The Cellar - May 28th, 2019: Martha Gellhorn

Yet another Feisty Broad and the only woman to hit the beach in Normandy on D-Day.
A depression era field investigator for FDR’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration, then news reporter, a war reporter in Spain
on the advice of Ernest Hemingway. Later she married him for awhile, then beat him out for the Colliers Magazine D-Day reporter
spot. She wrote an “angry letter” to the military brass when they declared women were not allowed at the front.
This is all a thumbnail background, as she was very complicated.

Quote:

On the night of June 6, 1944, before the ships departed for Normandy, Gellhorn made her way to the waterfront on the pretext of interviewing the nurses aboard a hospital ship. Once on board, she hid herself in the bathroom. Gellhorn knew that if she got caught, she would lose her accreditation and might even get deported back to America. Still, to witness the great invasion was worth the risk. Gellhorn remained in her hideout for several hours and only emerged when the ship was well on her way to France. Later that night, after the troops had landed and the massacre on the beach was finally over, Gellhorn sneaked ashore with a couple of doctors and medics as a stretcher bearer to collect the wounded. In the chaos of the war, nobody gave a damn that Gellhorn was a woman.

http://cellar.org/img/Gellhorn1.jpg

Quote:

Martha Gellhorn on D-Day
The stretcher bearers that were part of the American personnel started on their long back-breaking job. By the end of that trip their hands were covered in blisters and they were practically hospital cases themselves.
It will be hard to tell you of the wounded there were so many of them. There was no time to talk, there was too much else to do.
Cigarettes had to be lighted and held for those who couldn't use their hands. It seemed to take hours to pour hot coffee via the spout of a teapot into a mouth just showing through bandages.

Other correspondents reported on military movements, Gellhorn reported on people.

Quote:

Martha Gellhorn became the only woman to land in Normandy the same day the troops did. Other women followed, but much later. The first batch of women—members of the United States Women’s Army Corps—landed in Normandy thirty-eight days later.
Soon after Gellhorn had filed her story to Collier’s, the military police arrested her. They took away her credentials and transported her to a nurse’s training camp outside London. Gellhorn escaped from the camp by convincing a British pilot to fly her to Italy.

Chutzpah comes to mind.

http://cellar.org/img/Gellhorn2.jpg

Quote:

Martha Gellhorn continued covering conflicts her country was involved in. She covered the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s. She was still out at the front reporting the civil wars in Central America at the age of seventy, and incredibly, United States’ invasion of Panama in 1989 at the age of eighty-one. It was only when war came to Bosnia that she decided to quit, announcing that she was “too old” and not “nimble” enough for war anymore.
As Gellhorn entered the late eighties, her eyesight began to fail and she became almost completely blind. She was also suffering from ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver. She committed suicide in 1998, at the age of ninety, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

She refused to discus Hemingway, refused to be a footnote to his life, felt she deserve credit for her own career. I agree.
Nicole Kidman played Gellhorn in the HBO Films' Hemingway & Gellhorn.

Martha Gellhorn quotes...
• “It’s become as natural and right to be alone and silent that I don’t know how I can shift over to company.”
• “Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
• “I want to read and write and be very quiet.”
• “I feel very troubled in the head and heart.”
• “Oh my I love you and oh my I am homesick for you.”
• “I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”

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