When Henry Luce positioned the Chambers version of her interview as a Life cover story, Jacoby realized it was time to resign and go home.
In the fall of 1944 women won the fight for accreditation to the navy, and Shelley Mydans applied. It was her chance to be back in action with Carl, but for the moment she was slated for Guam, which was under the command of Admiral Nimitz and now boasted a press office, while her husband was scheduled for the Philippines, under General MacArthur and still closed to women. Life had promised Carl Mydans he could cover the recapture of Manila, and he traveled all the way from France to be there.
The landings on Luzon occurred in January 1945. The action signaled the first kamikaze attacks of the war, one of which killed a friend and fellow Life reporter on another vessel, but MacArthur’s flagship with Mydans aboard was spared. The immediate goal of the American forces was the prison camps, with the camp containing the survivors of the Bataan Death March as the first objective. When that sortie was successful, it was decided to risk a sixty-mile dash into the heart of Manila to liberate Santo Tomas, where Carl and Shelley had spent eight months of internment, and where after three long years some 3,700 Americans were still held.
Later Carl described to Shelley exactly what happened on that first day of February 1945. The jeep he shared with other reporters, including Frank Hewlett of UP whose wife was in Santo Tomas, was fourth in line after the tanks. There were rivers to ford and bullets to dodge. At one point an essential bridge had just been mined, but an officer dashed over and stamped out the burning fuses. A cheering populace greeted them in Manila, but again they did not pause, and night had fallen by the time they reached the entrance to the old university. The first tank turned in, and Carl was amazed to see, as he wrote later, “that gate and fence, which had stood so long between me and freedom, fall over like a painted illusion.”
Mydans and Hewlett ran for the main building. Inside they could see by a few flickering candles that the lobby and great stairway were crowded with people who at first would not believe that the two men facing them were Americans. “If you are Americans,” one said, “put that flashlight on yourself.” Mydans turned the light on his own face. “I’m Carl Mydans,” he said, and that was all he got out before he was mobbed.
This and much more was what Carl told Shelley when, a few weeks later, he flew to Guam. Shelley had been there for some weeks, and she was full of optimism about the progress of the war. Having just witnessed how hard the Japanese were fighting in the Philippines, Carl was surprised by her confident assertions that a sense of futility was sweeping Japan and that defeat was now expected. He accompanied her to the briefing room in an oversized Quonset hut where the commanding officer had just informed rows of airmen sitting before him that their target that night would be — yes, again — Tokyo. The men, smoking, chewing gum, sipping coffee out of heavy mugs, faced a huge photo-mosaic that covered the entire wall, on which one could see every street and building still standing in the Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama industrial area. As Shelley and Carl watched, a slender young intelligence officer aimed his pointer at one of the few sections not already burned to blackness on the photograph. “This is the area we’re taking out tonight,” he said, noting that it was light industrial, small aircraft engine plants, shops, some residential, mostly wooden structures. The population density ran at about 30,000 per square mile. He moved on to the weather pattern, and the men sat there immobile, inured to figures, lumping together information like “minimum ground wind” with “population 30,000 per square mile” as if they were equivalent.
Later Shelley showed Carl the file of Japanese home radio broadcasts. The city of Tokyo was a great wasteland, they read, “literally scorched to the ground,” although Japanese civilians were still being told that to conform to an “unconditional surrender” would be foolish. That night they followed the B-29 crews out onto the airfield. As they stood watching the great planes lift one by one into the soft night air, they could only wonder how much longer the Japanese could hold out.
Later that winter, on assignment for Life, Shelley joined flight nurse Victoria Pavlowski on the middle leg of the 4,757-mile trip from Leyte in the Philippines to Hawaii. The nurses of the Army Air Transport Command had already brought tens of thousands of sick and wounded from their island battlefields back to home ground. The nurses were young and pretty, Shelley reported, and inordinately admired by their lonely charges, but their jobs were an endless succession of weariness and danger.
After they took off, Mydans took notes on Pavlowski’s routine: taking temperatures, dispensing sleeping pills, codeine, or morphine for those needing it. Pavlowski brought out more blankets, as the heat on the ground had already been replaced by the cold of the sky. In the dim light the men who were not sleeping were watching her. “From the shadow of the litters I could see their eyes as they turned from staring above them to look at her neat head and slim shoulders in the baggy flight suit,” Shelley wrote. When the two port-side engines suddenly cut out and the plane dropped, they looked to her for reassurance. Her face did not change. Grasping the nearest litter to steady herself, she leaned down and, smiling, spoke to a young soldier in a body cast. The engines cut in again and the plane steadied, but all Shelley could think of was the phrase “prepare to ditch,” and the image of this kid swimming for his life in a body cast.
That called to mind stories she had heard other nurses tell. One, whose plane had crash-landed on a tiny island south of Guadalcanal, had managed to save all her patients, even the GI whose neck had been slit in the crash; she put a tube down his throat and syphoned out the blood with an ear syringe. When the rescue boat came, there wasn’t enough room for them and her too, so she swam out to the ship anchored beyond the coral reefs. Another nurse, when the pilot told everyone to prepare to ditch, propped up and held close to her a young blind soldier until, two hours later, the plane limped in onto Hickam Field. Watching Victoria Pavlowski now, Shelley understood the combination of desperate tiredness and exhilaration on their faces when each trip was over.
At last MacArthur lifted the ban against women reporters, and Shelley was among the first invited to return to the Philippines. Nearly three years had passed since she left Manila, and she was anxious to see the city. Throngs of people filled the streets. She and Carl drove around to all the places they had known, such as the Bay View Hotel where they and the Jacobys were staying when the Japanese invaded, now only a shell. Navy landing craft had replaced the sailboats in the little harbor, but otherwise the city appeared to be returning to some kind of normalcy.
The gates were open at Santo Tomas when they reached it. Morning glories covered the bunker. All the prisoners had been sent home and the main building turned into an army hospital. Shelley and Carl walked up to their old quarters. The wall between their two rooms had been torn down, and twenty-six GIs lay in rows of white beds where sixty-five prisoners once had lived. In the far corner a soldier, yellowed with jaundice, was reading. They went over to him. “This is where my husband slept when we were prisoners here,” Shelley said, but he just stared at them, not comprehending.
27
Iwo Jima
The battle for Iwo Jima in February 1945 was the first in which women correspondents in the Pacific were allowed in a combat area. Accreditation to the navy (implying permission to travel on and report from navy vessels) had just come through, and only a few women — new to the Pacific, and to the war itself — were available to go. Patricia Lochridge was one.
Patricia Lochridge, Woman’s Home Companion
Pat Lochridge grew up in Austin, Texas, where her father was editor and publisher of the Austin Statesman. After graduating from Wellesley and the Columbia School of Journalism, she followed the time-honored course of young journalists and joined the staff of a small daily paper — this one in Mexico, Missouri. It was valuable experience but lacking in glamour, and when in the late 1930s CBS, just forming a news staff, offered her a job at their Madison Avenue office, she g
rabbed it. It was not all news writing, she recalled; one reason it was offered to a woman was that, in the same time-honored way, she could double as secretary. It also fell to her to cover on weekends, and as Hitler’s armies always invaded on weekends, it was Pat who would open the network and see that the latest news got on the air. She often worked seven days a week, and during vacations kept in the swing by writing magazine articles.
After Pearl Harbor, Lochridge went to Washington to work for the Office of War Information (OWI), but left a year later for a job at Crowell Collier, publisher of Collier’s and Woman’s Home Companion. It was only natural that when an opening for a woman in the Pacific came up, the Companion asked Pat if she would like to go. There was a publicity angle to the position; she would be the magazine’s emissary. Her uniform was made to order by Saks Fifth Avenue. She was photographed by Warner Brothers and promoted as the Companion’s Fearless Girl Reporter, and she met regularly with advertisers. Uncomplaining, she was nevertheless grateful that this kind of hype was seldom seen by other reporters.
Patricia Lochridge with wounded ready for evacuation, Saipan, 1945.
STEVE BULL PERSONAL COLLECTION.
The voyage to Honolulu was an education in itself. The troopship was triple-loaded, which meant that each bunk was occupied by three persons alternately, eight hours each. Lochridge bunked with the nurses and played poker with air force officers.
Hawaii, under the command of Admiral Nimitz, was billed as a “forward area,” although Pat later said, “Playing tennis with the Nimitzes was not my idea of activity for a forward area.” Still, she managed to get one very good story, about the women who worked at Hickam Air Force Base doing repairs. “They lived in Quonset huts and worked the same kind of assembly line that women were doing in Nebraska or New York,” Pat recalled later, but the newsworthy part was that they were available single women plunked down in a sea of men. On their off hours they went to Waikiki Beach, among other places, and inevitably formed relationships. Since this put them in the category of a hazard to “home and hearth,” which the military did not want the home front to know about, Lochridge was convinced her story would not pass the censor if filed in a normal way. She solved that problem by prevailing upon a friendly air force colonel to pick her up at her hotel at 2 A.M. and take her to the night censor, who was believed to be more lenient. (Apparently she charmed the colonel that night — or perhaps she already had. He later became her second husband.)
Dickey Chapelle.
PHOTO BY M/SGT. LEW LOWERY, USMC. STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN.
In January 1945, Patricia Lochridge, Peggy Hull Deuell, and Barbara Finch, an American woman married to an Englishman and working with him for the British wire service Reuters, received accreditation to the Pacific fleet. They were authorized to go to “Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Guadalcanal, New Hebrides, Angaur, Peleliu, Christmas, Funafuti, Samoa, Tongatabu [sic], Ulithi, Tarawa, Makin, Apamama [sic] and other ... points in the POA (Pacific Ocean Area).” Within days Shelley Mydans and Bonnie Wiley of the AP had acquired the same. The dike was open.
Almost at once they began shipping out for Guam. There they were consigned to a single large tent near the commander’s quarters, on the theory that the sentries there would protect them as well. Although Guam had been captured six months before, even on apparently secure islands a few desperate enemy holdouts remained. The unsecured island of the moment — the island toward which all focus had turned — was Iwo Jima.
Iwo Jima is small — some five miles long, and half that in breadth at its widest point. Because it afforded only one landing area, troops and press were thrown into close proximity. No one on Iwo was ever very far from anyone else, friend or foe, and there were a great many of the latter, well-armed and entrenched in strong fortifications. The importance of the island was its position. From bases on Saipan and Guam, B-29s could fly to Japan, unload their bombs, and return without refueling, but they needed the protection of fighter escorts, which had a shorter range. And there, directly in line between the Mariana Islands and central Japan, lay this volcanic bulge of sand and clay, dotted with stunted trees and devoid of animal life except for typhus-carrying mites.
The battle for Iwo Jima was mostly a Marine Corps operation. The navy supplied the transport, the shellfire that provided cover for the troops while landing, the planes that strafed Japanese positions from above, and the hospital ships that took on the wounded. But the assaults were made by marines, and the long lists of casualties were marine casualties.
Women correspondents covered the battle from the hospital ships. Pat Lochridge arrived on a cold gray morning, four days after the initial landing, aboard the hospital ship Solace. She stood on the windy upper deck with a group of doctors, dreading what she knew she must see in just a few more hours. Unsure how well she would handle it, she was grateful when a young surgeon handed her a small bottle of ammonia to use “if things get too rough and you feel faint.”
Writing for a magazine and facing no immediate deadline, Lochridge could include considerably more detail than, say, the AP reporter Bonnie Wiley, whose Iwo trip two days before had of necessity been condensed into a few wire service dispatches. Pat described how the Solace maneuvered among battleships, cruisers, and carriers to anchor within several hundred yards of the battle-scarred, black sand beach. The gangplank was lowered, and almost immediately the ship was surrounded by small boats transporting the wounded from the beach, or from combat ships where they had found temporary refuge. The sea was rough, making the transfer difficult.
The wounded came on and on. Some still had their rifles; others were naked except for their battle dressings. Most were in terrible pain. All were terribly brave. By late afternoon we had taken aboard almost four hundred patients, to be put into bunks, given transfusions and medicines; to be cleaned up and have their dressings changed; to be fed a hot dinner with perhaps a drink of medicinal whisky to warm them after their cold days on Iwo.
By nightfall the neat shining white wards with their double-decked bunks were almost filled. On the once spotless white decks were little piles of dirty bloodstained clothing which had been cut off the men. The stain was everywhere — a splash on the toe of my shoe, litde droplets on a railing where I rested my hand. You fortify yourself against it in the operating rooms, train yourself to ignore it on the doctors’ white gowns. But there is no getting used to it everywhere.
Lochridge moved about the wards with the two chaplains, helping when and however they could, but only too aware that theirs was not the real work. That was done by the seventeen doctors, thirteen nurses, and 175 corpsmen who never rested. At dusk the Solace put out to sea so that its lighted decks and spotlighted red crosses would not indicate the position of the rest of the blacked-out fleet. There, as the ship rocked and pitched, the medical staff worked on. Abdominal wounds came first, then brain and chest operations, finally amputations. “Six men died,” Lochridge reported. “But three hundred and ninety-six of the worst shot-up men in the war were still alive in the morning when we returned to our post beside Iwo’s crowded bloody beach.”
She had survived the first day. Amid all the suffering there had been one moment to raise the spirit. It had occurred quite early when a marine was carried on board swathed in bloody bandages, but volubly happy. “Take a look at that,” he sang out, half rising from his stretcher to look back shoreward. Pat could just make out tiny figures struggling up the large extinct volcano known as Suribachi. “And then we saw it,” she wrote later, “an American flag on the peak, snapping in the wind. The marine lay back and smiled. ‘I helped put her there this morning,’ he said.”
In the press office on Guam, directly connected to the communications ship Eldorado anchored off Iwo Jima, a young woman was absorbing this news of the flag with increasing amazement. The teletype machine was monitored by a handful of rewrite experts whose job it was to relay dispatches from the battle zones. Watching it with them, Dickey Chapelle first learned that new marine unit
s had arrived that morning. The rewrite men nodded; that had been expected. The staccato continued: AN UNCONFIRMED RUMOR . . . THE FLAG HAS BEEN SIGHTED ON THE TOP OF THE HIGHEST POINT OF THE SAVAGELY CONTESTED SOIL OF... The men thought that improbable. Still, the tension was palpable. Suddenly the teletype clicked on again: IT HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY CONFIRMED THAT THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES NOW FLIES FROM MOUNT SURIBACHI HIGHEST POINT OF THIS VOLCANIC ISLAND. The room erupted in a cheer.
Dickey Chapelle, Life Story magazine
Dickey Chapelle first heard the words “Iwo Jima” aboard the large transport plane Martin Mars bound for Honolulu. Born Georgette Louise Meyer, blond and blue-eyed, she grew up a chubby, nearsighted child in a Milwaukee suburb, always marching to a different drummer from her classmates. Her idol was Admiral Richard E. Byrd who first flew over the South Pole the year she was ten. Tired of being called Georgie, she took the name Dickey from him. Dickey was accepted at M.I.T. on a full scholarship, highly unusual for a sixteen-year-old girl in 1935, but bored with her classes, she spent her days hanging around the Boston Navy Yard, or the airport, or watching the sophisticated tracking system at the Coast Guard station, and then describing the scene in stories for the Boston Traveler. It was a blow to her ego when she flunked out, but otherwise a relief. Migrating to New York, she contributed stories to the New York Times on air shows and daredevil flying exercises in which she signed on as a passenger in order to describe the sensations firsthand. At nineteen she took up photography with the same enthusiasm, and at twenty-two married her teacher, Tony Chapelle, a charming World War I navy photographer more than twice her age and, unknown to Dickey, still married to another woman.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 33
