Reporting Under Fire (15 page)

World War II engulfed Europe in 1939, and Margaret's work for
Life
took her to far-flung spots. Her
Life
editor, Wilson Hicks, had a hunch that the new peace pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union would not hold, and Hicks predicted that Germans and Russians would go to war. Hicks was correct; Hitler declared war against the Soviets in June 1941. Margaret was dispatched to Moscow to take pictures at the Eastern Front.

Germany had conquered most of Europe from the Atlantic to the Russian border, so Margaret and Erskine got to Russia via a backdoor route—just as Bessie Beatty, Rheta Childe Dorr, and Peggy Hull had in 1917. Instead of riding the slow-moving Trans-Siberian Railway, Margaret and Erskine hopped on a series of small planes to fly across China and Inner Mongolia and entered Russia through Alma-Ata (today's Almaty, Kazakhstan). Margaret was impressed by the number of statues and monuments dedicated to the Russian premier, Joseph Stalin.

On July 22, 1941, the Germans launched air attacks on Moscow. Margaret was the only foreign news photographer in the city, ready to clinch the scoop of her life as German bombs rained down on Moscow rooftops. But the Russians had issued an
ukase
—an edict—forbidding use of cameras, and civilians were ordered to underground shelters to wait out air raids. Margaret figured she could work around the ban on cameras, and she planned to stay above ground during bombings.

From her hotel balcony stretched Moscow's most famous view: the Kremlin, the onion-shaped domes of St. Basil's
Cathedral, Vladimir Lenin's tomb, and Red Square. There Margaret placed four cameras, set on timed exposure, to capture the streaks of light that swept to the ground as the bombs fell. Russian blackout wardens made frequent checks of hotel rooms searching for lawbreakers like her, and Margaret rolled under her bed when she heard them coming. Bending over her bathtub, she developed her film in trays and hung the negatives on cords strung across the bathroom pipes and pinned to the edges of towels and curtains. Her negatives found their way into diplomatic bags that traveled from the American embassy safely out of Russia and into
Life's
New York offices.

Margaret had another plan to photograph Joseph Stalin, but the mysterious “Man of Steel” seemed unreachable until President Roosevelt's personal envoy, Harry Hopkins, stepped in to help. Hopkins negotiated with Russian foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov to get Margaret access to the stone-faced Stalin.

Margaret prepared for this prized photo session with great care. Americans wanted to know, was this man really in charge of Soviet Russia, or was he just a figurehead? She did her best to get Stalin to relax as she set up her cameras and arranged the lighting in his Kremlin office. She sized Stalin up and decided there was nothing superhuman about him. She was five feet five, and Stalin was shorter. This small man with the pockmarked face was a nobody. Margaret's snap judgment of Stalin paralleled Dorothy Thompson's initial take on Adolf Hitler back in 1934. And like Thompson, she needed to look again and changed her mind. “Then in the next minute, I decided there was nothing insignificant about Stalin…. One look at that granite face, and I was sure that Stalin made all the decisions.”

Stalin's face was a block of ice, and no amount of small talk could make him change his expression. The nervous Margaret spilled a pocketful of peanut flashbulbs, and they went bouncing
on the floor. She dropped to her knees to gather them up, and Stalin started to laugh. Margaret rushed to her camera and managed to make two exposures before the strong man's face turned back to stone. She left thinking that this was the “most determined, the most ruthless personality” she'd ever met.

As Margaret grew ever more valuable to
Life
and took assignments far and wide, she put her life with Erskine Caldwell on hold. Promises of work in Hollywood led him in one direction as Margaret chose another. Margaret was on the move, far too independent to settle down. A Hollywood existence, or the promise of a new home in Arizona with Erskine, seemed like “golden chains” to Margaret, and she and Erskine went their separate ways. The marriage lasted three years until they divorced, amicably, in 1942.

With the backing of
Life,
Margaret was credentialed as a war photojournalist with the US Army Air Forces in 1942. The Army War College designed her uniform along the lines of what officers wore, adding a skirt. Gold buttons ran up her jacket front, and her shoulders bore the insignia of a war correspondent. An outdoor outfitter named Abercrombie & Fitch made Margaret's first uniform. Smartly turned out, she and other correspondents dined in the officers' mess and held the rank of captain, though they couldn't collect an officer's pay unless they were captured.

On to England Margaret flew, where she lived at a secret bomber base that was home to B-17s, the mighty Flying Fortresses. An aircrew asked her to name their plane, and she chose
Flying Flit Gun,
which they painted on the Fortress along with a bug sprayer and three insects with the faces of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. It pleased Margaret to see “Peggy” (her nickname) painted on the No. 3 engine, a special honor usually reserved for fiancées and wives, when she christened the
Flying Flit Gun
with a bottle of Coke.

After war reporters got the go-ahead to fly on bombing runs over Germany, Margaret stood in line to wait her turn. But an unseen force denied her permission, and matters worsened when the first two reporters left on a bombing raid and only one returned. Margaret chafed at the “invisible ink” that kept her from doing her job. She was a seasoned photojournalist, a mature adult nearly twice as old as many of the fighting men she wanted to photograph.

Her problem was typical of women reporters who tried to get in on the action during World War II. Most military commanders didn't want women anywhere near the line of battle, on an aircraft, or even aboard ships. Having a woman around would only distract fighting men from their work.

Margaret Bourke-White's photos brought despicable images of Nazi death camps home to Americans.
Holocaust Museum

Whispers on base told Margaret that the Allies were about to invade North Africa to force out the German Army and its
Luftwaffe
(air force). Margaret repeated her request one evening
when General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Eighth Air Force, walked into the officers' lounge. Margaret had met Doo-little years before at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and his wife Jo had embroidered Margaret's name on a tablecloth filled with signatures of their friends. Jimmy Doolittle wouldn't say no, of that Margaret was sure. She was assigned to a berth on a ship crossing the Mediterranean, though. The Allies weren't about to let a woman fly—that was too dangerous.

Ironically, the so-called safe passage turned into a nightmare when German submarines attacked the convoy. Margaret's ship was torpedoed, and hundreds of soldiers, sailors, nurses, and a few members of the Women's Army Corps (WACS) crawled over the ship's side and descended down swirling nets into lifeboats. Margaret's description of the attack in her autobiography,
Portrait of Myself,
offered one of the best memoirs from the war about how it felt to be in a rudderless lifeboat as people died around her. Some of the 6,000 soldiers on board had been trapped; others drowned. Yet even then, spots of humor shone through. (“Hi, taxi!” called one survivor in the water, as she flagged down a lifeboat.) All the while, Margaret hugged her one camera, tucked into her musette bag, to her chest. She lost four others when her ship was scuttled to the bottom of the sea.

Margaret Bourke-White had escaped from a torpedoed ship, and so the commanders had no more excuses to keep her off an airplane. She prepared thoroughly and planned how she would maneuver her heavy equipment around the tightly packed bomber, filled as it was with wires and tubes and a load of bombs stacked like books on shelves. She donned her flying suit, dressing in fleece-lined leather pants and jacket, heavy boots, and electric mittens to wear at altitude—15,000 feet for a B-17, which had no heat. The aircraft was unpressurized as well, which meant little or no oxygen at that altitude. Margaret
practiced with her portable oxygen bottle, knowing she had no more than four minutes to rove free from the permanent oxygen line the crew depended on.

On January 22, 1943, Margaret flew in the lead airplane in formation across the North African desert that would attack a German airfield in Tunis, Tunisia. When the B-17 crossed into enemy airspace, she took photos as the bombardier removed the safety pins that secured each bomb should they crash in friendly territory. Pop, pop, went her flashbulbs, not what the bombardier expected. “Jesus Christ, they're exploding in my hands,” he cried through the plane's intercom. The shaken airman had forgotten that Margaret was on his plane. Later, Margaret declared that the incident proved her point—women were no distraction around men who did dangerous work.

As the airplane flew its bomb run over its target, Margaret leaned past a machine gun and into the left waist window to take pictures through a few chinks of open space. The captain bobbed and weaved the Fortress to evade the antiaircraft fire coming from ack-ack guns on the ground. As the plane dipped and rolled, Margaret shot her pictures, some of them straight down. The
Flying Flit Gun
took two hits in the wing, but the sturdy Fortress, commanded by lead pilot Major Paul Tibbets, made it safely home to an airbase on an oasis named “Garden of Allah.”

Neither Margaret nor Paul Tibbets, a quiet, unassuming man, knew that the young pilot had a fateful mission ahead of him. On August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets would sit in the left seat of the
Enola Gay
and drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Six months later, Margaret returned to North Africa to the very airfield they had bombed, now under Allied control. Margaret was on her way to Italy, the “soft underbelly” of Europe, where the Allies had launched an attack and planned to drive
north. As she waited for a flight, she wandered into a graveyard across from the airfield. She was “caught up sharp” when she saw a graveyard marked with painted swastikas that were dated January 22, 1943—the day she'd flown on that mission. For a moment “those clumsy wooden swastikas took away the impersonality of war and recalled a day when death rained from the skies.”

Margaret spent five months on the Italian Front taking pictures from tiny, defenseless Piper Cubs as they flew reconnaissance across the lines of battle. She took more at a field hospital when the Germans attacked it, sending Screaming Meemies into their compound. The shelling was terrifying, the dreaded “sound of rushing wind from the mountains,” that built into a swell of sound, then a scream, then the roar of an explosion. One hit the hospital mess tent just 30 feet from where Margaret and a group of nurses had flung themselves on the ground. She took lots of pictures that night, as surgeons and nurses worked on the wounded. Everywhere, everyone was donating blood— truck drivers, ambulance crews, hospital staff, and gun crews, when they could make it in from the front. It was a “grotesque routine” of work, then diving for the floor, then back up to work some more.

The terror of that night was to be only a memory. When Margaret returned to
Life's
offices, Wilson Hicks gave her the bad news. Her precious negatives of the hospital, the brave nurses and doctors, a dying soldier who had asked for watermelon, the truck drivers donating blood, were lost somewhere in the Pentagon. They never turned up. Another 300 photos that Margaret took during the army's push northward through snow and ice were stolen from an army jeep. War could explain a lot, Margaret realized, but carelessness was unforgiveable.

Margaret left Italy and arrived at the front on Germany's Rhine River in time to travel with General George Patton's
Third Army. She thought of Nazi Germany's last days in 1945 as a
Götterdämmerung
—(the German term for “the twilight of the gods,” the violent, chaotic downfall of an empire). Margaret was with Patton when he inspected Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp, after the American Army liberated it on April 11, 1945. Patton was so angry when he inspected the camp, where more than 56,000 prisoners had died, that he ordered his military police to round up 1,000 German men and women who lived in nearby Weimar and force them to see for themselves the unspeakable evidence of Nazi brutality.

The MPs were so angry they brought in 2,000 Weimar residents and forced them to look at the piles of bodies stuffed into sheds, the burnt remains of others still in the cremation ovens, the mass graves of the dead, and the living skeletons of the men and boys who had somehow survived. The Germans claimed ignorance, denying it all. “We didn't know. We didn't know,” Margaret wrote, quoting everyday Germans dressed in shirts and ties and housedresses. “But they did know.”

Margaret moved on to photograph another labor camp where, only hours before, German SS guards had burned the inmates to death in the mess hall before running away. The bodies were still smoldering. The few who escaped, Margaret noted bitterly, ran into a meadow, only to be shot by boys in the Hitler Youth. For Margaret, the dead in the meadow, who had come so close to freedom, “made the most heartbreaking sight of all.”