Clare Hollingworth: The scoop heard round the world
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.
Toni Frissell: From Fashion Photographer to the Front Line
Toni Frissell (1907-1988) was born into a privileged Manhattan family. She used her background of wealth and social position to build a career as a fashion photographer for Vanity Fair, Vogue and Town and Country. She was one of the first photographers to move fashion photography out of the studio, transforming the way fashion and the fashionable were presented in print.
By the end of the 1930s, as the situation in Europe became more tense, Frissell became anxious to photograph something other than fashion and celebrities, writing "I became so frustrated with fashions that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job." Even with her connections and her track record as a magazine photographer, she was unable to get the type of long-term newspaper or magazine assignment that would allow her to be accredited as a war correspondent.
Since she couldn't get to the front, she used her social connections to pursue wartime assignments with agencies such as the U.S. Office of War Information, the American Red Cross and the Women’s Army Corps. Many of her assignments during this period were photo-reports of society women working for the Red Cross or the federal government—probably not as big a change from fashion photography as she had hoped for. There were exceptions. In 1942, in her role as pictorial historian for the American Red Cross, she covered Eleanor Roosevelt’s Red Cross trip to England and Scotland. One of her most important assignments was a story on Oveta Culp Hobby, the first director of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACS). *
It was 1945, when the war was winding down, Frissell got a chance to visit the frontlines as part of a group organized by the Writers’ War Board.** While in Italy, she had the opportunity to photograph the Tuskegee Airman during their daily activities. She was the only professional photographer to photograph the unit, and her work is an invaluable record of their service.
After the war, Frissell returned to fashion photography, including a stint as the first woman staff photographer at Sports Illustrated.
*And later the first secretary of the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare, making her the second woman to hold a cabinet position. So many amazing historical women, so little time to write about them.
**The Writers' War Board was a private organization devoted to producing domestic propaganda during World War II. Establish by mystery novelists Rex Stout at the request of the U.S. Treasury Department soon after the United States entered the war, its original purpose was to organize prominent writers to support the sale of war bonds. It quickly moved beyond its original mission, matching writers with government agencies, and quasi-government agencies, that needed help in shaping their story. Sigrid Schultz, for example, wrote several stories about Nazi Germany for children's magazines at the request of the Writer's War Board. (Not her finest work, I must say.)
Marvin Breckinridge: One of “Murrow’s Boys”
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 American filmmaker and freelance photojournalist Mary Marvin Breckinridge (1905-2002)* was traveling through Europe on two photojournalism assignments. She immediately went to London, where she took some of the first photos of air raid shelters and documented the evacuation of British children from the city. She was one of only four American photographers in Britain for the first months of the war and she saw no reason to leave. As she wrote to her mother, “I had planned to take the first boat home if war should start, but it now seems foolish to run away from the most interesting thing that I could be doing on earth right now.”
In November, 1939, Edward R. Murrow, head of CBS’s newly founded news division in Europe, invited Marvin to appear on a radio broadcast about changes the war had brought to England, based on a piece she had done called “An English Village Prepares for War.” That broadcast was followed by a second about women firefighters in London. Soon thereafter Murrow hired her as CBS’s first female staff broadcaster in Europe, despite the long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio. Murrow told Patterson: "Your stuff so far has been first-rate. I am pleased, New York is pleased, and so far as I know the listeners are pleased. If they aren't to hell with them."
One of only a handful of American women in Europe working in radio,** Breckinridge made fifty broadcasts from seven countries, including Germany. Broadcasting from Berlin, she famously slipped a negative assessment of Germany past the Nazi censors.*** Mentioning the German newspaper Völkische Beobachter, she said, almost as an aside “The motto of this important official paper is Freedom and Bread. There is still bread.”
Breckinridge's broadcasting and photojournalism careers ended abruptly in June 1940 when she married American diplomat Jefferson Patterson, who was then serving in Berlin. The State Department did not allow diplomatic spouses (which effectively meant wives) to publish photographs or articles or to broadcast on the grounds that such work could compromise diplomatic work. What a loss!
*She chose to use the name Marvin as an adult so as not to be confused with her cousin Mary Breckinridge, who founded the Frontier Nursing Service. Breckinridge (Marvin, not Mary) made an acclaimed silent film about the Frontier Nursing Service, The Forgotten Frontier, which was released in 1930.
**Including Sigrid Schultz, who added broadcast journalist to her resume in September 1938 during the Munich Conference. At first she worked as a stringer for the Mutual Broadcasting System, which was a cooperative radio network owned by member radio stations, including WGN in Chicago, which was a Tribune affiliate. By January, 1939, Sigrid was a regular in the Mutual lineup, with a fifteen-minute segment of news and analysis that ran on Sunday evenings live from Berlin
***Not that easy to do. A trio of German censors had to approve each script before broadcasters went on the air.
.