Landing the scoop

One thing you may not know about the D-Day invasions is that one of the reporting scoops was scored by someone who had been denied accreditation. But Martha Gellhorn was not the sort of journalist to be deterred by that sort of thing; she sneaked aboard a hospital ship in England, then hid in the head until the morning of the 6^th, and she went ashore disguised as a stretcher bearer to get her story.

I suppose that her years of being in a relationship with that blowhard Ernest Hemingway gave her the kind of experience needed to pull off that kind of coup. They’d met during the Spanish Civil War and married in 1940, but by 1944 their relationship had soured. He’d refused to help her get a press pass that would have enabled her to fly to England, so instead she went over on a ship laden with explosives. Gellhorn, a long-time correspondent for Collier’s magazine, had been set to cover the story, but Hemingway’s ego couldn’t bear that. He himself got accredited by Collier’s, which meant that Gellhorn was off the story.

Ergo the subterfuge. She filed her story, which pissed off the command structure, but it also got up Hemingway’s nose. (Although he filed copy that starred himself as the sole reason for the days success, in fact he never went ashore at all on the 6^th, and his “head wound” was from a pre-embarkation car crash. By nightfall he was back at his “headquarters” at the Dorchester hotel, regaling all the barflies with his bravado.)

War reporting was in Gellhorn’s blood—she covered wars right up to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. Prior to D-Day, she’d reported on the war in China and from Czechoslovakia, Finland and Italy. Following D-Day she was one of the first correspondents to cover the liberation of Dachau. I’m not a rabid fan of her writing style, but she had extraordinary courage and did know how to find the humanity in her stories.

In 1961, she spent time in the Middle East and gave this prescient analysis of the Palestinians:

“The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war… Today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad. The ultimate aim is not such humane small potatoes as repatriating refugees.”

She also reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962, and then revisited Germany two years later. Again, her story sliced open the heart of the matter with surgical precision:

“The adults of Germany, who knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until he started losing, have performed a nation-wide act of amnesia; no one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its horrors… The young realize this cannot be true, yet one by one, each explains how guiltless his father was; somebody else’s father must have been doing the dirty work.”

(Had she filed her report five years later, after the student revolutions of 1968, she’d probably have revised her conclusion. And were she to be writing in 2017, this sentence would have been entirely different: “Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.”)

The nation was lucky to have had correspondents like Gellhorn covering the big events of the 20^th Century.