The Women who Wrote the War
Page 43
Janet Flanner at the Petain trial, Paris, July-August 1945.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Martha Gellhorn settled in London, where she continued to write both fiction and nonfiction. She made a stab at family life — adopted an Italian orphan and married retired Time editor T. S. Matthews — but neither endeavor was successful. As the war heated up in Vietnam, she traveled there to report its effect on civilians, sending back eyewitness accounts of human suffering that were devastating in their indictment of U.S. policy. She was barred from returning. Subsequently she covered the Arab-Israeli conflict, wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the United States invasion of Panama; all her life she was both fascinated and repelled by war. She lived in London, Mexico, Italy, Kenya, and an isolated cottage in South Wales. Besides collections of her journalism, she published five novels, fourteen novellas, and two collections of short stories.
Having put off childbearing during the war years, Shelley Mydans had a son and daughter in quick succession and worked as a commentator for Time Inc. radio network news. She and the children joined Carl in Tokyo where he was serving as Time-Life bureau chief. Shelley reported on a half-time basis, held down the bureau when Carl traveled, and worried about neglecting her children. Back in New York she returned to fiction; besides The Open City, her novel about Americans interned by the Japanese, she published a fictional treatment of Thomas a Becket and other books. Carl became one of the foremost news photographers in the country.
Annalee Jacoby joined Teddy White in the passionate enterprise of writing the true story of China at war, and simultaneously advocating that America get out of China. Thunder out of China was a success, the collaboration less so. Both were strong-willed, their views were not identical, and White’s emotional ties to Jacoby affected his professionalism. They parted. In 1950 Annalee married writer Clifton Fadiman, emcee of the radio and TV show Information Please and later head of the Book of the Month Club.
Iris Carpenter married redheaded Colonel Russell F. Akers Jr., operations officer for the First Army whom she first met at the press camp just before the Battle of the Bulge. She became a U.S. citizen, and her two children joined her in America, but the marriage was not the success she had hoped for. She wrote No Woman’s World, about the war as she had experienced it, and continued to report from Washington for the Boston Globe and several English papers.
Carpenter’s press camp colleague Lee Carson was hardly back in New York before the wife of her AP buddy Don Whitehead paid her a visit, pistol in hand. Carson, who had had enough of firearms, relinquished any claims. Over the next two decades she worked for a variety of magazines, married twice, then died, still young, of cancer.
Marjorie “Dot” Avery and Catherine Coyne, dubbed by Coyne “the Rover Girls Abroad,” parted ways, although they kept in touch for the rest of their lives. Avery married the former editor of the Detroit Free Press, Andrew Bernhard, and taught English and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. At age ninety-one, knowing she had not long to live, she asked her housekeeper to take all her war stories and notebooks and burn them; no one, she said, would care about that anymore. Catherine Coyne returned to the Boston Herald, but resigned a few years later to marry Judge Eugene A. Hudson. She lived the rest of her life beside a tidal river on Cape Cod.
Predictably, Virginia Irwin had problems adjusting to civilian life, although the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch was proud of her wartime success and assigned her important stories such as the postwar status of the Oak Ridge atomic bomb project. A series on reentry problems experienced by men and women of the military was closer to her heart. She moved to New York and for fourteen years wrote feature articles from there, but never achieved her lifelong goal to make it into the Post-Dispatch newsroom.
Patricia Lochridge continued her career in journalism for most of her active life. She was a natural muckraker: she was hassled by lawyers for the trucking industry for exposing how trucks tear up highways, and was sued in the New Orleans courts for reporting the black market there. She married several times and had four sons. For a while she worked in PR for UNICEF, and she was instrumental in building the Scottsdale Art Center in Arizona before moving to Hawaii, where she lectured for many years at the university.
Ann Stringer and Marguerite Higgins, both of whom came late to the war, remained for the postwar scene in Europe. Stringer was still turning heads, and hearts: Dan DeLuce of the AP divorced his wife of many years to marry her, a union that lasted only a few weeks. Stringer continued to report for UP, mostly from Berlin, covering the blockade and the American airlift there. In 1949 she married the German-born American photographer Hank Ries and moved with him to New York. That union continued for three decades but brought Ann little happiness.
Soon after the war’s end Marguerite Higgins was appointed head of the Herald Tribune Berlin bureau. When the Korean conflict began, she flew to Seoul, hoping to find in Korea the complete war she had missed in Europe. She risked her life more than once, was ordered out of the country and then ordered back in, and won a Pulitzer Prize for her front-line dispatches. She married General William Hall, director of army intelligence, whom she had known in Berlin. They settled in Washington and had three children (Maggie accompanied Vice President Richard Nixon to the Soviet Union when eight months pregnant with the last). Beginning in 1953, she traveled frequently to Vietnam, but she could not remain objective, and used her column to voice her strong dissent with U.S. policy there. Eventually she broke with her editors on the subject and, after twenty-two years with the Herald Tribune, resigned and became a columnist for Newsday. Following her tenth and most taxing tour in 1965, Higgins came down with a rare tropical disease, but continued to write her column from her hospital bed during the two months before her death at age forty-five.
Dickey Chapelle and her husband Tony spent two postwar years traveling about Germany and eastern Europe, photographing and documenting the feeding and medical stations set up by the American Friends Service Committee. Dickey assembled some ten thousand negatives on the work of relief organizations. After she and Tony parted in the mid-1950s, Life sent her to Austria to record the stories of Hungarian refugees crossing the border after the Soviet-crushed revolt. Dickey seized the opportunity to slip into Hungary with a small camera and penicillin for the wounded, but was caught and imprisoned for months. Undaunted, she later covered revolutions in Algeria and Cuba, marine operations in Lebanon and the Dominican Republic, and the war in Vietnam. She always arranged to be in the field with her beloved marines, parachuted with them several times into the thick of the fighting, and was killed by shrapnel from a land mine near Da Nang in November 1965. She was forty-six, and remains the only American woman war correspondent killed in action.
World War II has been labeled “the good war”; it may have been a just war, but no war is ever good. Still, good things emerge from bad situations, and a lot of positive changes for women came out of World War II. For one thing, they found they could do things they had never imagined doing. In the Stateside job market women were courted; they took jobs and learned skills and gained a self-confidence they might never have acquired otherwise. They worked in munitions factories and on farms; they went up into the skies as pilots, and deep underground as miners. Women who served in the military, particularly those sent to the combat zones, expanded their world as they never could have done on their own; an ex-Wac and dear friend of mine, now over ninety, speaks of her tour of duty in the Pacific theater as the happiest time of her life. Even mothers (like my own) who found themselves a single parent for the duration met the challenge with creativity and pride.
Although women war correspondents were continuing in a field in which they were already established, the seriousness of the war lent a gravitas to their work that it might not have achieved otherwise. Their daring and their sheer endurance was extraordinary. That there were too many of them to brush off as anomalies served to raise the level of possibility for women journalists across the country. The wo
men I spoke with were interested in the feminist movement of the next generation, and tended to support their younger sisters in this endeavor, but none saw herself in that light. Their loyalty was directed to their vocation, their colleagues, the boss at home who had sent them into the field, and the reporters of both sexes among whom they lived and worked. Had it been otherwise, they may never have attained so much, and come home heroes, as they did indeed.
Notes
1. The Groundbreakers
1
Biographical material on Dorothy Thompson comes from Marion K. Sanders, Dorothy Thompson; Peter Kurth, American Cassandra; Vincent Sheean, Dorothy & Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); and Jack Alexander, “The Girl from Syracuse,” Saturday Evening Post, May 18 and 25, 1940.
2
“I am so scared of marriage” — Thompson to Rose Wilder Lane, September 3, 1921, quoted by William Holtz, Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991).
3
Biographical material on Sigrid Schultz is taken primarily from the Sigrid Schultz Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.
4
warmly welcomed by the “news gang” ... “sketchy” grasp of languages — Schultz, notes in the Sigrid Schultz Papers.
5
“Good old work!” — Kurth, American Cassandra, p. 103.
5
She selected ... ace pilot Captain Hermann Goering — Overseas Press Club Cookbook, ed. Sigrid Schultz (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), p. 147.
6
Schultz later recalled that Hitler — Schultz, interviews by Alan Green, February 1971, Sigrid Shultz Papers.
6
“I was a little nervous” — Thompson, “7 Saw Hitler!” as quoted in Sanders, Dorothy Thompson, p. 167.
7
“six thousand boys”—Thompson, “Goodbye to Germany,” Harpers, December 1934.
7
“Dorothy Thompson, American writer” — Schultz, Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1934.
8
“My offense was to think” — Thompson, New York Times, August 27, 1934.
8
General biographical material on Janet Flanner comes from Brenda Wineapple, Genet.
10
“As a ruler of a great European power” — “Führer” ran in the New Yorker on February 29 and March 7 and 14, 1936; reprinted in Janet Flanner’s World, pp. 7-28.
2. Gassandras of the Coming Storm
13
Biographical material on Helen Kirkpatrick comes from a Washington Press Club Foundation interview by Anne S. Kasper, April 1990, and an interview with the author, June 1991.
15
“The French and British consulted” — Kirkpatrick, Kasper interview, p. 41.
15
Biographical material on Josephine Herbst comes from Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst.
16
In the first of six installments —Josephine Herbst, “Behind the Swastika,” New York Post, 1935, reprinted in pamphlet form by the Anti-Nazi Foundation, January 1936.
16
“The newspaper, the radio” — Ibid., p. 3.
17
“For anyone who knew Germany” — Ibid., pp. 10-11.
17
Herbst wrote despairingly of walking through Berlin — Ibid., pp. 19-20.
19
So a backup ploy... was inaugurated — Sigrid Schultz, “Hermann Goering’s ‘Dragon from Chicago,’” How I Got That Story, David Brown and W. Richard Bruner, eds. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), pp. 76-78.
19
Schultz decided the time had come — Ibid., pp. 78-81.
20
The Chicago Tribune had begun a series of articles — Frederick S. Voss, Reporting the War, p. 5.
22
Biographical material on Martha Gellhorn comes from Carl Rollyson’s biography Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave, from introductory pieces in her collection The Face of War, and from various biographies of Ernest Hemingway.
3. Apprentices in Spain
25
Biographical material on Eleanor Packard comes from Current Biography 1941, pp. 647-648.
27
Reynolds became enamored of a Mongolian woman — Harrison Salisbury, interview by author, August 8, 1992.
27
In the fall of 1935 they were on their way — Reynolds and Eleanor Packard, Balcony Empire, pp. 17-36.
28
Material on Frances Davis in Spain comes from My Shadow in the Sun; biographical material is taken from her A Fearful Innocence (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981).
30
“Reinforcements have been sent” — Davis, My Shadow, pp. 108-110.
31
“a grim journalistic picnic” — Current Biography 1941, p. 648.
32
FROM ONE NEWSPAPER WOMAN — Davis, My Shadow, p. 220.
33
Biographical material on Virginia Cowles comes from Current Biography 1942 and her own account in Looking for Trouble.
33
She expected a solemn, black-uniformed dictator — Looking for Trouble, pp. 245-249.
34
Josephine Herbst, dragging a knapsack — Herbst, “The Starched Blue Sky of Spain,” reprinted in the Noble Savage, I, 1960, pp. 80-81.
35
He knew she would get there, he said — Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, p. 468.
35
“The shellholes, the camouflaged trucks” — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 14.
35
Martha wrote that “the sun was too warm” — Gellhorn, “Only the Shells Whine,” Collier’s, July 17, 1937.
35
“The heavy shelling usually came” — Herbst, “Starched Blue Sky,” p. 84.
35
Herbst and Cowles waited out — Ibid., pp. 108-110; Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 30.
36
“Looking out the door” — Gellhorn, “Only the Shells Whine.”
37
she had tagged along behind — Gellhorn, introduction to “The War in Spain,” The Face of War, p. 16.
37
Their cohabitation became clear — Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, p. 308.
37
Josephine Herbst remembered how the correspondents — Herbst, “Starched Blue Sky,” pp. 94-95.
37
“beautiful Saks Fifth Avenue pants” — Ibid., p. 83.
38
This front provided the baptism — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 21-25.
38
Her chance came one morning — Herbst, “Starched Blue Sky,” pp. 84-92.
39
Gellhorn described a visit — Gellhorn, “Only the Shells Whine.”
40
Josephine Herbst noted that — Herbst, “Starched Blue Sky,” Noble Savage, I, p. 115.
40
Virginia Cowles became embroiled in a situation — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 40-52.
41
Josephine Herbst, too, thought — Herbst, “Starched Blue Sky,” Noble Savage, I, pp. 115-116.
42
Virginia Cowles managed to cross the border once more — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 62-93.
42
Eleanor and Reynolds Packard reported the Nationalist victory — Packard, Balcony Empire, p. 57.
4. The Lessons of Czechoslovakia
43
Biographical material on Margaret Bourke-White comes primarily from Vicki Goldberg’s fine eponymous biography, augmented by Bourke-White’s Portrait of Myself.
46
“I was learning that to understand” — Bourke-White, Portrait, p. 134.
47
“These are German islands” — Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, North of the Danube (New York: Viking Press, 1939).
49
Virginia Cowles . . . arrived in the Sudetenland — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 116-120.
49
“We’re on an island now” — Gellhorn, “The Lord Will Provide for England,” Collier’s, September 17, 1938.
49
“Martha was infuriated” — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 127.
49
“Fancy going round to the pubs” — Ibid.
50
Nuremberg to cover the annual Nazi Party congress — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, pp. 141-151.
52
correspondents who flocked to Berchtesgaden — Schultz, Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1938.
53
Sunday Times articles on Spain — Cowles, Looking for Trouble, p. 107.
53
Kirkpatrick had a clear view of the prime minister’s return — Kirkpatrick, Under the British Umbrella, pp. vii-viii.
53
“The Czechs had one of the best armies” — Kirkpatrick, Kasper interview, p. 30.
53
along the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border — Flanner, “Letter from Budapest,” New Yorker, September 17, 1938, in Janet Flanner’s World, p. 46; Wineapple, Genet, pp. 153-154.