The Women Who Wrote the War

The women who served as combat correspondents in World War II were a capable, gutsy, and inquisitive bunch. Their bravery snapping photos from bomb-laden B-17s over North Africa or interviewing blood-soaked soldiers fresh from Iwo Jima was matched only by their pluck in overcoming sexist double standards and patronizing attitudes. To a one, they were determined to prove their mettle at a time when "few newspaperwomen had made it from the society desk into the newsroom," as author Nancy Caldwell Sorel points out. Sorel (whose witty First Encounters appeared in The Atlantic for years) tracked down dozens of these women, most well into or past their 70s, and has combined candid interviews with rigorous research to piece together their amazing wartime stories.

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 Führer "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