Chapter 9
On to Paris
Brave as a Saladang

For a few days in August 1944, while American and French forces fought the Germans defending the approaches to Paris in the French countryside, Hemingway served as the unofficial chief of intelligence at Rambouillet, a small city or, depending on your point of view, a large clearing in the ancient forests around the capital. Reconnoitering the routes that the Allies might take to get to Paris, the writer turned war correspondent and his driver, Private Archie Pelkey, were by themselves in a jeep on a country road when they encountered a small band of French irregulars, all but two of them naked from the waist up.

The Frenchmen were radical communists, not too different from the guerrillas Hemingway had known in Spain, and quickly found common ground with the large American, even making him their leader. Together they traveled to Rambouillet, and, finding it on the friendly edge of the no-man’s-land between the Allied and German armies, established themselves in a charming country hotel, taking eight of the thirty-some rooms in the Hôtel du Grand Veneur. There Hemingway created “a rather well-organized if tiny headquarters,” complete with large maps tacked to the wall marking German positions and friendly patrol routes.1

Speaking English, French, and broken German, all salted with curses, the ostensible war correspondent took charge. In his shirtsleeves, he received “intelligence couriers, refugees from Paris, and deserters from the German army,” methodically gathering information and writing reports that he passed to Allied intelligence officers.2 To gather more information, he planned and ran patrols into the no-man’s-land.

More than once, he accompanied the patrols himself, risking his life when the Germans fought back. “Some of the patrols we made would scare you worse than Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” he would write his new mistress, Mary Welsh, a few days later.3 Hemingway was so busy that he did not have time to organize the gear that built up in his sleeping quarters: “Carbines stood in each corner, revolvers of every nationality were heaped carelessly on the bed. The bathtub was filled with hand grenades,  . . . the [wash] basin with brandy bottles, while under the bed was a cache of army ration whiskey.”4 He was ready for whatever fate might throw his way.

 

Following the summer of 1943, there was not enough war in Cuba. Hemingway had hoped to make himself useful without leaving the island. His wish had almost come true. He could hear and see German submarines in the waters around the island; he knew that at least one real German spy had made his way to Havana and sent secret messages back to Berlin. But despite their hard work, the writer and his comrades had had little to show for their efforts. Now the focus of effort was clearly shifting to the other side of the Atlantic.

U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower’s forces invaded northwest Africa in late 1942 and advanced inland to link up with the long-suffering British Eighth Army. By the spring of 1943, the Allies had corralled some 225,000 Germans and Italians in a pocket along the Tunisian coast. German wags took to calling the place “Tunisgrad,” evoking the recent German defeat at Stalingrad in Soviet Russia, where the war continued to rage at fever pitch. In May Colonel General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim had had enough, and surrendered the once-proud Afrika Korps and its attachments. It was now only a matter of time before the Western Allies would invade the mainland of Europe.

Martha Gellhorn had never stopped wanting to ride to the sound of the guns in Europe; she knew that the Caribbean was at best a sideshow. The war on the Continent was “increasingly unbearable to read about.”5 She found it nearly impossible to sit down, to think, to settle for the quiet life in Cuba. Instead she traveled around the Caribbean, but the material she gathered was mostly about invisible threats: the crew of a B-17 bomber dutifully patrolling the Caribbean, with nothing to report on most days; or a quiet port city in a European colony where Fifth Columnists might be at work. But the stories in North Africa and Europe would be about epic battles for the future of civilization. So, in September 1943, she left Hemingway and Cuba and, a month later, found her way across the Atlantic to become one of the few female war correspondents in the European Theater.

Though a milestone on the road that would eventually lead to her divorce from Hemingway, Gellhorn’s decision to report from Europe was not the end itself. She wrote long, loving letters back to Cuba, filled with details about her life and work, and urged Hemingway to join her.6 The tempo of operations was about to speed up; he needed to come as soon as he could. Hemingway resisted stubbornly, unwilling to abandon Operation Friendless and urging her instead to return to Cuba to keep him company. She was loath to give in to his entreaties—but also not ready to let him go.

Gellhorn went so far as to involve American spies in a bid to save her marriage. On her travels in Europe, Martha had encountered Bob Joyce, the renegade diplomat last met at the American Embassy in Havana. Now he was in Bari, Italy, in the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, as the local base chief. Like many others, Joyce had joined America’s first civilian spy service in search of excitement. He could not get away from the State Department and the Foreign Service fast enough; that life was too stuffy and hidebound for a free spirit like himself.7 He knew that, under the charismatic leadership of the World War I hero William J. Donovan, OSS was filled with many of the best and brightest that America had to offer, and that the young agency was running a broad range of intelligence operations overseas, everything from ferreting out the enemy’s secrets to conducting black propaganda, even infiltrating saboteurs behind enemy lines. Joyce thought that the change would be liberating. That made him just the kind of man that Gellhorn was looking for. He knew what Hemingway had done in Cuba and he could now offer an entrée into the OSS.

She laid the family issue out for him: she was hitting her stride as a reporter. But Hemingway wanted her to come home. She was prepared to obey “the orders of her lord and master,” but desolate at the prospect of giving up her plans to cover “the big show,” meaning the Allied invasion of France. She supposed that Hemingway was making plans to come to Europe in some capacity, but had run into transportation and perhaps passport difficulties.8

Joyce heard the plea for help and cabled OSS headquarters. He suggested that his boss, Whitney Shepardson, the sophisticated international businessman who was head of Secret Intelligence (SI), consider approaching Hemingway. The idea was to enlist him for SI, the part of OSS dedicated to classic espionage—that is, dealing with spies and stolen secrets.

OSS officers scratched their heads as this message made the rounds. Just what could Hemingway do for the fledgling spy service, wondered Lieutenant Commander Turner McWine, the chief intelligence officer in the Middle East. The author’s prominence and temperament would make it hard for him to fit in.9

About a month later, Joyce addressed these concerns in a long letter to Shepardson. He listed Hemingway’s attributes: he was an authority on Spain who knew more non-Franco Spaniards than “any other American”; he had already run intelligence operations in Cuba; and, from the Spanish Civil War, he had firsthand knowledge of guerrilla warfare and special operations. Joyce defended Hemingway against traditionalists like the head of military intelligence, Major General George V. Strong, a perennial thorn in the side of OSS who had apparently criticized Hemingway. Strong’s criticism was more about the writer’s lifestyle and sympathies for the Spanish Republic than of his abilities. What did it matter if Hemingway had been married three times? Joyce summed up that Hemingway was a man “of the highest integrity and loyalty,” about as much of a communist or fellow traveler as the head of Chase National Bank. Joyce repeated his suggestion that Shepardson invite Hemingway to Washington to explore how he could be useful, perhaps in Spain or Italy.10

OSS Headquarters staffed the request carefully. Shepardson solicited the opinions of Deputy Directors Brigadier General John Magruder and G. Edward Buxton. Like his subordinates, Magruder expressed reservations about Hemingway’s temperament and left-wing politics, not to mention Joyce himself, “an extremely intelligent and somewhat temperamental individual who would not be improved by association with . . . Hemingway.”11 For his part, Buxton wondered if Hemingway might have more potential for Morale Operations (MO), the OSS’s black propaganda arm, than for SI.12 The file duly made its way over to MO, whose leaders concluded a few days later that Hemingway was too much of an individualist even for the highly unconventional MO mission of trying to demoralize the enemy (by, for example, circulating counterfeit German stamps that featured a skeletal image of Hitler).13 No one suggested that the forty-four-year-old Hemingway was suitable for a role in OSS’s paramilitary branch, whose members operated behind enemy lines as guerrillas, exactly the sort of thing that Hemingway (and his fictional hero Robert Jordan) had done in Spain. That kind of war was for much younger men, wasn’t it? In the end, Shepardson cabled back to Joyce in April that OSS had “[d]ecided in the negative about Hemingway. We may be wrong, but feel that although he undoubtedly has conspicuous ability for this type of work, he would be too much of an individualist to work under military supervision.”14

How did the Gellhorn-Joyce initiative end? Did Joyce ever get back to Gellhorn to deliver the bad news? If Hemingway and Gellhorn talked about her approach to Joyce, how did Hemingway react? It is impossible to know. Gellhorn and Joyce were out of touch in April, and wartime censorship would have made it difficult for him to give her the news in writing. By then Gellhorn had given in to Hemingway’s entreaties and made her way back to Cuba for a brief reunion.

The fastidious Gellhorn returned home to a husband who was drinking even more and washing less than usual. He had grown a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, so disorderly that mice played in it. (At least that is what he claimed in a chatty letter to his first wife, Hadley.15) He had been sleeping on the floor amid stacks of unanswered letters after having a few drinks. This was all right with the crew of Pilar, and Hemingway’s five dogs and eleven cats, all of whom made themselves comfortable in the disorder. The stage was now set for a private war. Hemingway talked about submarines in the Caribbean, Gellhorn looked to great battles to come in Europe, Hemingway defended Operation Friendless, Gellhorn attacked it. Some part of Hemingway had known for a while that Gellhorn was correct, but he did not want to admit it, certainly not to a woman who did not dutifully stand by her man and had gone instead on her own wartime adventures. That made her a bad wife who put her career before her marriage.16

Even after Hemingway raged at her, even waking her in the middle of the night to tell her how insane, irresponsible, and selfish she was, Gellhorn did not give up on looking for help from Allied intelligence.17 Just as she had approached Bob Joyce and OSS in Italy, Gellhorn turned to another friend for help in getting Hemingway out of Cuba and into the war. This time she called on her friendship with Roald Dahl, another warrior-writer-spy. He was a British fighter pilot who could no longer fly because, after being wounded in a crash, he lost consciousness at altitude. His official title was Assistant Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. Most attachés are spies in uniform, charged with collecting information about the host country. This was not enough for Dahl, who had another, unofficial portfolio from the organization known as British Security Co-ordination (BSC). Its job was to influence the American public and its leaders. BSC wanted to get them to support British war aims, work that involved a little bit of spying, the occasional press placement, and discreet pressure on the right person at the right time.18

Dahl had already begun his literary career by writing a combination of war stories and children’s fantasies, one of which had even caught Walt Disney’s attention. Impossibly tall at six feet six inches, with an exotic uniform and accent, to say nothing of his wartime record and literary credentials, Dahl was a prized commodity in Washington social circles. In October 1943, he had been invited to the White House for dinner and a showing of the film adaptation of For Whom the Bell Tolls in what he called the president’s “private cinema.” The hostess was Eleanor Roosevelt, who, Dahl wrote to his mother, “poured a lot of cocktails.” One of his dinner partners was Gellhorn, “a good type” who “uses as much bad language as her husband does in his books.”19

A few months later, in March 1944, Dahl was happy that “Marty Hemingway [had come] back last week from Italy and . . . was full of stories.”20 But she did not call on Dahl just to tell stories. She wanted to know if he could get Hemingway across the Atlantic. Space was scarce, reserved for war business. The air attaché controlled travel to Britain on Royal Air Force (RAF) planes. Dahl saw an opportunity. He could get a seat for Hemingway if he would agree to become an accredited war correspondent and report the war from an RAF viewpoint.21 When Gellhorn conveyed Dahl’s offer, Hemingway yielded to the inevitable and accepted. A grateful Gellhorn saluted Dahl for being “angelically helpful.”22

Hemingway soon traveled from Cuba to New York, still sporting the full beard that he had grown during Operation Friendless. In Manhattan he touched base with Collier’s, which was taking him on as a correspondent for the campaign in Europe, and met Dahl at the Hotel Gladstone. The two spent a memorable evening drinking champagne and eating caviar out of a seemingly bottomless, 2.2-pound jar with a man Dahl remembered as “some crazy boxing instructor.”23 Before he left for London, Hemingway told Gellhorn that women were not allowed on British aircraft (which was not true) and left her to cross the Atlantic by herself on a Norwegian freighter loaded with dynamite.

 

Gellhorn’s success in getting Hemingway to Britain did nothing to save their marriage. Once in London, Hemingway moved into the Dorchester on Park Lane in Mayfair, which happened to be her favorite hotel. Relatively new—it opened in 1931—and built with reinforced concrete, Londoners considered it to be both luxurious and bombproof. It still attracted regulars like the British novelist Somerset Maugham. But now it also attracted many with new money who came to be safe. (One wag commented that, during the war, it was like being in expensive squalor on a transatlantic luxury liner, perhaps one that was now being used as a troopship; the Dorchester was a fortress where money bought you safety but could not always compensate for wartime shortages or guarantee that the right kind of people were sitting at the table next to you.24)

The officially accredited war correspondent: the ID card that the Army issued in 1944. Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.

Though he had never been to the British capital before, Hemingway found himself among an amazing variety of friends, family, and associates who kept him busy. In the spring of 1944, London was the epicenter of the Allied universe. Everything and everyone, it seemed, was focused on the upcoming invasion of northern Europe. Passing by in the street, in vehicles or on foot, singly and in groups, were throngs of soldiers, sailors, and airmen from all over the free world. The better restaurants and clubs were filled with their officers. Journalists came to cover the great event that everyone sensed was about to happen. Hemingway’s brother Leicester, to whom he bragged about Operation Friendless, was there as part of a military film unit. When Gellhorn finally arrived in London, Hemingway had little time for her. Matters between them were worse than ever. They continued to fight, and he mocked her brutally in public. It did not help that he had developed an eye for Mary Welsh, the war correspondent from Minnesota who had worked with Leicester and talked to him about his big brother. She was a petite brunette, 5'2", with short curly hair and a friendly smile. The other correspondents thought she looked equally good in her uniform and the sweater she wore without a bra. Though still married to an Australian journalist, Mary soon became Ernest’s mistress. After his divorce from Gellhorn, she would become his fourth wife.

There were even a few spies in the mix. One of them was from the NKVD, and he was looking for Hemingway. The record of the meeting is short. It declares simply that an unnamed operative met Hemingway in London in June. How did the Soviets know when and where to find him? It could have been by chance, or the result of a diligent search. Or perhaps, at the last meeting in Havana, Hemingway gave the Soviet “worker” there an idea of where to find him. (According to hotel lore, the Dorchester had long been favored by Fifth Columnists and spies of all sorts.25) The Soviet contact and Hemingway might even have agreed on some kind of communications plan, perhaps that he would appear at a certain place at a certain time on a given day of the week.

The NKVD file suggests that this meeting was like the one that had occurred before Hemingway left Havana. It was, again, cordial and inconclusive, the Soviet probing for access and commitment, Hemingway sounding agreeable but stopping short of specific commitments:26

Our meetings with “Argo” [Hemingway’s code name] in London and Havana were conducted with the aim of studying him and determining his potential for our work. . . . “Argo” did not give us any polit. Information [sic], though he repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us.

Over the past four years, the character of the war against fascism had changed significantly. The writer remained sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the Russian people, who continued to make enormous sacrifices in the war against the Nazis. But now more than ever, his own country was mobilized and engaged in what Eisenhower would call the Crusade in Europe. America had made good on her promise to be the arsenal of democracy, turning out untold quantities of ships, planes, and tanks, and putting millions of men under arms. Hemingway himself had already served proudly on land and at sea. In the spring of 1944, the U.S. Army was getting ready to challenge the Germans on the plains of northern Europe. There were new and worthy American stories to record, and opportunities to contribute to the war effort that did not involve the NKVD.

 

Hemingway did not need another lecture from Gellhorn to know that D-Day would be, for America, the turning point in the war in Europe. He called in favors to get himself as close to the invasion beaches as possible. From a thirty-eight-foot landing craft, he watched history unfolding in the waters off Normandy on June 6, 1944. Around and behind him was one of the greatest armadas in history: the “derrick-forested” transport ships, the smaller boats “over all the sea” like so many water bugs, “crawling forward toward France.”27 The battleship Texas was not far away; her main batteries spouted flame and sent shells the size of small passenger cars into the cliffs overlooking the beach code-named “Omaha.” Amazingly, enough Germans survived the bombardment to shoot back at the invaders and create a killing zone at water’s edge. Just inland, Hemingway could see two American tanks burning brightly after being hit by German fire.

Omaha turned out to be one of the Allies’ greatest challenges on D-Day. The sector plan did not survive contact with the enemy. Confusion reigned. Most of the tanks designated for the beach sank offshore, infantry units could not find their objectives, and the German defenses in bunkers and pillboxes on the high ground held well into day. Some two thousand American soldiers died there in the surf and on the rocky beaches. But within the first twenty-four hours, the many survivors managed to rally and push a kilometer or two inland. They helped to establish the foothold on the Continent that would enable the American, Canadian, and British armies to battle their way through the difficult terrain of the coastal provinces in June and July before advancing east toward the River Seine and Paris in August.

 

After D-Day, Hemingway returned to London, and was finally able to fly with the RAF. Though now overweight, with a paunch above the beltline, he somehow fit into a British uniform with a shoulder tab labeling him as a correspondent. He even managed to buckle a life jacket and an oxygen mask over the uniform. In late June, he flew on sorties against V-1 “buzzbombs,” the unmanned missiles that the Germans called revenge weapons and aimed at English cities. One afternoon, aloft in an RAF “Tempest,” he watched a squadron of American B-25 bombers attack launch sites at a place called Droncourt in France. A few days later, on June 29, he flew over the south coast of England in a Mosquito, the RAF’s fast, plywood fighter, engaged in the dangerous work of shooting down the missiles in flight. In between raids, he studied navigation, because he did not want to be just a “sand-bagging passenger.” Here too he wanted to be useful. He began to enjoy learning about the war in the air and wanted to extend his “wonderful” time with the RAF.28 At least for now, he was willing to forget his prior detest for His Majesty’s Government, dating to its policy on the Spanish Civil War.

No matter what Hemingway’s wishes, the land war was soon much more important, and it was time to give up his base in London. The editors at Collier’s wanted him on the ground in France, where American soldiers were still fighting hard to push the Germans out of Normandy and Brittany. By mid-July, he had gotten himself accredited as a member of the press corps attached to the U.S. Army. Once on the Continent, he would remain true to the wartime criteria that he had established for himself. He had three goals: be useful to the fighting forces, find the best stories that he could, and operate on his own terms. They would lead to the high point of his career as a wartime spy.

After arriving in France, Hemingway befriended the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, Major General Raymond O. Barton, a tough, no-nonsense professional soldier, though one who was not humorless or close-minded. (For one thing, he tolerated the West Point nickname, “Tubby,” that followed him throughout his career.) Barton was willing to give Hemingway a jeep and a driver, who was usually the private from upstate New York with bright red hair named Archie Pelkey, and let him explore Normandy on his own. Outfitted with maps and binoculars, armed with rifles and hand grenades, they covered a great deal of ground: from ancient small towns like Villedieu-les-Poêles, literally “God’s City of Frying Pans,” where Hemingway calmly watched street fights between German and American soldiers; to the maze of country lanes and back roads near St.-Pois where an ambush by deadly accurate German 88 mm antitank guns could have cost him his life; to the magical tidal island Mont-St.-Michel, whose twelfth-century abbey still soars some five hundred feet from the surrounding salt flats where he went to recover from the ambush for a few days.29

Hemingway and his driver, Pvt. Archie Pelkey, on the road to adventure, France, 1944. Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.

From the start, Hemingway shared what he learned and observed with the U.S. Army. There were small bits of information that Barton and others found useful—perhaps something that Hemingway gleaned from a Frenchman, perhaps something that he himself noticed. Hemingway knew the French countryside well, especially the parts that he had explored on a bicycle in the 1920s when he was living in Paris with his first wife and their son. He also had an eye for terrain features that made a difference in combat.

Barton had an ulcer, exacerbated by the stress of combat. Once when he was exhausted at the end of the day and needed to lie down, Hemingway lay with him on a blanket and spoke softly about where the Germans were “and whether they have left or not and how it is ahead.”30 When the Allied armies started to close in on Paris in mid-August, Barton knew there was a good chance that the 4th Division would help to liberate the city that was still so close to Hemingway’s heart, and he gave the writer an unofficial reconnaissance mission: take your jeep and driver, and see what you can see on the road to Paris.31

Hemingway happily complied, heading east from the coast, leaving the cramped hedgerows of Normandy for the more open landscape of farms interspersed with the occasional copse of trees around Chartres. On August 19, 1944, he came across the two cars of bare-chested French guerrilla fighters armed with a haphazard assortment of weapons.32 These were the young men from the communist Franc-Tireurs et Partisans Français (FTPF), the most radical, hard-left fringe of the French Resistance which was “frequently charged with lack of discipline or excessive zeal.”33

Rapport was instant. The French irregulars were attracted to the large, energetic American who spoke their language, and they quickly attached themselves to him. He was equally happy to take them under his wing. It was not a formal relationship, but something that sprouted spontaneously on the battlefield. The Frenchmen were so taken with Hemingway that they soon began to copy his “sailor bear walk . . . [and, like him, spit] short sentences from the corners of their mouths . . . in different languages.”34 The American proceeded to scrounge captured weapons from nearby friendly units, and to outfit his men with odd bits of clothing and equipment from a U.S. Army truck that had been abandoned after an ambush. Soon the fighters were dressed and armed well enough, happily festooning strings of hand grenades about their waists and shoulders.35

Hemingway led his band to Rambouillet, now important because it sat astride one of the roads to Paris from the southwest. The German garrison had just evacuated; there was nothing between the small city and the enemy. This left a vacuum that Hemingway and his men could try to fill. He knew instinctively that he also needed to seek out the nearest American unit, to report where he was and what he had seen. So, on the morning of August 20, 1944, Hemingway drove a few miles back to the west to check in with the intelligence officer at the command post of the 5th Division outside the newly liberated Chartres, centered around the third-largest Gothic cathedral in Europe, its square towers and flying buttresses dominating the old town and the surrounding wheat fields. It was perhaps the bloated German and American corpses along the road that no one had yet had time to bury that impressed the senses more on that day, however.

About to step into “a bath of excitement”: Hemingway and Colonel David K. E. Bruce of the OSS, with a member of the French Resistance, August 1944. Hemingway wears a captured German belt, and holds a glass, likely filled by the man on his left holding a bottle at the ready. Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.

At the command post the writer ran into David K. E. Bruce, the senior OSS officer in Western Europe. Even in plain GI battle dress, Bruce looked like the leader that he was: helmet squarely placed on his head, field jacket clean and buttoned, insignia of rank—a colonel’s eagles—plain to see. His gaze was direct, his expression open and engaged, a sign that he had good people sense. In Chartres Bruce was (to use his words) “enchanted” by the “patriarchal” Hemingway, carried away by “his gray beard [and] imposing physique, much like God, as painted by Michelangelo.”36 Bruce’s enchantment made it easy for Hemingway to persuade him that Rambouillet might hold the keys to the gates of Paris. Together they could accomplish one of Bruce’s missions, that of finding out about the Germans’ strength and intentions, especially by infiltrating spies through the lines into the territory the Germans still controlled.

In the afternoon Bruce traveled the same road to Rambouillet that Hemingway had taken to and from Chartres. The colonel drove along the edge of a dense, old-growth forest that had been the king’s hunting preserve in the days of the monarchy, then by a small, fairy-tale chateau, gray stucco with a rounded tower on each corner—the country house for French rulers when they wanted to get away from the capital. In the heart of town Bruce found an “ancient hotel, delightfully shaded.”37 With its own garden, the Grand Veneur looked more like another large country house than a small hotel. The four-story building had wooden shutters on its many double doors and windows, which, along with the dormers breaking up the pitch of the roof, gave the place an inviting air. Though named for the king’s master huntsman (veneur), the Grand Veneur had been open to anyone who could pay to relax in style in the country.

Once inside the hotel, Bruce did not hesitate to plunge into the “bath of excitement” that Hemingway and his partisans had drawn for him.38 By setting up an operations center in his room, Hemingway had already done some of Bruce’s work for him, and they joined forces for the next few days. The patrols they sent out into the countryside between Rambouillet and Paris came back with reports that it was only lightly defended, key information for the Allied armies advancing on the French capital. Hemingway impressed Bruce as an expert interrogator and report writer, spending hours sifting the information he collected.39 At one point, a French irregular asked Hemingway and Bruce for permission to leave their headquarters for “fifteen minutes to kill a civilian traitor”—something that was not unusual during the chaotic days between the occupation and the liberation, when members of the Resistance could settle old scores. Bruce wrote in his memoirs that they approved the request, and lent the man a pistol.40

Bruce charged Hemingway with keeping order at the Grand Veneur, and he did it in his own way. He is said to have come up with the novel idea of making his German prisoners take their pants off (on the theory that a man without pants was less likely to escape), and then put them to work peeling potatoes, onions, and carrots in the hotel kitchen. At dinnertime, the hotelier added insult to injury by making the prisoners put on frilly jackets and wait on their captors.41

When the word got out that troops were staging in Rambouillet for the liberation of Paris, the town was soon “jammed like a New Year’s Eve party with . . . fairly trashy celebrants,” including a number of fellow war correspondents who wondered why Hemingway seemed to be running the place.42 He used his fists to keep order; as he put it later, he wound up hitting one newspaperman “squarely in the puss” and putting a hammerlock on a paratrooper who was “threatening everybody with his Sten gun to make them give him champagne.”43 The future diplomat Bruce would share a toned-down recap of that day with the writer Malcolm Cowley: “Ernest . . . was obliged, quite gently for such a Hercules of a man, to push a couple of them around with the back of his hand.”44 But even Bruce had to admit that the writer-spy could fly into rages at Rambouillet when he had had too much to drink.45

Bruce funneled the intelligence they produced to the advancing Allied forces. Some reports went directly to the field commanders, others onto the OSS wire—Bruce had his own encrypted radio and communicator. With a senior member of the Resistance, Bruce and Hemingway tried to brief the man who would lead the first Allied troops into Paris. The French division commander was a long-serving officer named Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hautecloque, who had been fighting the Germans continuously since 1939. Bruce admired the fellow aristocrat: “tall, spare, handsome, stern-visaged . . . a striking figure.”46 Hemingway was less generous in one of his wartime dispatches: he told how, far from being grateful for their work, Leclerc called his three briefers unspeakable names in French and told them “to buzz off.”47 But the general’s own intelligence officer sat down with them later at dinner, and Bruce gave him “a detailed summary, with sketches of the German strength between Rambouillet and Paris, along all routes, of the obstacles to be expected.” Bruce believed that the information had “a determining effect upon the . . . march to Paris.”48

Bruce valued Hemingway’s contribution enough to arrange for their collaboration to continue after they left Rambouillet. The night before Leclerc advanced on Paris, the OSS officer wrote in pencil on a small scrap of lined paper to “Dear Mr. Hemingway.” He, Bruce, would be leaving for Paris in the morning. Could Hemingway “arrange the transportation . . . of the twelve Resistance men who have done such excellent service here?” For Bruce it was “important to keep them together to be used for certain future purposes that I have in view.” He closed with a formal “Very Sincerely Yours, D K E Bruce, Colonel, G.S.C., C.O. OSS, ETO.”49 Hemingway carefully saved this note, as he had done with the letter from Ambassador Braden about his work in Cuba.

On August 24, Bruce and Hemingway joined one of the long lines of Allied trucks, jeeps, and tanks as they started to make their way slowly through the forest in the direction of Paris. The weather did not cooperate—it rained for much of the day, soaking everyone to the skin within an hour of leaving Rambouillet—and neither did the few remaining Germans. More than once Hemingway and his private army stopped to take cover (and maybe to fight back) when the enemy opened fire from half a dozen or so carefully chosen positions, perhaps a tank hidden in the woods or one of the still dangerous 88 mm antitank guns on a piece of high ground.

The future CBS newscaster Andy Rooney, then a reporter for Stars and Stripes, was nearby when he heard cannon fire ahead. He knew instantly that it was not friendly fire and jumped out of his jeep, looking for—and finding—a roadside wall that was just high enough for him to hide behind if he crouched down low. Behind the same wall, some fifty feet away, he saw another figure who shouted, “We’re going to be here a while!” The large man in a Canadian battle smock and officer’s cap with a leather brim who then crawled over to him turned out to be Hemingway. Pulling bits of paper from his pockets, the writer proceeded to tell Rooney where the Germans were on the road ahead. Though he had reservations about Hemingway the rogue war correspondent, Rooney was impressed by the accuracy of the information and grateful for the warnings about trouble spots.50

By late afternoon on the twenty-fourth, Hemingway and Bruce were inside city limits, coming up on the River Seine that flows through the heart of Paris. Pockets of German resistance and jubilant crowds slowed progress to a crawl. Even where the two sides were still firing, the streets were lined with Parisians happily forcing fruit, flowers, and, above all, drinks on the liberators. “It was,” Bruce wrote in his diary, “impossible to refuse [the gifts thrust upon us]. . . . In the course of the afternoon, we had beer, cider, white and red Bordeaux, white and red Burgundy, champagne, rum, whiskey, cognac, armagnac, and Calvados.”51 The combination was enough to wreck even Bruce’s sturdy constitution and once night fell, he and Hemingway decided to put up for the night in a nearby house.

On August 25, the Americans woke to “a wonderful sunny day.”52 After taking the morning to collect themselves, the small group set out at twelve thirty on a grand tour of some of the most iconic sights in the City of Light, driving down the magnificent boulevard known as the Champs-Élysées, which sweeps from the Arc de Triomphe to the elegant Place de la Concorde. Though sniper fire continued to ring out through the area, six French veterans stood guard over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the arch. Their captain allowed the Americans to go up on the roof to take in the breathtaking view—the sea of domes and roofs and spires above, tanks moving and firing in the streets below.

Later in the afternoon Bruce and Hemingway raced back up a now-deserted Champs-Élysées to No. 25, the home of the elite Travelers Club in the La Païva Mansion (named for a nineteenth-century courtesan also known as “la grande horizontale”). The club was mostly deserted, but they managed to find its president and joined him in a round of champagne. Then, after braving the crowds of cheering, drinking, and kissing Frenchmen in the Place de l’Opéra, they escaped to the relative calm of the Ritz, the venerable establishment in the heart of Paris, more like a chateau than a hotel, which was Hemingway’s idea of heaven. (“When I dream of [the] afterlife . . . , the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz,” Hemingway once wrote.53) There they settled in the bar with Hemingway’s irregulars, a few correspondents, and Bruce’s subordinates, ordering some fifty martinis, which the discerning Bruce dismissed as “not very good.”54 But dinner at the hotel that night, with Hemingway and a smaller entourage, was superb: the chef made the best of the few ingredients at his disposal, probably a cut of meat saved for a special occasion, along with some of the Ritz’s wartime staples like vegetable broth, rice and creamed spinach with a special sauce, then a handful of raspberries in liqueur, all washed down with wines from one of the best cellars in the world (which had survived the occupation and the liberation intact). After dinner, the diners wrote the date on menu cards, which each of them then signed. The card that the military historian S. L. A. Marshall took home bore the caption: “We think we took Paris.”55

They, of course, had not “taken” Paris in any sense of the word. But by most accounts they were in the vanguard, and their reports had proven useful, with solid facts about the enemy and the routes that were open.56 It was a real contribution to the liberation of the French capital that probably saved lives. This was Hemingway at his lifetime best in the spy business. Ground combat with irregulars suited him well, better even than the war at sea and certainly better than the war in the air. Other forms of spying, like running the Crook Factory or working for the NKVD, paled in comparison. Marshall, who had seen Hemingway in action a number of times between August 23 and 25, and was a good judge of military prowess, concluded that he had “the courage of a saladang, and . . . was uncommonly good at managing guerrillas.”57 For his part, David Bruce concluded that Hemingway had displayed that rare combination of advised recklessness and caution that knows how properly to seize . . . a favorable opportunity which, once lost, is gone forever. He is a born leader of men, and, in spite of his strong independence of character . . . a highly disciplined individual.”58

Marshall and Bruce were right. Hemingway could pick up a loosely organized team, become its leader, and lead it through the fog of war. But he was not just an independent guerrilla leader. He was careful to liaise with the regulars, and to make common cause with intelligence officers like Bruce. What Hemingway’s driver said about the radical French partisans applied equally to the man who led them in August 1944. For Private “Red” Pelkey, they were “a good outfit. Best outfit I have ever been with. No [Army] discipline. Got to admit that. Drinking all the time. Got to admit that. But plenty fighting outfit,” one that, with the right leader, got the job done.59