Clare Hollingworth (1911-2001) was one of the most active war correspondents of the 20th century. No, really.

She began her career with a bang.

In March, 1939, after German annexed the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement, Hollingworth began working for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Stationed in Katowice in southwestern Poland, he job was to arrange visas for and evacuation of the Czech refugees who were pouring into Poland. She was so efficient that she was fired in July for overturning standard procedures for vetting refugees, apparently because she was admitting too many people that British intelligence felt were politically or ethnically undesirable. (I suspect that meant Jewish.)

A month later she was back in Poland as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and once again stationed on the Polish-German border in Katowice. Soon after arriving, she borrowed the local consul’s car, which boasted the armor of a diplomatic flag, and drove across the border into Germany, ostensibly to buy aspirin and other goods not available in Poland. She drove back along the border, where a large canvas screen had been erected on the German side that made it impossible to see into the neighboring valley. When a large gust of wind caught the burlap she saw “large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns.” She hurried back to Katowice and filed the story that German troops were massed along the Polish border.

Three days later, on September 1, 1939, she woke at five in the morning to the sound of tanks rolling past her window. She immediately called her editor, as well as the British Foreign Office, to report the beginning of Germany’s invasion of Poland. It took her a few moments to make any of them believe her. (She held the telephone receiver out the window so they could hear the tanks roalling by.)

A week into her new job, Hollingworth had scooped the world, twice. (Both stories ran without her byline.)

She went on to report from Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Egypt during World War II. (When British General Bernard Law Montgomery banned women reporters from the front lines in Egypt, she wrangled an accreditation from Time magazine and attached herself to the American army.)

In the forty years after World War II, she traveled the world equipped with what she called her TNT kit—a toothbrush and her typewriter. Working first for the Daily Telegraph and later for the Guardian, she reported on international hot spots including the fall of Eastern Europe to communism, the bloody and complex Algerian war from 1954 to 1962, the Vietnam War, and the final years of China’s cultural revolution. She was the first reporter to uncover the defection of Soviet double agent Kim Philby. (Her paper refused to publish the story for almost two months for fear of being sued.) She also wrote five books: Poland’s Three Weeks’ War (1940), There’s a German Right Behind Me (1943), The Arabs and the West (1952), Mao and the Men Against Him (1985) and her memoir, Front Line (1991).

In 1981, she arrived in Hong Kong, planning to stay a few months to finish her biography of Mao Tse Tung. She never left. She continued to write as a stringer for international newspapers and magazines through the 1990s—in 1989, when she was nearly 80, she climbed a lamppost in Tiananmen Square to get a better view of the protestors, and the government protestors. She stopped work only when increasing macular degeneration in her eyes made it impossible for her to continue.

Hollingworth passed away at the age of 105. By some accounts, she still kept her shoes next to the bed and her passport in easy reach in case she needed to leave in a hurry. Old habits die hard.