Marjorie “Dot” Avery, Catherine Coyne, and Virginia Irwin fell generally into the go-slow category. They crossed over to France with the first Wac contingent, dressed in Wac garb of woolen underwear, olive drab pants with waterproof canvas leggings, sweater, field jacket, boots. They carried the regulation gas mask, helmet, folding spade, two musette bags, and a portable typewriter. The spade was for digging a foxhole should the need arise, and the second musette bag for their writing supplies. Coyne was so weighted down when she stepped out of the taxi at the London rendezvous point that she toppled over backward onto the sidewalk. “It was terribly humiliating,” she recalled, “the way I went to war.”
The group moved from truck to train to truck again until at last they reached the troop marshaling area, a camp hemmed in with barbed wire. The Wacs were allowed to mingle with nearby troops, young enlisted men with shaved heads also waiting to cross to France. It would be their last day resembling normal life for a long while. They played some hilarious coed softball, Coyne reported, but mostly they just sat on the grass and talked. “Talk American,” the homesick GIs begged, so the Wacs did — about their hometowns and movies they’d seen and music they liked. A few soldiers went into a nearby field and picked bouquets of brilliant poppies, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, and gorse, and the Wacs filled their seasickness bags with water to keep the flowers fresh.
Their cross-Channel transport was more like a cruise ship than a troopship. Irwin thought it incongruous, considering how they were all dressed, but she delighted in her private cabin and the turbaned Indian waiter who brought around lemon squash. They dined from china plates set on pristine tablecloths; there were pressed sheets on the beds, and real eggs and bacon for breakfast, items they would only dream about for a long time to come. Their arrival next day—July 14, 1944 — fell on Bastille Day, and the Wacs went ashore marching in step and singing the “Marseillaise” because this small part of France was free again. American soldiers on the beach watched them with open joy.
It was late but not yet dark when the party arrived at the apple orchard near Valogne. Except for the lucky few who had ridden in trucks with the equipment, they had marched the distance and were tired. Avery, among the marchers, described wild, desolate beaches dotted with pup tents “that looked like the sand-houses prairie dogs make” but were occupied by soldiers who crawled out to cheer and wave. Their way coursed through tiny ruined hamlets where houses had no roofs and windows no glass. Thick dust settled on their clothes and hair and faces until at last they came to a peaceful green orchard with tents set up among moss-encrusted trees.
For an undetermined time this would be home. Avery, Irwin, Coyne, and British reporter Judy Barden each pulled a canvas cot from the pile, retrieved her bedroll, and arranged her own area in the shared tent at the foot of the Wac stockade. An eight-holer latrine was positioned nearby. Each woman carried water for washing in her helmet and learned to take an entire bath out of it. There were intruders: bantam hens scratching for worms, snails that had to be removed from one’s boots in the morning, an occasional cow, even humans. They were once awakened by Dot, “whose voice,” Catherine said, “even at two o’clock in the morning had a blond loveliness about it,” asking conversationally, “Hello, who are you?” of three tired army officers who had walked up from the beachhead and, quite lost, were peering into the tent.
Virginia Irwin ,Marjorie Avery, and Judy Barden, Normandy, 1944.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES.
On sunny days the women correspondents set up a folding table and chairs under the apple trees and wrote their stories in the soft-scented air. The weather did not always cooperate, however, as on the evening the four tentmates were invited to dinner by the camp colonel. It had rained all day, the ground was saturated, the women were muddy and disheveled, but then so was the colonel. Although dinner was served as usual in the open field, a tent had been set up, and there were tin plates and cups instead of the usual mess kits. Everyone was very social, and the women slogged home in good spirits. It was still raining, and very dark in the tent with the flaps down. Just as they were trying to go to sleep, a great slithering noise was heard, the stakes pulled out of the ground, and half the tent caved in — a fitting conclusion to their first week in France.
The Channel crossing was in some cases a test in itself. Tania Long and Woman’s Home Companion reporter Doris Fleeson went on a Liberty ship and were stalled for three days by fog. They passed the time on deck mending torn signal flags. Tania had spent her schooldays in France, and she expected to feel emotional at returning, but she later recalled how they were met by “such a mechanical, well-organized operation that not a tear would rise to my eyes. There were soldiers doing traffic duty, their arms going up and down, signaling. They sent out a tiny boat for Doris and me, and we had to climb down a rope ladder, which was not steady at all and slapped against the boat. I had my typewriter in my right hand and kept getting my fingers pinched. The soldiers were yelling, ‘Throw it down, lady, throw it down!’ but I didn’t dare. Or else they’d say, ‘Jump! Why don’t you jump?’ and I’d look down, and it would seem like a mile. We finally got there, but it wasn’t at all the return I had expected.”
The two women were assigned to different areas. Long asked why she could not stay at a press camp (just to see what the answer would be), and was informed that the press camps had no women’s latrines and they weren’t about to dig any. Instead, she spent two weeks in a little tent at the edge of a field hospital. Initially she thought she could never sleep with her tin hat on, but she soon discovered that with shrapnel raining down from the sky, she could not sleep with it off either. As London editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, she had planned to confer with other Times reporters and encourage them to write pieces for the magazine, but that was impossible with no access to press camps, no car or driver, not even a telephone. She was able to write only of wounded soldiers at one hospital at one little spot in the woods. Still, the battle lines were very close. Tania saw a lot of the war in those two weeks.
Sonia Tomara had come north from Italy and, in company with Rosette Hargrove of Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), headed for Cherbourg. They dropped in to a little shop run by two sisters. Tomara had not been in her beloved adopted country since June 1940; this was her first conversation with ordinary bourgeois. The sisters were at first suspicious of the unlikely combination of American uniforms and Parisian French, but other townspeople came in, and the little store was soon full of people interrupting each other, everyone trying to explain how it had been to live under German occupation for four long years. Deeply sympathetic, Tomara could only think of her own family in Paris, holding on somehow for those same four long years.
Late in July, Lee Miller packed her cameras and thirty-five rolls of film and boarded a plane for Normandy to do a hospital story for Vogue. Coming in low to land, she recognized the walled farms and austere Norman architecture, but much was unfamiliar, like the pockmarked terrain and a huge new cemetery just up from the beach with the un-Gallic name of Omaha. The same incongruity of nomenclature struck her when driving: signposts at the crossroads juxtaposed French villages— Marigny, Saint-Jean-de-Daye — with code names of army units like Missouri Charlie and Vermont Red.
Miller’s first objective was the Forty-fourth Evacuation Hospital. Her mind worked on a visual plane, so that her story developed into a series of word pictures, brought into focus by her photos. She wrote of rows of tents with their “sloping, dark, swaying roofs, the swishing grass floor, and the silent wounded,” and compared a ward for severe abdominal wounds to “a jungle of banyan trees, a maze of hanging rubber tubes swaying in khaki shadow.” Later she moved on to a field hospital closer to the front. The tempo was quicker there, and the staff even more tired. She wandered about asking questions, taking care to warn the surgeons each time she used her flash.
One morning, sitting four in a row in the latrine, Miller asked the off-duty nurses what they planned to do with th
eir free time. One had decided to sleep all day in her pink satin nightie and wool socks, another thought she would wash everything she owned plus herself, and a third had in mind to look up a boy from her hometown in ward two. Lee photographed them lying on their cots in the sun, pretty even in their army-issue long Johns. She enjoyed their company, but she preferred that of the GIs, who smoked and cussed at the same level as herself; she thought they were without exception wonderful, an affection that was roundly returned. The chief surgeon took her along to a collecting station near the front, housed in a row of pretty gray cottages with roses and hollyhocks blooming. The wounded, brought by ambulance from the battalion aid stations, were carried directly into the flower-papered drawing room where wounds were re-dressed, splints applied, and plasma administered. Lee photographed it all; she felt it incumbent upon herself to educate the readers of Vogue who, she was convinced, thought of “the wounded” as brave, clean-shaven boys in freshly laundered uniforms, only a little bloody. On the contrary, she wrote, they were “dirty, dishevelled, stricken figures.”
At a nearby airstrip, en route back to England, she watched as planes lined up to take on the wounded. One at a time they taxied up to the loading area, the wide double doors were flung open, and from a group of waiting ambulances twenty-four litters were off-loaded, lifted directly into the cabin, and locked into the three-level decks. A nurse and a surgical technician checked in each patient, the doors swung closed, the plane moved off, and another one took its place. Each turnaround took exactly twelve minutes.
Lee Miller flew out herself a little later, climbing into the rain with her notes and precious film. The editors at Vogue were overwhelmed when they received the story; it was not at all the quiet picture piece they had expected. They ran it in full, and editor-in-chief Audrey Withers often spoke of it as “the most exciting journalistic experience of my war.” As for Lee, she was hooked. All she could think of was how soon she could go back.
Iris Carpenter and Ruth Cowan started out at the Fifth General Hospital outside Carentan. Cowan, whose admiration for American nurses had only increased since her experience in North Africa, had requested exactly that assignment, but Carpenter saw it as being “farmed out” and was not happy. There was yellow dust everywhere. There were jumbo-sized lizards and relentless mosquitoes. There was the strafing — “the German way of saying goodnight” — and the flak. The choice for reporter and nurse alike was whether to lie with her helmet over her face and hope the rest of her would survive, or to stumble out and hunch up in her slit trench behind the tent for the night. Later Carpenter wrote about the “tent talk” that she shared with the nurses when a heavy night kept them from sleeping. They told her of the restlessness that ate at them when nothing seemed to offer stability, when they met so many men and saw so many things that they could not afford to think deeply about. They described the fatigue that made their bones ache to the very marrow. Iris could not help but think that this was only the first month, and how would they hold up through all the months ahead?
It must have seemed to both women that the words “war” and “wounded” were synonymous. If there was glory in battle, they saw little of it. When after a dogged defense of the crossroads town of Saint-L6 the Germans at last surrendered it to the Allies, Carpenter and Cowan went there to find devastation beyond describing, although Iris was determined to try. For her the surreal composition of a dead American soldier lying under a fuchsia bush in full bloom at the gateway to a villa, with a large white rabbit hopping about him and a donkey grazing near his boot, expressed the futility of the war, at least for those who had to do the fighting. It was not as if this GI had been defending his home, or even his homeland, she pointed out. The few yards of earth he had died for meant nothing to him. Orders had been given, and “over the top of the hill he had gone, through the villa grounds, crawling on his stomach ... finally making the gateway, to peer carefully through, ready to rush across — to take a few yards of vital, precious main road. And for those few yards that could never benefit or matter much to his own country, or to those dear to him and to whom he was dear, he had to die.”
Carpenter’s view was substantiated by the carnage of the next few days. The American Nineteenth Corps was advancing at a good clip along the Normandy hedgerows, but was paying for it. The field collecting post that she and Ruth visited was jammed, even though the casualties stayed only long enough to be given plasma, oxygen, and a rough dressing on their wounds. Combat strain was beginning to tell, Carpenter reported: “As the ambulances slid to a standstill, men would lurch out of them with no mark of battle-hurt, but gray faces, often streaked with tears.” She noticed that the medics were especially gentle with these men. Iris revered the medics, many of them conscientious objectors, “working always under fire and often against greater handicaps than any combat soldier.”
That evening the two women, headed for Carentan, hitched a ride on an ambulance as far as the crossroads near Saint-L6. As they looked anxiously skyward at some planes they could not identify, a nearby MP shouted for them to take cover. A piece of wall — all that was left of the town jail — afforded slight protection from the German bombs suddenly falling all around them. The final stick of bombs fell very close, showering them with debris and, although she did not realize it until later, shattering Carpenter’s eardrum. They had just brushed themselves off when a command car drew up. The officers inside were highly incensed that two women in American uniform would have to thumb their way back to their quarters. They were war correspondents, weren’t they? Where was their jeep? Where was their driver? Cowan just smiled at them. “But we’re women correspondents,” she said, as if that naturally explained their lack of all the usual amenities.
The best thing about this assignment from Carpenter’s point of view was her partnership with Cowan. “Ruth was a straightforward person who took everything in its natural course,” she said later. Iris always thought her friend was feeling more than she said aloud, as she was herself, but the natural reticence of the upper-class Englishwoman and the acquired protectiveness of the American for whom life had not been easy meant that, for the most part, they kept their thoughts private.
* * *
Helen Kirkpatrick was one of the few women the army allowed to go off alone. In July 1944, after she was relieved as bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News London office, she went in to see Eisenhower. She mentioned the buzz bombs. “It’s not safe in England,” she told him. “Send me to France.” Ike laughed, and the next day she had her orders. At her request she was assigned to General Marie-Pierre Koenig’s French Forces of the Interior (FFI), although she spent the first few weeks at General Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters in Bayeux. Montgomery was known for refusing to allow women reporters with his troops. Helen did her best to avoid him.
If she did not exactly experience the glory of war, Kirkpatrick at least saw a less depressing side of it than most of the women. At the end of July, General George Patton’s Third Army, which had crossed the Channel in spurts and under great secrecy, began an advance south through Brittany toward the Loire. Calculating their probable route, Kirkpatrick and several British reporters set out after them, only to discover that finding them meant getting stuck in the middle of a crawling convoy. Just as they cut out of line in hopes of making better time, they saw a jeep with three stars bearing down upon them. An irate General Patton leapt out and launched into a lecture on the negative effects of getting out of line when in a convoy. Shamefaced, Helen and friends crept back into place.
On August 3, Patton’s forces attacked Rennes, the capital of Brittany, and that night the Germans withdrew. Kirkpatrick joined several other American correspondents driving toward the liberated city along a road lined with excited French. Their enthusiasm was contagious. “Our jeep had to be emptied three times of flowers that filled it, surrounded it, and threatened to bury us,” she reported. “Our helmets were covered, our road was strewn with magnificent blooms from gardens for miles around.”
In one village a delegation of little girls presented an enormous bouquet to la dame americaine. That night the reporters camped with the troops in a wheat field. Kirkpatrick recalled that the sky was a brilliant red from the fires of burning bridges. They spread out their bedrolls, and in the morning there was a bottle of milk, a loaf of bread, and a wedge of butter, left by a grateful farmer.
The next day the American infantry marched into Rennes, the American reporters with them. People cheered and clapped and cried. A beaming Helen strode along with Jean Marin, a handsome, six-foot-three Breton with a big cross of Lorraine on his uniform, whom she had known when he worked in London with de Gaulle. In the Place de la Mairie tension was high, the townspeople having pounced on some collaborators and brought them to the square. “Resistance men, tough and dirty, with their Sten guns slung from their shoulders, were all that prevented the crowd from tearing them to shreds,” Kirkpatrick reported.
She went with Marin and a few of the resistance men for lunch at what had been the town’s best restaurant. Its windows were shattered and there was no water, gas, or electricity, but a little cold ham had been discovered, along with bread, cantaloupe, and a great deal of champagne. Events moved so fast, Helen could hardly believe that only two days before, German troops had still controlled the town. At a ceremony that afternoon she stood on a balcony with Marin who was being roundly cheered. Nearby, astride a dormer window, a man took out his bugle and began to play the “Marseillaise,” and as Helen recalled, everybody sang “while we just stood there with tears streaming down our faces.”
The Women who Wrote the War Page 27
