Flying, fighting, writing

There are thousands of memoirs of the Second World War, including the war in the air. But a few feel especially alive – because they were written while it was happening. Some are still read; others are not, but should be, for they bring the air war vividly to life

As Washington Post publisher Philip Graham said back in 1963, journalism is “the first rough draft of history”. That hasn’t changed; new books about Donald Trump and Brexit pour off the press or onto our Kindles almost weekly, and they’re often by journalists – Bob Woodward and CBS correspondent Major Garrett are the latest. In a year or two their books will be out of date and out of print. But in time, historians will go back to them as primary sources.

A Halifax Mk I (Imperial War Museum © IWM CH 3393)

The Second World War was no different. Publishers fell over themselves to commission the topical. Sometimes, these commissions went to the well-known – people such as war correspondent Ernie Pyle and journalist and socialite Ève Curie, who slugged it out for a Pulitzer in 1943; Pyle won, but Curie’s book is a tour de force; I wrote about it here a couple of years ago. In Britain, Richard Dimbleby published two books during the war – The Waiting Year (about the run-up to D-Day) and the splendid The Frontiers Are Green. Even John Steinbeck got books out on the war while it was on (Bombs Away, about an American bomber crew, and a rather good short novel, The Moon is Down).

But publishers know an expanding racket, and they didn’t just publish the great and the good. A number of serving RAF pilots wrote about their experiences during the war. The best-known were Enemy Coast Ahead and The Last Enemy, by Guy Gibson and Richard Hillary – both to be killed later in the war – and Leonard Cheshire’s Bomber Pilot. There was much they could not talk about while hostilities were still on. Airfield names are omitted, for instance, and sometimes the names of other pilots. And of course they could not talk about the extraordinary electronic war that the RAF was fighting in the skies over Germany; some of that remained secret for some time after 1945. But they could give civilians a taste of the war being fought above their heads.

Books like Hillary’s and Gibson’s are still in print, but most have vanished. The two writers reviewed here are less well-known. Their books are not notable as literature, but they do offer flashes of fine writing. And they give an acute flavour of the war and what it was like to fight it in the air.

First, R.C. Rivaz’s Tail Gunner.

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Richard C. Rivaz was born in 1908 in India, where his father had been a civil servant. In the 1930s he tried to earn his living as an artist, but made little money, and turned to teaching. When the war began he volunteered for the RAF and was disappointed to be told that he was too old for pilot training, but was accepted as an air-gunner. In the summer of 1940 he was posted to an operational unit; as it was wartime he did not name the squadron or the airfield in the book, but it was 102 Squadron at Driffield, north of Hull.

Arriving late, he was put in a room with an officer who was already asleep but had left his possessions scattered all over the room.

I was awakened next morning by the buzzing sound of an electric razor, and saw a slight figure in brightly-coloured pyjamas walking up and down the room trailing a length of electric flex behind him and running the razor in a care-free manner up and down his face. After a few moments I said ‘Good morning’… and was favoured with some sort of grunt in reply. I saw this ...strange person several times during the day… but never once did he show that he recognized me. I noticed that he seemed to know everybody, and that most people called him Cheese. That night I changed my room.

Not long afterwards he is assigned to fly with this unfriendly character, who then makes himself quite charming. Rivaz gives his first name, Leonard, but not his second, which was Cheshire. At the time he wrote his book, Rivaz would have known that Cheshire was to be a successful pilot, but not just how famous he would become.

Before he can get off the ground, however, Rivaz experiences a fierce air attack on the airfield.

I saw a party of men digging furiously around a shelter that had received a direct hit: the ambulance was there… and the orderlies were lifting a man — with his tunic, face, and hair covered with earth — on to a stretcher. ...I noticed that his legs were in an unnatural twisted position. Someone was digging around another pair of legs: the body was still buried and the legs obviously broken. I saw two more men crushed — with faces nearly the same colour as their tunics — between sheets of corrugated iron: they were both dead.

It was August 15 1940 and Driffield had been attacked by a large force of German bombers; 14 RAF personnel were dead, including the first female RAF fatality, and 12 British aircraft were destroyed. These were details that Rivaz couldn’t give, but it doesn’t matter – his description of the raid is very vivid. So is much else in the book; Rivaz was to see a lot of action, and there are few dull moments. Flying over Cologne, his aircraft is hit and a flare explodes in the rear of the plane, temporarily blinding the crew, injuring one terribly and blowing an enormous hole in the fuselage; Rivaz, in the tail turret, must struggle past the damage and try to put out the flames. Cheshire eventually regained control of the aircraft and brought it home, a feat that won him the DSO. Later, Rivaz would twice fly on missions against the Scharnhorst at Brest, daylight attacks on a heavily defended target. He was not to know that in the first of these raids, in July 1941, armour-piercing bombs of the type he was carrying did damage the ship quite badly. They may have come from his aircraft. He also “ditched” twice and was rescued from the sea, both times in winter; on one of these occasions, he only barely survived.

Whitleys at Driffield (Imperial War Museum © IWM HU 104766)

Rivaz flew as rear-gunner in two types of aircraft. Again, he was writing in wartime so says little about them, but he does identify them. At Driffield it was the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, a twin-engined type that had been introduced in early 1937. In a time of rapid change, this meant it was already outdated. But it was not unsuccessful as a bomber, and later variants were also used for sub-hunting and for clandestine long-distance transport. What it wasn’t, was fast. Rivaz records that on one raid, to Leuna in Saxony, they were in the air for 11 hours. Life in the rear turret must have been extremely uncomfortable (and he does mention the extremes of heat and cold). Later he transferred, like Cheshire, to 35 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse; this was the first squadron to fly the new four-engined Handley Page Halifax Mk I.

Rivaz’s writing is inconsistent. But at its best it is excellent. He was a thoughtful and observant man; at one point he describes, in detail, taking off on a mission to Cologne on a March night. The Whitley’s engines are being run up. “The ground crew were standing by, watching: one stood too near the slipstream and had his hat blown off… it was rolling over and over behind the aeroplane, and he was chasing it. ...A large pool of water by my turret was being thrown up into a fine spray, and some bits of oily rag were flying about in the air.” They move off; the tail lifts in the air; the plane sways from side to side as the pilot keeps it straight with the rudder; then they are crossing the airfield perimeter, the lights glowing yellow and red below. Rivaz, as a gunner, is alert, knowing that enemy intruders have sometimes attacked bombers as they take off. Yet he sees his surroundings. He was, after all, an artist:

Rivaz with Cheshire in 1940 or 1941

We were still circling the aerodrome and climbing… and it was getting lighter instead of darker the higher we climbed. The ground appeared as a sort of grey-green colour, and seemed very remote and unreal. The aerodrome beacon was flashing red. ...The sky above us was a green-blue… and the western sky was lit by a glorious red sunset. The red glow tinted the edge of my gun barrels and the perspex round my turret a bright red colour. I was thrilled with the beauty, and called through to A__, telling him about it and asking him if he could see it. He replied that he could just see the edge of it. They would have lost the sunset from the ground by now… but up here it was as vivid as the ground was obscure. On the ground one is not always conscious of the transition of light to darkness. But in the air one is in the change… it is all around one.

But this night would not end well. By early morning “A__” (the captain) would be dead. Rivaz does not identify him; in fact, his name was Clive Florigny and he was from Streatham, South London. Rivaz also does not say, and probably did not know, that Florigny’s brother, also a Whitley pilot, was to be killed later the same day. Their names are on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede, along with other aircrew with no known grave.

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At about the time Rivaz was arriving at Driffield, Arthur (Art) Donahue was arriving at his own first operational station; like Rivaz, he does not name it, but it was Kenley in Surrey, on the southern approach to London. It was a rapid transition. As he recalls in Tally-Ho! Yankee in a Spitfire, also published in the middle of the war, just six weeks earlier he had been at work on his father’s farm in St Charles, Minnesota. He had applied to join the US volunteer reserve very early in the war, but had heard nothing. Now, hearing that France had collapsed, he decided that, as an American, he could wait until his people were forced to fight, as they surely would be; or he could join the battle now. He travelled to Canada to join up and just 10 days later he was on a liner to Britain.

I didn’t have any of the qualifications of a soldier. I was neither big nor very strong; I was quite mild-tempered and absolutely afraid to fight, and I was more cautious in my flying than the average pilot then.

Art Donahue

This may be modest. Donahue, then 27, had been a Depression-era barnstormer but was also a serious pilot; when the war broke out, he was instructing. Even so, the speed with which the RAF got him off the boat and into combat is astonishing, given the very long training that most RAF pilots had to undergo. On arrival, he was sent straight to an Operational Training Unit (OTU) – again, he does not say which, but it was No. 7 OTU at Hawarden. OTUs were what their name indicates – advanced training units from which newly trained pilots would undertake their first missions. After a brief period flying trainers, he was unleashed on a Spitfire, a plane that cruised at twice the speed of anything he had ever flown before.

As in Tail Gunner, there is hardly a dull moment. Donahue began his combat career by chasing a Messerschmitt 109 across the Channel and engaging it, he says, at Cap Griz Nez – a hot pursuit that I’d always thought Battle of Britain pilots avoided, not wishing to be lured into combat over enemy territory. Which is what happened to Donahue, who caught the fighter but was then bounced by its friends. He escaped, and landed at Hawkinge on the Kent coast with serious damage to his aircraft. Then just a week later his aircraft caught fire after being hit in combat, forcing him to bail out with serious burns to one leg. By the time he returned to flying, the Battle of Britain was essentially over. Yet he had taken part in it – one of only about 10 American pilots to do so.

Tally-Ho! is not always as gripping as Tail Gunner, and Rivaz is the better of the two writers. But every now and then Donahue does capture the imagination. A flight from Kenley to their advanced base at Hawkinge:

We had to fly to our advance base at dawn, and it was an unforgettably beautiful flight for me. It was just getting light when we took off, and the countryside was dim below us. Wicked blue flames flared back from the exhausts of all the engines as I looked at the planes in formation about me. We seemed to hover motionless except for the slight upward or downward drift of one machine or another in relation to the rest, which seemed to lend a sort of pulsating life to the whole formation; and the dark carpet of the earth below steadily slid backward beneath us. The sun, just rising and very red and big and beautiful, made weird lights over the tops of our camouflaged wings. We were like a herd of giant beasts in some strange new kind of world.

There is also striking detail on the life of a fighter pilot. They were clearly very organised. Donahue describes how, preparing for a period on readiness, he puts his parachute on the aircraft’s tailplane, as that is where he can grab it quickest if he’s scrambled. He even arranges the straps so that they will fall easily to hand. In the cockpit he hangs his helmet over the control stick and plugs in the radio and oxygen leads, making sure that they are hanging in the right way so they won’t slow down the business of putting the helmet on. The seat and shoulder straps are similarly arranged. Then Donahue methodically sets various valves to the open position so that he will not have to waste time doing so when the call comes. There are many more checks, all of them – by his account – meticulously carried out.

Donahue was apparently a strict Catholic and teetotaller (he mentions neither in the book), and one wonders how he fared with the hard-drinking RAF pilots; well enough, it seems. Also, he recounts in the book that he went to Canada to join the RAF but does not say that he claimed to be Canadian, almost certainly because he faced losing his American citizenship for serving under a foreign flag. In fact, the US rescinded this threat only a few weeks later. But it may explain why there are different stories as to how many US nationals flew in the Battle of Britain (between seven and 11, depending on where you look; more joined the RCAF/RAF soon afterwards).

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Rivaz’s Tail Gunner ends with the second daylight raid on the Scharnhorst at Brest (he gives no date, but it was in January 1942). At the end of the book, Rivaz staggers ashore after another ditching; the second attack, it seems, proved as hairy as the first one.

Rivaz still wanted to be a pilot, and finally persuaded the RAF to post him for training. The result was a second book, Tail Gunner Takes Over. It describes his training in Manitoba, and ends with his posting back to Britain. Tail Gunner Takes Over is not as good as Tail Gunner; there’s some padding, and the details of his training are now really only of interest to historians of wartime flying. Rivaz was a good rather than great writer. But the first book is gripping – not least because he was in the thick of the air war at the start of Bomber Command’s offensive against Germany. The casualty rate was high, and relatively few of the early pilots can have survived to write of those early raids in Hampdens and Whitleys. Later aircrew were more likely to, by virtue simply of having less time to get killed.

Moreover Rivaz could be quite thoughtful, and was fully aware of the destruction he was causing below:

Cheshire's Whitley after Cologne (Imperial War Musem © IWM CH 1764)

The fires would still be burning in Cologne, where there would be a lot of suffering and misery. That was what we had intended. Our target had been a large factory, and a lot of night-shift workers would have been working there: there would be people dead or dying… there would be people burned there. Some might be alive… living with broken bones, unable to move, and with crushed and mangled bodies pressed against them… with nothing but the stink of rubble and putrefying flesh for company. There would be people with arms and legs blown off… and people with their stomachs blown open… and people with half their faces blown away. They might have to wait hours or even days until they were found; unable to help themselves and wishing they could die… yet afraid to die. Some would be badly burnt and would die; [or] would not die, but would be crippled and scarred always… All these things I had seen when our own aerodrome was bombed.

Did Rivaz have doubts about what he was doing? He might have done; he was clearly aware of its consequences. Nearly 700,000 Germans would die in the air bombardment before the end of the war, and Rivaz was right – they would not always die mercifully. In practice, though, he probably felt, as others did, that the Germans had started the war, and besides had bombed us, and others; they could hardly complain that bombs were being thrown back. Most members of his generation still had no sympathy when I was growing up. But a few were not so sure.

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Donahue’s book ends a year or so before Rivaz’s, early in 1941; the Battle of Britain had really ended by the time he recovered from his injuries, and he was reposted to another squadron in the south of England. Here there is much that Donahue does not say, hinting only that he was transferred more than once. In fact, it seems that he was posted to an embryonic squadron for American RAF volunteers. It is said that he disliked it; no planes had arrived, and the Americans were not to the taste of the strict Catholic from the farm. But he does not say this in the book, and it is hard to confirm. At any rate, he gets himself posted again and as the book finishes he is flying offensive fighter sweeps over Northern France. These became more common in 1941 as the RAF, stronger now, looked for ways to strike back. They were not without losses; Douglas Bader, flying a Spitfire V, was captured on a sweep of this sort after his plane collided with a German in combat. Still, the fierce fighting of the previous summer was over. Tally Ho ends there.

Donahue’s flying career, however, didn’t. Like Rivaz, he was to write a second book. Unlike Rivaz, he would have plenty of action to speak of therein. In the autumn of 1941 he was transferred to a squadron that was going overseas, apparently at his own wish; he wanted to fight. The squadron set off on a troopship, to be united with their new aircraft at their destination. They weren’t to be Spitfires but Hurricanes, which Donahue had not flown before.

The Hurricane had entered service a little earlier than the Spitfire. It too was a fast modern monoplane with retractable undercarriage and eight guns, but instead of being all-metal, it was – like older aircraft – partially fabric, with a linen skin stretched and shrunk over a skeletal framework. This had its advantages, as it could be repaired more quickly, but it was also more prone to fire, and most RAF fighter pilots who suffered terrible burns did so in the Hurricane rather than the Spitfire. It did not help that the fuel tank was sited right in front of the pilot. (Though Messerschmitt 109 pilots actually sat on theirs, which may have felt worse.)

Donahue never learns where the squadron was supposed to have gone. In fact, it seems to have been the Middle East. But in South Africa they learn of Pearl Harbour; also, that they have a new destination. Arriving in the Dutch East Indies, they collected their new planes, and at the end of January they arrived in Singapore.

In Last Flight from Singapore, Donahue recalled his first sight of the island.

We began passing under heavy, blue-black storm clouds that forced us to fly lower and lower, and looking ahead I could now make out a great harbor on the coast, with the dim shapes of several ships anchored in it. Singapore harbor! ...We made it just ahead of a heavy rainstorm that was bearing down from the north, and though the setting sun was still shining from the west, we had to fly through a curtain of rain on the north side when we were approaching to land. Even circling the drome we could easily see we were in a war zone, for it was spotted with filled-in bomb craters just like the ones in England, and there were quite a few unfilled ones, too, indicating that the airdrome had recently been bombed. There was a fresh hole in one end of the concrete runway that we had to dodge when landing.

The next two weeks are intense. There are only a few Hurricanes, and less capable Brewster Buffalo fighters, on the island. Although they fly daily, the Hurricanes are rarely able to get high enough in time to get above the Japanese bombers, as there were no observers in Malaya to warn of their approach; the peninsula is now occupied by the Japanese, and on his first night Donahue is woken by the sound of British engineers blowing up the Johore causeway onto the island. Singapore is now under siege.

It is a bizarre time for the pilots, fighting for their lives in the day and then returning to the luxurious Seaview Hotel, where they are served wonderfully cooked multi-course meals and lived in sumptuous suites. Meanwhile the pilots encounter snobbery from the colonials, with one elderly man who was waiting to be evacuated protesting that they should not use the swimming pool because they had not been “introduced”. “His dislike for us was made obvious quite often,” records Donahue, adding that besides “fighting to keep the Japs off his head now, we would quite likely have to patrol and perhaps fight over his ship later, to keep him from being sunk.”

Donahue becomes aware that terrible mistakes are being made in the defence of Singapore and that the decadence of the British in the East is not helping.

Australian nurses arrive at Singapore, October 1941 (© IWM FE 49)

There’s no need denying that I was terribly disillusioned by much of what I had seen and experienced out here — things that I have avoided or passed over in this story because it isn’t in my province as a member of the forces to speak of them, and because I could only do harm by telling about them now. The enemy don’t advertise their failings either, you know. Doubtless you have seen references to this in the press, so there’s no harm in admitting that I saw many things out here that were very bad.

Yet there is also a poignant unreality. One day, with the Japanese already on the island, he and another pilot watch an “exotic, dark-haired English girl” exercising two greyhounds on the hotel lawn, as if nothing has happened.

She was swinging a cloth about for them to leap at. Her movements and theirs were so graceful that I thought she must be a dancer, but someone said she was a nurse. It seemed that either she or the approaching enemy and the terrible fighting must be unreal. It just didn’t make sense — but neither did a lot of things, in the last days of Singapore.

Later Donahue would wonder what became of her, as well he might; the Japanese would kill a large number of staff and patients at the British military hospital on February 14. (Although it was the Chinese community in Singapore that would suffer most; tens of thousands would be killed during the occupation.)

Donahue's own picture of a crashed Hurricane in Singapore

The battle for Singapore was brief. A week after Donahue’s arrival, the Japanese landed on Singapore. Two days later, on February 9, orders came to evacuate the last fighters to Sumatra, and he took off with two other Hurricanes and a Buffalo from an airfield that was already under ground attack, the crack of rifle fire only a few hundred yards away. It appears that this was indeed the last flight from Singapore, and there were no further Allied air operations over the island. It fell five days later.

Donahue continued to operate for a few days from Sumatra, but before long this too was invaded. On February 16, with other pilots, Donahue attacked the invading troops as their boats came up the Musi River towards Palembang. Hit by ground fire and seriously wounded, he managed to land his aircraft, and was evacuated to hospital in Bandung and finally embarked on a hospital ship. Last Flight from Singapore ends there; he wrote it shortly afterwards in India and in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he had rejoined his squadron.

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What were these men like?

Rivaz, the artist, seems to have been the more worldly; Donahue was from rural Minnesota and proud to be, and his letters home talk of the pigs on the farm there, and of the eggs and potatoes that the airmen produce on the base. But both were men of substance. Neither had had to fight; Rivaz was too old, and Donahue was a national of a neutral state. They were also, in the manner of the time, quite modest. Rivaz does not mention his prewar career; though he’d made no money as an artist, he must have been a good one, as he had studied at the Royal College of Art and is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy. Donahue nowhere says that he had qualified as a commercial pilot at just 19, at a time when flying in the States was dangerous. Moreover both write warmly of other men’s courage but speak little of their own. They do not reveal in their books that they had both had the Distinguished Flying Cross – Rivaz for his conduct on the first daylight raid on the Scharnhorst, when he destroyed an enemy fighter and saved his own plane, and Donahue for that last desperate low-level attack on the Japanese in Sumatra.

Spitfire Vs of 91 Squadron, Hawkinge, 1942 (© IWM (CH 5429)

One wants of course to know their eventual fates. On completion of his pilot’s training, Rivaz was posted back to Britain – not, to his disgust, as a combat pilot, but to the forerunner of Transport Command. He survived the war. In October 1945 he was a passenger on a Liberator that crashed on takeoff from Melsbroek, now part of Brussels Airport. All 31 passengers and crew died, including Rivaz; he is buried in Brussels Town Cemetery.

Donahue stayed for some months in Ceylon, but in August 1942 he returned to Britain and was posted to 91 Squadron at his old airfield of Hawkinge in Kent. On September 5 he wrote to his family in Minnesota:

Well, I think my plans are definite enough for the next few months so I can risk telling you this much, that the chances are four to one that I’ll be with you for Christmas this year! I have the furlough coming and could take it now if I wished to, but prefer to wait until then. I hope to have a month in the States, possibly more, so don’t go planning any celebration but keep it in your hope chest anyway.

Five days later, on September 11, Art Donahue took off in his Spitfire to chase a Ju 88, which he caught; it later crash-landed in Belgium. But his own aircraft must have been damaged in the encounter, and a brief message was received saying that he was ditching off Gravelines. His body was never found.

Tail Gunner, Tally-Ho!: A Spitfire Pilot's Personal Account of the Battle of Britain and Last Flight from Singapore: The Gibraltar of the East are all available in e-book form Amazon and other retailers. They can usually also be found in printed form. The e-books of all three can be bought in an omnibus edition together with D.M. Cook’s Spitfire Pilot.

Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from 

most online retailers, including Amazon (UK and US).

War tour: The incredible journey of Ève Curie

In 1943 Ève Curie's Journey Among Warriors nearly won a Pulitzer. But it has vanished; forgotten, and never reprinted. Why? It is one of the best pieces of reportage to come out of the Second World War

Early one morning in November 1941, a Pan-American Airlines Clipper flying-boat lay moored at New York's La Guardia, preparing for an historic flight. Outside, reporters gathered and photographers’ flashbulbs split the predawn darkness. The Cape Town Clipper was to pioneer a new route for PAA, to British-controlled West Africa. The flight was not secret, but its purpose was not explicit. Many of the 58 passengers were young men who were more often in uniform, while others were logistics experts. The British had set up an air route to ferry planes across Africa to the desert war. Now PAA was quietly helping the British and the neutral governments to strengthen it from the west.

Ève Curie in London in 1937

In the darkness inside the plane was a passenger PAA preferred to keep hidden, as she was not supposed to be there. “We will carry you to Nigeria,” she had been told, “but just try to forget how you got there.”  It had not been hard to arrange. This petite, charming woman was extremely well-connected. A few weeks earlier she had met the Roosevelts at the White House, and the year before she had dined with Churchill at Chequers. A little after five on the morning of November 10, she was escorted on board. Between now and February, she intended to go round the world. She carried all the luggage she was permitted: 29lb (about 13kg), including a brown silk dress, a typewriter and a book called Brush Up Your Russian. 

She would not get round the world. But she would visit almost every major front, and would write a book, Journey Among Warriors, that would narrowly miss a Pulitzer. Today it is mostly forgotten, yet it is a wonderful piece of writing that bears extraordinary witness to the war and to those who fought it.

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Ève Curie was French, but was half-Polish; she spoke both languages. In November 1941 she was just short of her 37th birthday. Pictures and newsreels from the war years show her to have been slim and elegant, with striking dark eyes. Unlike her sister, Irène Joliot-Curie, she had never shown their famous mother Marie Curie’s aptitude for science. But as a child she had been a gifted pianist, such that Paderewski was impressed when she played for him aged six. As a young woman she gave concerts in Paris and elsewhere, but she does not appear to have felt herself good enough for a concert career. Instead she turned to journalism. After Marie Curie died in 1934, Ève wrote a biography of her that was extremely well-received and remains in print. By 1939 she was well-known in France and on the outbreak of war was co-opted into a senior post in the Ministry of Information.

Early in 1940 Curie visited the US, where she addressed audiences on France and the war. She seems to have made some impact, featuring on the cover of Time in February 1940. She then returned to France via Lisbon on another PAA flying boat (that time her luggage didn’t make it, being left on the quay by mistake; the moment she was told this was somehow captured by a Life photographer). She arrived back in Paris in June 1940 – and left again, this time in a hurry. Leaving Paris on June 11, Curie escaped from France a week later on board the P&O liner Madura, which had been diverted to pick up refugees from Bordeaux. She never wrote of this voyage so far as I know, but others did so; badly overloaded, the ship survived air attack and reached Falmouth two days later with about 1,400 refugees that included not only Curie but Baron Rothschild; also Hugh Carleton Greene and assorted other British journalists, some of whom had a bibulous voyage.*

One's luggage has been left behind (Bernard Hoffman/Life)

Curie spent some months in Britain, working with the Free French and also visiting the Free Poles, then returned to the United States. There was another lecture tour, and Eleanor Roosevelt gave a dinner at the White House in her honour. The woman who sat in the dark interior of the flying boat Cape Town Clipper in November 1941 was now an exile and a nomad, but she was a jolly well-connected one. She had been commissioned to write for the Herald Tribune and for a British group; she refers to the latter as Allied Newspapers, though in fact it was by then Kelmsley Newspapers. It included The Sunday Times and The Daily Sketch.

“This intrusion of mine in the Anglo-Saxon press, the best in the world, impressed me frightfully,” she wrote. “For the first time, also, I was to attempt to write a book in English.... The water whistled under us and we took off. New York, the United States, vanished in the chilly mist.” Ève Curie’s Journey Among Warriors had begun.

*

The length and complexity of that journey are lost on us now. The regular JetBlue service from JFK to Bermuda takes two hours and nine minutes; from New York to Banjul is about nine and a half hours. Curie’s Clipper took five hours to Bermuda and would take three days to reach Bathurst, as Banjul was then known, via Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Belém and Natal. Nonetheless Curie expressed a sense of wonder at arriving in Bathurst just three days after leaving New York, and at the time she was not wrong.  The huge British Short flying boats had shrunk the Eastern hemisphere, the even bigger American Clippers the Western. 

In West Africa Curie found the British busy shrinking Africa. There was a desperate need for planes to reinforce the Middle Eastern front. Quite early in the war they had started to ferry planes across from West Africa, and by 1941 the Americans were also heavily involved in the logistics. In fact, reading this book, one realises that the United States was just barely neutral. Had it still been neutral when Journey Among Warriors was published, she would, one assumes, have been much less frank about what she saw.

Curie is also frank about the differing views of her American travelling companions. On the flying boat a young Californian pilot tells her that the administration was “muddling into this war against the will of the people, when America is not menaced. ...A war with Japan?” he sneers. “It is not in the interest of our good friends the English, so the English will see to it that it does not happen.” Other pilots and Pan American staff express a very different view. One comments that America must organize a full-scale war industry without being at war, and wonders if that is possible. In less than a month this debate would end with Pearl Harbor, which none of Curie’s companions could have foreseen. But history is written by events, and only a book like this can show you the world before they occurred.

She moves east across the continent, on a succession of planes. It is as she crosses Nigeria that she starts to use her descriptive skills. In Kano:

It was market day. ...We made our way slowly, cutting through the throng of black Mohammedans wearing white robes and flat fezzes, of black women draped in a splendid, dark blue material that they wove themselves ...The deep red mud houses of the native town, which dated back to the fifteenth century ... were so much like an African legend that it was difficult to believe they were true. The edges and corners of their flat roofs were bristling with sharp protuberances pointing to the sky, and complicated carvings ornamented some of the doors. It was all very rough, savage and virile – indeed beautiful.

Éboué with de Gaulle (Wikimedia Commons)

A European’s Africa. Later, the British Resident introduces Curie to a man she describes as “the local Emir”. It is explained to him that her parents had discovered “a thing called radium”, which was “very important in science and medicine”. She continues:  “The black ruler worded his courteous answer so that we should not gather whether he had, or had not, heard of radium before.” He was almost certainly Abdullahi Bayero, who had reigned since 1926 and had considerable autonomy, which he used to encourage industry in Kano. He had also, early in his reign, provided water and electricity across the city although the colonial administration regarded it as too expensive; in fact he made it pay for itself.  I think he had probably heard of radium.

Curie wonders how much the people of Kano know and understand about the war. She comments that educated Africans “were keenly aware – much more so than the Arabs – of what Hitler’s racial theories had in store for coloured people.” This is quite possible, but one wonders how she knew. But the fact is that in 1941 many Europeans would not have asked themselves these questions, or cared greatly about the answers. It is also clear that Curie has no time for the colour bar. It is a matter of pride for her that the Governor of the French colony of Chad, Félix Éboué, is black, born in Martinique, she says (wrongly; he was born in French Guiana). It is because Éboué has declared for de Gaulle that the crucial air route was possible; had he sided with Vichy, it could not have crossed Chad. Curie does not meet Éboué, and sadly he would die of a heart attack in Cairo not long after Journey Among Warriors was published.

*

Curie pushes on across the desert with BOAC, the forerunner to British Airways, arriving eventually in in Cairo soon after the beginning of Operation Crusader, Auchinleck’s offensive against Rommel, which had begun on November 18 and appeared to be going well. Curie wanted to go to the front and see the fighting. “No woman,” she writes, “foreign or British, had ever been allowed in the Western Desert so far ...the military men to whom I spoke did not seem to think that to send me to the front was the most urgent war measure that ought to be taken.”  They might have been right.  

However, as always, Curie is well-connected. She is staying with diplomat Michael Wright, who has been a friend when  posted in Paris, and who she describes as “now secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo” (actually he was First Secretary and would later, as Sir Michael Wright, serve as ambassador to Iraq).  She also had “off the record” talks with a number of “the great and the good”, including Air Marshal Tedder, who commanded the RAF in the Middle East;  Sir Walter Monckton, a future Minister of Defence who was head of propaganda in Cairo; and Oliver Lyttleton, Minister of State in the Middle East. “In the preceding twelve hours,” she writes, quite a few obstacles to my trip had been levelled.”  She is told Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son, will pick her up at seven. “Now remember,” says Lyttleton at dinner, “I have not heard that you are going to the desert tomorrow.”  One wonders how the old-fashioned war correspondents feel about this. Moreover, while Curie is never afraid to be near the fighting, she does not always seem to think too hard whether she might cause complications there. This was especially so in the desert, where the situation could change rapidly in a few hours – as she and Churchill would soon find; Operation Crusader has stumbled somewhat, and communiques describe the situation as “confused” as both sides used armoured columns to probe each other’s defences.

Every group of men we met ...had the same story to tell ...It amounted to: “There was a battle of tanks. The Germans crashed through our formations. We got lost.” Then, invariably, the men asked us how they could return to their unit.  ...We did not even know our own way.

On a sandy airstrip in the middle of nowhere Curie interviews young pilots as they leap out of their Hurricanes and Tomahawks. “One could see that their guns had been used. The men were gay and excited, also tired, somewhat out of breath. They looked like jockeys after a winning race.” She cannot get them to take themselves seriously, and seems to like them for it. There is some surprise at seeing a woman in the desert. A Polish pilot standing beside his Hurricane is even more surprised to be addressed in Polish, then announces he has read her book. A German pilot who has been taken prisoner is puzzled that she is French.  “He turned toward me and said severely: ...”May I know what Marshal Pétain would think of a Frenchwoman being here with the British? He would not be too pleased, I suppose!”

The Free French are a recurring theme in this book. Curie clearly prefers them to the British; but they were, after all, her people, and she was in exile. They were also a reminder that the humiliation of the surrender had not been total, because some Frenchmen had decided to fight on. When she talks of the Allied invasion of Syria, the fact that British forces were also involved is hardly mentioned, but perhaps she can be excused for that; the Free French had to shoot at other Frenchmen. But some British soldiers will also have found that hard. John Verney, who took part in the invasion as part of a Yeomanry regiment, later wrote that he only cried once in the war, after a bad day’s fighting in Syria.

Curie and her party emerge unscathed from the desert; the only casualty is Randolph Churchill’s silver whisky flask, crushed by someone’s typewriter. It would perhaps have helped had this happened more often in his life. (Curie mentions that only the unexpected presence of Auchinleck could shut him up.) By this stage of the book one is getting a better picture of Curie. It is a mixed one. She shows a touch of French chauvinism, yet also has great  charm and poise that she clearly uses, along with a massive social network, to get help from the English who (at least collectively) she does not really like. But she is also shrewd, and, although writing in wartime, honest; she is quite frank about the Allies’ problems with the Arabs, for example. In fact her political antennae seem unusually sharp. Moreover she clearly has some quite serious balls. To be sure, she pulled strings to get into the desert, but her drive to see the war, and to share its discomforts, was real. As for the bulging contact book, it would have been useless without enterprise. She shows this in her next port of call – Tehran, where she meets the new ruler of Iran.

*

In December 1941 Tehran (Curie spells it Teheran) was a very strange place. It was neutral, but pro-German rumblings, and the need to open a supply route to Russia, had led the British to invade it in August. In this they had the help of their new Soviet allies, who took over the north-west of the country. In the process the British deposed and deported the ruler of Iran, who had come to power in 1921 and had himself made monarch, or Shah, in 1925. His 21-year-old son was placed on the throne in his stead. Iran found itself under much the same position as Egypt: nominally independent and neutral, but under the thumb of the British, and humiliated. A few weeks later the Ambassador in Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, with whom Curie had lately lunched in Cairo, would force King Farouk (the young Shah's brother-in-law) virtually at gunpoint to dismiss his government. These are incidents that the British have forgotten; the Egyptians and Iranians have not. But they paved the way for much that has followed since.

Curie was not the first Allied journalist to interview the new Shah; in fact not the first woman journalist. That had been the gutsy English reporter Clare Hollingworth, who in 1939 had been the first to report that the Germans were about to invade Poland. Hollingworth had interviewed the young Shah very soon after the invasion the previous August. She seems to have got little from him, not least because he then spoke no English; he had been educated in French. Curie does seem to have warmed to him, perhaps for that reason:

...a tall, thin boy of twenty-two, clad in a pale green officer’s uniform. He had black, curly hair, thick eyebrows. In his handsome face, the eyes were very dark, sensitive and proud, the features sharp, the nose high-bridged. The Sovereign of Iran [was] as graceful as the oriental princes about whom I had read when I was a child.

The Shah with Queen Fawziah (Imperial War Museum/Cecil Beaton)

Curie finds the young Shah unsure of himself: “He often left a sentence in suspense, as though he found it unwise to express his whole thought about a subject about which he felt strongly.” He had, says Curie, just gone through a disturbing chain of events, being dragged onto the throne by the British on the same day that they sent his father, who he admired, into exile in Mauritius. Curie senses strongly how upset the new Shah still is about this. One wonders if anyone else did. The quiet young man who has been educated in Switzerland has found himself nominally in charge of a country that was in reality occupied by two ruthless empires. At one point he asks Curie what the world thinks of Iran’s “non-resistance” to the invading powers (in fact there has been a little limited resistance). “I was almost sure to make a blunder, whatever I answered,” writes Curie. She answers sincerely that her own country is overrun by Germans and that she would be delighted to have the Allies there temporarily instead, just as they now occupied Iran. The Shah accepts this eagerly, saying that it has been to avoid “the fate of countries doomed by Hitler” that Iran has accepted “the present arrangement”. It is a revealing interview; as with so much in this book, Curie seems to perceive the future implications of what she hears and sees in ways that others perhaps do not.

In one respect, the Shah does disappoint Curie. “It was amazing,” she writes, “to come all the way to Iran, a country of glamour, of legends, and to be received by the Shah in a dull office that could just as well have been located in the Rockefeller Center.” In this, Clare Hollingworth had fared better. The shah had “welcomed me in a small study ...where he had a range of bound books on military history and strategy.” Invited to stay to lunch, she “rather cheekily compared the ‘flash’ entrance hall of the palace to a Lyon’s Corner House.” The Shah takes this as a compliment and later asks her if she really thinks it is that good. Hollingworth would see the Shah change, for she would interview him again several times, in Tehran and finally in Marrakesh in 1979 after he, too had been sent into exile.  Yet there is something poignant about Ève Curie’s description of a young man adrift in a new world that foreshadows the struggle he would have to make sense of it.

*

But Curie does not intend to stay in Tehran. She has an appointment in Samara.

The central Russian city of Samara had since 1935 been known as Kuybyshev, in memory of an old revolutionary who had died that year, although probably not accidentally. Since October it has been the administrative capital of the Soviet Union; the embassies, government departments and much of Moscow’s industry have been evacuated there as the Germans surround Moscow (where Stalin has remained). A Russian-crewed DC3 is said to travel between Kuybyshev and Tehran, but Curie’s foreign friends assure her it is semi-mythical. After several weeks’ wait she is summoned to the airport, to the jeers of fellow-guests at her hotel, who assure her she will be back for lunch. She is not.

It is about 1,750 miles (over 2,800km) from Tehran, and it is the depths of winter. After an overnight stop in Baku (where Curie joins the locals for a well-attended opera), the plane pushes north via Astrakhan, and the temperature starts to drop. It can be below -40 deg F/-40 deg C in Kuybyshev in January; Curie is going to experience that in a hotel room with no heating. But she will also see what it means to fight a war in this weather. Just to keep machinery going is hard, and the crew must drain the oil from the engines at night, heat it and pour it back warm in the morning; charcoal stoves burn under the engines to stop them freezing. Coal stoves are used in the ambulances that bring wounded soldiers from the front. It is in Russia that Curie’s writing starts to reach heights that mark Journey Among Warriors as one of the greatest war books of all time, and for the rest of the book, the standard never drops.  

Lepeshinskaya in Don Quixote, 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)

It is clear to her that that the USSR is engaged in total war.  In a hospital she meets General Timofev Korniev, who has been badly wounded in the defence of Smolensk. Asked what he regards as the most important factor in resisting invasion, he cites the cooperation of civiliansand the fact that he could give orders to them too. Curie meets, too, the USSR’s preeminent ballerina, Olga Lepeshinskaya, who is also mobilized; she is secretary of the Anti-fascist Youth Committee. Beautiful, committed, urgent, she tells Curie, “I am twenty-five – about the age of the Soviet regime.  I am a daughter of the October Revolution I have never known anything else than the fight of the Russian people against capitalism and fascism.” One wonders if Curie gulps a little at this, but she accepts an invitation to a children’s party, where Lepeshinskaya will dance for the young evacuees:

She wore a short white tunic, white and supple, and had a red flower in her hair. She looked herself like a happy child. ...The floor was rough, the spotlights were all wrong, and the accompaniment ...of the poorest sort. Lepeshinskaya did not seem to care. ...She danced the most difficult steps with a delighted smile, ...as if she felt like leaping higher and whirling much faster still. She was a skilled virtuoso, and she was Youth herself.

The next morning Curie leaves for Moscow.

*

As always, Curie wanted to reach the front. No-one from the Press Corps had, and in Russia her society links were of little use to her. But the name Marie Curie was. On January 15 1942 her daughter Ève and her Russian companions drive out of Moscow in search of the fighting. This had come very close to Moscow in December, but the Germans were ill-equipped for winter and had been driven back by a determined counter-offensive.The Red Army was now hoping to retake Mozhaisk, about 70 miles west of the city. Its strategic position on the east-west highway meant that this would end the battle for Moscow.

Curie records a mass of evocative detail. There are the destroyed houses of which only the stove and chimney remain; there are soldiers on skis, stranded tanks, the skeleton of a crashed plane, men fishing for mines. Destroyed bridges are being replaced with wooden ones that the engineers throw together with manic speed, using tree-trunks hauled by peasants. German corpses lie scattered in the snow (Curie takes a close look at a few, but is warned not to touch them; they are sometimes mined). The destruction left by the retreating Germans appalls Curie. In one town of nine thousand people, Istra, just three houses are left standing. People from the town tell Curie that the Germans had forced them into the centre of the town as targets for the Russian shelling, and then lobbed grenades into the houses on their way out. In Volokolokamsk, 80 miles from Moscow, the Germans have burned the monastery, the School of Agriculture and the children’s hospital. Late in January Mozhaisk does fall, and Curie enters it soon afterwards. The first person she meets is a wailing young girl who tells her that the Germans had driven two hundred people into the cathedral and blown it up. The general in charge, one Leonid A. Govorov, confirms to Curie that this has occurred.

I can’t find any reference to this incident. But that does not mean it did not happen. Certainly Govorov was real enough (he would eventually take charge of the Leningrad Front, and finished the war as a Marshal of the Soviet Union).  Maybe the dead of Mozhaisk were, in the end, part of a catalogue of destruction so long that some items have been lost in the intervening years. In general, Curie seems reliable. To be sure, she had no love of the Germans. But crude propaganda was not for her, and she wasn’t afraid to argue with her Soviet hosts about politics. The Russian passages, like the rest of the book, have a ring of truth.

But there is a curious coda to her trip to the front. Near Volokolokamsk she interviews one Major General A.A. Vlasov, “one of the young army leaders whose fame was rapidly growing ...in the USSR.”  Vlasov hasn’t slept for five days but is hospitable and enthusiastic, showing Curie some of the regimental emblems and Iron Crosses that his men have captured, and gifts sent to him by the admiring people of the USSR – including an inscribed wristwatch.  Then he takes a large map and a pencil and shows Curie how the campaign has been fought.  Curie is impressed:

There was something very stimulating in talking with this energetic man, completely obsessed by his hard job. ...He kept muttering: “Everybody, everybody, must fight the fascists.”  Here was a man who waged war with something more than determination, something more than courage: he waged it with passion.

Vlasov with Himmler, 1943

But Vlasov was to go over to the Fascists. Captured in July 1942, he changed sides in captivity and by the time Journey Among Warriors was published in 1943, he had already written a pamphlet describing his reasons for joining the fight against Bolshevism. Later he would try to recruit an army from Soviet prisoners – with limited success, for the German high command never really trusted him. At war’s end he was arrested by the Red Army near Dresden; tried the following year, he was hung on August 1 1946. Vlasov’s treachery was to become notorious, but it is possible that Curie did not yet know of it in 1943. She was later to say that he was not the same Vlasov she had met near Volokolokamsk. But he was. So it is hard to know if she was being disingenuous, or whether she sincerely believed that the two men could not possibly be the same. My guess is the latter.

For the most part, though, Curie is not credulous. She admires the Soviet war effort but has not forgotten the Nazi-Soviet pact, and reminds her hosts of it now and then. And she has not forgotten the Poles. In Kuybyshev she spends time with the Polish ambassador, who is trying to find out what has happened to a staggering one million Poles who are believed to be in the USSR. They are no longer its enemies, and are now supposed to be set free or allowed to join one of the new Polish units training in Russia under the Polish General Anders.

Nobody said much. In Russia, amid the resuscitated Poles, I was learning an unusual kind of restraint. Men who had suffered extreme hardships ...[and] had chosen to join their former jailers in the struggle against Germany ...felt they were the best judges of what the ...attitude towards Russia should be.

Curie does not mention the Katyn massacre of 1940, when the Soviets murdered thousands of Polish prisoners of war. But it was not widely known of in 1942 (a neutral mission would go to Katyn at the instigation of the Germans the following year). She does know, however, that there are Poles scattered in towns and camps all over Siberia. The Soviets say they cannot help locate them all because they have simply lost track of them. Unbelievably, this seems to have been true; Curie meets a young man attached to the Embassy who wanders round isolated towns with a Polish eagle on his coat, finding Poles in rags everywhere, and making them help him find more.

*

From victory Curie goes to defeat. The British and their allies will win the war in Burma in the end, but in February 1942 they are retreating, and will soon lose the entire country.

Burmese refugees flee north, 1942 (Imperial War Museum)

Curie flies on a Chinese airliner to Lashio in the Northern Shan States, and then battles her way south by train and car towards the advancing Japanese against the tide of humanity fleeing in the opposite direction. In Rangoon (now Yangon) she finds quiet panic. Nothing works; shops are closed and the hotel staff have fled. The roads are crowded with refugees. She pushes onto the front with an Indian liaison officer, and interviews exhausted soldiers five miles from the fighting. A young British officer politely offers her tea, insisting that she have another biscuit. They are surrounded by teak trees, and an overwhelming silence. She returns to Rangoon, where the British governor of Burma, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, insists they plan to hold the city. But Curie has been in France in 1940 and can smell defeat. Rangoon falls three weeks later.

She is not polite about the British in Burma. “They did not, like the Russians, face the most appalling battles with an insane determination to win. They fought, and gave their lives, with something like resignation,” she says.  One wonders if she misunderstood something here. If he knows he must die, a Russian blesses the Fatherland; an Englishman returns his library books. But she may have been right about the civilians in the East, who she thought did not understand how the world, and their own country, had changed. In particular, she notes the colour bar. It distresses her Indian liaison officer, a volunteer who is committed to Allied victory but does not understand why he can’t go into a restaurant with a white man. As Norman Mailer was to write years later, British snobbery was forever building empires, then buggering them. At the same time, however, Curie seems bemused to find that Mr Porter, the Commissioner for the Shan States, who is her host in Lashio, is half-Burmese. (This will have been Arthur William Porter. He has been made an OBE some years earlier, though Curie won’t have known that. Sadly history records little else of him.)

The collapse in Burma has been very bad luck for a major ally, China. In April Lashio will fall, cutting the 700-mile Burma Road that linked it with Kunming in Yunnan. It also opens another front where Chinese troops will have to fight. They have in fact been fighting since 1937.

Madam Chiang returns to Wellesley, 1943

As Beijing (then known in the West as Peking) fell early on, the provisional capital is in Chongqing (again, then known as Chungking). Curie flies there from Lashio, again on China National Airways.  As usual, she meets everybody. Now China at last has friends in the war, but they have disappointed her, and Curie hears rude things said of Pearl Harbor, Burma and Singapore. She also meets Chiang Kai-Shek and Chou En-Lai. Yet it is not her interviews with them that are memorable – or even her meeting with Madam Chiang (Soong Mei-ling), who, intriguingly, is very American and has been educated at Wellesley, graduating from it 52 years before Hillary Clinton, who she seems to have resembled.

What is striking about Curie’s chapters on China is, first of all, her descriptive powers, evident in her picture of Chongqing, a very different city from the modern metropolis of 18.4 million. The second is Curie’s acute sense of the future. A prominent Chinese businessman takes her to see China’s one and only Bessemer converter in action.

Both the workers and the engineers were obviously thrilled when ...the one and only Bessemer converter poured dazzling white steel, as fluid as milk ...The men who handled the containers full of liquid metal were barefoot ...They wore dirty shirts or overalls and, for some unknown reason, round straw hats. To be sure, they did not go about their job with the routine precision that was the rule at Detroit or Birmingham. Yet the work was being done. Steel was actually being produced.

As I write this, the last British blast furnace is about to be shut down and Chinese steel is glutting the world markets. But Curie would not have been surprised. “This was a solemn moment in the history of Free China,” says Curie, and goes on to wonder whether the Chinese would “make the jump from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century without breaking their necks, ...or whether they definitely needed a transition period.”  

For the moment, an older China holds sway. On a visit to a military academy in Chengtu, she is told that it does have some tanks, “behind the dispensary”. On the way back the car breaks down in the countryside. In search of food, she walks to a mud house where she finds “a half-crippled woman with a frightening face; one of her eyes was enormous, entirely red and blind. She looked like a Cyclops in a fairy tale.” The party stop overnight in a village where she sleeps on a “bamboo mat in a wretched hovel ...For some unknown reason a dead squirrel was hanging on the door handle. When I first grabbed it in the dark, I did not find this a very exciting welcome.”

*

But the next chapter opens with Curie staying in the colonial splendour of Government House, Calcutta. It was once the residence of the Viceroy; the capital had moved some years before to Delhi, but it was still the home of the Governor of Bengal, Sir John Herbert, of whom she was a guest. There are no dead squirrels here.

The last 100 pages of this long book are amongst the most extraordinary, and of the most interest to an historian. Up to now, Curie has given us vivid descriptions of the fighting fronts, their hinterlands and the swarm of soldiers, technicians and engineers united in the war on fascism. But although she has met many people of importance, they have not always told her much; or more likely they have, but it has been in confidence. India is different. In Delhi, a week or two hence, she will alternate between the residences of the current Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, and the Commander in Chief of the Asian theatre, General Wavell.

Linlithgow she describes as: “A tall man, with long arms, long legs, and a remarkably long head.” She finds him modest and shy. History has not been kind to Linlithgow; he is remembered for bringing India into the Second World War without consulting Indian politicians (he was not obliged to join the war; the Raj was a separate entity under the Crown). He is also remembered for his failure to respond adequately to the appalling Bengal famine of 1943. It is said that he had been exhausted by his long tenure as Viceroy and had already asked to be released. But Curie will have known nothing of this. In any case, she devotes more space to Wavell, who will eventually succeed Linlithgow and will be the last real Viceroy. As such, he will start by taking more vigorous action to address the famine (which nonetheless is to cost millions of lives).  But he will also struggle to find common ground with the Indian leaders and, even more, between them. For the moment, however, that lies in the future. For now, Wavell’s problems are solely military.

Wavell as Viceroy (Imperial War Museum)

Wavell has a reputation for taciturnity, but Curie finds that when he does speak, he is frank and sometimes very charming. She does not mention that he also writes poetry (he will later edit an anthology of other people’s). Neither does she mention that he has recently suffered a serious back injury; an odd omission – it had occurred while he was boarding a flying boat at Singapore a few days before it fell. But she clearly likes Wavell, and history suggests that she is right.

However, Curie is in the unique position of being able to talk not only to the British high command but to the leaders of the Indian independence movement. In view of this, Curie’s portrait of them is of enduring interest. It is “easy to get to see Jawaharlal Nehru, because he was utterly natural and simple and because he liked people.”

How did Nehru look? Like a handsome prince in a fairy tale. ...He was clad in graceful Indian clothes ...He was slim and rather short.  ...What made him unforgettable was not only that he had dark, beautiful eyes and regular features. It was that, on his very pale and sensitive face, one could almost read his thoughts and guess what his mood was: gay or gloomy. His was a romantic face; also a witty one. It changed quickly, like the sky on a windy day.

Curie stays with Nehru in Allahabad. The family is immersed in preparations for Nehru’s daughter’s wedding. Curie does talk to her, briefly; one wonders what she might have asked Indira had she known that she would one day be the most powerful woman on earth. However, her extensive conversations with Nehru are riveting. In particular, Nehru is, in many ways, an upper-class Englishman; yet he is fighting an emotional battle for India’s separation. Yet it is clear that Nehru is himself very aware of this paradox and even amused by it. Also, he does not reduce imperialism to the idea of Empire; the concept of economic imperialism, as practised by the United States, is quite clear to him. Neither has he any illusions about the nature of Japanese imperialism. It is clear that Curie likes Nehru, and again, one feels that she is right.

Cripps with Gandhi (Imperial War Museum)

Curie comes to Delhi at a crucial juncture in India’s history: Sir Stafford Cripps is bringing a set of proposals for the country’s leaders. Although she doesn’t find out until later, they are an explicit statement of intent that India will become independent at the end of hostilities, and that although she will have Dominion status like Canada or Australia, she will be able to modify that if she chooses. Curie has the curious task of interviewing Jinnah and Gandhi when they know the contents of the proposals, and she does not (the Indian leaders will eventually reject them). With Jinnah, the conversation is one-way. That with Gandhi is far more interesting. He is welcoming and thoughtful. Curie presses him hard on his doctrine of non-violence. His response is courteous and shows great internal logic, yet seems, to her, ultimately sterile:

I mentioned ...the Poles who, by their heroism on countless battlefields, kept their invaded country alive – the Poles who had even accepted to fight at the side of the Russians, their former oppressors, in order to liberate their fatherland. ...He dismissed the Poles, not without disdain, by saying: ‘They are a race of fighters who have not the slightest notion of what a philosophy such as non-violence consists of. To fight is their only way of expressing themselves.”

To Curie, who was half-Polish, this must have struck a rotten note. She urges Gandhi to accept that non-violence will not protect India from invasion. He replies – one suspects, with a certain hauteur – that the Japanese would be no worse than the British. It is an attitude that Curie finds infuriating amongst Indian leaders. They have, she reflects, a relatively free press. They are also able to take part in politics; the British had by then introduced elections and limited self-government in most of India. Curie is not uncritical of the Raj, pointing to the medieval poverty that existed within its borders. It also seems clear that, in the long run, her sympathies lie with independence. But when she hears Indians say that British, Japanese and German oppression are the same, she is appalled. She notes that she is able to buy “two or three vitriolic volumes denouncing the sins of the British imperialists” in a bookshop, from an English clerk.

*

This long, final part of Journey Among Warriors that deals with India is fascinating, even compulsive, reading. It is especially so when Curie writes of Wavell, Gandhi and Nehru, air-raid drills in Calcutta, old-school expats mouldering in their clubs while other, younger men have come from Britain to forge weapons of war. Why has this book been neglected by historians?

Journey Among Warriors was published in 1943, in British and American editions. It attracted some interest, and Curie was in contention for a Pulitzer, but was beaten by the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The book was not reprinted after the war, apart from a French edition in 1947. It has since vanished.

Perhaps readers would find it a strange book now; the modern style of travel writing is as much about the writer as their environment, a sort of confessional. Curie belonged to a less self-indulgent age. And yet she is there in the book if you look for her. Now and then one is reminded how she must have felt. In Kaduna, Nigeria:

Suddenly, I felt very much alone among all these Englishmen. The frame of British life was universal and immense. All over the world, an Englishman could meet other Englishmen who shared his own ideas and habits, possibly his prejudices, who spoke the same language as he, with the same instinctive affectations, and who, most probably, knew one of his cousins or his brother-in-law.

Meanwhile Curie had been stripped of her citizenship (and her flat) by the Vichy government in May 1941. She had no idea when, or even if, she would return to France. She could take little pleasure in the splendour that sometimes surrounded her. On the mountainous Trans-Iranian railway: “A fringe of countless black sheep edged for an instant, against the dazzling sky, the silhouette of a steep rocky hill. Spring was there already – another war spring – and to me this was strangely sad and pathetic.” Travelling from Lashio to Mandalay, she is dazzled by the beauty of Burma: “Only the road told us of the retreat ...On both sides of us, defiantly spread under our eyes, was the most beautiful country in the world, which the war affected in no way and which knew nothing of our feuds. ...We passed silvery rice fields, then a swift river with jade-green waters.” In Lashio, soon to fall to the enemy, she has breakfast on the porch of Porter’s residence, the bright sun lighting the green hills around and the garden full of “red, exotic flowers ...It was one of those radiant mornings which seem to be the negation of everything cruel and gloomy.” Yet her job “constantly compelled me to leave the pleasant spots of the world ...in order to get to the ones where there was trouble.” In Allahabad she rests on the veranda of Nehru’s house, hearing the wedding preparations around her, and realises that, for the first time in months, she is in a real home. But this too she must leave.

Hermione Ranfurly, who met Curie in Algiers later in the war, describes her in To War with Whitaker as extremely intelligent, multilingual with perfect English, and also very pretty, but “rather serious”. The pictures and newsreels confirm that Curie was very attractive, and her English was indeed near-perfect. Mlle Curie was soigné, elegant, self-possessed, charming, and extremely well-connected, but also, one suspects, self-contained. She had many friends but was also alone, France and family lost, travelling the world like a restless spirit. One imagines her at dinner with the Minister of State or the Viceroy or the Commander-in-Chief or Randolph Churchill, the latter braying at someone to pass the salt; and suddenly one knows that sometimes, when no-one was looking, her gaze would fix itself on a wall or a painting, and she would not be there.

Early in Journey Among Warriors Curie is in the desert with Churchill and a “lean, good-looking” officer approaches:

He said: ‘Don’t you remember? We dined together in Paris, at Vera M---’s, and she gave us heaps of caviar.’ ...Several times, in the desert, it so happened that I ...heard a refined, slightly affected voice say to me: “How very nice to see you here! We haven’t met since that luncheon at the Ritz’ ...Somehow, I felt that the Ritz, and the occasional caviar, and everything pleasantly artificial  ...on both sides of the Channel, had very logically led us all here – to this bare land where the steel monsters, methodically built for years by the Germans, were now trying to take our lives.

Curie was finished with caviar. By the time Journey Among Warriors was published, she had joined the Free French army. When Ranfurly met her in Algiers, she was a lieutenant in the medical corps, and had served in Italy. In 1944 she was awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the war she worked in journalism in France and later as special assistant to the first Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Ismay. In 1954, now nearly 50, she married American diplomat Henry Labouisse, who became head of UNWRA and later UNICEF, a post he held until 1979. During his tenure Curie devoted herself to travelling and working for UNICEF, an organization with which she had already been involved, and to which she showed enormous commitment. Labouisse died in 1987. Curie, however, lived to be a very old woman indeed. In December 2004 she celebrated her 100th birthday, an occasion marked by a visit to her New York flat by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.The following year she was made an Officer of the Légion d’Honneur in a ceremony at UNICEF House.

Among her many achievements, Curie left behind two books. One, her biography of her mother, is in print to this day. (There is also apparently now a biography of Ève herself, though so far in French only**). But Journey Among Warriors has vanished, forgotten, never reprinted. Why? It is one of the most extraordinary pieces of reportage to come out of the Second World War.

Ève Denise Curie Labouisse died in New York on October 22 2007, six weeks short of her 103rd birthday. She had lived an immensely full life; concert pianist, journalist, socialite, war correspondent, public servant and diplomat. She had much to remember. But one wonders if, towards the end, she thought sometimes of the long journey by flying boat, the cold night in the Western Desert, the grandeur of the Viceregal residence, or the booby-trapped dead Germans in the snow; or of late nights talking with Wavell or Nehru; arguing with Gandhi; the silence of the teak forests; or the red, exotic flowers in a garden where she sat wishing she could enjoy them, if only the war would end.

* According to Daphne Wall, who as a child was amongst the English refugees on board (Wall, D.: The World I Lost: A Memoir of Peace and War, 2014).

** Monteil, Claudine: Eve Curie: L'autre fille de Pierre et Marie Curie, Odile Jacob, 2016. As previous books by Monteil, a feminist intellectual and diplomat, have been published in English, one hopes that this will be too.

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Mike Robbins's own collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.