The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Josephine Herbst, too, thought it was time to move on. The war was at a stalemate, and there was dissension among the various Republican ideological factions. Dos Passos, deeply disillusioned, had quarreled with Hemingway. Food was scarcer than ever, and Josie told herself that she — a noncombatant, a foreigner — was consuming too much of it, although in fact she had lost twenty pounds. She made her way to Barcelona and flew to Toulouse, looking forward to ordering a real lunch in a normal restaurant, only to find herself sobbing over her omelette “and looking at people calmly passing by as if I had entered into a nightmare where the ‘real’ world had suddenly been wiped off with a sponge and vanished forever.”

  Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway also left during that summer of 1937, but in September they returned. Although Franco now held about two-thirds of Spain, the Republican forces had recently had some success in Aragon, and together with Herbert Matthews of the New York Times the couple surveyed the area for stories. Traveling the mountain paths on foot and horseback, they lived out of an open truck and cooked over campfires. Snow fell early in the mountains, and the wind was cold, but Martha bore it all with great equanimity, endearing herself even more to Hemingway.

  The war — or perhaps Spain — continued to hold a magnetic attraction for reporters. True to her original plan to cover both sides, Virginia Cowles managed to cross the border once more to compare the situation in Nationalist Spain, bedecked from one end to the other with German and Italian flags and swastikas, with what she had seen in and around Madrid. She visited Guernica. Accompanied by a Spanish officer, she followed Franco’s army through the rugged province of Asturias, the soldiers on muleback forming “a long, silent procession winding through the mountains.”

  Having gone to war of her own volition, Cowles felt free to draw her own conclusion: for the common people, war was hard whether you were on the winning or losing side. Most civilians cared little about either military strategy or the isms thrown at them — Bolshevism, Fascism, Nationalism. War meant domestic upheaval, soaring prices, inadequate food, and houses with shell holes in them, if not worse. She found the soldiers on Franco’s side less idealistic, although better disciplined and far better equipped. But she learned to keep her conclusions to herself. Comparisons could be dangerous; objectivity was not tolerated. Unthinking, she contradicted the views of a Nationalist officer. Finding herself once again in grave personal danger, she counted herself lucky to slip out of the country.

  Madrid fell on March 28, 1939. The International Brigade, what was left of it, had long since been pulled from the lines. The Soviet general who had taken a fancy to Virginia Cowles had departed for Moscow and a very uncertain future. Most of the Italian troops had returned home as well, and at the end it was as it had begun — Spaniard against Spaniard.

  Eleanor and Reynolds Packard reported the Nationalist victory parade in Madrid on May 11. They viewed the proceedings from the press gallery beside Franco’s reviewing stand. For five hours the troops marched past in the rain. Tanks from Italy, German planes overhead, all were part of a show of strength that conveyed its own message: the civil war in Spain may have ended, but the Fascist onslaught had begun.

  4

  The Lessons of Czechoslovakia

  The international scene attracted early women photographers as well as men, although seldom professionally and seldom in the middle of an armed conflict. Forty years had passed since Anna Benjamin, her box-shaped camera slung over her slender shoulder, covered wars in Cuba, Manila, and the Far East. In fact, few American women had broken into news photography as a career, until during the 1930s one emerged who coupled genius behind the lens with extraordinary determination and would become one of the great photojournalists of World War II.

  Margaret Bourke-White, Life

  Margaret (sometimes “Maggie” or “Peg”) Bourke-White grew up in a small New Jersey town, in a family where standards of conduct — always doing one’s best, and then a little better — substituted for pretty clothes and position in local society. In high school, where appearance mattered, she felt herself on the sidelines, but she was happier at Columbia, the first of her several colleges. She enrolled in a photography course with Clarence H. White (no relation), mainstay of the Photo-Secession group. Already a perfectionist herself, she adopted his passion for absolute control of each picture.

  Margaret’s father, who had introduced her to photography and to whom she was very close, died that year, and she migrated to the University of Michigan, where she spent as much time with her camera as her books. She discovered the link between photography and adventure, clambering up and sliding down pitched roofs or lowering herself into a manhole to get the desired shot. It was at Michigan that she defined her goal to be “a news photographer-reporter,” and where she blossomed socially — joined a sorority, dated, fell in love with a fellow photographer. At twenty, and not without doubts, she married him. She tried to be a good wife (had she not been trained to do her best in every situation?), but her young husband’s family, bitterly opposed and supremely possessive, won out. When at last she left, having survived two years of stressful courtship and two more of connubial blisslessness, Margaret was ready for life as an individual again.

  Margare Bourke-White at an American air base in Engla nd, 1942.

  PHOTO BY LEE MILLER. © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES.

  At Cornell, her sixth college, she peddled her photos to help see her through to graduation. Wielding her old lea Reflex with a crack through its lens, she shot fuzzy, soft-focus impressions of Cornell’s fine old buildings. “Campus pattern pictures” she called them, or more romantically, “pseudo-Corots.” Cornell alumni who saw them featured in the Alumni News were impressed, and when during Easter vacation Margaret took her portfolio to the associates of a large New York architectural firm, she received a resounding vote of affirmation.

  Newly confident, Bourke-White made serious preparations for her career of star photographer. She had cut her hair to a smart bob and hyphenated her name when she left her husband; now she dropped both him from her record and two years from her life. Her new youth served to elevate her prodigy status. In Cleveland, selected as a stepping-stone for consolidating her reputation before she hit New York, she began shooting industrial locations — the Lake Erie waterfront, railways, steel mills. Some shots were possible only from the roofs of other buildings, or from precarious beams or ledges, and she became adept at conquering dizzy heights. Such antics were noticed, and contributed to a growing celebrity. Along with her newly vibrant, almost electric personality, she suddenly found she had sex appeal.

  Perhaps employing that elusive quality, Bourke-White persuaded a reluctant president of the Otis Steel Mills to allow her to photograph there at will. Henry Luce happened upon a sampling in the rotogravure section of a midwestern paper and sent Margaret an invitation to come to New York and join the staff of his new business periodical, Fortune. The first issue concentrated on the meatpacking industry, and her photo-essay of “pattern pictures of giant hog shapes” established her as a pioneer in the new photojournalism. From that time on, the magazine made extravagant use of her photographs, sending her to Germany, and then on to the Soviet Union to cover the new Russia. She returned there twice over the next two years. Stalin was consolidating his power, but she saw none of the terrible cost of that endeavor, and the country was otherwise open to her. She responded in kind: all her pictures were flattering.

  Her career moved at an ever accelerated pace. In New York in 1930 she photographed the Chrysler Building at every stage of its construction, even straddling the gargoyles for striking perspectives. In South Bend, Indiana, Luce himself accompanied her through the steel foundries, carrying her cameras from one site to the next. Many men in high positions would carry Bourke-White’s equipment over the next quarter of a century. Almost all her friends were men, and some were more than friends. A few would have preferred to be more than lovers, but Margaret refused to consider a serious relationship. She had no ti
me for love, she liked to say.

  This mind-set dissolved in the summer of 1936 when she approached Erskine Caldwell about collaborating on a social documentary on America’s poor. Almost exactly her age, he already had five novels to his credit — vivid naturalistic tales of the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and mill hands of his native Georgia. He was a committed activist and had reported extensively for the New York Post on the poverty of the South and its crudeness and degenerate sexuality, while Bourke-White had only recently come to a social consciousness. The tour by car that covered six states and resulted in the widely acclaimed book You Have Seen Their Faces proved a pivotal experience for her. “I was learning that to understand another human being you must gain some insight into the conditions which made him what he is,” she wrote in her autobiography. She was also becoming aware that a good photograph shows at a glance how events affect people.

  Their collaboration was not without difficulties. The terrain was familiar to Caldwell; he mapped out the trip, and left Margaret no choice but to relinquish control. Perhaps for balance, she introduced sex into the picture. Within the first week they were lovers. During the second, Erskine’s secretary, relegated to the backseat with cameras and tripods, left for home. Caldwell’s wife and three children blurred into the background. Bourke-White was, and always would be, attracted by fame, but even more by the creative process behind the fame, and in Caldwell’s case by the man behind the process. The ensuing relationship terminated whatever was left of his marriage, and by the spring of 1938 when they sailed together for Europe, he was pressing her for a commitment.

  In the interim, Bourke-White had shifted from Fortune to Henry Luce’s newest creation, Life. Life was a weekly designed to present the news in photos that would tell a story as succinctly as words did in Time. Margaret’s photo of the great earth-filled concrete dam at Fort Peck, Montana, graced the cover of the first issue on November 23, 1936. Now Life was sending her to Czechoslovakia. Caldwell would accompany her and gather material for a book on that country’s predicament.

  Czechoslovakia was rife with tension that spring of 1938. Pieced together after the First World War when the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell, it was surrounded by hostile, or at least unsympathetic, countries — Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany. The outer edges bordering Austria and Germany were known as the Sudetenland, and when his just-concluded annexation of Austria drew little opposition, Hitler determined to move in. He ordered Germans living in the Sudetenland to agitate for secession, forcing non-Germans, many of them Jews, to flee. Bourke-White and Caldwell found the population unfriendly, suspicious of each other and of foreigners.

  Crossing the Tatras Mountains on the Kosice-Zilina Express, they watched in strained silence as a German Nazi in their car brought out a map of Czechoslovakia on which all the place-names were in German. He circled half of Bohemia and most of Moravia, and made smaller rings elsewhere. “These are German islands,” he said. “Wherever German is spoken, that is German territory.” Perhaps sensing opposition, he began to expostulate. “It belongs to the Fatherland. Soon the German people will claim it. The Czechs have no right to it.” His face turned purple, Bourke-White later recalled, and the cords of his neck stood out. No one said anything. The train rolled on through fields of ripening wheat and young green oats.

  Late in May the German press stepped up their campaign against the Czechs, referring to “intolerable provocations.” Word came that German troops were mobilizing on the border; the Czech army followed suit. Although Bourke-White had not finished shooting, Life took what she had, combined it with the work of other photographers, and published a lengthy story on the crisis. Her five months in Czechoslovakia had yielded little pleasure of accomplishment. Instances of anti-Semitism were depressing, particularly to Margaret, who only after her father’s death had learned that she was herself half Jewish. He had never spoken of his background, and in that time of widespread prejudice, the sudden revelation had shocked her. It was years before she made her peace with it.

  Added to that were the pressures of working in a country where they were at the mercy of interpreters. Caldwell, often erratic and moody anyway, turned uncooperative and rude. Margaret felt that his hostility formed a barrier between them and their subjects. Nor was she pleased with her own work. There were photos of a Nazi storm-trooper training class in Moravia and a Nazi rally in Bohemia, but the majority were apolitical — shots of everyday peasant activities. They seemed to her superficial, lacking in depth and perspective. To a large extent she blamed Erskine. North of the Danube, the less-than-perfect book that emerged from this dual journey, was perhaps a harbinger of things to come.

  As the Czechoslovakian crisis spun out that spring and summer, women reporting from American news bureaus in Europe were among the hordes of press to descend upon that hapless country. In May Virginia Cowles, now reporting for the London Sunday Times, had only just arrived in the Sudetenland with a colleague from the Daily Mail when a Nazi official tipped them off” that the German army was preparing to cross the frontier. Cowles was astounded. That would mean war, she protested, and what about France’s treaty with Czechoslovakia, England’s alliance with France? Their informant shrugged. No one will fight for the Czechs, he said, an opinion supported by the 6,500 frenzied Sudeten Germans who packed a rally that night. But Germany indignantly denied any idea of marching, and the state of urgency cooled.

  Nazi rally in Czechoslovakia, 1938.

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

  Back in London, Cowles found the average Englishman not much interested in fighting for the Czechs either. She joined Martha Gellhorn, now reporting regularly for Colliers, in an assignment to discover how the British were reacting to recent events on the Continent. After what she had seen in Spain, Gellhorn viewed peace as close to unsalvageable. But in England she found that speaking of war as a probability was considered “warmongering.” Driving with Cowles through the Midlands to find out what ordinary people were thinking, she concluded that they were not doing much thinking. A woman in a pub opposite an armaments plant, asked if she had a gas mask, responded with a hoot of laughter. The director of a shipyard said that his firm was indeed building destroyers, cruisers, and battleships, but how they were to be used was up to the politicians. “We’re on an island now, and the world is someplace else,” Gellhorn mocked. “This is England and tomorrow there is probably a cricket match.”

  Cowles, with her patrician upbringing, was intrigued by Gellhorn’s visceral reaction. “Martha was infuriated by the complacency,” she wrote later. “The fact that the workingman in England was not stung to fury (as she was) by the treatment of his brothers in Spain or the doom of his brothers in Czechoslovakia struck her as shameful.” The trip took on the character of a lecture tour as Gellhorn devoted less time to asking questions and more to soliloquizing on the danger Hider posed to the world. At a Sunday afternoon tea in the Yorkshire home of Under-Secretary of State Lord Feversham, she complained that English people thought of nothing but racing and the weather. Their host, Virginia recalled, found it all very funny. “Fancy going round to the pubs and asking people what they think,” he said. “You two are a couple of warmongers. Just trying to upset the country and stir up trouble.”

  If England appeared somnolent to Gellhorn that summer, she would have done well to accompany Cowles to Nuremberg to cover the annual Nazi Party congress. There was nothing sleepy about the Germans in Nuremberg. Virginia was impressed by the drama of that medieval city, especially at night. “The long red pennants, fluttering from the turreted walls of Nuremberg Castle, shone in the moonlight like the standards of an old religious war,” she wrote; “the tramp of marching feet and the chorus of voices chanting the militant Nazi hymns had all the passion of an ancient crusade.” It was already clear that Czechoslovakia was the object of the crusade. But for the time being, everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. Cowles reminded herself that these were not army men but ordinary workers who the re
st of the year were bus drivers, garage mechanics, shopkeepers. This was their holiday, and they were making the most of it, eating sausages and sauerkraut and drinking beer and taking snapshots of each other. When questioned about the possibility of another war, they said no, no one wanted war, least of all Hitler.

  One afternoon Cowles attended a tea that German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop gave in Hitler’s honor. The guest list consisted mostly of diplomats and delegates, but Cowles moved easily between the press and diplomatic society. She arrived at the Hotel Deutscher Hof at four o’clock to find the hall scattered with small tea tables, each with a card reading: Please Don’t Smoke in the Presence of the Fuehrer. Besides the expected officials — Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Hess — there were a dozen or so English visitors, most noticeably the Honorable Unity Valkyrie Mitford, with her shoulder-length blond curls and large blue eyes.

  Unity joined Virginia at her table. A few minutes later the doors swung open, and as everyone stood rigidly at attention, Hitler came into the room and sat down. Glancing around, he noticed Unity, and Cowles saw his eyes light up, his face break into a smile, and his arm go up in the Nazi salute to her. Unity saluted back. A moment later Hitler’s aide-de-camp came to their table and whispered that the Fuehrer would like to see Unity; would she please come to his suite after tea? She sent back an affirmative reply, and to Virginia’s astonishment, Hitler suddenly appeared in better spirits, talking animatedly, laughing, and occasionally glancing in Unity’s direction — showing off for her benefit, Cowles thought.

  That evening she cornered Unity and asked her what Hider had said. Would there be war? “I don’t think so,” Unity replied with a smile. “The Fuehrer doesn’t want his new buildings bombed.” Cowles pressed her further. What did they talk about? “Gossip,” Unity said. Hitler liked gossip; it made him laugh. He had a good sense of humor, she said. He would do imitations of his Nazi colleagues Goering, Goebbels, Himmler — also Mussolini, which was the funniest. Sometimes he even imitated himself. He liked company, and especially excitement. “Otherwise he gets bored,” she observed. It occurred to Virginia that Hitler might invade Czechoslovakia merely to relieve his boredom.