‘I saw the villages of Spain burning and followed the flames across the map of Europe,’ wrote Virginia Cowles, the London-based American war correspondent in the prologue to Looking For Trouble, her classic 1941 memoir. ‘They spread upwards, scorching the woods of Bohemia, ravaging the plains of Poland, and even searing the ice-bound forests of the Arctic.’

And so she did for the better part of eight action-packed years, from 1937 when she tramped through those burning Spanish villages as one of the brasher members of the international press corps covering the Spanish Civil War, through to 1944, when she covered the Italian campaign of the Second World War with her friend and fellow ‘war co’, Martha Gellhorn.

Today, Virginia Cowles is not as well remembered as her illustrious friend and colleague. And yet, anyone who read the Telegraph or Sunday Times or the hundreds of American newspapers in which the Cowles by-line appeared during the Second World War, or who heard her inspiring broadcasts during the war on the BBC, would recall that she was one of the greatest correspondents of her era.

One of the reasons why Virginia remains a comparative unknown compared to Gellhorn is that she wasn’t at the war correspondent trade for quite as long. Unlike Gellhorn, Cowles stopped reporting after VE day, marrying her long-time friend, RAF aviator Aidan Crawley, who had just returned to England after four years of captivity and later became an MP, settling into the life of the English establishment, of which she was already an associate member. She devoted her literary energies to writing biographies while raising a family, including her daughter Harriet, now a formidable author in her own right.

However, during the full decade when she was an active correspondent, Cowles covered nearly as much ground as Gellhorn, filing dispatches from Italy, Ireland, Spain, Germany, France, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Finland, before the ‘real war’ began in spring 1940. After that came Italy and North Africa, as well as, of course, Britain, from where she, along with her colleague, Edward R. Murrow, the CBS radio broadcaster, helped publicise its plight to stateside readers and listeners.

The one-time debutante may not have loved conflict quite as much as Gellhorn, who continued as a war correspondent for another 40 years, but, as her friend and admirer, Winston Churchill, put it in describing his own youthful journalistic escapades, Cowles was certainly ‘eager for trouble’.

Unsurprisingly, Churchill, who Cowles befriended before the war, and of whom she later wrote an admiring biography, is one of the leading dramatis personae of her best-selling 1941 memoir, which the passionate Anglophile wrote in order to persuade a then neutral America to join the war.

One of the most moving passages of Looking for Trouble depicts the scene at the 1940 New Year’s Eve party in London at which she and the then Lord of the Admiralty were both guests. The party was hosted by Cowles’ and Churchill’s mutual friend, Marquesa de Casa Maury, who was known, among other things, for being the mistress of the Prince of Wales.

Gellhorn, her friend and sometime roommate, had just returned to America after covering the first month of the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland – the same conflict which Cowles would soon report on herself. Anyway, it’s doubtful that Gellhorn would have attended even if she could. Martha didn’t care as much for English society as Virginia did.

Like most of those present on that fateful evening at Maury’s Montagu Square townhouse, as the ‘phoney war’ in the West continued to drone on, the future prime minister had a presentiment that things would soon change, both for him and the world.

‘The house was overflowing with people’, writes Cowles, ‘and an accordion player went around the room playing all the popular tunes.

‘I remember Mr. Churchill singing “Run, Rabbit, Run”’, she continues, referring to the popular ditty of the day, written by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler for Gay’s show, The Little Dog Laughed, whose original lyrics went:

On the farm, every Friday

On the farm, it’s rabbit every day

So every Friday that even comes along

I get up early and sing this song

Run rabbit-run-Run! Run! Run!

Run-rabbit-Run-Run! Run!

By now since the European War, as the four-month-old conflict was still called, had entered its first winter, the rousing last stanza had been revised to poke fun at the Germans, who were still risibly ensconced behind the Siegfried Line:

Run-Adolph Run Adolph-Run! Run! Run!

Cowles draws a memorable picture of Churchill leading herself and the other New Year’s Eve partiers as they sang out the tweaked lyric.

A year later, after the fall of France and the Low Countries, when Britain stood alone against the Axis, and London was being pounded by the Luftwaffe every night, it would be the Germans who would be laughing. None of the partygoers knew that then.

Nevertheless, as Cowles writes, they witnessed a portent of things to come:

‘When the clock struck twelve a solemnity fell over the group,’ she recounts, ‘Mr Churchill took Freda Casa Maury and me on either side of him; we all joined hands in a circle and sang “Auld  Lang Syne”. In everybody’s mind was the question of what 1940 would bring.

‘When Mr. Churchill’ – the Great Man was always Mr. Churchill to her – ‘sang out the old year, he seemed deeply moved, as though he had a presentiment that in a few months he would be asked to guide the British Empire through the most critical days it had ever faced.’

For her part, Cowles decided that her compass pointed eastward to Finland, where her friend Gellhorn had been reporting the unequal contest between the Soviet behemoth and the feisty Finns for a month, arriving a few days after the latter, weary of the cold, had fled to Cuba and the warmth of her fiancé Ernest Hemingway’s finca.

She certainly found a lot of trouble – and action – during the two months she spent amid the frozen snowdrifts of Suomi. Cowles’ reporting from the Winter War, along with Gellhorn’s, ranks among the best reportage to emerge from the 106-day conflict.

And, like her hell-raising comrade, when Virginia was in physical trouble herself – as she was in May of that year, after the storm had broken and the war proper had begun, when she and her fellow correspondent John Kirkpatrick and two British diplomats found themselves cornered by a howling mob of Italian squadisti outside a Rome hotel – she also knew how to handle herself, as Kirkpatrick attested:

Virginia Cowles was as cool and crisp as her elegantly tailored clothes and the icy tones of her outraged voice could be heard over the melee. It was she who screamed for us to fight our way into the hotel because its narrow doorway would cut down the somewhat disadvantageous odds of fifty to three.

Indeed, like her celebrated friend, Virginia was a warrior. And her eye was just as sharp as Martha’s.

Witness, for example, this excerpt from her report of the 1938 Nuremberg rally. ‘As the time for the Führer’s arrival drew near, the crowd grew restless,’ she wrote. ‘The minutes passed and the wait seemed interminable. Suddenly the beat of the drums increased and three motor cycles with yellow standards fluttering from their wind-shields raced through the gates. A few minutes later a fleet of black cars rolled swiftly into the arena: in one of them, standing in the front seat, his hand outstretched in the Nazi salute, was Hitler.

‘The demonstration that followed was one of the most extraordinary I have ever witnessed,’ her account continues. ‘Hitler came to his box in the Grand Stand amid a deafening ovation, then gave a signal for the political leaders to enter.’

‘They came, a hundred thousand strong, through an opening in the far end of the arena. In the silver light, they seemed to pour into the bowl like a flood of water. Each of them carried a Nazi flag and, when they assembled in mass formation, the bowl looked like a shimmering sea of swastikas. Then Hitler began to speak. The crowd hushed into silence, but the drums continued their steady beat.’

Not that Cowles was overawed by Hitler, with whom she was later invited to take tea, along with Unity Mitford, the Nazi acolyte, with whom she had travelled to Germany and who, like her sister, Diana, nurtured a crush on the Führer, as well as vice versa, as she describes:

‘I had never seen Hitler at close quarters before, and what struck me most was his lack of distinction. If he hadn’t been Adolf Hitler he would have been lost in the crowd. He was just an ordinary and rather inconspicuous little man.’

‘When everyone was seated Hitler’s gaze wandered over the gathering and his eye suddenly lit on Unity. His face broke into a smile, he nodded, and gave her the Nazi salute. She saluted back and a few minutes later Captain Wiedemann, Hitler’s A.D.C. [aide-de-camp] came over to our table and whispered in Unity’s ear, “The Fuhrer would like to see you. When tea is over he would like you to come over to his suite.” Unity nodded.

‘I couldn’t help thinking how odd it was that, on the brink of war the Führer would condescend to see a twenty-four year old English girl.’

The following spring of 1939, after Hitler had seized the rump of Czechoslovakia that remained after the betrayal at Munich, and it was increasingly clear what he wanted, Cowles, now a roving reporter for the Sunday Times, visited Berlin, the last correspondent for the British media to actually do so. All the others, wary of the wrath of Joseph Goebbels, had left.

The chill in the air was palpable: ‘Everywhere you felt the sinister force of the German nation on the eve of launching its fifth war in Europe within the space of twenty five years,’ as the beat of those Nazi drums resounded between the lines of her finely-wrought prose. ‘You felt it even in the wind that blew through the capital exactly as it had the previous August; it caught bits of paper and rubbish and sent them scraping along the pavement with a queer noise sounding like a death rattle.’

Cowles was no less skilled at conveying combat, as she did in her haunting report for the Sunday Times from distant Suomussalmi, in Lapland and the site of Finland’s greatest victory during the Winter War, on 2 February 1940, just a month after she had held hands and fervently sung out the old year with Churchill.

But all that was a distant memory now.

‘We had been in the pit only a few minutes when the Finnish soldiers in our rear opened up artillery fire. A fountain of ice and snow shot up as several shells fell in the lake. The observation officer corrected the range and soon they were disappearing neatly into the trees on the other side. The Russians were not slow to reply, and a few minutes later the air resounded to the nasty whine of three-inch shells, and the pine trees were singing with the moan of grenades.

‘Twice, three times, branches chipped by grenades fell down on us, and when two shells landed uncomfortably close, wounding two Finnish soldiers, the captain declared we had better go back to the hut.’

‘Before we left’, she added, ‘I asked for a cup of tea.’

Cowles was adept at capturing the aftermath of combat, as she did in her postscript to the battle, after the wraith-like, white uniformed Finnish ski troops, steeling out of the snow-covered woods, decimated an entire Soviet division:

‘Perhaps it was the beauty of the morning that made the terrible Russian debacle all the more ghastly when we came upon it,’ her evocative dispatch began. ‘The rising sun had drenched the snow-covered forests, their trees like lace valentines, with a strange pink light that seemed to glow for miles. The landscape was marred only by the charred framework of a house; then an overturned truck and two battered tanks.

‘Then we turned a bend in the road and came upon the full horror of the scene. For four miles the roads and forests were strewn with bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun-carriages, maps, books and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood and the colour of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow.’

Actually, it is not entirely fair to compare Virginia Cowles with her better known friend. For one, the two pioneering female correspondents wrote for different forums, as well as for somewhat different, if overlapping audiences. Martha wrote exclusively for the American audience, via Collier’s, whose readers took the war seriously – particularly after it became their war, too.

Cowles, on the other hand, did the bulk of her reporting for the British audience, and some of it is freighted with irony, as she served up in her memorable rendering of the scene in Hanko, the heavily bombed Finnish port, during the Winter War. A Finnish press officer who had been detailed to show her and several other reporters the sights led the benumbed group into a corner café to warm up.

Happy for the business, the amiable proprietor brought Cowles and the other correspondents hot sandwiches and coffee. Then, as the group was tucking in, ‘he cheerfully informed us that the top floor of the house was on fire. It had been struck by an incendiary bombed two hours before. His sons were fighting it, and he was confident everything would soon be under control’.

‘Somehow’, Virginia wryly noted, ‘it was an odd experience to be sipping coffee in a burning building.’

Cowles could also wax sublime, as she did in a rousing 1942 BBC broadcast. ‘If we can maintain a faith in the great deity and convey a relentless determination that this time our victory will be a true one’, she declared, as metaphorical cymbals clashed in the background, ‘then we will surely accomplish it.’

Unlike Gellhorn, who was set on becoming a foreign correspondent from an early age, Cowles more or less stumbled into journalism. Her first appearance in the media was as a Boston debutante. Her mother’s death in 1932 left her a $2,000 insurance windfall, which she used to fund a tour of the world. Inspired, she decided to write about her travels for the Hearst syndicate.

Virginia found that she liked writing. Editors liked her work. One thing led to another, and soon she was writing about war. With the Dictator Powers, as they were then called, on the rise, there were quite a few to write about, beginning with Italy’s shock invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Somewhat to her surprise, Cowles was able to secure an interview with Benito Mussolini. Her memory of that encounter is priceless. It also tells a great deal about the author:

‘Instead of the solemn black-uniformed dictator, a small stocky man in a light grey suit and a pair of brown and white sport shoes bounced forward to meet me. He gripped my hand, flashed a mechanical smile and went back to his seat behind the massive desk. He walked with a peculiar strutting step – his head back and his chest thrown out – as though half his body was too large for the rest of him.

‘I soon realized that my worries lest the conversation should lag had been needless. He fixed his eyes on me menacingly, leaned across the desk and pointed a pencil at me, angrily. “Do you think I’m a despot?” he rasped.

“Oh no,” I said, weakly.

“Do you think my people admire me?”

“Oh yes.”

“Do you think that I have led them to war against their will?”

“Oh no.”

“Well, then, go home and tell the people of America that…”’

So she did. Unsurprisingly, Il Duce wasn’t pleased with the result. Cowles also interviewed Italo Balbo, the flamboyant, Anglophile Italian air marshal, who took her flying in a rickety two-seat Gerda biplane. Smitten with the glamorous correspondent, Balbo invited Virginia to go on an aerial vacation with him in his rickety conveyance. Wisely, she demurred.

Then came the war in Spain. ‘When the war broke out in Spain, I saw the opportunity for more vigorous reporting,’ as she put it.

‘I thought it would be interesting to cover both sides and write a series of articles contrasting the two.’ The experience turned out to be very interesting indeed – interesting enough to nearly get her killed.

Arriving in Madrid, Cowles found herself ensconced in the Hotel Florida, along with the squadron of other American and British journalists bivouacked there, including Ernest Hemingway, and Gellhorn. The two women’s friendship began casually, as Virginia recounts: ‘Being friends with Gellhorn at that time meant being friends with Hemingway, as well.’ Hemingway liked and respected Cowles, as much as he liked and respected any of his fiancé’s distaff friends, at least at first.

Sometimes they spent time together, as Virginia notes in her 1937 journal: ‘At the hotel we ran into Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway and arranged to meet at twelve to go to a festival for the benefit of Federacion Anarquista Iberica [the Spanish anarchist party], and hear Pastora sing,’ she recalls, referring to the then celebrated Spanish flamenco singer.

‘Pastora never sang and the show was bad,’ she continues mordantly, ‘a tap dancer in tails and top hat, a very old flamenco singer and a skit between a priest and a housewife, both of whom kept their backs turned squarely on the audience so that no one could hear what they said.’

‘Everyone cheered a lot’, Cowles recalls, tongue in cheek, ‘so it was evidently a success.’

‘Her courage under fire was inspirational,’ said Nigel Nicholson, the British solider assigned to accompany her during her forays to the battle front. ‘I can picture her to this day, running from house to house, taking photographs in a village under heavy air bombardment while the rest of us dived under cover.’

Two years later, Virginia would team up again with Martha when the latter was asked by her editors to go on a tour of the English Midlands to gauge how excited or not the British public was about the possible advent of war, which at the time it distinctly was not, causing the highly excitable Gellhorn to throw a series of tantrums, as her bemused friend later recalled:

‘Soon our trip began to take on the mild form of a lecture tour. The sentence “War? Who wants a war?” became like a red flag to a bull, and with a burst of exasperation Martha told them about Adolf Hitler, his mighty armies and his hosts of bombers. But they only looked at her with mild surprise as though she were a little queer in the head.’

Nevertheless, as much as Cowles enjoyed the company of her excitable friend and colleague, there was never any doubt that she was very much her own woman. She proved that in Spain when, disregarding everyone’s advice, including Gellhorn’s, she went sailing off in search of the fascist nationalists, and wound up barely escaping arrest and execution as a spy.

To be sure, when one comes right down to it, the two women’s journalistic philosophies were different. The more dispassionate of the two, Cowles, who eventually shifted from reporting to writing think pieces for the Telegraph, was keen on getting both sides of the story, if they could be got.

Gellhorn, the confirmed left-winger, had no truck with that ‘objectivity shit’, in her phrase. To the hell-raiser from St Louis there was only one side of the story.

Or as Anna Sebba put it in Battling for the News, her 1995 survey of the ground-breaking female war correspondents of the 20th century, which includes a diptych of the two: ‘Virginia preferred time to reflect and discuss, away from the heat of the moment,’ Sebba writes. ‘Martha never trusted the views of generals and politicians. For Virginia, getting to the top man in any situation was both important in itself and valuable for smoothing her path whenever she might need their help. Martha believed passionately in being partisan; as long as you describe what you have seen accurately, why should there be a need to put the case for the other side too? Virginia, however, drew strength from her determination to give both sides a hearing.’

Same flock, different feather.

Nevertheless there was never any doubt that the two respected each other, and indeed loved each other.

‘A tall, blonde girl, with a brilliant gift for writing and a passionate concern for the underdog,’ is how Virginia describes her comrade in Looking for Trouble.

Martha was just as admiring of Virginia’s preternatural sang froid, as she evinced in the incident in Italy with John Kirkpatrick. Virginia’s cool also helped get the duo out of certain tight situations, especially after the two re-united in 1943, after Martha had split with the boorish Hemingway, and they hit the superheated London social scene together; as well as later when their career arcs intersected again and they covered the Italian campaign together.

‘Nothing upsets her complete calm,’ Gellhorn wrote in a letter that year, ‘and I must say I never saw a girl who proceeded more confidently on her own, in her own way.’

Following the war, the two friends, whose careers overlapped each other at several points before they went on their own separate ways, wrote a play, ‘Love Goes to Press’, about their experience at the press camp at Monte Cassino in Italy fending off their respective suitors. It was a hit on the West End.

And, when, in 1947, Virginia was awarded the OBE for the much-appreciated role she had played in depicting the British experience of the war to America, the first US female journalist to be thus honoured, no one was happier for her or prouder than Gellhorn.

To be sure, Cowles, like Gellhorn also had her share of male admirers. One of these was her friend Fitzroy Maclean, second secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, who served as her interpreter when she toured Russia, Britain’s then ally, for the Sunday Times during the war. ‘Her methods were largely intuitive,’ the diplomat remembered. ‘She was ready to go anywhere and do anything, and by talking to a lot of people could get a good grasp of essentials in a very short time.’

Cowles also had no compunctions about using her feminine wiles to get an interview. Maclean remembers how furious he was when his American friend kept him waiting at a diplomatic function. But when the dashing American finally emerged from the Moscow snowdrifts, attired in her trademark fur coat, she looked so marvellous he forgave her.

Within ten minutes, she was the centre of attention.

‘She radiated vitality,’ the awed diplomat later recalled.

So, after all these decades, does Cowles’ vivid reportage.

For this writer’s part, I wasn’t even aware of Cowles, until I stumbled across one of her mesmerising wartime dispatches in a dog-eared anthology of war correspondence in a second-hand bookshop years ago.

In addition to her coruscating work itself, today her legacy can be found in the work of the female war correspondents who have followed her and her friend Martha Gellhorn’s work. As Christina Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times wrote in the foreword to the 2022 Faber reissue of her memoir: ‘If today there are almost as many women as men reporting from war zones, it is thanks to women like Cowles who showed what is possible.’

It is time to overlook Virginia Cowles no more.