Martha Gellhorn in Spain in the 1930s.
JFK Memorial Library
MARTHA GELLHORN FIRST knew she wanted to be a writer when she was a 16-year-old student at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri. Encouraged in her writing endeavors by two of her English teachers, she decided to send several of her poems to the celebrated poet Carl Sandburg. He wrote back saying, “If you must be a writer, you will be.”
Her mother, a suffragette leader and social reformer, and her father, a medical doctor who at the time was one of the only whites in St. Louis to regularly invite black people to dinner with his family, had instilled a strong desire to learn in their three sons and their daughter. But after three years at Bryn Mawr College, Martha decided that her thirst for knowledge could not be satisfied in a college setting. She wanted to write novels in Europe and thought that journalism would be a way to make a living while doing what she loved. In the spring of 1930, when Martha was 21, she arrived in Paris with two suitcases, a typewriter, and $75.00. She wrote articles for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch regarding the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) and wrote novels and short stories in her spare time.
In 1934, while living and writing in France, Martha was included as part of a special delegation of young French people invited to Berlin, Germany, to strengthen ties of friendship between France and Germany. After the train of young people arrived in Berlin, Martha and her friends were shocked when German border guards walked into their train car and confiscated their books and newspapers. They responded by singing the “Marseillaise,” the rousing French national anthem.
The rest of the trip did little to change Martha’s negative opinion of Nazi Germany. The Hitler Youth movement seemed too boisterously patriotic, and everyone seemed obsessed with race, especially the supposed superiority of the Aryan race over all others, particularly the Jews. As Martha’s parents were both half Jewish, she found this very disturbing.
Martha began to see the vital role that journalism could have: If people could clearly understand the truth of world events, they would demand action of their leaders. Wrongs would be righted, evil punished, and the innocent would be protected.
During the rest of the 1930s, Martha traveled throughout Europe and the United States, reporting for a time on how the U.S. Great Depression was affecting everyday people. She was in Germany when she first heard the Nazis refer to the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) as “Red swine dogs,” both in newspaper articles and chanted in the streets. She became so angry that she left Germany. Martha had such a low opinion of Nazis that she decided she would support the Republicans over the Nazi-supported Fascist Nationalists.
While in Spain, reporting the effects the Spanish Civil War had on civilians for Collier’s weekly newsmagazine, Martha realized that Fascism had to be stopped in Spain or it would take another, larger war to do so. The Fascist Nationalists won the war.
On the evening of June 6, 1944, D-day, Martha was walking through the docks of London. By this time, she had been reporting on the world war for Collier’s from England, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the Far East. She no longer believed, as she once did, that public opinion could be changed by journalism. After all, she and other journalists had been reporting the dangerous rise of European Fascism for years, and it had only grown more powerful. What Martha wanted now was a front-row seat to the fall of Fascism, which she believed had just begun that morning on the shores of Normandy. She thought that being a journalist gave her that ticket.
But she was going to have to find her own ticket this time. Along with the troops that had crossed the English Channel from the very docks she was now strolling through, hundreds of writers, radio journalists, and war photographers had also crossed over into Normandy. Martha, by now a respected and renowned journalist, had not been allowed to travel with them for one simple reason: they were men, and she was a woman. Female reporters weren’t allowed on the front lines of battle.
FASCISTS AND THE NAZI PARTY Fascism is a political ideology that promotes an authoritative single-party government intolerant of any other political views or parties. During the 1930s, several countries, including Spain, Italy, and Germany, developed Fascist governments, although Germany’s version of Fascism was far more destructive than the others.
As Martha walked around the docks, she noticed a white ship that had red crosses painted on its side. It was a hospital ship that was going to cross the Channel to help the wounded. Just then, a military policeman stopped her and asked what she was doing. She pointed to the hospital ship and told him that she was a journalist with plans to interview the nurses on the ship. He let her proceed. She walked aboard and locked herself in the bathroom until she felt the ship leaving port.
The transport ships that had crossed that morning with troops and reporters were painted in shades of green and grey to hide them from view of the enemy. The hospital ship Martha found herself on was stark white, and she and the six nurses and four doctors who were on board with her, moving through the dark waters of the Channel, hoped very much that the Germans would honor the Geneva Conventions that forbade the destruction of hospital transports.
Their crossing was slow. The Germans had put mines in the water to impede the Allied invasion, and the captain of Martha’s ship was being careful since the two preceding hospital ships had struck these mines. When the Normandy coast came into view, Martha was suddenly part of the invasion and wrote:
People will be writing about this sight for a hundred years and whoever saw it will never forget it. First it seemed incredible; there could not be so many ships in the world. Then it seemed incredible as a feat of planning; if there were so many ships, what genius it required to get them here, what amazing and unimaginable genius. After the first shock of wonder and admiration, one began to look around and see separate details. There were destroyers and battleships and transports, a floating city of huge vessels anchored before the green cliffs of Normandy. Occasionally you would see a gun flash or perhaps only hear a distant roar, as naval guns fired far over those hills. Small craft beetled around in a curiously jolly way. It looked like a lot of fun to race from shore to ships in snub-nosed boats beating up the spray. It was no fun at all, considering the mines and obstacles that remained in the water, the sunken tanks with only their radio antennae showing above water, the drowned bodies that still floated past … Then we stopped noticing the invasion, the ships, the ominous beach, because the first wounded had arrived.
All that day and into the night, Martha helped the doctors and nurses on the ship tend to the many wounded whom they brought on board. While waiting for the dawn, when they could cross the Channel back to England, Martha had these impressions:
If anyone had come fresh to that ship in the night … he would have been appalled…. Piles of bloody clothing had been cut off and dumped out of the way in corners; coffee cups and cigarette stubs littered the decks; plasma bottles hung from cords, and all the fearful surgical apparatus for holding broken bones made shadows on the walls. There were wounded who groaned in their sleep or called out and there was the soft steady hum of conversation among the wounded who could not sleep. That is the way it would have looked to anyone seeing it fresh—a ship carrying a load of pain, with everyone waiting for daylight, everyone hoping for the anchor to be raised, everyone longing for England. It was that but it was something else too; it was a safe ship no matter what happened to it. We were together and we counted on each other. We knew that from the British captain to the pink-cheeked little London mess boy, every one of the ship’s company did his job tirelessly and well. The wounded knew that the doctors and nurses and orderlies belonged to them utterly and would not fail them. And all of us knew that our own wounded were good men and that with their amazing help, their selflessness and self-control, we would get through all right.
Martha was the first female journalist to report on the D-day invasion. But because she had crossed the Channel without the proper permission, she was deprived of her travel papers and ration cards. This didn’t stop her. For the duration of the war, Martha relied on her charm and spunk to persuade many commanders to let her hitch a ride with their troops so she could see the war firsthand. She had wanted very much to fly in an Allied air mission over Germany, and one night she talked her way into becoming the first female journalist to do so.
While traveling through many European battle zones during the summer and autumn of 1944, Martha kept hearing rumors about Nazi concentration camps. The name Dachau stood out from the others, and it became a symbol of the entire Nazi regime in Martha’s mind. She needed to see it for herself.
The Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944.
FDR Memorial Library
When Martha arrived in Dachau shortly after it was liberated by the Allies and found herself interviewing one of the doctors in the camp, she met one of the former prisoners. She wrote:
What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin…. This man had survived; he was found under a pile of dead. Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked and suddenly he wept. “Everyone is dead,” he said, and the face that was not a face twisted with pain or sorrow or horror. “No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.”
Martha wanted to know everything, and she was told in detail how many people died from medical experiments and the cruel punishments inflicted by the SS guards who lived next to the camp in comfort with their wives and children. She was also given a tour where she saw the piles of dead, starved bodies that the SS had not had time to burn in the crematorium before they fled from the advancing Allied armies. As a war reporter, Martha had of course seen many dead bodies before, but to her, “Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged, naked, nameless dead.”
Dachau survivor.
Yad Vashem
THE THIRD MRS. HEMINGWAY Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway, a groundbreaking and influential American novelist as well as a war correspondent, in December 1940. Gellhorn greatly admired Hemingway’s novels, and he sometimes gave her advice on writing fiction. The marriage ended in 1945, in part because Martha wanted to continue reporting on World War II after their marriage and Hemingway preferred she stay home and write novels.
Toward the end of her visit, Martha was again speaking to one of the doctors when the former prisoner she had seen before came in and whispered something in Polish to the doctor. The doctor responded with “Bravo.” He told Martha that Germany had surrendered and the war was over.
“We sat in that room,” Martha wrote, “in that accursed cemetery prison, and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it forever.”
While touring Dachau, Martha lost her belief that truth and justice would ultimately prevail: man, in her opinion, had far too great a capacity for evil. But that did not keep her from reporting on wars. She continued to cover many conflicts, including Vietnam, the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and the civil wars in Central America. She died in 1998 at the age of 89, having fulfilled her earlier ambition to write novels and short stories, many of which were highly respected (and most of which were based on her own experiences). But Martha Gellhorn’s journalistic skills far outweighed those of her fiction writing, and she is widely considered to be one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century.
In the year following her death, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established as an annual award given to a journalist who illuminates a major news story by highlighting the human aspect of that story.
LEARN MORE Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life by Caroline Moorehead (Henry Holt, 2003).
The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn (Simon & Schuster, 1959; reprinted by Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).
War, Women, and the News: How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover WWII by Catherine Gourley (Atheneum Press, 2007).