Helen Kirkpatrick felt it was important that American troops in England were learning firsthand how it was to live in a bombed city. Touring London, she was reminded of the old Blitz days. “There were streets where, for several miles, the entire populace seemed engaged in sweeping away glass,” she wrote. “School children were being evacuated again, boarding trains in the railway stations, wearing the same tags and carrying the same small bags and seen off by the same half-tearful, half-relieved parents.”
Meanwhile, in Normandy what had begun (except at Omaha Beach) as an early success soon reverted to sustained and bitter combat. The area was a network of high banks and tight hedges, far easier to defend than attack, and the Germans clung tenaciously to each hedgerow. German forces in the vicinity of Calais, where Hitler had predicted the main invasion would occur, sped to the aid of their compatriots and were holding the line. The battle for the port of Cherbourg lasted five days; the city of Caen, which General Sir Bernard Montgomery had expected to take on D Day, was not captured until six weeks later. The Allied advance slowed to a crawl.
It was against this reality that women correspondents in Britain conducted their own campaign to get to where the war was. By late June the military had reached the point of arranging trips for them. Ruth Cowan and Iris Carpenter went over together in an LST. Their orders were for the beachhead only. Cowan had expected to be gone no more than thirty-six hours and hadn’t even taken a clean shirt; it was eight days before she got back to London. Carpenter interpreted the term “beachhead” to include Cherbourg, now in Allied hands, and took off for there. She was court-martialed for this indiscretion, but the American officer present stood up for her. It was deemed a fuzzy area, and her professional future was saved.
Other women correspondents flew to France and back on day or overnight trips, some of them several times, but by D Day plus one month still none had gone to stay, and all were letting the army know how unhappy they were about it. They had been told they would go when the nurses went; well, the nurses had gone. The Red Cross workers had gone. The battle for France was moving ahead. If something were not done soon, the battle for France would be over, would be won, and they would still be in England.
21
Trekking North from Rome
But not all women correspondents that summer of 1944 were primed to go to Normandy. When Martha Gellhorn, confined to a nurses’ training camp in England as punishment for her hospital ship jaunt, farther disobeyed orders by bagging a lift to Naples without papers, travel orders, or PX card, it was because she saw no other course open to her. Italy offered more options. There the war slogged along on several fronts; she could avoid American jurisdiction by attaching herself to the French, Poles, Brits, or Canadians. Besides, women correspondents in Italy were batde-sawy. No wave of novices had been sent there, for whose sake veterans like herself had been handed a list of dos and don’ts that straitjacketed their talents, Gellhorn huffed. In Italy she could get on with her job.
Eleanor Packard would no doubt have agreed had her opinion been asked. She and Reynolds were back in Italy, in charge of the UP office in Naples. Anzio and Cassino were old news now, and just before D Day, as the last German troops fled through the northern gates of the capital, the U.S. Fifth Army had entered Rome from the south. The Packards rode with them, past throngs of Italians heading toward the capital on foot, their voices a joyous roar. The Piazza Venezia, when they at last reached it, was jammed. Through a deluge of white flowers Eleanor looked up at the balcony where Mussolini had so often stood. Reminded of that December day in 1941 when he had declared war against the United States, she half expected his short, bull-like figure to reappear.
The figure that did appear on a balcony that day was Pope Pius XII. From the great square in front of Saint Peter’s, Eleanor heard him offer thanks for the sparing of Rome; she was part of the sea of humanity that fell to their knees in a single great rippling motion. As a Catholic, she had always defended the pontiff against the charge that he was sympathetic to Fascism. Now, learning that he had harbored dozens of escaped Allied fliers and prisoners of war at the Vatican, she felt vindicated.
After the ceremony, at an audience especially for journalists, Pius XII glimpsed what facing the media in the postwar world would be like. Gone was the decorum of the past. As he spoke in his excellent English from the dais, photographers scrambled about in mad gyrations to get the best angles for their pictures, jumping up beside him, popping their flashes almost in his face. A newsreel camera ground away. Old-timers in the press stood red-faced with embarrassment, Eleanor doubly so because she was already breaking protocol by appearing in army garb, meaning pants. Circling the long room afterward to speak with those present, the pontiff drew up short when he reached her, and she felt obliged to explain how when you move with a fighting army a skirt is not useful. She had not anticipated the present occasion. His holiness forgave her with a smile.
Later that week, traveling with an army patrol, Packard underwent the unsettling experience of being taken for a spy. The road to Vblterra had been blown up by retreating Germans and the town could only be reached by a two-mile climb. Her physical condition not what it once was, she stopped off at the first available cafe for a little rest. As she told the story later, she ordered a glass of wine and was at once surrounded by excited villagers wearing patriot armbands. She spoke to them in Italian, and when some of them switched to French, so did she. Three GIs heard her and asked if she were a French ambulance driver. No, she replied in English, she was an American correspondent. That brought on a shower of questions “by a tough old Partisan looking like Mr. Underground himself,” and she became aware of a ring of hostile faces.
It was then that Mr. Underground pounced. “Have you heard there is a German woman hiding in Vblterra?” he asked. In fact, Eleanor had heard that, but thought it unwise to say so. Several ugly examples of mob psychology crossed her mind, along with the disconcerting thought that a spy always carries a complete set of fake papers. One of the GIs, who had been conferring off to one side, approached her. “Ma’am,” he said, “can you prove you are what you say you are?” Packard was indignant, but when he suggested that she was unlikely to get out of there unless she could, she produced her passport, War Department accreditations, vaccination certificate, New York checkbook, and PX card. It was the PX card that convinced the GIs. They huddled with the Italians, and suddenly suspicion melted away. Apologies were made, amidst laughter, and wine was poured all round. “We’d never seen a woman correspondent so close to the front before,” one of the GIs explained. “It just didn’t look right.”
Allied forces continued to nudge the Germans northward, and in July Martha Gellhorn, who since her piece on Polish refugees had felt a natural affinity with the Poles, attached herself to a squadron that called itself the Carpathian Lancers, all its members having escaped Poland over the Carpathian Mountains. They had fought in the Western Desert and at Tobruk, had helped take Cassino, and were now moving up the Adriatic coast. In their prewar lives many had spent time in prison — German or Russian. All they talked about, Gellhorn reported, was the Russian army advancing across Poland. They listened to news broadcasts with agonized concern, although how the British were doing in Florence, or the French in Siena, or the Americans in Pisa was of no interest to them, and Normandy could be the moon. Only Poland was important; they worried that, once there, the Russians would never leave. Martha tried to reassure them, but after talking with a twenty-two-year-old whose father had died in a German camp, whose mother and sister had been sent to a labor camp in Russia, whose brother was simply missing, no one knew where, she realized how naive her thinking was. “I belong to a large free country and I speak with the optimism of those who are forever safe,” she conceded.
The war in Italy was at a sluggish stage. The Germans were retreating northward, nothing urgent, and the Poles, in convoy on the roads, were keeping pace. “We moved the next day and every day after that,” Gellhorn reported. “
It was great fun, like being gypsies or a small-town circus.” Her troubles with U.S. Army protocol and with her hostile, bullying husband seemed a long way off. In the evenings the Lancers camped and sent out scrounging parties to local farms to buy geese or ducks or rabbits before soldiers from other squadrons could grab them. It was hot and dusty, and they were glad not to have to fight just then. The whole regiment spent Saturday night trying to get clean, and the next morning appeared at the little local church. The chaplain celebrated the mass “rather shyly, as if he were taking someone else’s place,” Martha wrote. “The villagers came too, old women and young women, with lace scarves on their heads and rosaries in their hands.” The soldiers’ clean brown faces were quiet and respectful, and when they sang their national prayer at the end, their rich, sad voices “carried out through the open door of the church into the sunny fly-ridden village.”
In August 1944 Eleanor Packard took on the role of UP bureau chief in Rome while her husband Reynolds went with the troops. In the first of a long series of dispatches printed verbatim on the front pages of many American papers, she reported the Allied invasion of southern France on August 15:
The U.S. 7th Army, comprising American and French troops, stormed eight miles into Toulon against weak German opposition today, while thousands of sky-borne troops struck far inland to throw a solid block across the path of enemy reserves moving down on the beachheads. . .. Unopposed by the strangely dormant Luftwaffe, hundreds of gliders and transports streamed boldly across the French coast before nightfall. . . . Giant naval rifles of the Allied fleet, firing over the heads of the advancing Americans and French, devastated the Nazis’ inland defenses.
In succeeding dispatches Packard described the fall of the great naval base at Toulon and, in rapid succession, Grenoble, Avignon, and Nice. On August 28 the cities of Toulon and Marseilles were liberated.
The invasions of southern France and of Normandy could not have been more different. On the Channel coast the armies fought desperately for every foot of ground with heavy losses, while on the languorous Riviera the troops splashed ashore virtually unopposed and moved forward against minimal resistance. At the culmination of a mere two-week operation, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) took it upon themselves to seize Bordeaux. That news must have struck a poignant note with those women correspondents — Sonia Tomara, Virginia Cowles, Mary Welsh — who had been in that city when news came of France’s capitulation some four years earlier.
The Allied command in Italy read with envy of the Franco-American “prance across France,” as some called it. The U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies were preparing to attack the Gothic Line, the German army’s major line of defense across Italy. Still avoiding the former body, Martha Gellhorn attached herself to the First Canadian Corps of the latter. She was shocked by how the “lovely range of the Apennines” had been altered almost beyond recognition. Not only had the Germans dynamited villages, but they had laid barbed wire in the gravel riverbed, along with “never-ending mines: the crude little wooden boxes, the small rusty tin cans, the flat metal pancakes which are the simplest and deadliest weapons in Italy.” In the hills themselves concrete machine-gun pillboxes were concealed, and tank turrets with long 88-mm guns. It was this armored trap that the Eighth Army faced, and Martha identified with the common soldier whose job it was to break through. “It is awful to die at the end of summer when you are young and have fought a long time ... and when you know that the war is won anyhow,” she wrote.
It would hardly seem possible from Gellhorn’s description, but the Canadians found “a soft place” to penetrate, although, she wrote, “if you have seen one tank burn with its crew shut inside it you will never believe that anything is soft again.” For the reporters watching from the hill opposite, the first day’s battle was spread out in miniature:
Suddenly you see antlike figures of infantry outlined against the sky; probably they are going in to attack that cluster of farmhouses. Then they disappear, and you do not know what became of them. Tanks roll serenely across the crest of a hill, then the formation breaks, you lose most of them from sight, and then in what was a quiet valley you unexpectedly see other tanks firing from behind trees. On a road that was quite empty and therefore dangerous, because nothing is more suspect at the front than the silent places, you see a jeep racing in the direction of a town which may or may not be in our hands.
The next day the correspondents crossed the river and drove along that “dangerous” road. The remnants of the battle, no longer in miniature, were all too real. Still, the Gothic Line had been cracked, the crack would be widened, and armored divisions could now advance to the Lombardy plain. The battle for Italy was that much closer to the end.
Before that summer’s end, Margaret Bourke-White returned to Italy. U.S. Army personnel still had her tagged as “temperamental” and “inclined to ignore orders”; her request to cover the Normandy invasion had been denied. But with many in the press having deserted Italy for fresher fields, her application to return to that forgotten front was granted.
Besides her determination to continue her career as a war photographer, Bourke-White was anxious to renew her connection with Major Jerry Papurt, the counterintelligence officer with whom she had formed a relationship in Naples exactly a year before. They had been writing ever since. In the spring Papurt had left Italy for England, then crossed over with the invasion to France. After that Margaret knew nothing until her convoy docked at Naples and a close friend of his met the boat to tell her that Jerry had been wounded, then captured by the enemy and confined in a German POW hospital. She was distraught. Thin blue V-mail letters, written before his capture, continued to be forwarded to her. She could not write to him, but the Vatican had set up a system for delivering messages to prisoners of war. There was a ten-word limit, and no guarantee anything would get through. Bourke-White’s message was only eight words: “I love you. I will marry you. Maggie.” She never knew whether he received it. Later that fall she learned that during an Allied bombing, the hospital received a direct hit, and Major Papurt was among those killed.
After his death, his personal effects, probably not on his person when captured, were returned to his wife, Maxine “Mackie” Cohen Papurt, in Columbus, Ohio. Along with a Swiss Army knife, assorted pendants, and a couple of U.S. Army gold leaf major insignias was a simple black leather wallet made by Mark Cross and embossed with “Maxwell Jerome Papurt, United States Army.” In the place for photos there were three: a white-haired man, no doubt his father; a dark-haired woman, not beautiful but with wide-spaced eyes and a warm half smile, his wife Mackie; and a headshot of a young and lovely Margaret. Tucked into another section were a pair of more contemporaneous photos of Margaret and a tiny, much folded note dated “Naples 1943,” reading “My Darling: I have only one thing to give you this Christmas Day and that is my love. But it is yours. Maggie.”
A half century later Margaret Wolf, Maxine Papurt’s niece, brought me this little collection of items. She affirmed that her aunt had known nothing of Bourke-White’s existence until the packet from the U.S. Army arrived. There had been no letters asking for a divorce, as Papurt had told Margaret. There had been no indication in his letters home that anything was other than normal. Was Maxine heartbroken then at learning the truth? The answer to that was probably also in the negative, Wolf said. Mackie adored her husband, as did everyone — he was so vibrant a personality, so warm and full of, well, sex appeal. Perhaps there had been indiscretions before, or perhaps, knowing him well, she had given him leave to be not-so-literally faithful. There were no children, but the family was a close-knit one and she was quite sure that, after the war, her husband would have come home to her. She felt so confident of this, in fact, that when Bourke-White’s final book on the war, “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, “was published in 1946, Maxine Papurt proudly showed the book and its dedication — “for M.J.P. who died too soon” — to all her friends.
During that fall of 1944, the Tim
e Inc. office in Rome wrote the home office in New York of a changed Margaret Bourke-White. “During the month she’s been in Italy she has worked quietly and graciously,” they reported, and praised her “considerate approach.” If they knew of the grief behind her submersion in her work, they did not say.
22
That Summer in France
It was mid-July 1944 before women correspondents crossed the Channel to stay. They went mostly in pairs or small groups, attached either to a Wac contingent or a field hospital; the army was not about to float them free if it could help it. The rules were laid down by SHAEF: women reporters were not to visit the press camps, were not to go farther front than the nurses, were not to leave a hospital or Wac area without permission from the CO. Jeeps and drivers were not offered to them. While the men’s stories were censored on the spot, the women’s would go by ordinary field-message service back to London, by which time (as an exasperated Iris Carpenter pointed out) they often made no sense, because there was no chance for the writer to bridge over what had been censored out.
Some women rebelled against these restrictions right from the start. Carpenter believed she was at least as competent to handle Normandy as most male correspondents. Lee Carson felt the same, and certainly Helen Kirkpatrick had no intention of allowing herself to be unduly constrained. Other women, especially newcomers unfamiliar with the Continent and those who spoke little or no French, were content to go slow. They had seen the wounded brought back; they knew what a mine could do, or a sniper, or an enemy shell, and they were aware that reporters too died in the war. Some had been cautioned by their editors to take care — major risks were not expected of them. Later they would push at the barriers; for now it was enough just to get their bearings, to seek out and write their stories.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 26
