The wagons were filled with hay and the soldiers lay on top of the hay like an army taking a holiday and going on a mass hayride.... The fierce fighting men of the Red Army in their tunics and great boots, shabby and ragged after their long war, riding toward Berlin in their strange assortment of vehicles, singing their fighting songs, drinking vodka, were like so many holiday-makers going on a picnic.
Traveling with the forward units, a crude handmade American flag flying from their jeep, the trio were well into Berlin by evening. The dead lay all about, on sidewalks, in front yards. Russian vehicles clogged the streets, while horses, freed from their supply carts, ran about loose. “But the Russians were happy — with an almost indescribably wild joy,” Virginia wrote with feeling. “They were in Berlin. In this German capital lies their true revenge for Leningrad and Stalingrad, for Sevastopol and Moscow.”
Irwin was not even much worried when they were labeled possible spies and taken to a regimental command post in what was left of a German home. The guards-major quickly cleared them of suspicion and invited them to stay. There was no electricity or running water, but he had his Cossack orderly — “a fierce Mongolian with a great scar on his left cheek” — take Virginia a dishpan of water, along with German face powder, perfume, and a cracked mirror. Thus tidied up, she descended to a dinner that defied description. A candelabra of upturned milk bottles and a pickle-jar vase fall of spring flowers adorned the table. Servers passed huge platefuls of food, not all of which Irwin could identify, although the liquor was always vodka. “After each course there were toasts to ‘the late and great President Roosevelt,’ to Stalin, to President Truman, to Churchill, to ‘Capt. Andre Tooley,’ to ‘Capt. Veergeenee Erween,’ to the Red Army, to the American Army, to ‘Sarjaunt Wilson,’ and ‘to the American jeep.’ “
“Sarjaunt” Johnny Wilson was so excited at being the first GI to get to Berlin that he could hardly eat. The Russians had discovered a beat-up old Victrola, so after dinner there was dancing. A young captain, adept at the jitterbug, danced with Virginia, and when she could twirl no longer, he grabbed Johnny. The three exhausted Americans soon caved in and were shown to their rooms. “Captain Veergeenee” sat down to write her story, the flame of her candle fluttering from the artillery only a few blocks away. It was the most exciting experience that could happen to a reporter, she said. “It is all unreal. Russian officers in their worn tunics bedecked with the medals of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and all the other great Russian battles, are unreal. The whole battle is somehow unreal.”
Unreality continued all the next day. After a breakfast of charred veal and potatoes washed down with hot milk and vodka, the three Americans moved in a circuitous route about the city, trying to get to the center but often blocked by artillery and sniper fire. The little flag on their jeep was a sign for Russian soldiers to gather round; Virginia said she shook hands until her right wrist was paralyzed and smiled until her ears ached. Accustomed to streamlined American supply, she could not get over the hodgepodge of the Russian army. “Great herds of sheep and cows are mixed in with armored cars and half-tracks with household belongings lashed to their sides. Super tanks tangle with a fantastic mess of horse-drawn vehicles, many driven by soldiers with their heads swathed in bandages, and all loaded down with ammunition, food, women, wounded soldiers, and animals.” Through it all the Russian artillery was letting go with barrage after barrage. “The earth shakes,” Virginia reported. “The air stinks of cordite and the dead. All Berlin seems confusion.”
Later, trying to make sense of the past few days, she likened the experience to having been caught in a giant whirlpool of destruction; at times she thought she must have imagined much of what she had seen.
The women, for example — not the Red Army women, but the secretaries, laundresses, traffic cops, all riding in hay wagons with the infantry — that had been unexpected. The transport was positively medieval. And what should she make of the time she got out of the jeep to shake hands with a milling mob of Russian soldiers, one of whom was serenading her on an accordion, to find she was standing in the middle of a yard of German dead? And the noise — whenever a column came to a halt, there would be (besides the artillery) “an unearthly din of truck horns mixed with the neighing of horses, the bleating of sheep, the cackling of chickens,” while some Russian folk tune was being wildly rendered on an accordion and men were shouting at each other in their unintelligible tongue.
It was mad, she said, but wonderful.
On the evening of the second day, mindful of their need to file their stories, Irwin and Tully said goodbye to the guards-major and, with “Sarjaunt Johnny” at the wheel, headed west out of Berlin. They reached the Elbe that night and hid out with a couple of British POWs. At dawn, after the Russians refused to take them across, Virginia stood on the bank and yelled, “I’m an American woman, come and get me away from these Russians.” Two assault boats put out from the opposite shore. At the Weimar press camp they learned that stories written from Berlin could not get clearance. Friends in the Ninth Air Force saw them to Paris; there they discovered that SHAEF had suspended them, meaning they could neither send stories out nor communicate with their home offices. In a scribbled note to Joseph Pulitzer that passed the censors only because it did not mention Berlin, Irwin informed him that she was suspended and could not file, asked him to call her mother and tell her she was safe, and noted that she would need a thousand dollars “if I am to stay any length of time.” Pulitzer, figuring she was on to something, complied.
During the following week five more reporters returned from Berlin with their own stories; they, too, were suspended. Irwin remained the only woman among them. By the time their combined dispatches were allowed through, the impact of the scoop was decidedly lessened. Nevertheless, the first of her three-part front-page series ran under a lovely photograph of her at her typewriter — not the Virginia of three parts perspiration to one part bomb rubble dust, not the dancing, whirling Virginia or the bottoms-up on the vodka Virginia, but the serious correspondent Virginia, the unquestionably brave Virginia, who had done her newspaper proud.
When Hitler’s death became known, there was a dash for his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Lee Miller and Dave Scherman drove like mad over rugged terrain; at one point their little Chevrolet slid right off the road and had to be pulled back on course by a handy army bulldozer. Further along they crossed paths with an abandoned 1939 Mercedes under the dubious care of a group of GIs, who were persuaded to relinquish it in exchange for posing with Lee for their hometown papers. “Ludmilla” proved better equipped for the difficult roads, and they arrived just after the Third Division, Seventh Army, ousted the resident SS troops who, before their retreat into the forest, set fire to the chalet. Miller and Scherman scrambled up the back of the mountain and held their flashguns for each other as they photographed Hitler’s beloved Eagle’s Nest going up in flames. Later Lee described the moment:
The mountainside was a mess of craters, Hider’s own house was still standing with the roof slightly askew and the fire which the SS troopers set as a final salute was lashing out the windows. I crawled up and down... and looked at the empty flagpole which had carried the last Nazi banner to fly over the redoubt. The departing SS had ripped the swastika center from it, but left the red cloth.
There was a sunset to color the snowy mountain tops, and it was warm enough by the fires. Two more fires started on the peak opposite like beacons and the soldiers on the jeep kept their machine guns ready, because if there were any unsurrendered vengeful Nazis around we were a beautiful target in the firelight.
The next day saw a free-for-all of souvenir hunting. Marguerite Higgins was there: “Stores of china, glassware, linen and silver lay in vast quantities in the cupboards and storerooms lining the passageways,” she wrote. Soldiers and correspondents alike seized whatever they could stuff into their knapsacks. By the time Helen Kirkpatrick and Bill Walton arrived a few days later, little remained. “The GIs had stripped
the place,” Walton said. The only thing he could find to take was an ice cube container. Helen discovered a frying pan. They hadn’t had lunch yet, and they had some A-rations, so there near the rubble that had been Hitler’s beloved retreat, they built a little fire and cooked powdered eggs and bacon.
The war in Italy ended at noon on May 2. On the fourth, Field Marshal Montgomery accepted the surrender of all German forces in Holland, Denmark, and northwestern Germany, and Admiral Donitz, Hitler’s appointed successor, ordered German U-boats still at sea to return to port and surrender. German Army Group G in Bavaria capitulated, and on May 5 much of Prague was seized by resistance fighters. But the surrender that counted was the one at General Eisenhower’s headquarters at the schoolhouse in Rheims, France.
Controversy about that — as far as the press was concerned — continues to this day. General Alfred Jodl represented Germany, General Walter Bedell Smith (Eisenhower’s chief of staff) the Allies, and General Ivan Suslaparov the Soviet Union. All plans were highly secret. The signing was planned for May 7, and active hostilities were to end at one minute past midnight on that day. But no one — or almost no one — in the press knew these details.
Lael Wertenbaker of Time-Life knew because, Lael said, Ike told Wert and Wert told her. (Lael had remained in Paris when everybody else fanned out over the Continent because, you might know, she was pregnant again. She was the only pregnant woman in the U.S. Army allowed to stay at her job — or so she believed.) Apparently Wert had been out at SHAEF and caught sight of one of the German generals and guessed something was up, so Eisenhower had felt obliged to call him in and tell him about the surrender plans. “But Ike said,” Lael continued, “ Tf you breathe one word you’ll be court-martialed. This is a serious secret.’ So Wert whispered it to me in the middle of the night in the middle of our double bed, but I didn’t tell, and he said nothing more. And then he was left out of the surrender. The army guy in charge just made his own list of people who could attend. And Wert wasn’t on it.”
Helen Kirkpatrick rushed back to Paris from Berchtesgaden to find she wasn’t on it either. “A general who had been assigned as the Poohbah for the press corps in Paris, by himself and without consulting any correspondents, set up a pool of correspondents to go witness the surrender. On what basis he made his choices, none of us ever knew. Obviously they had to make choices, but they could have consulted the press corps — we had a sort of loose organization — to see that the major newspapers and magazines and wire services were involved. But he didn’t do that.”
Realizing what was about to happen in Rheims without them, Kirkpatrick, Wertenbaker, and two other male reporters drove there to join other excluded colleagues pacing about outside the schoolhouse. Helen at least wiggled to where she could see over some heads, but she did not find that satisfactory, and they returned to Paris. There events soon became even more bizarre. The story could not be released. It had been impressed upon those who attended the surrender that nothing must be said until it had formally been announced by SHAEF. Military officers understood that all had agreed. Those who had been there unofficially, such as Kirkpatrick, also felt bound by the rules, as did others who heard about it later that day. The censors had their instructions, and the phone lines were monitored. Correspondents back at the Scribe stayed up all night expecting news, but none came. Later the press was told that permission for release could not be given until the documents had been “signed,” or “ratified,” in Berlin.
Years later it was reliably reported that owing to an oversight, the surrender agreement signed at Rheims had not been the one previously approved by the Russians — a fact that was not noticed until the Russian signatory returned to his headquarters in Berlin. The correct documents had to be located and flown there for a second signing by representatives of all parties on May 8. The delay in SHAEF’s announcement of the surrender was thus longer than expected. But Edward Kennedy, an AP reporter throughout the war, decided that circumstances had changed and he was no longer bound by what he may or may not previously have agreed to. He found a line to London open and phoned in his story. The London AP office, which also knew of the ban, released the story anyway.
The brouhaha that followed was of the first order. Eisenhower was furious. The AP was briefly suspended and Kennedy disaccredited. Most correspondents felt they had been cut out twice, first by the military and then by one of their own. Seeing what all had agreed would be a shared story appear everywhere under Kennedy’s byline was doubly galling. Fifty-four correspondents, including Kirkpatrick, signed a strongly worded statement in condemnation of Kennedy and the AP. They also criticized SHAEF for security so lax that such a thing could happen. In time, some reporters defended Kennedy, but the bitterness remained.
Meanwhile, just as they had done throughout the war, Marjorie “Dot” Avery and Catherine Coyne turned up for the story but stayed out of the fray They were practical women, and when they couldn’t get into the schoolhouse, they looked about for a related story to do instead. They talked to the GIs assigned to guard the German officers and to the Wac who managed the guest house and to the three Wac secretaries to the general staff. Avery was able to report that during the ceremony Eisenhower sat “in his office with his feet comfortably perched on his desk, his spectacles half down on his nose, engrossed in a Western-story magazine.” Coyne expanded: “Those who saw him said he was completely relaxed as he waited for signatures to make his triumph official. Nobody is supposed to know about these signatures until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon but news of desperately fought for and long prayed for peace petered out to the world. Residents of this champagne center of France, glimpsing enemy officers in speeding staff cars, guessed the news.”
Those “enemy officers” turned out to be the chief of the German army staff, the commander in chief of the German navy, and a colonel with the war office. Avery wrote that all three men were courteous, had ramrod bearing, and wore exquisite clothes. Each night they placed their shining boots outside their doors to be polished yet further; although the MPs refused, a GI orderly took on the task. They spent their time working in their rooms or telephoning or eating or walking in the garden “with their hands behind their backs in a manner of classic moments of history.”
Coyne reported that chief of staff General Jodl, the only one who held membership in the Nazi Party, admired the “Sad Sack” cartoons and Yank magazine. Otherwise he was found by the American MPs to be arrogant, impatient, and cold as steel. But the Germans did look like soldiers, the MPs admitted, while the American generals, including Eisenhower, looked like competent businessmen in uniform.
The majority of correspondents were not in Paris and thus not affected by events there or in Rheims. Margaret Bourke-White, photographing the harbor at Bremerhaven from a Piper Cub, passed a C-47 “trailing a curtain of fluttering white flakes behind it... leaflets to inform the German people below that World War II had come to an end.”
Lee Miller and Dave Scherman were at the press camp in Rosenheim, south of Munich, working on their stories when a soldier walked in. “I thought you guys might want to know Germany has just surrendered,” he said. Lee kept right on typing. “Thanks,” she said. Then she stopped. “Shit! That’s blown my first paragraph!”
In Salzburg the Third Division, Seventh Army, had taken as headquarters the camouflaged palace that once belonged to the prince-archbishops of the city. Marguerite Higgins was sitting in the spacious tree-shaded grounds talking with the soldiers when they heard the news. That night there was a party. “At exactly one minute after midnight — the official hour of the war’s end — we all went out on the balcony to see the artillery guns of the division flash in celebration into the sky,” Higgins reported. “Red and blue flares, tracer bullets, ack-ack guns, tank guns, fired into the midnight sky for the last time on this front.” Below them the valley reverberated with the noise. Maggie found it a tremendous and moving experience.
“We sat in the press camp now in a small hotel b
ack at Weimar and wrote our last dispatches,” Iris Carpenter recalled. At the command posts bottles of schnapps and wine and cognac were being cracked open. The battle maps on the walls were still marked with the little squares and crosses and numbers that meant this corps, that division, that regiment. The scrawls that indicated heavy fire from a strongly entrenched enemy didn’t have to be feared anymore, she thought, and the brown and green and blue markings could be thought of simply as hills and forests and rivers instead of how many men might be wounded or die in taking them.
The First Army press camp decided to have a party. “We swept typewriters off the tables in the copy-room,” Carpenter wrote. “We rolled up the maps. We filled great jugs full of lilac boughs.” Everybody put on his or her best uniform. Lee Carson was going to wear a skirt until she remembered she had nothing but combat boots to wear it with, so settled for “pinks” and her best jacket. General Courtney Hodges, First Army commander, came with his staff, as did the division commanders with their staffs and the public relations and intelligence officers. “We were even friendly to the censors,” Iris said.
“In Paris the war ended the way it began — with marching,” Janet Flanner reported in her “Letter from Paris” of May 11, 1945. It began with the French soldiers marching off to the war and it ended with the French civilians marching around into the peace.” They had started marching just after de Gaulle’s announcement came over the loudspeaker system at 3 P.M., and thousands were still marching at dawn.
Catherine Coyne, Marjorie Avery, and other colleagues celebrating V-E Day and Coyne's birthday, Germany, 1945.
SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE COLLEGE.
Virginia Cowles and Marth a Gellhorn, during the West End run of the ir play about two women war correspondents in Italy, with actors Ralph Michael and Irene Worth, London, 1946.
The Women who Wrote the War Page 40