The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  As for Erskine Caldwell, he was not happy about his wife’s choice of career moves. They had bought a house in Arizona and still talked, or he did, about having a child. While Bourke-White was on a lecture tour, he took a well-paying job in Hollywood and lined up one for her, too. But Margaret had no desire to go to Hollywood. During wartime a photographer’s job was to be where the real action was. That summer she received her orders to go to a secret American air base in Britain.

  The United States had recently sent over thirteen heavy bombers — big fast B-17s that could cruise at high altitudes and thus safely be sent out on daytime raids. Bourke-White was there to photograph their first mission, and Life gave the story seven pages. Photographically, it was not very interesting. Most of the shots were of men — meteorologists, intelligence officers, duty officers, navigators — conferring with each other or with the bombing crews before and after the flight. The intent was to give the reader a sense of the experience of a B-17 in action, but as Margaret was not allowed up in the plane herself, the heart of the story was missing.

  Still, she enjoyed herself and was delighted when one of the bomber crews asked her to christen their plane. An elaborate ceremony was arranged, employing a small band with a piano on the runway. The weather and the Germans both cooperated, and a glowing Bourke-White brought the bottle of Coca-Cola down hard on the nose of the plane. “May the Flying Flitgun bring to the enemy the devastation its godmother has brought to the Ninety-seventh,” quipped the commanding officer, Colonel J. Hampton Atkinson, in this, his initial encounter with that “godmother.”

  At first no reporters were allowed on the B-17 bombing raids, but once that rule changed, Bourke-White worked hard to get permission to go. She was never refused outright, but on the other hand, when a permission did come through, it was always for a man. Of the first two reporters who went, only one came back, but that did not deter Margaret from continuing to try.

  Charles Wertenbaker, widely known as “Wert” in his post as foreign editor at Time, arrived at the London office that spring of 1942, and Lael Tucker was assigned to show him about. Lael had never met him, but she had been cabling him stories for several years and, like many Time reporters, depended on him as a perceptive, open-minded editor. Wert had a sense of her, too; her analyses were at times politically ingenuous and her preconceptions uncritical, but he believed what she sent was as truthful as she could make it, which he knew was not the case with every reporter.

  Wertenbaker was forty-two, twice divorced, and contemplating a third marriage, and Tucker, thirty-four, was married to one of his own reporters, Stephen Laird. The Lael-Wert relationship thus began quite innocently, turned mildly flirtatious, and then suddenly grew serious. One day they deserted a Ministry of Information tour in Liverpool “to see the things we wanted to see, which were the same things,” Lael recalled later. Another day she took him to Dover and, after viewing the installations, introduced him to three schoolgirls she had come to know. The girls clustered around her, giggling at their inability to understand Wert’s Virginia-accented English. Later Lael wrote that they first looked at each other with love across those dark, blond, and red heads. And when on the grass at Oxford he solemnly pronounced that he was a very lucky man, that seemed to settle it.

  Except, of course, for Steve. Lael had known her marriage had problems, but she had thought it would improve with time. She had not expected it suddenly to be engulfed by a far stronger force. Nor had she anticipated getting pregnant. But Wertenbaker was indeed lucky. Laird, who had long admired him, rejected the role of outraged husband. Only Steve’s uncompromising decency, Lael admitted later, kept a tense emotional situation from turning ugly. They had shared a lot—the bubonic plague scare in Manchuria, the long trip across Russia, the anxious year in Berlin. “It was hard leaving Steve,” she said.

  That summer Laird remained quietly in London reporting for Time. Lael went home and filed for divorce. In due time Wert returned to the New York office, they were married, and their son was born.

  Besides having to follow directives, obtain permissions, and seek authorization for even minor activities, women correspondents during the war found their customary easy movement between Britain and America obstructed by a certain Mrs. Shipley, head of Immigration and Naturalization. It was Mrs. Shipley’s belief that women had no business exposing themselves to danger in a war zone, and to that end she began to pick up their passports when they returned home for what they had planned as a brief visit. Unless they first obtained an ironclad guarantee of an exact return date, women could find their home leaves extended indefinitely.

  Sonia Tomara ran afoul of Mrs. Shipley when she arrived in New York after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. Tomara’s plan was to stay the prescribed time to become an American citizen and then return. Meanwhile from the home office of the New York Herald Tribune she turned out regular analyses of events in central Europe. But Tomara was a twenty-year veteran; to her, reporting was not just a job, it was her whole identity. And Mrs. Shipley was blocking the delivery of her new passport. Having observed Margaret Bourke-White’s much publicized accreditation to the Army Air Force, and the ease with which her former colleague on the Herald Tribune, Tania Long, returned to England for the New York Times, Sonia realized that it was all a matter of who you knew.

  So she went to Helen Rogers Reid. Reid had brought Dorothy Thompson to the Herald Tribune and was responsible for its having more women on the editorial staff than any other daily in the country. Throughout her long life Reid acted on her belief that women, married or not, should work and be economically independent. That, like her advocacy of women’s conscription for military service, was antithetical to Mrs. Shipley’s views, but Reid had, a colleague once said, “the persistence of gravity.” In no time Tomara was accredited, her new passport issued, and her assignment to the China-Burma-India theater, known as CBI, assured. By mid-August 1942 she was off.

  Sonia’s first dateline read “Somewhere on the coast of Africa,” and although she could not be more specific, she did inform her readers that whereas eight months earlier there had been nothing on this spot, there were now living quarters for sixty-odd military and technicians, a well-equipped hospital, and a mess hall serving food imported from America. There was an airfield, but no road to the interior. The base was surrounded by jungle, and the nearest town, reached only by air, was sixty miles away.

  With the rainy season over, Tomara reported, the weather on the coast was delightfully cool. Palm trees bent in the wind. One can imagine her leaning against one, looking out to sea, exultant.

  16

  Women On Trial: North Africa

  In the fall of 1942 American troops landed along the coast of North Africa and engaged in their first ground offensive. Early successes freed Algiers for U.S. Army headquarters and, impelled by the need for clerical personnel, Eisenhower secretly requested that a newly trained contingent of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps be sent there instead of England. For its part the War Department conceded that female members of the press might go along to report WAAC activities. And as a Washington reporter who had been covering their training, and an old friend of Oveta Culp Hobby, head of the Wacs, Ruth Cowan was a natural for the job.

  Ruth Cowan, Associated Press

  The daughter of a mining prospector of limited success who died when she was still young, Ruth Cowan had a childhood that was sparse of funds but even more of stability. Her mother moved her about at whim until, in her teens and anxious to live and go to school among people familiar to her, Ruth elected to remain behind in San Antonio. “I’ll perch someplace,” she recalled thinking, her terminology reminiscent of the chickens she had cared for during her mother’s Florida citrus farm tenure. Her first perch during high school was a convent, her second a large civic-minded family who took her in as a surrogate daughter. Blond and blue-eyed, she had acquired an air of independence that amused people, she said, but which developed out of her conviction that she had no one
to fall back on.

  Ruth Cowan equipped for battle reporting, 1942.

  SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE COLLEGE.

  After graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked in the state library to support herself, Cowan took a job on the San Antonio Evening News. She had a desk in the city room, the only woman there. It was in the city room that she learned how to find the news angle of a story, how to write a lead, how to call in a story — collect, of course. “I covered everything I found uncovered,” she joked later. Then she turned to freelancing and covered the 1928 Democratic convention for the Houston Chronicle. A United Press official saw her there, was impressed, and hired Ruth B. Cowan as R. Baldwin Cowan, but she lost the job when the main office discovered she was a woman. R. Baldwin was not one to give up easily, however, and she soon signed on with a somewhat more enlightened Associated Press. She worked in the Chicago office, again as the only woman, throughout the gangster years of the 1930s, covering the trial of Al Capone along with more benign events such as the 1933 World’s Fair. She was strict, almost hard on herself. Whenever possible, a story should be a scoop, but in any event each story should be well written and a little unusual. When asked to write a story again, she would write it again. No complaints.

  In 1940 Cowan was transferred to Washington. There she quickly became a regular at Eleanor Roosevelt’s weekly women-only press gatherings, as well as covering White House social events and Washington cultural events. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Ruth was one of the few AP reporters in town, so she covered the Washington aftermath to Pearl Harbor too. In 1942 she added the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps training to her schedule, and that fall, hearing that her Wacs were going overseas, presumably to England, she applied to accompany them. The AP was willing, even agreed to a clothes allowance for wool pants and long winter underwear. Then in December a story came over the teletype that five Wacs had been torpedoed off the coast of North Africa. Ruth stared at the story. She knew that a small WAAC contingent had already gone to England, and she also knew that General Eisenhower had requested a second detachment. And where was the general now? North Africa.

  Cowan’s first reaction was to ponder, half philosophically, half emotionally, whether she wanted to get that close to war. But her reporter instinct dismissed that question almost at once, and she filed a new application to the War Department, which read in part: “It is presumed that the WAAC are going to England, but nevertheless, the Associated Press desires that Ruth Cowan accompany them wherever they may go.” The AP chief signed it, and Cowan personally delivered it to the brand-new Pentagon building. There she was subjected to a small and not unfriendly interrogation by the chief of the war intelligence division in the War Department’s bureau of public relations. “So you want to go to war?” he asked her. He was regular army, a colonel, but Ruth happened to know he had once been city editor on a Salt Lake City newspaper. Was she athletic? he asked. Did she like camping? (No to both.) Was she afraid of firearms? (She was.) Could she keep a secret? She must always be very careful, he stressed. It would be most unfortunate if a leak in military security were traced to a woman. (She promised to keep all secrets.) One thing more. “You won’t be very comfortable. Things will happen you won’t like. Do you think you can take it?” Ruth thought she could.

  After that Cowan began the process that would become familiar to all women setting out as war correspondents over the next few years. Once her accreditation came through and she suffered through the inoculations — tetanus, typhoid, typhus (typhus in England? Ruth mused) — she received a small green folder of identification, called an “AGO card” for having originated in the Adjutant General’s Office. Wac uniforms were ordered; in time a package arrived containing two officer jackets, two skirts, pants, half a dozen shirts, ties, and a raincoat (nothing warm enough for England in midwinter, she noted).

  On January 2,1943, Cowan reported to the troop movements division at the New York port of embarkation in Brooklyn. Almost instantly she was confronted with army red tape. Did she have her orders? She had no orders, no one had mentioned orders, but (God be praised) her name was on the sailing list. Did she want to pick up her equipment while there? It had not occurred to her that she would require “equipment.” Of course, she replied, and was taken to an upper floor of a huge warehouse where, yes, her name was on the list sent up from the War Department. She was issued a helmet, a musette bag, a fatigue outfit, green coveralls with white hood, gloves that had been treated for gas, insect powder, sunglasses, mosquito netting (for the river Thames? she wondered), a canteen, and a gas mask, which a bemused sergeant taught her how to use. His chuckles were understandable. It was still new for Wacs to go overseas, and now here was this bewildered blonde who didn’t know enough to carry her new belongings downstairs, “thereby violating another rule for women in war,” she noted later. “Carry your own weight. Don’t expect men to be gallant.”

  The staging area before embarkation was Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Cowan had been told to pack her musette bag so she could live out of it for a month, and to keep in mind that she would be carrying it on her back. A Wac officer helped her. In went three shirts, pants, underthings, socks, cold cream in a tin tube, powder, lipstick, anti-gas attack salve, and two small bottles of self-apply bleach (out of the dozen she was taking — Ruth fully intended to remain a blonde throughout the war). A few days later, in a crowded army transport, part of a huge troop convoy, she put out to sea.

  In the meantime Margaret Bourke-White, languishing in England, was desperate to go to North Africa. It seemed to her she had done all she could with the air force in Britain; now much of it was moving down to Morocco and Algeria, and the action would be there. She needed new challenges, new successes to prove to herself that she had done the right thing in trading her marriage for her career — which was what she had done in rejecting the Hollywood job her husband had arranged and taking an assignment to England. Her reflections were private ones. Life reporter Lincoln Barnett, who occupied the hotel room next to hers and ate with her often, had no idea she and Caldwell had separated. Perhaps she sensed that her male colleagues might not have sanctioned her decision.

  Military protocol did not permit Bourke-White to request that Life send her to North Africa, so she set about persuading the U.S. Army Air Force still in England that they would need her there. This caused a problem because the magazine already had a photographer in that combat zone, and two from the same publication were not allowed. A highly competent and unhappy male photographer had to be evicted before Margaret could go in. If she knew this, she chose not to dwell upon it. The assignment came through, although the air force decreed that flying was too dangerous and sent her with American and British nurses in a large convoy. She was assigned to the flagship, formerly a pleasure cruise boat, along with six thousand troops, four hundred nurses, five Wacs (the very ones that attracted Ruth Cowan’s attention on the teletype), and several women from General Eisenhower’s staff, including Elspeth Duncan, a tall, handsome Scotswoman, and his spirited Irish driver, Kay Summersby.

  War is heavy with best-laid schemes that gang agley. If the air force had sent Bourke-White off to North Africa in the Flying Flitgun, she would have arrived promptly and safely. As it was, she endured five days of violent storm and gales, and then worse. “Down in the trough you felt you would never see the sky again,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Up on the peaks, you caught a second’s flash of other ships bobbing like celluloid toys.” Through it all, lifeboat drills took place on schedule two or three times a day, the poor sick nurses grabbing at the guide ropes strung along the decks as they made their way to the lifeboat stations.

  Once in the calm Mediterranean everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But this was premature. Trouble lurked under those still waters. Bourke-White packed and repacked her small musette bag, meant to contain soap, extra socks, and concentrated chocolate. In the penultimate packing her small Rolleiflex and some film displaced the socks and most
of the chocolate, and in the final one her beloved Linhof, with the five most valuable of its twenty-two lenses, went in too. She and two newsmen obtained permission, should an enemy attack occur, to cover the action from the base of the bridge. They were among the few aware of the submarines following them.

  In her story “Women in Lifeboats,” which appeared in Life, Bourke-White described the sensation when the torpedo awakened her — not so loud a crash as she might have expected, but suggesting that the contact was a fatal one. She tore into her clothes, put on her greatcoat, grabbed her life belt, helmet, and musette bag, and flew past two lines of troops filing in perfect order up from the hold, one turning to starboard and the other to port. Pausing under the bridge, she realized that the nighttime sky would not provide enough light for pictures. This excuse allowed her to make a dash for her boat station, relieved to find that the nurses were only beginning to board and she could take her assigned place in the order.