Reporting Under Fire (3 page)

War correspondents such as Peggy Hull wore uniforms to avoid being arrested as spies.
Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries

Nothing was going to stop Peggy Hull from getting a story. When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the
Morning Times
agreed to sponsor her, provided that Peggy pay for her voyage and her expenses herself. If she were lucky enough to get some stories, then her editors would be happy to pay for them.

Peggy almost beat Pershing's soldiers to Paris, arriving just as the first troops from the American Expeditionary Force appeared. Unlike her male counterparts, who held credentials from the War Department, Peggy was completely on her own. She filed her early stories, How Peggy Got to Paris, with the El Paso paper, and they caught the eye of Floyd Gibbons, who reported for the
Chicago Tribune.
With Gibbons' approval, Peggy tweaked her words for the soldiers who read the
Tribune
's army edition. Always the innovator, Peggy offered her shopping services for the “boys” in the Expeditionary Force. She also found a friend in the older, elegant Anne McCormick, wife of an American businessman working abroad, who was to become a respected—and the first female—member of the
New York Times
editorial board after starting as a freelancer in Europe.

Peggy longed to get inside an army training site, but she lacked official credentials. Sympathetic officers managed to get her into an American artillery camp with a group of YMCA canteen workers, the only women besides nurses allowed anywhere near fighting men. She lived with the eight YMCA workers in a barracks heated by stoves and was up at 5:45
AM
to wash her face in a basin of water and comb her hair in front of a tiny mirror. Peggy watched as soldiers learned how to fire trench mortars, which she likened to “gray devils” that could kill her if they went off course. When it came time to send the trainees to the battle line, Peggy rode 28 miles in the rain to see them off.

For the most part, male correspondents in France were slow to write war news. Waiting for the “real” fighting to start, they hadn't bothered with the human-interest stories that were Peggy's specialty. Peggy both entertained and informed the folks back home, and her woman's take on a soldier's life worked so well that other editors took notice and asked their reporters why they didn't produce the same stuff. The angry newsmen ganged up on Peggy, complaining to army brass that her work as an uncredentialed correspondent was “undignified.” They forced the issue with Pershing, who admired Peggy and her gutsy reporting but refused to give her credentials.

Faced with leaving France, Peggy made plans to return to El Paso, where she was popular with the locals. When she departed, she made a dig at the men who'd forced her out of France.

When we've won the war and all you brilliant writers are out of jobs, come back to El Paso, Texas, and if you crowd my stuff off the front page there will still be two persons who'll look for it inside—mother and me. And I promise I won't fuss with the managing editor about it—or tell him you should be sent to Mexico or even ask him to put you in jail—I learned to be a good loser long before I came to France.

I cannot leave France without publicly announcing my gratitude and appreciation of the hospitality of Maj. Gen. Peyton C. March and his staff—of the YMCA men and women workers when my colleagues were seeking my blonde scalp …

Peggy went home but wasn't there for long. By the New Year in 1919, she was on the move and making headlines herself:

PEGGY HULL, NERVY WAR CORRESPONDENT, BRAVES SIBERIA'S TERRORS TO GET NEWS

First Covered Trains for Kansas Paper; She Reported Movements of Pershing's Army in Mexico and Then in France

She's Gathered News in Honolulu, and Now She's in Far East in Search of Facts About Mysterious Russia and Siberia

The world war was over, but the Russian Revolution still raged, and Peggy made plans to report from Vladivostok. First she needed credentials; there was no way she could get all the way across the Pacific to eastern Russia without money and the all-important paperwork.

Her task didn't come easy. Peggy moved to Washington, DC, where she sent letters and telegrams to every editor she could name. She had to get approval from the army too and made an appointment with the very General March she'd known in France. Broader-minded than most men in his position (he was army chief of staff), March guaranteed he'd supply credentials to Peggy—
if
she could find an editor to pay her way to Siberia.

It took weeks to make a good connection until S. T. Hughes, editor in chief of the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate, reviewed Peggy's record and agreed to sponsor her. Armed with these pledges, she went to the Office of Military Intelligence to get her paperwork, but the captain in charge put her off. Peggy insisted she had official permission, and then he accused her of lying. Peggy left and returned in one hour with
a stern directive from General March: “If your only reason for refusing Miss Peggy Hull credentials is because she is a woman, issue them at once and facilitate her procedure to Vladivostok.”

Peggy Hull had won her longed-for credentials, the first American woman to become an official war correspondent.

A hometown paper printed the letter she wrote to her parents from Vladivostok on November 24, 10 days after she arrived from Japan on a filthy boat. Full of news and musing, the letter's tone was classic Peggy:

I attended two dances while in Yokohama and met a number of Americans who have been living in the Far East for some time. The people stood around in groups watching me dance in uniform, and my various partners said they were all puzzled because I could manage to dance in my boots. I aroused a lot of curiosity in Japan because I was the first woman they had ever seen in uniform, and the Japanese men are very much opposed to their women doing anything but raise children, so they openly disapproved of me, which bothered me a whole lot you may well know. Fortunately there is an American hotel in Yokohama where one can have a private bath—the Japanese men and women bathe together, and in some parts you can't get a private bath.

Once she got to Vladivostok, Peggy had trouble finding a bathtub of any sort.

It was chaos in Siberia, where the Russian Revolution raged. The slaughter went on around her, as Bolsheviks and White Russians killed each other and wild bands of soldiers and bandits preyed on the innocent. Peggy's report ran in the
Cleveland Press
on March 6, 1919.

Siberia is on the threshold of its blackest period. Twice a victim first to monarchy and then to anarchy—its people this winter will die by thousands. They are freezing to death now and the coldest weather is still to come.

Farther inland, where the disorganization of the railroads has made it impossible to carry supplies, they are starving to death, while roving bands of Bolsheviki and bandits terrorize the unprotected communities.

Murder, pillage, starvation, and bitter cold—what a desperate outlook.

Together with its allies, the US Army was quietly backing the White Russians in their battles against the Bolsheviks. Elements of the British and Japanese armies were in Siberia as well. The American mission was confusing because Allied generals couldn't determine exactly whom to support. Command and authority broke down, and many American soldiers took to the streets like punks, not the boys Peggy had so admired in Texas and France. When the Americans departed in June 1919, their commander, General William Graves, wrote that the US government had wrongly backed the White Russians,

a monarchistically inclined and unpopular Government, of which the great mass of the people did not approve. The United States gained, by this act, the resentment of more than 90 percent of the people of Siberia….

I must admit, I do not know what the United States was trying to accomplish.

It was a thoroughly miserable experience, and the fact that Peggy's stories either went unpublished or were heavily edited didn't help. She also had her safety to consider. Vladivostok was
filled with thieves and murderers. Windows were sealed shut to preserve the heat, and everything stank. Cafes were filthy, as were the people who cooked and served her meals. There wasn't a single bathtub where Peggy could get clean (General Graves would not permit her to use his), until a sympathetic navy admiral invited her to use the tub on his ship.

By summertime, all of the Allied nations began to ship their troops home from Siberia. Peggy rushed to leave Vladivostok and Siberia, a dirty and bitter place with a dark future. Siberia became a giant prison camp for millions of children, women, and men who stood against the Bolsheviks—later the Communists—who ruled Russia from 1919 until 1989.

As luck would have it, Peggy traveled through Shanghai, China, on her way home to the States. A port city, Shanghai hosted a large expatriate community of Americans and Europeans who made China their home. There she did two stints at the
Shanghai Gazette,
an English-language newspaper that was the mouthpiece for Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese reformer. Americans and Europeans lived in an area known as the Bund, an 8.3-square-mile area that sat along the Huangpu River. This “Paris of the East” attracted all manner of people who wanted to live a posh life on the cheap; a houseful of Chinese servants cost pennies in American dollars or British pounds.

But the real Paris called to Peggy as well, so in 1921 she moved there, thinking that her old friend Floyd Gibbons could find her a job. Peggy took a room in a cheap hotel where she met another reporter 10 years her junior, who was to become a lifelong friend. Her name was Irene Corbally, a Chicago girl hired by Gibbons as a fashion writer for the
Chicago Tribune
.

Just as quickly as she came, Peggy decided to leave Paris and return to Shanghai and her old job. On a whim—and angry at her boyfriend—Irene went along. Their adventures on the
voyage from Marseilles across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and on to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore could fill a book all by themselves. For Peggy, the highlight of the journey came when she boarded another ship in Singapore to look for an old friend, only to come across another acquaintance, a British officer named John Kinley. They promptly fell in love, and Peggy dropped her plan to sail on to China, trusting Irene to deal with her 11 suitcases in Shanghai.

Eventually Peggy and John Kinley set up housekeeping in Shanghai's International Settlement. It was a pampered life, but Peggy sensed the growing discontent among the Chinese who worked for the Europeans. Wages were down in the Bund, because a tidal wave of Russian refugees were happy to work for very low pay, undercutting and “breaking the rice bowls” of the Chinese. The insulted Chinese lost their high regard for their white employers, as general unrest against foreigners rippled across China.

As lovely as life was in the Bund, with its tea dances, diplomatic receptions, opera, and theater, Peggy warned that Western influence in China was in danger of yielding to Russian communism. “China is worth the struggle,” she wrote, “but the Russians are going to get it, if you don't watch out!”