Ann Stringer: The Widow on the War Front
Ann Stringer (1918-1990) was a reporter for the United Press before the beginning of World War II. She had reported alongside her husband, Bill Stringer, from Dallas, Columbus, and New York and as foreign correspondents in Latin America. By 1944, both of them were eager to be reassigned to Europe, where the real action was. They struck a deal with Reuters. Not surprisingly, Bill got his accreditation as a war correspondent first.* The plan was that Ann would follow as soon as her accreditation came through.
The day Ann was scheduled to leave for Europe, she learned that Bill had died in Normandy.
She was even more determined to get to the war front and cover the big stories. She sailed for England in late 1944 as an accredited war correspondent with the United Press. She filed her first story from London in January, 1945, then moved to the First Army press camp, where Bill had been assigned. According to Andy Rooney,** when Ann replaced Bill Stringer on the job “the rest of us in the First Army press camp didn’t know how to act toward her. Ann made it easy. She just picked up and did Bill s job, often with tears in her eyes."
As is so often the case when a widow steps into her husband’s field boots, Ann exceeded expectations. And her colleagues at the United Press did not hesitation to admit it. According to Walter Cronkite, "She was tough. She knew what she wanted, and she knew how to get it. And she was one of the best reporters I have ever known. And, yes, she was beautiful." Harrison Salisbury took his praise even further: "What I can tell you about her is that she was simply superb, the best man (I’ll say that even if it sounds chauvinistic) on the staff. Annie illuminated every one of her assignments. She was all reporter--not ‘girl reporter’—straight reporter. She was a two-fisted competitor."
Stringer often ignored the Army’s restrictions on women in the front and was warned at least once that refusal to comply would lead to the loss of her accreditation. She learned to file her stories with vague datelines that wouldn't trigger questions at army headquarters. When she couldn’t get official jeep transportation to the combat zone, she begged unofficial rides, including a lift over the bridge at Remagen from a general in a tank.
She is best known for sending the first dispatch reporting the link-up between the American and Soviet armies at Torgau, Germany, on the Elbe River, on April 26. She persuaded a friend in Army Intelligence to lend her and an INS photographer two small spotter planes and the pilots to fly them to Torgau. After an hour in Torgau, carrying her typewriter and a roll of film, she hitched a ride to Paris on a C-47 cargo plane and scooped her competitors/colleagues.***
Ann continued to report from Europe through the summer of 1945 and later covered the Nuremberg trials. In 1949, she left United Press, married German-born American photographer Hank Ries, and settled in Manhattan, where she continued to write for a variety of news media.
*Even before 1944, when the United States put regulations in place distinguishing between male and female correspondents, there were always limitations on women, even if they were “written in invisible ink” as photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White put it.
**Yes, that Andy Rooney. Even crotchety old icons were once bright-eyed young reporters. (Or maybe he was a crotchety young reporter. I don’t know for sure.)
***Other correspondents were always both.
***
Twelve days until the publication of The Dragon From Chicago! So. Dang. Excited.
Betty Wason and the “Problem” of the Female Voice
As I have mentioned before, American radio executives were not enthusiastic about hiring women to broadcast hard news. They believed that American listeners were perfectly happy to hear women read ads on the air, talk about about recipes and housework, or even, interview guests. But despite the success of radio personalities like Mary Margaret McBride, and to a lesser extent, *ahem*, Sigrid Schultz, radio executives were sure the American public did not want to hear a female voice delivering the news.
The most egregious example of this is the case of Betty Wason (1912-2001). She had tried unsuccessfully to get work with CBS before World War II began. Then Germany invaded Norway on April 9, 1940 Wason was in Sweden at the time and received a call from the CBS representative in Berlin. The network needed someone to broadcast from Scandinavia NOW. She found a woman who could translate breaking news from the Swedish papers for her first broadcast, which allowed her to scoop the other networks. She followed the first broadcast with more war news from deep in Norway. In May she got a call from CBS asking her to find a man to broadcast in her place because her voice was too young and feminine for war news. She reached out to a male reporter, coached him through his first broadcast, taught him how to write for radio, and lost her job to him. (Grrr.)
The story doesn’t end there. Wason traveled to the Balkans, which had become a hot spot. Her replacement followed her. She filed a few print stories from Turkey. Then she went to Athens, where she reported for CBS again, and was again asked to hire a male broadcaster. This time she hired a young secretary from the American embassy in Athens to be her voice. Unlike his predecessor, he had no interest in replacing her, in fact, he introduced himself as “Phil Brown# speaking for Betty Wason.” She continued to run the CBS bureau in Athens until the Nazis occupied the city in April 1941. The Germans held Wason and several other American reporters for almost two months. They were finally allowed to leave when German correspondents were ordered to leave the United States. They flew from Athens to Vienna, where they were detained as suspected spies, and then transported to Berlin by train under Gestapo guard.
Wason returned to the United States, where the Newspaper Women’s Club honored her “for the daring and courage she had shown in her war coverage in Norway, Finland, Greece and elsewhere. Despite their recognition, she was not able to get broadcasting work with CBS. She turned to print journalism and wrote a book about her experience in Greece, titled Miracle in Hellas (1943). After the war, she built a successful career, publishing another 23 books, many of them cookbooks, and working as an editor for women’s magazines. She also found work in radio, as a talk show host rather than a broadcast journalist.
#Not his real name
***
Two weeks and counting until The Dragon from Chicago releases. In case anyone wants to know.
Clare Hollingworth: The scoop heard round the world
Clare Hollingworth (1911-2001) was one of the most active war correspondents of the 20th century. No, really.
She began her career with a bang.
In March, 1939, after German annexed the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland following the Munich Agreement, Hollingworth began working for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. Stationed in Katowice in southwestern Poland, he job was to arrange visas for and evacuation of the Czech refugees who were pouring into Poland. She was so efficient that she was fired in July for overturning standard procedures for vetting refugees, apparently because she was admitting too many people that British intelligence felt were politically or ethnically undesirable. (I suspect that meant Jewish.)
A month later she was back in Poland as a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, and once again stationed on the Polish-German border in Katowice. Soon after arriving, she borrowed the local consul’s car, which boasted the armor of a diplomatic flag, and drove across the border into Germany, ostensibly to buy aspirin and other goods not available in Poland. She drove back along the border, where a large canvas screen had been erected on the German side that made it impossible to see into the neighboring valley. When a large gust of wind caught the burlap she saw “large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns.” She hurried back to Katowice and filed the story that German troops were massed along the Polish border.
Three days later, on September 1, 1939, she woke at five in the morning to the sound of tanks rolling past her window. She immediately called her editor, as well as the British Foreign Office, to report the beginning of Germany’s invasion of Poland. It took her a few moments to make any of them believe her. (She held the telephone receiver out the window so they could hear the tanks roalling by.)
A week into her new job, Hollingworth had scooped the world, twice. (Both stories ran without her byline.)
She went on to report from Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Egypt during World War II. (When British General Bernard Law Montgomery banned women reporters from the front lines in Egypt, she wrangled an accreditation from Time magazine and attached herself to the American army.)
In the forty years after World War II, she traveled the world equipped with what she called her TNT kit—a toothbrush and her typewriter. Working first for the Daily Telegraph and later for the Guardian, she reported on international hot spots including the fall of Eastern Europe to communism, the bloody and complex Algerian war from 1954 to 1962, the Vietnam War, and the final years of China’s cultural revolution. She was the first reporter to uncover the defection of Soviet double agent Kim Philby. (Her paper refused to publish the story for almost two months for fear of being sued.) She also wrote five books: Poland’s Three Weeks’ War (1940), There’s a German Right Behind Me (1943), The Arabs and the West (1952), Mao and the Men Against Him (1985) and her memoir, Front Line (1991).
In 1981, she arrived in Hong Kong, planning to stay a few months to finish her biography of Mao Tse Tung. She never left. She continued to write as a stringer for international newspapers and magazines through the 1990s—in 1989, when she was nearly 80, she climbed a lamppost in Tiananmen Square to get a better view of the protestors, and the government protestors. She stopped work only when increasing macular degeneration in her eyes made it impossible for her to continue.
Hollingworth passed away at the age of 105. By some accounts, she still kept her shoes next to the bed and her passport in easy reach in case she needed to leave in a hurry. Old habits die hard.