The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Betty Wason with Leland Stowe in Norway, 1940.

  BETTY WASON PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  Her first stop was Constantinople, her second, Paris. In both cities she fell in love with married men, heady relationships followed by unhappy endings. In Paris, the work compensated. Jules Sauerwein, foreign editor at Le Matin, hearing of a desperately poor young Russian noblewoman who spoke French, English, Italian, German, and Russian, hired her on the spot. Before long the managing editor was including her in his midday conferences to report on current foreign events. During her six years there, she also wrote on finance for the New York Herald Tribune, fashion for the London Daily Express, and politics for newspapers in Vienna and Constantinople. She saved enough to send for her sisters, and together they became part of a bohemian circle of young Russian exiles. In time her mother and once-wealthy aunt from the big house near Moscow came, too. With so many to house and feed, Sonia needed more money. Providence intervened, and in 1928 Leland Stowe, then Paris correspondent for the Herald Tribune, offered her a chance to write at double her previous salary.

  When Italy went to war with Ethiopia, Tomara was sent to hold down the Herald Tribune desk in Rome. She reported Mussolini’s balcony speeches from the Piazza Venezia and, in time, his victory speech from same. Later she traveled across the plains of Slovakia to the Sudeten mountains in Bohemia, sorting out for Herald Tribune readers the irreconcilable differences between the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs. After a stint in the home office in New York, she returned that summer of 1939 for a tour of Europe. On landing in France, she felt at once a sense of impending catastrophe. So many young men were in aviation uniform. She tried to reassure herself that France had the best army in Europe, but the thought kept recurring that the country was not yet fully healed from the last war.

  At Strasbourg Tomara crossed over into the Reich. There she encountered German soldiers on maneuvers, “sun-burnt, steel-eyed men emerging from steel tanks, women smiling to them and the men waving and smiling back.” It was an arresting picture. Somehow she doubted that these men thought it was France that had the best army in Europe.

  In Berlin she consulted her friends from the Wilhelmstrasse. Hitler, they said, talked about nothing but Poland, read about nothing but Poland. He had changed since Munich, they told her; he paid no attention to his ambassadors or the communiques they sent, the advice they gave. The newspapers screamed in big headlines about Polish atrocities against the Germans, exactly as they had done about Czechoslovakia the summer before. Hitler had only one thought, one holy mission: Poland.

  Mussolini, of whom not much had been heard lately, found this gobbling up of territory far too one-sided. Three years had passed since his Ethiopian conquest, three years in which Hitler had annexed Austria and in effect Czechoslovakia, and Hitler was clearly not finished. The world might begin to think Italy a secondary power, or himself a minor leader. Facing Italy across the Adriatic was Yugoslavia, a large country with friends and protectors, where the consequences of a takeover were at best uncertain. But directly opposite the heel of Italy’s boot was Albania. This small, backward country ruled by a nominal king would seem ripe for the plucking.

  Eleanor Packard first heard the rumor of Italian designs over a bridge table in Rome. With her husband occupied as UP bureau chief, it was often she who dashed off for a firsthand observation of the latest trouble spot. In Prague for Czech army maneuvers the previous summer, for example, she had been standing next to William Shirer when a Skoda fighter failed to come out of a deep dive and crashed directly in front of them. The pilot and his observer were still alive when extricated from the mass of twisted metal. Shirer had been badly shaken, but everyone remarked how calm Packard remained. A woman correspondent could not afford to go to pieces, no matter what she witnessed.

  With Albania in possible jeopardy, Eleanor decided to fly to Tirana, the capital. Cash was a problem: she and Reynolds had only sixty-eight dollars on hand, tucked at the entry on “money” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Because it was illegal to take funds out of Italy without special permission, she secreted most of that sum in her bra. She was glad of the assignment. Rome had become quiescent, and it was not for a steady dose of bridge that she had become a foreign correspondent. She much preferred to be moving, however slowly, and in Tirana where horse-and-buggy taxis clip-clopped to primitive hotels, that meant slowly indeed. She arrived to find an excited populace celebrating the birth of a son to King Zog and his young wife. On her third day she was awakened by the clerk from the American legation, informing her that the Italians had landed and she should proceed to the legation for safety. She brushed off that advice, but did check in regularly for progress reports. One disclosed the queen’s escape with her baby son by ambulance to Greece, another the king’s decision to go to the mountains to lead his troops. That, Eleanor reasoned, was only posturing; his troops had no arms of any consequence. As she anticipated, King Zog and the government were soon off to Greece as well.

  The next day Packard watched Italian troops on shiny Bersaglieris roar into town. Opposition was minimal. The radio station and telegraph office were secured, leaving no way for her to send her dispatches. Italy resolved to legitimate this takeover without delay, and during the following week parliamentary delegates, preapproved by Italian officials, arrived from the provinces. Eleanor attended the session in the tiny opera house. Despite her shocked objection, she was frisked before entering — an official pawed through her pockets and handbag, felt her armpits for a shoulder holster, and otherwise carefully studied her silk-dress-clad figure from every angle. At the proceedings, officials announced that the Italian flag would fly next to the Albanian and that the crown (long missing) would be offered to the Italian king. The delegates accepted the inevitable. It had been a remarkably unbloody coup, but Packard hated the thought of another Fascist success in what seemed an irreversible progression toward war.

  In Berlin that summer Sigrid Schultz was unearthing a prospective Nazi maneuver of the first magnitude. Her detective work was initiated by her doctor, Johannes Schmidt, also physician to party officials, who tipped her off about an astrologer whom he said Hitler had recently consulted. Schultz made her own appointment, but the astrologer’s suggestion that the Fuehrer was planning some kind of rapprochement with the Soviet Union she found at first incredible. So much of Hitler’s strategy was, always had been, built around opposition to Communism. On the other hand, if he had designs on Poland, it made sense that he would want advance assurance that the great power to the east would not rise in her defense.

  On July 13, 1939, an article by “John Dickson” appeared in the Chicago Tribune, revealing that Berlin had sent negotiators to Moscow to discuss plans for Soviet-German cooperation. “The newest toast in high Hitler-Guard circles is: ‘To our new ally, Russia!’” Dickson trumpeted. He conceded that cozying up to Stalin ought to discredit Hider as a crusader against Communism, but “if Hitler says the wicked Red Soviets are no longer Red nor wicked, the Germans will accept his word!” All this remained conjecture until August 21 when the Chicago Tribune first broke the story, under Sigrid Schultz’s own byline, that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had flown to Moscow to sign a nonagression pact with the Soviet Union.

  Was Poland lost then? Virginia Cowles, in Rome that late summer of 1939 for the London Sunday Times, learned that Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, had returned from Berchtesgaden after conferring with Hider. That news prompted rumors that a date for war had been decided, so when Virginia was invited by the Prince and Princess del Drago to join Ciano for lunch on the beach at Ostia, she accepted. Lunch on the beach with Ciano was always a comic affair, with waiters carrying trays of spaghetti and buckets of red wine along the sand.

  Cowles avoided questioning Ciano outright about his Bavarian visit, but she knew he could not resist dropping a hint or two. After lunch he took her for a motorboat ride and, about a mile offshore, dove off the boat for a swim. When he surfaced, hair dripping over
his eyes, he blurted out in his excellent English, “I bet you’d like to know what I talked to Hider about.” Virginia replied that she would indeed, particularly as she suspected Hider had done most of the talking. The suggestion that Ciano had played a lesser role in the conference proved the wrong thing to say, and no more information was forthcoming.

  They met again on the beach the following day. Dino Alfiero, minister of propaganda, was also there, and when an elderly man and his daughter, both in bathing suits, came along, Ciano and Alfiero rushed over to greet them. Prince del Drago rather pointedly did not. Cowles asked who the man was. “General Dlugoszowski, the Polish ambassador,” del Drago said. “I would have liked to have clasped his hand and told him we would save his country for him. But alas, it’s too late. We can’t.”

  In her still unofficial role with the Chicago Daily News, Helen Kirkpatrick began to sleuth out the German scenario for war. She knew: one, that the summer-1939 German mobilization would reach its peak by August 15; two, that the Czechs had been ordered to deliver the harvest to Germany by the twenty-fifth; and three, that German agents were in Britain and Ireland buying copper, tin, and — yes — horses, all for immediate delivery. A German correspondent in London told her that she would be able to tell by August 20 if there would be war because, if so, arrangements for the Nuremberg rally, always held in September, would be canceled by that date. On the nineteenth Helen learned from a colleague in Berlin that firms with contracts for the rally had been quietly notified of its cancellation.

  Later Kirkpatrick recalled her last weekend of real peace:

  I spent it in the country, not far from London, in a luxurious house with eleven other guests. We swam, we played tennis, we rode horseback in Windsor Great Park, we gathered rather frequently around the cocktail bar, and we saw the latest films in a complete miniature moving picture theatre just next to the squash courts in one wing of the house. The company ranged from stockbrokers to film magnates, from movie actors to two other exceedingly depressing and serious newspaper people like myself. The whole atmosphere was slightly mad, tinged with the same undercurrent that must have pervaded the court of Louis XVI. “Apres nous le deluge” might well have been the toast proposed in the excellent champagne we drank each evening.

  On Thursday, August 31, 1939, Virginia Cowles flew into Berlin’s Tempelhof airport to prepare a story for the Sunday edition. Grim rows of black fighter planes with white swastikas bordered the field, and she could make out antiaircraft guns on the rooftops. She sensed gloom and depression everywhere she went. At a press conference at the Foreign Office, the official spokesman fended off questions from the dozen reporters around the table. Shaking his head over and over, he repeated in a low, strained voice, “Ich weiss nicht.” That morning, a colleague told her, the press chief had actually broken down and cried.

  Afternoon stretched into evening. Everywhere there was anxiety, confusion, people speaking in hushed tones. The British ambassador left for a last talk with Goering, but no one expected a favorable outcome, and piles of luggage waited to go out on the diplomatic train when the signal came. The special flag indicating that Hider was in residence flew from the chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse, where a small crowd had gathered.

  Cowles was awakened the next morning, September 1, by the tramp of feet on Unter den Linden below. Storm troopers lined the avenue. Hitler, she learned from a phone call to the desk, would address the Reichstag at ten o’clock. There was no time to call out the usual crowds of enthusiastic spectators; only a handful of Berliners watched Hitler drive past in the field gray uniform of the German army. His speech was short. He enumerated a list of atrocities he said the Poles had committed, and announced that, as of 5:45 A.M., German troops were “returning Polish fire.” That afternoon Virginia expected to find a great crowd waiting outside the chancellery for Hider to speak, but the crowd was small and Hitler stayed inside.

  The previous Sunday, August 27, 1939, Sonia Tomara was winding up her six-week tour of Europe in Warsaw. She reported a football match between Poland and Hungary: thousands of spectators stood on the sidelines and cheered the Polish team to victory. But that night troops began moving out of Warsaw. Gas masks were distributed to the correspondents, and they were urged to leave the Hotel Europeiski, which was perilously situated between the General Staff building and the Foreign Office. Tomara reported that the government remained optimistic, relying on its ability to wage mobile warfare with forty regiments of mounted infantry, regular infantry, and a large air force.

  On Tuesday, August 29, German troops moved into Slovakia. Poland’s western boundary with Germany was already vulnerable, and now so was her southern border. Tomara watched thousands of soldiers leaving for the front; because there were not enough uniforms, many marched in civilian attire. She talked with women who were already taking over such home defense jobs as digging trenches in the parks, and who were heartened by avowals from France and Great Britain that they stood fast by Poland’s side. When on Wednesday mobilization posters went up all over Warsaw, she noted that people read them silently, without emotion.

  On Friday she was awakened by the ring of a telephone and the terse message of the Paris-Soir correspondent: “C’est la guerre.” That day bombs fell on the bridges over the Vistula and the main railway station. Even for one who had experienced the terror of Russia’s revolution and civil war, it was frightening. All communication was cut — a reporter’s nightmare. Warsaw was the focus of the whole world’s attention, and there was no way to send dispatches.

  By nightfall it was quiet. A few heavily shaded lamps lighted the courtyard, and the correspondents dined as usual in the soft late-summer air. A press conference was called after dinner in a smoky upstairs room at the Foreign Office. Most reporters there spoke French, German, or English. No one spoke Polish. Tomara was the only woman present, and the only person speaking Polish and able to make sense of what was said. It was unclear when reporters could go to the front, or where the front was. There was talk of hiring a car, but no cars were available, and no reporter’s papers were valid beyond the limits of Warsaw.

  In contrast with the confusion in Warsaw, London on that first day of September 1939 was quiet and well ordered. The long-prepared-for evacuation of the children had begun. Helen Kirkpatrick reported how boys and girls assembled at their schools with gas masks on their backs, a small bag of clothes in their hands, and identification tags around their necks. Their mothers kissed them goodbye, much as if they were off to summer camp, except that these mums were unsure when, if ever, they would see their children again.

  Parliament was summoned for six o’clock on September 2. Watching the ticker at the Herald Tribune office, Kirkpatrick hoped that if the news reached Chicago at the earliest possible moment, it would strike a point in her favor. She carried with her a cable to the Daily News drafted to include Britain’s declaration of war. But Chamberlain did not make it easy. He spoke first of Hitler’s “senseless ambitions” and of his own attempts at negotiation. Kirkpatrick waited for him to confirm her cable, to state that “Britain is at war with Germany,” but no, there was to be an ultimatum instead. He would give Hitler one more chance. All aggressive action against Poland must be suspended and all troops promptly withdrawn or Britain would “without hesitation fulfill her obligations to Poland.” To her dismay and disgust, Helen had to rewrite her cable from start to finish.

  Hitler disdained to acknowledge the ultimatum. He did not order his troops, his tanks, or his planes to reverse course, and on Sunday morning, September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war.

  With communication out of Warsaw cut off, Sonia Tomara was not heard from again for nearly a week. By then the bombing was ruthless, air raid sirens screaming every two hours. Tomara and Cedric Salter of the London Daily Mail studied the map and realized that in four days the Germans had covered two-thirds of the distance to the capital. The Polish ministers asked Tomara to broadcast to the United States, and that night she did so, walking
to and from the radio station in the blackout, its effect obviated by a full moon. She was exhausted on her return, and conscious as she fell asleep that the moon that played so charmingly on the windowpanes laid the city bare to imminent destruction. The air raid alert at dawn did not awaken her, and not until later did she learn that the German army was converging on Warsaw from three directions. She packed in fifteen minutes whatever she could carry in her knapsack, passing along suits, dresses, shoes, and her grandmother’s ivory dressing set to a Russian maid at the hotel. Carrying her camera, typewriter, and gas mask, she slipped into a car with Salter and two other British correspondents. The Polish government had fled, and the reporters were following in their tracks.

  Tomara and her colleagues came upon the Polish ministers in Naleczow, a health resort some distance south of Warsaw, where they camped in unoccupied villas and held meetings under the shade trees. An impromptu press conference was held on the shore of a pond. Swans glided with marked unconcern from one side to the other. “I saw high members of the Foreign Office confer at Naleczow in a whisper,” Sonia wrote, “their faces gray after sleepless nights.” At the provisional foreign office a Polish official rose to greet her, his face mirroring her own anxiety. Was her luggage packed? he asked, a question that under the circumstances amused her. The Germans, he said, had reached the Vistula, only fifteen miles away.