What most impressed Tucker about London that fall was the breakdown of social conventions. She described sharing a compartment on a train with two white-gloved ladies who had never met before, and who were talking to each other about how extraordinary it was that they were talking to each other. Lael was also fascinated by people’s attachment to their neighborhood air raid shelters in the Underground. Most shelters now offered bunks and artificial ventilation, and morning tea was served. But with fewer bombers over London after the Germans invaded Russia, there was talk of closing some of the shelters. The question of where to move if one’s shelter closed was a serious one, Lael said.
Mary Welsh did a piece for Life that fall on British conscription of women. They might be drafted for anything from winding the long gelatinous strands of dangerous explosives to pitching hay and milking cows. The thrust of the article was the different types of young women in each of the separate services, and it was uncharitable at best. For example, the ATS (Army) attracted “hearty young women with chins” who wore khaki and slapped their thighs when they laughed; the Wrens (Navy) uniform was more flattering; the Waafs (Air Force) were the most datable. The Woman’s Land Army consisted of vicars’ daughters, little London manicurists, and Woolworth clerks — meaning, naive and dull. There was hardly a mention of the important jobs they were doing. Of course, it is possible that Mary included such particulars and that, considered boring by the New York rewrite staff, they were cut. Or perhaps she was not at her best that week. She appears not to have welcomed the addition of another, and very attractive, American woman to the Time Inc. London office. Mary was the only person Lael met who was not friendly.
There were those who thought Helen Kirkpatrick was not very friendly, or in any event was a loner who did not need female friends. On the contrary, Helen said, it was just that her social life revolved around her work. Everyone else in the Chicago Daily News office was male, and almost everyone she met in the course of her job was, too. This last was borne out by the diary she began to keep that fall, into which went observations that would have been censored out of her dispatches. The entries, reviewing the events of her day or analyzing the immediate state of affairs, had everything to do with her head and nothing with her heart. Her notations for the months of October and November 1941 indicated that, during her waking hours anyway, she was seldom alone. October 31, for example: that afternoon she met first with the British minister of economic warfare, just back from Washington, and later with the first lord of the admiralty. News of the sinking of the American destroyer Reuben James had just come in; it had been convoying British ships, she reported, and the admiralty now expected the Germans to go all out against the United States on the high seas. That evening she gave a dinner for Alexander Woollcott, who was in town; other guests included a married couple and half a dozen single men. Street musicians came in to play, and much brandy was consumed. It was a not untypical day in her life that fall.
In fact, Kirkpatrick’s contacts made her enormously useful to the News. Unlike Virginia Cowles’, Helen’s roots were not upper-class; she would never be a familiar at Chequers, nor godmother to Churchill’s grandson and namesake, as Cowles was, but her style and intelligence endeared her to many in the English aristocracy. Nancy and Waldorf Astor’s Cliveden and especially Ronald and Nancy Tree’s Ditchley were regular haunts of hers. The bombing of Pearl Harbor might have been less startling if she could have sent off to the News what she jotted down in her diary for November 29-30: “Went to Ditchley for the weekend. Ronnie who lunched at Chequers with the Churchills says that FDR talked to the PM Friday night and said war with Japan within a week.”
When the imminence of the United States’ entry into the war came up, the conversation always turned to the question of which Axis power was most likely to trigger the event. The British assumed Germany, Americans thought as often of Japan, and then there was Italy. Still in Rome, Eleanor and Reynolds Packard worried about the future. When the United States froze the funds of all the Axis countries, Mussolini did the same to American funds in Italy. In consequence, the news bureaus had no cash for their own salaries or to pay Italian members of their staff. Favorite restaurants and neighborhood shops allowed the Packards to run up tabs, but when permission was asked to withdraw money to pay the Italians who worked for UP, the government was unsympathetic. Good Fascists should not be working for American firms, they said.
By the fall of 1941 only a skeleton crew of journalists remained in Rome. The embassy promised that in the event of war they could leave on the diplomatic train. All very well, Eleanor remarked, //the Italians allowed it. In the meantime, Japanese nationals in Rome were being mysteriously overfriendly to those few American reporters left. On December 4 Japanese counselor Ando honored Japanese and American correspondents with a lavish cocktail party and buffet supper at his new home. Eleanor and Reynolds attended, unaware that similar parties were taking place wherever both Americans and Japanese nationals still resided, which was generally limited to Bern, Berlin, Lisbon, and Madrid. There was an abundance of food and liquor, more than Eleanor had seen in Rome for some time, and at the evening’s climax Ando raised a glass of straight Scotch and toasted “the continued friendship of America and Japan.”
12
China Hands
Europe was not the only promised land for a young American woman with journalistic ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s. There was also the Far East, specifically China — a vast but not unfriendly country, already home to thousands of American businessmen and missionaries and their families. They and their British counterparts made up the readership for English-language papers and journals often in need of staff, while U.S.-based newspapers and wire services hired stringers on a regular basis.
A small number of American women seized the chance. In the early 1920s, just out of her teens, Edna Lee Booker set out with a chap-erone for China and nailed a job with INS and China Press. Before long she was striking out for the interior to interview powerful warlords, or reporting a civil war, or dodging shell fire to keep an appointment with Dr. Sun Yat-sen, concealed in a flotilla of gunboats on the Pearl River. By the late 1930s, married with children and writing for Cosmopolitan, she found herself scrambling off trains and into rice paddies to escape Japanese bombs.
Agnes Smedley, blue-eyed daughter of a part-Cherokee tenant farmer, was an established writer and journalist at the time of her arrival in China; she was also a passionate radical, friend of Emma Goldman and Madame Sun Yat-sen. Reporting first for the Frankfurter Zeitung, she shuttled between Shanghai and Hankow and spent seven months in Yenan, Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army headquarters, where she taught Mao and Chou En-lai to dance. After the war with Japan began in earnest, she divided her time between canvassing for medical supplies and composing strongly partisan pieces for the Manchester Guardian and the Nation from the headquarters of Mao’s New Fourth Army.
With her youth, style, and movie starlet looks, Helen Foster was Agnes Smedley’s polar opposite. She arrived in Shanghai in 1931 with four evening gowns in her steamer trunk, and golf bag, tennis racket, and typewriter in tow. A stringer for the Scripps-Canfield syndicate, she prevailed upon seasoned reporter Edgar Snow to help her get a press pass; in time, she married him. Foster reported from Peking, Sian, and Yenan for the London Daily Herald, the New York Sun, and the Nation. In Yenan she crossed paths with Smedley, who thought her a political lightweight. Approaches differ. While in Yenan, Foster took down thirty-four oral histories of the Long March as told her by women survivors.
Then there was Peggy Hull, first accredited woman war correspondent following her World War I reporting in France. Hull came out to Shanghai accompanied by INS correspondent Irene Corbally Kuhn. They plus Booker, Smedley, and Foster were all in Shanghai when the Japanese first attacked in 1932. They covered the invasion of that port, the bombing of Chapei (the Chinese section of the city), and the subsequent “presence” of the Japanese military in China, as well as Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of appe
asement with Japan and his ruthless crusade against the Communists. All except Hull were still there to report the renewal of hostilities in 1937, which marked the start of the active Sino-Japanese War. Anna Louise Strong’s arrival in 1938 could be said to complete the picture.
Well, almost. There was also the young and beautiful Emily Hahn, less a reporter than an adventuring writer, who after a year in the Belgian Congo went to China to visit a friend and stayed for nine years. During that time she worked on the North-China Daily News, for the literary magazine THen Hsia, and as an official correspondent for the New Yorker under the “Reporter at Large” designation. She lived her life as she chose. In Shanghai that meant a liaison with a married Chinese artist, and in Hong Kong with a British officer, also married. Her child with the latter was born just before Pearl Harbor and the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese. With no way to send out stories, Emily concentrated on keeping her daughter and herself alive. In 1943 they were repatriated to America.
These were the early “China hands,” the women who knew a China that ceased to exist after the Japanese wreaked general havoc on Peking, Nanking, Canton, Hankow, and a great expanse of the countryside.
Except for Emily Hahn, this little cadre of women journalists had all left China by the winter of 1941 when Carl and Shelley Smith Mydans flew from Hong Kong to Chungking. They flew with the China National Aviation Company (CNAC) over Japanese lines in the black of night, the only two passengers aboard the tiny plane, burlap bags of freshly printed Chinese dollars — soldiers’ pay — strapped to the empty seats. The pilot navigated the Yangtze gorge to land on a sandbar in the middle of the river; except at flood tide, everyone arrived in Chungking in this manner. From the bottom of the gorge, one was transported by sedan chair up the almost vertical cliffside to the top. “Those poor men,” Shelley lamented, recalling the coolies’ leathered shoulders. “Never again.”
Shelley Smith Mydans, Life
What one first noticed on meeting Shelley Smith was her natural grace. Dance had been part of her curriculum at Stanford, following a childhood on the Palo Alto campus where her father was head of the journalism department. After a brief career in West Coast theater, she took off for New York to work for the Literary Digest and then for Life, where she met Carl Mydans, a gifted, hardworking staff photographer. Mydans liked to tell how, emerging late one night from the darkroom, he found a beautiful young woman still in the “bull pen,” her desk piled with sheets of paper scribbled with numbers. Her explanation, that she was balancing the budget for that week’s lead story on federal expenditures, Carl found intriguing, and he liked the “exciting tones to her voice,” as well. He was thirty, she twenty-two. Six months later they were married.
In September 1939, equipped with gas masks left over from the last war and money belts stuffed with a thousand dollars in small bills, Life’s first roving correspondent team flew to Europe to report defense preparations. The China assignment came six months later. Gaining access to the provisional capital of Chungking was not easy, but reporters for Time Inc. had little problem. Henry Luce was a close ally of Chiang Kai-shek, head of both the Nationalist army and the Kuomintang, the governing body of China. In China the phrase “Time-Life” was magic. One dropped it casually and closed doors opened, bumpy ways were made smooth — or as smooth as was possible in craggy, beleaguered Chungking.
Shelley Mydans inte rviewing Indian troops, Singapore, 1941.
CARL MYDANS/LIFE MAGAZINE. © TIME INC.
Shelley Smith, starry-eyed at finding herself in China at all, was much taken with this medieval walled city of layered bamboo and mud structures poised high on a rocky promontory where the Chialing and Yangtze rivers meet. The wall dated back five hundred years to the Ming dynasty, and beyond it, as far as she could see, were rice paddies. Where once there had been no easy access, a motor road lined with stores and government offices and lit by electricity ringed the upper city, from where alleys dropped into the rank and congested poorer areas, lighted only by oil lamps. Shelley and Carl found walking the alleys a fascinating pastime. As a war capital Chungking’s great advantage was its relative impregnability atop the soft sandstone hills from which caves had been carved for bomb shelters. Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek lived there; so with less visibility did Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung’s eyes and ears to official China.
Smith and Mydans moved at once into the government press hostel, a rough complex of two or three sizable buildings that included a stone one used for offices and two lines of cubicles constructed of mud and straw that when bombed could be easily rebuilt. Bamboo palings skirted with banana trees fenced it round. Shelley and Carl were allotted a single cubicle with a bed, table, and chair; floor and walls were of mud and wattle, the roof was thatch, the window without glass. Allergic to the charcoal used for heating, Shelley developed a rash, which she treated with a heavy white cream. Back home this might have caused her distress, but in China, a culture permeated by ghosts, her chalk-white face met with favorable regard.
Most of the occupants of the press hostel worked for Time Inc. Theodore H. “Teddy” White had come straight out of Harvard two years before to supervise the dissemination of news (i.e., propaganda) at the ministry of information (i.e., propaganda). Time Inc. noted his workaholic habits with approval and wooed him to their own staff; his job was to provide background information called “mailers” for stories to be written in New York. He joined Robert R “Pepper” Martin, a UP reporter before Time took him on. Next to Martin’s great size and physical prowess, Teddy looked like a gnome. Both men had been present at the saturation bombing of Chungking in May 1939 when thousands of civilians perished, and were considered “old hands,” as was Tillman Durdin of the New York Times. Till and his young wife Peggy, born in China the daughter of missionaries, lived more comfortably in a mission. Peggy spoke fluent Mandarin and had taught school in Shanghai; she would later join the staff of Life.
The press hostel was also home to Jack Belden, an ex-wire services reporter, and Melville Jacoby, a China scholar and classmate of Shelley Smith’s at Stanford, both of whom were, or were about to be, hired by Luce. The only permanent inhabitant of the press hostel not with Time Inc. was INS stringer Betty Graham. An attractive blonde with a wide smile, Graham had her own little hut in the hostel complex, built for her by Hollington Tong, vice minister of communication, out of deference to her unmarried state. She was what Emily Hahn called a “hardy Chungking perennial,” meaning that she had worked for various organizations. Betty was in love with handsome Mel Jacoby, whom she followed about, much as she was trailed by an even more besotted Belden. Both she and Jack would be disappointed in love, but not in their profession; she would soon score a scoop documenting the Japanese use of poison gas, and Belden would become famous as General Stilwell’s right-hand man and chronicler.
Not all American correspondents in China were in Chungking. Many preferred to remain in Shanghai, where life bore a semblance of normality, rather than subject themselves to Kuomintang suppression and Japanese bombs. The year 1941 was the third year of severe raids on the capital. After the horrific bombing of 1939, cavernous shelters had been dug out of the sandstone hills, and an elaborate warning system devised. Smith and Mydans found it uniquely Chinese. They watched in fascination as, at a main intersection, a soldier climbed onto a box in front of a large billboard painted with a map of western China. Spokes angled out from its center, Chungking, like the hands of a clock. Attached to the tip of the longest spoke were three miniature wooden airplanes which the soldier slid along toward Chungking, evoking a murmur from the citizenry, who then turned to stare at an empty flagstaff topping a building nearby. The first large red lantern hoisted up the staff served as a warning; the second was the signal for the populace to head for the tunnels.
The hours wasted waiting out raids underground did not add to the charm of the Chungking assignment. Nor did the damp, mosquito-infested climate, perennial murky gloom, rudimentary living conditions, scarcity o
f foods one dared eat, and limited number of fellow reporters, often depressed. “But Carl and I were young,” Shelley recalled later. “We could view it as an adventure, even enjoy it, because we were young.”
The adventure of China was exactly what Martha Gellhorn thought she wanted. Since her trips to Czechoslovakia in 1938, she had returned briefly to Europe late in 1939 to report the Soviet invasion of Finland. Otherwise she had been either in Cuba or in Idaho with Hemingway, whom she married in November 1940. It was soon after her wedding (if vows before a justice of the peace could be called a wedding) that she started angling for the trip to China. Her private and professional aspirations were focused there, although she later admitted that the Orient she hankered after was the one pictured in books from her childhood, not the reality. The hard part was persuading her new husband to accompany her. Scribner’s had recently published For Whom the Bell Tolls, taken in part from their shared experience in Spain, and Ernest would have preferred a relaxing winter and spring in Cuba, but humoring his lovely new wife had its own priority. Her assignment from Collier’s was to “report on the Chinese army in action and defenses against future Japanese attack around the South China Sea.” What that meant in practical terms she had little idea.
In Gellhorn’s mordant but highly amusing Travels with Myself and Another, she refers to Hemingway as “U.C.” for Unwilling Companion, which he was throughout the six weeks or so (March-April 1941) of their visit. He settled down comfortably in Hong Kong, however, and acquired a coterie of blustery friends from local cops to retired thugs with whom he ate, drank, and told stories. These were not Martha’s kind of people, and she was glad to escape to her first assignment: a story on the CNAC passenger-mail flight from Hong Kong via Chungking and Kunming to Lashio where the Burma Road began, and back again. From her vantage point in the seat nearest the pilot (there was no copilot), she experienced a baptism of the elements. On the first lap they hit a hailstorm; the windshield was a sheet of frost, elevator drafts lifted and dropped the plane. She thought she would perish from cold. On the next lap, the night flight to Lashio, downdrafts caused the plane to plunge thousands of feet in a few seconds, forcing them to fly at higher altitudes, where it was colder yet. Martha found the rest house at Lashio — a wooden shack with iron cots and a shower — “heaven itself,” and was gratified that they traveled the Burma Road by daylight. “Beautiful hopeless country, jagged mountain after mountain and a brown ribbon of road,” she wrote.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 15