The Women Who Wrote the War

The Women Who Wrote the War follows the chronology of the conflict through the reporters' eyes, beginning as early as a 1931 interview of Hitler by Dorothy Thompson Lewis (wife of Sinclair), in which she called the future Fuehrer "inconsequent ... voluble, ill-poised, insecure." (Shortly after her "Little Man" rose to power, she would be expelled.) Tough and opinionated Collier's correspondent Martha Gellhorn, another reporter married to a famous writer, frustrated her new husband, Ernest Hemingway, shortly after D-Day--defying military orders, she sneaked onto the beaches of Normandy just ahead of him, pitching in as a stretcher-bearer to get her story. Gripping and well documented, Sorel's work ably captures the excitement of both the war and the exploits of the women who reported on it. --Paul Hughes

Book Description

They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from San Francisco and points east. They left comfortable homes and safe sourroundings for combat-zone duty. They were women war correspondants, bringing to the battlefields of World War II a fresh perspective, reporting what they witnessed with a new sensiblity.

The women who wrote the war include world-famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only Western photgrapher to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR; writer Martha Gelhorn, wife of Ernest Heminghway and one of the first reporters to document the menace of fascism; Lee Miller, the legendary photographer who took a bath in Hitler's tub; and dozens more gutsy women whose devastating and heartwarming reports are captured in this seemless narrative that assures them, at last, their rightful place in history.

By her own admission, the author cut fully half of the female reporter roster from the book so as not to render it unwieldy. Even then, the half remaining is an Honor Roll of the profession: Helen Kirkpatrick, Margaret Bourke-White, Lee Carson, Ruth Cowan, Lee Miller, Martha Gellhorn, Catherine Coyne, Virginia Irwin, Iris Carpenter, Annalee Jacoby, Mary Welsh, Dickey Chapelle, Sonia Tomara, Shelley Mydans, Pat Lochridge, and a host of others too numerous to mention here.

Beginning roughly with the Spanish Civil War, and finishing with the months immediately after WWII, the book's chapters are a series of snapshots in which Sorel's subjects appear or not, depending on their presence in the theater of conflict being described - and they all seem to move around a lot. So, in sequential order, one reads of reporting Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, the attack on Poland, the fall of France, the Blitz, the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union, the war in China, the Japanese capture of the Philippines, the North African and Italian campaigns, D-Day, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, the Pacific islands war, the advance into Germany, the American-Russian link-up, the liberated concentration camps, V-E Day, and, finally, the surrender of Japan.

I can't give WOMEN WHO WROTE THE WAR a 5-star rating because the number of players was too excessive. It would've been better had Sorel focused on, say, just 3 or 4 correspondents in each theater (Europe and the Pacific) as representative of the whole. As it was, so many names kept popping in and out of the narrative that it was hard to "get to know" any one of them, though some are better introduced than others. However, taken as written, this is an admirably comprehensive look at the gutsy ladies that did what they had to do to bring the stories back home to readers in America. For example, Virginia Irwin obtained one of the biggest scoops of the war by deliberately defying a specific SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces) restriction on correspondents' movements in a certain area. You go, girl!