The title of Virginia Cowles’ memoir as a war correspondent neatly covers the contents. “Looking for Trouble” (1941) is exactly what this enterprising young female American journalist has been doing between 1937, covering the Spanish civil war, and 1941, when she wrote this book in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain. In between, she has travelled to Germany, to then-Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania, covering the advance of German troops, to Finland to write about the Finnish-Russian war, to Russia and Ukraine, to Rome, and to France at the moment that Paris is being abandoned. She has been at each and every significant event of war-torn Europe at the time, it seems, and she has been really there, at the front line, with the soldiers, frequently in quite hazardous circumstances that would be unthinkable in today’s war coverage. It helps that Ms Cowles seems to know everybody, and whenever necessary seems to be able to call on friends, diplomats and further connections all over Europe, as well as in the UK. She meets Chamberlain and Churchill, she manages to interview Mussolini, and casually lunches and dines with an array of other important people. If you wouldn’t know better, she might have been a spy, and occasionally she is treated like one, only to be saved by her press credentials – or by yet other friends at influential places.
This is a fabulous eye witness account of a period in European history which we all know about, but never imagined it to be as Ms Cowles describes it. All the more valuable, because she wrote the book in 1941, without hindsight, still fresh from memory. Entertaining, although that is perhaps not the appropriate word for the subject matter. Oh, and at times eerily comparable to what the world is experiencing, right now…
RSS – Posts
