The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  “We were very much a family,” Iris Carpenter recalled. That night they sat around, family style, discussing the advisability of continuing to go to the front. The boundaries had become so fluid that nobody knew which areas were held by the enemy and which by the Allies, or, for that matter, which apparent GIs were in fact Germans. UP’s Jack Frankish, jeep companion to Bill Boni and Lee Carson, thought he wouldn’t go out the next day unless the picture cleared. “I’ve got a wife and a couple of kids,” he said. “I guess I owe something to them as well as to my job.” Lee and Bill said they understood, but thought they’d go anyway, and in the morning they left without Jack. They were gone all day. It was December 24, and Lee, with her big heart and her loyalty as much to the GIs as to INS, was determined to do what she could to make the day a little happier for them. “I spent Christmas Eve on the line,” she wrote later. “The poor guys tried to make a Christmas for me. I ate fruitcake until it hung out of my ears. Everybody had fruitcake from home and I had to eat some of everybody’s. They all gave me something from home — food, soap, aftershave lotion — or wine they had taken from somebody’s cellar. I had to take it. But about one A.M. we had a tank attack and a hell of a bad time thereafter.”

  Carson and Boni did not make it back until the next day. In their absence German planes, perhaps thinking the hotel at Chaudfontaine was still occupied by headquarters, bombed it. Colonel Andrews, the camp commander who had warned Lee and Iris not to “go making it harder for yourself than you need,” suffered a fractured skull and was sent to a base hospital in England, where he died. Jack Frankish was killed outright.

  Although Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter remained the only women to experience the Battle of the Bulge from the start, other women attempted to cover it in its later phase, which gravitated around the market town of Bastogne. By December 23, 1944, Marjorie “Dot” Avery and Catherine Coyne — who seemed to have no problem following the action, usually in the company of friendly male colleagues — had made their way to Belgium and were advancing with the troops. Which troops they could not say. “The convoys were huge, fantastic, noisy parades — if you did not look at the young faces beneath the heavy steel helmets,” Coyne wrote. Holly and mistletoe adorned the netting of those helmets, and the Belgians, who counted on these young men to save them from another Nazi invasion, cheered them on.

  All that the reporters knew of the Belgian town of Bastogne was that it was at a road junction in an area where few crossroads existed, and its capture was essential to the success of Hitler’s undertaking. At one point German troops came within two miles of the town, but halted there until morning. This proved their undoing. During the night the 101st Airborne, driving headlong the hundred miles from Reims in open trucks, reached Bastogne and joined forces with the battered Tenth Armored. After that, and though surrounded and outnumbered three or four to one, they repelled attack after attack and held the town. Dense fog kept planes grounded, and supplies were dangerously low when, on the twenty-third, the clouds broke. By noon the blue sky was filled with silver C-47s dodging German ack-ack to hover above the town just long enough to drop their precious containers of food, clothing, blood plasma, gasoline, and ammunition.

  The Germans mounted their last big offensive against the town on Christmas Day 1944. When it was over and the defending Allied troops realized they had survived, they felt a new confidence. They had stopped the best the enemy could marshal against them. On December 26 a division from General Patton’s Third Army plowed through an enemy roadblock and reached the town’s perimeter. Paratroopers from the 101st Airborne climbed cautiously out of their foxholes to greet them. The stranglehold on Bastogne was broken.

  “How we got here and what we saw on the way ... doesn’t enter into this story,” Dot Avery wrote of the quartet of correspondents who reached the town the next day. Perhaps she was thinking of the sensibilities of her friends on the society page of the Detroit Free Press, friends for whom she had whipped up gastronomically perfect suppers in what now seemed like another life. Still, if these horrors had happened to American kids — and so many of them were only kids — how could she flinch from writing it, or they from reading what she wrote? “The town is still burning from German bombing,” she reported. “There are the usual scenes of wreckage and desolation. Civilians are digging themselves out, picking up bits of junk and trying to salvage their homes. In a pile of rubble which had been an improvised hospital before bombs hit it, German prisoners and medical corpsmen are searching for bodies.”

  For all the havoc, the arrival of replacements had brought a crazy relief, a sense of holiday. Several soldiers invited Dot into their home in a small garage. They were boiling water for coffee, and she was grateful for a few sips against the bitter cold and constant mist that penetrated right through to the bone. She talked with a medical officer directing the search for bodies. He had a wild tale of having been trapped by enemy tanks and ringed with enemy artillery fire, of litter bearers attempting daring rescues of men in burning tanks while under murderous fire from snipers and machine guns. When at last they reached Bastogne, the Americans had expected a fully equipped hospital to be waiting, only to discover there was nothing. Men had gone around town begging for supplies from private homes to treat the wounded. Then on Christmas Eve six enemy planes had dive-bombed, hitting the makeshift hospital and setting it afire.

  What the correspondents “saw on the way” to Bastogne was dev-astatingly multiplied by what faced them when they got there.

  Arriving a day or so later, Martha Gellhorn felt very like a weary soldier herself. She had begun the month by driving over a sixteen-foot embankment, from which she suffered no more than bruises and a broken rib, but which served to remind her of her own mortality. She wrote to her editor at Colliers of her exhaustion. Sometimes the war seemed to have depleted her, wrung her dry. She felt unable to do justice in her writing to the terrible things she witnessed every day.

  Gellhorn had had another unpleasant encounter with Hemingway in Luxembourg over Christmas, and she moved into Belgium with some relief. She and a colleague took the road, marginally safer than before, to Bastogne. They stopped at an ex-German gun position to consult with ten American soldiers there. A sergeant advised against continuing up the road, which was cut with small-arms fire, he said, and in any case a German counterattack was in the works — thirty tanks headed their way. “What are you going to do?” Gellhorn asked them. “Stay here,” one of them said, and shrugged. War was lonely and individual work, Martha brooded in her piece for Colliers. “It is hard to realize how small it can get. Finally it can boil down to ten unshaven gaunt-looking young men, from anywhere in America, stationed on a vital road with German tanks coming in.”

  Gellhorn and her colleague compromised by taking a secondary road and stopping to consult at the farmhouse headquarters of the American general in command. A dead horse with spilling entrails blocked the front door. Only a few minutes before, a shell had landed in the farmyard, also killing a cow and wounding another, which was moaning softly in the passageway between house and barn. Martha’s driver, heretofore silent, was bitter about the livestock, “all beat up this way. Goddammit, what they got to do with it?” he asked. “It’s not their fault.”

  Bastogne, Gellhorn observed when they reached it, was “a German job of death and destruction ... beautifully thorough.” The wounded had been flown out, but the 101st Airborne was still there. Martha and her colleague could not understand the cheerfulness of the paratroopers. Not having experienced the previous couple of weeks up close, she had difficulty accepting that to have made it through against such odds, even when many of your buddies had not, left a heady sensation.

  Back in Luxembourg on New Year’s Eve, she ran into Bill Walton of Time. They contemplated visiting the front, but the front, as it turned out, was quiet. Fat snowflakes were falling softly. “We decided, like millions of other people, that we were most heartily sick of war,” she wrote. “What we really wanted to do was borro
w a sled and go coasting.” They did borrow a sled — an unsteerable homemade variety — and were directed to a steep hill near an abandoned stone quarry where dozens of children were already descending on similar sleds. There were noisy planes nearby, and artillery directed at the planes, but the children paid no attention. “Screaming with joy, fear, and good spirits, they continued to slide down the hill,” Martha noted, as she, Walton, and their driver stood watching them. “Children aren’t so dumb,” the driver said. “What I mean is, children got the right idea. What people ought to do is go coasting.”

  Indeed, it seemed the only sane occupation as bitter cold arrived in the Ardennes. At the First Army press camp, now inhabiting a convent in Tongres, it was so cold “that water brought us for washing froze almost before we could pour it into the basins,” Iris Carpenter wrote. Blizzards dropped up to eighteen inches of snow, and the roads were sheets of ice. Driving became more hazardous than facing the enemy: it was then that Lee Carson smashed three jeeps in a single week, but that feat was not uncommon, and it was merely suggested that she try to be more careful.

  The Luftwaffe celebrated the New Year with what would turn out to be their last great concentrated effort of the war. Among a group of reporters lying flattened against a roadside barn, Carpenter observed that until then she would not have believed it possible to lie in the snow and melt it to steaming point with perspiration. Two days later the Americans began to push the Germans back eastward. The going was slow over the ice, tanks skidding all over the place, Iris said, and the last thing you wanted to have skid into you was a tank.

  First Army headquarters and press camp returned to Spa exactly a month after their near-panicky retreat. The proprietress at the Portugal welcomed them with open arms, and a party was held in Chambre Six. At headquarters General Courtney Hodges gave a press conference. “We shall continue bending the bulge backward right into Germany,” he said, tracing his pointer along the map in the general direction of Bonn. The armies were already moving, pressing against the desperate resistance of Hitler’s Panzer divisions.

  The Battle of the Bulge exacted an enormous toll: some 19,000 American dead, 15,000 taken prisoner. On the other side, Hitler lost 100,000 killed, wounded, or captured in the Ardennes. Logistically speaking — which was of little comfort to families back home, of course — the Americans could afford the loss, while the Germans could not. Eisenhower had fresh troops on their way; Hitler had none.

  26

  Penetrating the Pacific Barriers

  The Pacific theater presented an entirely different challenge for the woman war correspondent. Most offensives were of necessity island operations. American bombers took off from islands — Hawaii, Midway — or from aircraft carriers. Their targets were other islands — Guadalcanal, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima — on which, when taken, airstrips were built (or old ones repaired) for more bombers to reach other islands until the target was those islands that made up the Japanese nation itself. Ground troops reached their destination by ship, on which the men lived in close quarters for weeks. From those ships they were disgorged onto islands, and if they made it through the surf and onto the beach, and past the beach to the interior, there was not only the enemy to contend with — machine-gun fire, mines, snipers — but often a torrid climate, mosquitoes, dysentery, malaria. Small wonder that through 1944 only male reporters covered the offensives, and not always happily. But the successes of those troops meant that in time there were islands to which reporters of either sex could go with relative safety and minimal discomfort. It was then that General Douglas MacArthur’s dictum that no women reporters be allowed in his Southwest Pacific theater of command, and similar restrictions on the part of Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Ocean Area (POA), began to come under pressure from women and their advocates in the press.

  No one exerted more pressure than the first woman to have been accredited as a war correspondent, Peggy Hull. She had reported the training of American troops in France in 1917, the mission to Vladivostok two years later, and the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932. Now Peggy Hull Deuell, widow of New York Daily News managing editor Harvey Deuell, renewed her old affiliation with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which agreed to send her wherever she could get accreditation. But over fifty and overweight was not what the War Department judged appropriate for overseas. In time, however, her persistence wore them down, and for some months in 1944, from Hawaii, she reported the stories GIs told her when they returned there for hospitalization or on leave, or wrote her from more forward areas. Her informal style, alternately snappy and poignant, exactly suited her little stories. Still, she often felt shut out, belittled by the male correspondents around her. “Our presence in various fields is bitterly resented by the men we compete with,” she noted. “Overwhelming obstacles are frequently set up to prevent us from working.”

  The overwhelming obstacles Annalee Whitmore Jacoby would face on her return to China that fall of 1944 did not originate with the U.S. military and had nothing to do with her sex. Three years had passed since she left Chungking and flew to Manila to marry Melville Jacoby, more than two since Mel’s death on an Australian airfield. “Friendly fire” takes many forms; Mel’s came by way of a propeller that detached from its plane, stormed across the field, and cut him to pieces in seconds. Annalee held that image before her eyes for a long time. She also retained memories of their perilous escape by boat to and then from Bataan, of night watches together on Cebu, of sitting close and whispering their hopes and plans — all for nothing. That great irrational called war cared nothing for hopes and plans.

  After she returned to New York, Annalee Jacoby (she seldom used her maiden name now) went to the Time Inc. offices to discuss her future with the editors there. Work was what she wanted, all-engulfing work, and she asked for “an eighteen-hour-a-day job right in the middle of the war, if possible.” But in 1942 that wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible for her to go to the China-Burma-India theater as she requested, because women were not yet allowed there, and by the time they were, she was otherwise involved. Mostly, she was mourning — an activity postponed during the first rather crazy months of her widowhood.

  Back in China Theodore H. “Teddy” White, his emotions grafted to the image of his late best friend’s wife, wrote to an editor at Time of his concern for Annalee and his hope that she might be persuaded to work in one of the Time Inc. offices. “I can’t do a damn thing about her because she answers no letters she receives from China,” he lamented. Still, he never stopped writing, and on his home leave early in 1944, White sought her out. He felt it was time to make his feelings known, to say aloud what Annalee must already have guessed. He asked her to spend the last two weeks of his leave in his company, and she agreed, but then turned around and took a job with Time, effectively aborting the experiment, if that was what it was. Perhaps for her it was still too soon; perhaps she could not so easily substitute Teddy’s round, homely face for Mel’s dark, handsome one, which still haunted her dreams.

  White nevertheless clung to the prospect of Jacoby’s return to Chungking, and together they sought government permission for her to join the Time Inc. staff as his assistant. Teddy returned to China, and that fall, exerting influence as only he could, Henry Luce managed to get Annalee back there. She was the only woman correspondent in residence.

  Chungking no longer seemed to Jacoby the heroic little city it had once been. Air raids were rare now, the cavernous shelters hardly used, but there was more hunger. The city was full of refugees. The problem of inflation absorbed the Chinese to the detriment of all else. “All our old idealistic friends from 1941 had to do rather unsavory things in order to stay alive and feed their children,” Annalee noted. “Chiang’s troops were starving. Some didn’t even have straw sandals to go into battle.” The long-dormant war had become active as Japan launched an offensive aimed at capturing air bases the U.S. military had built across southeast China and from which they were bombing Japan. Ironically, by the time
Japan took the bases, it hardly mattered. The airfields in the Mariana Islands were operational, and Tokyo could be bombed from the south.

  Jacoby found the city and her life there depressing. She and White gathered information and pounded out their stories, but they weren’t stories that pleased Henry Luce. He did not want to know that China had lost its strategic importance in the conduct of the war, or that corruption under Chiang Kai-shek had reached such a state as to make normal commerce impossible, or that the army, also under Chiang, simply vanished into thin air when ordered to fight. He especially did not want to hear what Teddy and Annalee were reporting in dispatch after dispatch: that the only economy and the only army performing properly were Mao’s economy and Mao’s army operating out of Yenan.

  White and Jacoby had rooms next to each other in the press hostel. Teddy hoped that proximity would help sway Annalee’s affections, but that did not happen. In the middle of the compound lay the new Melville Jacoby Memorial Garden, assuring her late husband’s subliminal presence in her life. Teddy was her colleague and her friend, but her heart was not in the relationship, and he knew it. For the time being, he put Annalee in charge of the Chungking bureau and went off to report the war.

  It was during that period that Jacoby interviewed Chiang. When in 1941 she had worked for Madame Chiang’s United China Relief, the Chiangs had liked and trusted her. Now her opinions were no longer in sync with those of her boss on the subject of Chiang. Luce, she noted, still saw him as “an honest Christian, beloved by his people,” believed that “anyone who said otherwise was mistaken or Communist,” and had recently appointed a like-minded man by the name of Whittaker Chambers to the post of foreign news editor. Annalee’s interview produced little of note to report except Chiang’s proposal to make Sian the postwar capital. “This seemed an unlikely place,” she said, “lacking buildings, transportation, almost everything except charm, so I featured this in my dispatch and added some Chiang platitudes. Back came a long article, which went on for pages of questions I had not asked and answers Chiang had not given. Whittaker had made up the dialogue.”