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Look Back: P-D reporter Virginia Irwin, 1945
Date: 5/6/2011 Album ID: 1242219
Photos by Post-Dispatch staff photographers
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The first of Post-Dispatch reporter Virginia Irwin's stories on the fall of Berlin splashed the front page on May 8, 1945, the day after Germany’s surrender to the allies in World War II. One of the few women reporters overseas, Irwin and Boston newspaperman Andrew Tully were the first American reporters in the German capital.
Post-Dispatch reporter Virginia Irwin and Army Sgt. Johnny Wilson in Berlin April 27-28, 1945, while the Russians were advancing upon the last German defenders in the bomb-wrecked city. Irwin, a native of Quincy, Ill., joined the Post-Dispatch in 1932 and was a feature writer when World War II began. In 1943, she took a leave of absence to serve in the Red Cross in England. Shortly before the Allied invasion of Normandy beach on June 6, 1944, she talked the newspaper into accrediting her as a war correspondent. She reached France on July 11 and wrote columns and stories about soldiers, military life and battles. On April 25, she and Boston Traveler correspondent Andrew Tully, with Sgt. Wilson at the wheel of their Jeep, reached Torgau, Germany, on the Elbe River, where American and Russian forces met. Without authorization from the Army press office, they decided to try for Berlin, 80 miles to the north through Russian lines. A few weeks before, her editors had asked whether she wanted to be relieved. Irwin cabled back, I want to stick it out until I get to Berlin. She got there on April 27, four days before Adolf Hitler killed himself. But when Irwin and Tully returned to American lines, furious Army censors yanked their credentials and refused to send their stories for a week. They were angry because she and Tully did not get the Army's permission to head for Berlin. (Post-Dispatch)
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This photograph of Virginia Irwin, taken in St. Louis in 1939, ran on the Post-Dispatch front page on May 8, 1945, with the first of three three dispatches from Berlin. Army censors sat on her copy until the Germans formally surrendered. But her three-part series describing the street fighting in Berlin was picked up by The Associated Press and published in dozens of newspapers. The Post-Dispatch on the desk next to her typewriter is the edition of Oct. 17, 1939, reporting the German sinking of the British Battleship Royal Oak at Scapa Flow, Scotland. (Post-Dispatch)
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The Post-Dispatch front page of May 8, 1945, with Virginia Irwin's first dateline story from Berlin. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin in her Red Cross uniform while she worked at an Army Air Forces base somewhere in England in 1943-44. She later worked in public relations for the Red Cross in London and wrote occasional articles for the Post-Dispatch before getting her credentials as a war correspondent. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin with American airmen in England. Soldiers called her mom, and one of the conversation-starters she employed was to encourage the boys to go home for five minutes and talk about what their families and friends were doing back in the states. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin and a helper forage greenery in England to decorate a base club for Christmas 1943. She wrote that they decorated a tree with burned-out bulbs. At least it was something for the boys. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin (left) writes a story beneath a tree somewhere in France after reaching the front in summer 1944. With her is (center) Marjorie Avery of the Detroit Free Press and Judy Borden of the New York Sun. Irwin preferred the action along the front to the press hotels behind the lines. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin speaks in St. Louis shortly after returning from Europe. She is wearing her war correspondent's uniform. Despite the dust-up with Army censors, she was welcomed back home with praise and awards. But the War Department didn't invite her to the big dinner in Washington on Nov. 23, 1946, honoring overseas war correspondents. On March 20, 1947, the department sent her a citation thanking her for outstanding and conspicuous service in Europe during the war. (Post-Dispatch)
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Chester Borntraeger, commander of the Fred Stockham American Legion Post in St. Louis, honors Virginia Irwin during a ceremony at the Hotel York, 8 South Sixth Street, on June 30, 1945. The York was demolished in 1964. (Post-Dispatch)
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Virginia Irwin in November 1950, when she wrote from the Post-Dispatch New York Bureau, her assignment since 1946. She worked from New York until 1960, when she returned to St. Louis. She retired from the newspaper three years later and moved to Webb City, in southwest Missouri, to live her sister. She died in Mt. Vernon, Mo., in 1980 at age 72. (Post-Dispatch)
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