The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Helen Kirkpatrick, who from her position on the correspondents’ committee to plan press coverage of Overlord was familiar with that preparation, sat in the bureau chief’s chair at the Chicago Daily News that morning. She was the only one on staff to remain in London. “The correspondents who were going with the troops were down in the south,” she recalled later. “The rest of us — we didn’t know until it happened. We heard planes, just hordes of planes. The sky was black with them.”

  In the first of several dispatches she would send off that day, Kirkpatrick wrote:

  The first landings today were made on the Normandy coast of France at 6 A.M. (11 P.M. last night, Chicago time). Landing craft continued to disembark initial assault troops up through 8 A.M. . . . First reports indicate that mine-sweepers had effectively cleared long lanes for the convoys to go in and for bombardment ships to get into position for naval shelling of the beach and enemy coastal artillery. Behind them, on a 20-foot tide, came small craft, followed by Seabees. Planes that dropped airborne troops returned with very light casualties. No great German air strength had been noted up to 9 A.M.

  Marjorie Avery’s dispatch to the Detroit Free Press was more personal. “I was fast asleep, dreaming I was riding on top of a freight train in Australia,” she wrote, “when violent knocking at the door announced a phone call. Calls also were announced to the rooms on each side of mine, across the hall and immediately above. It was SHAEF with a message to proceed at once to a designated place. Ten minutes later, with my eyes half shut, I was on the street.” At the Ministry of Information she found her fellow reporters — American, Canadian, and British — various of whom confided that they had not washed, shaved, or brushed their teeth, and weren’t sure what clothes they were wearing.

  Catherine Coyne had received a similar call, but when she walked into the Ministry of Information, she was asked first thing for her SHAEF papers. When she told the officer she hadn’t been “SHAEFed” yet, meaning that her accreditation had not come through, he would let her no further in, but when she started to leave, it turned out that she couldn’t go out either. By default, they allowed her to stay. “I guess I was looking lost,” Catherine recalled later, “because Dot Avery called me over to sit with her. She said, ‘I’ve ordered you breakfast.’ And that’s how we became very good friends.”

  Martha Gellhorn was also there in that “great guarded room,” as she referred to it, “with a good percentage of the world’s press watching the clock.” An English officer came forward to announce that in five seconds the first communique would be given to the world, and they could leave. “Go!” he said, and everyone raced out as if fleeing a fire. Martha had hired a car, but when she told the driver the invasion had started, he didn’t believe her. “I’m on twenty-four-hour duty when the invasion starts,” he said defensively. “They’d have told me if it was starting. They wouldn’t start it without calling me.”

  By D Day plus one, news had sifted back from reporters on the scene, and not all of it was good. Against minimal resistance, British and Canadian troops had waded ashore onto the easterly beaches labeled Sword and Juno and Gold, while the Americans had encountered little trouble landing on Utah to the west. But between Gold and Utah was Omaha, a stretch of shoreline subdivided into smaller beaches called Dog, Easy, and Fox and protected by a crack German unit firing relentless volleys from the steep cliffs onto the struggling American forces below. The few men in the lead company who reached the beach could do little more than try to rescue the wounded still in the water.

  Attack plans were of necessity jettisoned; survival became the only realistic objective.

  Later Iris Carpenter attempted to record the landing as men who were there had described it to her:

  Wherever troops hit France on those Omaha beaches — Dog, Easy, and Fox — they took terrific punishment, as, feet slipping in the shirting sand, men stumbled through gray wave caps which raced over them to slap them down with their too-heavy equipment, toss them on the beach, suck them back, toss them on again among the nightmare of jumbled equipment, smashed boats, drowned and broken bodies....

  “Easy Red” was a small beach at the mouth of a wooded gully.... Gun emplacements laced the slopes on each side, with summer villas converted into pillboxes. Woods were tunneled under and fortified so the Germans could and did fight their way back through them for miles without ever having to come into the open....

  From the sea the view was as unmenacing-looking as the Normandy landscape.... Only [later] it became visible — visible as a wall of fire so withering that it cut men down in drifts which will forever haunt the memories of those who had to fight their way in over them.

  One of the big tank landing ships attempted to beach — there were only ten allowed on all the Omaha beaches on D-Day because that was all we dared risk losing — finally made shore as a machine gun in the cliffs above chattered while the big doors in her bow yawed slowly open. When, eventually, the first tanks debarked, the drivers cried and vomited as they had to drive over the bodies of their buddies.

  The dispatches women correspondents filed that week reflected their own activity, and were without question less dramatic. On D Day plus one Catherine Coyne hitchhiked, in company with three other reporters, to an invasion base town on the south coast. The dock area seemed at first glance a spectacle of confusion, but gradually they divined an intricate traffic pattern at work. Ships that appeared about to collide, didn’t. They walked along the quay, passing vehicles crowded with American soldiers sitting quietly, smoking or munching chocolate bars or just staring into space. Within a few hours they would be on one of the craft there in the harbor, and a few hours later in France. What were they thinking, Coyne wanted to ask, but regulations did not permit conversation.

  That night Marjorie Avery went out to a C-47 carrier station. “Great formations of gliders rose in the air,” she wrote, “circled low over their home fields, then floated off toward the French coast. ...” The sky was completely blanketed by C-47 cargo planes towing small light American cargo gliders, four abreast.” A courier pilot described for her how, flying low in his tiny Piper Cub, he saw above him gliders strung out all across the sky, their red, blue, and green lights glowing, while below him were “crowds of people standing in the streets of towns, and workers in the gardens and farmers in the fields, all standing like statues, looking up.”

  At headquarters, where Dot went to wait for the C-47s to come back, everyone was exhausted. She described a Waaf going back and forth with trays of sandwiches and coffee, trying to keep people awake. Men found that if they so much as sat down, their eyes closed. The colonel, called to the telephone, was discovered asleep with his head on his desk. A desultory game of billiards went on through the night, although the players kept changing as people wandered in or were called away. Through it all, RAF pilots sat by the fire, waiting for the last planes to return.

  Ruth Cowan had formed a connection with an army field hospital on the south coast. Now she stood on the dock of a military port marshaling area to watch the first American dead of the invasion, along with nineteen survivors “picked up at sea,” brought off returning minesweepers. A young British sailor with fixed bayonet stood at the head of the gangplank, while rifle-bearing American soldiers in blue armbands marked “security” lined the wharf, barring anyone without proper credentials. A tall American with a CIC (counterintelligence) armband whispered a few words to a Wac press relations officer, who approached Cowan. “I’ve been told to tell you that if you attempt to talk to anyone getting off the ship you will be shot,” she said. Ruth assured her she would not.

  A minesweeper eased up to the dock. The ship’s officers descended to the foot of the gangplank, and the first survivor strode down, a young man wearing the pajamalike two-piece white wool suit given to men picked up at sea. Others followed: this one seemed very tired; that one stumbled. Willing hands helped them into a waiting truck. A man dressed in borrowed navy gear and holding tightly to a small leather ca
se stopped to shake hands with the ship’s officers. As Cowan watched, another minesweeper eased alongside the first, and three survivors descended its gangplank and climbed into the truck, which then drove off. Only after that did the British sailors carry out the first litter, covered with canvas. “Then as gently as though the soldier were alive and able to feel pain,” Ruth wrote, “British hands ... shifted the burden to the Americans. Four litter bearers took the stretcher away to an ambulance.”

  That action was repeated eight times.

  The invasion was barely under way when a few of the cannier women began to devise ways to bend the rules and get closer to the action. Lee Carson managed that on DDay itself; while all the others cooled their heels at the Ministry of Information, she went out to an air base and found a group commander who found a pilot who found her a seat on a plane. She knew it was a risk, but she would chance it. Her aerial view of the attack was as comprehensive as any that came in that day, and perhaps first as well.

  On D Day plus one, or maybe two, Martha Gellhorn crossed the Channel in a hospital ship. It was a daring act, against all regulations. She simply went down to one of the ports, boarded, and hid in the lavatory until the boat was under way. In her story “The Wounded Come Home,” she did not mention this stratagem, focusing instead on the trip across — the “snowy white” ship with its “many bright new red crosses painted on the hull and painted flat on the boat deck,” and the six nurses who had scrubbed walls and floors, made beds, and prepared all the supplies. She wrote of the difficulty of taking on the wounded in rough seas from a landing craft, and of the water ambulances that churned off to the beaches and came back full. From two o’clock in the afternoon until seven the following evening when the ship docked again in England, the nurses were absorbed in caring for the wounded. “They had to be fed, as most of them had not eaten for two days; their shoes had to be cut off; they needed help to get out of their jackets; they wanted water ... it seemed to take hours to pour hot coffee from the spout of a teapot into a mouth that just showed through bandages.” Besides such menial tasks, there was the constant administering of blood and plasma and oxygen and sedatives.

  Gellhorn helped wherever she could, but when an opportunity arose to go ashore, she seized it. This was, after all, her real purpose in making the trip; she was a reporter, not a nurse. She climbed into the motor ambulance with the stretcher bearers and they headed through the dusk for the Normandy shore, hoping to pick up more wounded “before the dangerous dark cold could get into their hurt bodies.” She was out to get the story that no other woman — and not many men — would get.

  When the motor ambulance could go no closer, Gellhorn and the stretcher bearers waded ashore in water to their waists. They stumbled up a road being scooped out of the cliff and walked the narrow mine-free path between white taping to a tent with a red cross on it. There a couple of grimy but polite young American soldiers were directing trucks transporting the wounded to the beach. Martha’s crew helped unload the stretchers into an LST (landing ship, tank), where they all sat immobile until a tide change allowed the water ambulances to pick them up. A German air attack provided some danger and diversion. As it turned out, all the wounded on Gellhorn’s run were German prisoners, which effectively canceled out any Yank hero angle to her story. Some readers might have questioned why injured American boys on a hospital ship were held up extra hours while a water ambulance went back to shore for Germans.

  Martha’s Colliers story ended with the ship’s return to the Channel port, but her personal story did not. The army press office took a dim view of her excursion to Normandy in open defiance of the rules. She was arrested, confined to an American nurses’ training camp outside London, and told she could go to France with the nurses when they were ready. Gellhorn quickly tired of this arrangement. Abandoning her passport and credentials, she climbed over the fence and hitched a ride to a military airfield, then another on a flight to Naples. She had already written Hemingway a note, having been told that he was livid on hearing she had reached France when he, although he had crossed the Channel in an LST on D Day, had not been allowed ashore. She wrote that she was off to Italy, adding, not very subtly, that she preferred reporting the war to hanging around a London hotel.

  The next woman correspondent to step onto French soil was Iris Carpenter. By D Day plus four a tiny landing strip had been laid out along the terrible stretch of beach at Omaha. It was so short there seemed not an inch to spare, either for landing or taking off, but ammunition and medical supplies had to be flown in, and the wounded flown out, so it served. Iris crossed in the same plane with reporter Cornelius Ryan, who would later immortalize the events of June 6 in his book The Longest Day. Ryan moved on into Normandy. Carpenter was restricted to the airstrip.

  But even there lay a story. The great bay, like blue velvet, was littered with hundreds of ships — battleships, yachts, tugboats, barges — each with a silver barrage balloon swaying protectively above its deck. Alighting from the little plane, Iris was confronted with the sight of several dozen medical corpsmen gingerly poking about with spades, excavating bodies that had been hurriedly buried in the white sand. Long rows of sticks marked the temporary graves; from each hung a small canvas bag with that soldier’s dog tags and personal possessions inside. Now the army was recovering its dead, unwrapping each body from whatever scrap of blanket had been used as a cover, slipping it into a clean white shroud, and carrying it up the hill to the new cemetery where men were digging fresh graves in the earth. Iris thought that if only those officials rejoicing at the lower-than-estimated casualty figures could walk on that little hill, they would feel less smug.

  Although Carpenter flew back to England with a load of badly wounded soldiers, most casualties returned by water. On D Day plus five Marjorie Avery stood on a narrow pier on either side of which an LST was moored — one loading troops and equipment for France, the other, having just come back, about to unload its wounded. It was the latter that captured her attention:

  Some of the men who made the first assault on the coast of France have returned.

  Some of them tell stories. These are the ones who walk off the ships with head, arm, hand or shoulder bandages. They tell of the battle as each saw it, of waves beating on the sands, of murderous cross-fire on the beaches, of shells exploding in air, of pain and fear, of grotesque details that leave impressions when death is all around.

  Some joke and say that they’re going back. Some, too dazed to smile, tell you stories in dull voices. They are eager for human contact and want me to write down their names for the papers. They ask how the war is going in France, just as I asked them. None knows.

  Some of the men coming back aren’t talking. They are carried off the ships on stretchers, bits of their clothing lying pathetically across their blanketed figures. A few look at the sky with unseeing eyes. Some are coming back who will never talk again. Their stories are finished. They come off the ships last, still figures covered with blankets and loaded like their dying brothers into waiting ambulances.

  Barrage balloons ride nervously over the big blue LST boats docking at this port. The job of unloading has been going on all morning and will go on all afternoon. It is a slow, painstaking task. The port and the men who are doing the work are very quiet. There is no break in the stillness except for sudden shouted orders which are muted by the sounds of the surf....

  As the ambulances roll up from the wharves to the main road above the harbor, they meet another convoy coming down — a long line of men and tanks and trucks. The men who move into war are as silent as those who are coming out.

  This was the story that at last moved a happy Dot Avery off the women’s page and directly onto page one, column one, of the Detroit Free Press.

  As if in retaliation for the invasion, Hitler chose D Day plus ten to launch a new weapon at England — a pilotless, jet-propelled rocket-projected plane, twenty-five feet long with a sixteen-foot wingspan, operated by an automatic pilot device se
t before takeoff. Trailing orange fire as it spun low over London rooftops, and at some unforeseeable point dropping to the ground and exploding, it was variously referred to as a robot, buzz bomb, doodlebug, or V-l (as opposed to the soon-to-come V-2). “There was something macabre about this wholly mechanical enemy and about the idea of being killed by an insensate, innocent machine,” Mary Welsh said.

  Tania Long reported from London that people had gone back to sleeping in the shelters again, and that normal life during the day was difficult. You thought very hard before taking a bath, she said, because you couldn’t exactly run naked and dripping into the hallway of the Savoy to avoid the glass, which was what you were supposed to do when you heard the bomb’s final cough before it zoomed downward. She and Ray had bought a little house outside London, but the drive to it was unsettling now, and its doors and windows had been blown out the first week.

  Catherine Coyne was in a Red Cross club in London when a voice over the public address system warned that a “gas buggy” was headed their way. Catherine hit the floor with the men. “The infernal machine seemed to be buzzing down upon us,” she reported. “Suddenly its broken rhythm ceased. There was an awful silence. The sailor beside me beat his fists against the floor and muttered, ‘Crash, you bastard, crash! ’” It crashed, but not on them, and Coyne noted that after the initial relief, you felt guilty, because what missed you might, say, have toppled the wall of a day nursery. But she also felt relief, almost exhilaration, to be sharing some small part of the danger daily experienced by the troops in France.