Of the nearly 160,000 people who embarked for Normandy on this day in 1944, there was only one woman, Martha Gellhorn — who was not supposed to be there.
Fans of Ernest Hemmingway may know Gellhorn as his third wife, but she was a powerhouse in her own right who deserves far more attention outside her tumultuous and short-lived marriage (which failed largely because of her strong will and independence in the face of Hemingway’s infamous difficulty as a partner).
In fact, by the time Gellhorn met Hemingway in 1936, during a Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida, she was already a noted writer and journalist. As young as seven, she had participated in “The Golden Lane,” a rally for women’s suffrage at the Democratic Party’s 1916 national convention in St. Louis. After enrolling in Bryn Mawr College, a famous liberal arts institution for women, in 1926, she dropped out a year later to pursue journalism, managing to get published in The New Republic.
Determined to become a foreign correspondent, in 1930, Gellhorn worked at the United Press bureau in Paris, but was fired after she reported sexual harassment by a man connected with the agency. She then travelled around Europe, writing for newspapers in Paris and her native St. Louis, covering fashion for Vogue, and even published a book about her experiences.
After returning to the U.S. in 1932, Gellhorn was hired as a contributor to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s column in Women’s Home Companion, spending many evenings in the White House. She was then hired as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), which was created to end the Great Depression. She spent the next several years travelled around the country to report on the plight of average Americans. She lost her job at FERA after she convinced a group of workers in Idaho to break the windows of the local FERA office to draw attention to their crooked boss — which had worked.
When Gellhorn was hired to report for Collier’s Weekly on the Spanish Civil War, she and Hemingway decided to travel there together; they celebrated Christmas of 1937 in Barcelona. She reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler, and was in Czechoslovakia just months before the infamous Munich Agreement. She remained in Europe when World War II broke out in 1939, describing these events in a novel published the following year, “A Stricken Field”. She later reported the war from across the world, including Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England. As she would later recall: “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.”
Naturally, when the largest amphibious landing in history was underway, Gellhorn wanted in on the action. She applied to the British government for press accreditation to report on the Normandy landings; her application, like those of all female journalists, was denied. Lacking official press credentials, she instead posed as a nurse and was allowed onto a hospital ship where she promptly locked herself in a bathroom. Upon landing two days later, she saw the many wounded and became a stretcher-bearer. She was among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by U.S. troops in April 1945.
(Gellhorn, who had married Hemingway in November 1940, clearly didn’t allow marital life to get in her way. Her famously prickly husband grew increasingly resentful of the long absences during her reporting assignments; when she left the comfort of their Havana estate in 1943 to cover the Italian Front, he wrote “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?” Hemingway, however, would later go to the front just before the Normandy landings, and Gellhorn also went, with Hemingway trying to block her travel. When she arrived in war-torn London after a dangerous ocean voyage — he had landed there 11 day earlier by plane, which she had arranged for him — she told him she had had enough; they divorced in 1945).
After the war, Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s. Even in her 70s, she continued covering the civil wars in Central America. As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically, but not in spirit: She still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and the following year, she went door to door in the slums of Panama City to report on civilian casualties resulting from the U.S. invasion. She finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began, as her vision had become permanently impaired; he managed one last overseas trip to Brazil in 1995 to report on poverty, which was published in the literary journal Granta. By this time, Gellhorn’s eyesight had failed to the point that she could not read her own manuscripts. In her final years, Gellhorn was in frail health, nearly blind and suffering from metastasizing ovarian cancer. On 15 February 1998, she died in London, where home for the last several years, apparently by swallowing a cyanide capsule; she was 89.
Gellhorn resented her fame as Hemingway’s third wife, remarking that she had no intention of “being a footnote in someone else’s life.” As a condition for granting interviews, she reportedly asked that Hemingway’s name not be mentioned. “I’ve been a writer for over 40 years. I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him. Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?
Sarvodaya 
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