The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

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  During this time, General Patton’s Third Army was gradually encircling the town of Metz, and Iris Carpenter (on leave from the First Army) arrived with John Arthur Bockhorst of News of the Day news-reel service and Johnny Morris of Life magazine to cover its surrender. With German forts up in the hills still shelling the town, she had no business being there, but there she was, and not about to turn back. The road in ran directly between two German forts and, crouching down in the jeep as they came within range, Iris could feel prickles on the back of her neck. At the river’s edge they were obliged to abandon the jeep for a just-completed infantry footbridge.

  Their progress took on the quality of one of those “home free” games children play on summer evenings in backyards across America. They would edge warily along, hugging a building, peeping around its corner to jump back, peep again, and then race across. On reaching the railway line, they crouched by a shed in somebody’s back garden, each in turn crossing the tracks and scrambling up the far bank.

  At the command post they crowded into a jeep with half a dozen other correspondents and set off for the cathedral. Parking the jeep in the town square, they were inching down the narrow street that circled back of the church when their driver, not four feet from Iris, was shot in the hand. Another correspondent dashed up to warn them of snipers ahead. They turned back, the driver less concerned about his injury than about Iris’s future. “If SHAEF hears about Carpenter being in this show, they’ll discredit her so fast it’ll make her head swim,” he said. She was advised to write her story without mention of having been present at the cathedral, and her companions swore they would deny ever having seen her there.

  Late in November 1944 Sonia Tomara, attached to the press corps of the Seventh Army, moved into Alsace. Traveling by jeep along the Strasbourg corridor, she could hear the artillery of a fierce battle going on in the Vosges Mountains. “The American 100th Division is cleaning the Germans out of the Vosges,” she reported to the New York Herald Tribune. “I used to go skiing there before the war. There is no snow now, but all the valleys are flooded and streams have swelled into big torrents.” Fortunately, conditions were just as bad for the enemy, who were surrendering by the thousands. All along the road they passed groups of bedraggled Germans in field gray. Sonia recalled Hitler boasting that he had annexed Alsace to Germany forever. For the troops in field gray, “forever” had not lasted very long.

  Tomara was there to report the day the French Second Armored and the American Seventh Army infantry entered Strasbourg, capital of Alsace. One could walk through the streets, she wrote, although there was still some shelling. Always when entering a cathedral city, reporters went first to that great stone edifice to see whether it had survived the Allied bombing. Here all the stained glass was gone, but the wonderful exterior sculpture still intact. Sonia found it strange to be back in Strasbourg. She had first been there as a child, before 1914 when it was German, then later when it was French, and finally just before this war began, when she crossed the Kehl Bridge on foot between the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. After that, with the fall of France in 1940, Alsace and the province of Lorraine to the north had reverted to Germany. But now, by the New Year of 1945, they would be French again. Sonia marveled how people could live in so topsyturvy a world.

  A week later, in the town of Saverne, she attended the parish church to hear the first sermon delivered in French since June 1940. The joy of it was in sharp contrast to what followed. That afternoon Sonia and several colleagues went forty miles by jeep to Struthof, a small-scale concentration camp at the top of a mountain banked by forests of dark fir. It began to snow as they wound their way upward and entered through an electrified barbed wire gate. Here were many dark green sheds, and their guide, a member of the FFI, led them to one in particular. In the first room was “a sort of stove to make gas — the FFI man did not know what gas,” Sonia reported. “A pipe led to another small room without light. There were eight rods running parallel under the ceiling and attached to them were hooks, such as butchers use for meat. When Struthof was in operation, men and women were attached to these hooks, and the gas arrived through the pipe opening.”

  Tomara had visited places of torture around Paris, but this was the first time she had seen anything like a gas chamber, although word of their existence had circulated for some time. The one at Struthof appeared small and primitive, but as yet she had little basis for comparison. It was not known how many people died there, only that 6,000 people could be accommodated at the camp at one time, and the ashes of 1,665 women were carefully stored in earthen urns like flowerpots. Those prisoners still alive when the Germans began their retreat had been taken back across the Rhine with them.

  Night came early that time of year, and it was getting dark as they completed their tour of the camp. Tomara felt the wind lash at her; her feet were numb with cold, and her heart, she said, was frozen.

  Each woman experienced a different war. Dot Avery and Catherine Coyne, for example, were surprised to find that there was a social life east of the Siegfried Line. Was it because of the rain and mud, which were constants, and were more bearable in company? Or because American men at the front would find any excuse to spend a little time with American “girls.” Avery and Coyne were visiting an area of “static warfare,” which meant that the infantry was holding — that although there was shelling, usually at regular times of the day, neither side was moving forward, for reasons not revealed. Instead the men spent time improving their foxholes and, whenever possible, their meals. In static warfare, the men were fed twice a day from chow wagons that brought the food in hot insulated vessels; otherwise they ate cold K-rations.

  Avery and Coyne had been invited to lunch at battalion headquarters, and it was clear that K-rations were not on the menu. Over a small wood-burning stove a captain was frying potatoes in a big skillet into which he tossed some very tender-looking meat. When Dot asked what it was, he replied that his sergeant had been “attacked” by a deer the day before and, by way of defending himself, had brought back venison for lunch. As for the stove, it had been “found” all alone by the roadside. And the Rhine wine? Also “found.” An unexpected treat for the two correspondents.

  Back on the Luxembourg side soon afterward, Avery and Coyne were invited to a dinner party, once again made possible when another deer “attacked” yet another American soldier, this time a general’s aide. The two-star general was host. After a day in the rain and mud of a section of the Siegfried Line, the general’s aide picked them up, presented each with an American Beauty rose, an anomaly in those surroundings, and drove them through the wet blackout to the house that served as headquarters. In the long white modernistic living room, their host and another general and a colonel stood before the fireplace to greet them. Clean shirts were the only fresh apparel the women had found to put on; they had brushed their pants and field jackets and scraped their boots as best they could, but the sole feminine touch Catherine was able to come up with was a piece of mottled green parachute cloth given her by a paratrooper which she wore around her neck. In contrast, the officers were in dress uniform complete with campaign ribbons, highly polished boots, and insignia that glowed in the firelight. The opportunity to dine with American women was rare, and they had dressed in honor of the occasion.

  Over dinner Coyne and Avery entertained their hosts with a humorous description of their life with the Wacs in Normandy. The men laughed uproariously. More dramatic was the brigadier’s story of capturing a notorious German general. The German had at first declined to surrender to a general with only one star, but was informed that “captured,” not “surrendered,” was the operative term. Arrogant even in defeat, he came out of his bunker sixty feet underground leading a beautiful dog. He looked at the line of grim GIs facing him, then up at the sky. Patting his dog, he commented, “Ah, this is no time for warring. The hunting season is just beginning.”

  The rain beat against the windows, while inside the
Americans lingered around the fire, sipping wine and talking — spinning out what was for all of them a very special evening in an otherwise crazy war.

  25

  The Battle of the Bulge

  In early December 1944, SHAEF reversed itself and granted Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter full accreditation to the First Army This may have come in response to pressure from INS and the Boston Globe, neither of which had another correspondent with the First. Sonia Tomara had already received full accreditation to the Seventh Army, but SHAEF made it clear that these were to be considered special cases, not an opening of the dike through which many more would soon flow. Such accreditation guaranteed them a seat in a jeep, the opportunity to attend briefings and examine maps and eat in the same mess as the men, and the right to submit copy as soon as it passed the censor rather than waiting until the men had sent theirs.

  The unresolved question was how far forward they were to be allowed to go. For the record, the camp commander noted: “They can go wherever their reporter’s conscience drives them — same as the men do — and if they get a beat on the story and scoop the pants off the men, it’s all right with me.” Privately he was more restrained. “Now don’t go making it harder for yourself than you need,” he warned Iris and Lee. “Remember, you’re going to be no darned good to your paper if you get hurt, and you’ll be one hell of a big embarrassment to me.”

  Fifty years later Carpenter recalled that when she and Carson met at First Army headquarters and press camp in Spa, Belgium, they began by disliking each other intensely. Then one evening Lee returned to the press camp, saw that Iris had been detained, and phoned the Boston Globe contact to inform them that Carpenter’s copy would be coming and to hold for it. “I thought that damned decent of her,” Iris said. “We grew to like each other very much.”

  For nearly two months the First Army had been attempting to take the Huertgen Forest southeast of Aachen — attempts that not only had failed but were proving more costly in casualties than any single objective so far, except for Omaha Beach. Men were dying at far too high a rate, and it seemed to Carpenter that her daily trips to the front were increasingly more harrowing. About ten o’clock one night, after completing a story she was sure the censors would cut to bits and thinking that perhaps now she might wash her face and comb her hair and get something to eat, she was confronted by the redheaded First Army operations officer. He suggested that although she could not write about it yet, it might be a good idea to go down to the crossroads in the forest where the entire drive was then held up. That was a tip she could not ignore, and the next day they went there together. In a cottage in a forest clearing, the division commanding officer described the difficulties — swampy pine thicket on either side of the causeway, pillboxes, thickly mined and booby-trapped terrain. He had lost almost a whole regiment there already, he said, and added, “I don’t like the way the Germans are holding so hard in this neck of the woods. It wouldn’t surprise me to find them breaking out of here any time in such force we’ll get the shock of our lives.”

  That was what Iris Carpenter and operations officer Russell “Red” Akers — a man to whom she gave little thought at the time but would one day marry — heard about noon on Friday, December 15. Eighteen hours later the commanding officer’s prediction came true. German forces broke out of those very woods, and the Battle of the Bulge began.

  The term came from the large protuberance the German army carved into Allied territory before they were stopped. The heart of the battle took place in the Ardennes, a wooded plateau averaging two thousand feet above sea level and covering parts of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Hitler’s plan was to sweep through what he correctly saw as a weak spot between the American First and Third Armies to Antwerp, retaking Brussels on the way. The element of surprise was virtually complete, and the American position was further endangered by infiltrators: English-speaking Germans dressed in American uniforms, carrying American weapons, and driving American tanks and jeeps.

  When the Germans began to march, before dawn on December 16, Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter were asleep in the Hotel Portugal near First Army headquarters in Spa, directly in line with the main thrust of the attack. The only troops there were a few armored cavalry, a couple dozen MPs, engineers, jeep drivers, cooks, and censors, all of whom were issued arms. The briefing in the press camp was short: “The Germans have broken through at several points. The situation is extremely fluid.” Walking back to their quarters afterward, Carson and Carpenter passed frantic citizens hammering shutters over their windows.

  Almost at once the American lines broke. Eisenhower ordered an armored division from the Ninth Army to the north and another from the Third Army to the south to proceed immediately to the Ardennes. But it took time for them to arrive, during which four divisions of the First, one of them new to battle, took the offensive head on. The day was chaotic. The men were not used to retreat. The skies were gray, the snow was gray, and billowing gray smoke rose from fuel pumps purposely set aflame.

  On the morning of the eighteenth, three wire service reporters — Jack Frankish of UP, Bill Boni of the AP, and Carson, who jeeped together — drove to see how the situation looked from a forward command post near Monschau. “Retreat in the face of Germany’s smashing counteroffensive on the Luxembourg-Belgium frontier today is a new experience to the battle-tested doughboys of the American First Army,” Lee began her story, then continued in rapid-fire prose: “The Germans are roaring up nearby roads in their Tiger tanks, zooming down from the pink-streaked winter skies to shower our frontline positions with streams of hot lead, and tearing the world apart with their heavy artillery barrages.” She had talked with a private from New York entrusted with carrying a message to the command post from his unit, which had been surprised that morning by nine Tigers rolling down the main street of the little village where they were billeted. “Those German tanks came right under the windows of the houses we were staying in,” Lee quoted him as saying. Since his unit had nothing to fight tanks with, they had fled.

  In her story, Carson did her best to put a positive slant on the day’s events. She wrote of Yanks “ensnaring scores of Germans,” “hammering back,” “blunting the German spearheads.” But she also reported what sounded much more ominous — enemy tanks roaring in “to unleash a withering fire.” The nearby town of Malmedy was endangered. “Nazi penetration in the Malmedy area . . . remained the enemy’s most successful thrust,” Carson noted. “German tanks in this vicinity were reported roaming the woods unchecked.”

  Iris Carpenter and her jeep buddies set out for Fifth Corps headquarters at Eupen along a road of hairpin turns bordered by pines. There is no more beautiful country in the Ardennes, but they had more on their minds than scenery. At one point an armored car headed out in front of them. “Better stay close behind,” the driver said. “This road is lousy with parachutists.” At Eupen the general was curt. Where had they come from? By which road? They’d best get back to Spa while they still could, and they shouldn’t dawdle there either. First Army headquarters was pulling out.

  Seven times on the return trip low-flying Luftwaffe obliged them to hit the ditch. As they approached Spa, they came upon bumper-to-bumper trucks loaded with supplies, including gas and ammunition from a huge Allied dump, all retreating westward. Their fellow correspondents were stripping the press camp, piling maps and personal belongings into trucks. “Keep my room,” Iris told the sobbing proprietress at the Portugal. “I’ll be back soon.” On the way out of town people waved them goodbye, and when they passed the schoolhouse, the children were lined up singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  On December 20, four days into the battle, Carson first reported that the enemy was shooting American prisoners. In an incident occurring near Saint-Vith, German troops ambushed a supply and medical convoy, disarmed an unspecified number of GIs, marched them into a field with their hands above their heads, and opened fire. She also reported a more extensive massacre said to have taken place o
n the second day of battle:

  A field artillery battery, supply troops and medics, numbering about 150, were moving south on a road in the vicinity of Malmedy. At a fork in the road the convoy saw tanks at a short distance dotting the woods on either side of the road. As the tanks opened fire, the Americans leaped into ditches. An ambulance trailing the convoy was fired on. Two wounded enlisted men were dragged from it, loaded on a tank by the Nazis and taken off down the road.

  The others were rounded up, disarmed and robbed and then marched to a nearby clearing, lined up in ranks and searched again.... Then the killers in the tank, parked some 50 or 60 feet away, opened up. The wounded crumpled and others, pretending to be hit, fell with them. Machine-guns on the tanks continued to fire into the writhing mass. The Germans kicked their way through this bloody tangle and answered the cries of wounded for help with pistol shots.

  Carson’s dispatch was an early, bare-bones account of what became known as the Malmedy Massacre. Later, when the site was recaptured, victims were tagged and photographed where they had fallen in the snow. Eighty-six Americans lay dead; four survived to tell the tale. The photographs would later be used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials in the prosecution of the German officer in charge.

  During the first week of battle, the First Army press camp moved twice. From Spa it retreated to a chateau near Liege, but when this was shelled until no glass was left in a single window, they relocated to a hotel in Chaudfontaine only just abandoned by headquarters.