The Women Who Wrote the War

The Compelling Story of the Path-breaking Women War Correspondents of World War II

Nancy Caldwell Sorel

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781611450491
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628721157
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Here's how a hundred brave American women left their families and entered the combat-zone to chronicle what they saw. Nancy Sorel's portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility. Their experience was at once wide-ranging and intimate, devastating at one moment, heartwarming the next. In their ranks we encounter world-famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only Western photographer to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR; Martha Gellhorn, writer and wife of Ernest Hemingway, who presciently reported on the menace of fascism; The New Yorker 's Janet Flanner, recording the bleak realities of life in post-liberation France; and Marguerite Higgins, who dared enter the concentration camp at Dachau just ahead of the American army. In her graphic, seamless narrative, Nancy Sorel weaves together the lives and times of these gutsy, incomparable women, assuring them their rightful place in this century's history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Author
• Halftitle
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• A Note on the Foremothers
• The Groundbreakers
• Gassandras of the Coming Storm
• Apprentices in Spain
• The Lessons of Czechoslovakia
• One Thought, One Holy Mission: Poland
• Waiting for Hitler: The Phony War
• Fleeing France
• Braving the Blitz
• Working Under the Swastika
• Margaret Bourke-White Shoots the Russian War
• Treading Water, Marking Time
• China Hands
• Facing the War That Is Our War Now
• Women Behind Walls: Manila, Siena, Shanghai
• Learning the Rules, Dressing the Part
• Women On Trial: North Africa
• Touching Base on Five Continents
• Slogging Through Italy
• New Women Gome Over for Overlord
• D-Day
• Trekking North from Rome
• That Summer in France
• Liberating Paris
• Grossing the Siegfried Line
• The Battle of the Bulge
• Penetrating the Pacific Barriers
• Iwo Jima
• Of Rain, Ruin, Relationships, and the Bridge at Remagen
• The Month of April: The Advance
• The Month of April: The Gamps
• The Longed-for Day
• It Is Not Over, Over Here”
• Women Winding Up a War
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index