2023 Hello , Recognize the name Clare Hollingsworth? With my background, she should have been square one because her life connects so closely with a couple of the books I've written. I wrote extensively about the German invasion of Poland in my book Irena's Children. Irena Sendler was at work September 1, 1939, when bombs started to fall in Warsaw. Claire was the first western reporter to see it coming. Irena survived the war and helped save the lives of 2,500 Jewish children.
Israel’s Holocaust memorial organization named her Righteous Among the Nations for her work. Irena's Children tells how she sneaked children out of the Jewish Ghetto, was arrested by the Gestapo, sentenced to death and escaped the firing squad, literally at the last moment.
Thanks to a subscriber who wrote me about Claire Hollingsworth, I now bring you the story of one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th Century, the woman who broke the story to the world when Hitler invading
Poland.
One of the Great Women of the 20th Century
For her first assignment as a journalist in 1939, Claire convinced the editor at the British Daily Telegraph to send her to Poland. On the ground
less than a week, planning to cover refugees fleeing the Nazi's, Claire noticed the German army converging on the Polish border. She called the British Embassy to report they were on the brink of war--the war that would later be known as WWII. Guess what! They didn't believe her. "I was driving back along a valley and there was a hessian screen up so you couldn't look down into the valley." Claire explained later. "Suddenly, there was a great gust of wind which blew the sacking from its moorings, and I looked into the valley and saw scores, if not hundreds, of tanks."
Claire rang a friend she knew at the embassy who said it must be an exercise because the British were still in negotiations to
prevent war. To make her point, Claire held the phone out the window, and the sound of tanks on the move roared down the line. Initially, the Warsaw correspondent for the Daily
Telegraph also needed convincing. Claire believed women deserve a place at the frontline and on the front page. She filed her story, and it appeared on Tuesday, August 29, on The Daily Telegraph's front page.
Three days later, Claire reported war had begun when German tanks rolled over the border and Nazi bombers hit Warsaw.
As Claire Hollingsworth continued her career as a journalist, she had a deep knowledge of military
strategy. "I broke this story when I was very, very young," Claire said. "I went [to Poland] to look after the refugees, the
blind, the deaf and the dumb. While I was there, the war suddenly came into being." She continued filing stories from the field throughout WWII, following the fighting in Turkey, Greece, Cairo and
General Eisenhower's troops in Algiers. During the latter part of the war, she reported from Palestine, Iraq and Persia. She had found her passion and when the war ended, she kept going. For more than four decades she reported from the frontlines of conflict all over the world including Israel,
Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Algeria and Vietnam, working for news outlets including the Guardian, the BBC and NBC. “I enjoy action," Claire said once. "I’m not brave, I just enjoy it. I don’t know why. God made me like this. I’m not frightened.” She traveled light, with what she called T & T, a toothbrush and typewriter. She remained in shape for rough
living by sleeping on the floor at least once every two weeks. “Comfort isn’t very important
to me,” she said. “I’m fortunate in that I don’t mind going without food for five or six days.”
Clare Hollingworth, curtesy Clare Hollingworth personal collection.
Whatever it took to get the story. And over the
years, Claire got some big ones. She was the first western reporter to interview the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1941, and the last to talk with him before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In 1963, Claire identified a fellow journalist as a Soviet double agent. She and Kim Philby were working together in Beirut – she for the Guardian, he for the
Observer– when he disappeared. She tried to track him down and found Philby had sailed on a Soviet ship bound for Odessa. She believed Philby to be the "third man" in a British spy ring with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. She wrote the story, but the Guardian editor feared it wasn't true and refused to print it. When a competing paper splashed
the new in a front-page story, the government confirmed Philby had defected to the Soviet Union. Two years later, Claire Hollingworth crossed paths, figuratively, with the subject of another of my books, reporting on the Vietnam War from Saigon. Like Catherine Leroy in Close Up On War, Claire told more than stories of battle. She often focused on the effects of the war on Vietnamese civilians.
In May 1965, Claire reported: “Today, in spite of American bombing of targets in North Vietnam and the danger of the local struggle becoming a major war, there is a military stalemate …
this stalemate could continue indefinitely.” She influenced her editor at the Guardian's and Harold Wilson's Labour government's view of the war in Southeast Asia. Like Catherine Leroy, Claire gravitated to battle not minding the danger. She was described as “literally marching toward the sound of gunfire" covering the war in Algeria and was nearly killed by a sniper bullet in Vietnam in the 1970s. In her early days as a reporter, Claire barely escaped the bombing of the British Mandatory administration in Jerusalem in 1946. The attack by pre-State of Israel underground
militia killed nearly 100 people and destroyed the King David Hotel 300 meters from where Claire was standing.
Clare on assignment in Palestine in the mid-1960s Claire continued working as a journalist into her late 70s, her last post in Hong Kong where
she retired in 1981. “I miss the sound of bullets whizzing past my head,” she told Economist writer Jane Robins. Even after her 100th birthday, Claire kept her passport handy in case another assignment came calling. She died January 10, 2017 at the age of 105.
Claire Hollingsworth celebrated her 100th birthday in her adopted home of Hong Kong. (AFP/Getty
Images)
Claire was not the first female war correspondent, but the depth of her technical, tactical and strategic acumen rivaled many of her male and female counterparts. Reporting some of the greatest stories of the 20th century, Claire paved a path and set a standard for women
journalists to come.
Like my article today? Please share:
Sources https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/01/10/clare-hollingworth-legendary-telegraph-journalist-reported-outbreak/
Here's something fun. Or maybe not. My niece Amelia is reading a book for high school English. Her mom thought it came from school, but apparently, it's a book my brother inherited from our childhood bookcase. Appears I checked it out in 1972. What Ameila found inside.
I guess it's no surprise I got an email from my local library this morning to say a book I checked is past due and classified as lost. I know right where it is. Taking it back
today.
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