Hell Hath No Fury (40 page)

Reference: Lilya Wagner,
Women War Correspondents of World War II,
1989.

K'TUT TANTRI

“Surabaya Sue,” Scots Writer and Propagandist for Indonesian Nationalism, b. 1898, d. 1997

In a remarkable career that embraced as many pseudonyms as occupations, K'tut Tantri was perhaps most celebrated as “Surabaya Sue,” the woman who made propaganda broadcasts for the Indonesian nationalists in their struggle to gain independence from the Dutch in the years after World War II.

She was born Muriel Stuart Walker in Glasgow and after World War I made her home in California, where she supported herself by supplying stories about the movie stars to British newspapers. In 1932 she abandoned her husband and sailed for Bali in the Dutch East Indies under the name of Mrs. Manx (after the Isle of Man, birthplace of her parents).

In Bali she became a hotelier, fell in love with the Balinese way of life, and conceived a hatred of Dutch colonial rule. Bespectacled, plump, and barely five feet tall, she now saw herself as more Balinese than European. She dyed her auburn hair black, as the Balinese considered red locks the sign of a witch.

When the Japanese invaded Bali in March 1942, she used her connections with one of the island's rulers, the raja of Bangli, to avoid internment. It was the raja who gave Walker her Balinese name, which roughly translated means “fourth-born child and teller of tales.” Then, according to her own highly suspect account, she joined an underground nationalist resistance movement. The likely truth is that she became a collaborator, but this did not save her from imprisonment, in what were undeniably grim conditions, as a suspected spy for the Allies.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, K'tut Tantri joined the nationalist guerrillas in East Java, and broadcast from their headquarters. While the British and the Dutch dubbed her “Surabaya Sue,” she worked as an interpreter for the rebel leaders when they were interviewed by Western journalists. She later made broadcasts from Central Java and wrote speeches for Achmed Sukarno, president of Indonesia, who described her as “the one and only foreigner to come openly to our side.”

Now it was time for K'tut Tantri to become disenchanted with the Indonesians, and she appears to have offered her services as an informer to the British in Singapore. In the late 1940s, she visited Australia and the United States but her reputation and lack of papers made international travel difficult. Throughout the 1950s she worked as a journalist for the Indonesian Ministry of Information, and in 1960 she published
Revolt in Paradise,
a self-mythologizing account of her life in Indonesia. Truly she was a “teller of tales.” Hollywood showed a brief interest, but the project foundered on K'tut Tantri's absolute intransigence when it came to plotting a plausible storyline through her fancifully embroidered memoirs. She died in Australia, a recluse.

Reference: Timothy Lindsey,
The Romance of K'tut Tantri and Indonesia,
1997.

LYNN, VERA

“The Forces' Sweetheart,” British World War II Vocalist, b. 1917

A singer who was equally popular with Britain's servicemen and on the home front, Lynn provided the war generation with a soundtrack to their lives, delivered with unaffected simplicity and sincerity.

A plumber's daughter from East Ham in London, Lynn gave her first public performance in 1924. She subsequently sang with the bandleader Joe Loss, joined Charlie Kunz in 1935, and moved over to Bert Ambrose's orchestra in 1937. In the spring of 1940 she was voted the British Expeditionary Force's favorite singer, ahead of Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and Bing Crosby, in a poll run by the
Daily Express.
Her appeal was founded on perfect pitch, simple diction, and homespun good looks. She was the epitome of the girl next door.

In the summer of 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, Lynn had a huge hit with “The White Cliffs of Dover,” her plangent, haunting delivery overriding the song's sentimentality to paint an idealized picture of Britain at peace and safe from enemy bombs, “where Jimmy will go to sleep in his own little room again.” Perhaps her most enduring success, “We'll Meet Again,” the song that made Lynn so popular with the forces, had been recorded in the autumn of 1939 and was movingly in step with the feelings of loss, separation, and hope for a better future that characterized the public mood of the war years. Lynn herself believed that its success was due to the fact that the song expressed sentiments that ordinary people felt but were unable adequately to articulate.

From 1941 to 1947, Lynn had her own radio show,
Sincerely Yours,
in which she sang songs requested by men of the armed forces. She recalled, “My songs reminded the boys of what they were really fighting for, for precious personal things rather than ideologies or theories.” She also made three wartime films,
We'll Meet Again
(1943),
Rhythm Serenade
(1943), and
One Exciting Night
(1944). In 1944 Lynn visited the troops on the Arakan front in Burma and subsequently led the singing in many of the concerts that marked the end of World War II. After the war, she remained a beloved figure in British national life and in the 1990s was closely associated with the campaign to improve pensions for war widows.

Reference: Vera Lynn and Robin Cross,
We'll Meet Again: A Personal History of World War II and Victory in Europe,
1989.

POLITKOVSKAYA, ANNA

Russian Investigative Journalist, b. 1958, d. 2006

A fearless investigative reporter who exposed the Kremlin's dirty war in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was shot dead by an unknown assailant in the elevator of her Moscow apartment block.

Politkovskaya was born in New York, where her Soviet Ukrainian parents were diplomats at the United Nations. A member of the privileged Soviet
nomenklatura,
she was educated in the Soviet Union and graduated from the journalism faculty of Moscow State University. She worked for the newspaper
Izvestiya
and then the in-house journal of the Soviet state monopoly airline Aeroflot. With the advent of perestroika in the late 1980s, Politkovskaya, unlike many of her contemporaries, did not cash in on her privilege but began to work for the emerging independent press.

During this period, the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev—perestroika (the introduction of market forces and individual initiative) and glasnost (the promotion of openness in politics and the media)—dissolved the glue that had held the Soviet Union together and broke it into its constituent parts. A series of internal wars erupted, the most savage of which was in Chechnya, on the northern slopes of the Caucasus. In 1992 Chechnya became an autonomous republic. Attempts by the Russian Federation to regain control of Chechnya during the presidency of President Boris Yeltsin ended in a peace deal and troop withdrawal.

In 1999 Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, invaded the small and war-ravaged region and took deliberate steps to ensure that the brutality of the conflict would not be reported by the Russian press. Politkovskaya's employer, the biweekly
Novaya Gazeta,
partly owned by Mikhail Gorbachev, remained one of the few Russian media outlets to defy Putin. Politkovskaya herself would eventually become a thorn in the side of the Kremlin and a courageously even-handed reporter of the savagery with which the conflict in Chechnya was prosecuted both by Moscow and the Chechen rebels.

Politkovskaya's interest in Chechnya had been initially aroused during the first conflict by the plight of Chechen refugees in Russia, and then by the fate of pensioners stranded in the Chechen capital, Grozny, by the Russian advance. She traveled to Chechnya, wrote about the Chechens' ordeal under fire, and played a part in their eventual evacuation. This marked the start of her role as an intermediary between the Russian military and the Chechen rebels on behalf of civilians caught in the crossfire. It reached a climax in the Moscow theater siege in 2002, when Politkovskaya acted as a negotiator. She remained unrepentant that as a journalist she had become personally involved in the unfolding drama, claiming that this role gave her insights she could never gain as a mere observer. Nevertheless, her increasingly proactive role in the reporting of the conflict in Chechnya gained her many powerful enemies. In 2004, while flying to Beslan to act as a go-between in the siege of a school occupied by Chechen terrorists, Politkovskaya was poisoned by the FSB, the Russian security service, and came close to death.

Politkovskaya had come into her own as a campaigning journalist and war reporter in 1999 at the start of the Second Chechen War. At that point the relatively moderate wing of the Chechen resistance, led by former president Aslan Maskhadov, had run out of money and into the resulting vacuum poured funds from the coffers of Wahabi Islam, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. When the attacks on Washington and New York took place on September 11, 2001, they provided Vladimir Putin with a cynical pretext to join the “war on terror” by stepping up the conflict in Chechnya. While Politkovskaya was frank about Russia's need to prevent the establishment of a hostile Islamic state in the northern Caucasus, she was savagely critical of the means sanctioned by Putin: “It was clear to me it was going to be a total war, whose victims were first and foremost going to be civilians.”

From this platform Politkovskaya launched a stream of searing articles and books exposing the atrocities committed in Russia's name. Her first book,
A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya
(2001), chronicles in harrowing detail not only what Russia was doing in Chechnya but also the corrosive effect that this was having on Russia itself.
Putin's Russia
(2004) describes how the new Russian ruling class had acquired its money through a combination of violence and chicanery. Her determination to preserve the embers of democracy at home fueled her repeated expeditions to the cockpit of the northern Caucasus.

She was also contemptuous of Western leaders who, with their desire to exploit Russia's burgeoning markets and their dependence on its oil and natural gas, were careful to remain close to Putin: “It's impossible to talk on the one hand about the monstrous scale of victims in Chechnya and the spawning of terrorism and then lay out the red carpet, embrace Putin and tell him, ‘We're with you, you're the best.'” In
Chechnya: Russian Dishonor
(2003), she describes the Putin regime as being even more “morally soiled” than that of Boris Yeltsin. She accused him of confusing chauvinism with patriotism, particularly where it concerned his policy toward the Chechens, which she believed was motivated by racism.

Such outspokenness came at an enormous personal cost. In Chechnya she was arrested by security forces and subjected to a mock execution; her husband left her; and her neighbors in Moscow, cowed by the attentions of the FSB, shunned her. She remained defiant, although she was at pains to point out that she was not particularly brave: “The duty of doctors is to give health to their patients, the duty of the singer is to sing and the duty of the journalist is to write what this journalist sees in reality.”

In the last months of her life, Politkovskaya had turned her critical gaze on Ramsan Kadyrov, the Chechen prime minister (son of a former Chechen ex-president, another old foe), who, she claimed, had publicly stated his intention to kill her. Politkovskaya was set to testify against Kadyrov in a case concerning the kidnapping and killing of two Chechen civilians. In her last interview, she announced that she planned to publish in
Novaya Gazeta
the results of a wide-ranging investigation into torture in Chechnya.

She never filed the article, although part of it was published posthumously. In another piece, however, she foresaw her own death:

Some time ago Vladislav Surikov, deputy head of the presidential administration, explained that there were people who were enemies but whom you could talk sense into and there were incorrigible enemies to whom you couldn't and who simply needed to be “cleansed” from the political arena. So they are trying to cleanse it of me and others like me.

Reference: Anna Politkovskaya,
A Small Corner of Hell, Dispatcher from Chechnya,
2003.

SURABAYA SUE,
see
K'TUT TANTRI,
Chapter 9.

TOGURI, IKUKO

“Tokyo Rose,” Japanese-American World War II Propagandist, b. 1916, d. 2006

“Hello, boneheads. This is your favorite enemy, Ann. How are all you orphans of the Pacific?” These are the opening words of an October 1944 broadcast,
Zero Hour,
from Radio Tokyo to American troops in the South Pacific. The young broadcaster was known to Allied troops in the Pacific not by her real name but by a nickname they had coined, “Tokyo Rose.”

Tokyo Rose was born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles in the summer of 1916, a first-generation Japanese-American who attended high school and junior college in Los Angeles. In January 1940, she graduated from the University of California with a degree in zoology. She was known as Iva by her classmates and was athletic, popular, and considered a loyal American.

In July 1941 she sailed for Japan without a US passport, ostensibly to visit a sick relative and to study medicine. While in Japan she applied for a passport to enable her to return to live in California. However, her application was overtaken by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Toguri decided to remain in Japan for the duration of the war and from mid-1942 worked as a typist in a Tokyo news agency. In August 1943 she obtained a second job as typist for Radio Tokyo, and three months later she began a career as one of the many female English-speaking presenters on the station.

Toguri filled a twenty-nine-minute slot in an hourlong program known as
Zero Hour,
whose presenters and scriptwriters were captured Allied personnel and which was broadcast six days a week. She introduced herself as “Orphan Ann” and mixed dance-band music with teasing comments about the inadequacies of the US Navy and the infidelities of navy wives back at home. It was crude psychological warfare and earned her, and other female Japanese broadcasters, the mock-affectionate nickname bestowed by US service personnel in the Pacific. Toguri was unique in that she was the only American-born broadcaster dubbed “Tokyo Rose.” Her real loyalties remained ambiguous, and it seems that, at some personal risk, she smuggled food, medicine, and blankets to the Allied POWs who had been coerced under threat of execution into producing
Zero Hour.