War Correspondent Martha Gellhorn by Kayleigh Hunter

Martha Gellhorn was a war corresponded at a time when that field of work was male dominated, and in her 89 years she saw and wrote about lot of different worldly conflicts and the impact that they had on the people surround them. Today she is considered one of greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. Martha was one of four children of George and Edna Gellhorn, born in November 1908 along with her brother Walter Gellhorn, in St Louis, USA. Her father was a Doctor from Germany and someone Martha thought of very fondly, and her mother was a suffragette and social reformer from St Louis, USA. The couple brought their children up to accept everyone as an equal, regardless of their sex, their colour, their background or their religious beliefs. Martha would later say in an interview that her sex was never a disadvantage to her growing up, because her parents made sure that anything her brother could do, she could do. In 1916 Martha’s mother took Martha to witness the Democratic National Convention where 7,000 people protested for women’s right to vote. From that day on. Martha never took her vote for granted, but she also never claimed to be a feminist either. Instead she was against the injustices of the world, and reveled in the freedoms that the women who came before her had fought for, such as the vote and a woman’s right to own her own bank account and money. Martha attended three schools whilst growing up. The first was the proper girls school in St. Louis, which her mother had attended, but after showing her biology lesson to her father, he pulled her out claiming he was horrified by the lack of education she was receiving. She was then moved to a community school that her mother and other parents organised, and then in her teen years she went to Bryn Mawr College which was a private all girls school outside Philadelphia, but she later dropped out. After dropping out of school, she then went to pursue her interest in writing, by writing articles for various different magazines such as The New Republic in New York and Hirst Paper in Albany. She then moved to Paris with the intention of being a foreign correspondent, where she worked for the United Press and Vogue Magazine. Unfortunately, Martha was not very successful in Paris, and whilst she was still sending off articles for publish and writing a couple of published fiction stories, she had to return to the States.

Upon returning to America she got a job working for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (created by president Roosevelt), which involved interviewing up to five under privileged families a day. Martha wanted to share with the people of America that the so-called American dream was not all that it seemed. Her articles were so moving that Eleanor Roosevelt herself read them and reached out to Martha to become acquainted with her. After being fired due to encouraging the working people to protest against their struggles, and being labelled a Communist by her previous boss, she got a job working at the White House. There she helped the First Lady with her weekly column called “My Day” which was part of a magazine called Woman’s Own Companion. But Martha wanted to write more thought-provoking material than that of the First Lady. She got a book published called “The Trouble I’ve Seen” which was all about the lives of American people during the Great Depression. She wanted her writing to help people. In 1936 Martha was on holiday in Key West, Florida with her parents when she met Ernest Hemingway. The two struck up a conversation, and she quickly learnt that they had a lot in common in regards to their writing styles, and the topics they liked to cover. Hemingway explained that he was heading to The Spanish Civil War, where he was working on a document called This Spanish Earth. Martha secured a contract with the Collier Magazine and followed Hemingway to Spain, to write about the war. During their three year affair Martha proved that she could keep up with Hemingway’s need for adventure. The two travelled to China where Martha wrote about the Second Sino Japanese War, then from there she coved the Nazi Occupation of Czechoslovakia and Finland. When the two were working on their own separate projects they would write letters to one another and arrange meetings when both their schedules allowed it. In 1939 the two started living together in Cuba, and in 1940 they got married. Unfortunately, the marriage wasn’t to last as the two wanted very different things from married life. Hemmingway wanted Martha to settle down and become a housewife, whereas Martha had no intention of having children with him and wanted to keep pursuing her passion of being a war correspondent and felt it was her duty to shine a light on the atrocities of war. “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 away 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.” When the news came that the allies were going to storm the beaches of Normandy, Martha did not waste any time securing a press pass from Collier Magazine. Writer Roald Dahl, a friend of Martha’s, helped her secure a sponsorship to have her plane ticket paid for by the Royal Air Force so long as she wrote positively about them in her piece. Hemingway, either out of jealousy, anger or spite, went straight to Collier Magazine and demanded he be given Martha’s press spot. They agreed and gave him Martha’s plane ticket and press pass. Furious with Hemingway, Martha was still determined to get to Normandy. She first made her way to the UK, and upon her arrival in Liverpool, she found out that her husband was in hospital in London after being in a car accident. She made her way to London only to find him sat in bed with a bandage around his head, drink in hand and merely talking to anyone who would listen about his adventures. Seeing that he was alright, she decided not to waste any more time and carried on with her journey to Normandy. Dressed as a nurse she made her way onto the beaches of Normandy, and still without her press pass, Martha helped to carry wounded soldiers off the battlefield. As she helped the soldiers she made mental notes about her surroundings and the events taking place, so she could write about them later. She stayed in Europe and made her way to the Dachau Concentration Camp. Martha was one of the only writers there on the day the camp was liberated by the Allies. Nothing could prepare her for the horrors she saw. Upon leaving Germany with some rescued prisoners of war, she noted “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’.”. She knew after all the sickening atrocities she had witnessed, that she had to continue to devote her life to revealing the truth.

When she arrived back in the USA she filed for divorce, of which Hemingway was furious and called her “a phony and pretentious bitch”. Afterwards, he set out to her destroy her reputation. In 1949 Martha went to Rome to visit children in an orphanage who had lost limbs or had become blind because of accidently stepping on landmines. She then wrote a piece called ‘The Children Pay the Price’ for the Saturday Evening Post and adopted a little boy called George ‘Sandy’ Alexander. Being an American woman wanting to adopt an Italian child, she wrote to the Roosevelts to ask for their help in bringing Sandy home so she could provide a better life for him. However, her schedule prevented her from being a full-time mother and Sandy instead was mostly cared for by her parents, until he was eventually sent to a boarding school. The love of her job and her mission to record the injustices of the world took its toll on the relationships in her life. She was estranged from her parents, and barely got the chance to be a mother to her adoptive son and although she did marry again in the 1960s, the relationship was short lived. But Martha hated nothing more than a government that was power hungry. In her book The Face of War, she wrote about the amount of money that America was making from weapons of destruction, rather than using that money to help the poor. The moment that was the biggest tipping point for her was what she witnessed during the Vietnam War. She originally was not intending to go to Vietnam, until her country went, and the stories the press were putting out did not sit well with Martha. Determined to get the truth, she travelled to Vietnam and recorded all that she witnessed. In September 1966, Martha went to Qui Nhon and visited the free hospital for citizens of Vietnam and she quickly learnt that not only was the hospital unsanitary, but the patients were also thin and fragile, both healthy and sick alike. She wrote in her book The Face of War “a boy of fifteen sat on his cot with both legs in plaster casts. He and his little brother had gone to the beach to mend nets; a Vietnamese patrol boat saw them and opened up with machine-gun fire; his little brother was killed.” One thing she notes is that when the American’s were involved, they thought, genuinely thought, that they were there to help the Vietnamese people fight the injustice of the Communist regime they were under. In the end, the damage that America did to Vietnam was something that would continue to effect generations to come. Although her adventuring started to slow down the older she got, this did not stop her from getting to the truth of a situation if she felt that the media was not giving a true representation. As time went on, she was so disgusted with how America was treating war, and its people that she decided to leave America for good and moved to London, where she remained the rest of her life. Martha started suffering from cancer and was almost completely blind when she took her own life 15th February 1998, aged 89, leaving everything she had to her adopted son Sandy. In 1999, The Martha Gellhorn Award was established, and is only rewarded to war correspondents that tell the world about the truth of what the people are experiencing. “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.” – Martha Gellhorn