Virginia Irwin

When Virginia Irwin was told by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that they wouldn't send a woman war correspondent overseas to report on what was happening in Europe in 1943, she just volunteered to go over as a Red Cross worker and started sending articles back anyway. Eventually, of course, the Post-Dispatch editors couldn't resist printing them and Irwin had her way after all.

She's particularly recognized for sneaking off from the safety of the Russian-American meeting at the Elb River at the end of the war. While all the other correspondents were partying with everybody else, Irwin and another reporter took off and hustled their way through miles of Russian troops to report on the military capture of Berlin, a city where Americans had been ordered not to go.  But in-your-face women, of course, rarely take orders.