Clare Hollingworth, the veteran British war reporter who first reported the start of World War II with the Nazi invasion of Poland, died in Hong Kong at 105.
Hollingworth reported for the Daily Telegraph when she saw German forces gathering on the Polish border while traveling from Poland to Germany in 1939, the BBC News reported. She earned another scoop by reporting on the invasion three days later.
"We are sad to announce that after an illustrious career spanning a century of news, celebrated war correspondent Clare Hollingworth died this evening in Hong Kong," a spokesman for the Celebrating Clare Hollingworth group said in a statement on Facebook on Tuesday.
The Guardian writer Emma Graham-Harrison said that Hollingworth's reputation started from her very first stories in journalism.
"Her first two stories, as a 27-year-old novice correspondent, together formed 'probably the greatest scoop of modern times' – nothing less than a warning that the second world war was imminent because German troops had massed on the Polish border and, three days later, that an invasion had begun," Graham-Harrison continued.
BBC war correspondent Kate Adie told The Telegraph that Hollingworth was "a pioneer" for women in journalism, who was full of adventure and a "terrific attention to detail and fact."
"She was a role model, without being aware of it," Adie said, according to The Telegraph. "In the sense that she loved the job and had a terrific zest for journalism right to the end of her life. In her 90s she followed the news. I met her. Several times. When she was in her 70s and still with an eye on China and I remember going to the Foreign Correspondents club in Hong Kong and someone saying 'there's a legend upstairs.'"
The Guardian wrote that Hollingworth was almost killed by sniper fire in Vietnam in the 1970s and escaped a 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. That bombing killed nearly 100 people, the newspaper noted.
"She simply wanted to be at the story, full stop. She had nothing to prove," Paul Hill, who spoke to Hollingworth almost daily as the foreign desk manager at the Telegraph for more than 30 years, wrote The Guardian. "She loved cordite, she would go to the smell of guns."
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