Women on the Rise: The War Correspondents
September 2023
By Mari K. Eder, U.S. Army Major General, Retired
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It’s an honor to present this special post by my friend and author colleague, retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder. General Eder is a former Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve Joint and Special Troops Support Command. She is also a former Deputy Chief of Public Affairs for the U.S. Army.
In August 2021, General Eder published a wonderfully inspiring book titled The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II. Her most recent book is titled The Girls Who Fought Crime: The Untold True Story of the Country’s First Female Investigator and her Crime Fighting Squad.
Thanks to General Eder for sharing this short story about some incredible trailblazing women who fought to pursue journalistic paths during WWII. Enjoy and be inspired…Deb
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Only twenty years old, in 1932 Ruth Gruber became the youngest person in the world to earn a doctorate. She was a phenomenal writer, an icon of American journalism in the 20th century. Her reporting started with a visit to the Russian Gulag, a book about life in the Alaskan wilderness followed, and later she became involved with coverage of the war in Europe and its aftermath. Ruth wasn’t exactly a combat correspondent. By 1940 she was already an experienced newspaper reporter, starting first with the New York Herald Tribune. The next year she was a government employee, working for Secretary Harold Ickes at the Department of the Interior. There she continued to explore and to write. Her personal brand of journalism is what has often been called “the first rough draft of history.”
Ruth didn’t just passively observe history unfolding. She was more than a reporter. She said, “I had to live the story to write it, and not only live it - if it was a story of injustice, I had to fight it.” It was her destiny – bound up with stories of rescue and survival. She was the witness. And the advocate.
She lived the story of the only group of Jewish immigrants coming to the U.S. in 1944, personal guests of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Secretary Ickes sent her to accompany them from Italy to the U.S. Ruth was their guide, their interpreter, and their biographer. She sailed with them, nearly 1,000 men, women, and children; from the Western Mediterranean through the dangerous waters of the Atlantic to New York. Ruth interviewed the refugees and took thousands of pictures of their journey. She accompanied them to a former Army post in Oswego, New York where they were to be temporarily interned and she continued to serve as their advocate and friend for years afterward. “Mother Ruth,” they called her, their protector.
In 1947 she covered the story of the refugee ship Exodus, bearing witness to Holocaust survivors battling the British in their attempts to create a Jewish state. She went on to write thirteen books about the astonishing events she not only witnessed but lived. “Inside of time,” as she put it. Meaning she lived in the moment.
Margaret Bourke White was the first woman war correspondent in World War II. A documentary photographer, she was the only correspondent in Moscow when the Germans invaded. She captured the firestorm that ensued. Later she reported from North Africa, with U.S. infantry units in Italy, and was the first American woman to fly a combat mission, in a bombing run . The staff at Life magazine called her “Maggie the Indestructible.” She traveled through Germany with Gen. George S. Patton in the spring of 1945 and witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
Martha Gellhorn was another highly respected correspondent who covered events in Europe from the mid-1930s through her trip through Dachau at the end of the war. In June 1944 she stowed away on a hospital ship to gain access to the D-Day invasion and was the only correspondent and the only woman on the beaches that day, helping evacuate the wounded. Her husband, Ernest Hemingway didn’t make it to the beaches. She noted how difficult it was for women reporters to gain access, saying. “If they don’t want to accredit you, you just do it. Any little lie will do.”
A recent military magazine article on WWII journalists neglected to mention any women reporters aside from Martha Gellhorn and gave her but a mere nod in passing. Yet she is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th Century, having covered nearly every major conflict in the world during her sixty-year career. The Wall Street Journal called her “One of the most fearless, determined and talented journalists ever to have covered wars.” She too wrote a number of books, detailing her wartime coverage, but she also wrote about travel and fiction.
By 1945 there were 250 female journalists accredited to the allied forces as reporters and photographers. They represented nearly every major newspaper in the U.S., plus dozens of magazines, wire services, and radio stations. These included the likes of:
Virginia Cowles who interviewed both Hitler and Mussolini and covered the entire war, writing for the Sunday Times and later the Chicago Sun.
Clare Hollingsworth scooped Germany’s invasion of Poland, having driven across the border to witness first-hand the German preparations to take over the country.
Sigrid Schultz was the Berlin Bureau Chief for The Chicago Tribune before the war. She later worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) providing them with useful intelligence.
Mary Welsh covered the war from London, often reporting on Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s press conferences. She later became Ernest Hemingway’s fourth wife, following his divorce from Martha Gellhorn.
Dixie Tighe reported on Nazi bombing raids in London for the INS and flew with the RAF in dangerous submarine hunting forays.
Kathleen Harriman played a major role in orchestrating the American presence at the Yalta Conference. She later covered reports of Russian war crimes at the end of the war for Hearst’s News Service.
Helen Kirkpatrick was the first woman journalist accredited to the Chicago Daily News. She covered the North African campaign and following the allied landings at Normandy was the first to interview Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. She rode with American tanks into Berchtesgaden, and later entered Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.
Lee Miller got her start as a fashion model for Vogue magazine. She met Martha Gellhorn when they both covered the American forces’ liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp. She also covered the liberation of Paris.
Tania Long served with The New York Times. She covered the arrival of American forces in Berlin and later reported on the Nuremberg trials.
Elizabeth Murphy Moss was the first Black woman certified as a correspondent. She reported for the Afro-American newspaper.
These are but a few of those incredible women who fought to serve, to use their skills to find information and stories, sometimes terrible, sometimes overwhelming and heartbreaking, but always important, and indeed necessary. They had to fight for the right to serve, facing entrenched misogyny, sexism, racism, and often just downright stupidity. They had to prove they could dig a latrine, ride in a combat aircraft, face death and the evidence of its aftermath. They performed.
True, many were later haunted by some of the horrific scenes they had witnessed. As were thousands of men. But these women were determined to pursue the truth and tell it – loudly and often. These intrepid correspondents made a difference in their pursuit of the story, every one of them. Trailblazers all. But as much as they had to fight to do their jobs they now have to fight to not be forgotten.