Review | Six trailblazing women who became war correspondents in World War II

Judith Mackrell’s previous non-fiction includes “Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation and Bloomsbury Ballerina” (shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award). Her new book “The Correspondents: Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II” skilfully interweaves the narratives of six remarkable women war correspondents who fought against sexism, misogyny and circumstance in determined pursuit of their story. Like their male counterparts, Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller and Sigrid Schultz faced the danger inherent in reporting from war zones, but, unlike the men, these women often had to improvise to get access. Ever intrepid, Gellhorn noted, “If they don’t want to accredit you, you just do it, any little lie will do.”

Virginia Cowles, former society columnist, a “flapper reporter,” was one of a handful of correspondents to cover the Spanish Civil War from both sides. In her high heels and elegant attire she could “coax the toughest, most recalcitrant of men to talk,” including Mussolini and Hitler. Fellow journalist Randolph Churchill helped her get her ideal job as “roving correspondent for the Sunday Times,” covering European political and social issues.

Martha Gellhorn became a war correspondent by accident in 1937 after she travelled to Madrid during the Spanish Civil War as “an act of solidarity,” where citizens were standing up to Franco’s totalitarianism. When she filed “High Explosive for Everyone,” Collier’s put her on the masthead. With trenchant moral clarity she wrote, “… the next world war will be the stupidest, lyingest, cruellest sell out in our time.” Not having travel orders, Gellhorn stowed herself on a hospital ship to report on D-Day; she was the only correspondent to get to shore where she helped evacuate the wounded. She reported on the Gestapo’s secret prisons around Paris, the liberation of Dachau and the Nuremberg Trials, noting, “aside for the terrible anger you feel … you are ashamed of mankind.”

In 1938, Daily Telegraph reporter Clare Hollingworth volunteered in Prague refugee camps, hoping to alleviate some of the misery, becoming conscious “of the scale of human suffering that fascism could wreak.” At the end of August 1939, Hollingworth was in Warsaw. She begged the use of a consular car and daringly drove across the German border where she spotted Panzer divisions in formation. She telephoned her dispatch and the next morning Hollingworth’s exclusive scoop on the German invasion of Poland was front pages news: “Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke.” She’d later suggest she was not being brave, but that her “overriding feeling was enthusiasm for a good story.”

Helen Kirkpatrick wrote for Chicago Daily News, and when told that a woman could not be promoted above stringer, she flared, “Well, you know you can change your policy, but I can’t change my sex.” Later, facing the excuse that women could not report from the front because there were not suitable facilities, she pointed out that there weren’t any latrines there, it was “exactly like camping in the woods.” During the Battle of Britain, while male colleagues hid from bullets zinging overhead, she and Virginia Cowles lay in a field “flat on their backs … counting aeroplanes.” Later, Kirkpatrick would become the first U.S. woman granted accreditation in December 1942.

Some of the most haunting images of the war were taken by Lee Miller, a photojournalist with Vogue. Contemptuous of fascism, she had been reluctant to engage publicly. But during the London Blitz she recognized “a brutal and profoundly photogenic poetry” emerging from the ruins. Miller would cover Saint-Malo and later, like Gellhorn, Dachau where she forced herself to push personal trauma aside as she calmly captured the devastation.

Sigrid Schultz, fluent in five languages and in Berlin with Chicago Tribune, was the first woman to run an American foreign bureau. Persistently opposed to the Nazi regime, scrappy and never intimidated, Schultz intended “to give readers all the dope there is,” including when she reported on the masses of corpses stacked like cords of wood at Buchenwald, “an inferno of suffering and cruelty, stench and filth, disease and death.”

By 1945 there were 250 women accredited to the Allied armies as reporters and photographers. Everyone had something to do that felt necessary, though post-war many were “shredded up inside.” With the narrative drive of a well-paced thriller, Mackrell’s essential work will have you reaching for more about the words and lives of these trailblazing six.