The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  What happened next, Carpenter reported, was this: A platoon of tanks twisted down the hairpin road to Remagen, where the crew learned that the bridge was wired to be blown up at four that afternoon. It was then three-fifteen. Company A Infantry of the First Army Armored Division reached the bridge at ten minutes to four to find the Germans desperately trying to blow the charges early; they had succeeded in knocking out a support pier and blasting a large hole in the bridge surface about two-thirds of the way across. But three Company A engineers, working feverishly, managed to cut the wires of the forty-pound explosives below deck, and then sped across the bridge to cut the main cable. When that proved too thick for their instruments, they shot it through, and the infantry started across in the face of German machine-gun fire. While two sharpshooter sergeants picked off the enemy gunners, the rest of Company A raced over and up against the face of the cliff. The Germans above tried everything to dislodge them, including hurling rocks, but the Americans held. After dark the tanks and tank destroyers started across the narrow bridge, its surface mere planks laid across the railroad tracks. One vehicle slipped off the roadway and hung precariously near the edge, holding up traffic when every moment was precious, but somehow it was towed off and the procession resumed.

  General Courtney Hodges, First Army commander, when notified, ordered troops in the area to “get everything you’ve got over.” “Pour everything you’ve got across!” General Omar Bradley, Ike’s second in command, shouted into the telephone. Everyone began to see the Remagen bridge as the conduit for a quick Allied victory — that is, until word came from SHAEF that three divisions across would be quite enough, and everyone else was to continue with the execution of Montgomery’s northern offensive as planned. The British field marshal had been promised the prize of first across the Rhine, and he was not happy with this impulsive, unplanned pounce of the American First Army.

  Back in Spa, Iris Carpenter, Lee Carson, and Ann Stringer had been complaining that the First Army press camp was too far behind the lines, and never more so than when word came of the events at Remagen. When Carpenter, her jeep buddies, and driver left Spa at four the next morning, it was cold with a dismal rain. Before long they were wet through and covered with yellow ooze from passing vehicles. As bad as the weather, the terrain was narrow and twisted, and marked by craters which, to the surprise of the Allies, German civilians were filling in. Nobody had asked them to, Iris said; they saw that it needed doing, grabbed shovels, and set to work. But if this was a bright spot in the trip, it was the only one. She and her jeep buddies were united in their opinion that for anything but crossing the Rhine, they would not be there.

  After seven hours they came within sight of the bridge. “The narrow road looped steeply through woods and vineyards to bring us opposite twin gray stone towers, and a long ribbon of boardwalk that disappeared into the black cliff face on the far bank,” Iris reported. An MP told them to park their jeep under the bridge and foot it over with the infantry, “but keep ten paces between you and the next guy — it’s hot around here!”

  Writing of it later, Carpenter did not mention the gunfire on the way across. What she remembered, while traversing the narrow footpath above the steely gray and fast-flowing river, was the view in front of her: “the incredible loveliness of the Rhineland — schloss-drowned hills, terraced vineyards, and cream-and-yellow villages looking like bunches of primroses tucked into the country’s corsage.” She also remembered the fair-haired German soldier they had to step over. “Don’t look at his face, Iris,” her colleague turned to warn her, but she did, and thought there could be nothing so blue as those eyes. Then, having reached the tunnel at the far end, they solemnly shook hands before beginning accelerated interviews of everyone in sight, especially the proud troops of the Ninth Armored.

  Later they recrossed the bridge to an accompaniment of shells, but the river road home proved even more hazardous. It was seven o’clock when they pulled into Spa. Aching from the long hard ride and the tension, Iris plunked herself down next to Lee Carson who was already pounding away at her typewriter. Both were mud-caked and disheveled, but they had crossed the Rhine and made it back to tell the tale. “German armed forces on both the east and western banks of the Rhine deteriorated into a state of complete chaos today in the sector where the U.S. 1st Army made a spectacular surprise crossing of the Rhine,” Lee wrote. “The Germans frantically scoured their front for reserves to throw against the rapidly-expanding Remagen front. But in the meantime, American tanks, heavy guns, men and materials poured across the bridge in an endless stream.”

  Both women went back to the bridge the next day — Lee without her helmet, having left it “at home on the piano.” “Home” is an existential in wartime. Lee and Iris walked across the bridge together; enemy artillery fire had been pounding it since dawn, and ack-ack batteries were going strong. At one point they were down at the river bank with other reporters inspecting some engineering when five ME-109s approached. “We gazed confidently at the planes zooming down until the ack-ack let loose and then everyone wished he had paid a little more attention to aircraft identification instruction,” Lee reported. “By the time I swan-dived into a foxhole some yards from the road the planes were so close I could see the pilots in the cockpits. The combination of falling flak, enemy strafing and bombing made the foxhole seem entirely inadequate. For the first time I felt like a high priority target, hand-picked by Berlin.” But the “hand-picked” target proved instead to be the London Daily Telegraph correspondent, one of their “family” (another wartime existential) at Spa, who had not dodged an incoming shell quite fast enough. “One minute he was there, alive, talking to us, and the next he was gone,” Iris recalled later. “I realized then it could happen to any of us.”

  Ann Stringer and Dot Avery also crossed the bridge at Remagen. Refused jeep transport to the combat zone, Stringer resorted to begging a ride from a general in a tank. It is hard to imagine that SHAEF was happy to read her account of crossing the bridge at five miles an hour in an open jeep with enemy artillery shells “swooshing overhead, landing much too close for comfort,” not to mention “the spiraling swish” of American shells, “almost as terrifying.” Nor were they likely to have appreciated word that a “burning jeep and truck sending off hot flames and black smoke” had greeted her on the other side, or that a German fighter, hit by American fire, had dived so low over them that they “could see the frantic pilot trying to extricate himself.” Clearly, Ann had determined to cover the war on her own terms.

  Dot Avery drove down from Cologne a few days later. The road remained exposed to German shell fire, but by the time she reached Remagen, engineers had constructed a new pontoon bridge parallel to the old steel railroad one. For all its efforts, the enemy had not been able to slow the American passage across the Rhine, Dot wrote, and the morale of the American soldiers had risen immeasurably: “Nothing has cheered the men like this since the fall of Paris.” Crossing on the old bridge, still under constant shelling, she wrote her story from a cellar in what was left of the village of Erpel on the far side. “Crossing takes some doing,” she reported. “You wait your turn in a long line of tanks, guns, trucks and ambulances.... You just sit there in line, feeling like an oyster — open and helpless.”

  For a while longer the old Ludendorff railroad bridge hung suspended next to the new pontoon bridge over the Rhine. Then one day, damaged by shelling, its structure weakened under the weight of heavy equipment, it gave way and sank into the river forever.

  29

  The Month of April: The Advance

  For women correspondents, April 1945 was both a dream come true and a nightmare. The Rhine crossings were already legend, but once east of the Rhine, there was little organized resistance. The front was everywhere and nowhere: no one knew where from day to day, sometimes hour to hour. It was at the same time both wide open and so hazardous that the women had to weigh their movements carefully. Lone jeeps with a party of four, reporters’ usual mo
de of travel, were at serious disadvantage in an area where an enemy soldier or civilian, not yet disarmed, could pick off his victims and then grab the jeep for his own purposes. No longer were women denied access to the press camps; rather, they were encouraged to use them as bases, and they did, glad for a “safe house” come evening. With the end of the war in sight, no one wanted to become a statistic — the only woman correspondent killed in World War II.

  Margaret Bourke-White had spent much of the winter of 1944-45 on the interminable Italian front, during which yet another set of irreplaceable negatives on their way to Life had been lost by the army. In an attempt at compensation, Life sent her to Germany. She linked up with General Patton’s Third Army and settled briefly into a house requisitioned as the Air Power Press Camp in Frankfurt. But her reputation for risk-taking preceded her. The commanding officer assigned a tall, handsome corporal, the division’s best rifleman, to protect her. “Never let that woman out of your sight,” the CO warned.

  Bourke-White found just-captured Frankfurt a mangled ruin. Twisted figures of newly fallen dead were scattered about, but it was the living that caught her eye. Women climbed out of the darkness of their cellars into the light and wandered about dazed. She photographed an old man who came along leading a horse; he had been ordered to bring it to town for the German army, and it was hard for him to comprehend that there was no longer a German army in Frankfurt to receive it.

  Helen Kirkpatrick, Virginia Irwin, and Marguerite Higgins reached Frankfurt by Easter Sunday, the first of April. Helen reported that fierce fires were still burning. The German population of half a million had diminished by two-thirds; 106 Jews out of an original 30,000 remained in this, the Rothschilds’ hometown, but that there were any at all was surprising. Also in Frankfurt were some 20,000 “emancipated slaves,” people who had spent the war years at hard labor in Nazi munitions factories or on farms, more commonly referred to as displaced persons or DPs. In Germany Allied forces conquered and liberated simultaneously. Irwin too wrote of this “great army of Hitler slaves,” who celebrated Easter by raiding Frankfurt cellars. “You could tell that the taste of freedom was sweet,” she reported. “Emaciated men grown gaunt on the potato-peeling soup and black-bread diet of the German labor camps staggered grinning under the weight of gunny-sacks full of provisions for the feast.”

  Marguerite Higgins wrote of a Frankfurt where roofs were a rarity, where twisted steel girders were all that remained of a vast airplane propeller factory. In Hoechst she interviewed a young leader of Hitler Youth now in the city jail. Later that month she moved south to the Sixth Army Group press camp in Rosenheim, south of Munich, from where she drove out daily to newly captured Bavarian towns. Further afield, she reported a jet fighter factory buried deep in a mountain in Kahla, Thuringia, and in a cellar five stories below the Franconian castle of Lichtenfels, the discovery of the library and secret documents of top Nazi Alfred Rosenberg. The subject she as yet avoided was the general havoc and desolation, the crumpled bodies in American uniform, young like herself, lying dead in a foreign town with a name few of them could have pronounced. What she saw bore little relation to her father’s stories of gallantry and glory in World War I.

  Eleanor Packard and Patricia Lochridge also worked out of the Sixth Army Group press camp south of Munich. UP had sent Packard up from Italy, and Lochridge had moved on to Europe from the Pacific; she was the only woman to cover both theaters. She roomed with Packard, whose no-nonsense attitude and professionalism she admired. In Bavaria the information each jeep crew brought back was shared with other correspondents over dinner at the local gasthaus — “group journalism,” Pat called it. It rankled her and Eleanor that Higgins went out on her own and refused to share her material. That was not playing fair, Lochridge said, and harmful to the development of women in journalism, too. Higgins didn’t care what they thought. She wanted to be known as a reporter who got stories no one else did, and she succeeded. “Maybe it didn’t matter,” Pat admitted later. “Maybe there’s room in a war for a person like her.”

  Bourke-White and Kirkpatrick moved on to Kassel with the Eightieth Infantry. The sun filtered through yellow bomb dust, which lay thick on the crushed contours of the buildings. It seemed to Margaret “that people had always lived in the crevasses and ridges of a country like the surface of the moon.” Helen recorded her impressions of the next town, Schweinfurt:

  Death rained down yesterday and the day before yesterday — from our planes and from our guns, and from German guns. German shells fell with curious impartiality on their own men....

  While this organized death was being dealt out, unofficial death came to a good many citizens of Schweinfurt. Hans Friedlich, only one month in the army, reached his home town in time to die, slowly, from a bullet in the lungs. They laid him out on the floor of the hospital chapel, uncovered and still bleeding. Two hours later they laid his wife beside him, covered by a sheet... .

  The town’s streets are littered with dead — soldiers and civilians. Nobody has had time to bury them, or even to glance at these odd, twisted, ragdoll remnants of human beings.

  The press camp on the outskirts of Schweinfurt was a dark but commodious house, a welcome distance from the town center and the unburied dead. The woman who owned the house was very dignified, the press officer said, and no one was to loot anything, including the little gold coffee cups with swastikas on them in the china cabinet. One evening Helen was organizing dinner, trying to make something palatable out of K-rations while the others were relaxing, when a jeepful of medics brought the news: President Roosevelt was dead. GIs began to flock in, seeking their own kind. “They’d heard it from the Stars and Stripes network,” Helen said, “and they were all in tears.”

  Catherine Coyne and Dot Avery were at the press camp in Frankfurt when word came. Avery talked to a trainload of Third Army frontline soldiers waiting to depart for Paris on a long-anticipated furlough. Their spirits were noticeably dampened by what they felt as a personal loss. Many times she had heard soldiers say, with varying degrees of seriousness, that they were going to write the president to complain about this or that aspect of the war. They thought of him as a sympathetic friend. Passing a homeless French boy who had attached himself to the outfit as a chef’s assistant, Avery saw tears running down his cheeks. “Le president est mort,” he wept. “Poor world!”

  Coyne talked with black soldiers from a mortar section, mostly from South Carolina. They had slept several nights in bombed houses, and their clothes smelled of spent explosives. “He was the one guy who knew what the score was,” one of them lamented, meaning that he would have known what to do when the war was over. “President Roosevelt had plans” another declared. “Right now when we’re going like a cyclone, to have this happen!” “It’s funny,” said a third, “you see death every day, you walk over corpses and do not notice, then something like this happens and you tighten all up inside.” Almost as an afterthought they asked who the new president was. “Harry Truman,” Coyne told them. “Never heard of him,” they said.

  At the Scribe in Paris Ruth Cowan reported that correspondents hung about the desk, stunned. Her own story for AP was on the president’s wife, who had been instrumental in sending her overseas. Before the war Cowan had accompanied Eleanor Roosevelt across the country, covering her visits to farm picnics, coal mines, health clinics, and schools. Now she was no longer first lady, but she would not disappear — Ruth was sure of that. Pat Lochridge agreed; she had known the Roosevelts in Washington (the fact that she had come down with polio when young had cemented their relationship). She recalled how once at dinner she had dared to chide the president for breaking crackers into his soup, and often over tea had reported to Mrs. Roosevelt on what people “in the real world” were saying.

  Janet Flanner wrote that “the sorrow the French felt at losing Roosevelt seemed like someone’s private unhappiness multiplied by millions.” If they remembered his opposition to de Gaulle, they were not mentioning it. “
On the Rue Scribe, a sergeant in a jeep held up traffic while he received the condolences of two elderly French spinsters,” she reported. At the Place de la Madeleine a patriarchal flower vendor passed out pink tulips to startled paratroopers, and on Sunday great crowds gathered at Notre Dame where, from behind the high altar, came the trumpet call of taps. “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played slowly as a dead march,” Flanner wrote, after which followed “a prayer of intercession to the Virgin Queen of Heaven for the soul of a Democratic, Episcopalian President.”

  “We all wondered when the war would end,” Margaret Bourke-White recalled later. “Logically, it should have been over; there was no real reason for the Germans to go on fighting. Prisoners were being taken by the tens of thousands. During each day’s advance we caught up with whole cattle cars of German wounded, without mattresses, straw, or food. Victory for the Reich could be only the dream of a madman.”

  But some Germans, the fanatic SS troops and Hitler Youth in particular, did go on fighting, and the erratic front lines remained dangerous. Across central Germany there were long fingerlike extensions of Allied-conquered territory, while in between might be large undefined German-held pockets. Once when Bourke-White’s jeep companions flagged down an American oil truck for gas, the driver warned them not to slow down for anybody over the next thirty miles, especially in wooded areas; forty SS men had attacked their convoy there the previous night.