After checking into a prominent Madrid hotel in March 1937, Virginia Cowles quickly realizes her rookie mistake: “My room at the Hotel Florida was on the fourth floor,” she recalls of her early days as a war correspondent. “People who knew their stuff lived as close to the ground as possible to get to safety quickly in the event of an air raid.” After all, Franco’s troops stand in front of the city and bomb it daily. Madrid will endure another two years in the most adverse conditions, until it finally falls into the hands of the nationalists.
He saw through Mussolini’s megalomania
Virginia Cowles has long moved on. As a foreign correspondent for NBC, the BBC and the Sunday Times, she paints portraits of the inner workings of dictatorships in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. She witnesses the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, she visits the freezing Northern Front during the Russo-Finnish Winter War, and she, in turn, escapes the Nazis in one of the last cars in Paris. The Spanish experiences have sharpened their perspective considerably.
Cowles saw through Mussolini’s megalomania, showed himself impervious to communist illusions and – unlike many high-ranking statesmen he met for tea here and there – did not cave in to German peace protests. The extent of the Nazi propaganda illusion is finally revealed to her in Nuremberg. At an inn, enthusiastic party delegates clawed their hands in front of Cowles and colleagues over Hitler’s alleged pacifism. If war breaks out, it will only be because of foreign provocations! “They’re like children,” a French correspondent for the group observed after the group of journalists left the bar with trepidation. “Can someone tell me why they let them play with guns?”
A monument to Churchill
In just five years, which elapsed before “Looking For Trouble” was written in 1941, the young American blossomed from a politically rather indifferent fashion journalist to an analytically infallible first-rate contemporary witness. His book is a large-scale travelogue across a crumbling continent. The staunch democrat saw it primarily as a plea to her compatriots to join Britain in the war against the Axis powers. She has felt connected to the Empire since she was a child. She is a monument to the stoic perseverance of the British and above all to wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Unfortunately, this praise can also be read as an apology for England’s colonial history.
It remains to be seen whether an awareness of the problem would have arisen here if Cowles’s memoirs had been written years after the end of the war and not during it. The same goes for his judgment of the Germans, which turns out to be more lenient than that of his enlightened comrade-in-arms Lee Miller. However, the Wehrmacht’s eastern campaign and the Holocaust were yet to come.
Understand how ideologies work
Cowles differs from her war reporter friend Martha Gellhorn in her aesthetic approach, she avoids overly drastic depictions of violence. “No description, however detailed, does justice to the cruelty and suffering,” she said during the air war over London.
Instead, Cowles creates atmospheres of extreme oppression, but also knows how to loosen them with humorous anecdotes when the time comes. He never abandons his refined sense of language. He wanted to portray the human side of war, understand the nature and functioning of ideologies, focus on the immense psychological pressure he puts on the civilian population. He does it brilliantly.
