The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  The torture chambers of Paris were the first glimpse the women had of the horrors they would find revealed in full in the concentration camps some seven months later. Only a few wrote about them, indicating that perhaps only a few visited, but they all heard about them, and it could not but color their thinking, and their expectations of what lay ahead.

  Some women correspondents remained only briefly in Paris; others stayed on longer. Martha Gellhorn was glad to be back in Paris again, but her visit was colored by Hemingway’s presence and their mutual animosity. One evening he insisted she have dinner with him, and she complied, hoping to discuss the divorce she had determined upon. Instead, he brought along his soldier buddies and then insulted and mocked her throughout the meal. The young men were embarrassed, and Gellhorn fled as soon as she could manage it. A sympathetic Robert Capa found her in tears at four o’clock in the morning. As Capa told the story, he brought up the subject of Hemingway’s liaison with Mary Welsh and suggested Martha call the Ritz and ask for Mary. Hemingway would probably answer, he said, and when he did Martha was to tell him she knew all about him and Mary and demand a divorce. According to Capa, Martha made the call, and it all happened right on cue.

  If Gellhorn did not already know about her husband and Mary Welsh, she was one of the few in Paris so uninformed. “Mary and I live at the Ritz. You might as well do it in style,” Hemingway informed his first wife, Hadley, in correspondence the following spring. For Welsh, those early fall days of 1944 were dominated by the progress of their relationship, which was often rocky. Hemingway wanted to be sure that by going from one war correspondent wife to another, he was not about to repeat his current situation: a wife who favored her career over her marriage and preferred reporting in the field to staying at home with him. But Mary’s career was important to her, too, and was not to be relinquished lightly. She wanted to make very sure of her man. She and Noel Monks had grown apart, but she had never known him other than gentle and considerate. Hemingway was that only occasionally. He drank too much and was subject to wide mood swings. One night Marlene Dietrich met them for dinner in the Ritz dining room, and Ernest brought along several officer friends. Champagne flowed, and before long the men became drunk and offensive. One of them insulted visiting Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce — wife of Mary’s boss — at a nearby table. Furious, Mary excused herself and went upstairs, only to find that another of Ernest’s buddies had vomited all over her bathroom. Hemingway, returning later, accused her of insulting his friends, and when she retorted that they were “drunks and slobs,” slapped her face. “You poor coward!” she baited him, dancing about the room. “You poor, fat, feather-headed coward! You woman-hitter!” Handing him his clothes, she pushed him out the door. It took many apologies, and many emissaries in Ernest’s defense, before peace was restored.

  For most of the women, however, Paris was an exciting, joyful interlude. Sonia Tomara spent happy evenings reunited with her sister. Helen Kirkpatrick kept the Chicago Daily News bureau going, and Tania Long and her husband Ray Daniell reopened the New York Times Paris bureau and hired a pretty young cousin of Tania’s as a bicycle messenger. In the late afternoons they sat on the terrace of the Cafe de la Source and talked with the waiters of the hardships of the recent past and their hopes for the future. Lee Miller continued to make the rounds of her friends — the poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, Jean Cocteau, Colette — and to photograph fashion shows for Vogue. Marjorie Avery reported the arrival of the Wacs and their sweet innocence in that sophisticated town. And Lee Carson interviewed Paris hepcats, who had kept the jitterbug and boogie-woogie alive and well during the occupation, and delighted in the bistros and nightclubs where “jerking, jumping, hair-in-eyes GIs reign as supreme monarchs.” All that and so much more was liberated Paris.

  24

  Grossing the Siegfried Line

  Their sojourn in Paris provided war correspondents with an unexpected bonus: it threw male and female reporters together at the Hotel Scribe, most notably in the correspondents’ mess in the basement. In Normandy and Brittany women had not been permitted in the press camps, and with SHAEF so concerned about their safety, mixing had been minimal. Longtime reporters such as Sonia Tomara, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Martha Gellhorn had by default more male than female friends, but the majority of women now covering the war had arrived on the Continent in the last year to find themselves cloistered with their own sex by regulation. After Paris, however, SHAEF appeared to recognize that the initiation period had passed, and that attempts to extend it further would be difficult to enforce.

  The front expanded rapidly that fall, with American forces fanning out across northern Europe in five distinct army groups — the First, Third, Seventh, and Ninth Armies and the Twelfth Army Group. SHAEF would have preferred that women correspondents remain well to the rear of the advance, but the women knew their publications and wire services expected them to follow the action along with their male colleagues. As a result, although the rule prohibiting women from combat areas remained absolute to the end of the war, it was variously interpreted. Once enemy ground forces had retreated, women reporters tended to consider the area “ex-combat,” never mind a few last incoming shells and tardy snipers haunting the side streets. Frequently a lucky woman met up with a CO who was keen to cooperate on a story that would play up his outfit’s performance under fire and was not particular about who wrote it. The European theater was expanding, and ambitious women were learning fast how to bend the rules.

  Virginia Irwin, reporting for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, was a case in point. She was unabashed in her preference for the company of men over that of women, which she felt she’d had enough of in the apple orchards of Normandy and the press hotel in Brittany. Somehow she contrived to be attached to the command post of the Nineteenth Tactical Air Command of the Ninth Air Force. Headquarters, located in a pine forest by a landing strip cut through a grain field somewhere in France, was commanded by General Otto P. Weyland. The six-foot-two towheaded Weyland with his cowboy stride and continuous good humor was exactly what Virginia thought a general should be, but it was “the boys” who captured her heart. Her visit, scheduled for three days in mid-September, lasted well into December. This was not what the PR officers at SHAEF had in mind, but Virginia was adept at dodging their all-points bulletins for her return. Although the Post-Dispatch could seldom locate her either, they printed her stories in full, often on the front page, and were pleased she was so close to the front, particularly as their other (male) reporter had reached Europe too late for an assignment to France and could file his stories only from England.

  In mid-September three airborne divisions — the American Eighty-second and One-hundred-and-first and the First British — parachuted and glided into Holland. This surprise attack by the greatest airborne armada ever attempted up to that time was clearly newsworthy, and the Eighty-second’s commander, the charismatic thirty-seven-year-old Lieutenant General James Gavin, suggested that reporters cover the action. Martha Gellhorn, Marjorie “Dot” Avery, and Catherine Coyne accepted the challenge.

  In her story “Rough and Tumble” for Collier’s, Gellhorn, who struck up a close friendship with Gavin, reported how the Eighty-second flew in formation over the Channel, then dropped by parachute or glider onto the Dutch countryside. Their mission was to take and hold the steel-girded bridges at Grave and Nijmegen, which were heavily defended. Gellhorn related how this was accomplished, in part by acts of bravery that seemed almost suicidal. Her admiration of the raw courage of the Eighty-second pervaded her story. “They do not boast when they say that where they fight, they fight without relief or replacements and that they have never relinquished a foot of ground,” she wrote. “Men who jump out of airplanes onto hostile territory do not have dull lives.” As with the CNAC pilots on the China-Burma route, Martha felt a visceral connection to men who took such risks.

  Nijmegen, which remained precariously exposed for weeks, was the subject of another story, “Deat
h of a Dutch Town.” Martha reported on the dangers and hardships to civilians who coped with the daily allotment of broken glass, always sweeping it up “in a despairingly tidy way.” She also explained why one never saw any Jews in Nijmegen. Already she had documented the fate of Europe’s Jewry, a concern she shared with her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, in a number of stories, beginning with Prague in 1938. She was lucky in her choice of periodicals: the editors of Colliers never flinched from printing her revelations. Nijmegen’s Jews had been deported to Poland, she wrote; she then described in considerable detail the tiled “baths” that were in reality gas chambers.

  Dot Avery and Catherine Coyne drove up to Nijmegen with two male journalists they had come to know at the Scribe in Paris — Flem Hall of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Ervin Lewis, broadcaster for Station WLS, Chicago. The trip was unsettling. “The battles had been recent ones,” Dot noted, “and I got a fresh view of the aftermath: bricks and debris tumbling into the streets of clean little Dutch towns. Dead bloated cows with stiff legs outstretched in a sort of dumb protest. Freshly dug graves. A few still unburied Germans lying like heaps of rags. The smell of decay.” Her first act on arrival in that border town was to fulfill a vow to cross the Siegfried Line onto German soil. In the cool fall sunshine, she and Coyne walked over that fabled line of demarcation on the grounds of a hotel that German officers had only just abandoned. Some admiring paratroopers took their pictures, while solemn-faced blond children trotted behind them, nodding when they spoke, but saying nothing themselves.

  A major from Baltimore invited Coyne to accompany him to the command post of a parachute regiment. They arrived in time for supper, and were just having coffee when a thunderous roar was heard. “You’re lucky,” the colonel in command told her, “you’ll get a good show.” Officers ushered her to a top-floor dormer window, which provided an excellent view of enemy planes dropping flares over the command post. The great bridge, their target, was silhouetted cleanly against the moonlight, while flares on the opposite shore started fires that turned the velvety sky a pale pink. Catherine was particularly impressed by the pattern of orange tracer bullets, pellets merging to form a great wall of fire in the sky:

  There was about it constant beauty, constant movement, a kind of grace.... Certainly nothing could get through that steadily moving wall of fiery bullets! Then the planes roared in. The flares, the moon and the tracer bullets made it as light as day. I leaned out the window to get a look at the planes silhouetted against the sky.

  The ack ack batteries went into action. Great puffs of black exploded high in the air. You could feel the concussion in the very air you breathed. Then I was aware there was no air in front of me to breathe. Just a hot sensation of emptiness that passed quickly. The building vibrated. When it happened I don’t believe I was aware of sound. Then I knew, even without recognizing sound, the planes had dropped their bombs.

  They didn’t get the bridge. The ack ack stopped. The tracer bullets disappeared into nothingness. The flares burned low.... Most of the bombs on that run landed in the river. One was close enough to damage one of our supply sheds and killed a soldier. All the glass in the windows on the two lower floors of our building was blown out. . . .

  Major Ireland suggested we take advantage of the lull to get back across the river. We got into his jeep, drove carefully through the moonlight dusk to the bridge, then dashed madly over it to the other side. It was a cold starlit night. I tried not to think of the boy who had been killed. The major sang phrases from popular songs — he did not seem to know a whole song — probably to keep up that daredevil attitude that characterizes the paratrooper. “Doesn’t this remind you of football weather back home?” he asked....

  As we rode through the quiet streets of Nijmegen, we heard the faint rumble of planes. They were returning. The cold starlit sky was changed again into a pattern of dazzling orange and golden light. The air was rent with the explosions of flak and of bombs. Now it did not seem so beautiful, for we could smell the burning homes. We could smell charred and burning wood, first the hot smell, then the acrid odor of water having been poured on the fire; then we could smell the bombs and the tracer bullets — they smell just like old-fashioned fireworks.

  In the faint light we could see silent Dutch families standing close to their dignified and substantial homes looking skyward, silent.

  Coyne’s experience was indicative of how a woman could fall into a dangerous situation through no design of her own and emerge with a story that might have cost her her life.

  The Allied hold on the bridges at Nijmegen and Grave allowed General Eisenhower to order the U.S. First Army to begin the attack on the West Wall, a string of fortifications running roughly along Germany’s western boundary. Both Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson had managed to attach themselves to the press corps of the First Army, which meant that despite previous acts of insubordination on the part of both women, SHAEF was sufficiently impressed by their cool heads and competence to permit them a trial run. Carpenter had spent much of her time in Paris in the hospital receiving treatment for her shattered eardrum. Quantities of sulfa drug had alleviated the need for an operation, but the ear specialist insisted she receive more treatment. Watching other correspondents moved out of Paris, Iris had begun to fear the war would be over before she caught up with it again. When she heard that the Ninety-first Evacuation Hospital was scheduled to go to Germany, she convinced her doctor that she could continue treatment while moving with it.

  The city of Aachen, on the far side of the West Wall, was the First Army’s objective. Hitler’s command that it be defended at all costs was countered by an Allied order to surrender under threat of destruction. In the ensuing American bombing, only the cathedral was spared. It rose from the rubble with the altar where Charlemagne had been crowned still intact. Entering the town on the heels of the victorious Americans, Carson and Carpenter were struck by the sudden reversal of realities. Until now, civilians in combat areas had been liberated by Allied successes; beginning with the defeat at Aachen, civilians were among the conquered. Those who had not evacuated as ordered had only an unsympathetic American army to turn to for help.

  There were moments when both women must have stopped to marvel that they were actually reporting from Germany with the U.S. First Army press corps. But if they thought their inclusion would prove seamless and without conflict, they soon learned otherwise. Most male reporters were delighted to have such “good-lookers” as daily company, but a few viewed them as competitors out to use their sex for advantage. Their new situation also exposed the women to what Carson called “the wolf in correspondent’s clothing.” She noted that “when it became glaringly apparent that I was not having any, thank you, knighthood in full flower withered quick.”

  So, apparently, did common sense. The GIs adored Carson, who represented that almost-forgotten other world of the “American girl.” Lee would try to get them to laugh and relax. In Aachen she found herself one evening “with a bunch of red-eyed miserable doughs” in a house under enemy sniper fire. They found a phonograph that worked, a bottle of wine and some eggs, and decided to have a party. Lee was happily dancing with every GI there when a male correspondent wandered in, took in the scene, and left in high dudgeon. “How can you work against a dame?” he protested. “There she was dancing with these guys and getting a helluva story. Can I dance with GIs? Can you? Course not. But that’s the way a dame gets stories.” Carson’s response — that dancing with weary soldiers was strictly extracurricular — was brushed off with a shrug.

  Janet Flanner returned to Paris from New York that fall of 1944 in her old role of New Yorker correspondent. The progress of the war had left its mark on her, even from a distance. A friend, the photographer Horst, had approached her the year before to compose a text for a book of his photographs of the 1930s, and Janet had indicated her willingness, but now she wrote to tell him she had changed her mind. Included in the book were a number of Parisian society figures rumored to be c
ollaborators, and Flanner shrank from being in any way associated with them. Horst offered to remove the most flagrant offender, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, but Janet stood firm. The photographs were as beautiful as ever, but the times had changed.

  Flanner flew from New York to London, where she found life much altered. The house she had often stayed in before the war had vanished. The blackout took some getting used to. She bought a uniform and field jacket, an electric heater, and a bicycle, and moved on to Paris, where she deposited everything at the Hotel Scribe and took the first train for Orgeval. That much was the same, she noted, recalling all the times she had taken that train before the war, when she and Noel Murphy had meant everything to each other. Except for a relatively brief period when the Germans interned resident Americans, Noel had lived out the war years on her farm in Orgeval. It was raining as the train pulled into the little station. Janet saw Noel waiting on the platform with her bicycle, noticeably thin and stooped, but smiling. The meeting was more complicated for Janet: it was she who had abandoned her friend five years before and had gone to live safe and well-fed in America. Worse, she had abandoned Noel emotionally: much of that time had been spent with a new friend, Natalia Danesi Murray. Flanner knew that Hemingway had mentioned this fact to Noel, but in those first days at Orgeval, the name Natalia hung in the air between them unspoken.

  After that initial visit Flanner spent part of each week with Murphy on the farm and part at the Scribe in Paris. She often saw that “splendid Helen Kirkpatrick” and renewed her old friendship with Hemingway, always on his best behavior with her. Together they attended a literary party at Sylvia Beach’s apartment — old friends from the days of Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Flanner wanted to make it clear that she had discarded her prewar apolitical stance. She knew that the half snobbish, sardonic humor of her previous writings was wildly inappropriate now. “Paris is still a mass of uncoordinated individuals, each walking through the ceaseless winter rains with his memories,” Flanner wrote in her first “Letter from Paris,” December 15,1944. At the Scribe, where everyone knew she was Genet of the New Yorker, she was alternately sharp-tongued and sentimental, and the only white-haired woman there.