The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  The next day reporters fanned out to assess the damage. “For nearly ten miles in the East End of London there was a scene of devastation today,” Tania Long reported. “No wreckage looked alike. Here three-quarters of a tenement had been blasted away, leaving an iron bedstead dangling crazily from what was left of the floor. ... There, a block away, were the ruins of a Methodist church. Only three outside walls were standing, and on first sight the whole had the graceful air of an ancient Roman structure slowly crumbling to dust.” Rescue squads were still pulling bodies from the ruins, and everywhere she saw people trying to dig out their belongings. Mothers trailed by children were attempting to wheel perambulators top-heavy with salvaged household goods to the riverbank, to ferry across to relatives or friends on the other side of the Thames.

  Those with a place to go were fortunate. Others, carrying babies or small suitcases crammed with possessions, lined up at bus stops, heading for makeshift shelters in the center of the city. By chance, Long was dining in one of the large hotels that evening when a throng of the newly homeless came in, seeking refuge in a few bare basement rooms that the hotel had turned over to them.

  As for Helen Kirkpatrick, she had gone downriver with the fire brigade during the bombing. “It was both scary and fascinating,” she recalled. “The fires were huge, monstrous.” Returning that night to her flat in the West End, she could read a newspaper by the light of the fire burning in the East End. “It lit the whole of London. And they used that to guide planes in and drop more bombs.”

  The second night, the bombing was more widespread. “London still stood this morning, which was the greatest surprise to me as I cycled home in the light of early dawn after the most frightening night I have ever spent.” Helen had been with friends for dinner; they had ignored the early sirens, but “when the first screaming bomb started on its downward track we decided the basement would be healthier.” All night they had moved back and forth. “Most of the time we felt that the entire center of the city had probably been blasted out of existence and we ticked off each hit with ‘That must be Buckingham Palace — that’s Whitehall.’” But the next morning when she cycled past those landmarks, each appeared solidly in place, as was her own house when she arrived there. Only later when she walked through the rubble and debris where the bombs had landed did she wonder how anyone who had been there could possibly be alive.

  Before long every London correspondent had his or her own bomb story. Helen Kirkpatrick and Ben Robertson of the New York Herald Tribune went down to Cliveden at the invitation of Lord and Lady Astor to escape the London bombing, only to have a bomb fall so close to the house that it blew a car onto the roof. The windows of Tania Long’s house were smashed, the shutters blown in, all the pictures knocked off the walls. Virginia Cowles was dining with a friend at Claridge’s when the nearby John Lewis department store was hit. People who had come inside for shelter, as well as guests forced downstairs in a variety of night garb, were warned to keep to one side of the lobby, as a time bomb had fallen on the other side and might go off at any moment. Cowles described how an elderly lady dressed all in black and followed by three other women descended the stairs, and the hush that fell over the crowd as exiled Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her ladies-in-waiting walked through the lobby.

  Mary Welsh went down regularly to the workers’ flats along the Thames to see how ordinary people were faring. They always welcomed her with “a cuppa” (tea) and opinions on hot topics like rationing or evacuation to the country. East Enders were resigned to the former but firmly opposed to the latter. “Husbands and wives had been born and raised within a street or two of each other,” Welsh explained, “and this was their territory. Nothing could lure them from their own private bits of London.”

  But staying put was chancy. More than once when Welsh visited, her friends took her to see the latest damage, and to speak with the newest homeless. The bombings were referred to as “incidents”; most distressing were the “incidents” in which people were buried, still alive, under the remains of their homes. Mary often went out before dawn and “hung around the edges of an incident” to watch the Welsh miners employed in the rescues. They removed the debris one brick or plank at a time, fearing to jar the support of persons perhaps still alive below. One morning near Paddington Station she was startled when a small boy of four or five, wearing pajamas, a sweater, and socks but no shoes, ran sobbing toward her. He clutched her knees and gasped, “My mum’s down there, my mum’s down there,” until Mary sat down on a pile of bricks and held him, nuzzling his dirty hair with her nose and repeating, “It’s going to be all right, buddy, it’s going to be all right.” An air raid warden came along to claim him, assuring her they would have his mother out soon, and that she was “not in too bad shape.” That could be anything short of dead, Welsh thought, as she brushed herself off and headed for the Time-Life office. She might have stayed for the denouement of the “incident” had her employers expressed any interest in stories of this nature. They had not. Walking to work another morning, Welsh had passed a gray van with its back doors open parked near a heap of rubble which the day before had been a house. Several men were sliding canvas-wrapped bodies on litters into the van. “These were some of London’s dead of that night,” she wrote. “They looked nameless, and very still.” She cabled a short piece on the gray van and its contents to New York. It was rejected — “too grim.”

  That kind of censorship irked Welsh, who believed the American public should be educated about war’s reality. If she, a woman, could bear to go there, see it, and write about it, surely Time-Life readers sitting in their comfortable living rooms might be allowed to read about it.

  In November 1940 both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune moved their offices into the Savoy Hotel, which meant it became more than ever the focal point of the American correspondents’ lives. There for dinner one evening, Helen Kirkpatrick realized that ten years had passed since her first visit. She recalled bright lights, glittering jewels and shimmering gowns, young debutantes swinging about on a gleaming floor, and a huge plate glass window reflecting the light into the Thames below. Now that window was boarded up, and guests moved on to safer rooms below where heavy curtains shut out the sound of the gun barrages. Men in uniform and women in tailored suits sat at little tables clustered cozily about the steel pipes. Puzzled, Helen asked the waiter if this had not once been the Abraham Lincoln Room. His expression did not change. “It is still the Abraham Lincoln Room, madam,” he replied.

  Most of the staff of the Times and Herald Tribune, including Tania Long and Ray Daniell, moved into the Savoy. Ray liked the arrangement there; he could no longer bear not being sure Tania was safe during a raid. They had known each other more than a year, had experienced normal, peaceful moments and times of great stress. A man and a woman who shared hard times were particularly vulnerable. After unwise marriages, and despite hardship to their children, Ray and Tania could no longer imagine life without each other.

  Besides providing live/work space for their clientele, the management at the Savoy understood what hardworking people needed in an air raid shelter. Each guest had a normal upstairs room, and a mattress complete with linens “down below.” There separate areas were designated for single men, single women, and married couples, and a little section was screened off for the Duke and Duchess of Kent when they were in town. There was a “snore warden” on duty all night who would gently shake an offender with “Sorry, sir, but you’re snoring. Please turn over.” Tania recalled a woman with lovely long blond hair who laid claim to a certain chair in the lounge; every night she sat there brushing her hair in front of everyone before lying back and going to sleep. Tania and Ray dubbed her Lady Godiva.

  In time, however, they gave up going down to the shelter. Tania didn’t like the rats running along the ledges high under the ceiling, and Ray snored and woke up one night to find the Savoy chef’s hand pressed firmly over his mouth. He recalled how in the morning he woul
d stagger up to his room and “there was the bed, crisp and fresh, with sheets unwrinkled and the coverlet drawn down invitingly.” One night he was so tired that he didn’t go “down below,” and the next morning he was still alive, so he decided to take his chances, and Tania did the same. That placed her on the scene to report the direct bomb hits that severely damaged the Savoy, killing the former Belgian minister of war and another guest.

  “When one hears bombs coming that close there is no time to do anything,” she informed her readers. “In my own case I crammed deeper into the armchair, put my arms over my head, and prayed for the best. As one after the other the bombs hit, there was a groaning and creaking of the walls, the floor and the ceiling which, at one point, I thought was coming right down on top of me.” When she dared open the door she saw the corridor thick with black smoke, and other guests, also shelter shunners, fleeing their rooms to spend the rest of the night “down below.”

  On November 16, 1940, the bombing moved northward. Beginning at dusk, the cathedral town of Coventry was battered and blasted by wave after wave of German planes dropping a million pounds of high explosives, sixty thousand of incendiary bombs. When dawn came at last, Coventry was unrecognizable.

  Long and Daniell, driving through the blacked-out night, arrived to find the entire center of the city destroyed. The cathedral, one of the oldest in England, was an empty shell. Only the tower and spire still stood and the latter tipped dangerously. The beautiful half-timbered houses in the center of the city were demolished, and most of the streets impassable. They moved on to Birmingham and Manchester, which had also been badly hit. For four days Tania shuffled about through ashy ruins among distraught and grieving people. She hardly ate or slept — all the beds were given over to the bombing victims. She returned to Coventry on the day the victims of the attack there were buried.

  Thin wisps of smoke still rose from the ruins of central Coventry today, and rescuers still were searching for further victims, as a thousand men and women silently watched their loved ones laid to rest in a common grave. The dead ... now lie in plain pine coffins, placed end to end and tier upon tier in a deep, narrow trench hastily dug by steam shovels borrowed from a construction job.

  There was nothing beautiful about this mass funeral. It was grim — as grim as the expression on the pale faces of the drably clothed mourners who had walked two miles in a drizzling rain from the city where they once had homes to the cemetery set among the fields.... The Bishop of Coventry led the brief services from a heap of muddy earth, his purple robes flying in the wind. The people stood below him, facing the common grave.

  When the service was over, the people walked slowly along the length of the grave, casting their flowers on the pine boxes below. Death was anonymous — many of the victims were never identified — and there was nothing to distinguish one coffin from another. It did not seem to matter. The only decorations on the grave were a few rain-sodden Union Jacks, lending a vaguely military touch to the funeral, as if soldiers and not just ordinary citizens were being buried there.

  The little group of women reporters in London during the Blitz contributed to a major shift in America’s perception of Britain during that fall of 1940. Reaction to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s appeasement policies had ranged from lack of interest to censure. But once the blunt-spoken, half-American Winston Churchill was in charge, once Americans read stories in the press of the daily horrors of the Blitz, saw photos of gutted buildings and dead civilians on the front page of their morning papers and heard the thud of bombs in the background of Edward R. Murrow’s nightly broadcasts, the mood changed. The British were a brave lot after all, worthy allies in battle, should it come to that. As for American reporters who remained in London by choice — including the women, as exposed to danger as any — they were heroes all.

  The following February, at the Front Page Ball of the New York Newspaper Women’s Club, Kathleen McLaughlin of the New York Times paid tribute to “American women reporters now active on various war fronts.” The women at home “envy their assignments and admire their achievements,” she said, and proceeded to call by name each woman who had reported from the scattered battlefronts of 1940. Tania Long received an award as writer of the best news story of that year for her combined stories on the bombing of Britain, and Betty Wason was also singled out “for the daring and courage she had shown in her war coverage in Norway, Finland, Greece and elsewhere.” The evening closed when guest of honor Eleanor Roosevelt asked all present to stand in a special toast to “those women war correspondents who are surely making, or helping to make, newspaper history in this critical period of civilization.”

  9

  Working Under the Swastika

  However harrowing it was to be in London during the Blitz, at least one was surrounded by friends. American correspondents in Berlin during 1940-41 lived among their enemies while being bombed by their friends. It was a not unwelcome paradox — but not easy, either, as Lael Tucker discovered.

  Lael Tucker (Laird) (Wertenbaker), Time Inc.

  Lael Tucker was the oldest of five children in a family of Deep South ancestry, where a Biblical name (Numbers 3:24) was nothing unusual, especially from a clergyman father. Like Mary Welsh, Tucker was impatient to get on with her life; she started college before graduating from high school, then left at eighteen to go to New York. Her goal was to be a playwright, but the income from that was worse than preacher’s pay, so she took a job with the Theater Guild and wrote plays on the side. She had a vibrant personality and a husky voice that carried volumes. To hear her read a play was an arresting experience, but none of her own was ever produced. In time she abandoned the theater, joined the staff of Fortune, married fellow reporter Stephen Laird, and moved with him to Washington. There she filled in at Time when they were shorthanded, which entitled her to reporter status and to go along when Steve was sent to Berlin in 1940. Wives could accompany their husbands only if they were reporters themselves.

  Lael Werte nbaker, London, 1943.

  PHOTO BY LEE MILLER. LAEL WERTENBAKER PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  Even so, the road to Berlin was not without obstacles. The State Department considered the usual route through Lisbon too dangerous; Laird and Tucker would have to go the opposite way around, via Japan, Manchuria, and Russia. As it happened, the eastern route held far more perils than the western. In Manchuria, breaking their rail journey to spend the night in a town near Harbin, they came upon a surreal, nightmarish scene in the station — people clustered around a table, receiving injections from open pans of serum. Tucker managed to slip under a fence and cross the road to the Intourist bureau, but what she saw there was even more disquieting — the whole staff was masked, as in a medieval story. She must leave at once, they said. Grabbing luggage and making a dash for the tracks while eluding pursuing guards, Lael and Steve piled onto a waiting third-class train fall of cackling chickens, a trade-off they minded not at all. At Harbin the truth came out: the area was subject to an outbreak of bubonic plague, which the authorities were trying to hush up.

  The Soviets knew of it, however. When Tucker and Laird tried to board the Trans-Siberian Railway, their passports were confiscated and they were placed in quarantine with thirty missionaries on a railroad siding. Their clothes were taken away for disinfection, and they were issued cotton underwear, pajamas and dressing gowns, paper slippers, and toothbrushes. When after a week no one came down with the plague, their clothing was returned and they could begin the long journey across Russia to Germany. Lael always assumed that they had come upon a chance outbreak of that dread disease. Fifty-five years later she and the world learned the truth: the city of Harbin had been the site of a vast Japanese research project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including anthrax, cholera, and bubonic plague. In 1940 Japanese planes dropped bombs loaded with plague-infested fleas on nearby cities.

  Knowing nothing of this at the time, Tucker and Laird tended to downplay all the fuss that delayed their arrival in B
erlin until the fall of 1941. A dwindled press corps at the Adlon welcomed them with open arms. Still, Berlin took some getting used to. It was Lael’s first experience with bombing, and at the first whine of the air raid alarm, she prepared to dive for the nearest shelter. The long-termers, however, were concerned only with whose room had the best view, and Lael, not wishing to be branded a coward so early, tagged along to the appointed window. Within a week she was leading the way. Life in Berlin was drab; one seized at any distraction. Besides, she said, they wanted Berlin to be bombed, and watched with grim satisfaction.

  Not all the scary moments came from bombs, however. One night Lael stopped at a bierstübe to telephone her husband. A man came up behind her and grabbed the receiver out of her hand, growling, “You can’t speak English here!” Startled, she turned to find herself surrounded by brownshirts. At first she was paralyzed with fear, but just as quickly fear dissolved into anger, and anger produced an adrenaline that initiated action. When the man put his hand on her arm, Lael burst into a stream of more fluent and profane German than she was aware she knew, then abruptly turned and stalked out. No one followed.

  Still, Lael decided, it was like everywhere — some people were bad, some good, and for every crazy Nazi there was a German who remained quite sane. Many Berliners betrayed a grudging admiration for the RAF airmen who came from so far, hazarding antiaircraft fire and defensive fighter planes to unload their bombs and then return. When an RAF plane was hit, a gasp of horror rose instinctively from the watchers below. There was sympathy for the ordinary Englishman, too. Lael was heartened when one night after a movie a captured Allied newsreel was shown. Scenes of London burning from a night of bombing came on the screen. The audience, Lael said, was absolutely quiet. Then the prime minister appeared, inspecting the damage, and the German commentator shouted, “You’re to blame, Winston Churchill, for all this.” Again there was not a sound in the theater, except for one woman crying softly, “Those poor British people. Those poor British people.”