The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Marguerite Higgins.

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN.

  Early in March 1945 the First Army reached Cologne, and a few days after its capture Janet Flanner, Marjorie “Dot” Avery, Catherine Coyne, and Lee Miller arrived. They found lodging in an apartment only slightly less shattered than most. Flanner was glad to be out of Paris, which made her edgy. With the cold beginning to abate, nightlife had returned, and for many GIs and journalists it had become the good-time place. Life at the Scribe reflected that. Ravished Cologne better suited her mood.

  All four women recalled how horrible the destruction of Aachen had seemed when they first saw it. Miller remembered climbing onto some wreckage to photograph the cathedral and causing an avalanche of debris upon which she slid to the street. “Half-buried, putrefying flesh ... clung to my hands, elbows and bottom,” she had written. But now Cologne seemed worse. “Aachen died in a different way,” Flanner noted; “its handsome melancholy skeleton is left upright; behind its elegant, carved facades, it was burned out. Cologne and its heavy, medieval pomp were blown up. By its river bank, Cologne lies recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat.”

  Coyne agreed. One did not see a whole building anywhere, she wrote, only piles of rubble from which flew white flags, indicating that underneath homes were still operational. She could not imagine living for two years with no gas for cooking, no telephone, intermittent electricity, all while under frequent attack. On Sunday she watched with amazement as the citizens took their customary Sunday promenade along the rubble-lined streets; on Monday it was even more astonishing to see men setting off briskly from their bombed-out hovels with their briefcases as if going to the office. Where in fact they were going she could not guess. Avery was surprised by the plenitude of items not to be found anywhere else. An abundance of food was the most obvious, but little things, too, like paper clips (which were hardly available even in America), rubber items, even paper napkins. And how well dressed, if a little dusty, people seemed to be.

  The four women were present in the cobbled prison yard the day more than fifty people were freed from the Klingelputz Gestapo prison. Avery described how the living had to be sorted from the dead, lying together as they were on the stone floors. First to walk out was a thin but lovely nineteen-year-old Belgian girl arrested for helping French prisoners elude the Germans, then starved and beaten in an attempt to make her talk. A young Frenchman with sunken cheeks but a disarming smile followed. After that, in no particular order, emerged a Dutchwoman caught with her husband and daughter listening to the BBC; a woman from Brussels who, unable to forget the five weeks she had spent naked in solitary confinement in the prison cellar, wept uncontrollably; an emaciated sixteen-year-old Dutch boy; and a little Russian girl who repeated the same phrases over and over, about the beatings and the hunger and the cold.

  “They came out into the sunlight one by one,” Avery reported, “and stood around the courtyard holding small suitcases or bundles.... To me it was a glimpse into an unknown and horrifying world.” Flanner wrote of “a thin young Belgian, in what had once been good tweeds, praying over a mound of earth in the prison courtyard. His father and four other prisoners had been buried there the night before our soldiers came in.” She was glad for the witness of her colleagues, so that their accounts, being the same, would be believed. Miller was as horrified by the implications as the facts. “This went on in a great German city,” she pointed out, “where the inhabitants must have known and acquiesced or at the very least suspected and ignored the activities of their lovers and spouses and sons.”

  Before they left, the women visited the great cathedral, its twin spires the tallest in Europe. American bombers had made an effort to spare it, and indeed it was gauged to be only ten percent damaged, although you thought more when you walked ankle-deep through the debris and gazed at the leaden sky through two gaping holes in the roof, Coyne said. Flanner conjectured that “Cologne’s panorama of ruin” would be what American soldiers could expect now in city after city. And however the Allies might eventually divide Germany, she wrote, “her cities, if they are like Cologne, are already divided into morsels of stone no bigger than your hand.”

  From the cathedral square the women looked out on what was left of the once great bridge spanning the Rhine, blown by the retreating Germans to a mass of twisted steel. The Allies would not cross the Rhine at Cologne.

  March was also the month when that most controversial of women correspondents Marguerite Higgins moved out of Paris toward the front.

  Marguerite Higgins, New York Herald Tribune

  Born in Hong Kong, Marguerite Higgins was the only child of a steamship company agent, once an American World War I flier, and his French wife, whom he had met in a Paris bomb shelter. Maggie, as she was called, grew up fluent in French, and with an imagination steeped in her father’s war stories. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, she apprenticed at several small California papers before entering the Columbia University School of Journalism on a scholarship. There she achieved two journalistic coups, genderwise: she was taken on by the New York Herald Tribune as their first female campus correspondent, and she was hired by them right after graduation in 1942. Despite an active social life revolving around the city room, Higgins got married that summer — to Stanley Moore, a young, upper-class leftist philosopher she had known in California, now an air force recruit. But neither job nor marriage met her expectations: she was soon openly unfaithful, as well as vocally desirous of quitting run-of-the-mill reporting to cover the war. That aspiration placed her at the bottom of a long list of hopefuls, and the Herald Tribune was not about to leapfrog her to the top — not at least until she persuaded publisher and feminist Helen Rogers Reid to do just that. By the fall of 1944 Higgins was accredited and off on the Queen Mary, if just barely.

  The luxury-liner-now-troopship made the crossing from New York to Southampton twice a month, departing at midnight in an attempt to avoid any U-boats still about. On the night of the sailing, seven of the eight expected correspondents were assembled on deck. The Queen Mary approached Ambrose Light, and the pilot was lowered over the side. But when the ladder was raised, reporters, crew, and an entire army regiment were amazed to see a young woman in full army uniform clinging to it, blond hair blowing out from under her helmet. Marguerite Higgins was off to war, and the style of her leave-taking was only one of many unorthodox acts etched into the minds of her fellow correspondents.

  Marguerite’s husband Stanley, posted in London, had a room at the Savoy reserved for her. While she awaited her orders to the Continent, they had several months together, dining and dancing as well as working. But the honeymoon idyll soon turned to frustration. If their goals had ever been the same, they were no longer; for Maggie, life as a wife quickly paled before that of a war correspondent. In January 1945 they parted ways. At the Scribe in Paris, Higgins worked hard. Her French stood her in good stead: she read all the Paris dailies before writing her own copy, often on politics or the economic situation. She had also taken on the position of “foreign correspondent” for Mademoiselle magazine, to which she posted stories on wartime fashion and lifestyle, along with dramatic tales told her by refugees from the newly liberated countries. But she wanted nothing so much as to go to the front, and was delighted when, in mid-March, she was sent to the Ninth Air Force base in Germany. Others were not so pleased.

  Maggie Higgins was well remembered by her female colleagues. Their lack of enthusiasm owed something to her youth (twenty-four), her half-innocent, half-sexy kind of prettiness, and her wealth of energy at a time when many of them were very tired. It owed much also to her doing, as a matter of course, what most of them scorned to do, which was to use her femininity to get something she could not acquire otherwise — not that she was the only one ever to do that. Then there was her driven personality, the ambition that fueled her often frenetic activity, her solipsism — attributes that were not always pleasan
t to be around. Helen Kirkpatrick recalled that she, Lee Miller, Higgins, and a fourth correspondent went to the outskirts of Cologne and took over a house for a day or two. There was no running water, and the beds were all in the same room. Everyone except Maggie wanted the window open at night, but each time it was opened, she would get up and close it. The unwritten rule of correspondents — that new arrivals defer to the old hands — she blatantly ignored. The old hands in this case had never met anyone so determined, and so adept at tramping on toes.

  From Higgins’s point of view, she did not have time for social amenities. She had come to the war very late; probably only a few weeks remained, and she had to make the most of them, she just had to. Nothing else mattered. But to the women whose paths she crossed — none of whose papers were competitors of hers — certain things did matter, like courtesy, an attempt at cleanliness, a sense of humor, and what they saw as a reasonable view of one’s place in the universe. In that spring of 1945 these were not Maggie’s strong points, and she was not easily forgiven.

  Marguerite Higgins’s radical views on sex constituted another point of contention with many of the women correspondents. The subject of sex was a touchy one. There were few discernible signs of a sexual revolution in the 1940s; even during the war, with their boyfriends and fiances going off to possible death, “nice girls” were expected to say no and remain virgins, although, of course, many did not. The practices of women correspondents were similarly varied. After Lee Carson went to Europe, Pat Lochridge moved into her Washington apartment for a time, and was startled to find a stack of condoms in her medicine cabinet. The profession of journalism was hardly immune to the double standard of the time, as Carson had discovered, or rediscovered, when she joined the First Army press camp and was accused of getting human interest stories by dancing with the troops. Women were attacked for trading sex for information and thereby advancing their careers, which in fact happened rarely, but no one suggested that the men involved might have borne part of the blame.

  Whatever happened in private, most women were discreet on the job. They were more apt to form liaisons with other reporters with whom they had regular contact than with the military, although both occurred. Some women — Catherine Coyne was one — were outspoken in their opposition to women engaging in relationships with male colleagues who they knew had wives back home, but others, probably the majority, had no blanket rules. War had a way of breaking down absolutes.

  With the ratio between men and women in the press so skewed, most women had more opportunities for sex, or relationships leading to sex, than they cared to think about. A woman working out of a particular press camp spent much of her time in a jeep, so it was well to be choosy about who her companions were. Iris Carpenter traveled with two British correspondents, and it became awkward for her when one of them became emotionally attached and wanted more than just jeep time. Lee Carson began sharing a jeep with her AP competitor, Don Whitehead, in a close, steady relationship that drove the ever-suspicious AP head, Wes Gallagher, crazy. Calm and dependable in a crisis, Whitehead was also married, but few people condemned the strong mutual attachment between two people who were so happy in it themselves. “Lee was quite frank about it,” Carpenter said later. “She felt she needed sex, that it made her forget the daily horror of the war. Other people didn’t feel it comforted them in any way. For me there was too much else to think about — there was so much horror that sex didn’t belong somehow. People are all different.”

  Intent though she was on establishing her credentials, Ann Stringer found it hard to ignore the men who flocked around her. She had difficulty resolving her feelings about her husband’s death, and was often depressed because she could not reconcile the dualities of her nature. She had moved to the First Army where Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter might have helped her, but there is no indication she sought help from them. Perhaps she saw Lee (INS) as the competition, and Iris was not without her English reserve. Stringer was still under SHAEF prohibition from combat situations, which meant she had to move about judiciously and be careful how she worded her datelines. It also meant she had to seek out her own transportation, although INS photographer Allan Jackson was happy to oblige with a seat in his “liberated” Ford V8 convertible coupe.

  One day Stringer and Jackson drove up to the market town of Eschweiler to visit the Fourth Division. They happened to catch a tank battle in the street; the Americans won, but there were dead and wounded. It was always distressing to correspondents, particularly women, to see young Americans die, and to Ann, with her husband always in mind, this was especially true. After the battle it was too late to reach First Army headquarters before dark, so Ann wrote her story and Allan his captions, and the press officer sent these back by courier and found them quarters for the night in a German farmhouse. They were lodged over the barn where they could hear the cows and feel the warmth and smell the odors coming up through cracks in the floor. Their hosts provided fresh eggs, bread, and milk for breakfast, and they made coffee from their own supply. It was blissful to linger there over the barn, to absorb the simple country sounds and smells — for Ann, a few hours of healing after the stress of the previous day and the recurrent images she carried with her.

  But not all relationships were fresh and exciting. To the relief of both parties involved, an old one was reaching dissolution. Early that March Martha Gellhorn was in London, in bed with flu at the Dorchester when Hemingway came to see her. Assured of Allied success in the war, he was on his way home, i.e., to the Finca Vigia, the farmhouse outside Havana that Martha had discovered and renovated, and where they had lived, sometimes together, seldom in harmony. He would divorce her in Cuba, Ernest said; that was the simplest solution, since both were residents there. She acquiesced, grateful that she need not leave the war for a spell in Reno. Her first thought was to change the name on her passport back to Gellhorn. “I wanted above all to be free of him and his name,” she said. At the time Hemingway thought he wanted to be free of her as well, but in fact this remained throughout his life the most traumatic of all his separations.

  Nowhere that winter were the women very far from the Rhine. That great waterway was a major logistical obstacle, and one that carried mystical importance as well. Now that the Siegfried Line had proved vulnerable, the river was the only significant barrier between Allied forces and the heart of Germany. Hitler’s armies retreated steadily eastward, blowing up bridges behind them.

  British Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and General George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army, both assumed the goal of crossing the Rhine as a personal mission. Women were among the correspondents who had linked up with Patton’s forces. Catherine Coyne recalled a briefing he held at this time at which she and Dot Avery were present. “He came in with his raincoat and his gun belt with the two ivory-handled pistols, his fluffy white hair and his foxy grandpa voice. He stood up there, and his aide said, as a kind of preemptive strike, ‘There are women here,’ and he replied, ‘So I see.’ He said to us, ‘You’ll have to excuse my language.’ Every time he spoke of the enemy, he called them the ‘son-of-a-bitch’ Germans or Krauts or whatever. And every time he did that, he’d turn to Dot and me and apologize. It made her furious, that he would single us out that way, but I thought it was very funny”

  Virginia Irwin was with Patton’s Fourth Armored Division when they made their dash to the Rhine. On the morning of March 5, 1945, what Irwin referred to (in print) as “the hard-bitten, horny-handed tankers of the Fourth Armored” set out from the little village of Erdorf. By the night of the seventh they had cut through six German divisions to the Rhine valley. In their wake the smoke of burning German vehicles and oil dumps lay like a dense fog. Those Germans still alive were “scared witless, begging to be taken prisoners,” Virginia wrote. There were about four thousand of them; other booty included an estimated thousand vehicles, not including tanks, an ordnance depot intact, and piles of artillery and other equipment.

  The Fourth Ar
mored was moving so fast, Irwin reported, and the nearest infantry support was so far behind, that they might at any time have been cut off by the Germans. “It was not a comfortable feeling sitting up with these tankers at the fingertip of the attenuated spearhead only as wide as the road we had traveled,” she said. The prisoners were so numerous that there was no way to accommodate them but to send them westward, on foot, unarmed, often unaccompanied. “Everywhere, as I traveled today up to the most favored forward tank position, the krauts are getting in the way of military traffic. In their stumbling long overcoats they march in straggling columns with their ‘leader’ waving a white flag like a way-station depot master trying to flag a fast freight.”

  On the morning of the ninth, Irwin drifted down for a closer look at the Rhine, then stopped in at headquarters for a cup of coffee, where she learned that the route she had just taken was in range of six 105 howitzers. Anything might have happened, and why Virginia was so far to the front is not clear. As the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch’s primary correspondent, she may have acquired special status, or perhaps she and Patton had spent a rainy evening sitting around cussing the enemy together. Certainly, in the six months since she “shook like an aspen leaf” on encountering the enemy on the road to Paris, the cowardly lioness had found her courage.

  While Irwin waited with Patton’s Fourth Armored, patrols of the First Army’s Ninth Armored Division to the north were battling down the west bank of the Rhine to link up with them. One patrol, the Fourteenth Tank Battalion, had orders to take the town of Remagen, site of the old Ludendorff railway bridge, which the Allied command assumed the Germans would by now have destroyed. But as Iris Carpenter told the story, the patrol came out of the woods above the town to see the bridge still there, “strung from the face of a five-hundred-foot black cliff to the cream-colored huddle of houses which was Remagen village, across one of the most breathtakingly beautiful stretches of waterway in the world.” Not only was it beautifully intact, it was crowded with German tanks and troops streaming eastward.