Reporting Under Fire (8 page)

The sweating telegrapher, fearing that a baby would appear any minute, handed over the information she needed. Irene copied it—there were actually five tidal waves, not one—and she wrote her story. “I borrowed my terrified friend's typewriter and collated the notes under a good fast lead” and stayed until the nervous telegrapher, terrified that a baby might be coming any minute, sent the cable to INS on the mainland. That night, INS cabled back that Irene had scooped the other news services, and a $50 bonus was on its way. The extra cash, Irene cheered, “paid for the baby.” Irene Leilani Kuhn arrived on March 2, 1923.

Always on the move, the Kuhns returned to Shanghai, and Bert rejoined the
China Press.
He missed the excitement of working in China. Bert lived a double life, working for the
Press
and also as an agent for the US Naval Intelligence. Irene set aside her qualms and cheerfully went along, although she worried about keeping her baby healthy.

Irene made news of her own when she became the first person to make a radio broadcast across China in 1924. She worked in a small, sheet-draped cubicle in the
Press
office, speaking into
a microphone the size of a salad plate. A crank-style wall phone picked up the sound and carried it to a radio transmitting station a few miles away. A portable phonograph supplied with a dozen records completed the equipment:

Promptly at two minutes before six that first evening I walked into the room alone, a sheaf of news dispatches from the British Reuters service in my hands. At one minute before the hour I unhooked the telephone receiver, cranked the contraption a few times, waited for a “click” at the other end. Then I said “okay,” replaced the receiver quietly and tiptoed over to the mike.

We broadcast by guess and by God, for while the click was supposed to be the signal that the microphone was open and I might now begin the program, I never could be sure until after the 20-minute broadcast whether I was talking to myself in a vacant room or to a small but enthusiastic audience in widely distant places.

After “good evening, everyone,” I played a phonograph record to give the sending station a chance to pick themselves up had anything gone awry. The musical interval also provided time for the funny homemade sets which had sprouted in Hong Kong, Soochow, Hankow, Peking, and the outports, to warm up before the “main event.”

Irene took her little girl Rene to the mainland to meet the family, leaving Bert at work in Shanghai. She was in Chicago for a visit when Irene had a vision of black-clad mourners, an open grave, and a small box to be interred. Worried, she decided to rush home to Shanghai, which would take days. She was in Vancouver, Canada, with Rene, a toddler, ready to set sail, when she received a series of telegrams.

… husband dangerously ill best not to sail.

… death expected momentarily.

Bert dead.

The doctor's report stated “unknown causes,” but Irene knew better and was convinced that Bert had been poisoned, something to do with his work with Naval Intelligence. She planned to stay in Chicago supporting herself and Rene by freelancing, when her old boss Phil Payne offered her a job at his new paper, the
New York Daily Mirror,
the Hearst chain's answer to the
New York Daily News.
Irene went back to covering messy divorces, high-profile murder trials, and the cross-Atlantic flight of American pilot Charles Lindbergh.

She continued to move from one job to another as she raised Rene as a widowed mother. In the early 1930s she tried a stint in Hollywood writing film scenarios for three big-name studios. But Irene missed newspaper work, forthright and factual, not the devious complications of the movie industry.

In 1933, Irene returned to New York to write features for the
World-Telegram.
She penned her memoir,
Assigned to Adventure,
sharing well-crafted stories about her days in Paris and Shanghai and profiling some big names in journalism. Irene also scooped her rivals by revealing the scandalous abdication of Great Britain's King Edward VIII, who gave up his throne to marry Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, an American divorcée. She wrote about women she met and admired: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; actress Helen Hayes; Adele Springer, a lawyer who campaigned for safe ocean liners and who worked for world peace; and Dee Collins, the young widow of a test pilot who'd earned a living for her children as a cabaret singer in New York's Rainbow Grill.

The “tremors of approaching violent change” that Irene Kuhn had sensed during her months in Shanghai eventually shook China to pieces. Irene watched first how the early revolution of 1925 split into opposing sides as Nationalists and Communists fought to gain control of China's government. The second wave of change came from outside when, in 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria and moved south to attack Shanghai in 1932.

When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Irene, working as a commentator with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), found herself frozen in her job. She'd planned to leave earlier, but the US government declared broadcasting—like shipbuilding and steelmaking—an essential part of the war effort. “I couldn't leave to go back to my own writing, as I really wanted to do,” she told an interviewer later, “so I turned it to advantage.”

In uniform, Irene Corbally Kuhn broadcast from US Navy ships during World War II.
Irene Kuhn Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

The “advantage” Irene used was her experience and status as a reporter, which enabled her to score credentials as a war correspondent in the Pacific. During the war years she logged 24,277 miles in Air Corps planes in the China-Burma-India Theater. Never friendly to the idea of having women on its ships, the US Navy tolerated her presence. Irene reported from the USS
Rocky Mount,
flagship of the Pacific Fleet, when Japan surrendered to the United States. The next month, General Joseph Stillwell, commander of American forces in China, caved after repeated requests and allowed Irene into China to work.

In 1945, Irene met her goal to be the first American to broadcast from newly freed Shanghai. Every night she sat behind a microphone reporting the news, never sure that it would reach anyone. When her pleas to “please relay to San Francisco,” were picked up by the Pacific Fleet, she was invited to report from the
Rocky Mount.
The ship dropped anchor at Shanghai's number-one buoy, the spot of honor traditionally reserved for a British vessel. Irene's reporter's instincts told her immediately that the United States of America was now the world's dominant nation. She, Irene Corbally Kuhn, was witness to the transformation of America into a superpower.

That September, together with another reporter and an American officer, Irene toured a former Japanese prison camp where American airmen had been imprisoned and died in 1942 and 1943, three of them executed. A Chinese colonel was in charge of the Japanese soldiers who had worked at the camp; now the Japanese were prisoners themselves.

The Chinese colonel ordered tea, and the little group sat down to be served by the Japanese. As they sipped from teacups, a small silk-wrapped box was placed on the table in front of the reporters, a delivery from the former Japanese camp commander. The box contained the ashes of a 24-year-old American
flyer who had died a prisoner in his camp. In a collection of reporters' memoirs, Irene wrote, “It was a sadistic little gesture, timed to perfection, this arrival of the dead flyer's ashes in their urn inside the wooden, silk-wrapped box set down there now on top of the other box amid the teacups.”

After she returned to the US, Irene Corbally Kuhn continued to broadcast for NBC and shared a program with her daughter Rene Kuhn Bryant. During these postwar days, when the Soviet Union and a rising Communist power in China led to 40 years of Cold War, Irene's conservative instincts dominated much of her writing. She took a strong stand against communism and fully believed that its zealous supporters would never stop trying to bring down Western democracy. In 1951 she wrote an article that called out the liberal-leaning
New York Times Book Review
for its pro-communist views. Y
OUR
C
HILD
I
S
T
HEIR
T
ARGET
, written by Irene for the
American Legion Magazine,
warned of the dangers of American education falling to communist influences.

W
OMEN
D
ON'T
B
ELONG IN
P
OLITICS,
said another article in 1953, Irene declaring that giving women the right to vote back into 1919 hadn't done much to change the future. As she pointed out, both women and men were voters when the United States suffered through the Great Depression and fought a world war at great cost, only to see “victory [which] we let traitors, nincompoops and ruthless political opportunists throw away as if were a soggy bun, something for the birds.”

Irene Corbally Kuhn and other women reporters of her generation had lived their lives making their way in a man's world. In our eyes it seems strange that she disapproved of younger women moving into the workplace. Y
OU
O
UGHT TO
G
ET
M
ARRIED,
read her article in the
American Mercury
in 1954. Perhaps Irene yearned for what she missed in her own life, a husband to share her achievements, sorrows, and joys. Unlike so many
women writing about war, Irene never remarried after her husband's unexplained death. Throughout her life, she followed astrology and maintained a keen interest in the occult.

Well into old age, Irene kept writing. Her stories appeared in magazines as wide ranging as
American Legion, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan,
and
Gourmet.
She lived to the age of 97.

In 1919, Europeans picked up the pieces from the Great War and tried to move on. The Treaty of Versailles, signed by the Allies and Germany in 1919, thrust heavy penalties on Germany, stripped away its territories, and exacted the huge sum of $33 billion in war reparations. The Empire of Austria-Hungary was dismantled, and young republics sprang up in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria.

Under the terms of peace, Germany also established its first republic. The young democracy turned out to be a disaster, and late in the 1920s Germany lapsed into a period of massive inflation followed by a depression. Amid the joblessness, disorder, and general bitterness about paying Germany's war debts, a new political party arose seemingly from nowhere: the National Socialists, or Nazis. A fascist organization, the Nazis were backed by large numbers of German military men and industrialists who manufactured steel and armaments.

The Nazis first gained real power in 1933 when elections placed them in 44 percent of the seats in Germany's Reichstag (parliament). Their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, became Germany's führer (“leader”), chancellor, and commander in chief soon thereafter. With Hitler as their leader, the Nazis pledged to rescue Germany from those they hated: liberals,
socialists, communists, and Jews. Hitler's government isolated German Jews by gradually stripping away their rights.

Fascists also installed Benito Mussolini as Italy's dictator in 1922. In Spain the fascist General Francisco Franco, backed by German arms and air power, marshaled an army of rebels in 1936 and toppled Spain's young republican government. The Spanish Civil War was later seen as a practice run for Hitler's Germany when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

All the while, the Nazis nationalized German industry, built Germany's war machine, and created the autobahn, a network of superhighways. By the end of the 1930s, Germany had annexed Austria and seized German-speaking regions of France and Czechoslovakia.

Ordinary citizens, international experts, and entire governments stayed in denial about Germany's plans to conquer Europe. Americans, caught up in the Great Depression, were content with thinking that Hitler was a problem for Britain and France to sort out. But reporters Sigrid Schultz and Dorothy Thompson sounded the call as the Nazi menace grew, though few Americans heeded their warnings. Thompson was called the “American Cassandra,” an unflattering comparison to the Greek goddess who was cursed with predicting a future that no one would believe.

Berlin, September 1

At six
AM
, Sigrid Schultz—bless her heart—phoned. She said: “It's happened.” I was very sleepy—my body and mind numbed,
paralyzed. I mumbled: “Thanks, Sigrid,” and tumbled out of bed. The war is on!

—William Shirer,
Berlin Diary, 1942

She was a looker. Blue-eyed and blond, fashionably dressed— she was smart, as well—not to mention an excellent listener. She was a gourmet cook, was said to smoke a pipe, and she gave wonderful parties in the apartment she shared with her mother. It seemed natural that important men from the German government liked to drop by her desk in the
Chicago Tribune's
bureau in Berlin's elegant Hotel Adlon. They might have thought she was German—she spoke like one, but she could switch to French, Polish, Dutch, or English. And when she spoke English, her American accent shone, because Sigrid Schultz had been born in Chicago.