The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  “Helen Kirkpatrick drove the lead jeep.”

  HELEN KIRKPATRICK PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  In the safest of circumstances, jeep navigation was an acquired skill that not everyone possessed. In their little press convoy “it was Helen Kirkpatrick who read the maps, charted our course, and drove the lead jeep,” Bourke-White said. “She loved to sail along so fast, however, that the Colonel was always in a dither, knowing that before the day was over her exuberant little jeep would disappear into the distance and leave the rest of our convoy far behind.” Margaret admired Helen’s expertise with “the extra gears which could be called on for almost perpendicular hills.” Catherine Coyne also drove her press jeep for a while, “after our driver had steeplechased a ditch and landed us in a field,” she said, and added that when she dreamed about being killed, it was always by jeep accident.

  Suicide scene in the Leipzig City Hall, April 1945.

  MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/LIFE MAGAZINE. © TIME INC.

  Never again in their lives would the women see death take so many forms as in that single month of April 1945. Leipzig was a case in point. Bourke-White, Kirkpatrick, and Dot Avery went in on the heels of the American troops; Lee Miller, Iris Carpenter, and Lee Carson followed. A resident of the town took Carson to view what remained of the house of a bazooka factory director who, just as the Americans crashed the city gates, committed suicide and took a hundred or so friends with him. He had invited them to a banquet, at the conclusion of which he touched a button under the table and blasted them all to bits.

  Even that was less bizarre than the contents of the eighteenth-century Gothic city hall that a GI brought to the attention of Bill Walton of Time. Walton immediately sent for Bourke-White, who loaded up her equipment, rushed over, and followed Bill up three flights of stone steps and through a pair of padded soundproof doors. “Reclining on the ponderous leather furniture was a family group, so intimate, so lifelike, that it was hard to realize these people were no longer living,” Margaret wrote later. The Leipzig city treasurer sat at his desk, head in hands. His wife reclined serenely in an overstuffed armchair, while their daughter rested on a stiff leather couch, a pillow under her pretty head, her little Red Cross cap slightly askew. Family documents were set out in an orderly manner on the desk, along with an empty bottle of Pyrimal. A similar tableau of silent and apparently painless death was repeated in every room.

  The story spread, and Lee Miller brought her own camera onto the scene. Iris Carpenter described the family of the burgomaster, including his daughter, a contemporary of the little Red Cross worker, with an Easter note from her soldier-sweetheart in her hand. The men had taken their poison in cognac, the women in lemonade. One imagines them watching, from windows high enough to afford an unimpeded view, the thundering approach of American tanks and troops, and acting accordingly.

  But for American women correspondents, it was contact with their own soldiers, newly released from POW camps, that left them most moved. Virginia Irwin found it difficult to write dispassionately of the “haggard and half-starved Allied prisoners of war, ghost-like remnants of an ‘army’ of 30,000 men condemned by the Germans to a two-month, 500-mile starvation march across Germany.” One group she came upon in a POW hospital had been “starved, beaten and herded across Germany like animals.” An American chaplain taken prisoner in Holland told her he had buried many who died after reaching the hospital. But others had not made it that far. Everyone had an incident to relate — Americans stoned as they walked through German towns, a GI shot for picking potato peelings out of a garbage pail, another who begged a German woman for a cup of water only to have a guard strike it down and beat him to insensibility.

  “We ate snow when the Germans weren’t looking,” a sergeant told Virginia. “Sometimes we managed to steal a little wheat or dry mash that they fed to the cows, and in the night we would soak this in water and eat it.” On “lucky” days they were issued a piece of black bread and a bit of cheese, plus a pound of meat to share fifty ways. The men stole anything vaguely edible, he said; he himself had just missed detection when he liberated a rabbit from a coop, skinned it, and devoured it raw. But a friend had been caught and beaten to death for digging a turnip out of a field.

  Virginia reported that when they set out on the return march from the prison camp, the men carried a blanket and some personal belongings, which, in their increasing exhaustion, were one by one discarded. Some died just before the Americans arrived, some just after. Those alive but too weak to care for themselves were lying two or three to a bed, resting until they were strong enough to evacuate to a proper hospital. Having lost a great deal of weight, they could no longer digest solid food, but were living on powdered milk mixed with water, a glassful every two hours. Virginia spent as many hours as she could spare at their bedsides.

  Helen Kirkpatrick too talked to Allied prisoners of war, most captured during the Battle of the Bulge. They were obsessed with food, having lived for months on “grass soup” — a watery substance made from greens and potatoes — and a little bread they said tasted like black sawdust. More than a hundred had been sent to work at the oil plants in Leuna or Zeitz, but were so weak by the time they arrived that the personnel director considered them useless. Lee Miller reported that some of the newly freed British had been imprisoned for five years; they had a better survival rate than the Americans, she said, because “they knew all the secrets — when to be arrogant, stupid, argumentatively clever, or plain deaf.” And in devastated Trier, Catherine Coyne watched liberated French and British soldiers struggling against hysterical laughter and tears as they crowded into boxcars for the journey across the German border to freedom. Women, too, were crossing that border. One Sunday Janet Flanner went to a Paris train station to report the arrival of three hundred Frenchwomen from the camp at Ravensbrück, in the marshes near Berlin. Their faces gray-green in color, eyes that “seemed to see but not to take in,” they were met by a nearly silent crowd carrying lilac branches, including General de Gaulle, who wept, Flanner said. Some women could not be recognized even by their husbands who had come to meet them. “There was a general, anguished babble of search, of finding or not finding. There was almost no joy... too much suffering lay behind this homecoming.” Although the select three hundred had been the healthiest in the camp, eleven had died en route. “One matron, six years ago renowned in Paris for her elegance, had become a bent, dazed, shabby old woman,” Janet wrote. “When her smartly attired brother, who met her, said, like an automaton, ‘Where is your luggage?,’ she silently handed him what looked like a dirty black sweater fastened with safety pins around whatever small belongings were rolled inside.”

  There was no longer any doubt that Flanner had found a new voice, and an enormously effective one. This was true in a literal sense as well — she had been broadcasting that winter and spring for the Blue Network. Her broadcasts were more personal than her “Letters”; she allowed herself to speak her feelings on what she observed. Several had dealt with the inefficiency and lack of feeling accorded returned prisoners of war by the French minister of deportees. Janet thought the incompetence of the French in this matter only slightly less appalling than American lack of concern for, and aid to, the French people, who were still doing without basic items like pots and pans, bed linens, and knives for peeling onions, the only vegetable yet available in the Parisian markets.

  Flanner’s contemporary Sigrid Schultz, beleaguered Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune before America’s entry into the war, returned to Europe that spring. She had spent three years in New York and its bucolic Connecticut environs, writing for the Tribune, Collier’s, and McCaWs. Early in 1944 she published Germany Will Try It Again — a general denunciation of that country and a warning against false sen-timentalism toward its people. Back in Germany now and reporting for the Tribune and McCall’s, she saw nothing that caused her to change her mind. She had left a Germany of prideful Nazis; she returned to find people denying their affiliatio
n, soft-pedaling their allegiance. Even in Nuremberg, once home to the Nazi Party congresses, this was so — although admittedly there was not much left of that lovely medieval city. But there as in all the once important Nazi towns she visited, Schultz heard the same refrain: “We are the little people. We had nothing to say in Germany.”

  Virtually all the correspondents following the victorious Allied troops encountered the same national denial. “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was,” Martha Gellhorn, traveling with a regiment of the Eighty-second Airborne, wrote in prose laced with sarcasm. “To see a whole nation passing the buck is not an enlightening spectacle. It is clear that all you have to do in Germany, in order to lead the country, is to be successful; if you stop being successful, no one will admit they ever heard of you.”

  The big story that last week of April 1945, and for many the climactic moment of the war, belonged to the First Army — more specifically to a platoon of the First Battalion and another of the Third Battalion of the 273d Infantry Regiment, Sixty-ninth Division, who within a few hours of each other on the afternoon of April 2 5 would link up with the Russians near the town of Torgau.

  That the Red Army was not far away had become apparent to Lee Carson, Iris Carpenter, and others in the First Army press camp by the change in makeup of the moving humanity clogging the roads. Displaced persons liberated from the work camps were now joined by German civilians trekking westward. Rumor spread that Germany was to be divided into zones occupied by the victorious powers, and the Soviet Union, naturally, would have the eastern zone. The Russians were not expected to show much sympathy toward their old foe at Stalingrad.

  The Americans were not prepared for this latest exodus. They had halted west of the Mulde River, to await formal contact with the approaching Russians, when the order went out that all German civilians east of the Mulde must stay there. Only freed Allied prisoners of war, DPs trying to get home, and surrendering German soldiers were allowed across. The wrecks of bridges that remained were carefully policed, and the identification of each person was carefully checked. “Men, women and children wept and pleaded as they attempted to alibi or beg admittance into ‘protective’ American arms,” Carson reported. Among the Nazis turned back was a German princess distantly related to Queen Victoria and her husband, professor of American history at the University of Leipzig. “Well, lady, you’re not crossing the river,” Lee quoted a lieutenant from Nebraska barking at the princess. “You’re staying right here. Even if you did get across, which you won’t, it wouldn’t do you any good because the Russians are coming right in here. We’re going to give them a bang-up welcome, too.” Rejected Germans settled on the river bank, hoping for a change of policy. They sat there for days, Iris wrote, in absolute despair.

  Meanwhile, the area between the Mulde and Elbe Rivers was being patrolled by eager GIs, ostensibly looking for American POWs, but actually hoping to be the first to make contact with the Russians. On April 25 this at last occurred. As Carson and Carpenter both reported, a six-jeep, twenty-man patrol under Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue sighted a single Russian cavalryman east of the Elbe about three o’clock. The Americans promptly crossed the river and were taken to Krunitz where Lieutenant Kotzebue was presented to the Russian commanding general. News of the encounter was flashed by radio to the Sixty-ninth Division command post: “Mission accomplished. Contact made. Arrangements being made for a formal meeting.”

  That same afternoon, however, Lieutenant William D. Robertson in a single jeep with a corporal and two enlisted men, out hunting for POWs, they said, became aware of soldiers on the other side of the Elbe who they decided were Russians. As Robertson later told the story to Carson, Carpenter, and others, he hurriedly painted a rough approximation of an American flag, missing a few stripes and many stars, on a large sheet of paper, and waved it madly. Then he inched his way on his hands and knees along the girders of what was left of the bridge. A Russian private crawled toward him from the other side. In the middle, clinging to a girder and with the river swirling below them, they shook hands.

  That solemn ceremony having been satisfactorily completed, the four Americans located a boat and crossed to the east bank to meet “the rest of the gang. The Russians offered sardines, biscuits, and chocolate,” Carson reported, and there was “an all-around swapping of rank and insignia, toasts with German schnapps out of Russian canteens shouted noisily in two languages, neither of which was understood by the other side.” “We just said ‘Hi-yah, here’s to you’ and shook hands,” Robertson told her.

  Iris Carpenter interviewing the first GIs to make contact with the Russians, Torgau, 1945.

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN.

  Although no reporter was present at either event, they heard about it soon enough, and by the next day Carson and Carpenter were joined by Dot Avery, Catherine Coyne, Virginia Irwin, Lee Miller, and dozens of male correspondents who headed their jeeps for Torgau. Ann Stringer’s arrival was much more dramatic. Stringer had once again run afoul of army regulations and had been ordered to retreat to Paris. Instead, she was touring about with her INS photographer friend Allan Jackson in his old Ford. Coming upon two Piper Cubs, they persuaded the pilots to take them up for a view of the Elbe River front. They had not flown far before Ann heard voices speaking a recognizable Russian on her plane’s radio. She asked to land at Torgau to investigate. They came down in a clover field, climbed over two roadblocks, and suddenly saw a young man running toward them. “Down the street of Torgau came a Russian youth wearing blue shorts and a gray cap with a red hammer and sickle on it,” Stringer began her story. “‘Bravo, Americanski!’ he yelled. ‘Bravo comrades!’ He was dripping wet because he had swum the Elbe River to greet us.”

  Virginia Irwin (facing camera) during dance celebrating the U.S.-Russian linkup, Torgau, April 1945.

  U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH.

  Stringer went on to describe “the small fleet of shaky boats and canoes,” one of which she, the two pilots, and Jackson took across, and how the Russians on the far side “rushed down to the river bank through the tall, wet grass” and helped them beach the canoe. They were taken to meet the regimental commander. “We gave the Russians our autographs. They gave us theirs. The commander invited us to lunch. He said I was the first American woman he and his troops had ever seen, and he seated me in the place of honor on his right.” After which followed an expansive lunch, including a series of toasts with a variety of intoxicants.

  At last they returned to the river where a racing shell awaited them, but while the Russians were helping her into it, Stringer accidentally pitched headlong into the Elbe, blurring the notes she had taken down so carefully. And how to file her story anyway once she wrote it? she worried aloud as they approached the far bank, landed, climbed back into the Piper Cubs, and headed west. She could not return to the press camp. Just then her pilot spotted a C-47 and came down beside it. Yes, it was leaving for Paris shortly, and the pilot would (with pleasure!) take her along. Ann sat on one wing and typed her story. Eventually she reached a military field outside Paris, hitchhiked to the Scribe, filed her story, and collapsed.

  There were a lot of glum faces, mostly male, at the First Army press camp when reporters there found out they’d been scooped.

  Still, all the women’s stories received front-page — some banner-headline — placement. Lee Carson described “carnival scenes” on the east bank of the Elbe. “Conversation is sincere if short-circuited by lack of a mutual tongue,” she reported. “The Russians are handing over captured German lugers to the Doughboys, who in return are giving away everything from radios to shaving soap.” At a regimental command post Carson recorded the toast given by a Russian major with a working knowledge of English: “Today we have the most happy day in our lives. At Moscow and Stalingrad in 1941 and 1942 we have the most difficult days of our lives. Now our great friends the Americans we have met one another. It end up the enemy. Long live our great leader. Long live America’s great leader.”

  The Russian
s, Carson said, are “like overgrown, bearish children, good-natured, abrupt, and direct. Their handshakes are guaranteed bone-crushers. Their bearhugs are rib-crackers.” But she survived intact.

  Everyone (except Ann Stringer) was present a day or two later for the ceremony in a sunny meadow when General E. F. Reinhardt of the Sixty-ninth Infantry Division crossed the Elbe in a rowboat to meet his counterpart, the youthful General Vladimir Roussakov of the Fifty-eighth Guards Division of the Red Army. They shook hands, posed for innumerable pictures by both news and amateur photographers, and then retired to a barracks to feast on captured German eggs, black bread, cheese, and twice-captured champagne.

  Catherine Coyne reported that the Yanks were at the river bank first thing that morning with a big sign reading “East Meets West, Courtesy 69th Division,” and Russian soldiers came swarming across in racing skiffs to stroll along the towpath with the Americans and try out each other’s firearms. Dot Avery compared the day to a cross between a circus and the armistice celebration after the First World War. She and Coyne crossed over to the Russian side with a lieutenant from the Ukraine, three Siberian captains, and an obliging American officer for protection. One of the Siberians pinned the brass star from his cap onto Catherine’s jacket, and she and Dot were offered “a strange assortment of impossible drinks,” she said. After that the Russians sang, and when they asked for an American song in return, Catherine and Dot sang “Birmingham Jail,” which the Seventh Airborne had sung as they flew to jump east of the Rhine.

  Iris Carpenter reported that the mile or so of road between the river and the village was lined with flag-waving Russian soldiers, every third or fourth one a Red Army woman wearing the “guard’s star” awarded to four-year veterans. Lunch for officers was served in the garden of a small villa. “On a plum tree on one side hung a crepe-framed picture of Roosevelt. On an apple tree on the other was a picture of Stalin.” The American generals were presented with the red silk flag of the Thirty-fourth Corps, said to have flown over Stalingrad throughout the battle. “There was more food than any of the Americans present had ever seen on any table at any one time — and more liquor,” Iris recalled. “Women soldiers brought the steaming dishes first to the officers’ table and then took them to the enlisted men’s party across the street. Enlisted men, however, were served with a kiss and embrace.”