Reporting Under Fire (4 page)

As much as her head governed her abilities as a newswoman, so had Peggy's heart led her into a second, ill-thought marriage. By the fall of 1925, she and John Kinley had separated, and Peggy came home to the United States only to discover that, by marrying a foreigner, she had lost her American citizenship and couldn't stay. She stalled for months longer than her temporary visa permitted, facing deportation as she petitioned US officials to change the rules. She went public with her predicament, and news of Peggy's “exile” was splashed in papers everywhere. It took five years before the immigration law was corrected by Congress, and by then, Harvey Duell had come back into her
life. They decided to marry, but first Peggy had to return to Shanghai to get a divorce from John Kinley.

Peggy's trip in search of divorce papers turned into a blessing for her career. In January 1932, just as she got to China, Japan attacked Shanghai. “Go to work; you're our correspondent,” cabled Harvey from his post with the
New York Daily News.
Peggy did, working 24-7 for three days straight; for a month she slept in an office chair. To scoop other reporters, she found someone with a short-wave radio to relay her stories across the Pacific in a quick 20 minutes; it took several hours before other correspondents could file theirs via cable. Equipped with notebook and field glasses, she watched as the Japanese sent air raids over Shanghai. At least once she climbed to the top of a flour mill, a serviceable but dangerous observation post to watch Japanese planes bomb a working-class neighborhood:

The tenements crumbled like pie crusts and the ruins burst into flames as the terrified Chinese fled into the narrow streets, running in packs like bewildered animals. Thousands huddled in the debris. It was a frightful scene of human misery.

Shanghai endured the assault for six weeks before the Japanese withdrew. As a neutral observer, Peggy Hull was allowed to interview both Chinese and Japanese military leaders. She boarded a warship to interview Japanese admiral Kichisaburo Nomura and posed with him for a picture that ran in papers at home. Nomura, an honorable man, gifted Peggy with a safe conduct pass stamped on muslin to tuck in her purse.

On her way to interview a Chinese general, Peggy and her driver, a Russian veteran, mistakenly took a route directly into fighting between the Chinese and Japanese. Abandoning their
car, they took refuge in a mound-shaped Chinese tomb, but not before Japanese soldiers spotted them. As the soldiers approached the tomb and fired, Peggy watched her driver, Sasha, with the “crazed fury of a trapped man,” panic and run outside, where he was gunned down. From her hiding spot Peggy watched as “groups of short, stocky, khaki-clad, dark-skinned men bore down, their rifles smoking at exact intervals.”

Grateful she wasn't wearing Chinese gray, Peggy dug into her purse but couldn't find the safe conduct pass. At first she panicked but then came to her senses when she remembered that the folded fabric was inside her passport. She stuck the pass on her coat with hairpins, fluffed up her hair to look as womanly as possible, emerged from the tomb, and raised her hands. The sight of a white woman surprised the Japanese, and for a moment, it crossed Peggy's mind that these men might be as afraid of dying as she was. A shocked Japanese officer sent her to his headquarters, where to her surprise Peggy met a general she had known in Vladivostok. “You know,” he told her,” if you do not give up your war corresponding, you are surely going to end your life on a battlefield.”

Peggy returned to her Shanghai hotel as the assault dragged on. By the end of February, thousands of Chinese refugees had taken shelter in the International Settlement, and its Western residents were reacting oddly:

In a seemingly endless stream they [the refugees] came trudging along, in the flapping blue cotton trousers and black coats, carrying bundles and babies on their backs, in their arms, and in creaking wheelbarrows and groaning carts.

In vivid contrast to their anguish was the scene that was then being enacted within the ivory marble halls of
the Cathay Hotel, just 100 yards away. Under beautiful murals and amber lights, crowds of foreigners—their fears relieved by the failure of the Chinese artillery to respond to the Japanese attack—drank cocktails, sipped tea, and listened to splendid music.

That eerie display of denial showed up time and again in reports from war zones.

Peggy Hull eventually returned to New York, married Harvey Duell, and made her home with him until he died in 1939. During World War II she went back to work as a war correspondent, although it took two years for her to secure credentials. Peggy returned to the Pacific and won a navy commendation for her reporting as she moved from island to island. She talked with soldiers and sailors 30 years younger than she was, always in search of small but significant stories to share with readers. After the war, Peggy moved to California, where she died in 1967.

Historians compare Peggy Hull Duell with the legendary war reporter Ernie Pyle, who was killed by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific. Pyle's fame came during wartime. Scholars didn't recognize Peggy Hull's work until the 1980s, after women researchers rightly pointed out that “history” should include “her story,” too.

Russia was a gigantic but backward empire when it went to war against Germany in 1914. Russia's Industrial Revolution didn't come until 1890, more than a century after it came to Western Europe. When it arrived, Russian industry served the needs of the czar's autocratic government, and a prosperous middle class
never arose as it had in the United States and Western Europe. What was more, unlike the monarchs in Western Europe, Czar Nicholas II, the last of the Romanov Dynasty, held real power. A revolution in 1906 had forced the czar to establish a Duma (parliament), but it had no true authority.

In the early spring of 1917, with the war going poorly and people hungry at home, citizens in the Russian capital of Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) surged into the streets to call for an end to the monarchy. The Russian military permitted the monarchy to collapse. Nicholas II abdicated the throne and was exiled with his family to Siberia. The Winter Palace in Petrograd, home to the czar's family, became the seat of Russia's new provisional government. The Winter Palace, a massive structure with hundreds of rooms, was to become the symbol of power during the weeks that followed.

However, competing political groups already had plans to force their own forms of government on Russia. The political situation changed almost weekly over the summer. At first, the Mensheviks, political moderates, seemed to have the upper hand. However, the radical Bolsheviks, under their leader, Vladimir Lenin, were building a grassroots insurgency. The Bolsheviks claimed to speak for Russia's vast, poor underclass—peasants, factory workers, and foot soldiers. In the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace and overthrew the provisional government.

Lenin and his small inner group who made up the Communist Party consolidated their power across Russia in 1918. They allowed no dissent and murdered anyone who appeared to threaten them, including the deposed Czar Nicholas II and his wife, son, and four daughters. When the Communist Red Army was challenged by the moderate White Army, a vicious civil war spread across Russia from Petrograd in the west to Vladivostok
in the east. Two years later, Lenin's Reds had gained control. The Communist Party ruled Russia (later renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) as a totalitarian government until 1989.

Whenever the firing dies down the correspondents used to make quick dashes into the streets to try to estimate the extent of the carnage, to count dead and dying men and horses lying on the pavements.—Rheta Childe Dorr

During the first critical months of the Russian Revolution in 1917, three American women journeyed to Petrograd to see the revolution for themselves. Each arrived with her own outlook and set of expectations, and each went home with her own view of what revolution meant for Russia.

Louise Bryant, 31, working for the Bell Syndicate and Philadelphia
Ledger,
accompanied her husband John Reed, a passionate communist and gifted writer who chronicled the Bolsheviks' rise to power. Bessie Beatty, at 30 a crusader for social justice, had covered miners' strikes in Nevada and written about the desolate lives of prostitutes in the
San Francisco Bulletin.
Americans knew Rheta Childe Dorr as the author of the syndicated column
As a Woman Sees It
for the
New York Daily Mail.
Nearly 50 and a veteran journalist, Rheta had made news herself as a
suffragist when she challenged President Woodrow Wilson face-to-face during a White House meeting.

The three crossed paths reporting not only on the Russian Revolution, where Russians warred among themselves, but also during Russia's battles against Germany during the Great War. Americans wondered whether their Russian allies would keep their commitments as allies against Germany. With even more revolution brewing and so much at stake at home, would Russia's new, moderate government pull out of the war?

Newspapers all across the United States sent reporters to find out. Male correspondents were tasked with reporting on the war and Russian politics, the hard and fast news of emperors, governments, generals, battles, and casualties. Their dispatches were cabled home for immediate publication before the news grew stale.

Matters were different for Louise Bryant, Bessie Beatty, and Rheta Dorr, the only three American women reporters who got to Petrograd and Moscow during World War I. Their job was to report on the “women's angle” of war and revolution to draw women readers, but their stories often appeared weeks after they were written. Editors didn't rush them into print in the same way they handled hard news filed by men. Bessie Beatty's eyewitness account of the fall of the Winter Palace bore a December 1, 1917, dateline, but the
San Francisco Bulletin
didn't print it until January 28, 1918. Her woman's observations lacked the same standing as a man's reporting.

But reading their reports dropped Americans right into the drama in Petrograd. Louise, Bessie, and Rheta wrote in first person, almost as if they were creating memoirs. Their stories drew readers across time and space to that remote and strange Russia: Bessie and Louise sidestepping mobs as they fought in the streets; Rheta taking tea in a convent with a Romanov grand
duchess turned mother superior (the Bolsheviks later murdered her); Bessie dancing the mazurka with a Russian officer in a small village.

All three correspondents knew fear and understood the risks. Rheta lay in her hotel bed one night listening as a gang of Bolshevik sympathizers slaughtered an old general in the next room. Louise put herself in danger by going to Moscow to witness a Red Funeral, when the Bolshevik revolutionaries laid their dead to rest in red-stained coffins inside the Kremlin wall. Bessie, as she did her interviews all across Petrograd, witnessed scores of killings, sometimes of soldiers, others of innocent onlookers. She could have been one of them.

Bessie was the first into Petrograd, arriving via a convoluted route from the East. The
Bulletin
had sent her on assignment to report from Japan and China, and Bessie had been on board four days when word arrived that the United States had entered World War I. Bessie switched her destination to Petrograd by heading north to Vladivostok, Russia, where she embarked on a 12-day train trip across Russia, riding from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea some 6,000 miles west. When the Trans-Siberian Express, the “train deluxe of the longest railroad in the world” arrived in the middle of the night, no one was waiting for its weary passengers, the first hint that life in Petrograd was changing.

When Bessie first walked its streets in June 1917, Petrograd, a Russian jewel, was abloom with flowers. Russia was in the hands of a provisional government, and the scene seemed peaceful. Bessie watched a young couple stroll through a park, tagging them with the names “Vera” and “Ivan.”

Peace, joy, exultation, was upon that spring-clad city. Freedom was young then, like the spring, like the leaves on the trees, like Vera and Ivan….

Poor Ivan! Poor Vera! They could not guess that afternoon, any more than I, what the months would do to their butterfly treasure. They could not know that they themselves would soon lay violent hands upon it….

Russia was descending into chaos. War with Germany already had placed huge demands on its people. With Russia's old class system abolished and everything from factories to farms to schools to the police organized into soviets—committees of ordinary citizens—Russian society fell into disorder. Crops rotted in railway cars; soldiers refused to salute their officers and deserted the army. With no one to operate machinery, factory production ground to a halt. Bessie noticed the queues, lines that formed everywhere in Petrograd for bread, kerosene, shoes, chocolate, and even shipping trunks for those who hoped to escape Russia forever. Louise ached for the hungry children she saw throughout the countryside. Rheta wrote that 90 percent of Russians could not read and asked how such hungry, uneducated, and fatalistic people could establish a sane democracy.

Week by week, Bessie Beatty, Louise Bryant, and Rheta Dorr mingled with the mighty and the masses as the summer and fall of 1917 unfolded. Bessie and her interpreter rode trains to the battle zone, scrounging seats as best they could in a new Russia where there was no longer such a thing as a reservation for a sleeping berth—for the moment, the revolution meant first come, first served.

Bessie's successful journey to the battle zone made her the only American woman to get to the Eastern Front in World War I. Standing just 160 feet from the trenches, she gazed from an observation post across no-man's-land, “like a bone between two hungry dogs,” at the Russian-German line. As she stood
with a Russian officer and her interpreter taking in the scene, she thought she saw something move.