On the Fourth of July, the Russians formally handed over to the Americans their designated area of Berlin. An emotional Sigrid Schultz was part of the first contingent of correspondents who drove in convoy from Weimar to Halle and then on through a steady rain across the Russian sector to the capital. Press officer Barney Oldfield, in charge of lodging, recalled her eagerness to see what was left of the Wilhelmstrasse.
Ray Daniell and Tania Long arrived to open the postwar New York Times Berlin bureau. Berliners had been hard at work, and much of the rubble had by then been removed. Always practical, Tania discovered a house with electricity and plumbing still intact; she ascertained from the startled maid that the owners were away and informed the maid that she and her husband would be moving in. The Long family ftirniture and books and paintings had been stored in a large warehouse when she and her mother left Berlin in 1939; most of the warehouse was a shambles, but the corner holding her family goods stood firm, its contents in excellent condition. Berlin neighbors still harbored Tania’s mother’s silver, and even the family parrot, left with the maid, was noisily alive and well.
Shattered Berlin was slowly returning to life. In the evenings Tania and Ray could drop by the open-air cafes, go to the theater, a concert, or the movies. There was horseracing at Karlshorst again on Sundays, boating on the Wannsee, and of course the zoo. The beloved zoo had not fared well despite dedicated keepers who had done their best to keep the animals alive. Only one elephant and a few monkeys had survived.
Berliners complained a lot, Tania said, but exhibited none of the sullenness she had encountered in Bavaria. She located the Times’s prewar secretary and opened the bureau for business.
Helen Kirkpatrick and Janet Flanner spent much of July and August in a small, shoddy, crowded chamber of the high court of France covering the trial for treason of eighty-nine-year-old Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the Vichy government. Kirkpatrick sat within a few feet of the white-moustached leader in his immaculate uniform, his sole decoration the Medaille Militaire, France’s highest award. He listened to the testimony, she said, “with the air of injured innocence of a male Joan of Arc.” Leon Blum, the Socialist former premier who had been imprisoned at Dachau, was the first to declare that Petain was indeed a traitor.
Flanner wrote that the trial, held in “an atmosphere in which all the men seem faintly fallible and all the methods slightly illegal,” tarnished everyone it touched. At one point each politician testifying was asked by the judge how treason should be defined. Blum’s response impressed her most: “An absence of moral confidence was the basis of the Vichy government, and that is treason,” he said. “Treason is the act of selling out.” In the end it was Petain’s own words that condemned him, Janet noted. In one radio broadcast he had said: “The responsibility for our defeat lies with the democratic political regime of France.” His buckling under Nazi pressure for more conformance with the anti-Jewish laws didn’t help either: of the 120,000 French Jews deported, only 1,500 returned.
A few women simply went home. Lael Wertenbaker, now noticeably pregnant and having trouble adjusting her uniform, was one. She and Wert flew home, anxious to see their son, delighted at the subsequent birth of their little daughter. Mary Welsh had already gone, having requested a year’s sabbatical from Time. In Cuba Hemingway was waiting.
Sonia Tomara, confined to the U.S. General Hospital in Neuilly with pneumonia during much of the spring, flew back to the States late in April; an exhausted Ruth Cowan, sent over as a war correspondent in that long-ago winter of 1942-43, did the same. Although her stories had been much appreciated back home, Wes Gallagher — commonly known as “the AP’s field marshal on the western front” — had never ceased to give her a hard time. Nor was it to the AP’s credit that its only long-term female reporter in the European theater was never made to feel part of the staff.
Virginia Irwin, disaccredited, went home to find herself a bona fide hometown hero. She was named “woman of the year” for “distinguished war coverage” by the Organization of Business and Professional Women. The War Department saw it differently, however; it was two years before they forgave her Berlin escapade and reac-credited her.
Lee Carson managed to hitch an early plane back to New York. She scooted right over to the INS office in her battle dress — GI pants, Eisenhower blouse, paratrooper’s boots — excited to be home, tired, but bubbling over with talk. The next day she gave a press conference in her hotel room, wearing a blouse and a short gray-green skirt, those lovely long legs no longer hidden.
Gradually, the others followed. One could not hang on forever, although some who stayed to cover the Nuremberg trials stretched it out for a year or longer. A few women — Carpenter was one — planned to go to the Pacific theater, and sailed to America with that intent, but the war against Japan ended before that could happen.
Waiting for a place on a returning troopship could be a slow process. Martha Gellhorn flew from Scotland in a C-54 transport carrying wounded; she qualified because she was doing a story on them. The trip to the airfield, the on-loading, had been a strain, and at first all the men did was sleep, or lie there thinking because everyone else seemed to be asleep. “There are many things you think about when you are coming home after a war,” Gellhorn wrote with her characteristic percep-tiveness.
You think in small amazed snatches, saying to yourself, how in God’s name did they get all those ships there on D Day; and how did they ever straighten out that freezing rat race when the Germans broke through the Ardennes; and how did anybody survive Italy? . . . You wonder how it all worked; it was too big to work, big and crazy. But it had worked and here we were, rocking in a large calm plane, with the Air Transport Command looking after us like a mother and bringing us home.
These wounded were all young, Gellhorn continued, between nineteen and twenty-one mostly, plus one old man of twenty-five. After that first sleep, they began to talk. No one complained. If they hurt somewhere, they turned their faces to the side of the plane to hide it. “It was a nice plane full of nice people,” Martha noted, “even though it smelled pretty awful the way wounds and bodies and drainage bottles will smell; and it was a happy plane. I couldn’t even imagine what home would be like because home was written on everyone’s face so lovingly, so hopefully; home must be the end of the rainbow. Then we landed late at night at Mitchel Field and everyone was silent when the doors opened and the hot air of American summer came in.”
In the Pacific, going home was still mostly on the schedule books. Shelley Mydans was in Manila for the preliminary surrender conference held in the crack-walled city hall that she remembered from better days. On August 28,1945, General MacArthur arrived in Yokohama to head the American occupation and reconstitution of Japan. The battleship USS Missouri, flagship of the Pacific fleet, sailed into Tokyo Bay, and on the morning of September 2, one-legged Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, in striped pants and top hat and carrying a cane, limped aboard with General Yoshijiro Umezu of the general staff. The surrender documents, in Japanese and English, lay on a long table; Shigemitsu, with great dignity, signed them both, followed by Umezu. Then MacArthur came forward, flanked by Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, in whose charge he had left Corregidor, and Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Percival, who had commanded Singapore for Britain — both not long released from Japanese POW camps. MacArthur signed, followed by Admiral Nimitz and delegates from the Allied powers. The general gave a brief and conciliatory little speech, and then the war was really over.
And the men in the Pacific, too, were on their way home. First, again, the wounded, then the men who had been out there so long — on the tiny atolls and in the remote ack-ack batteries and up in the hills outside Manila. Like their fellows in Europe, they went home to moms and dads, kid brothers and sisters, sweethearts and wives, and to babies they had never seen, now no longer babies. In both theaters, women reporters described their return. It was scary, this going home — and the women found it scary for
themselves, too. Like the GIs on the atolls, some of them had been out there so long. But they had gained their own kind of victory; they had truly proved themselves. The recognition they had earned was not only for themselves, because most of them thought their achievements were just what any woman lucky enough to have been in their place would have accomplished, but for their sisters coming after them. If they had not exactly made rough paths smooth — smooth was too much to hope for — they had made them passable. Passable would do.
The women went home, not so much to a particular person as to old friends, and to a life that would have to be painstakingly reassembled. Martha Gellhorn — whose last home was now occupied by another — said it gave one a kind of desperate feeling. “For the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?”
Epilogue
What the women in these pages did after the war, and how women journalists to follow seized the advantage and succeeded — or failed, or were prevented by new circumstances from carrying that advantage through — is the story of the last half century. It is as varied as the number of women involved, and has many of the same highs and lows that have appeared in these pages. Feminism was a boon, but not a decisive one. From what they accomplished in a male world, these correspondents would appear to have been on the cusp of the feminist movement, but in fact no woman I interviewed claimed affiliation or even affinity with it. Most saw its value for women a generation or two down the line. Times change.
A number of correspondents of both sexes joined the great postwar fraternity of the psychically displaced. The wide field of operation that the war had provided was no more. Only a favored few were assigned to cover areas that had required dozens a short time before, and in most cases men received priority. Women who returned to their local papers often found themselves in positions that seemed, after all they had been through, inconsequential, bordering on trivial. Adjustment was not easy.
Dorothy Thompson and Sigrid Schultz, heads of opposition news bureaus in prewar Berlin, confronted each other again as contributors to the two major postwar women’s magazines, Ladies’ Home Journal and McCalPs respectively. An out-of-character ending for pioneering women, one might think, but politically the world had passed them by. Both were out of sync with the postwar era, Schultz in her disapproval of rapprochement with Germany, Thompson in her pro-Arab, anti-Zionist stance. At least for Dorothy, those years, marked by her marriage to a Viennese-born Czech emigre artist, were happy ones.
Janet Flanner’s “Letter from Paris” continued to appear in the New Yorker for another thirty years. For so long a period of passionate writing, “Genet” was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. She had more devoted friends than anyone could count: from the past, Solita Solano, with whom she had first escaped to Paris, and Noel Murphy, who remained on the farm at Orgeval; Natalia Murray, with whom she later lived in New York; and many, too, from the next generation. Her writing was always paramount. “I’ve never wanted to do anything else,” she affirmed late in her life. “I’d rather write than eat, than eat with good wine, even.”
Josephine Herbst worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Washington during the war. Most of her later years she spent at her simple country house in Erwinna, Pennsylvania. She divided her time between her writing (mostly poetry) and a host of friends, but she never got over her divorce and loved her husband until she died.
Frances Davis married a Harvard professor. She wrote for the rest of her life, but never returned to journalism.
At the end of the war Sonia Tomara left the staff of the New York Herald Tribune to marry Colonel William Clark, a legal officer on Eisenhower’s staff, later a judge. Clark was drafted by General Lucius Clay to reform the German courts, and they lived for six years in Berlin. Back in America they settled in Princeton. Tomara had never wanted to be on the world’s stage; her goal had been to report it from second row center, but she relinquished that position, too, without regret. She had at last found the solid love, “the security and personal peace,” that had eluded her in her long years of uprooted existence.
Eleanor and Reynolds Packard remained in Rome. They switched their allegiance from UP to the New York Daily News, but still frequented the same cafes on the Via Veneto and played bridge with old friends.
Betty Wason wrote Miracle in Hellas about her time in Greece, followed by twenty-three other books. She continued her work in broadcasting, hosting a talk show in Washington, serving as women’s editor for Voice of America, and for six years moderating “Author Rap Sessions” on NBC.
Life continued to send Margaret Bourke-White to war-torn areas of the globe. She covered India’s struggle for freedom from Great Britain and the bloody civil strife between Muslims and Hindus, photographing Gandhi often and visiting him only hours before his assassination. Her camera took her a perilous two miles deep into the gold mines of South Africa, and high into the mountains of Korea to shoot the guerrilla warfare occurring there. Several men passed in and out of her life. On the plane trip home from Korea she became aware of a dull ache in her left arm and leg, first signs of the Parkinson’s disease that she would fight for nearly twenty years until her death.
After the war the Chicago Daily News was taken over by the New York Post, and Helen Kirkpatrick accepted the job of roving European correspondent. She traveled to Moscow, then to India to cover the last days of the British raj, and on to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. But she never felt at home at the Post, and resigned. From government-related jobs in Paris and Washington, she assumed charge of the USIA in Europe, accompanying Secretary of State Dean Acheson as his press officer. Not long thereafter, she met Robbins Milbank of a prominent New England family, married him, gave up her far-flung career, and settled into new roles as wife, stepmother, occasional teacher, civic leader. In recognition of her wartime and postwar activities, she was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, the Medaille de la Reconnaissance, and the U.S. Medal of Freedom.
Mary Welsh gave in to Ernest Hemingway’s need for a wife who was only a wife and, with their marriage in 1946, gave up all regular reporting. Hemingway gave up nothing, certainly not his drinking or bullying. They lived mostly at Finca Vigia in Cuba, with seasons in Key West, and in Ketchum, Idaho. Their efforts to have a child were nearly fatal to Mary, and Ernest suffered yet another head wound when, on safari in Africa, their plane crashed in the jungle. In 1961 he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and Mary assumed the laborious job of custodian of his work.
After their postwar stint in Berlin, Tania Long and her husband Ray Daniell moved on to London and finally New York. Too much time had passed for Tania to make a real family with her son; their relationship became another of the casualties of war. In time she and Ray were sent to the Canadian capital, Ottawa, where they worked contentedly together for eleven years. After Ray’s death Tania became the PR director for music at the National Arts Centre of Canada.
Lee Miller married Roland Penrose shortly before their son, Antony, was born. Picasso and Henry Moore were only two of the many luminaries of the art world who visited them on their farm in East Sussex, but neither the pastoral life nor motherhood held Lee’s attention for long, and during the 1950s her chronic depression, fueled by alcoholism, returned. It did not help that Roland, not she, was commissioned to write a biography of Picasso, or that Roland fell in love with a slim and beautiful young woman, neither of which Lee was anymore. She was saved by two new interests, cooking and music, both of which competed with photography for her time. After her death, the Lee Miller Archives were established in Chiddingly, East Sussex, England.
Ruth Cowan returned to Washington and to her old desk at the AP office. She was assigned to the Congressional press gallery and later to the House Armed Services Committee and the Pentagon, and was elected president of the Wome
n’s National Press Club. The AP frowned on employing married women or anyone over the age of fifty-five. On nearing that age, she resigned and surprised everyone by marrying Bradley Nash, a kind and supportive man who had held various government posts. They retired to his farm in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.
A few years after the war Lael Tucker Laird Wertenbaker and her little family went down to live in the Basque country of France. Wert quit his job at Time Inc. and they freelanced and began to write fiction. It was there Wert learned he had cancer, and it was the long experience of his dying — in full knowledge, and in the heart of his family — that prompted Lael to write Death of a Man, a seminal work on the right of a patient to know the truth about his condition and to choose how he wished to die. She wrote six other nonfiction works, six novels, and three children’s books.
Virginia Cowles continued as a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and received the Order of the British Empire for her war reporting. She and Martha Gellhorn collaborated on a play about two women reporters on the Italian front (it opened in London to enthusiastic reviews, but lasted only four days on Broadway where its humor was not understood). As soon as could be arranged after his return from a German POW camp, Virginia married Aidan Crawley. He was elected to Parliament, and they raised three children. Over the years she wrote biographies of Winston Churchill, the Marlborough and Rothschild families, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Edward VII. She died in an automobile accident on the Continent in 1983.
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