Category Archives: journalism history

D-DAY: Hemingway and Gellhorn at War
By Christopher B. Daly

. . . In 1944, as the world war reached a crescendo, so did the marital conflict between Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, the journalist Martha Gellhorn. “Marty” was engaged in covering the Allied campaign to liberate Italy, but she still wanted to find some role for Hemingway. She even suggested that he might pitch a series to Collier’s, the popular national weekly magazine. If it worked, she knew full well that he would outrank her among the magazine’s correspondents; she also knew that each magazine got only one slot to cover the front lines, so it might cost her. Still, Hemingway balked and stayed in Havana – drinking to the point where he often started with a scotch around 10 a.m. and ended the night by sleeping in his clothes, on the floor. “My crime really,” Marty concluded, “was to have been at war when he had not.”

There are differing versions of exactly what happened next. One view is that Marty offered Hem the chance to take her place as Collier’s front-line war reporter. The other version is that he went around her back to editors at Collier’s and talked them into letting him big-foot her off the momentous story. From her letters it appears that Marty regretted the switch, and she certainly came to resent Hem for it. To make matter worse, she called in a favor with her writer friend Roald Dahl to arrange for the RAF to fly both herself and Hem across the Atlantic. As it turns out, Hem got his seat all right, and then he informed Marty that the RAF was not taking any women on such dangerous flights (even though the actress Gertrude Lawrence was somehow given a seat on Hem’s flight). Bumped from flying, Marty had to go by ship. She was the only woman and the only civilian on a Norwegian freighter full of explosives crossing the North Atlantic. As such, her ship was a prime target for Nazi submarines prowling the ocean.

At this point, the marriage was pretty nearly shot. During the long voyage, Marty poured her heart out in a letter to an old friend.

 

He is a good man, which is vitally important. He is however bad for me, sadly enough, or maybe wrong for me is the word; and I am wrong for him. . . . As far as I am concerned it is all over, it will never work between us again. There may be miracles but I doubt it, I have never believed in them. . . . I dread the time ahead, the amputating time, I do not see how to manage it.

 

Hemingway arrived in London well ahead of Marty in that fateful spring of 1944, and he was soon up to his old tricks. Thanks to the writer Irwin Shaw, Hem was introduced to Mary Welsh, an attractive American journalist (who also happened to be somewhat married). They were soon carousing around London, as Hemingway enjoyed getting to know the 36-year-old Mary, who clearly adored him. (As Mary wrote: “I wanted him to be the Master, to be stronger and cleverer than I; to remember constantly how big he was and how small I was.”) On May 25, while Gellhorn was still at sea, Hemingway attended a very boozy party in London hosted by the photographer Robert Capa. Hem got a ride home, but the driver crashed the car into a water tower, and Hemingway was thrown against the windshield, resulting in another of his many traumatic brain injuries. Among his hospital visitors was Mary Welsh of TIME magazine, who brought daffodils.

When Marty arrived in London, she quickly sized up the situation and decided she had really had it with Hem’s drinking, his lying, his cheating, and his bullying. She would have demanded a divorce right then, but she felt bad for the fifty-seven stitches etched into Hem’s head and so she waited.

All that spring, the Allies were planning their big push from England into France. All of London, indeed all of England, was abuzz about the impending invasion, the largest amphibious assault in world history. Everyone knew it was imminent, but no one knew exactly when or where. The details were top secret. Throughout May and early June, soldiers, officers, journalists, and others all knew that something epic was coming, but much still depended on the tides and the weather. In the final days, journalists were quietly tapped by military handlers and vanished, one by one, into the staging areas.

The Allied public relations staff assigned Hem to cross the Channel on a big Navy ship named the Dorothea Dix; from there he would be lowered into a landing craft skippered by Lieutenant (j.g.) Robert Anderson of Roanoke, Virginia.

In the story that he wrote for Collier’s, Hemingway behaves (and writes) as if he outranks Anderson – offering to steer the ship and, if needed, command the whole invasion. As usual, Hem makes himself the main protagonist of his story, if not the hero. Mostly, they end up bobbing around in their landing craft, searching for the intended landing spot.

The landing craft, also known as Higgins boats, were 36 feet long, with sides made of plywood, equipped with an engine in the rear and a bow that could drop open to form a ramp. The boats could be driven into shallow water or right onto a beach. They could be used to sweep for mines, to transport vehicles and explosives, or to carry loads of soldiers. The U.S. Navy purchased thousands of them and used them to storm beaches from Normandy to Sicily to Iwo Jima.

Each boat could carry about three dozen soldiers who, with the bow lowered, could charge down the ramp and into action. Ideally, the men could exit swiftly, the skipper could throw it into reverse, and clear the area for the next craft to hit the beach. In practice, the boats tended to bounce around badly in choppy seas or high surf, and the wooden sides could not stop enemy fire. As a result, the soldiers on board were vulnerable. Many times, the ship’s bottom would be shin-deep with a mix of seawater, blood, and vomit.

 

 

This photo captioned “Into the Jaws of Death,” taken on D-Day by U.S. Coast Guard photographer Robert F. Sargent, provides the soldier’s view of the invasion from a Higgins boat.

 

In Hemingway’s account, we see him using his own binoculars, conferring with the skipper like a peer, offering advice to Anderson, pointing out landmarks, and trying to guide the boat to a section of Omaha Beach code-named Fox Green. Thousands of words later, the landing craft proceeds near the beach and disgorges its platoon of fighting men. Hem, who stayed on board, wrote a deeply misleading finale to his story. He notes that the Germans kept firing their antitank guns and mortars from the cliffs above the beach. But the Americans kept coming. “It had been a frontal assault in broad daylight, against a mined beach defended by all the obstacles military ingenuity could devise,” he wrote in his final paragraph. “But every boat . . . had landed her troops and cargo. No boat was lost through bad seamanship. All that were lost were lost by enemy action. And we had taken the beach.”

 

 

U.S. troops struggle to get ashore during the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Photo by Robert Capa for LIFE magazine. 

 

 

When Hemingway wrote that “we” had taken the beach, he could not have meant that he was among the successful invaders, because he knew damn well that he had never left the boat nor gone ashore. To be fair, though, it was a common practice among U.S. journalists during World War II to say that “we” were doing this or that. So close was the identification of the press corps with the military corps, and so unified was the commitment to victory, that the usage became standard and drew almost no notice. But Hemingway’s last statement – “We had taken the beach” – was both true and misleading. It’s true that American troops had taken the beach, but by using the pronoun “we,” Hem was implying that he was among the “we” who had taken the beach. Actually, in this case they took the beach. In fact, Hem did not step foot on an invasion beach that day or any other. He made it back to London the same day and spent the night at the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair. He did not get to France until weeks later, safe and dry. Then, thanks to the general he was attached to, Hemingway was provided with a captured German motorcycle that had a sidecar, plus a Mercedes convertible with his own driver.

 

As for Gellhorn, she was furious at Hemingway, enraged by his boorishness. As any journalist knows, the decent thing for him to have done would have been to find another magazine to write about D-Day for and to have left Gellhorn as the top correspondent at Collier’s. But no. He had to take her slot, then stash her at sea for three weeks while he partied in London and started romancing a new woman.

Marty was also angry at the last-minute restrictions imposed by the Allied public relations command. They decreed that no women would be allowed to report on the first day of the invasion. Instead, all the women reporters were shepherded into a giant press briefing center in London, along with any male reporters who were left behind; they were all locked in, and all fed the same official information about the invasion from Public Relations Officers.

As soon as the doors opened, Marty made her own way to the story. Wearing her standard-issue correspondent’s uniform, she hitched a ride to one of the embarkation ports in southern England. There, she wrote a story on June 6 about the first batches of German prisoners to reach England.

The next day, she found a hospital ship getting ready to cross the Channel to the invasion beaches. She talked her way on board, then locked herself in an empty bathroom and hid there until the ship was under way. Painted white, the ship was under the command of the English merchant marine, not the U.S. Navy, so she was allowed to move about freely, observe the action, and interview nurses, doctors, patients, and prisoners.

The result was a magnificent piece of reporting. She began by noting that the white medical ship stood out in the sea of grey military craft “like a sitting pigeon” and that “there was not so much as a pistol on board in the way of armament.” Carefully, the ship picked a way through lanes in the sea that had been cleared of German mines. “Then we saw the coast of France and suddenly we were in the midst of the armada of the invasion.” Noting the stunning number of ships, planes, and barrage balloons (“looking like comic toy elephants”), Gellhorn described the continuing booming of naval weapons all around.

Then, the first of the wounded began to arrive. A wooden box, “looking like a lidless coffin,” was lowered overboard to pick up the wounded from the smaller craft known as “water ambulances.” Those little ships were beginning to scour the surf and the beaches for wounded combatants to bring them to the large floating hospital. As it turned out, the first soldier was German. No matter. The medical team went right to work. Marty described horrible injuries suffered by U.S. soldiers – gaping untreated wounds, shattered bones, missing body parts.

Around sunset, she went ashore at “Easy Red” beach with a medical team and set to work as a stretcher-bearer. She was now the only woman among the invading force of hundreds of thousands of men. Staying in the narrow, marked lanes that had been cleared of mines, Gellhorn pitched in and helped move bodies in the dark to pickup spots. All the while, German sniper fire and the occasional anti-aircraft battery kept up the roar of war. “Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker and it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here sometime,” she wrote.

Eventually, she boarded a landing craft loaded with wounded that was heading back out to the hospital ship, anchored in deeper water. She looked back at the beach, where bonfires were roaring. “The beach, in this light, looked empty of human life, cluttered with dark square shapes of tanks and trucks and jeeps and ammunition boxes and all the motley equipment of war. It looked like a vast uncanny black-and-red flaring salvage dump, whereas once upon a time people actually went swimming here for pleasure.”

Under fire, she had gone ashore and served as an eye-witness to history from one of the invasion beaches – something her famous husband had not done. Marty had beaten Hem to France.

Six months later, they were divorced.  . . .

 

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Christopher B. Daly is a journalist, historian, educator, and award-winning author. This story is adapted from his current work-in-progress, a book titled The Democratic Art, (UMass Press 2025) which is a narrative history of the role played by journalism in the careers of America’s top literary and visual artists.

 

[All quotations in this article come from Hemingway’s story “Voyage to Victory,” which can be found in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, or from Gellhorn’s story “The First Hospital Ship,” which can be found in The Face of War.]