I could not have felt any prouder when I wore that uniform for the first time. Jubilant, too, because I had what I wanted.
When I was sure there would be no more bureaucratic foulups, I flew back to our home in Arizona to wait for my orders and to spend time with Erskine. In early August my orders came through. I was to leave for England. Our last few days together were warm and affectionate but cooled as the hour of my departure approached. Erskine was sunk in one of his black, bleak moods when I left. Neither of us had any idea how long I’d be gone.
28
United States at War—1942
I WAS BILLETED AT A SECRET BOMBER BASE OUTSIDE OF London, staying in the officers’ quarters in a cell-like room with a cot, a coke-burning stove, and a washstand. I arrived around the same time as the B-17 bombers. I was out on the runway to photograph the Flying Fortresses, as they were called, when they took off on their first mission—thirteen of them—and I was there and counting them as all thirteen returned.
I quickly became part of the team, and the crew of one of the B-17s asked me to name their plane. The name I proposed was Flying Flit Gun. “Flit” was a widely-used bug spray, and a Flit Gun was the hand-pumped sprayer. The “bugs” to be “sprayed” with bombs were caricatures of our enemies—Germany’s Hitler, Italy’s Mussolini, and Japan’s Hirohito—painted on the plane’s fuselage. A proper christening was arranged, which usually meant smashing a bottle of champagne on the bow of a newly launched ship, but this was a plane, not a ship, and we had no champagne. I climbed a tall ladder in my “dress pinks” skirt, loudly proclaimed, “I christen thee Flying Flit Gun,” and smashed a bottle of Coca-Cola on one of the bomber’s guns. A band played, and the commanding officer, Colonel Atkinson, made a speech. I always felt pride and relief when Flying Flit Gun made it back safely from another bombing run.
Sometimes I was sent on special assignments to London—photographing Prime Minister Winston Churchill on his birthday, for one—but making portraits was not the reason I was there. I wanted to witness the war up close. I wanted to fly on a combat mission, but my requests were denied. I could go on practice runs, but not on a real bombing mission. I knew why. “The High Command does not wish to expose women to the dangers of war.” I kept trying.
At the same time, I had something much more deeply distressing to deal with: my husband. When I left for England, our marriage was fraying—I could see that—but I wanted to believe that it was still intact. Erskine wrote to me often, but our letters crossed in the transatlantic mail, and the latest letter from Erskine was never a response to my most recent letter to him.
He was lonely, he said. He had trouble writing when I was away, and he pleaded with me to finish up whatever I was doing and hurry home. He loved me, he wrote. He would always love me. He said I was his truest, deepest love.
Suddenly his tone changed. At the beginning of October I received a terse cable stating that the last he’d heard from me was a letter on the tenth of September and a wire on the twentieth. Five weeks of silence followed. On November 9 I received another cable.
He had reached a difficult decision, the most difficult of his life, he wired—PARTNERSHIP MUST DISSOLVE IMMEDIATELY. The situation was unbearable, he could see no future for it, and nothing could be done to change it. He was truly sorry, Erskine stated, and was himself inconsolable.
That was all.
I was completely thrown off balance, but I did not want anyone to know how badly shaken I was. I wired back and asked him to explain his reasons more fully. Was there someone else? Two days later I had Erskine’s reply. It didn’t offer much of an explanation, except to say that both present and future were dismal. It ended, SUCH IS LONELINESS.
I shot back that this answer was really no answer at all. Then I waited. Perhaps I should have been devastated, but in fact I felt relieved. I would no longer have to worry about what sort of mood he was in, how he would behave around other people, or how he would relate to me. After a week had passed, I wrote to my lawyer as my husband had suggested, telling the lawyer that the only thing I wanted from the marriage was the house in Connecticut. We hadn’t spent much time there recently, but I liked it, and I’d need a home when the war ended. Erskine agreed.
And that was that. My marriage was over. Work would be my salvation, as it always had been.
I was about to launch another campaign to get myself on board a bombing mission when I heard a rumor that the Allies were planning to invade North Africa. The plan was top secret-no one knew, certainly not my Life editors. I simply had to be involved. Luck was on my side: General Atkinson would command the invasion—he was promoted from colonel soon after he’d given the speech at the christening of Flying Flit Gun. I knew him well, and it wasn’t hard to get his permission.
I assumed I’d fly in one of the B-17s, preferably the Flit Gun, but the top brass vetoed that idea. “It’s too dangerous, Margaret,” General Atkinson said flatly when I tried to change his mind. “You’ll travel in a convoy. It’s much safer.”
It was a very large convoy with an aircraft carrier, troopships, destroyers, and smaller escort ships called corvettes. I was assigned to a troopship that had formerly been a luxury liner, with chandeliers and plush-covered divans and a sweeping marble staircase. Somehow they had managed to shoehorn six thousand British and American troops onto this grande dame of a vessel, plus four hundred Scottish nurses, five WAACs—the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps—and Captain Kay Summersby, a beautiful Irish girl who served as chauffeur for General Dwight Eisenhower, who was in charge of the invasion.
Off we sailed, straight into the teeth of one of the most violent storms the ship’s captain could remember. Day after day we zigged and zagged toward Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, tossed around like bathtub toys, rising and plunging through towering waves. The grand piano rumbled across the floor, tables and chairs became airborne missiles. Almost everyone was horribly seasick, but for some reason I was immune.
No matter how bad it got, the ship’s captain insisted that we endure regular lifeboat drills. They were torture for all those poor seasick souls who had to drag themselves out of their bunks, march to their assigned lifeboat stations, and wait, silent and attentive for a quarter of an hour as they were dashed with freezing spray, until they were allowed to totter back to their cabins.
As soon as we were through the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean, the sea became calm. Those of us with sturdier stomachs who had braved the grand saloon twice a day for a meal prepared by the unflappable galley crew told stories of flying crockery that made every meal dangerous. But all that changed. We relaxed. We laughed. We were due to land in North Africa the next day. I made sure my cameras and lenses were in order and rearranged the contents of my musette bag, a rubberized canvas shoulder bag that we’d each been issued and instructed to keep stocked with extra socks, chocolate, soap, first aid supplies, and a few emergency rations. I decided that an extra camera and film qualified as an emergency supply.
A farewell party was in raucous progress in the grand saloon. Rumors circulated that a German U-boat had been sighted earlier in the day. It was likely there were others, as they often traveled in “wolfpacks” and had been shadowing our convoy for three days, since we’d escaped the storm and entered the Mediterranean. The destroyer had taken out one submarine. “That leaves the rest of the wolves to worry about,” commented a junior officer as the party wound down.
“Good night!” we called out cheerfully as we headed below to our bunks. “Good night!”
Most of us were asleep an hour later when the German torpedo found its mark.
… It has been a long, long night of hunger, cold, and fatigue. Shivering in my soaking wet officer’s coat, I fear for my own life, but I also grapple with the sickening knowledge that men and women have been dying all around me since we abandoned ship, and I can do nothing to save them.
I wonder if I will die. I wonder if Erskine will grieve for me if I do.
Hours
drag by. After sunrise I take pictures. It’s the only thing I know to do.
In midafternoon someone spots a flying boat, a large seaplane. It flies low over us, waggling its wings, and we wave back, assuring each other that help will come soon. The afternoon fades and the sun sinks lower, lower. There is no sign of rescuers. It won’t be long before darkness descends, and they won’t be able to find us. No one wants to speak about this.
Late in the day a destroyer appears, a mere speck on the horizon. It’s possible that they don’t know exactly where we are. It’s possible there’s another German U-boat out there, another deadly torpedo. We will the ship to come faster. We will it to see us. And then it is there, and we’re cheering, dizzy with relief. By nightfall we’ve been hauled aboard the crowded ship, grateful to be warm and dry with food in our stomachs and a place to sleep.
Exhausted but not yet ready to sleep, I walk out on deck and stand beneath the glittering bowl of the heavens as the destroyer slices through the silent waters of the Mediterranean toward the coast of North Africa. I have survived. For now I am safe, but the world is at war, and I have much more work to do.
Margaret emerged from her linsey-woolsey girlhood as a glamourous woman and a famous photographer.
Note from the Author
Girl with a Camera is a work of fiction based on the real life of Margaret Bourke-White. I’ve ended my story in December 1942, near the midpoint of her career with many years of exhilarating adventures and triumphant achievements still ahead.
After her rescue, Margaret and the others on board the destroyer landed in Algiers, where she had the good fortune to run into General Atkinson, the same officer who had cleared her to travel with the troops to North Africa. The general gave her permission to go on a bombing mission. Issued a fleece-lined leather flight suit, she took pictures from the window of a Flying Fortress as the bombs were dropped.
I remember as a child seeing a photograph in Life of Margaret in her flight suit—it seemed that everyone followed the progress of the war in the pages of that magazine. My father had enlisted in the Army Air Forces soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he’d received his overseas orders in the fall of 1942. My mother and I saw him off at the railroad station in my hometown. He flew first to England, then to North Africa, and he must have arrived there about the same time that Margaret did.
Margaret Bourke-White caused a sensation wherever she went, and as I was working on this book I began to wonder if Lieutenant Meyer had ever met the glamorous photographer. Then I found one of his missing wartime diaries. In an entry my father made late in December 1942 I found a reference to Scottish nurses whose ship had been torpedoed. A few pages on he mentioned having coffee with General Atkinson. No mention, though, of Margaret Bourke-White.
In the spring of 1943 she returned to the States, but after only two months she was agitating to get back to the war. Early in September Margaret returned to North Africa and received her orders to join Allied troops who had moved on to Italy, where they were fighting to drive out the Germans. For months she flew reconnaissance missions and slept in foxholes, repeatedly risking her life to get the pictures she wanted.
As she prepared to leave Italy in 1943, she photographed a field hospital under bombardment. The photographs were sent to the Pentagon in Washington to be cleared by the censors, but somehow they were lost and never found. Margaret believed this was one of her most important stories, and it was a painful loss she never forgot. A few months later, when most of the other reporters and photographers had moved on to cover the fighting in France, Margaret was allowed to return to Italy, where the fighting stubbornly continued. She was in Rome until early 1945, when she left for Germany and photographed the liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Her pictures of the atrocities committed there were among the first seen in America. As the war came to a close, Margaret was assigned to photograph German factories as they were being captured. Then she flew home, staying long enough to write another book, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, expressing her anger at Germany. Although Margaret never referred publicly to herself as being “half Jewish,” the prejudice against Jews that had been instilled in her by her mother had been eradicated even before she witnessed the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.
Margaret’s next Life assignment took her to India in 1946 and again in 1947, to photograph Mahatma Gandhi as the subcontinent was gaining its independence from the British Empire. In 1949, she traveled with her camera to South Africa to document conditions in the gold and diamond mines. After that experience, she vowed she’d never wear gold or diamonds again.
During the early 1950s, when writers and actors and photographers and ordinary citizens were being investigated by a Congressional committee for their supposedly pro-Communist activities and beliefs, Margaret found herself on the list. Determined to clear her name, she persuaded Life to send her to Korea to do a story that would demonstrate beyond doubt her loyalty to the principles of democracy.
About this time Margaret began to notice a weakness in her leg and clumsiness in her hands. The symptoms worsened, and she was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a progressive disease that affects the brain’s ability to control the body’s movements. Even as her condition deteriorated, Margaret kept working, until in 1957 she was no longer able to accept assignments from Life.
Not long after Margaret’s ship had been torpedoed off the coast of North Africa and she was rescued, she received a letter from her lawyer. Enclosed was a newspaper article that reported the marriage of Erskine Caldwell to a college student in Arizona. It was her former husband’s third marriage; a few years later he married for the fourth time.
Margaret did not marry again, but she did fall in love several times—with an American major in Italy who did not survive the war, with a brilliant Russian violinist, with an army colonel stationed in Japan—and there were other, less serious, relationships. Mostly, though, she lived alone in her Connecticut home, surrounded by mementoes of her many trips, where she wrote, entertained friends when she wasn’t immersed in writing her next book, and struggled valiantly against the inexorable progress of her disease. Margaret Bourke-White died August 27, 1971, at the age of sixty-seven.
I have drawn the outline of her life and filled in the details from various sources: her autobiography, Portrait of Myself; Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography, by Vicki Goldberg; her high school yearbook, and some of her personal papers from the Special Collections Library at Syracuse University. That collection is voluminous. I was happiest when I discovered gems like the poem she wrote when she was eleven, “Flit on, lovely butterfly,” carefully saved by her mother. Another gratifying moment occurred when I dug up a copy of her high-school yearbook with the words of the class song she helped write and the name of the co-author, Jack Daniels.
I didn’t alter facts, but because this is a novel, I did invent certain details (such as Margaret’s prize-winning story) and a few minor characters, and I assigned names to characters who were not named specifically in my sources. For example, Tubby Luf was real; Sara Jane Cassidy was my creation.
Carolyn Meyer
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Picture Credits
Getty Images/Photo by Margaret Bourke-White: 193; 198–199; 205
Getty Images/Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt: 230
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: LC-DIG-ppmsca-19361: 4; LC-DIG-ppmsca-15839: 76
Carolyn Meyer is the best-selling, award-winning author of numerous novels for children and young adults, many of them on courageous women of the past. Diary of a Waitress, about the Harvey Girls of the American West, was also published by Calkins Creek. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Visit her at readcarolyn.com
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