The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  UPI/CORBIS-BETTMANN.

  “V-E Day was like an occupation of Paris by Parisians,” Flanner continued. “They streamed out onto their city’s avenues and boulevards and took possession of them from curb to curb. They paved the Champs-Elysees with their moving, serried bodies.. . . The babble and the shuffle of feet drowned out the sound of the stentorian churchbells that clanged for peace and even the cannon firing from the Invalides.... All anyone cared about was to keep moving, to keep shouting, to keep singing snatches of the ‘Marseillaise’ — ‘Le jour de gloire est arrive ... marchons, marchons.’ “

  It was mostly a young crowd, Janet noticed. By midnight crowds had thinned sufficiently for the long lines of young men and women holding hands to stretch out like cut-out paper dolls. It was they who screamed joyfully at the huge American planes roaring over the tips of the chestnut trees on the Champs-Elysees, and they who shouted at the skyrockets that shot through the night sky. “It was the new postwar generation,” she said, “running free and mixed on the streets, celebrating peace with a fine freedom which their parents, young in 1918, had certainly not known.”

  Ann Stringer too was in Paris that day. It was a hard time for her; she could not help thinking of her husband, who had died nearby the previous August, just before the liberation of the city. Her friend Allan Jackson drove into Paris to spend the day with her, and then, since neither of them had anything else immediately to do, they drove to Normandy where Bill Stringer was buried. Jackson had traded in his old Ford coupe for a liberated BMW, so the ride was made in comfort. Ann had only a vague idea where the U.S. military cemetery was, but at last it was found outside the town of Staint-Andre. It was large and still very bare; there had not yet been time for anyone to plant a lawn. Allan stayed by the car, and Ann entered the gate to a sea of white crosses. Later she described how, as she walked along the first row, she felt as if she were being pulled toward the center, and then suddenly there she was in front of the cross with the marking that read “William J. Stringer, Jr.” She sat there a little while, Allan said, and then returned to the car and they drove back to Paris.

  32

  It Is Not Over, Over Here”

  In the Pacific, Peggy Hull Deuell heard the news of V-E Day while at “A Little Army Camp in the South Seas.” Peggy’s datelines were never very explicit. Sometimes she was “On the Road to Tokyo” or at “A Remote Army Post.” Most often she was just “Somewhere in the Pacific.” She and her boys had been hanging around the radios in the orderly room for days, she said, trying to filter out the news through the static. When at last V-E Day was announced during mess, no one could work up much excitement. Some of the men had been at that station for thirty-eight months, which was longer than any regular American forces had been in the European theater, Hull pointed out. “It is over on that side of the world, but it is not over, over here.”

  This particular war was over, however, for photographer Dickey Chapelle. Her appetite for combat whetted by the experience of being under fire on Iwo Jima, she managed to go ashore on still-unsecured Okinawa against the precise order of her commanding officer, and to spend six nights there — or was it eight? The admiral was so mad that the actual number was unclear.

  Except for its strategic location, fertile Okinawa had little in common with the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. It was a large island, with farms and a sizable civilian population. Two marine and four army divisions had landed there on April 1,1945, without a shot being fired. The USS Relief, with Chapelle aboard, joined 1,500 other American ships anchored in the harbor. But unlike Iwo Jima, there was little at the beginning for the medical staff to do, as yet no wounded marines in need of whole blood for Dickey to photograph.

  On her third day of inactivity, Chapelle organized a photo opportunity for herself: she followed fifty cases of blood from the Relief, via LCI, LST, and “duck,” shoreward, except that she herself could not land. The next day, toting camera and life preserver (a storm was in progress), she caught a ride to the Eldorado, the communications ship, where she complained to Commander Smith about lack of subject material and asked to be allowed to go ashore in search of casualties. Smith, who did not know of Admiral Miller’s ban, agreed that she might go to Brown Beach to photograph the delivery of blood to the army field hospital, returning by nightfall. But the coxswain who delivered her to an amphtrac (amphibious tractor) informed her that it would be impossible to pick her up that day, as an order had gone out to secure all small craft. Dickey was exultant. Her own initiative had brought about one of the “firsts” her editor wanted — first woman reporter on Okinawa. Now luck had handed her another — first woman to spend the night on an island during combat. That these “firsts” might have their day of reckoning, she pushed to the back of her mind.

  No one onshore knew where Brown Beach was, but a couple of MPs happened by and took her on a harrowing ride to the marine command post. There men were digging in for an anticipated counterattack, and their commander’s reaction at the sight of Chapelle was an instantaneous “Get that broad the hell out of here!” At Marine Corps press headquarters, where she spent that night, she was no more welcome. That night the kamikaze attacks began. They came in waves, some 350 planes in all, suicide pilots hurtling toward the new American strongholds on the island or at selected ships offshore. Six American ships were sunk.

  John Lardner, a celebrated Pacific correspondent and one of Dickey’s inhospitable tentmates, set down his impressions of her visit in a dispatch to NANA: “The nerves of the boys in our tent section were somewhat demoralized by the presence of the first American woman to go ashore on Okinawa, Miss Dickie Chapelle.” She was there, he continued, because her boat had landed her too late for the return trip to her ship that day. She was “small, bespectacled, and almost invisible under her standard steel helmet,” and “came drifting drowsily out of the tent with the rest of us from time to time during the night to huddle in ditches or foxholes.”

  Back on Guam a livid Admiral Miller read Lardner’s dispatch, and an angry missive from the commander of the Joint Expeditionary Forces. By then the forces on Okinawa were engaged in full combat. Chapelle moved on to the Sixth Marine Division where the general, although nonplussed at her arrival, was too courteous to chew her out. Conditions did not allow for her return that day either, and she spent the night in his tent. On the following day there was too much traffic on the road, and the day after that she found a jeep traveling to a field hospital and hitched a ride to do a story there. She spent that night holding a heavy navy flashlight while the resident doctor operated on an ambush victim.

  Late on the sixth day after her landing, some eight hundred yards in advance of the front, her jeep was pulled over by a weary MP who could no longer continue the charade that he had not seen her. “Don’t you know there’s an order to arrest you on sight, ma’am?” he asked, and directed her to the PR office nearby.

  Chapelle, a pro at marine lingo by this time, let off a few colorful rejoinders, but she went. She was arrested, was evacuated with the casualties, and reached a hospital ship just before two days of even heavier kamikaze attacks in which twenty American ships were lost. In due time she was returned to Guam. Admiral Miller had transferred on to Washington, but had left instructions to relieve Dickey of her credentials. The navy wanted to send her home by slow boat, but the army flew her in style — to annoy the navy, some said. Her husband Tony was waiting.

  Chapelle did her best to get her credentials restored. Her editor at Life Story himself wrote to the navy: “It is our considered opinion that the decision to discipline Mrs. Chapelle was made largely because of her sex.” But the navy was not interested in editors’ opinions. In fact, her editor lost interest himself after he saw her photographs — too “dirty” for his publication, he said. They appeared instead in the December issue of Cosmopolitan.

  No one ever pretended that it was an equal opportunity war.

  Other women went to Okinawa later, after the guns had been silent for a while.
On all the islands, a reporter who moved into the interior was likely to encounter clusters of Japanese, soldiers and civilians alike, who did not know what they should do next, if indeed they even knew that their army had lost. Shelley Mydans met up with some on Guam. The American military had ceased thinking of them as dangerous, Mydans said in her piece for Life, but wanted them out of there anyway. Japanese POW volunteers newly indoctrinated with a smattering of psychological warfare went back into the jungle to make contact with the holdouts. They stressed the difficulty of jungle life and the need Japan would have for men like them. “Your family and friends are worrying about you,” they said. “Give up now and live to rebuild Japan for them.”

  One officer, after nearly a year in hiding, had become a Guam legend, Shelley said, and she described his emergence from the jungle with his little troop of faithful:

  Now he stood in the clearing, ready to surrender to the Americans. With him was his lieutenant, his orderly — who from time to time wiped the sweat from the officer’s forehead — and thirty-three ragged soldiers. When Colonel Howard Stent, USMC, arrived in his jeep, the Japanese officer snapped his men to attention. “You are now prisoners of war,” he said. “This is no disgrace. It is a mistake to think of it as such.” The thirty-five men turned toward their emperor in Tokyo and bowed, eyes closed. Then they went off to the prisoners’ stockade.

  All spring Shelley had watched as the B-29s flew out of the Marianas to bomb the large industrial centers of Japan — Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kawasaki, Kobe, Osaka. She knew that the bombs they dropped were incendiary bombs filled with jellified petrol. Everything they touched went up in flames. One raid left the heart of Tokyo so hot that the water in the canals boiled. The casualties were in the hundreds of thousands; exact numbers were only guesswork as so little could be identified afterwards. By summer the steel and chemical industries had collapsed. There was not enough fuel for boats to travel between the islands, and the railroads would soon cease to function. There was not enough food anywhere.

  In May the Allies had sent out peace feelers through the Japanese legation in Switzerland, but they were met with silence. In June, after the steep cost of American lives on Okinawa had been assessed, the Southwest Pacific Command foresaw that the price of invading Japan, planned for the fall, could be very high. By July it seemed clear that saturation bombing was not pushing the surrender process forward as hoped. It was in the middle of that month that an atomic device was detonated in the desert of New Mexico. President Truman saw the device as a military weapon, and neither Churchill nor Stalin voiced objections to its use. There were those in Truman’s cabinet who pushed for a more explicit warning to Japan, and a feeler to the effect that the emperor’s abdication might not be required for surrender, but others disagreed. On July 26, the Potsdam Declaration was issued with an ultimatum: accept unconditional surrender or face absolute destruction. The Japanese announced they would ignore the ultimatum.

  None of the women correspondents in the Pacific or anywhere else (and probably none of the men) knew of the inner workings of this period of the war. Shelley Mydans had no idea that two bombs — one uranium, one plutonium — were being assembled right there on Tinian, on the other side of Saipan from Guam, nor did she know until afterward, when everybody else learned too, of their explosion on August 6 and 9 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, and the resulting horror and devastation. On August 10, the Japanese government sued for peace, asking only that Hirohito remain as emperor. The request was granted.

  Hirohito, a small and gentle man, a marine biologist who kept a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in his study, was present at the final meeting of the Japanese Supreme War Council. Although there were officers on the council still holding out, the emperor said they would accept the terms offered. Then he broadcast over the radio to all the people of Japan, wherever they might be, that the war was over.

  33

  Women Winding Up a War

  Then they were war correspondents without a war. When they woke at dawn, there was quiet; they had been released from the boom and crash and ack-ack of the bombs, the mortars, the artillery, even the little ping of sniper fire. These were sounds that most of them would now put behind them, along with sights like torn-up young bodies, along with smells they hoped never again to know. But their jobs had not ended; they were still reporters, still under contract to go, to see, to write. The terrible tension, which had vitalized them and at the same time drained them, had already begun to dwindle. They would have to be careful not to lose all momentum.

  Now there were few rules as to where a reporter of either sex could or could not go, except for the vast area to the east that the Soviets were claiming as theirs, and where even before the surrender they were posting guards and denying entry. Iris Carpenter went to Prague the day after V-E Day with colleagues from the First Army press corps. On the return trip, retracing their way through twenty kilometers of what, between afternoon and night, had become the Russian lines, they found themselves among hordes of Germans trying desperately to get across to the American side. Wounded soldiers crowded into wagons of every sort, men hobbled on crutches or were pushed by nurses in handtrucks, civilians trudged along. At the sign “Limit of Advance for American Troops” Carpenter watched a weary GI shoo them all into custody as he would sheep or cattle. Many were the same Germans Hitler had uprooted and sent to populate the Sudetenland a decade before. Another little irony of the war.

  None of the women relaxed for more than maybe a day. Eleanor Packard was on hand to report the surrender of Hermann Goering to the Seventh Army, although her story lacked the drama of Patricia Lochridge’s version in which the Reichsmarshall surrendered to members of the press, his car full of fried chicken and wine that was promptly devoured by that same press. In Berchtesgaden Lochridge moved into a house with officers of the 101st Airborne and, dubbed by them Fraulein Kommandante, governed the town for a week, reopening the banks so that elderly citizens would have money for food. Also in Berchtesgaden, Marguerite Higgins wrote of the fabulous art treasures uncovered in the tunnels below Goering’s villa. Valued at more than two billion dollars, they included four Rembrandts, several Rubenses, and van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Bridge at Aries.

  Life sent Margaret Bourke-White to Essen in the Ruhr valley to interview and photograph Alfred Krupp, who headed the once massive armament works that had supplied Hitler’s troops. Before that, the Krupp family had armed the Kaiser’s troops in 1914, the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and both sides in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. Although the current Krupp, about Margaret’s age, had been forced to relinquish his 117-room mansion to the Allied Control Commission and move into his servants’ quarters, he remained, she noted drily, one of the wealthiest men in Europe.

  In the last of their many cooperative ventures, Marjorie “Dot” Avery and Catherine Coyne flew to liberated Norway. They were shocked to find arrogant Germans still strolling about with Lugers on their hips and speeding through towns in their accustomed staff cars, except for the uncustomary white flags flying from their windshields. Even so, Catherine reported, witnessing the peace was a joyful alternative to covering the war. In Oslo, the long-planned celebration began at dawn with hundreds of Red Cross women thronging the streets, singing. Later marching bands, resistance fighters, and children paraded through the town. On the balcony of the royal palace, Crown Prince Olaf stood in worn British battle dress; he had returned from England only a few days before, Dot said, and “the people almost tore themselves apart welcoming him.”

  Vienna had been divided into five zones of occupation: American, British, French, Russian, and “international.” Ann Stringer went in with the first convoy of Western correspondents. From there she and her buddy, INS photographer Allan Jackson, took off for Budapest on one of her typical unauthorized jaunts. They crossed back and forth over a Danube littered with corpses of undeterminable age and origin. Later they drove across Yugoslavia to Bulgaria, and on to Bucharest. Stringer, l
ike Higgins a lady-come-lately to the war, was determined to stretch her odyssey to its limit.

  In Vienna both Stringer and Lee Miller sought out and interviewed the Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and his wife Romola. Miller found the Nijinskys in the “international zone.” Madame Nijinsky had hidden her deranged husband throughout the war, afraid that the Nazis would remove him to one of their infamous camps. “He’s like a nice speechless backward child,” Lee cabled back to Vogue. She wrote of his excitement at hearing Russian spoken again, and how Russian soldiers, shocked that “the great Nijinskaya had no shoes,” cut pieces of red leather from a sofa and made her some sandals.

  But the peace brought little of its elusive quality into Lee Miller’s own life. She had thrown herself heart and soul into the war, thriving on the vagrant life, and now she could not easily relinquish it. In England, where British Vogue hailed her with parties and accolades, she felt displaced and depressed. She returned to Paris, but there her bouts of depression deepened. Sometimes she lay in bed weeping all day. Her buddy, photographer Dave Scherman, was there; he could make her laugh, and, in time, laugh at herself.

  Marguerite Higgins’s adjustment problems were of a different kind. Much of her reporting that summer she did in the company of George Milar of the London Daily Express, who also figured personally in pieces she did for Mademoiselle. Milar was a journalist who had joined the Rifle Brigade early in the war, had been captured in North Africa, escaped from a POW camp and returned to England, and then had parachuted back into France to work with the resistance. He was as handsome as he was brave, and Maggie was soon in love as never before. They passed idyllic days by the Wolfgangsee and swam nude in mountain lakes before setting out for Paris in a smart sports car she had liberated from a fleet that once belonged to Ribbentrop. In Paris problems emerged. Milar planned to settle down in a small English village to write fiction — not the postwar life Higgins saw for herself. Nor could Milar see her there. He returned to England and abruptly married. Maggie was crushed. To be denied something she wanted badly was not in her experience. As with Dorothy Thompson nearly twenty years before, salvation lay in work. In that first year after the war, Higgins was credited with the most front-page stories of any foreign correspondent.