Hell Hath No Fury (38 page)

By then she had survived a short-lived marriage in the mid-1920s and had reinvented herself as Margaret Bourke-White. In 1929 she became a staff photographer for a new magazine,
Fortune,
launched by Henry R. Luce and focusing on dramatic coverage of US industry. On assignments for
Fortune,
Bourke-White developed the concept of the photo-essay, before embarking on a freelance assignment in the Soviet Union, during which she completed the first comprehensive photographic record of Stalin's Russia. She made a second visit, at the invitation of the Soviet government, in 1931. A third visit, in 1932, to make a documentary film, was a failure.

In 1936, working for Luce's
Life
magazine, Bourke-White toured the American Dust Bowl with the writer Erskine Caldwell. Her pictures for
Life,
accompanied by her own text, saw the photo-essay emerge in full-fledged form. Bourke-White also provided the illustrations for a book with Caldwell on the Depression,
You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937). Two years later she married Caldwell, and during their brief marriage they collaborated on
North of the Danube
(1939) and
Say, Is This the USA?
(1941).

In early 1941, nearly a year before the United States entered World War II, Bourke-White and Caldwell were dispatched by
Life
to the Soviet Union via China to report on how Communism had fared since her first visit in 1930. On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. As German bombs fell on Moscow on July 20, Bourke-White was the only foreign photographer present to record the scene from the roof of the US embassy, providing
Life
with a major scoop. She also photographed Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, where she was taken aback by his shortness and nonplussed by his refusal to smile for the camera. However, the Soviet dictator finally cracked a brief, wintry smirk when Bourke-White dropped her flashbulbs, enabling her to capture “the Man of Steel” in an unusually relaxed mood.

After covering the faltering German drive on Moscow, Bourke-White became the first woman photographer attached to the USAAF, in North Africa, where, on January 22, 1943, she also became the first American woman to fly on a combat mission. In 1945 she accompanied General Patton's Third Army into Germany and photographed the liberation of the death camps. She poured her experiences with the Third Army into a vivid book,
Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly,
which chronicled the sudden and sometimes surreal collapse of the Third Reich. On the road to Frankfurt she encountered a goods train that had been halted by an air attack and which looters were now plundering: “A German
hausfrau
came running down the railroad tracks towards us. Her arms were so full of pink panties and undershirts that she was scattering a pink trail behind her, and she was laughing and crying at the same time. ‘Germany is
kaput!
Might as well loot!' she shouted.” At the very end of the war she photographed the corpses of the dead wife and daughter of the assistant mayor of Leipzig, who had swallowed cyanide rather than accept German defeat.

Bourke-White later had these reflections on photographing war victims and scenes of unimaginable horror:

It is a peculiar thing about pictures of this sort. It is as though a protecting screen draws itself across my mind and makes it possible to consider focus and light values and the technique of photography in as impersonal a way as though I were making an abstract camera composition. This blind lasts while I am actually operating the camera. Days later, when I develop the negatives, I am surprised to find that I cannot bring myself to look at the films.

The wartime years were proof of Bourke-White's extraordinary energy, tenacity, and physical courage. An exceptionally attractive woman, she was able to focus all her resources of well-bred charm and journalistic low cunning to get the results she required. Crucially, she possessed an almost supernatural ability to be in the right place at the right time.

In the immediate postwar years, Bourke-White made long trips to India, photographing Mahatma Gandhi many times and taking her last picture of him hours before he was assassinated on January 30, 1948. In 1950 she rejoined
Life
and in the following six years covered subjects as diverse as the Korean War and the gold mines in apartheid South Africa.

It was in Korea, in 1953, that she first felt the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. She refused to surrender to the condition and continued to work for
Life,
undergoing a risky operation to the right side of her brain in 1957. This became the subject of a
Life
article, written by Bourke-White, with pictures by her colleague Alfred Eisenstaedt. However, a second operation in 1961 left her able to speak only with great difficulty. She died following a fall. Margaret Bourke-White has been portrayed twice on screen: in
Gandhi
(1982) by Candice Bergen; and in
Double Exposure
(1986) by Farrah Fawcett.

Reference: Margaret Bourke-White:
Portrait of Myself,
1963; and Vicki Goldberg,
Margaret Bourke-White,
1986.

DEUELL, PEGGY HULL

Pioneer US War Correspondent, b. 1889, d. 1967

Although the many reports Peggy Hull Deuell filed from the Pacific theater in World War II focused on trivial issues, she had played an important role in an earlier conflict—World War I—in establishing the right of women to send dispatches from the war zone.

Hull Deuell began her career at the age of sixteen as a typesetter for a small-town newspaper in her native Kansas. She gained her first taste of military life, if not action, when in 1916 she traveled to the Texas-Mexico border for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
to cover the US Army's attempts to deal with the cross-border raids by the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. She went on a fifteen-mile route march with an infantry company and, in her own words, emerged a “hardened veteran.” In a contemporary photograph, Deuell posed in a uniform borrowed from the Ohio National Guard, snapping off a salute and looking like an endearingly perky heroine from a Charlie Chaplin movie.

On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. The first American troops arrived in London the following August, although it would be many months before they saw any fighting on the Western Front. Nevertheless, Deuell began to press her new employer, the
El Paso Morning Times,
to send her to France as a war correspondent. Her entreaties were initially rejected as being “perfectly ridiculous,” principally on the grounds that Deuell was a woman. However, she persisted and in the summer of 1917 established herself in Paris as a roving reporter, supplying the
Morning Times
with “human interest” on the American troops in France.

Deuell never made it to the front line, but her lively copy on conditions in American training camps created something of a sensation and her reports were taken up by the
Chicago Tribune
's newspaper for the US troops in Europe, which described her as a “typical young American woman” full of “grit and energy.” The grit proved an irritant to the male reporters in France, who ungallantly pointed out that Deuell had not received proper accreditation. She returned to Texas, and mid-1918 found her in Washington, working for a news syndicate and lobbying hard for permission to cover the American military expedition that had been dispatched to Siberia to extract the Czech Legion from the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution (see
Bochkareva, Maria,
Chapter 4) and aid its transfer to the Western Front. Despite the US War Department's initial reluctance to accede to her request, Deuell arrived in Siberia in the autumn of 1918 as the first accredited female American war correspondent.

After World War I, she was divorced by her first husband, journalist George Hull, and settled in Shanghai, where she was married for a second time, to the English captain of a merchant ship, John Kinley. The marriage meant that she lost her US citizenship, and her fight to regain it played a part in the reform of the law affecting citizenship and married women. She was in Shanghai in January 1932, in the process of divorcing husband number two, when the Japanese attacked the city, a passage of arms that she reported for the New York
Daily News.
In 1933 she married the newspaper's editor, Harvey Deuell, who died of a heart attack in 1939.

Deuell's notable pre-1939 career counted for little when in 1943, with America at war with Japan, she went to Washington to collect her press credentials. She was now in her fifties and was advised that the best place for her to observe World War II was from a rocking chair on her front porch. Once again Deuell persevered, and in the winter of 1943 was dispatched to the Pacific. Because of her age and sex, she was never allowed near the front line, and her reporting duties were confined to military bases and hospitals in Hawaii until the beginning of 1945, when she reported from some of the islands in the Pacific that had been retaken and cleared by the Americans. She conveyed her sense of frustration in a column of August 1944 in which she lamented, “I am a woman and as a woman am not permitted to experience the hazards of war reporting.” For her services in World War II, she received a Navy Commendation.

In 1953 Deuell moved to California, where in her declining years she became a devotee of astrology. Her contribution to the history of war reporting was firmly rooted in the “little stories of war,” which concentrated on the hopes and fears and daily lives of ordinary soldiers, one of whom wrote to her, “You will never realize what those yarns of yours…did to this gang…. You made them know they weren't forgotten.”

Reference: Wilda M. Smith and Eleanor A. Bogart,
The Wars of Peggy Hull: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent,
1991.

FRANK, ANNE

German-Jewish Diarist and Holocaust Victim, 1930–45

The author of perhaps the most widely read diary of all time, Anne Frank is also the best-known victim of the Holocaust and, arguably, the one with the most significant impact on posterity.

Anne was born in Germany, but her family escaped to Amsterdam in 1933, when Hitler came to power. In Holland her father, Otto, reestablished his pharmaceuticals business, but in 1940 the Germans invaded and occupied the Netherlands and began to intern Jews. In 1942, as the persecution became more severe, Anne, her parents, and her older sister, Margot, took refuge with four other Jews in a secret apartment in the building that housed Otto Frank's offices. Here they were fed and cared for by some of his former employees.

The fugitives remained in hiding, unable to leave the apartment, until 1944, when they were denounced by an informer. During these years Anne wrote stories and kept a diary in which she rehearsed her hopes, ambitions, and awakening sexuality. She was thirteen when she began the diary, in the form of letters to her imaginary friend “Kitty,” and not yet sixteen when she died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after her deportation.

Her mother and sister perished, too. Only her father, who was in the camp hospital at Auschwitz when it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, survived the Holocaust. He was given Anne's papers by Miep Van Santen and Ellie Vossen, two of his former employees and guardians, who had found them in the ransacked secret apartment after they had been tossed aside by the Gestapo. Otto published Anne's diary in the original Dutch in 1947 under the title
Het Achterhuis
(The House Behind). In 1952 it appeared in an American edition as
The Diary of a Young Girl
and was followed by Broadway and Hollywood productions, in 1955 and 1959 respectively, as well as being translated into over thirty languages. The house in which the Frank family sought refuge in Amsterdam has been preserved as a memorial to all the young Jews who suffered and died in World War II.

On February 23, 1944, Anne had not left the cramped apartment since her family slipped into concealment there in 1942. Nevertheless, her luminous and unquenchable spirit shines through in what she wrote that day to “Kitty”:

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature…Oh, who knows, perhaps it won't be long before I can share this overwhelming feeling of bliss with someone who feels the way I do about it.

Yours, Anne.

Reference: Anne Frank,
Diary of a Young Girl,
1953.

GELLHORN, MARTHA

US Writer and War Correspondent, b. 1908, d. 1998

A pioneering female war correspondent who covered conflicts from the Spanish Civil War in 1936 to Central America in the 1980s, Gellhorn was also married for four years to the novelist and war groupie Ernest Hemingway, a subject that in later years she was notably reluctant to discuss.

She was born in St. Louis into a liberal, cultured family—her father was a professor of gynecology, and her adored mother was an advocate of women's suffrage and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. She attended college at Bryn Mawr but in the late 1920s, at the end of her junior year, she left to pursue a career as a journalist.

In 1930, Gellhorn traveled to Europe. In Paris she wrote her first novel,
What Mad Pursuit
(1934), featuring the first in a long line of fictional journalist heroines, and became active in the pacifist movement. She returned to the United States in 1936 to work as a field reporter for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), headed by Harry Hopkins and part of Roosevelt's New Deal. Gellhorn poured this experience into
The Trouble I've Seen
(1936), a novella that combined fact and fiction, established her reputation as a writer, and led to a close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt.