War Correspondent, First To Report The Start Of WW II, Dies At 105

A pistol-packing reporter who snuck into Nazi territory to break the news that World War II had begun has died. Clare Hollingworth was a trail-blazer for female war correspondents. She was 105.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Clare Hollingworth has died. She was a pioneering war correspondent. Her career spanned decades, but she's best known for her very first story. In 1939, she had one of the biggest scoops of the century - the beginning of World War II. Here's John Otis with her remarkable story.

JOHN OTIS, BYLINE: Clare Hollingworth first traveled to the Polish-German border as an aid worker to help Jews and other refugees fleeing from the Nazis. When that job ended, she was hired by London's Daily Telegraph newspaper as a part-time reporter in Poland.

In her third day on the job, the 27-year-old cub reporter borrowed a car from the British consulate. The diplomatic plates allowed her to slip across the border into Nazi territory. A giant tarp along the road blocked her view. But in an interview with The Telegraph when she was in her 90s, Hollingworth described how a gust of wind blew the tarp aside.

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CLARE HOLLINGWORTH: And I looked down into the valley and saw scores, if not hundreds, of tanks.

OTIS: Her story ran on The Telegraph's front page. Three days later, Hollingworth woke to the sound of the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland. Retired British diplomat Elizabeth Wright said that Hollingworth had trouble convincing her editors and diplomats that World War II had really begun.

ELIZABETH WRIGHT: She was in a phone box, ringing this through. And everyone was saying, OK, that can't possibly be true. And she stuck the receiver outside and said, what you can hear is the tanks rumbling in.

OTIS: Hollingworth filed many more big stories. In 1963, she revealed that British double agent Kim Philby had defected to the Soviet Union. But she was best known for covering conflicts in Algeria, Greece, Kashmir, Vietnam and Yemen. To prepare for the rigors, she sometimes slept on her apartment floor. Hollingworth once admitted she was a war junkie.

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HOLLINGWORTH: I'm really passionately interested in war, and if one is passionately interested in war, one can't help like being in it.

OTIS: Along with Martha Gellhorn, Virginia Cowles, and Clare Boothe Luce, Hollingworth paved the way for today's female war reporters. That's according to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who spoke last year at a tribute to Hollingworth.

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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: It's not us pioneering. It's them. It's Clare and that band of women who really did it for us.

OTIS: Hollingworth emerged from the battlefields unscathed, but Wright says she often thought about death.

WRIGHT: And I remember her saying to me once, you know, Elizabeth, I'd really love to be killed in a war by a rocket or something like that.

OTIS: Instead, Hollingworth died Tuesday in her home in Hong Kong. She was 105. For NPR News, I'm John Otis.

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