D-Day Open Thread: Martha Gellhorn At the Normandy Invasion

Today is the anniversary of D-Day.

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World War II saw some of the greatest war correspondents of all time go into action with the troops. Along with Ernie Pyle in the Pacific, Martha Gellhorn was probably the best of them — blessed with courage and determination, she stowed away on a hospital ship and thus become the first reporter on the beaches of Normandy:

Then we saw the coast of France and suddenly we were in the midst of the armada of the invasion. First it seemed incredible; there could not be so many ships in the world. The is 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.

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, as naval guns fired 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. On an LCT near us washing was hung upon a line, and between the loud explosions of mines being detonated on the beach dance music could be heard coming from its radio. Barrage balloons, always looking like comic toy elephants, bounced in the high wind above the massed ships, and invisible planes droned behind the grey ceiling of cloud.

Troops were unloading from big ships to heavy cement barges or to light craft, and on the shore, moving up four brown roads scarred the hillside, our tanks clanked slowly and steadily forward.

Before D-Day Gellhorn had covered the war in Italy, and after the Normandy landing, followed the American soldiers all the way to Dachau. Something of a limousine liberal, passionately anti-war and a committed leftist, Gellhorn — third wife of Ernest Hemingway, to whom he dedicated his masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls — was also an excellent writer and an unflinching observer of the truth. She had no patience for official channels, REMFs (look it up) and cowardly whiners:

What mattered then was the defeat of Hitler. That was the most important thing in the world. I wanted to be where everybody was. I didn’t want to be sitting someplace safe.

All the other wars were nice and disorganised and they didn’t bother you much as a journalist. In Spain you could go wherever you wanted if you had transport. But during the Second World War there were American public relations characters who had come from someplace quiet like California and had never heard a shot fired in anger. They were extremely starchy and ridiculous.

During the whole of the Second World War. I operated as a gypsy, privately, without any contact with anybody. I had no papers. I’d just sort of thumb my way around.

There are still distinguished journalists covering America’s wars: John Burns of the New York Times, and independent journalist Michael Yon. But not enough. Instead, we get this:

How times have changed.

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