The General and Mrs. Hemingway (Martha Gellhorn) An Adaptation from “Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich”
https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2022/11/01/the_general_and_mrs_hemingway_862199.html
The following is an adapted excerpt from “Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich” by Martin Dugard.
General James Gavin was a dangerous man.
Tall, powerful, charismatic. Abandoned by his parents at age two and adopted by a coal miner. Dropped out of school in eighth grade, enlisted in the army at seventeen, went on to graduate West Point and rise through the ranks, becoming a two-star general at just thirty-seven. Paratrooper with four combat jumps to his credit, including the Normandy D-Day invasion. The “Jumping General” was always in the lead C-47 and first man leaping out the door: thirteen-inch Randall knife strapped to his rig, .45 holstered on the right hip, and M-1 carbine wedged into his parachute harness. He used each of these weapons with deadly precision.
But on October 15, 1944, General James Gavin met his match.
The last year of World War II saw combat on an epic scale, from D-Day in June, Market Garden in September, and the grizzly winter fighting of Hurtgen Forest and Battle of the Bulge. To the east, the Soviet Union’s massive and now often overlooked Operation Bagration decimated Nazi Germany. Every day of fighting was focused around the eventual capture of the Nazi German capital of Berlin and bringing the war to a close.
Gavin and the unicorn who would become his unlikely lover and confidante could lay claim to playing vital roles in these pivotal months – for better and worse.
The affair began when Gavin and the 82nd Airborne were headquartered in a woods outside the Dutch city of Nijmegen. Three weeks earlier, they famously captured the main bridge over the Waal River in heavy fighting with German forces during Operation Market Garden. The weather was miserable, endless days of cold autumn rain. On that dreary Sunday morning, military police captured a spy taking detailed notes in the city’s ruins. The individual was an American woman claiming to be a journalist but possessing no press credentials. Rather than conduct their own interrogation, the MP’s defused the awkward situation by driving her to their commanding general.
James Gavin towered over the small blond woman as she entered his tent. Everything in Holland was mud and grime but her appearance was fastidiously neat. She was chatty, undeniably attractive, and just a few years younger than Gavin. The woman insisted that her note taking was not spying, but observations for a story she was writing for Collier’s magazine. She then wove a complicated story explaining her lack of credentials and how she managed to travel alone through to the front lines to do her job.
Most incredible of all, the woman claimed to be the wife of Ernest Hemingway.
Martha Gellhorn was, in fact, the novelist’s third wife. Their marriage was failing on the day she met General James Gavin. Gellhorn’s world-famous husband was currently sharing his bed at room 31 in Paris’ Ritz Hotel with Mary Welsh, a fellow journalist two years away from becoming the fourth Mrs. Hemingway.
A smitten Gavin believed every word of Gellhorn’s tale. The normally hardened young general marveled that her talent for living off the land was like that of a top guerilla fighter. If she was dumb enough to wander into a combat zone, then he was just dumb enough to let her go. The general’s plan was to pretend he’d never seen her.
That should have been the end of it.
But Gavin had one last question, wondering where Gellhorn could be found when she wasn’t on the front lines.
“Paris,” the mystery woman said to her new friend. She would later state that a physical charge coursed through her as she looked Gavin in the eyes.
“The Lincoln Hotel.”
Gavin could not get Martha Gellhorn off his mind. “Met a very interesting newspaperwoman yesterday, Mrs. Hemingway,” the general typed into his private diary. That still-unpublished journal would provide vital new insights into their relationship during the writing of my forthcoming book, Taking Berlin.
And so erupted one of World War II’s most passionate, unusual, and its own way, influential romances. Gavin and Gellhorn were polar opposites. Neither partner was concerned with appearances. Gavin continued to command men in complicated and bloody battles. Gellhorn came and went as she pleased, writing her stories near and far.
Gavin and “Mrs. Hemingway” conducted their long affair while observing and actively taking part in the fighting. To this day, the general’s daily journal and the reporter’s published missives combine to present an intimate portrait of life during wartime. And though Gavin had a staff around him at all times, allowing little to remain secret, this heated affair is still very much an historical curiosity.
Just as Gavin was much more than a typical military commander, Gellhorn – the surname on her byline, never Hemingway – was much more than just the wife of a notorious author. Her reporting during the last nine months of the Second World War far outshone that of her husband.
D-Day was the best example. Ernest Hemingway covered the landings in June 1944 from the comfortable distance of a naval vessel. Gellhorn, like other female journalists, was denied access. But having already covered war in Spain and China, she was determined to write about such a monumental moment in history. Gellhorn stowed away on a hospital ship, locking herself in a bathroom and sipping from a flask until the vessel cleared port. Upon being discovered, Gellhorn was put to work scouring the Normandy beaches for wounded. Once every bed on the Prague was filled, she returned to the ship and continued her assistance, even using her fluence in German to speak with enemy prisoners.
“It will be hard to tell you of the wounded,” Gellhorn wrote for Collier’s. “They had to be fed, as most of them had not eaten for two days. Shoes and clothing had to be cut off. They wanted water. The nurses and orderlies, working like demons, had to be found and called quickly to a bunk where a man suddenly and desperately needed attention.”
Gellhorn was chatty and ecstatic as the hospital ship returned to Portsmouth, joking about being an “old timer” while taking the salt air on deck with medical staff. But the reporter was immediately arrested once Prague docked. Her incarceration was short lived but the professional cost was catastrophic: Allied officials stripped Gellhorn of all press credentials.
The undeterred journalist chose not to tell her editors at Collier’s, fearing she would be replaced. Instead, she relied on her good looks, moxie, and liberal use of profanity to cadge transportation to the action in jeeps, personnel carriers, and airplanes. In addition to D-Day, the writer would file stories about fighting in Italy, meeting up with Soviet soldiers in Germany, and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, among many others. Her March 17, 1945, piece about flying a combat mission over Germany showed the nerves behind her courage. “We were over Germany, and a blacker, less inviting piece of land I never saw. It was covered with snow. There were mountains, there was no light and no sign of human life, but the land itself looked actively hostile,” she wrote for Collier’s.
Gellhorn’s writing and her insistence on traveling alone elevated her beyond any mention of being a camp follower, but she always made a point to find her way back to Gavin – and used her privileged insider connections to write extensively about the general and his 82nd Airborne. And if the general could not easily leave his post to travel to her, he was not above sending a plane to Paris to fly Gellhorn to his side, as he did on one occasion (she refused at first, furious that Gavin would attempt to dictate her comings and goings).
The passion is “what I’d guessed, read about, been told about; but not believed, that bodies are something terrific,” Gellhorn marveled of their electricity.
“My darling Marty,” the normally reserved Gavin responded, before adding gushing paragraphs filled with inside jokes and yearning for her presence, later signing off with “I love you beautiful.”
“Dearest Love, dearest Jimmy and darling, I have thought of nothing but you all these days and everyone and everything seems very flat in comparison,” she wrote. “I love you so much that these are fuzzy dreams and I am living suspended in time, waiting for you to come.”
The affair that was kindled with nights of making love and playing cards in Nijmegen carried on past the end of the war, empowering Gellhorn to finally tell Ernest Hemingway on New Years Day 1945 that their marriage was over. The reporter had long questioned their incompatibility, particularly in the bedroom, once stating that sex with Hemingway was “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, without the thank you.”
Even so, Gellhorn became depressed as the marriage ended, writing a friend that “when I’m alone sorrow drowns me. This is a grief I did not know I could feel but it is very hard to bear.”
Ultimately, the relationship between Gavin and Gellhorn also ran its course.
General James Gavin was one of the most influential figures of the Second World War, taking part in almost every major engagement in the last year of the conflict. He even planned the war’s final parachute drop, an assault on Berlin that was meant to result in his personally accepting the German surrender. The jump was scrubbed but Gavin’s selection to lead Operation Eclipse is a telling indicator of the high professional esteem in which he was held.
Just as equally, Martha Gellhorn’s missives for Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post brought Americans behind the scenes into the war with unabashed realism, substituting true human emotion for jingoism.
Yet as perfect as they seemed for one another, Martha Gellhorn turned down James Gavin’s postwar marriage proposal.
“I simply could not be a good army wife. I’d be dreadfully bad at it,” she admitted to him in fall 1946. Gellhorn wrote from the London flat where she would end her life in 1998, taking cyanide rather than endure the ovarian cancer ravaging her 89-year-old body. The outside of the envelope bore the words “For Jimmy Sad Letter.”
The affair that began two years before in a Dutch forest was over. Martha Gellhorn would go on to cover wars around the world for 40 more years. James Gavin would become President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to France. In 1984, he returned to Nijmegen for the fortieth anniversary commemoration of Operation Market Garden.
“The Big Plan is already made and we have made it with the years of our lives,” Martha Gellhorn reflected in her farewell letter to James Gavin. As they both knew, soldiers and war correspondents chase battlefields. Love is secondary – and fleeting.
“We may always be in love, some way; but we won’t be able to make a partnership that will last day after day after day.”
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