Martha Gellhorn was present during every single war and conflict around the world for 60 years.
She was the only woman to land on the shores of Normandy during D-Day.
Throughout the course of her life, she was a pacifist, and devoted her life to documenting
everything she could with a sense of perspective and empathy for the human beings she was surrounded
by.
Many have called her the greatest war correspondent who ever lived.
Early Life and Career
Born in 1908 in St. Louis Missouri, Martha Gellhorn could not ask for two more feminist
parents in the world.
Her mom was a suffragette, her dad was a gynecologist, so they were all about female empowerment.
In 1916, her mother brought Martha to witness 7,000 people protesting at the Democratic
National Convention for women's right to vote when she was just 8 year old.
This event stuck with her for the rest of her life, and young Martha never took her
vote for granted.
The Gellhorns raised their daughter to know that she could do anything a man could do,
which gave her the confidence that would help her throughout the rest of her life.
Martha Gellhorn attended Bryn Mawr College, which is a private all-girl's school just
outside of Philadelphia.
She dropped out before she completed her degree in journalism, because she realized that it
was not necessary for her to start a career in writing.
Martha was able to get a few articles published in a publication called The New Republic.
Armed with a byline, she applied for a position as a foreign correspondent in Paris, and got
a job at The United Press.
In 1930, she was 22 years old, and living a happy and romantic life in Paris.
Unfortunately, she became a victim of sexual harassment at work.
When she refused to sleep with someone in exchange for a raise, she was fired.
She continued to live in Paris and sell her articles to several magazines, including Vogue.
But by 1934, she decided it was time to move back to the United States, because she felt
that the American people needed someone to give them a voice.
President Roosevelt had created an organization called the Federal Emergency Relief Administration,
and Martha Gellhorn began working for them.
She would interview upwards of 5 underprivileged families every single day, and heard their
struggles about poverty, disease, and so much more.
Seeing American people live in such horrible conditions during the Great Depression was
shocking.
She wanted to let the world know that the so-called 'American Dream' wasn't as glamorous
as everyone thought it was.
Her articles were so moving, that Eleanor Roosevelt herself read them and reached out
to become Martha Gellhorn's friend.
While working at FERA, Martha encouraged a group of workers to protest when their boss
was treating them unfairly.
This escalated into a riot, and windows were broken.
She was fired, and they tried to label her as a Communist.
However, the Roosevelts were on her side, and they helped to make sure the crooked bosses
were removed.
After losing her job, Martha Gellhorn was invited to live and work in the White House.
She helped Eleanor Roosevelt with writing her monthly column called 'My Day' for a magazine
called Woman's Home Companion.
However, these topics she was writing with the First Lady were very vapid compared to
the hard-hitting journalism that she was used to.
Gellhorn thanked the Roosevelts for their kindness, but she wanted to move on with her
career.
She published a book called The Trouble I've Seen, which described the suffering of the
American people in the Great Depression.
Deep down, she knew that she wanted to use her writing to help people, and eventually,
she would get her wish.
Loving Hemingway
Even though Martha Gellhorn had already accomplished so much during her early writing career, much
of that is overshadowed by the fact that she fell in love with the famous author Ernest
Hemingway.
In 1936, Martha Gellhorn was in Key West Florida on vacation with her parents when she decided
to get a drink at a bar called Sloppy Joe's.
At first, she was taken aback by a loud, dirty man who was telling wild stories and acting
like the center of attention.
She locked eyes with the man across the room, and realized that this was the famous Ernest
Hemingway.
He approached her, and they began to strike up a conversation.
Even though he did not recognize her face, it turns out that he had, in fact, read her
articles, and her first book.
They both had a very similar writing style in the way that they cut out all of the flowery
language in favor of getting to the point.
They also deeply cared about the struggles of other human beings.
By the end of their fist conversation, it was clear that they had chemistry, and they
wanted to see one another again.
Hemingway told her that he was headed to The Spanish Civil War to write the script of a
documentary called This Spanish Earth.
He would eventually narrate the movie, as well, because the actor they hired couldn't
get the cadence exactly right.
Martha Gellhorn has never written on the war front before, and she secured a contract with
Colliers Magazine, and followed him there soon after.
There were several other men on the documentary crew, as well as other reporters who lived
and worked together at the Hotel Florida in Madrid.
No one can be sure exactly when their relationship escalated from co-workers to lovers.
In a lot of ways, they truly were the perfect couple.
There was perhaps no other man alive on the planet who was manly enough to handle Martha
Gellhorn's strength, and she could keep up with Hemingway's need for adventure.
Over the next four years, Gellhorn and Hemingway continued their affair while he was still
married to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.
Okay... before you go calling Martha Gellhorn nasty names in the comments of this video,
you should know a bit about Ernest Hemingway's first two marriages.
Ernest Hemingway's first wife was named Hadley Richardson.
After he became a bestselling author in 1926 with The Sun Also Rise, he started receiving
a lot of attention, and suddenly, he had to deal with fangirls who fell in love with his
masculine writing style.
However, he was still very poor, and could hardly pay for basic needs.
A woman Pauline Pfeiffer grew up spoiled by wealthy parents, and she secured the posh
gig writing fashion columns for Vogue magazine.
She often wrote in the first-person about attending lavish parties and fashion shows.
Pfeiffer was used to getting everything she wanted in life, and Hemingway was added to
her wish list.
She swooped in, claiming that she wanted to be best friends with Hadley Richardson.
The two women had almost nothing in common, and it was truly odd that this wealthy heiress
was suddenly so interested in this impoverished couple.
Pauline Pfeiffer seduced Hemingway, and became pregnant with his child.
He had to divorce Hadley and married Pauline, but spent the rest of his career bitterly
writing about how much he actually hated her.
So, no one really felt sorry for Pauline Pfeiffer when she had ended up being cheated on, too.
In fact, most feel that Martha Gellhorn was his true love, and it took marrying two of
the wrong women before he could find her.
Their time spent in Spain was exhilarating.
Gellhorn found this new love and compassion for the people who were affected by war.
She and Hemingway both worked in China to cover the events of the Second Sino Japanese
War.
From there, she covered the Nazi occupation of Czechoslevakia and Finland.
When they were not working together on assignment, they would write letters to one another, and
only meet up when their schedules aligned.
They had an affair for a total of three years, and he only grew more and more convinced that
this was the woman he truly wanted to marry.
In 1939, Hemingway purchased a 15-acre estate in Cuba called Finca Vigia for he and Martha
to live there together.
After getting his new life settled, he officially divorced his second wife, and he and Martha
were married in 1940.
Even though they now had this beautiful house together in a tropical paradise, Martha continued
to travel the world as a war correspondent.
Hemingway continued to write his novels alone at his typewriter, and went fishing and drinking
with the locals.
He was so lonely, that he began a very strange hobby of breeding six-toed cats.
He bred so many of them, that they soon overran the estate.
World War II
For a few years, Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway seemed to be very happy living together
in Cuba, enjoying the beaches and the sunshine.
Unfortunately, their marriage eventually became toxic when Hemingway began to ask if Martha
was ever going to settle down and become more nurturing.
This is when things got a bit awkward.
Hemingway was used to going on his wild adventures.
Then, he could come home to housewives like Hadley and Pauline who were happy to cook,
clean, and look after their children.
He knew that being a war correspondent was Martha's passion, but he figured that after
getting married, she would calm down and become a novelist who did all of the typical duties
of a wife and mother.
But her motivation for being on the front lines never went away, and she did not want
to have children with him.
Hemingway already had several children from his previous marriages, but there came a point
where he felt that he truly was missing starting a new family with her.
But Martha felt that it was her duty to be a witness to the atrocities of war, instead
of staying home where it was safe.
'If nobody puts it down on the record anywhere, then the monsters win totally.
It must be some place on the record, because otherwise, they can get by with anything.
Does it stop anything?
I don't feel that anything I have been done is any use.
But at least it is better than silence.
Because if you are silent, they can re-write it any way they want.
They can make it look great afterwards.
So there is a point in the record.'
Aside from his hobby of being a crazy cat lady, Ernest Hemingway continued his mid-life-crisis
by getting into the habit of hunting for German U-Boats off the coast of Cuba.
He never actually caught any, but he still filled his boat with grenades, because had
the mindset that maybe one day, he could be the hero who demolished a Nazi submarine.
When the news arrived that the Allies were about to storm the beaches of Normandy, Martha
did not waste any time securing a press pass from Colliers Magazine.
She was friends with the British author Roald Dahl, and he helped to set her up with a sponsorship
to have her plane ticket paid by the Royal Air Force, so long as she wrote positively
about them in her piece.
For whatever reason- Whether it was anger, jealousy, or pure spite, Hemingway marched
right into Collier's, and demanded to take her press spot.
Since he was the famous novelist, they couldn't refuse the opportunity to publish one of his
pieces.
They gave him Martha's plane ticket, and the press pass.Martha was infuriated by his betrayal,
but she was still determined to make her way into the war zone.
She dressed up as a Navy nurse, and stowed away in the bathroom of a ship headed to Europe.
Meanwhile, as Ernest Hemingway boarded a plane, Martha Gellhorn was struggling to get to Europe
by sea.
Once he arrived in Paris, Hemingway began partying almost immediately, and he decided
to work together with a rag-tag group of war correspondents who were on a mission to liberate
The Hotel Ritz in Paris.
This used to be his favorite bar in the city, and he wanted nothing more than to try to
get in some Nazi-fighting action.
Hemingway began cheating on Martha Gellhorn with a woman he met named Mary Welsh.
Finally, after stowing away on a ship and risking her life, Martha Gellhorn arrived
at the harbor Liverpool, ready to confront her husband.
She heard that he was at the hospital in London, because he had gotten into a car accident
while drunk driving.
When she found Hemingway, he seemed perfectly fine aside from a gash in his head, which
was wrapped in bandages.
He was drinking whisky surrounded by fans who were hanging on to his every word.
Martha decided not to waste any more time or energy on Hemingway.
She went to Normandy, and snuck her way onto the front lines of D-Day.
Since Hemingway still had her press pass, Gellhorn had no choice but to dress as a nurse
and helped to carry injured soldiers on a stretcher on and off the battlefield.
She paid attention to her surroundings, making mental notes of what to write later.
Exposing the Truth
After the Allied victory, she did not go back home right away.
She stayed in Europe, and made her want to the Dachau Concentration Camp.
Martha was one of the very first and only journalists to arrive on the scene when it
was liberated by the Allies.
No one could ever anticipate the horrors that unfolded there.
Martha Gellhorn was mere feet away from the starved bodies of the Jewish prisoners lying
next to the dead German soldiers who had been perfectly clean and well-fed.
She describes a horrific scene of bodies with shaved heads that were so thin, their ages
or genders were indistinguishable from one another.
They could smell the rotting corpses.
The last shipment of prisoners had arrived from Buchenwald to Dachau, but the Nazis locked
the train doors from the outside, and left them to die slowly of starvation.
Gellhorn describes a Polish prisoner they found inside of a train car.
'One man had survived; he was found in a pile of the dead.
Now he stood on the bones that were his legs, and talked, and suddenly wept, 'Everyone is
dead.'
'
On the plane ride out of Germany, Martha sat together with a group of stunned American
prisoners of war who had been rescued from Dachau.
She wrote: 'No one looked out the window as we flew over Germany.
No one wanted to see Germany again.
They turned away from it in sickness; everything about it was evil'' The men sat in silence
for a long time, until one soldier said, 'no one will believe us.'
After bearing witness to some of the most sickening atrocities in human history, it
only reminded Martha Gellhorn why her job to expose the truth truly was so important.
She knew that she needed to continue to devote her life to this cause.
On her flight back home, she must have reflected on how petty all of the arguments with her
husband truly was.
None of it was worth it anymore.
After arriving back in the United States, Martha Gellhorn filed for divorce from Ernest
Hemingway.
He was absolutely furious, and wrote letters to her saying that she was a 'phony and pretentious
bitch'.
Then, he set out to ruin her reputation, just like he had with his second wife.
Their divorice was so uncivilized, she scarcely wanted to speak to him- or even about him,
ever again.
During interviews later in life, Martha Gellhorn refused to talk about her marriage with Hemingway.
"I've been a writer for over 40 years.
I was a writer before I met him and I was a writer after I left him.
Why should I be merely a footnote in his life?"
Hemingway would go on to get married to his mistress, Mary Welsh.
She would be his fourth and final wife, and she had absolutely no problem fitting into
the role of a homemaker.
Unfortunately, even though he got the sort of wife he wanted, Hemingway continued to
struggle with being happy.
He would eventually commit suicide in 1961.
Later Life and Career
Following her divorce from Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn decided to remain single for
several years, and focused on her career.
In 1949, she visited Rome to see children in an orphanage who had lost limbs or became
blind because they accidently stepping on landmines.
She wrote a piece called 'The Children Pay the Price' for the Saturday Evening Post.
Her heart was breaking for these children, so she chose to adopt a little boy named George
'Sandy' Alexander.
Since she was an American woman trying to adopt an Italian boy, she had to write several
letters to the Roosevelts, asking for their help to bring Sandy back to the United States,
so that she could provide a better life for him.
However, her busy schedule prevented her from being a full-time mother.
Most of the time, Sandy was left in the care of Martha's parents, and he was sent to boarding
school.
After taking some time to be on her own, Martha began dating several successful men who were
doctors, businessmen, and journalists.
Eventually, she married the managing editor of Time Magazine, T.S. Matthews in 1954, but
they also got a divorce in 1963.
After two failed marriages, she never tried again.
The lifestyle she chose of traveling to far-off places to put her life in danger was very
difficult to balance being a wife or mother.
So she remain single, traveling around the world and reporting from the front lines,
because she truly felt compelled that this is what she was supposed to be doing with
her life.
When we talk about honoring people in the armed forces, the word 'sacrifice' is often
said.
For Martha Gellhorn, she truly did sacrifice everything to be a war correspondent.
She gave up her marriages, the chance to have children, and precious time spent with friends
and family.
Instead of living for herself, she chose an existence that gave a voice to the downtrodden
across the globe.
Martha often traveled alone with nothing to her name except a single suitcase of her bare
essentials.
She wrote that loneliness was far more difficult than anything else.
In one of her letters, she wrote, 'I was used to having only myself, cold and hard as that
is; I could live with it.
And now I wait, for a voice, a face, a body, that is not is not mine, does not in any case
wait as I do, nor share this homesickness.'
After witnessing so many wars, there was nothing that Martha Gellhorn hated more than a government
who was power-hungry.
In her book, The Face of War, she gives a breakdown of just how much money the United
States spends on nuclear weapons, and at the time she wrote the book, it amounted to over
$1 billion a day.
So much could be done with that money to help the poor and the sick, and yet it all goes
into these weapons that could lead to the destruction of the human race.
For her, the straw that broke the camels' back was witnessing first-hand what Americans
were doing during The Vietnam War.
It disgusted her so much that she couldn't bring herself to continue to live in the United
States anymore.
She moved to London, which is where she spent the rest of her life.
In 1998, she was 89 years old, and she was almost completely blind.
She was also suffering from ovarian cancer.
She was sick, and barely hanging on to life.
So she decided to commit suicide by ingesting a cyanide capsule, and left everything she
had to her adopted son, Sandy.
Ten years later, in 1999, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established.
In order to win the award, a war correspondent must accomplish reporting that '...is essentially
a human story that penetrates the established version of events and illuminates an urgent
issue'the unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment
conduct and its propaganda.'
Even after witnessing some of the darkest parts of humanity throughout the course of
her career, she never gave up hope that people can be good.
'I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time.
I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world
peace.
I only believe in the human race.
I believe the human race must continue.'
For years to come, Martha Gellhorn will continue to inspire war correspondents everywhere to
do just that- Get on the ground, find the truth of what people are experiencing, and
tell the world.
By understanding one another, we can only get closer to remaining in a world where peace
exists, and wars are few and far between.