Martha Gellhorn Didn't Need Permission
Although the Army accredited about 120 women reporters and photographers to cover Europe in World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower prohibited women from covering combat.
This curtailed Martha Gellhorn’s options. Credentials facilitated transport, bed and board, and access to the censors and telegraph wires necessary to get a story out. By 1939 when the war in Europe officially began, Gellhorn, 30, had already been four times to Spain during its Civil War, and covered the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. From 1939 to 1942, she did occasional war reporting from Finland and China, and toured installations in the Caribbean from her home in Cuba.
By the winter of 1943-44, she couldn’t stand it anymore. The only active front in Europe was Italy, and with four languages, she moved between the French, Polish, and American sections of the Allied front without papers.
Desperate to see the invasion of France, Gellhorn snuck onto a hospital ship in Southampton on D Day + 2, and made her way to the coast, the only woman correspondent to do so, and was interned briefly for her trouble. She returned to Italy, and then made her way back to France after the liberation of Paris, covering the Battle of the Bulge and the occupation of Germany, including Dachau days after its liberation.
A witty, leggy blonde, Gellhorn had little trouble cadging rides and favors, but in October 1944, covering the 82nd Airborne in Nijmegen, she was detained. Suspected as a spy, she was brought before the commanding General, James Gavin. Charmed and impressed by her guerilla savvy, and also careful of her famous (alienated) husband Ernest Hemingway, Gavin let her go. Months later, they began a serious love affair.
The prohibition on women at the front was not the only reason Gellhorn avoided the censor and official wires. On her first trip to Madrid in 1937, she carried a letter from Collier’s magazine that got her into the country, but that was a favor from a friend. She didn’t have enough military expertise to write for the dailies, though she was learning fast. Instead, on a lark, she mailed a piece to Collier’s. They printed it as-is, put her on the masthead, and took dozens more over the next eight years.
Collier’s was a beautifully produced weekly magazine with big lead times, and thus never broke news, but also ranged more freely than the dailies. Its correspondents had time to write with context and to hone their voices. Gellhorn had been a novelist as long as she had been a journalist, and her pieces were innovative: carefully observed, beautifully written, and often infused with a moral urgency on behalf of civilians. She preferred to report from a war zone for three to four weeks, and then retreat to a hotel behind the lines, blazing through several pieces in a week or two.
Spain was the first modern war that specifically targeted civilians. Though at first she resented any attempt to relegate her to “local color,” Gellhorn soon realized that those stories could show the human costs of war lost in daily dispatches about military engagements. She liked to immerse herself in groups of people long enough to fade into the background, whether civilians, soldiers, prisoners, or refugees.
The space and time Collier’s afforded became an enormous strength as the gravity of the last year of the war made its mark on her. She wrote about the suffering of Paris under occupation, the hypocrisy of German civilians, and morale of the American forces without having to please the Army censors. Collier’s did spike one story for being too tough on the Russian allies. Though some American reporters managed remarkable work on the liberation of the death camps under tight deadlines, notably Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald, none comes close to Gellhorn’s Dachau piece in recognizing the gravity of mass genocide. Murrow, traveling with the Third Army (and requiring accreditation to broadcast), ends on an uplifting note, celebrating the liberation of the camp and Franklin Roosevelt, who died the same day. Gellhorn, traveling alone, and writing later in Paris, marks the devastating failure of western civilization.
Without restrictions on women correspondents, Martha Gellhorn might well have become an ace frontline reporter. She had the smarts of a Herbert Matthews, and the sympathy of an Ernie Pyle. Discrimination often fuels creativity in the marginal spaces left to those excluded, so Martha Gellhorn became something different from a war correspondent: she became a writer at war, and one of a kind.