|
|
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ladies with typewriters elbow their way to the front, May 10 2001
Waging slaughters has traditionally been considered Guy Stuff. So, too, the reporting of them. THE WOMEN WHO WROTE THE WAR, by Nancy Sorel, is the story of the female war correspondents who, working for various U.S. newspapers and wire services, shoved their way to the battlefronts of World War II, making that conflict, especially in its latter stages, the first to be equally reported by both sexes. 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!
|
