The untold history of six female war correspondents

On August 28, 1939, a 27-year-old woman from Leicestershire drove across the Polish border for ‘a shopping trip’ to Germany.

The previous day Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had warned Hitler that an invasion of Poland would be defended by the British and most Poles believed that would keep them safe. But novice reporter Clare Hollingworth wasn’t convinced and she was determined to take a closer look.

Hollingworth spent the day in Germany buying goods that were scarce in Poland — wine, torches, camera film — but it was on the drive back along the frontier road that she got her scoop and broke news of World War II. A ‘sudden gust of wind’ blew aside the camouflage screens lining the route to reveal ‘hundreds of tanks lined up ready to go into Poland’.

Eyewitness: Novice reporter Clare Hollingworth,  had only been working for The Daily Telegraph for a week  when she was the only British journalist on the spot as the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 (pictured in 1932)

When she returned, with the news, the British consul-general in Warsaw wouldn’t believe she’d even made it into Germany until she brandished her shopping bags. Then the mood changed and he sent a coded message to London, while she called her very surprised editor at The Daily Telegraph.

Two days later, on the September 1, Hollingworth woke in her hotel room in Katowice, 160 miles from Warsaw, to hear the German bombers delivering the first of their payload.

Staff at the British Embassy still refused to believe her until she held the telephone receiver out of the window so they could hear the gunfire. Hollingworth was the only British journalist on the spot. The boot manufacturer’s daughter — whose education had ended at a domestic science college for ‘lady housewives’ — had been in the job only a week.

Over the next few weeks she kept ahead of the Panzer divisions, driving across cornfields in her battered old car in the hope of witnessing the final fall of Warsaw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Hollingworth

American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (pictured in 1946) was just 28 when she stowed away on a ship bound for Normandy to become the only female reporter present at D-Day

Then there’s the maverick Martha Gellhorn, she’s still widely remembered for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway. She was just 28 when she scooped her husband (and the rest of the press corps) by stowing away on a ship bound for Normandy to become the only female reporter present at D-Day.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn

Lee Miller — the American fashion model-turned-photographer who covered the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau for Vogue. Miller was the woman everybody wanted to know because she always had ‘whisky, cigarettes and a plan’.

But she had been damaged by the war and ‘could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils’. She died in 1977, a ‘raging alcoholic’ consumed by self-loathing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Miller

The steely Jewish Sigrid Schultz, holding her nerve at dinner parties with the Third Reich’s top brass to send damning reports from Berlin to the Chicago Tribune, which published them under a pseudonym.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigrid_Schultz

Virginia Cowles, the glamorous American debutante who crawled through trenches in her high heels, got kidnapped by a smitten Russian general and sweet-talked Unity Mitford into giving her the low-down on Hitler’s character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Cowles

Unity Mitford told Cowles that the dictator loved doing impressions of his fellow fascists — Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and especially Mussolini - ‘but what he really likes is excitement. Otherwise he gets bored.’ Cowles blanched to think that ‘world happiness hung on the ennui of one man’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Mitford

Going with the Boys

by Judith Mackrell