Peggy’s War
PEGGY HULL HEARD THE NEWS of V-E Day on a static-filled radio in the orderly room at a location she described in her dateline only as “A Little Army Camp in the South Seas.” She and “her boys” found it hard to get too excited about the news. Hull had lived alongside the young soldiers for several months, roughing it, as she wrote to a friend, “in a hut in an army camp—sleeping on a canvas cot—running out of doors to a latrine and a shower shed quite a distance away—plowing through dust one day and mud the next.” Some of the soldiers had been at their stations for more than three years, longer than any American forces had been in the European theater. The most they were hoping for was that Germany’s surrender would free up forces to support them. As Hull reminded her American readers, “It is over on that side of the world, but it is not over, over here.”
Yet “over here” was exactly where Hull wanted to be. During World War II, new opportunities opened up for women in the newspaper business as men left to become soldiers or war correspondents. With publishers desperate to fill the vacant positions, women reporters made the leap from the society page to the front page. By 1943, newspaper staffs in smaller American cities were 50 percent female. Some women worked as copy editors and typesetters. Some ran presses. But almost 130 found their way overseas as war correspondents.
At 54, Peggy Hull was determined to be one of them. The first woman accredited as a war correspondent by the U.S. military, she had already reported on four armed conflicts between 1916 and 1932, often traveling alongside the soldiers, and she was eager to get back into the game. As Hull told a reporter for Editor & Publisher shortly after she arrived in the Pacific theater, “I’ll never tire of doing this work, and as long as we have American boys in isolated parts of the world, I want to write their story for them.”
IN 1905, 16-YEAR-OLD Henrietta Goodnough applied for a reporting job at the Junction City Sentinel, a small-town paper in her native Kansas. The editor told her he didn’t need another reporter, but if she didn’t care about the condition of her fingernails and was willing to set type, she had a job. She took it. Two weeks later, she received her first reporting assignment.
Over the next 10 years, she moved from newspaper to newspaper, chasing opportunities and, for a time, following her first husband, a charming journalist with a drinking problem named George Hull, whom she married in 1910 and divorced six years later. She worked at newspapers in small towns and big cities in Colorado, California, Hawaii, Ohio, and Minnesota. Her editor in
