Eve Curie's battlefield travelogue
Eve Curie wasn't a war correspondent in the traditional sense, but her dispatches from a wide-ranging tour of battlefronts in late 1941 and early 1942 were widely read in the U.S. and beyond.
Born Dec. 6, 1904 in Paris, Curie was the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning scientists Marie and Pierre Curie and the sister of another, Irene Joliot-Curie. But she broke from the family mold, becoming a pianist and writer. Her biography of her late mother, "Madame Curie," won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1937.
Curie was an outspoken opponent of the Vichy regime and was stripped of her French citizenship in 1941. That fall, the New York Herald-Tribune enlisted her services as a roving correspondent. She would visit various fronts in the war with the backing of the U.S. government, as she no longer had a French passport. Her credentials were signed by William J. Donovan, who was in the process of ramping up what would become the OSS.
Beginning in Khartoum in late November, she would also file stories from far-flung locales like Egypt, Moscow and Burma over the next few months. While her pieces were dotted with anecdotes from locals, Curie left little doubt where she stood in framing the mushrooming global conflict.
"In Africa you understand the geographical pattern of this war perfectly well," she wrote. "Hitler has conquered Europe, but his enemies are organizing the whole world to conquer him."
In January, near Volokolamsk, about 80 miles west of Moscow, Curie came across a half-destroyed German tank with the bodies of three German soldiers scattered around it.
"Their uniforms, hardened by frozen blood, told the drama of Germany's fight against the Russian winter," she wrote. "Their uniforms were of thin material, hardly warm enough to protect a man quartered in occupied France. Their boots were of light black leather and, from what we could see, the underwear was thin, too. One of the men had wrapped around his waist, under his uniform coat, a woolen shawl not in the least military and which looked like shawls worn by Russian women.
"Indeed, it seemed to make little sense to come and die for the sake of Hitler's new order along this remote country road hundreds of miles east of any territory inhabited by Germans."
Doubleday published a book-length account of her trip, "Journey Among Warriors," in 1943. By then, she had gone to work for the Free French and would return to Paris after its liberation the following year.
She remained involved with journalism through the 1940s before focusing more on public service and marrying U.S. diplomat Henry Richardson Labouisse in 1954. He would go on to lead UNICEF for 15 years and Eve was actively involved throughout.
Curie would eventually move to New York and live there until her death in 2007 at age 102.