Catherine
Coyne graduated
from Boston University in 1930. After
working for a trade magazine she joined the Boston
Herald. She also supplied articles for Time
Magazine and Life
Magazine.
In 1944
the Boston Herald sent Coyne to
Europe to cover the Second World War. This included following the
Allied advances after the D-Day landings
in June 1944.
Like
fellow women journalists such as Iris
Carpenter,
Tania Long, and Ann
Stringer, she was not made to feel welcome and they were
placed under the command of the Public Relations Division and told
they could not visit the front-line. This directive was later changed
and she reported the war in France, Holland,
Belgium and Germany.
This included being at Torgau when the Red Army
and the US
Army joined
up for the first time.
After the
war she covered the Nuremberg
War Trials
before writing a regular column for the Boston Herald. C resigned
in 1948 to marry Eugene A. Hudson of the Massachusetts Superior Court.
(1)
Catherine Coyne, Boston Herald (27th April, 1945)
Americans and Russians in their historic long-awaited link-up in their
joint war against Germany provided the world with a hilarious preview
of VE-Day in a sunny meadow on the bank of the Elbe river here this
afternoon.
There was a ceremony, of
course. Maj.-Gen. E.R Reinhardt, commanding general of the 69th Infantry
Division, one of whose second lieutenants made the first contact unofficially
and accidentally late yesterday afternoon, crossed the Elbe in a rowboat
to meet a major general of the 58th Guards Division of the Red Army.
They shook hands, posed
for thousands of pictures in the center of a screaming, shoving mob
of official professional and amateur cameramen, then feasted in a
German barracks on captured German eggs, black bread with cheese and
tumblers of champagne and eau de vivre, an inferior cognac
bottled for the Wehrmacht.
Primarily, however, it
was a day for the little man of the armies - for the GI and the junior
officer-and each made it a merry one, forgetting war while toasting
the United States and Russia, swapping insignia and watches, snapping
pictures and trying out one another's weapons amid noise, danger and
laughter reminiscent of the Fourth of July at home.
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