Journey Among Warriors is a book of war reportage by the French-American journalist and writer Ève Curie, first published in 1943, in which the author described her experiences during her trip to Africa, the Near East, Soviet Union, China, Burma and India, where she traveled from November 1941 to April 1942.
Origin of the book
The author of Journey Among Warriors, French pianist, journalist and writer Ève Curie (daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie), fled to the United Kingdom after the surrender of France in June 1940, where she joined the Free French Forces and General Charles de Gaulle. She fought Nazism mainly as a journalist, publishing articles and giving lectures. She spent the war years mostly in Britain and the United States, writing articles for New York Herald Tribune.
In November 1941, her employers – Herald Tribune Syndicate from New York City and Allied Newspapers Limited from London – decided to send Ève Curie as a reporter on a journey to the countries in which warfare had already been waging. Ève was to visit Africa, the Near East, the Soviet Union, China and to return via Singapore, the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco to the East Coast of the US, her planned journey being, in fact, a trip around the world.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 resulted in modifying these plans. After Ève Curie had reached China, she could not continue her journey to Singapore, which had already been taken by the Japanese, so she returned, also via Asia and Africa, to the US. She systematically wrote reports from the journey to the newspapers which employed her, and on the basis of these reports, the book Journey Among Warriors was published in 1943.
Synopsis Journey Among Warriors consists of five parts, each describing one stage in the author's journey.
Part I – Africa
Ève Curie's journey started on November 10, 1941Ève Curie, Journey Among Warriors, Garden City, New York 1943, p. 1. when she set off from New York to Africa on board a Boeing 314 Clipper. This was the first, experimental flight of this huge flying boat from America to the west coast of the African continent, which was why it was kept secret both by Pan American World Airways, which operated the airline, and the American government. Ève was the only woman and the only journalist among the 40 passengers or so of the flying boat; most of her travel companions being members of the staff of Pan Am who were flying to Africa to prepare the infrastructure for the planned flight service on which war supplies (including military planes) were to be transported from the US to the Middle East (even though the United States was a non-belligerent country at that time, it actively supported the Allies with supplies of war equipment).
Via Bermuda, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and the Brazilian coast Ève Curie reached Bathurst in the Gambia and then Lagos in Nigeria (which were British colonies then). Even though there was no warfare waged on the West African coast at that time, the threat from the Axis powers was felt everywhere in the region, and everybody worked at full steam to provide supplies to the front. In Nigeria, Ève also first met her Polish half-compatriots – a Captain Izicki told her how Polish and British pilots ferried the planes assembled in West Africa in convoys over the jungles and deserts to Sudan and later to Egypt.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 16.
From Nigeria, Ève Curie flew to Khartoum in Sudan, with stopovers, among others, in Kano, where she met the local emir, and Fort-Lamy in Chad, which was controlled by the Free French. In Khartoum she learned about the offensive the British had started in Cyrenaica, and she left for Egypt to write a report about the fights.
Despite the initial reservations of the military, who opposed to a woman being so close to the front line, Ève, thanks to the help of Randolph Churchill (Winston Churchill's son), managed to come near the places in Libya where the British fought the German and Italian troops in desert areas, in very unfavorable climatic conditions.
Having returned to Egypt, Ève also visited a harbor on the Red Sea where American ships with supplies for the fighting British were being unloaded, and on December 8 she was shocked to learn about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 64. When she later heard about further conquests of the Japanese in the Far East, she realized that she might not fulfill her plans to reach Singapore.
Part II – The Near East From Cairo, Ève Curie flew first to Beirut where she met General Georges Catroux,Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 75. who had been appointed by de Gaulle High Commissioner to the Levant. The reporter also made herself acquainted with the situation in Syria and Palestine. Even though the Free French controlled these territories, they still had to cope with the problem of political sabotage operations conducted by the Germans and the Italians, who were broadcasting radio programs aimed at the local Arab population. These acts of sabotage also took on graver forms – anti-British feeling in nearby Iraq, which had been growing for some time, resulted in breaking out of the Anglo-Iraqi War in 1941.
After several days, Ève flew from Lydda Airport farther to the east, to Teheran, the capital of Iran. Formally, during the World War II, Iran was an independent and neutral country; in fact, since August 1941, it had been under common British-Soviet occupation. The concern about the growing German influence in Iran, the willingness to secure the local oil deposits and, first of all, the importance of Iran as a transit country for supplies of war equipment to the Soviet Union resulted in an Anglo-Soviet intervention. The British and Soviet troops occupied the country, forced Reza Shah Pahlavi to abdicate and brought his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne. Since then to the end of the war, Iran was a very important communication hub – a transit country via which Western militaries and diplomats were traveling to the Soviet Union and one of the channels through which American war equipment was sent to the USSR under the Lend-Lease Act.
In Teheran, Ève Curie had to wait for several weeks for an opportunity to leave for the Soviet Union. She spent this time, meeting politicians and soldiers, including the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland in exile and the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army Władysław Sikorski,Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 103. who, despite his country's negative experiences with the USSR (in September 1939, Poland had been invaded both by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and many Poles were deported by the Soviets to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other regions of the interior of the USSR), still hoped for a common fight of Polish soldiers on the side of the Soviets against the Germans. In Teheran, Curie also had a meeting with Shah Reza Pahlavi, who, probably because of his young age (he was only 22 years old), did not feel fully comfortable on the throne yet.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 108.
Part III – Russia
Ève left Teheran on January 6, 1942, flying via Baku to Kuybyshev (now Samara), where the embassies and many Soviet central offices had been evacuated to from Moscow because of the threatening German offensive at the end of 1941. Already on board the plane she could observe the frozen Caspian Sea; biting frost and snow were to accompany her during her whole stay in the USSR. In Kuybyshev she met wounded soldiers in the local hospital, visited a bearings factory evacuated from Moscow where workers labored and lived in extremely difficult conditions, she also attended a service in an Orthodox church and talked to its priest (after the outbreak of the war, Joseph Stalin had slightly alleviated his policy of persecutions of religion). Both in Baku, Kuybyshew and later in Moscow, Ève could see how important culture, even though much ideologized, was for the fighting Soviet Union – she watched theatrical and opera performances and went to other cultural events, in Kuybyshew she also interviewed Olga Lepeshinskaya, an outstanding Soviet ballerina of that time.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 147.
During her stay in the USSR Ève Curie was constantly "looked after" by Lieutenant Liuba Mieston, who was officially her translator, but in fact, as Curie was guessing, worked for NKVD and supervised her contacts with the inhabitants of the Soviet Union. Despite this, both women became friends, Ève wrote very warmly about Liuba in her memoirs.
After several days of efforts, Ève succeeded in obtaining a permission to visit the front line. On January 12 (before other foreign correspondents, who stayed in Kuybyshev) she flew on a military plane with Liuba to Moscow, and on January 15 she could leave the capital for the places where fights were going on. In December 1941, as a result of the so-called Battle of Moscow, the Soviets had managed to repel the Germans from the capital; the hostilities were now going on around 60 miles from the borders of the city. On her way to the front, Curie could see many examples of atrocities the Germans committed on civilians – burnt down villages and towns; their inhabitants who were now coming back told her about robberies and mass executions conducted by the Nazis. Now, the German troops were withdrawing, and their defeat was also the result of harsh climatic conditions – this was the first winter for the Germans on the east front for which they were not prepared either in terms of clothing or military equipment. Many times, Ève saw corpses of German soldiers on the snow.
After they had arrived in Volokolamsk, Ève and Liuba also had an interesting meeting with General Andrey Vlasov, the commander of the Soviet troops fighting at Moscow.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 170. Vlasov appeared to her as a faithful soldier and Soviet patriot; she did not know yet that after a few months he would be taken prisoner by the Germans and defect to the Nazis as the commander of the Russian Liberation Army.Ève probably still did not know about Vlasov's betrayal at the moment of the publication of Journey Among Warriors, because she did not mention it in the book. The Russian Liberation Army was formed and sent to the front by the Germans only in 1943.
On January 18, Ève again left Moscow to visit just relieved Tula (it had been besieged by the Germans from October to December 1941) and Lev Tolstoy's house in Yasnaya Polyana. In Tula, the local secretary of the Communist party Zhavoronkov told her about the hardships of the three-month siege;Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 204. in the town, Ève also met one of local Soviet partisans (guerillas) – Esipov, a carpenter, who had fought the Germans behind the frontline.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 200. On the next day (January 19), Ève and Liuba, accompanied by Sophia Andreyevna Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoy's grandniece), who supervised all Tolstoy's museums in the USSR, visited Tolstoy's family house in Yasnaya Polyana, which the Germans had converted into a mess for Wehrmacht officers and tried to burn down when they were withdrawing.
Ève also wanted to see the siege of Leningrad but was refused a permit to fly to the city, so she stayed in the capital for some time, observing the daily life of its inhabitants, taking part in Moscow's cultural life (she saw for example the opera Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky) and meeting scientists at the Geological Institute and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where she learnt about huge losses (running into millions) of the Soviet army on the front.Curie, Journey Among Warriors, p. 239.