Dangerous and daring assignments were always more attractive than others for Margaret Bourke-White. She liked pursuing pictures that no other photographer had attempted before; and if she had to travel long distances or endure hazardous situations in order to obtain the exposures she wanted, she welcomed the prospect with relish.
The thrill of taking risks was only a part of what made photography so inviting to her, however. From her earliest days as a professional photographer, Bourke-White's aim had been to record the Big Thing of the Age: the burning issues and central drama of the times in which she lived. Taking risks was warranted, she felt, for the sake of preserving history-in-the-making.
In the late 1920s when she opened her first studio in Cleveland, Ohio, the Big Thing of the Age was Industry. The booming factories and construction projects, spawned by a decade of prosperity in America, stirred Bourke-White more deeply than any other subject, and the images she produced of the cranes, railroad yards, and other mammoths of modern design that had sprung up around Cleveland are among the most stunning industrial photographs ever made. In particular, her 1928 photographs of the making of steel, the first ever to convey the awesome visual power of the world inside a steel mill, had a very significant impact. Upon seeing those steel-making photographs, Henry Luce hired Bourke-White as Fortune magazine's first and only photographer in the spring of 1929.
Luce, who had begun publishing Time magazine in 1925, detected in Bourke-White's pictures the style that conveyed most succinctly "the dignity and the beauty, the smartness and excitement of modern industry," which was to be Fortune's central focus.
When Luce hired Bourke-White again in 1936, as one of the first on Life Magazine's original team of four photographers, Industry had long since receded from its place as the Big Thing of the Age. The cold realities of economic depression had awakened America's artists and writers to the country's social ills, and Bourke-White eagerly joined their ranks. She had her hands full flying around America for Life magazine photo stories for most of 1936. But, true to her convictions, she also completed a project, in collaboration with Erskine Caldwell, that was designed to document the harsh and unjust conditions of sharecropper life in the deep South, which Caldwell had fictionalized in his bestselling novel and Broadway play Tobacco Road.
The book Caldwell and Bourke-White created, a unique marriage of photographs and text, entitled You Have Seen Their Faces, was immediately recognized as one of the most important social documentaries of the 1930s. But by the early 1940s, the importance of the sharecropper issue had paled. The Big Thing of the Age was unquestionably the war in Europe.
Bourke-White had been an eyewitness to the early advances of Nazi terror while on assignment for Life in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1938. She also had a burning desire to cover the war itself, when it fully erupted in Europe; and, as fate would have it, in the spring of 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, Bourke-White was already on the spot.
The Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was in effect when Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell (whom she had married in 1939) reached Moscow in May 1941. Within a few weeks, however, the non-aggression pact had been scrapped. The Nazi army was storming Russia's borders, and Bourke-White was the only American photographer present to record the fighting. Her dramatic photo reports on the bombing of Moscow, the bloody Yelnya battlefront, and other important aspects of the early clashes of the war in Russia, which appeared in Life magazine week after week between August and December 1941, awakened the millions of Americans who read Life to the unrelenting brutality of the Nazi forces and surely helped sway public sentiment towards accepting the military responsibilities America was soon to take on.
Bourke-White was indebted to Life, of course, for sponsoring her expedition to Russia and for bringing her photographs to the largest imaginable audience, but magazine work alone never fully satisfied her. Although she had provided the magazine with outstanding news material on the Russian war, Bourke-White had a great deal more to say about what was going on behind the surface of the news, and for six months in 1942 she worked on putting her personal insights and experiences into Shooting The Russian War.
Shooting The Russian War was, in fact, her second book on Russia. Her first, entitled Eyes On Russia, was published in 1931, following her historic journey as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under Stalin's Five-Year Plan. She traveled to Russia as a guest of the Soviet government for three summers in a row between 1930 and 1932, making hundreds of exposures in every region of the country and on every aspect of life there.
Of course, the Soviet Union to which Bourke-White returned in 1941 had changed considerably from the country she had visited as an industrial photographer in the early 1930s. The towering figure of Stalin had replaced Industry as the country's singular obsession, an ideological chill had settled in, and Bourke-White keenly felt the difference in spirit.
Above all, however, Bourke-White saw that the Russians were unified in their determination to defend their land against the Nazi invaders, and that whatever political differences America might have with Russia, they were minuscule compared to the objective of defeating Hitler at all costs, to which both countries were firmly committed by the end of 1941.
Bourke-White saw a very different picture, indeed, when she traveled to the Italian front in the summer of 1943. The United States Army and the German Army were pitted against each other on opposite hills overlooking Cassino Valley, where some of the hottest battles in the war were fought. The Nazis had the superior position, based as they were on the heights of Monte Cassino, and American casualties were so heavy that the battle zone was nicknamed Purple Heart Valley (after the medal awarded to US servicemen who are wounded or killed in action).
Bourke-White had been under fire before, of course. Notably in Moscow, but also in North Africa, where, in January 1943, she had become the first woman permitted to accompany an Air Force crew in action on a bombing raid. She had learned to endure enemy bombings and machine-gun fire. In Italy, however, she was working under greater risk than ever from the constant threat of unpredictable artillery attacks, which she found much harder to accept with equanimity.
Bourke-White's assignment to Italy had come from the US Army Service Forces, commanded by Gen. Brehon Somervell, who wanted Bourke-White to tell the story of "logistics," or how the soldiers in the field were supplied with everything they needed to survive: from food and ammunition to medical and even religious services. Life magazine used Bourke-White's photographs to show Americans how big an undertaking the war was, and how efficiently the military was handling the whole operation.
There was another aspect of the war in which Bourke-White herself was keenly interested, but which the US military and Life magazine more or less took for granted, and therefore ignored. Namely, the restoration of a democratic way of life in Europe. It chagrined Bourke-White to see how few constructive efforts were being focused on eradicating the social damage fascism had done.
"In Italy it seemed to me we were neglecting a magnificent opportunity. It was not enough to conquer this territory if we did not educate it in such a way that we could live at peace with it in the future. What is the use of all this bloodshed unless we insure the future for civilization and for peace? What is the use of leaving all these American boys on the battlefields if we leave occupied countries unchanged when we move on?. . . There is no use fighting a war unless we leave behind us a better world, and to do that we must get the youth of Europe on our side."
In Italy, Bourke-White also developed a stronger sense of herself as a writer than she had had before. As she explains her autobiography, Portrait Of Myself:
"The very intimacy of the Italian conflict sharpened my awareness of human beings around me, and I began to listen to what people said. I mean really listen. Someone drops a phrase and you say to yourself, 'No one else could have said just that thing in that way. It is like a portrait of the man.' Until then, I had considered myself eye-minded and let it go at that, but much as I love cameras, they can't do everything. The American soldier with his bitter humor and his peculiar gallantry had opened my ears."
When Bourke-White returned to America in the fall of 1943, she assembled the copious notes she had taken in Italy, many of which had originally served as captions for her photographs in Life magazine, into her second book on World War II. Entitled Purple Heart Valley, the book is a remarkably vivid and comprehensive portrait of the conduct of the war in Italy. The bizarre disorder and violence she describes in Purple Heart Valley, however, are practically benign compared to the devastating chaos she later saw in Germany.
In Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, Bourke-White's extraordinary account of the ending of the war, she wrote:
"I know of no way to convey the feeling of rising violence that we witnessed as we drove deeper into Germany: the waves of suicides, the women throwing themselves after their loved dead into newly dug graves, the passionate denunciation of friends and neighbors, the general lawlessness. Each street corner had its open tragedy; every life seemed shot through with its own individual terror. And over all hung the numbing realization that this newly conquered world was facing a sterile future."
Life magazine used Bourke-White's photographs of Germany in the spring of 1945 to tell the story of "Faceless Fritz," a report designed to give Americans greater insight into the character of that nation that had triggered the war and kept it going with mindless intensity for so many years. Showing the faces of the German people, however, hardly explained the mentality behind the inhuman horrors that had been carried out.
Bourke-White therefore stayed in Germany through October 1945, long after her work for Life was completed, in order to determine for herself what made the Nazi mind tick. Her interviews with Germans at high, low, and in-between levels on the Nazi ladder make up a good part of the text of Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, and shed considerable light on the "logic" of the Nazi phenomenon.
It troubled Bourke-White that the patterns of thought responsible for starting the war were still not being confronted in earnest by the occupation forces. She felt that the evil persisted in Germany, and it frightened her.
"We turned our backs on our greatest opportunity to do something constructive with the youth of Germany. We had no plan, no desire, no willingness it seemed to teach a democratic way of life. We poured out lives and boundless treasure to win a mechanical victory and now we had not patience for the things of the spirit which alone can save us from another far greater catastrophe. It was time to go home."
Nonetheless, Bourke-White believed it was possible to make up for past neglect:
"Unless we do this war will be without meaning for us, and some of the hope for a good world will die down in the hearts of men everywhere."
After the war, Bourke-White continued traveling around the world for Life magazine. She covered the last two years of Gandhi's struggle for independence from Great Britain, and was the last reporter to interview Gandhi -- only hours before his assassination. Bourke-White also covered the Korean War for Life in 1952. But although she had become one of the eminent personalities on the American scene, was awarded honorary degrees, and made frequent appearances on radio and television, the final twenty years of her life were bitter for the most part. In 1953, Bourke-White contracted Parkinson's Disease, which slowly crippled her, and forced her to stop all work with photography after 1957. She retired officially from Life magazine in 1969, and died at her home in Darien, Connecticut in August, 1971.
The three books from which this volume has been compiled represent a reporter's personal chronicle of World War II. Although too personal, perhaps, to be considered works of serious history, the three books are also in a different class than most war memoirs, chiefly because Bourke-White herself was in a different class than most other reporters. Her implacable nerve, her keen sense of justice, and her humanitarian vision stand out prominently, and constitute Bourke-White's voice in these writings. She was a person who lived, above all, to record history, and in documenting the remarkable drama of the 20th century, as she did, secured herself a remarkable place in history as well.
