One of the best war correspondents of World War II is better known for her famous marriage than her myriad of accomplishments. It’s like Eleanor of Aquitaine, all over again.
Rather than reporting from the famous front lines of Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Martha Gellhorn instead covered war-torn China and the Caribbean.
Gellhorn was in the journalistic trenches of these two lesser-known areas of combat. She had previously reported on the Spanish Civil War and would go on to cover the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, and unfortunately unnamed conflicts in Central America.
She was the real deal, and her coverage of China and the Caribbean remind us that war happens beyond what the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the front page of Google report. Gellhorn acts as a personal witness to the devastation caused by the Japanese and the Germans in her memoir, Travels with Myself and Another (Putnam, 1978).
Even among poverty and disease, Gellhorn writes with the wit of Dorothy Parker and the detachment of Albert Camus. In 1941, while traveling through war-torn but stubbornly beautiful China, she remembers the paper arches that were constructed to welcome her as a member of the press: “We passed through slatternly villages, each adorned with a triumphal arch for us and a duck pond with malaria for them” (32). Malaria was no joke in China: “The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing” (35).
Although Hunter S. Thompson would be later credited with spawning Gonzo journalism, Gellhorn was going Gonzo when Thompson was learning to read. She writes unabashedly about elements of war zones that personally annoy her. With a decisive lack of multi-cultural training she refers to the Chinese language as a “nasal, harsh sing-song” (28). Disease, sing-song, and pernicious smells that inevitably accompany war-resulting poverty were bearable; it was only the “hawking up phlegm” that made her retch (28). But she literally sucked it up, made her retching look like swallowing, and got down to business of war reporting.
She affectionately refers to her war travels as “horror journeys” and lovingly refers to her traveling-partner husband, also a well-known writer, as U.C. (Unwilling Companion). When Gellhorn is acting the part of shrew – complaining about the food, the cold, and the damp – U.C. is busy advising and cheering her through whisky-riddled speech. He also served as her main apologist and explained her departure from large gatherings with these words: “Martha loves humanity but can’t stand people” (48).
This humanism would compel Gellhorn to visit the Caribbean in August and September of 1942, when German U-boats were busy doing what they did best. Caribbean natives were less concerned about Nazis than they were about hurricanes, although they did advise her, as a white woman looking to travel by boat, “to wait until after the war and hire a yacht like everyone else” (62). The rough seas resembled “churned cement,” but Gellhorn met more cockroaches and tarantulas than Nazis on her sloop-cruise through the dangerous Anegada Passage between Virgin Gorda and Anguilla, a “hunting ground for submarines” (63, 67). She seemed disappointed to find little beyond nuclear-resistant insects and furry, carnivorous arachnids.
Gellhorn leaves behind an impressive list of both fictional and non-fiction works. But again, she may be best known for U.C. dedicating his iconic For Whom the Bell Tolls to her.
Unfortunately her five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway made her more famous than her fifty-plus years of writing: the war reporting, the numerous novels and short stories, and even the O. Henry prize in 1958.
Well, she was a leggy blond with a lot of sass.
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