Martha Gellhorn was the only female journalist to report first-hand from the Normandy landings, and that was just one of her many brave forays into war zones around the world, says Rebecca Wallersteiner
Next month, on 6 June, the world will mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when combined Allied forces began the largest seaborne invasion in history. Operation Overlord, as it was codenamed, involved 156,000 soldiers – and one woman.
The journalist Martha Gellhorn had been denied permission to accompany the troops, so stowed away on a hospital ship. She was the only woman to land on the Normandy beaches on that fateful day, and wrote a brilliant first-hand account of the invasion.
Gellhorn was already an acclaimed war correspondent for Collier’s, an American magazine, but news outlets could only send one journalist each to cover the landings. Collier’s decided to accredit Ernest Hemingway, who didn’t work for the magazine but, thanks to his best-selling novels, was a much more famous writer. He was also Gellhorn’s husband.
She refused to accept no for an answer. In her vivid account, published in her memoir The Face of War, she described how she crept on board the ship, posing as a nurse, and locked herself in the toilet until it departed for France.
‘There was nothing to do now but wait,’ she wrote. ‘The big ship felt empty and strange. There were 422 beds covered with new blankets; and a bright, clean, well-equipped operating room, never before used; great cans marked “whole blood” stood on the decks; plasma bottles and supplies of drugs and bales of bandages were stored in handy places. Everything was ready, and any moment we would be leaving for France.’
There were hundreds of grey or camouflaged ships as far as the eye could see, she wrote, from fishing boats to battleships, contrasting with the “snowy white” hospital ship with bright red crosses painted on the hull and boat deck. If caught, Gellhorn would likely have been sent back to America and lose whatever foreign press credentials she had.
Pulling out of the harbour that night, they passed a ship going the same way, packed with American troops standing on deck, silent and unmoving. The hospital ship was unnarmed, with not even a pistol on board, and everyone aboard hoped the Germans would follow the Geneva convention and not attack it. It was equipped with six water ambulances – light motor launches that could be lowered from the ship
