The last diplomatic train left on May 13,1942, for Lisbon. On the railroad platform the carabinieri ignored the presence of their own foreign-office personnel and passed out names and addresses of relatives in the United States for the reporters to look up. Not until they were on the train, however, did the idea of “home” begin to take root in their collective consciousness. As many as could jammed into the compartment of the third secretary, also a guitarist, to sip brandy and sing “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” and “Home on the Range.” The mood was one of relief, verging on giddy.
They reached the Spanish border late the next afternoon. Because the railroad tracks in Spain and Portugal were of a wider gauge, the passengers had to climb down from the Italian train, trudge across the border with their belongings, and clamber onto a Spanish train on the other side. Unknown to them, news of their progress preceded them. At Barcelona, which they reached about midnight, Eleanor was touched to find Spanish reporters whom she and Reynolds had known when they covered the Civil War waiting to shake their hands and wish them well. In Madrid the next afternoon the UP bureau chief brought two bottles of his best sherry down to the station to toast their release.
The train was held up in a small town near the Portuguese border. It was dinnertime, and children crowded up to the dining car windows, begging for bread. When the diners passed some out to them, their shrieks brought what appeared to be the whole town. There had always been beggars in Spain, Eleanor recalled, but never whole towns of them. The train crossed into Portugal early the next morning. Portugal was a neutral country, but the Packards knew that if something went wrong with the Drottningholm — the Swedish diplomatic ship returning from the United States with their Italian and German counterparts — the train would be halted, perhaps turned back. Not until they reached Lisbon, where when they dismounted British reporter friends rushed up to shake their hands, did it finally sink in that they were free.
By September 1942 Shelley Smith and Carl Mydans were also on the move. As it happened, among the people interned at Santo Tomas back in January were a number of American women who had fled Shanghai with their children and were caught in Manila when war broke out. They had petitioned to be allowed to return to Shanghai, but by the time arrangements were made and a boat sent for them, most had changed their minds. How could they know what awaited them there? Santo Tomas was bad, but perhaps Shanghai was now worse. What if their boat—Japanese, of course — encountered American submarines? Or what if, in their weakened condition, they or their children did not survive the rough voyage?
Shelley and Carl also worried about these matters, but they were aware as well of the prison camp psychosis which makes the greater outside so strange and frightening that familiar territory within, no matter how bad, appears preferable. Then, too, an old retina condition in Shelley’s eye had been acting up. There were, or had been, good doctors in Shanghai. Perhaps chances of repatriation were better from there, or perhaps escape to Free China. These were the considerations that led to their being part of the little group — baggage tied into bundles, best clothes hanging loosely from their bodies — that piled into an old U.S. army bus and, with a mixture of joy and trepidation, left Santo Tomas behind.
The Maya Maru was a small freighter converted into a troopship merely by installing wooden shelves in the hold for beds and cooking vats on the well deck for a kitchen. Three privies on planks had been lashed to the railing so that they extended over the side. Shelley could not imagine the American navy considering such conditions remotely suitable. Because the ship had to zigzag to avoid minefields, the trip lasted a very long two weeks. On their side, the Santo Tomas group tried to keep the same discipline they had practiced in the camp; on the far side Japanese soldiers with their Formosan women lounged about, playing games and making love. A group of Hindus — men in loincloths, women cooking on charcoal stoves, children picking lice out of each other’s hair — acted as a kind of buffer. From down below came the whinnies of a herd of thin, nervous horses captured on Bataan, many with the U.S. Army brand on their flanks. At night cockroaches moved along every surface; even worse were the rats, sniffing out food anyone tried to hoard.
Paradoxically, Shelley recalled, the humans easiest to tolerate were the soldiers. They had nothing against the Santo Tomas contingent, and smiled and bowed as if they were all at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo together. At times she found it hard to view them as the enemy. One particular encounter always stayed with her. She had arisen one morning while it was still dark to go up on deck and try to wash a little at the spigot. As she was brushing her teeth, some soldiers came along to brush theirs. They crowded around, jostling each other, and as she hurried to finish, by accident she spit right into a soldier’s toothbrush cup. She straightened up at once, bowed, and apologized, and the soldier bowed in return. As they stood there in the half-light bowing to each other, Shelley experienced one of those moments of recognition that sometimes occur on a battlefield but are unexpected on a crowded, vermin-infested freighter. She saw a young man from some Japanese village, or perhaps a farm, who had done nothing to her or probably any other American, who had no better accommodations on this ship than she had and was fed the same food in the same portions, who was polite and unthreatening — and yet was the enemy. Whenever she relived the scene, she always hoped he had survived the war.
After two long and painful weeks, the Maya Maru landed in Shanghai. The city seemed to Shelley remarkably unaffected by the war. She was surprised to find the streets clean and orderly, hotels and restaurants busy, and well-fed westerners living — outwardly anyway — much as they always had. Those American women and children from Santo Tomas who had braved the trip were able to return to their old homes. At the Palace Hotel where the Mydanses were quartered, an elderly Chinese man waited upon them — “turned down our sheets in the evening and drew our baths and would have laid out our evening clothes had we had any,” Carl said.
Six months after their arrival in Shanghai, this pleasant life came to an abrupt end when all British and Americans were interned. Their baggage was loaded into rickshas and deposited on the lawn of an earlier bastion of American commercial success, the Columbia Country Club. Shelley and Carl found their own belongings meager compared with those of the old China-hand families who had lived much of their lives in Shanghai, but lavish in contrast to a few down-on-their-luck types whom none of the establishment families had ever seen before, but who were now part of their circle because they, too, possessed a U.S. or British passport.
The Mydanses were assigned to a camp within the walled ruins of the old China University in Chapei. Rations were inadequate and deficiency diseases developed, but the group was fortunate to have as a member an American missionary from North China who improvised a kind of primitive grindstone at which eight men spelled each other, Carl recalled, “walking the grindstone round and round by the staves like plodding Missouri mules.” By grinding soybeans, they produced soybean milk, an essential addition to their nutrition. Shelley’s eye problem was aggravated by the poor diet, but she was allowed to go regularly to a clinic for treatment, and in fact managed to remain outside the camp much of the time.
The day came when news of the first repatriation reached the Chapei internment camp, and on the bulletin board appeared a list of internees scheduled to be exchanged. Never had Shelley and Carl felt more vulnerable than when they inched through the crowd to check the names; never had they felt such relief as when they found their own there. All around them were people whose names were absent, to whom it was awkward and painful to talk after that. Not until the morning the buses came through the gate did the departure become real, to those going and those left behind, but many of the latter followed their luckier compatriots to the gates, singing “God Bless America” with great bravado. Even after they could no longer see them, Shelley and Carl could hear their voices.
The once French, now Japanese freighter Tela Maru waited in Shanghai harbor, its first stop. Accommodations ex
isted for seven hundred; by the ship’s final stop, more than twice that number were aboard. They filed on from Stanley Prison Camp at Hong Kong, from Santo Tomas in Manila, from Saigon. Emily Hahn, who had managed to escape internment but not malnutrition, came on at Hong Kong with her little daughter. Everyone looked shrunken and aged. It took days of no fences and wide horizons before they began to feel like individuals again.
Shelley and Carl were strongly affected by the trip. As they approached the neutral port of Mormugao in Goa, where the exchange would take place, they became depressed and anxious. It was, Carl wrote later, a kind of fear that life had gone on and left you behind, that people had forgotten you, that your job wouldn’t be waiting for you and your life was finished. So when on the twenty-sixth day they passed a few small fishing boats and the long empty dock area came into view, they could not work up any enthusiasm. Tugs pushed the boat broadside against the dock. There below they could make out a little knot of people waving and shouting, but they saw it all in a fuzzy sort of way until a voice beside them broke through their trance. “It’s you they’re calling, Shelley. Right below. They’re calling you and Carl!”
Only then did their eyes focus on the little group of men in khaki bush jackets and shorts. Suddenly they recognized them — those were old friends down there, journalists like themselves, waving their sun helmets and laughing, expecting them. And just as suddenly, Carl later recalled, he and Shelley were themselves again.
15
Learning the Rules, Dressing the Part
In London in 1942 women correspondents found there was an upside and a downside to America’s entry into the war. Their new position as declared allies of the British made their lives easier, particularly after hours when one shopped in half-bare markets or dropped by the local pub. The downside was that where before American reporters had moved about freely, now there were rules. Instructions were issued, directives dispersed, permissions required. Authorization became obligatory for things that one had done of one’s own accord before. Authorization came from the new command structure: European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army (ETOUSA, or just ETO), created in Washington by Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall and headed in Europe by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now every reporter and photographer moving into the war zone had first to be accredited to a particular branch of the service (usually the U.S. Army) so that the War Department could keep track of them.
The next step was to put accredited war correspondents into uniform. As yet there were no ready-made uniforms for women (the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps was in the formation stage), but practicality suggested an officer jacket and two skirts — khaki for everyday and “pinks,” really a warm gray, for dress — plus khaki shirts, ties, and cap. Pants, cut slightly slimmer than the men’s, were soon added. Helen Kirkpatrick, Mary Welsh, Lael Tucker, and Tania Long set off at once for Savile Row to have their uniforms tailor made. They were soon joined by two INS reporters — Dixie Tighe, famous for her blunt language and flamboyant life style, and tall, engaging Kathleen Harriman, who also reported for Newsweek, but left London to accompany her father, presidential envoy Averell Harriman, to Moscow.
Women war corre spond ents in London (left to right):Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harrim an, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, Tania Long, 1942.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES.
The insignia designating “war correspondent” had its own evolution. Initially, it was a green armband (green signified noncombatant) with the letters WC on it, but when this prompted too many jokes in Britain, it was changed to a single C for correspondent and P for photographer. Soon these were supplemented by a neat patch reading War Correspondent — rectangular over the left jacket pocket and circular on the cap.
Uniforms were important as identification. Correspondents held the rank of “captain”; the rank was theoretical, assigned to allow them leverage should they be captured by the enemy. If this happened, as it did to several male reporters, and they were in uniform, they would not be viewed as spies by the enemy, and would later receive captain’s pay for time lost. But more important from a woman’s point of view was that a uniform made her look professional — equivalent to her male counterpart in similar attire — and indicated her role in the United States Army.
Mary Welsh interviewing AEF troop s, No rthern Ireland, 1942.
MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE/LIFE MANAGEMENT, © TIME INC.
That army reached the British Isles only seven weeks after Pearl Harbor, and remained part of the British landscape until well after the end of the war. Helen Kirkpatrick and Mary Welsh were at a not-to-be-named port in Northern Ireland to cover the arrival of the first troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). Writing for the Chicago Daily News, Kirkpatrick described how hundreds of workers from the dock area gathered to welcome them, and how women and children lined the country lanes over which they marched to their various camps. Mary concentrated on the nuts and bolts of daily existence for the Yanks, as they were called both in Ireland and in Life: the Nissen huts, elongated igloos of corrugated iron in which they would live; their food, which came directly from America; and the dance halls they planned to build at various crossroads across Northern Ireland.
These troops were the beginning phase of a virtual deluge of Yanks and accompanying tanks, trucks, jeeps, housing, and supplies that poured into the British Isles. By summer the AEF was deemed ready for a visit from King George and Queen Elizabeth. Helen Kirkpatrick, already acquainted with the royal couple, accompanied them as they toured field hospitals, examined pontoon bridges, reviewed artillery and infantry units wheeling past to the strains of Sousa marches, and watched light tanks roar over the hills and motorcycle patrols fire tommy guns at a moving target. It was a cross between a Wild West show and a hometown carnival.
Helen Kirkpatrick with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
HELEN KIRKPATRICK PERSONAL COLLECTION.
At the king’s request, fifty-four American privates joined Their Majesties for lunch around a great horseshoe table. Helen described the menu which began with roast beef and concluded with cherry pie and coffee from outsized mugs that made the queen laugh — perhaps because everything that day was outsized by English standards. Later Their Majesties were tucked into jeeps and driven to the top of a small mountain where, seated comfortably under a large tent, they viewed a simulated “battle for the North Ridge.” Tea was served, along with American doughnuts made on the spot. Kirkpatrick summed up the day as a royal success all round.
After a nine-month home stay in the United States during most of 1941, Tania Long and Ray Daniell were planning their return to England. The New York offices of the Herald Tribune and Times, respectively, had kept them busy, but it had been a difficult time for both. In London during those months of the Blitz it had seemed clear — a young divorced woman (with a child in America) meets a man (with a wife and two children in America). Thrown together by the vagaries of war, they hold and comfort each other as bombs rain down around them. In time they return to the States to put their lives in order — a new order satisfactory to all concerned, they hope. But however possible that may have seemed in England, it was much less so in America. Even after Ray’s wife at last agreed to end a marriage that had been troubled long before Tania came on the scene, there were still the children. In America the children, silent until now, proved to have voices. They spoke outright how they felt, protested, or withdrew in tears. Tania’s son felt displaced by this stranger in his mother’s life, and abandoned when she told him she planned to return to England. It was the war, she told him; war separated families; but this was less obvious to a child in the winter of 1941 -42 than it would be later, and he knew no one else whose mother had gone away to war. Tania was torn by divided loyalties. She could, she supposed, remain in the New York office of the Herald Tribune, but she knew how unhappy she would be there, reporting civic affairs with the world at war and Ray in London braving the dangers alone. No, she had made her decision.
; After Ray’s divorce came through, they were married. News of Pearl Harbor reached them on their honeymoon in Pass-a-Grille, Florida. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, they came back from fishing, and there it was — confirmation of the long expected, and a message that the New York Times requested Daniell’s return ASAP. So much for honeymoons. In New York, Long transferred her allegiance to the Times; both agreed that it would be inappropriate for her to work for her husband’s rival, and Daniell was returning as head of the Times London bureau. Even had he been a mere reporter, Tania would not have suggested that he switch to her publication. No woman would have done that in 1942.
Back in England, in charge of acquiring material and writing pieces for the Times Sunday Magazine, Long went down to Dover to report on how the town was coping with bombing raids. She found a whole new system of deep tunnels and connecting passages honeycombed through the famous cliffs. Deep in the interior were kitchens equipped to feed the entire town, open areas where dances were held on weekends, and a hospital complete with operating rooms for the wounded. There was a bunk for every man, woman, and child; many families went regularly into the caves at night to avoid having to do so before morning anyway. Some children could not remember ever sleeping anywhere else.
She had saved her son from that disrupted existence, Tania thought, even as she recognized that he might very well have preferred it.
During her 1941 sojourn in America, Tania Long could not help but notice an unexpected twist in the national mood, and the strong approval now enjoyed by that God-forsaking, capitalist-denouncing country Soviet Russia. Although the embattled Britain of 1940 had been accorded high marks for endurance, by mid-1941, with British troops concentrated in Libya and Egypt and losing most of the battles there, Americans had begun to question both their ability and their motives. Saving the British Empire was not an American priority, which was probably the reason why nearly half the Americans polled in an OWI (Office of War Information) survey, asked if they thought Britain was doing all it could to win the war, replied in the negative. The same question in reference to the Soviet Union, however, brought a ninety percent “yes.” From the American point of view, Russia’s total immersion in the war was admirable, and no one believed that more heartily than Margaret Bourke-White. Judging the United States much too comfortable for a nation at war, she looked back with longing on her Soviet venture. That spring of 1942 she asked for an assignment overseas. Her editors at Life requested that she be accredited to the U.S. Army Air Force, and the Pentagon agreed on condition that they have first claim to her photographs. With much fanfare the Army War College set about designing her uniform, which emerged looking not very different from what the women correspondents in London were already wearing.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 19