ARTICLE: An American Woman Visits the Phoney War, 1940

A quick read today. I wanted to give you something else from 1940 to round off this week, and it comes via a published French account of 1939-40. It’s written by Rene de Chambrun, whose books usually draw more notable attention for the sections that deal with the Fall of France, or his subsequent wartime work in the US. Squirrelled away in there though, is an example of one of the many visitors who managed to blag their way up to the front lines before matters took serious turn on 10th May.

In this case, the visitor is Clare Luce. At the time of her visit, she had just celebrated her 37th birthday. Married to the publisher of multiple magazines, in 1940 she was working as a journalist in Europe for Life. She was an extraordinary woman. She continued to travel widely throughout the war. Her list of apparent lovers includes Joseph P. Kennedy, Randolph Churchill, General Lucian Truscott and a young RAF officer posted to Washington named Roald Dahl. If you believe his side of the story, he was instructed to get into bed with Luce, 13 years his senior, as part of a spy effort to convince the Americans to join the war, and she was so sexually demanding, and he so knackered that he begged to be taken off the assignment. He was apparently told to soldier on.

After the war, Luce was elected to the House of Representatives, and in 1953, she was named as United States Ambassador to Italy. In 1983, she became the first female member of Congress to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here then, is the story of the day she visited the men of the French Foreign Legion on the Maginot Line…

Clare Boothe Luce pictured in 1941. (Harry Warneke and Robert F. Cranston/National Portrait Gallery)