Ms. Hollingworth in 1985. Credit United News/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

Clare Hollingworth was a reporter for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph when she broke the news of the start of World War II. Credit The Telegraph

There, in early 1939, she aided thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland — the region of Czechoslovakia that had been annexed by the Nazis in October 1938 — arranging travel documents that would let them cross into Poland. She wrote about their plight for small publications in Britain.

The Telegraph learned of Ms. Hollingworth’s work in Poland, and on Aug. 25, 1939, while she was visiting London, it hired her as a correspondent. Assigned to cover the prelude to war in the region, she flew to Warsaw the next day.

From Warsaw she traveled to Katowice, commandeering an official car from the British consul general there. It was in that car, Union Jack boldly flying, that she drove over the border, past astonished Nazi guards and into Germany on Aug. 28.

Ms. Hollingworth’s scoop comprised two parts. The first was her story of Aug. 29, about the advent of war. The second was her report on the start of the war itself.

Awakened by explosions at dawn on Sept. 1, Ms. Hollingworth, from her quarters in Katowice, saw German bombers overhead and the flash of artillery fire in the distance.

She telephoned a friend at the British Embassy in Warsaw.

“The war has begun!” she cried.

“Are you sure, old girl?” he said. Her published article notwithstanding, Ms. Hollingworth later wrote, British officialdom persisted in thinking that war remained weeks away.

She held the receiver out the window as German tanks roared outside. The embassy was persuaded and soon, too, was her editor.

Ms. Hollingworth’s article on the start of hostilities appeared in The Telegraph the next day. Her work from this period is unbylined — few reporters were accorded bylines then — a state of affairs she pronounced as being for the best: It simultaneously spared her parents familial anxiety and social indignity.

What followed was more than 40 years of chasing danger, for it was in the most dangerous places, Ms. Hollingworth often said, that the best stories lay.

Traveling with British troops in North Africa, she was buried in the sands for the night when she awoke to the sounds of a German reconnaissance party. “A sneeze would have brought death to us all,” she later wrote. She held her breath in the darkness, and the party passed unseeing.

In Vietnam, a sniper’s bullet narrowly missed her head.

Ms. Hollingworth’s first husband, Vandeleur Robinson, whom she married in 1936, divorced her for desertion 15 years later. (“When I’m on a story, I’m on a story — to hell with husband, family, anyone else,” she told The Guardian in 2004.) Her second husband, Geoffrey Hoare, a journalist whom she married in the early 1950s, died in 1965.

Her death was confirmed by Patrick Garrett, her grandnephew and her biographer. Her survivors include a stepdaughter, Hilary Sandre.

Over time, some members of the British press grew alienated by what they saw as Ms. Hollingworth’s imperious manner. “Ms. Hollingworth’s snobberies are very tiring, her cozy relations with British embassies irritating,” the English journalist Robert Fisk wrote, reviewing her 1990 memoir, “Front Line.”

But she remained a widely admired, even venerated, figure, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire in 1982 and a perennial fixture at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, where she had made her home since the early 1980s.

Her other books include “The Three Weeks’ War in Poland” (1940), “There’s a German Just Behind Me” (1942), “The Arabs and the West” (1952) and “Mao and the Men Against Him” (1985).

As Ms. Hollingworth made clear in later interviews, though there was no dearth of wars to accompany her old age, she did not truly expect to be called upon to cover them. Yet to the end of her life she slept with her passport and a pair of shoes within easy reach, just in case.

Credit: New York Times