The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  I found myself inside in the main aisle, a few feet behind the generals. People were cowering behind pillars. Someone tried to pull me down. The generals marched slowly down the main aisle, their hats in their hands. People in the main body were pressed back near the pillars. I was pushed forward down the aisle.

  Suddenly an automatic opened up from behind us — it came from behind the pipes of Notre Dame’s organ. Other shots rang out and I saw a man ducking behind a pillar above. Beside me FFI men and the police were shooting. For one flashing instant it seemed that a great massacre was about to take place as the cathedral reverberated with the sound of guns. There was a sudden blaze and a machine gun sprayed the center aisle, flecking the tiles and chipping the pillars to my left. Time seemed to have no meaning. Spontaneously, a crowd of widows and bereaved burst forth into the Te Deum as the generals stood bareheaded before the altar.

  It seemed hours, but it was only a few minutes, perhaps ten, when the procession came back down the aisle. I could only stand amazed at the coolness, imperturbability and apparent unconcern of French generals and civilians alike who walked as though nothing had happened. General Koenig, smiling, leaned across and shook my hand. I fell in behind them and watched them walk deliberately out to their cars. A machine gun was still blazing from a nearby roof, and one could hear shooting all along the Seine.

  Various theories were later put forward as to the purpose behind the assault, but none was ever proved. The next days were quieter. Kirkpatrick went over to the Chicago Daily News office at 21 Rue de la Paix; old editions of the paper were piled by the door as delivered after the staff had left the city more than four years earlier. Edgar Mowrer’s last piece was on his desk; when Helen picked it up from the gray blotter, the surface underneath was green. The office was on the top floor, and the concierge had convinced the occupying Germans that nothing was up there. Now the Germans had been evicted from the city; Kirkpatrick opened the office, and within hours the Chicago Daily News Paris bureau was functioning again — with herself as bureau chief.

  With Paris pronounced safe that August of 1944, the women correspondents at the press building in Rennes were released. They traveled the route to the capital with mixed emotions. Catherine Coyne wrote of German soldiers “sprawled in hideously awkward death across the shoulders of the road or flung like waste on the green fields”; Marjorie Avery reported shelled houses, burned-out tanks, occasional bands of dispirited Germans walking the road under guard. On a happier note they passed French farmers shoveling the soil back into foxholes no longer needed. Their entry into Paris lacked the earlier crazy emotionalism, but the roads “were still avenued with cheering people when we drove in,” Iris Carpenter noted in her broadcast for the BBC, although her shattered eardrum, memento of the crossroads at Saint-L6, prevented her from hearing herself speak. Lee Miller was in time to photograph the barbed wire barricades at the Place de la Concorde and the sandbags near Notre Dame. “I arrived exhausted by my share of millions of handshakes, the embraces of grandmothers, of French sharpshooters and bevies of French girls,” she reported to Vogue. “I was the ‘femme soldat.’ Small use to say I was just a journalist....”

  Virginia Irwin and British reporter Judy Barden took a roundabout route through the suburbs of Paris in an attempt to see if they could locate a fellow correspondent who had crossed enemy lines and not returned. They were traveling in a jeep with a driver, following a sign that read “Paris — 15 km” and snaking their way confidently among Allied trucks, when a blinding flash and explosion sent them diving to the ground. When they dared raise their heads, it was to see two dead Germans and another one badly injured only five yards away. Sensing a downturn to his career if anything should happen to his passengers, their driver decided to backtrack to the nearest village. Irwin had never laid claim to courage and was “shaking like an aspen leaf,” Barden wrote, especially when they approached the town and saw no American flag. The first Americans to arrive, they were exuberantly kissed and hugged and cried over, their jeep heaped with flowers, tomatoes, peaches, and cognac. The driver’s face was plastered with lipstick and Virginia declared she had kissed the whole village. When at last they reached Paris, it was almost anticlimactic.

  Tania Long drove down from Cherbourg with her husband, Ray Daniell, through Chartres — “lovely but dead, with no water, light, gas or food,” Long reported. The crowds became thicker as they neared Paris. Every Allied vehicle that passed, “whether a gigantic tank or a modest little jeep, was individually cheered by the joyous French,” who appeared to have relinquished all normal activities “to stand in the street hour after hour to shout and wave and yell and throw bouquets.” Tania felt she could not absorb it all, and it was not until the next day that the enormity of it hit her. She was sitting in a cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines — a spot she remembered well from her years at the Sorbonne — when behind her an accordion struck up the “Madelon,” at first softly, then with increasing volume. Suddenly the emotion that she had suppressed almost without knowing it welled up inside her, and tears poured down her face.

  On arriving in Paris, the women went directly to the Hotel Scribe, already overflowing with correspondents. Jeeps, trucks, and army cars lined the adjacent streets, and a hotel attendant guarded the door against anyone not in uniform. In the lobby khaki duffel bags and bedrolls lay in heaps topped by gas masks, and the current guests were as likely to be in field clothes with mud-caked boots as in proper attire. The first floor was consigned to the press offices; in a couple of rooms with bare tables censors worked all day and much of the night, and couriers came and went with their distinctive bags. In the transportation room the beds were pushed against the wall to make room for the cans of precious gasoline, which were doled out as cars were assigned to correspondents; it doubled as a mail room, with thin V-mail envelopes spread out more or less alphabetically on the red eiderdown quilts. The correspondents’ mess, featuring K-rations, coffee, and champagne, was next to the kitchen in the basement.

  Hotel Scribe after the liberation of Paris, 1944.

  PHOTO BY LEE MILLER. © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES.

  Once she had settled in, each woman had her own priorities. Ruth Cowan’s was to recover her blondness. Having discovered that the 203rd General Hospital was scheduled to move to Paris, she had herself transferred with it — or as far as the suburb of Clichy where it was to occupy the modern Raymond Poincare Hospital. While army doctors inspected the blue-tiled operating rooms and a delouser “big enough to drive a jeep into,” Cowan looked for the beauty parlor. She found it next to the barber shop, both in shambles, but the proprietors had returned. Ruth was their first customer. They applied a little of this and a little of that, she recalled, Charles using a single kettle of water for the wash, while Henriette with her many-pronged dryer executed the set. At the end of three hours, Cowan said, “I not only matched my passport and credentials, but I had my courage and glamour restored.” These were not unimportant commodities in liberated Paris.

  Lee Miller, who had left so many friends in France, was in her element. Where were they, and how were they, these artists and dancers and writers she had not seen for five years? First of all, Picasso, whom she found at his studio: they fell into each other’s arms. He declared her to be the first Allied soldier he’d seen, and looking so different from the gaudy portrait he’d painted of her that summer in Antibes that he’d have to do another. He tried to show her everything he’d been doing in that first morning. There was little to be had at the corner bistro for lunch, but Lee had K-rations to contribute, and of course there was wine. After a glass or two, talked out for the moment, they sat and held hands and cried.

  Catherine Coyne wanted nothing so much as to experience Paris. Delighted by the Gallic enthusiasm after the stolid Normans and phlegmatic Bretons, she set out in a buggy drawn by an ancient horse, but was soon persuaded by GIs in a passing jeep to join them instead. Americans in a jeep were sure to find themselves surrounded by an emotional crowd a
t every traffic stop. “Even I, conservative Boston spinster that I am, came in for my share of kisses,” Coyne quipped. When they stopped for lunch, Parisians congregated, insisting that the liberators join the liberated in an aperitif. Toast followed toast, succeeded in turn by a magnificent lunch of delicacies hoarded for years for this moment.

  Later Miller and Coyne shared accounts of their day, and Catherine so loved Lee’s story about visiting Picasso that Lee took her friend along to meet him. Coyne thought the painter looked like a Prudential Insurance collector, but she laughed at the way Lee ran into his arms and he picked her right up in the air. They joined other artists for lunch, Catherine regretting her less-than-fluent French but managing to follow the conversation. Afterward, in Picasso’s studio, she found words to be unnecessary. One needed only to look. She was most intrigued by the tomatoes he was growing in tins as subjects for a series of small paintings.

  Another day Miller invited Coyne up to her room at the Scribe for a drink. Catherine remembered later that Lee’s friend and fellow photographer David Scherman was there, and that Lee was excited because she had just received a cable that Roland Penrose, with whom she had lived in London, was coming to Paris. “Suddenly she took off all her clothes, right there,” Coyne recalled, “and said, ‘I’m going to go have a good clean bath for this!’ and Davy took me by the arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s you and I go get our drink.’” Scherman, who had witnessed Lee disrobing many times, did not remember this particular incident a half century later, but “Spinster Coyne” never forgot it, and for her the words “Lee Miller” and “liberation” were forever synonymous.

  Picasso with Lee Miller, Paris, 1944.

  © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES.

  Lael Wertenbaker wanted desperately to come to newly liberated Paris. The previous spring she had left her baby son with her mother and rejoined her husband in London. Of course she missed the baby, she said later, but his grandmother was an excellent substitute, and Wert was not the kind of husband you wanted to leave loose out there. The problem was that Lael had come over rather suddenly, without waiting for her accreditation to the army, and now Wert was in Paris and she was back in London, still waiting. The solution emerged in the form of General John Clifford Hodges Lee, known as Courthouse Lee (or alternatively as Jesus Christ Himself Lee because of his conspicuous religiosity). Head of Services of Supply (SOS) and later deputy theater commander, Lee was responsible for the mechanics of getting the main corps of the army to the Continent, a massive undertaking. As Lael remembered it, a PR man from Lee’s retinue came to Wert and said, “I want my general on the cover of Time” and without batting an eye Wert replied, “I want my wife in Paris.” A little trade was arranged, and in quick-step time there was General Lee on the cover of Time. Lael was in uniform in three hours, a not-too-well-fitting one right off the rack, and was provided phony papers and told not to go near the PX, which as yet was nonexistent in Paris anyway. She flew over in Elliott Roosevelt’s plane and was never questioned. She could work, send cables, write stories, and six weeks later when her papers at last came through, so had the PX, to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Most of the women did at least one article on the Paris fashion scene, and a few covered every show, which miraculously materialized only a few weeks after the liberation. Marjorie Avery interviewed Lucien LeLong, famed fashion designer and president of the syndicate of Paris couturiers. LeLong compared his position to someone who for four years had walked a tightrope with no net under him. In 1940 he had been informed that the entire fashion industry would be moved to Berlin. He objected, explaining that fashion cannot be ordered, but must emerge as the free creations of the designers. The German officials seemed nonplussed at that idea, and nothing happened.

  Throughout the occupation, Avery reported, women’s fashion had been an expression of dissent. German uniforms were gray-green in color, so nothing green was worn. When the situation was at its darkest, women began wearing increasingly wide crazy hats, until a visiting general decreed a maximum on width. After that hats climbed to absurd heights instead. LeLong told Avery there were regulations on the width of skirts, too, and that the Germans wasted a lot of time crawling about the floors in dressmakers’ establishments, trying to prove an infringement of the rules.

  With Parisians still in a celebratory mood, it only gradually became apparent that there was a dark side to postliberation Paris. Early in September the French announced that during the four years of German occupation, an estimated 75,000 persons had been shot by the Germans, which came to about fifty per day. This figure did not include those who died of torture, an area in which the extent of the Gestapo’s activities was only then beginning to emerge. A torture chamber on the grounds of the French ministry of aviation had been discovered, and there were others, too — on the Rue des Saussaies, at 84 Avenue Foch, and in the suburb of Chatou. Reporters were invited to come see for themselves; not all women had the stomach for it, but Sonia Tomara, Helen Kirkpatrick, Catherine Coyne, and Martha Gellhorn, lately arrived from Italy, were among those who went.

  The horror of it was almost too much to take in, much less write about. The little “tour” began at the Gestapo’s main headquarters on the Rue des Saussaies. One could see the tiny bath room “where they say prisoners were plunged for an hour into water almost at freezing point,” Tomara reported, and then revived, to begin it all again. Above was the room where electric current was used. In another prisoners were placed against the wall, virtually crucified while beaten. At the rifle range at Issy, the little group saw three macabre poles standing. “The prisoners were attached to the poles by the neck and the Germans shot at these live targets with blunt bullets which tore the flesh horribly,” Tomara wrote.

  “When you first go into the chamber you disbelieve everything,” Coyne wrote of Issy.

  It is like a movie set, and you tell yourself human beings cannot treat other human beings the way men and women were treated here. ... It is a long room, a separate concrete building erected by the French as a practice range for its air force. The floor is of soft white beach sand.... The posts are chewed near the top, chewed by whizzing bullets fired into the heads of blindfolded men and women by Germans lying on their bellies on the wooden platforms there....

  Execution was not swift and merciful. There is proof of torture in the front portion of the building where the concrete wall is covered with gray matting, a soft asbestos-like material used to deaden sound.. . . Into the soft matting of the walls are pressed handprints, prints of hundreds of hands that scarred the material with tearing, clasping fingers. They look as though tortured prisoners tried to claw their way up the wall, tried desperately to hang on by digging their sweating hands into the soft material. . . . There are hundreds upon hundreds of those prints .. . some small enough to be the prints of women or boys.

  Coyne also described the vents from which jets of steam were sprayed on the prisoners — victims burned alive with steam. Those who were tortured seldom came out alive, because the Germans did not want them to talk of what had happened.

  Helen Kirkpatrick visited one of the exceptions — a Frenchwoman, a member of the underground, who had somehow lived through her torture. A large, solidly built woman, she moved with difficulty as both her shoulders had been broken and then healed without having been set. Her right arm and left leg were nearly paralyzed. Dark brown stains on her wrists indicated how deeply the manacles had cut into her flesh, and the burned soles of her feet were healing, although they still looked “like underdone beef,” Helen wrote. After her interrogators decided that perhaps she did not know anything after all, they had dropped her off at a hospital, where she was fed but received no medical aid until “on the 32nd day Paris was liberated and so was she.”

  Martha Gellhorn went to look at the underground passages at Ivry, one of the old fortifications of Paris. Young men from the FFI — they seemed like children to her — conducted them inside. The French had stored ammunition and explosives in the grea
t dank tunnels that the Germans in turn used as prisons. “They simply locked men and women there in the wet unending dark until they died, or until it was time to torture or shoot them,” Martha wrote, describing the central tunnel with its hard mud floor, wet with seepage from the stone walls. There was no light anywhere. Rooms opened off passages, and it was so cold that in half an hour one was chilled to the bone. In places there were embers from small fires, and charcoal had been used to write on the walls “as if, dying, a man or a woman felt the fierce need of leaving some word or cry in this black silence.”

  There was also a cemetery at Ivry, handily so. Two rows contained the graves of some nine hundred men shot by the Germans, often for no reason other than terror tactics. The graves were unmarked, but family members could come and ask the cemetery keeper if the name of their father or husband or son was on his list. If it was, and if it was possible, the guardian would show them the proper mound so they could keep flowers on it. He said that no other graves were so covered with flowers as these.

  Gellhorn also visited the fortifications at Romainville where people were burned alive in great ovens, gradually, from the feet upward. “It is impossible to write properly of such monstrous and incredible and bestial cruelty,” she wrote, adding (as if hyperbole were itself inappropriate), “But since there are more torture chambers in and around Paris than you can conveniently visit in a week, this place, too, is probably not remarkable.”

  At one site Martha visited there was a thin little book of the last letters of those killed. One, she reported, was from a boy of eighteen, who like most eighteen-year-olds could not believe he was going to die. “And you, Mama,” the letter went, “Maurice told me you had been to the Kommandantur. How tired you must be. Above all, take care of yourself and do not get sick because of me. Really, Mama, all is not yet lost.”