The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Experiences like these are the perks of war, but aside from Kirkpatrick, they had so far been reserved for the men.

  By August 1944 Germany’s Atlantic Wall was crumbling. Patton’s troops had taken the entire northern coast of Brittany except for the little seaside town of Saint-Malo, which had been reported captured but was in fact only partially so. What was left of the enemy force was commanded by one Colonel von Aulock, a relic of the old Reichswehr, holding out on an island citadel while in the town solitary armed marauders and snipers lay in wait, unaware how far behind their own lines they now were.

  That was Saint-Malo’s situation when Lee Miller grabbed at a chance offered by army public relations to photograph the work of a civil affairs team whose job it was to ease the town’s return to normal life. When she discovered that army PR had been misinformed and the battle was still in progress, she could hardly believe her good fortune. She knew the rules against women in combat, but surely no reasonable officer could expect her to back off now. On that assumption, she remained. The troops were delighted; when she got out her camera, men jumped to find her the best vantage point, even when that meant driving her about in full view of enemy guns. From a bedroom window in a tiny hotel down on the beach, she photographed Old Saint-Malo still smoking, a fort where several hundred French civilians were being held, and the He du Grand Be fortress from where most of the shooting originated. Her guide thought that should be adequate, but Lee was after more. “I had the clothes I was standing in, a couple dozen films, and an eiderdown blanket roll,” she gloated. “I was the only photographer for miles around and I now owned a private war.”

  For the next few days Miller dashed about from one vantage point to another. At night she spread out her eiderdown wherever it looked safe. Photographing an air attack in which smoke belched upward, “mushrooming and columning — towering up, black and white,” she was unaware that the mushroom was in fact one of the first uses of napalm. When the film was developed back in England, British censors promptly confiscated that section of it.

  On the occasion of the first Allied attempt to take the citadel, Miller watched a platoon of soldiers creep down to the rocks by the shore and then climb single file up the steep approach to the fort, while a second platoon crouched among the rocks waiting their turn. The tension was palpable; her own arms and legs ached from projecting into the struggle, which became all the more real when German shells landed just above her window. She saw the platoon leader hit by enemy fire, and the men behind him begin to retreat, scrambling along and finally “oozing down the escarpment and sliding down the path they had so painfully climbed.”

  A new assault was planned for the next afternoon. Miller’s friend the Life photographer David Scherman arrived, and they sat in easy chairs in front of a hotel window facing the citadel, eating K-rations and waiting. Just before three o’clock a patch of white appeared. There was frantic telephoning to try to stop a formation of P-38s scheduled to bomb momentarily, and Lee saw an American captain with a white flag and an interpreter running toward a cluster of German officers outside the fort. Another American officer followed, and together they spread scarlet boundary markers on the ground to signal the pilots not to bomb, that the fort had surrendered. It was too late to stop the first plane, but those that followed saw the markers and veered off. With Miller and Scherman in close pursuit, the major in charge raced along the causeway to the tunnel entrance at the back of the fort. Vanishing into the tunnel, he reappeared escorting the tall figure of Colonel von Aulock — pale, monocled, Iron Cross around his neck, camouflage coat over his uniform. The flash from Lee’s camera prompted him to shield his face with a gray-gloved hand. Directed into a waiting jeep, he stood to shake hands with each of his aides before he was driven away.

  Later Miller went through the tunnel into the fort. Hundreds of men had packed their bags on very short notice, and she took note of the general disorder: clothes strewn about, empty bottles, photographs and letters, loot taken from French towns. The wounded were lying on litters outside the hospital corridors, waiting for transport. The resident Reichsdoktor assured his captors that in return for what the Germans considered clean fighting on the American side, the tunnels were not mined. It was perhaps the most gentlemanly battle of the war.

  Lee retraced her steps and crossed back over to the town. Reporters were gathering “like vultures for the kill,” she recalled, and were amazed to see a woman correspondent already there. The army would be similarly surprised. Since her pictures had to pass the censors, there was no way to hide what she had been part of. Even should the army admit responsibility for her presence in Saint-Malo, for her to have remained in what was clearly a combat zone violated the terms of her accreditation. What her fate would be she did not know, but Miller felt strongly that in all spheres of life men and women should have the same opportunities, and she would not have hesitated to do the same thing again.

  By mid-August 1944 the activities of the Wacs and nurses in Normandy offered little in the way of fresh copy, and most of the women had moved on to Brittany, and its capital, Rennes, to report the return of General Charles de Gaulle to France. Although he had assumed almost godlike status among Bretons who had risked their lives to hear his broadcasts from England, they were divided about his political expectations. Some felt the leadership should go to those who had remained in France and suffered the hardships — not that life in blitzed and buzz-bombed England had been a picnic.

  De Gaulle slipped into the country unheralded, but word got out, and his drive down from Cherbourg was marked by cheering crowds. When next day it was announced that he would speak from the Hotel de Ville at noon, throngs of people began filing into the square despite a heavy rain. The scene was almost theatrical, Catherine Coyne wrote. “Drawn up in front of the city hall, standing stiffly at attention with new American carbines over their shoulders, was a company of the French Forces of the Interior, shabby civilian youths from the resistance movement who looked like characters out of novels by Dumas.” Men and women were pressed so tightly into the square that they could not raise their umbrellas, while hundreds waited on the roof of a partly bombed-out building.

  Standing bareheaded in the pelting rain, de Gaulle intoned words of old-fashioned declamatory French. “Great is our emotion at being here in free Rennes in Brittany, which is victorious ...” he said. “Great is our emotion at being on a piece of French soil on the road to victory towards freedom and grandeur.” Oddly, he spoke of this great emotion in a cold and expressionless voice. Iris Carpenter felt he was much moved by being there, and held himself in check for that reason. Coyne thought that with so much emotion permeating the very air, it didn’t matter. “The crowd started shouting and screaming at the conclusion of every phrase,” she said. At the end, before anyone could applaud, he ordered, “Sing ‘Marseillaise.’” He sang the first phrase himself, and the rain-soaked crowd joined in.

  Other women correspondents had varying impressions of that day. Sonia Tomara wrote of how deliriously happy everyone seemed. Carpenter thought they were disappointed by de Gaulle’s failure to mention the part they had played during the four years of oppression. Afterward, Virginia Irwin seized the opportunity to go out onto the balcony from which the general had spoken; she leaned over, and the crowd looked up and cheered, “Vive l’Amerique!” Coyne recalled descending the stairs from her room on the top floor of the press building and smelling “something awfully nice,” which turned out to be Lee Miller, there under house arrest for her actions in Saint-Malo. “She was rubbing eau de cologne all over herself because she’d been bitten by fleas,” Coyne said later. “I told her calamine would be better, and gave her some of mine.”

  Helen Kirkpatrick did not return to Rennes for de Gaulle’s visit; instead she went to the just-liberated Mont-Saint-Michel, a rocky isle in the Gulf of Saint-Malo which had become the correspondents’ R&R. The photographer Robert Capa was there, as were Charles Wertenbaker (Lael’s husband) and Bill Walton, all of
Time Inc., plus Ernest Hemingway and Irwin Shaw. Hemingway was recovering from yet another accident — while riding a motorcycle with Capa, he had leaped into a ditch to avoid a German antitank gun, hit his head against a boulder, and suffered a second concussion. Helen thought him dogmatic, always talking about military strategy as if he were a consultant to the generals, but good company nonetheless.

  Afterward, driving up the Cherbourg peninsula with Walton, she pointed out an inviting little beach, and Bill said they had to go for a swim, never mind that neither of them had suits. They took off their uniforms and ran into the water, Helen in her khaki Wac underwear but “looking very statuesque,” Walton reminisced a half century later. Their presence attracted a small crowd, which made reemerging onto the beach a little embarrassing, but Bill said that he for one had never had a better swim.

  Back in Bayeux, Kirkpatrick joined the French Second Armored Division at Ecouche. She was surprised to find that there was no mess; each section had its own popote, built a fire, and cooked for itself. At night, listening to the BBC, they could tell that the Americans were closing in on the capital. “These Frenchmen were going out of their minds wanting to get to Paris,” Helen said. “We all were. And finally the order came.”

  23

  Liberating Paris

  All the women could talk of that month of August was the expected advance on Paris and whether they would be a part of it. They could not have known that American troops themselves came close to missing the action; that Eisenhower, fearing a loss of eastward momentum, would have preferred to bypass the capital. But the fate of the city hung too delicately in the balance. Hitler had ordered that in the event of German evacuation, Paris be left “a pile of ruins.” This was a course General Dietrich von Choltitz, head of the occupying forces and guardian of his own historical reputation, was reluctant to take. He quietly let it be known that he would need an Allied force to surrender to, and he would need it soon — before Hitler realized that he was procrastinating and sent in the Luftwaffe.

  Ike sent out the order to General Philippe Leclerc’s Second French Armored to advance on Paris. Helen Kirkpatrick, camping with that division outside Ecouche, said that when word came “everybody fell into line and we just went hell bent straight across that French plain.” It was raining, and Helen rode with John Reinhart, an American liaison officer with the French, in a captured German jeep with no top or doors and water sloshing back and forth. In climbing out at one point, she slipped and broke her toe. It was after dark when they reached Rambouillet, the designated rendezvous point, and they camped in a pasture. “To tend to one’s needs hopping on one foot in mud was quite a feat,” she recalled.

  Kirkpatrick found Rambouillet full of PR men, censors, and correspondents, the most prominent of whom was Ernest Hemingway in his Papa Soldier role. He was surrounded by a band of what she kindly referred to as his “scouts” (others termed them “ruffians” or worse), whom he had shaped into a partisan force to scout the approach to Paris. (In a dispatch he wrote at the time, Hemingway admitted that General Leclerc seemed unimpressed with his reconnaissance activities, no doubt true.) Leclerc had decreed that only French forces would go in the next day, Friday, August 25, but in the end the French captain guarding the Porte d’Orleans could not buck the American opposition and gave way. Charles Wertenbaker and Robert Capa told their driver to swing in behind a passing armored car — which turned out to be General Leclerc’s own — and entered exactly at 9:40 A.M., claiming to be the first among the correspondents.

  Kirkpatrick’s party had spent the night in a little bistro just outside the city. “I will never forget the next morning coming up over the hill and there below was Paris, white and shining in the sun,” she recalled. “Our driver was as excited as we were.” They crossed into the city that afternoon with a column of French tanks. Snipers still haunted the rooftops, but cheering Parisians lining the streets were not to be robbed of their victory, even when gunfire up ahead forced a brief retreat. Kirkpatrick’s little band were ushered to the mairie of the sixth arrondissement where the honorary mayor of Paris, Henri Boussard, age seventy, received them with tears coursing down his cheeks. From the windows she gazed at the Saint-Sulpice Church rising majestically in the afternoon sun. “The Germans are still holding out,” Helen wrote, “but Paris is free. Its freedom is heady and intoxicating.”

  Sonia Tomara rode into Paris on a weapons carrier, an arrival that doubled as a homecoming. She had left the city four years before, on a warm June day in 1940; there had been no tanks under the trees in the Bois de Boulogne then, she recalled, no barricades in the streets or burned-out cars like now. “My heart was so tense,” Tomara wrote of her return. “For four years Paris had been a forbidden city immersed in legends brought over by refugees or by agents of the resistance. Now I was on its pavement once more ... and there was the house. It took me a second to run up the three flights of stairs, and here were my folks, just a little older, a little thinner than when I had left them.”

  As Tomara soon discovered, Paris had been liberated from within before the Allied armies ever arrived. One of her first stories from the capital was on the mechanics of that uprising: how the FFI laid their plans from a hideout in the vast underground sewer system, how liaison agents (many of them women) stole German guns, how on the prescribed day shots were heard and barricades went up all around Paris. Ordinary citizens seized their moment of reprisal, their chance for revenge, and settled the fate of their enemy in whatever way came to hand.

  Lee Carson of INS reached Paris with the Fourth Infantry Division, by jeep. It was the first time anyone in authority had seen her for two weeks. An order had been out on her ever since she had gone to Normandy on a “facilities tour,” linked up with several (male) reporters, and vanished. Lying low, she could not send out any stories, not even the one in which she took sole charge of six German soldiers offered up by local resistance forces, but she was never in real danger until she arrived in Paris. There, standing in the shelter of a building with two FFI men, trying to figure how to cross the street while avoiding snipers, she was approached by a dark little man with a bundle of Oriental rugs. “Madame want to buy a beautiful rug very cheap?” he asked, and started to roll them out onto the pockmarked sidewalk for her inspection when a sniper’s bullet got him and he collapsed right onto his rugs.

  A near miss like that was exactly the kind of experience SHAEF was trying to avoid for its women reporters. Carson knew this, and after two weeks incommunicado, she was apprehensive as to what kind of welcome she would receive at the Scribe, the hotel reserved for correspondents. Major Frank Mayborn, the first SHAEF PR man to arrive, was just checking in when she appeared in the lobby. He was aware of the order to apprehend and return her to London, but was so glad to see her alive and well (having had adequate time to consider the alternative) that he ignored all else. Lee was doubly lucky: her appearance was also witnessed by another early arriver — publisher and principal owner of INS, William Randolph Hearst Jr.

  Mary Welsh reached Paris that night, having driven down with a major she thought much too cautious and pokey, but she was “deliciously, deliriously back in real France,” and never had she seen so many people on the roadsides or such unbridled jubilation. The major dropped her off near the Hotel Scribe. “In the noisy, happy dusk, I was propelled from one to another group of roistering, singing, shouting unburdened Parisians, hugging and kissing me and my knapsack when they saw my uniform,” she wrote later. “The city had gone crazy with rejoicing. Everybody was eighteen years old, free of shackles, bursting with joy.”

  Next day, when Welsh dropped by room 31 at the Ritz Hotel, she found Monsieur Hemingway and his buddies (“scouts,” “ruffians”) cleaning rifles and sipping champagne. Hemingway was giving a lunch for a select group: Helen Kirkpatrick and her jeep partner, John Reinhart, Charles Wertenbaker, and Irwin Shaw. Welsh, on assignment, and perhaps not happy about the combination of Hemingway, Shaw, and herself at an intimate function, did
not attend. The menu was sparse except for the alcohol, but the company was jovial. Over brandy Helen mentioned that she and Reinhart were about to leave for the victory parade. Hemingway tried to dissuade them. “Daughter,” he said, assuming his Papa mode, “sit still and drink this good brandy. You can always watch parades but you’ll never again celebrate the liberation of Paris at the Ritz.” But Kirkpatrick had other reasons for being in Paris that day besides sipping brandy and listening to Hemingway pontificate.

  Even so, she could not have guessed she would witness one of the most dramatic moments of the liberation. With all Paris and its suburbs converging on the center of town, she and Reinhart could not get near the Arc de Triomphe, so turned back to Notre Dame where a Te Deum service was to be held. French tanks were drawn up around the square, and people thronged toward the cathedral, which was already filled with families of FFI men who had died during the battle for Paris. Helen came across Robert Reid of the BBC, and they established themselves at the entrance just as generals de Gaulle, Koenig, Leclerc, and Alphonse Juin, who were leading the procession, arrived.

  “The general is being presented to the people,” Reid began his broadcast, when suddenly a splattering of shots rang out and piercing screams were forever registered on tape. People pushing to get into the shelter of the church trampled and disconnected his microphone. By the time it was reconnected, de Gaulle and the others were progressing in measured steps toward the waiting cardinal and monsignor at the altar. From her pivotal vantage point Kirkpatrick described the scene:

  The generals’ car arrived on the dot of 4:15. As they stepped from the car, we stood at salute and at that very moment a revolver shot rang out. It seemed to come from behind one of Notre Dame’s gargoyles. Within a split second a machine gun opened up from behind the Hotel de Ville. It sprayed the pavement at my feet. The generals entered the church with people pressing from behind to find shelter.