Clare Hollingworth

I knew that Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, but this was a part of the story I had not heard:

In late August 1939, [Clare] Hollingworth was a 27-years-old cub reporter for the Telegraph in Poland. After talking a British diplomat into allowing her to borrow his car, she drove across the border into Germany, where she observed large numbers of troops, tanks and field artillery lined up along a road.

As she wrote in her autobiography, when the wind blew open burlap screens “constructed to hide the military vehicles . . . I saw the battle deployment.” Her story appeared in the London newspaper on Aug. 29 under the headline “1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier.” Germany invaded Poland three days later.

Melanie Kirkpatrick, “The Woman Who Scooped Everyone on World War II,” Hudson Institute (Jan. 12, 2017) [link].  Interesting story, which also appeared in the Wall Street Journal.