Hell Hath No Fury (39 page)

In 1936, while on holiday in Key West, Florida, Gellhorn met Ernest Hemingway. They were reunited in 1937 in Spain, where Hemingway was reporting on the Civil War for the North Atlantic Newspaper Alliance (NANA) and Gellhorn was working for
Collier's
magazine. Although a novice war reporter, Gellhorn rapidly found a distinctive voice with which to distill her firsthand experience of the effects of the conflict on civilians. Her fiction of the period pointedly stigmatized the failure of the European democracies to face down fascism.

Like the protagonist in her 1940 novel,
A Stricken Field,
Gellhorn recognized the limited influence exerted by the individual writer, commenting “I'm not Joan of Arc, I'm only a journalist.” She was also prey to ambivalent thoughts about the role of women as correspondents in a combat zone, a dilemma reflected in her 1940 short story “Portrait of a Lady,” drawn from her experience reporting the Russo-Finnish War for
Collier's.
In the spring of 1940, her unsuccessful attempt to help the writer Max Ohlau, a Communist friend from the Spanish Civil War who had been interned by the French government, provided the background to a pessimistic short story, “Goodwill to Men.” Looking back in a 1995 interview with the filmmaker Marcel Ophüls, Gellhorn was at pains to point out the pitfalls that lie in wait for journalists who surrender their objectivity to a passion for a particular cause.

Gellhorn married Hemingway in November 1940 and subsequently traveled with him to the Far East to report the Sino-Japanese War. Their experiences resurfaced in sourly humorous form in the 1978 collection
Travels with Myself and Another,
in which Hemingway appears as “UC” (Unwilling Companion).

The fault lines in their stormy marriage were widened by the time Gellhorn spent with Hemingway in Cuba after completing her own extended tour of the Far East—Hemingway had bailed out after China. After the United States entered World War II, Hemingway's war effort in Cuba consisted of equipping his fishing boat,
Pilar,
to hunt U-boats off the coast of Cuba, an exercise in braggadocio of no military value. The couple spent much time drunk and at loggerheads.

After a stint as a war correspondent in Italy, where she reported on the Allied bombing of Monte Cassino, Gellhorn persuaded Hemingway to join her in Europe. He arrived as a correspondent also writing for
Collier's
as she was, a move calculated to enrage his wife, as female journalists were not accredited to front-line formations.

The rivalry between husband and wife came to a head over Operation Overlord, the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. The
Collier's
edition that carried their stories on June 22 concentrated on Hemingway, although the great bombast had never set foot on the invasion beaches. In contrast, Gellhorn arrived in Normandy, on Omaha Beach, just two days after the landings. She had gained an edge on Hemingway by stowing away on a hospital ship, a feat of initiative that resulted in a brief internment in Britain.

While Hemingway played at running his own private army in liberated France, Gellhorn covered the closing stages of the war, with vivid accounts of the Battle of the Bulge, the savage fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, and the Battle of Berlin. All these were to provide the material for her 1948 novel
The Wine of Astonishment.

Gellhorn divorced Hemingway in 1945, and in what she termed the “honeyed peace” moved restlessly around the world, reporting from Dutch Indonesia, Israel, Poland, and Germany. In 1954 she married the editor in chief of
Time
magazine, T. S. Matthews; they were divorced in 1966.

Gellhorn published more fiction drawn from her own life, including
His Own Man
(1958), which was based on the exploits of her friend, the photographer Robert Capa. She continued to ruffle feathers with hard-hitting reports from the wars in Vietnam, the Six Day War in the Middle East, and, in the 1980s, the conflicts in Central America. Her last assignment, when she was eighty-five, was in Brazil. By then she had attracted the admiration of a younger generation of journalists, including the Australian John Pilger, and the British Jon Simpson and Kate Adie. She was always a challenging, cantankerous companion. One of her friends compared Gellhorn to a rhinoceros “who has no idea that he has stepped on your foot.”

When she was raped in Kenya at the age of eighty, Gellhorn remained curiously untouched by the experience. The earth only moved for her, as she suggested to Eleanor Roosevelt, when she was in the thick of battle, as she had been in the Spanish Civil War, and could simply “put your body up against what you hate.” In later life Gellhorn refused to be seen merely as a literary adjunct to Ernest Hemingway, whom she dismissed as a “disgusting mythomaniac.” Although Hemingway was by some distance a much better novelist, as a war correspondent Gellhorn left the greater mark.

Reference: Caroline Moorehead,
Martha Gellhorn: A Life,
2003.

GILLARS, MILDRED ELIZABETH

“Midge at the Mike,” American World War II Propagandist for the Axis, b. 1901, d. 1988

Mildred Gillars sought fame as an actress and, having failed in this ambition, earned lasting notoriety as the Nazi propagandist dubbed “Axis Sally” by GIs in World War II.

She was born a US citizen in Portland, Maine, graduating from high school in Ohio and attending Ohio Wesleyan University, where she studied drama but failed to graduate. A series of dead-end jobs was followed in 1929 by a trip to Europe with her mother in search of an acting career. After studying for six months in France, she returned to the United States and eventually found work in New York as a small-time vaudevillian and musical comedy artiste. However, the breakthrough never came, and in 1933 she returned to France to work as a governess and salesgirl before moving to Berlin in 1935.

In the German capital, Gillars joined Radio Berlin as an announcer and actress. She remained at the station until May 1945 and from December 1941 presented a regular program called
Home Sweet Home,
referring to herself as “Midge at the Mike.” The majority of the programs were beamed from Berlin, but some were also transmitted from occupied France and Holland.

Gillars's broadcasts, delivered in sultry, teasing tones, could be heard in Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the United States. On May 11, 1944, she made her most notorious broadcast, a dramatized prediction of the gory fate that awaited the Allied Expeditionary Force then readying itself to invade northwestern Europe. In other broadcasts, she attempted to interview captured American servicemen while posing as a Red Cross worker, a ploy that was not always successful.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Gillars remained at large before being arrested in 1947 by the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps. She was held in custody for over a year and in August 1948 was flown to the United States, where she was eventually charged with treason by a federal grand jury. In March 1949 she was found guilty and received a prison sentence of ten to thirty years and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. In 1959 she became eligible for parole but waived the right, apparently preferring prison to the hostile reception that awaited her in the outside world. She was eventually released on parole in June 1961, after which she taught for a while before resuming her studies at Ohio Wesleyan, where she graduated in speech in 1973.

Reference: Williams M. Fuller,
Axis Sally: The Most Listened to Woman of World War II,
2004.

HANOI HANNAH

Trinh Thi Ngo, North Vietnamese Propagandist, b. 1931

In the tradition of
Tokyo Rose
(see Chapter 9), Hanoi Hannah was a North Vietnamese radio announcer who broadcast pro-Communist propaganda to South Vietnam with the aim of undermining the morale of the US troops stationed there during the Vietnam War.

Hanoi Hannah broadcast three times daily, reading from lists of killed or captured Americans, playing antiwar songs, and encouraging her audience to question the purpose and morality of the war. Initially she was listened to with a mixture of amusement and contempt, but as the war dragged on, her pointed exaggerations of American casualties, and her reports of antiwar protest back home, undoubtedly prompted some servicemen to question the point of the war. On June 16, 1967, she greeted her listeners in characteristically subversive tones: “How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about the going of the war, to say nothing of a correct explanation of your presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.”

In her broadcasts, Hanoi Hannah particularly singled out black troops. The aim was to heighten racial tensions within the US Army by convincing blacks that they were being exploited by whites. She had a point. The Vietnam War coincided with the militant stage of the civil rights movement in the United States, which turned the role played by blacks in Vietnam into a major part of an ongoing controversy. Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. argued that young blacks were more likely to be drafted than whites and, once drafted, were more likely to be ordered on dangerous assignments. There was substance to this statement, too. Although blacks made up 13 percent of the US population, in the years up to 1966 they sustained over 20 percent of the combat deaths in Vietnam.

After 1967, both the army and the marine corps made determined efforts to reduce battlefield casualties, and by the end of the Vietnam War, blacks had sustained approximately 5,700 of the 47,200 battlefield casualties—12 percent of the total.

Reference: Peter McInerny,
The Vietnam Experience: A Contagion of War,
1983.

KIRKPATRICK, HELEN

US War Correspondent, b. 1909, d. 1997

In World War II, Kirkpatrick's dispatches from Europe were a mainstay of the circulation promotion of the
Chicago Daily News.
Posters carrying her stern face informed the city's pedestrians and bus passengers that the best method of keeping abreast of the unfolding events of the war was to read “Our Helen.”

Born in Rochester, New York, Kirkpatrick graduated from Smith College in 1931 and then studied international law at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She turned down a job at the
New York Herald Tribune
in favor of a job in merchandising at Macy's department store.

In 1935 she returned to Geneva, where she wrote for and edited
Research Bulletin,
published by the Foreign Policy Association. At the time, Geneva was the headquarters of the League of Nations and an international news hub, enabling Kirkpatrick to write articles for a number of British newspapers. She acquired a reputation for the assured coverage of great issues of the day and became a stringer for
The Manchester Guardian, The Daily Telegraph,
and the
New York Herald Tribune.

By 1937 she was acknowledged as a League of Nations insider and was invited to London to work on
Whitehall News,
a weekly newsletter analyzing European current affairs. Here she was perfectly positioned to chronicle the approach of war, in the process ruffling the feathers of the British political establishment with her candid criticism of what she saw as the supine attitude of the British and French when dealing with Mussolini and Hitler.

In 1939 Kirkpatrick became the European correspondent of the
Chicago Daily News
in spite of strong opposition on the paper to the appointment of women as overseas reporters. She recorded an early scoop in the spring of 1940, accurately predicting that Hitler was poised to invade Belgium. In the autumn of that year, she reported on the Blitz on London, writing on September 9, two days after the first heavy Luftwaffe raid, “Fright becomes so mingled with a deep almost uncontrollable anger that it is hard to know when one stops and the other begins. And on top of it all London is smiling even in the districts where the casualties must have been very heavy.”

Kirkpatrick later reported from North Africa and Italy, frequently criticizing the often ill-informed and isolationist attitude she encountered among some American officers and men, while also paying tribute to the spirit of cooperation among the Western allies. She was invariably tough and self-sufficient, silencing the oft-voiced criticism that women were too fragile to cope with the rigors of life on the front line without special assistance from the army. When a high-ranking officer voiced the opinion that women reporters should be barred from the Normandy invasion because of the lack of appropriate latrine facilities, one of Kirkpatrick's supporters offered to wager five pounds that “Helen Kirkpatrick can dig a latrine faster than anyone in this room.”

Kirkpatrick witnessed the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and was lunching at the Ritz Hotel with fellow war correspondent Ernest Hemingway (see
Gellhorn, Martha,
Chapter 9) when she announced that she would have to leave to cover the Allied victory celebrations. With characteristic vainglory, Hemingway replied that lunch at the fabled Ritz was far more historic than the story she intended to cover. Kirkpatrick, the better journalist, left to do her job and was on the spot to record another scoop when a group of Free French generals came under fire as they entered Notre-Dame Cathedral:

The generals' car arrived on the dot of 4:15. As they stepped from the car, we stood at salute and at that very moment a revolver shot rang out. It seemed to come from behind one of Notre Dame's gargoyles. Within a split second a machine gun opened up from a nearby room. It sprayed the pavement at my feet. The generals entered the church with 40-odd people pressing from behind to find shelter.

After the war, Kirkpatrick worked as European correspondent for the
New York Post
(1946–49) and then as chief of the information division of the Economical Corporation Administration (1949–51). As public affairs adviser for the State Department (1951–53) she played a part in the implementation of the Marshall Plan.