Long, Tania (1913–1998)

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Long, Tania (1913–1998)

German-born war correspondent. Born Tatiana Long on April 29, 1913, in Berlin, Germany; committed suicide on September 4, 1998, in Ottawa, Canada; daughter of Robert Crozier Long and Tatiana Mouraviev; graduated from Malvern Girls College in England (1930); did post-graduate work in history and economics at the Sorbonne, Paris (1930–31), and the Paris École des Sciences Politiques; married Raymond Daniell (London bureau chief, The New York Times), in 1941; children: (from a previous marriage) Robert M. Gray.

A trail-blazing female war correspondent, Tania Long was born in Berlin in 1913 to a Russian mother and a British father. She acquired an early familiarity with a variety of languages and got her first journalistic experiences at the side of her father, who was a New York Times financial columnist and Berlin correspondent to The Economist of London.

Long lived and studied in cities across Europe, but became an American citizen in 1935, beginning her career at New Jersey's Network Ledger the following year. By 1938, she had returned to Berlin to work for the New York Herald Tribune's bureau there, where her sound writing skills soon earned her the job of assistant chief correspondent. Upon the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she transferred to Copenhagen, then on to Paris, and finally to London, where in 1941 she won an award for her reporting on the bombing of that city. One of these award-winning stories was an account of bombs falling on the Hotel Savoy—the hotel where she was living.

That same year, Long's future husband, Raymond Daniell, London bureau chief for The New York Times, called her a serious journalistic competitor in what he had, up until then, considered man's work, and said that "her calm and courage during the frightful days of the blitzkrieg helped us all to keep our nerves steady." Daniell and Long—"an attractive girl with … alert eyes and the most infectious smile"—married in November 1941. Long joined The Times as a reporter about three months later. She reported on war-torn London and covered the Allied advance through France from just behind the lines. She is thought to be the first female reporter to follow the Allies into Berlin.

After the war, Long returned to Germany as a Times correspondent, assisting Daniell in covering the Nuremberg trials. In 1946, she was awarded a campaign ribbon of service by the European theater secretary of war. From 1952 to 1964, she and Daniell headed The Times' bureau in Ottawa, Canada, where they became part of a distinguished journalistic and political society. Decades later, after suffering from a series of illnesses which, according to a friend, made life just too painful for her, Long committed suicide at age 85.