The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  After Pearl Harbor, Dickey received accreditation from the War Department and became a news photographer for Look magazine in the Caribbean where Tony’s naval unit was combating German U-boats. U-boats were the big story, but one she was not allowed to tell. Although she worked for Look, she read Life avidly and wanted nothing more than to do cover stories or, better, be the cover story, as Margaret Bourke-White had once been. But Chapelle was not Look’s darling the way Bourke-White was Life’s-, she was let go, and returned to New York to wait for a second chance.

  That came in 1944 when she signed up with Life Story, a popular women’s monthly, to do a series on “the ordinary doings and problems of women’s lives,” and turned it into something else. Although her husband was opposed, Dickey persuaded her editor to send her to the Pacific. Early in 1945 she became accredited to the U. S. Navy while doing a story on navy flight-nurse training, then made the trip out with a new contingent of flight nurses. All her life she remembered how privileged and special she felt on that flight — at twenty-five, the youngest woman correspondent there. When the copilot of the Martin Mars climbed back to where Dickey and the nurses were sitting among the mailbags to tell them the marines had landed on this little island, he had to spell I-w-o J-i-m-a for them.

  By the time she hit the press room at navy headquarters in Hawaii, the news had turned bad. Whole units of assault troops were going in, only, it seemed, to be shot up or killed. Dickey decided this was the story for her. “I want you to be sure you’ll be the first woman somewhere,” her editor had whispered into her ear before she left. “Any of those islands will do.” So when the public relations officer asked her where she would like to go, she did not pause: “As far forward as you’ll let me.” Her request, however, did not find a sympathetic ear in Admiral Harold Miller, head of navy PR in the Pacific. He had just the job for a woman photographer, he said: to document photographically the use of whole blood in the treatment of the wounded, thus advertising the need for more blood donations from the folks back home. It was a good cause, but not the kind of thing Chapelle knew her editor was hoping for. Still, she thought she should be able to achieve both goals together. Miller wrote her orders for the hospital ship Samaritan, and Dickey left for Iwo.

  Pat Lochridge found her second day on the Solace more devastating than the first. For one thing, yesterday’s men were better able today to talk of their experience, and she heard of nothing but impenetrable blockhouses, thousand-pound rockets, huge mortar shells, no way to take cover, and everyone shivering in the raw cold. Worse than his wildest nightmares, one marine told her. Whenever there was a new arrival, they were full of questions about their units, their friends. “Only once was it still,” Lochridge recalled. “A red-haired corporal choked out the words: ‘They got me when they killed John.’ Each man knew that John was Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone, Congressional Medal of Honor veteran of Guadalcanal, whom all marines believed invulnerable. In the stillness I couldn’t bear the expression on their faces.”

  That day the accumulated smells of blood, disinfectants, gangrene, and death became more pervasive. Lochridge went up on deck. She had arranged to be taken ashore to see how the doctors and corpsmen were operating. She found the beach littered with equipment and stores unloaded from the ships but not yet distributed. Mortar fire was still heavy. Medical personnel patched up the wounded temporarily in beach casualty stations, but sometimes they were wounded a second time, or even killed, while they waited for the small boats to take them to the hospital ship.

  Lochridge returned to the Solace to find that the ship’s crew had been evicted from their quarters to provide more beds. Death also made for more room. “Some live and you don’t know why,” one of the surgeons told her. “Others die and you don’t know why either.” That evening Pat and the surgeon, exhausted and drained, stood together on the quarterdeck as the Solace struck off for Saipan.

  Peggy Hull Deuell was on Saipan. Japanese bombers no longer called there at night. “It is the time of the hill moon,” Deuell wrote, plainly infected by its lunar magic. “Under its soft light the camp becomes a landscape of surprising beauty. The tents look like small dark pyramids — dozens of them in orderly rows. The coconut palms, their tall gray trunks distinct in the moonlight, are great feather fans above the sleeping men.”

  But Peggy’s quiet was sharply broken the night the Solace reached harbor. Over the public address system came the summons to stretcher bearers to report to the receiving stations. “They’re coming in now,” said the redheaded nurse in Peggy’s tent, and they walked together up the hill to the brightly lighted platform in front of the Quonset hut lined with litters.

  Gray blankets cover the quiet figures. Medical officers kneel beside the wounded and give their commands in a low voice. “Fracture — X-ray room,” you hear, and a stretcher moves past. You look at the next litter, and the pallor, even in the deceiving night light, carries a significant warning. The pallor and the resignation, as if death had already been accepted. “Plasma now.” The doctor speaks cryptly [sic] as if he does not want to waste further time even with words.

  A young soldier smiles up at me from another litter. His blue eyes are bright. “Say, haven’t I seen you before?” he asks. “Didn’t I see you in Honolulu?” “Yes, I was there.” ... He talks with difficulty for his throat is encased in a vise-like cast. A bullet had gone through his mouth, taken out some of his teeth, and broken his neck — nonetheless he is cheerful.... Somehow his good humor, his banter, lifts the tragic pall from the scene. He, with the others, is just back from ash-covered, blood-saturated Iwo Jima, but from the wisecracks they toss at one another, from their bright remarks to the nurses and doctors, you would think they were just coming in from a football game.

  Peggy Hull Deuell was proving her worth at last.

  Dickey Chapelle’s experience on the Samaritan was much like Lochridge’s on the Solace except that Dickey saw it mostly through the lens of a camera. At the beginning she used that lens as insulation against shock. She stood by the gangway, trying to keep out of the way of the stretcher bearers, endlessly focusing and shooting. The wounded seemed to come in a stream that never slowed down, even when, more than once, she heard the doctor grunt to a boat crew that they had reached him too late. “Take him back,” he said hoarsely. “We only have space for the living.”

  The second day was much like the first, except that Chapelle went through the wards to check on the men she had photographed the day before. Having no names as yet, she had carefully copied the numbers from each man’s dog tags into her notebook. One marine sitting up on his bunk, an enormous bandage around his midsection, welcomed her enthusiastically, insisting she had taken his picture the previous day. Dickey didn’t remember him, but there was his number in her notebook. The face across from her simply bore no resemblance to the one she had photographed; fourteen pints of blood fed into his veins had made that much difference. She photographed him again, and the two pictures, taken twenty-four hours apart, were used on posters for years afterward to attract blood donors.

  Chapelle spent part of the day in one of the operating rooms, secured with a rope to the pipes overhead so that if she fainted, she would not fall on top of the patient. She found photographing amputations a grisly business. The surgeons averaged an amputation every thirty minutes, night and day, for three days running. Meanwhile, all the bunks were occupied, and men lay along the corridors on stretchers because there was nowhere to move them to. That evening the Samaritan threaded its way around the warships and, like the Solace before, left Iwo for Saipan.

  Pat Lochridge did not return to Iwo Jima, but Dickey Chapelle felt there was something inconclusive about her time there. For one thing, she had not set foot on the island, and she probably heard that Lochridge had. For another, her few days with the wounded had only served to whet her appetite for combat experience. Back in the big tent on Guam, she mentioned this to Reuters correspondent Barbara Finch, sitting cross-legged on her canvas cot. It
was Finch you went to when you needed specifics on the Pacific war. Among her most recent nuggets of information was the news that a field hospital had been set up by a captured airfield in the interior; Barbara had already flown there and back on an evac plane, and suggested that Dickey do the same. Dickey’s orders, once obtained, specified that she would photograph procedures using whole blood at the field hospital at Motoyama Airfield One. The round-trip flight would leave at 3 A.M. and return the same day — the navy’s way of insuring that no woman spent a night with the troops.

  Chapelle’s C-47 reached Iwo in good time, but had to circle a while over the airfield until sniper fire died down. When it landed, the pilot ordered her to hit the sand and keep running — no easy job carrying bulky camera equipment through ankle-deep volcanic ash. She set to work inside the three-tent hospital, where conditions were primitive in the extreme. Night operations took place by handheld flashlight. After photographing the whole-blood procedures, Dickey decided that she should have an exterior shot of the hospital as well. The trick to that was carrying twenty pounds of equipment up one of the fifteen-foot ridges — an accomplishment that left her more respectful of the marines with their seventy-pound packs.

  On the ridge she found three young officers laughing at her struggle. They asked what she was doing, and she knew she should have explained that she was photographing the hospital, and then done just that. Instead, she blurted out what she wanted to be doing, which was looking for the front. No doubt envisioning the tale they would tell their fellows, the young men were happy to oblige. They tucked her into their weapons carrier and drove about forty minutes along a cratered lane toward Mount Suribachi, at which point they came to a halt. Gesturing toward the great sooty range of ridges, they informed her that this was “somewhere on the front.”

  Chapelle climbed laboriously up one of the ridges and looked around. She had no idea which direction to focus on; it looked the same everywhere. She solved the problem by setting up her tripod and photographing in a great circle. It was hot and windy up there, and she could hear what sounded like invisible winged insects all around. In the distance were a few tanks, and now and then a marine popped up from a hole in the honeycombed ridges, looked around, and ducked down again. Dickey found it pretty scary, and as soon as she had her photos, she stumbled back down. The waiting officers, no doubt thinking of the dressing-down they would have received had she been shot, gave her the same. Was she crazy? Didn’t she know better than to stand up on a skyline and expose herself on all sides? Disgruntled, they returned her to the airfield.

  Back in the big tent on Guam, Barbara Finch listened to her story and laughed at the part about the whizzing insects. There was no animal life on Iwo, she said; what Dickey had heard was sniper fire. It took Dickey a moment to digest that fact. Apparently, she’d been to the front, she’d been shot at, she’d survived. She had crossed the divide, and she felt wonderful. She floated down the hill to the Quonset known as the “zebra hut,” after the stripes on the sleeves of the NCO (noncommissioned officer) reporters whose territory it was. Technically, it was off limits to civilians and officers, but it was handy, and as Finch had shown her, a woman could slip in quietly, type up her material, and slip out again. This evening, however — perhaps emboldened by her prowess in the field — Dickey typed up her story (the dateline read “March 5, 1945, Iwo Jima. Under Fire”) and then didn’t leave. Instead, as she recalled later, when she heard one of the men bitching about civilian reporters — how they didn’t want to go forward and never wrote about the marines anyway — she forgot herself and tore into him at length, naming correspondents who had gone in with the troops from Guadalcanal on, and concluding with a summary of her own stories since arrival, all of them about marines. Her outburst was met by stunned silence. She should have left right then while she was ahead, but again, she didn’t. “Now you just tell me,” she remembered blaring forth, “is there anything else this civilian correspondent can do for the United States Marine Corps?”

  The response was a resounding “Yes, ma’am!” accompanied by hoots of laughter. Chapelle flushed scarlet. The top NCO made his way across the room. “Come on, I’ll take you home now,” he said gently, and walked with her back up the hill, saluted, turned about, and retraced his steps. Dickey figured that from then on she’d be catching the jeep up to CINCPAC to do her typing. But the following morning when she started off to the civilian mess for breakfast, she was intercepted by three NCO correspondents. Why did she want to go eat “brass chow”? they asked. Theirs was much better. They took her to the big mess hall where she was amazed at the size of the portions and how good it tasted — and how comfortable she felt there. There was a lot of banter, much of it against officers, and as a correspondent holding captain’s status, she might have felt defensive. But clearly it was not directed at her; rather, she felt that they were all for her. Suddenly her insecurities — at being the rookie reporter in the big tent, at having a husband back in the States who she knew was seeing other women — began to fade. Lew Lowery, photographer for Leatherneck, the Marine Corps magazine, even came over to speak to her, and referred to her in front of the others as “our girl.”

  This marked the beginning of Dickey Chapelle’s love affair with the marines, which lasted the rest of her life.

  28

  Of Rain, Ruin, Relationships, and the Bridge at Remagen

  The winter of 1945 was the worst of the war. Wearing their Wac long Johns under thick wool fatigues, or dress uniforms topped by overcoats, the women correspondents were far better clothed than the civilians they moved among, friend or enemy. The weather was the Great Equalizer: it dealt the same heavy rains and bitter cold to both sides, and to all points along the front, from the northern reaches of the Rhine valley to the Vosges Mountains in Alsace and the Apennines in Italy. Nor were the cities spared; coal barges could not navigate on rivers swollen from constant rain. At the Scribe in Paris, there were two hours of heat each day. Women based there typed in their rooms with gloved hands. When Lee Miller went to the Palais Royal to see Colette, she photographed her in bed piled with fur coverings; they talked of the black market, the end of the war that for a while had seemed close and then wasn’t, and the cold. “Parisians are colder than they have been any other winter of the war,” Janet Flanner wrote in the New Yorker. “They are hungrier than they have been any other winter of the war. They are the hungriest they have been since the Prussian siege of Paris, when their grandparents ate mice.”

  Every week, it seemed, a new correspondent arrived. Some women brought years of valuable experience to their job, such as Virginia Lee Warren, veteran of the Washington Post and Time magazine, who replaced her husband, Milton Bracker, at the New York Times bureau in Rome to free him for field reporting. The AP’s Lyn Crost gave up a Washington staff job to cover the activities of those extraordinary Japanese-American soldiers in the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy and Alsace. But other newcomers were still in their twenties — less practiced, more concerned with proving themselves. Most prominent among these were Ann Stringer and Marguerite Higgins.

  Ann Stringer, United Press

  Ann Stringer arrived in Europe in the tender position of wife of a correspondent killed by enemy fire. She had grown up in Texas and gone to college there before marrying William Stringer, then UP bureau chief in Columbus, Ohio. After a stint on the Columbus Citizen, Ann too was hired by UP, and she and Bill were sent as a team to New York and Buenos Aires. But reporting the war in Europe was their goal, and when UP would not send them, Bill switched to Reuters and in the summer of 1944 left for France. Ann was to join him, but before that could happen, Bill, in a moment of bravado during the advance on Paris, drove his jeep into the town of Versailles and was hit by sniper fire.

  News of her husband’s death was the same news received by thousands of other young American women that summer, but it was less common among war correspondents. Only Annalee Jacoby had lost a husband, and that
was not at the hands of the enemy. A sympathetic UP management offered to send Ann to Europe, only to find that SHAEF was reluctant to allow her on the Continent for fear she might prove as rash as her husband. In time, however, SHAEF reversed itself, and in the lobby of the Scribe in Paris the UP chief introduced her to Colonel Barney Oldfield, head of the Ninth Army press camp, and placed her in his care.

  Everyone who knew Ann Stringer mentioned her beauty, but that she was both beautiful and bereaved lent her a special aura to which every healthy American male seemed susceptible. She was tall and slender, with shoulder-length light brown hair worn loose and what Oldfield referred to as “butter-melting” eyes. Wherever she went, heads turned, which could be dangerous when the head belonged to the driver of your jeep. Unhappy at the proscription against women in the combat zone, she was eager to make good as a war correspondent and justify UP’s faith in her. She also had in mind to complete what her husband had not been able to, although some officers feared she harbored a wish to complete it in the same way he had. Perhaps in her grief she saw no reason to be careful, causing every man around to conclude that he must be careful for her.

  Ann Stringer interviewing GIs, Germany, 1945.

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN.

  During February the Ninth Army moved steadily eastward, and Stringer with it. But her impatience was too evident and her timing too close for the officers at SHAEF when they saw her datelines in the Herald Tribune Paris edition. Oldfield received a teletype message reiterating the rule that a woman correspondent was to go “no further forward than women’s services go,” and that refusal to comply could cut short her stay with the Ninth or any other army. Personally, Oldfield believed that reporters of either sex should have the option of moving into a danger area as long as they were clear that was what they were doing. But his job was to enforce the rules, as he reminded the senior UP hand who complained when the message from SHAEF caused Ann to burst into tears. The dateline “With the Ninth Army in Germany” was fine, Barney said, but “With the First Troops in Julich” would only cause trouble.