Planning for Overlord itself took place at the old St. Paul’s School with General Eisenhower in charge and General Omar Bradley as the number two America
n. Helen, it was noted, moved among generals and journalists alike with enviable ease and charm.

  The same month that Kirkpatrick returned to England from Italy to assume her new post, November 1943, Martha Gellhorn arrived in London from Cuba. She took a room at the Dorchester and applied for her official war correspondent credentials. The subjects of her stories for Colliers ranged widely: the daring flights of RAF pilots; how the poor children of London were faring during this long war; Polish refugees.

  Both she and Helen Kirkpatrick wrote stories at that time from interviews with men who had slipped out of Poland and made their way to Britain. Helen’s informant was a key man in the Polish underground who to her surprise spoke fluent English, which he said he had learned from British prisoners of war who had escaped from their camps and were living with members of his network. Gellhorn interviewed three Poles for her story; only one was Jewish, but all described the horrors that the Jews were suffering there.

  The first, whose farm had been confiscated by the Germans but who remained there as a servant in preference to being deported elsewhere, described how German soldiers had made a group of Jews dig their own graves nearby, and then had shot them in the village square. “We have seen everything,” the man said.

  The second Pole, a student when the war started, told Gellhorn he had been sent to do forced labor in East Prussia, but had jumped from the train. Back in Warsaw he had changed his appearance, his name, and his papers. The underground sent him all over Poland, so he had seen more than most people — the breeding farms, for example, “where selected Polish girls are kept so as to augment the great Aryan race.” As for the German policy of extermination of the Jews, he had nightmares, he said, after he saw the cattle cars with Jews of all ages packed into them, forty-six cars with 130 persons per car. They just ran the train twelve kilometers outside of town. It took the people inside seven or eight hours to die.

  Gellhorn’s Jewish informant had been in the ghetto in Warsaw. Before the war he had been a lawyer and an official at the League of Nations, but he had gone back to Warsaw and lived in the ghetto until, near the end, some Poles helped him escape to France because of his particular usefulness. She recorded his story of the ghetto, of the ten-foot-high wall, how the Jews were not allowed to go out to work but forced to live off meager rations. Hunger, cold, lack of sanitation, then typhus, and no medicine to combat it. Young German soldiers prowling about, taking potshots at anyone they saw, as if they were rabbit hunting. And finally, the decision of the remaining Jews to fight back, perceiving that although the Allies would get there sometime, it would be too late for them.

  “Poland seemed dreadfully far away, dark and silent,” Gellhorn concluded her story, “but these men ... speak for the silenced millions of their own people.” As for herself, she was making sure they were heard, heard in safe, comfortable America where too many people did not want to hear, or believe, what was happening in a faraway, dark and silent land.

  Gellhorn’s interest in Poland had been noted by Mary Welsh, who recalled a cocktail party given for Martha in which she “had devoted her entire attention to a couple of Polish pilots.” Welsh, who took her socializing seriously, had not approved. She was a regular at the over-populated and often raucous weekends at Time Out, the Time Inc. home-away-from-home in Buckinghamshire. William Walton, another Time reporter who shared an office with her, said she was very gay that winter and spring, had given up on her marriage, and had a string of beaus, including a very ardent general who competed for top dog with Irwin Shaw, reporter for Stars and Stripes and Yank. All were married, but Mary’s husband Noel Monks was in the Pacific, and the men’s wives a long way off in America.

  Another man was about to enter Welsh’s life. Ernest Hemingway was not only married, he was the husband of a colleague. After her winter in London and Italy, Martha Gellhorn had returned to Cuba to make one last attempt to pry him loose from what she saw as his dissolute life, and get him to Europe. Perhaps she hoped that if they were reporting the same war, even if not always together as in Spain, some of the companionship of that time might be restored. Hemingway at last acquiesced, but in his anger at her for forcing the issue, he asked Martha’s editors at Colliers to take him on as a combat correspondent, knowing that they could not refuse, and that it would limit her chances at the front. He acquired air passage for himself only, leaving her to recross the Atlantic on a slow freighter loaded with dynamite.

  Welsh was lunching with Irwin Shaw at the popular White Tower in London one warm spring day when Hemingway stopped by the table and asked to be introduced — he didn’t actually say “to this fine woman who looks so devastating in her sweater,” but his old friend Shaw knew that was what that glance meant. He also knew that although he had competed quite satisfactorily with the general, the famous novelist was out of his class. Not long afterward Shaw learned that in spite of the fact that Mary’s husband Noel had just arrived in London on leave, she had moved with a woman friend into the Dorchester Hotel, ostensibly because of its “roof of lovely thick concrete.” Hemingway was also staying at the Dorchester. Late one night after a cocktail party, he visited the two women in their room, and as they lounged on the beds with the lights off and the windows open to the blacked-out London night, he proposed. “I don’t know you, Mary,” she recalled him saying. “But I want to marry you.... I want to marry you now, and I hope to marry you sometime. Sometime you may want to marry me.” Welsh reminded him they were both married. “You are very premature,” she murmured, somewhat lamely.

  A few nights later, returning from a party at which everyone had drunk too much, the car in which Hemingway was a passenger went head-on into a steel water tank, and Ernest head-on into the windshield. He suffered a concussion and required many stitches at a nearby hospital. Mary brought him spring flowers and spoke soothingly. In contrast, Martha, when at last she reached England and visited him in his hospital room, was critical of the drunken orgy that had brought about his mishap and laughed at the size of the bandage. His injury was in fact serious, but after two weeks on a freighter with explosives and without lifeboats, Gellhorn could not dredge up much sympathy. When he began his usual taunting, she cut him short. She had had a long time crossing the Atlantic to mull over his endless, crazy bullying, she told him. She was through. She stalked out and, back at the Dorchester, took her own room some distance from his.

  Most women correspondents were not even aware of these mad goings-on. They searched out stories by day, wrote and filed them, caught a bite to eat somewhere, tried to get back to their digs before the blackout, and often as not went to bed early. The coming invasion weighed heavily on their minds. They knew that troops had begun to collect in the great marshaling area along the south coast, but that was all they knew, since only reporters accompanying the troops could go there. Iris Carpenter slipped in because she had family there, but then she had to stay. Once you were in, you couldn’t get out again, nor could you communicate with anyone beyond the barriers. Not until later could she send dispatches describing the lovely verdant spring, the stacks of ammunition sheltered by hedges covered with May blossom, the road signs topped with myriad colored disks and code signs of units hidden nearby. The camouflage was effective. “Woods and hedgerows were spiky with guns and jammed tight with vehicles,” Iris noted. “Towns and villages bristled with men and armor and equipment. Yet from the air southeast England looked unmenacing as Maytime.”

  Accompanying the Red Cross doughnut girls, Carpenter saw the trucks “ready packed and waiting, snugged down under the trees.” She was surprised at the outward lack of anxiety in the soldiers. When the order came, the men clambered into their vehicles, cursing the weight of their ammunition belts and most of all the long hours of waiting until their convoy could meander its way, as Iris wrote, “to a coast so tight-jammed with craft that the feat of walking on the sea would have been no miracle.”

  20

  D-Day

  “At about 4 A.M. on June 6 my military friend
rang to say, ‘Take the curlers out of your hair and get going,’” Mary Welsh wrote later. “I had no curlers but I got going.”

  It had come at last, this day for which the preparations of three nations over two years’ time were finally coming to fruition. Expectations for April, and again for May, had prompted a kind of invasion anxiety that by June was bordering on frenzy. It was open knowledge that the date for an amphibious landing such as this one was governed by abundant daylight, the weather, and the tides; the readiness, or unreadiness, of the troops was a factor about which no one in the press would have dared speculate. Dawn came early in June, allowing preinvasion bombardment, and the early morning low tide needed to spot obstacles on the Normandy beaches was present from the fifth to the seventh of the month. On Sunday night, June 4, rain poured down along the coast and winds were high, but by Monday morning there were signs of clearing. From the standpoint of the fliers, and particularly the paratroops, the weather was far from perfect, but the decision was Eisenhower’s to make, and he decided it would do. He spent that evening mingling and talking with young paratroopers of the 101 st Airborne, their faces blackened and heads shaved. Until the very early hours of Tuesday, June 6, not one had ever dropped into combat.

  Awakened that cold, gray morning with the notification of D Day, the women correspondents were immediately aware of an undertone of excitement, a sense that their lives had shifted into a higher gear. In their dispatches they were limited to reactions on their side of the Channel, but images from the far side kept intruding into their heads. They knew that even as they set out for the Ministry of Information, tens of thousands of infantry were pouring off assorted landing craft, making their way through the surf, and possibly a rain of fire as well, to the French shore. They worried that although many British and some Canadians were veterans of earlier battles, among the Americans only the First Division had seen combat. Most GIs were as yet untried — “unblooded,” as the term went — young, and probably scared. So were the thousands of paratroopers dropped into France in the dark of the night. Yet the women could not but think that this long awaited invasion must succeed. So much preparation had gone into it, so much equipment, so many men — if it failed, surely the outcome of the war itself was in jeopardy. It was a possibility not to be entertained.