The Women who Wrote the War

The compelling tale of a hundred brave American women who after leaving their families joined combat-zone fighting during World War II to chronicle and report faithfully back to the States. 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 this important and timely book, Nancy Sorel eloquently demonstrates the role they played in bringing the war to the folks back home. In their ranks we encounter world-famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, the only western photographer to cover the Nazi invasion of the USSR and among the first to photograph Buchenwald; Martha Gellhhorn, writer and wife of Ernest Hemingway, who reported the menace of fascism from the beginning; Lee Miller, legendary photographer, famously snapped taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub in 1945; the New Yorker'sJanet Flanner, recording in her "Letter from Paris" 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. These brave reporters and dozens more formed the crucial link in the long chain of women's struggle for full equality in a profession hitherto dominated by men. 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.