Martha Gellhorn: War Correspondent

On June 4, 1944, more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, France in a bold military operation known as D-Day.  The epic scale of the invasion, which would take several days, was the Allies’ best hope of liberating France and other countries in Europe from Hitler’s conquest.

What is little known is that among those brave hordes was a woman – reportedly the only woman – who not only witnessed history but helped make it.  That woman was Martha Gellhorn, who at 36, already had a reputation as a fearless war reporter.

Seven years earlier in 1937 she had covered the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches for Collier’s and The New Yorker, two of the leading magazines of the time, placed her in the thick of the bombings in Barcelona and in the trenches with the troops and tanks in Madrid. The only fear she felt, she wrote from Spain, was “that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place.”  From the start of her career, she was committed to bearing witness to what was happening to humanity using the most honest, gutsiest language she knew. 

Martha Gellhorn was born on Nov 8, 1908 in St. Louis Missouri. Her parents, George and Edna were solidly upper middle class. George was a successful gynecologist. Edna was a suffragist and advocate of progressive causes, who would later become one of the founders of the National League of Women Voters. As a young girl, Gellhorn remembers going to suffragist meetings with her mother, most memorably a rally at the 1916 Democratic National Convention in St. Louis.

Gellhorn attended Bryn Mawr, one of the elite Seven Sister colleges where her mother had also studied. She stayed one year, quitting to try journalism. She wrote briefly for The New Republic magazine and a local Albany, New York, newspaper.  Neither offered her the kind of excitement of being a foreign correspondent. So, in 1930 she shipped off to Paris to work for the wire service agency, United Press International. According to her bio, she quit when she was being sexually harassed by a colleague. Gellhorn stayed in Europe, however, traveling, observing, and freelancing for Vogue and a few French newspapers.

By 1931, Gellhorn was back home in the United States as the country struggled through the Depression.  Her mother had been a classmate of Eleanor Roosevelt at Bryn Mawr and they had stayed in touch. Through Roosevelt, Gellhorn met Harry Hopkins, a social worker who would later head the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) created by Franklin Roosevelt when he became president in 1932.  Hopkins hired Gellhorn as a field investigator in New England and the Carolinas. Her job was to travel the region, interviewing, observing and writing about the impact of the Depression on those most affected.

In essence, it was a reporting job. Gellhorn sharpened her skills in the craft of journalism: how to interview, how to track down information, how to apply statistics to real life situations and how to translate all of what she saw into compelling stories about real people. Her reports were so good that they were sent directly to FDR.  She would later team up with photographer, Dorothea Lange, who shot pictures of the hungry and homeless for the agency. Together their words and images became part of the official government history of the Depression.  

Nothing in Gellhorn’s life could have prepared her for the suffering, despair, poverty and pride in the people she wrote about. She had tremendous sympathy and compassion for them and was ultimately fired from the FERA when she incited a group of unemployed workers to riot against their boss. Her work at FERA shaped Gellhorn as a person and journalist and was preparation for the war reporting that would be even more gritty and demanding.  Gellhorn based her collection of fictional short stories called “The Trouble I’ve Seen,” on the portraits she wrote. Published in 1936, the book got good reviews and made Gellhorn a literary star.

That same year, on a family vacation in Key West Florida, Gellhorn met one of her own idols, best-selling author and journalist Ernest Hemingway. They shared a lot in common – both were writers and thrill junkies addicted to the kind of rush that only covering wars and crises can bring.

But their relationship quickly got more complicated. In addition to his reputation as one of the new voices of American literature, Hemingway was a known womanizer. Married to his second wife at the time he met Gellhorn, they began an affair that would take them both to Spain to cover that country’s civil war. From there, Gellhorn went to Germany, Czechoslovakia and Finland, reporting on Hitler’s rise to power and takeover of Europe.  It was dangerous work and few journalists were doing it.

By 1940, a newly divorced Hemingway married Gellhorn.  But unlike his first two wives, Gellhorn had no intention of quitting her successful career to become a full-time wife.  “Why should I be a footnote to somebody’s else’s life?” she asked.

Shortly after the wedding, Collier’s sent Gellhorn to China to report on that country’s war with Japan. Unhappy that his new wife would be globe-trotting again, Gellhorn persuaded him to come along and make it their “honeymoon.” It was far from a romantic trip, and it wouldn’t be the last time that they would clash over her work assignments.

The longer World War II dragged on, the more in demand Gellhorn became as she burnished her reputation as one of the best war reporters around.  In London after the Blitz in 1943, she was on her way to Italy to cover the war there, when she received a letter from Hemingway. With one question, he summed up his jealousy and resentment: “Are you a war correspondent or a wife in my bed?” For Gellhorn, the answer was simple. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” she later recalled. “I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the woman’s angle.”

For most of the war, Hemingway had stayed at their home in Cuba, content to read dispatches his wife had written from all over Europe. But D-Day was an epic event that he had to be part of. With their marriage on the rocks and knowing that women would not be allowed on the beach when the troops landed, Hemingway, by now a famous author, contacted Collier. He offeried to cover D-Day for them. They said ‘yes’ and just like that, stripped of credentials, Gellhorn was shut out of the biggest story of the war and her career.

When Hemingway refused to help his wife get a ticket on a flight to London, Gellhorn knew the marriage was over.  She would have to find her own way to get back to Europe and Normandy. It took two weeks, but she got there sailing on a Norwegian freighter carrying dynamite and personnel carriers.  On the docks in southern Britain, where the Allied ships were preparing to sail for France, she had to use all the ingenuity she had developed as a reporter to get even closer. Passing herself off as a nurse, she stowed away on a hospital ship and as the vessel crossed the English Channel, she locked herself in a bathroom.

At dawn, she awoke to an overwhelming scene: thousands of destroyers, battleships and amphibious vessels offloading thousands of troops as bullets and gunfire erupted everywhere.  All day long a steady stream of the wounded were brought onto the ship and in the chaos, no one questioned whether Gellhorn was a nurse or why a woman was so close to the action. Her dispatches from D Day, which ran in Collier’s, were vivid snapshots of the wounded and of the heroism and tireless efforts of the medics and doctors.

Two days later on June 8, a small team from the ship, with Gellhorn as a stretcher bearer, made it onto Omaha Beach to retrieve more of the wounded.  She wrote:

“We waded ashore, in water to our waists, having agreed that we would assemble the wounded from this area on board a beach LST (landing ship tank) and wait until the tide allowed the motor ambulance to come back and call for us. It was almost dark by now, and one had a terrible feeling of working against time.”

“Everyone was violently busy on that crowded, dangerous shore. The pebbles were the size of apples and feet deep, and we stumbled up a road that a huge road shovel was scooping out. We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path and  headed for a tent marked with a red cross.”

After D-Day, Gellhorn stayed in Europe and was one of the few journalists to witness the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau in April 1945. ''Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence,'' she wrote of her visit to Dachau, ''the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces; they all look alike and like nothing you will ever see if you are lucky.''

The war was over by September but Gellhorn’s career as a roving war correspondent would last another 44 years.  Over her six-decade career, she was on the ground for at least twelve major conflicts, including Vietnam, the Six Day War in the Middle East and Nicaragua.  By one count she had reported from more than 50 countries. The final war she covered, at age 81 was the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.  She was “retired” when war broke out in Bosnia in 1992. “Too old,” she conceded. “You have to be nimble to cover war.”

Throughout her career, Gellhorn believed in telling the stories of ordinary people, “the sufferers of history.”  She was not a believer in objectivity when it came to war and she had no fear of calling out lies or taking on the bad guys in her work.

In her last years, Gellhorn’s health failed. Eye problems left her nearly blind and she had terminal ovarian cancer.  In 1998, living alone in London, she committed suicide. She was 89.

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project