Ernest was indeed more energetic than he had been since his submarine patrols. He was all pumped up with adrenalin fueled by his quest for revenge against Martha who was shell-shocked, reeling unsteadily from Ernest’s act of vengeance. But she looked more glamorous than ever after her series of beauty treatments, all dressed up in tailored new outfits to go back to war, but with no job now to take her there. Still, she would find a way to get over there again somehow. She would find a way to gain access to the battlefront and write about how war affected ordinary people where they lived. And she would get Collier’s to publish her dispatches because they would be too good to ignore. If Ernest thought he had defeated her, he had better think again.
Collier’s got more than a war correspondent when it put Ernest on the payroll; the magazine hired an intelligence agent as well, a writer with combat experience who would be granted access to the thick of the action. Ambassador Braden had been extremely impressed by Ernest’s activities as a sub-hunter, and he gave Ernest a letter commending him for his “highly confidential intelligence activities,” and for “performing certain other work, likewise of a confidential nature, involving personal risks and ever-present danger.” Ernest also had contacts in the OSS, the wartime predecessor of the CIA that was formed to conduct intelligence operations behind enemy lines. Secret documents from the period indicate that the OSS refused to recognize Ernest as an official operative, but nonetheless acknowledged that he had “conspicuous abilities for this type of work,” which the agency was willing to put to good use in a clandestine capacity. There was little question but that Ernest would be going to Europe not only as a writer, but also as an agent for the federal government traveling into the warzone without portfolio.
Chapter Thirty-four
Martha begged Ernest to let her travel with him aboard a seaplane bound for London, but he brushed her off saying that no women were allowed on the specially arranged flight. Martha found out later that the passengers on Ernest’s plane included the actress Gertrude Lawrence, who was flying across the Atlantic with food supplies for friends in London. Martha turned once more to Allen Grover, who arranged passage for her on a Norwegian freighter carrying a load of dynamite, amphibious personnel carriers, and other military equipment. Martha was the only passenger aboard the uncomfortable ship, which had no amenities and contained a crew of boisterous sailors who spoke little or no English. Martha read nonstop to pass the time and ruminate on the state of her marriage.
“I find I cannot think of him in kindness but only with dread,” she wrote in her diary on May 10, 1944. In a letter to Hortense Flexner, she confided, “He is a rare and wonderful type…He is a good man, which is vitally important. He is however bad for me, sadly enough, or maybe wrong for me is the word; and I am wrong for him…I feel terribly strange, like a shadow and full of dread…It is all sickening and I am sad to death, and afraid…I want my own name back, most violently, as if getting it back would give me some of myself…We are, basically, two tough people and we were born to survive.”
The crossing was agonizingly slow, taking three weeks in all as the freighter plodded slowly through heavy fog and churning seas heavily populated with German wolf packs looking to send Allied cargo ships to the bottom of the ocean. Martha landed in Liverpool on May 31, only to learn that Ernest had arrived two weeks earlier and was recuperating in a London hospital following a serious automobile accident. A doctor named Peter Gorer had offered Ernest a ride back to his hotel one night from a party hosted by photojournalist Robert Capa. The good doctor was at least as drunk as Ernest was after a long night of drinking, and both men failed to see the steel water tank that loomed on the side of the darkened street at three o’clock in the morning. The crash propelled Ernest headlong into the windshield, splitting his forehead with a long gash that required fifty-seven stitches to close up. Ernest’s already battered knees were also smashed again. The injury would leave him with a concussion, ringing ears for weeks afterward, and new scars to accompany others on his forehead, arms, and knees resulting from a series of earlier injuries.
Martha headed to the hospital as fast as she could and found her husband, his head covered by a huge wraparound bandage that looked like a turban, hosting a party for a new band of cronies. There was a well-stocked bar alongside his bed, with Ernest and the others imbibing freely. In the room with him were novelist Irwin Shaw, CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, Time
correspondent William Walton, Robert Capa, and a few others including a small, pretty, thirty-six-year-old journalist with short curly hair named Mary Welsh whose byline appeared in Time, Life, and other major publications.
* * *
Ernest had met Mary in a restaurant near the Dorchester Hotel shortly after his plane landed in England. She was sitting at a table with Irwin Shaw, who would gain fame in 1949 with his war novel, The Young Lions. Irwin pointed out the burly man sitting at another table across the room. “That’s Ernest Hemingway,” Irwin said. She looked over just as the rugged, good-looking man glanced across in her direction. Their eyes locked. Before she could turn away, he rose from his table and strode directly over to Irwin and Mary. Ernest barely looked at Irwin. Instead, his eyes drank in the compact woman with the tight sweater that perfectly complimented her trim figure. Irwin introduced them and Ernest sat down.
“It’s been nice knowing you,” Irwin said to Mary later.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
Before Martha so much as set foot on English soil after her arduous journey across the Atlantic, Ernest told Mary within days of meeting her, “I don’t know you, Mary, but I want to marry you. I want to marry you now, and I hope to marry you sometime. Sometime you may want to marry me.”
Lucky Mary!
She was as taken with him as he was with her. After Martha arrived on the scene, Ernest made a date to take her out to dinner to discuss their faltering marriage. She waited patiently in her room, but Ernest never showed up. On his way to pick her up, Ernest ran into Mary and took her out to dinner instead. Ernest’s thirst for revenge was not yet slaked. When Ernest and Martha did appear together, their friends remembered him reducing her to tears with the most castigating language they had ever heard a man direct at his wife in public.
Mary Welsh was no stranger to marriage and romantic relationships herself. Born in Minnesota in 1908, the same year Martha was born, she aspired to become a writer from the time she could read. Her first marriage was to a drama student from Ohio named Lawrence Cook when she was already thirty-two. She divorced him shortly afterward and moved to Chicago to take a job at the Chicago Daily News. She met another reporter there named Will Lang, with whom she had an affair while they worked together on various assignments. The next stop for Mary was London where she found a job on the Daily Express, which sent her to Paris to cover war preparations in the years leading up to World War II. When France fell in 1940, Mary went back to London to cover the war on British soil. At this time she accused a fellow journalist named Andy Rooney (yes, that Andy Rooney who was there reporting for Stars and Stripes) of plagiarizing her material—a charge that was eventually settled amicably. Mary then married another reporter in London, an Australian named Noel Monks, who was away on an assignment when the most famous writer on planet Earth appeared at her table while she was dining with Irwin. Mary was having affairs with Irwin and possibly one or two other journalists in London before Ernest swooped in to claim her.
Those looking for similarities between Mary and Martha had a laundry list to choose from: both were attractive, ambitious, talented writers from the Midwest a few months apart in age; both had a history of relationships with successful men; and both were unhappily married in the spring of 1944. One was pulling away from the most famous writer of his generation, while the other was being sucked into his orbit. It’s a tossup as to who was getting the better deal here. Or maybe not.
* * *
D-Day was looming on the near horizon as the three prota
gonists jockeyed for position. On June 6, 1944, one hundred and sixty thousand allied troops would be landing on the Normandy coast, marking the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. DDay—Decision Day, Disembarkation Day, or Operation Overlord as it was alternatively called—had been in the planning stage for months and waited only for the proper weather and tide conditions to set it in motion. June 5 was a lousy weather day; June 6 promised to be somewhat better, but not ideal. The operation involved five separate landings in all by American, British, and Canadian troops under the command of American General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eisenhower planned to set the invasion in motion with five thousand ships carrying his men and hundreds of military vehicles across the English Channel. Eight hundred planes would be launched over France, dropping thirteen thousand paratroopers behind enemy lines while an additional three hundred bombers released their deadly charges on top of German troops defending the beaches. Despite his bandaged head and knees, Ernest planned to be among those going ashore with the combatants. Martha wanted to be there as well. The problems she faced were twofold: how was she was going to get there now that Ernest had thrown his roadblock in her path? And, if she did manage to secure a ringside seat for the invasion, would Collier’s publish her dispatches with Ernest occupying the prime real estate on the magazine’s pages?
Chapter Thirty-five
Martha would not be denied the story of the decade, if not her lifetime. Displaying remarkable grit and determination to achieve her goal, Martha waited patiently in London for the invasion to get under way. “9:46 or so,” she entered in her diary. “In 5 seconds the command will be given to the world.” She described the sound of bombers roaring overhead on their way toward the English Channel: “the sound of a giant factory in the sky.” She made note of the weather as she looked up at them: “Weather raw and cold.” And notwithstanding her disappointment at being stranded in London, she thought about her husband: “Worried for E,” she wrote.
Without knowing exactly what she planned to do, Martha set out for the coast of England. Later that night she walked along the docks where she ran into a military policeman guarding a large white ship with enormous red crosses painted on its side. “I’m here to interview nurses for my magazine,” she told him as she presented her press credentials. To her astonishment he waved her through. Once aboard the ship, Martha looked for the nearest bathroom and locked herself inside until she felt the ship inch its way out of port into the open sea. When she slipped out of the bathroom she located a stash of whiskey. “The weather gets rainier and colder every minute,” she wrote. “Badly spooked…I was very scared, drank, got unscared.” Martha stayed awake through the long, cold, blustery night, prowling alone through the dark corridors of the vessel. At the first light of dawn she saw “ a seascape filled with ships…the greatest naval traffic jam in history…so enormous, so awesome, that it felt more like an act of nature than anything man made.”
Then she was in the midst of battle. “Double & triple clap of gunfire,” she wrote in her diary. “Unseen planes roar. Barrage balloons. Gun flashes. 1 close shell burst…Explosions jar the ship.” Soon her ship was alive with teams of medical personnel, nurses and doctors just over from the States, merchant seamen in blue denim, all of them scurrying around purposefully as the war exploded all around them. Martha had her ringside seat as the hospital ship came to rest in the American sector on Omaha Beach. She saw the giant bulldozers scooping up mines on the beach just as the men ran ashore. She saw the artillery shells slamming into German positions on the cliffs beyond the sand. And she saw the bloated bodies floating by, some of them drowned when they left their landing craft too soon and sank under the waves beneath the weight of their own equipment, “swollen greyish sacks.” She saw arms and legs of others blown to bits by German guns.
At night Martha went to work with the nurses and doctors who waded onto the beach through waist-high water behind the soldiers. She pushed her way ashore with them, carrying one end of a stretcher, picking up the wounded and dead one by one and carrying them back onto the hospital ship. They picked up German wounded, too, and directed them into POW cages, a “terrible seedy bunch,” most of them young and scared, and some of them grizzled with the scars of combat. “Great speed & efficiency of loading,” she wrote. “Blood soaked bandages. Everyone watching in silence.” In the light of the red flares that went up over the beach, Martha looked out at a landscape from hell, a “junk yard, with the boxy black shapes of tanks, trucks, munition dumps.”
And then it was over for her. The military police discovered that she was the only journalist aboard and arrested her for crossing into the warzone without authorization. They sent her back to London where Martha set to work immediately, writing two articles for Collier’s about all the horrific things she had witnessed firsthand. Martha had her story, the story of a lifetime. She would not be denied.
* * *
With his head and swollen knees covered with bandages, Ernest took his place with scores of infantrymen aboard the Empire Anvil as it plowed across the English Channel with hundreds of other transport ships bound for the beaches of Normandy. Ernest studied his briefing map, with the names of beaches destined to take their places in history: Sword, Juno, Gold, Utah, and most infamous of all, Omaha Beach. Omaha was where so many men drowned before they reached land as a result of navigation problems. It was where the fighting was fiercest because the Germans concentrated the largest number of troops there to defend the French coast. The landing at Omaha and the raging battle that ensued would be immortalized years later in the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan.
With his head throbbing and his knees threatening to buckle under him, Ernest clambered down the rope ladder onto a landing craft, where he was transferred to another ship with another rope ladder, and finally onto a smaller landing craft crowded with grimfaced infantrymen. At dawn he scanned Omaha Beach with his field glasses, observing every detail as the men struggled to reach land. “The green water turned white and came slamming in over the men, the guns and the cases of explosives,” Ernest wrote in a dispatch for Collier’s. “Ahead you could see the coast of France. The gray booms and derrick-forested bulks of the attack transports were behind now, and, all over the sea, boats were crawling forward toward France.”
Men were puking with seasickness, others prayed for salvation with no hope of retreat if they failed to punch through enemy lines. Only the sea was behind them, waiting to swallow them up if they turned back from their deadly charge. A thousand Allied soldiers would lay dead in the pebbled sand before the long day ended, many blown to pieces, others riveted with machinegun bullets, easy targets for the German gun emplacements. Ernest took it all in, observing “the first, second, third, fourth and fifth waves laying where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on that flat pebbly stretch between the sea and the first cover.”
The Allied forces finally broke through and forced the Germans to retreat. The enemy continued to fight on as best they could for some time longer, but the backbone of their resistance had been broken. A few days later Ernest was back in London, sitting in
his room in the Dorchester Hotel working on his articles for thCollier’s. On June 15, while he was in the officers’ mess of the 98 Squadron in Dunsford, a German V-1 bomb scored a direct hit on the building, raining plaster and other debris down on the men inside. Ernest was uninjured as he secured a piece of bomb shrapnel for a souvenir. A few days later he was airborne with the 98th, flying among eight groups of six B-25 Mitchell bombers on an afternoon run to bomb V-1 launch sites in Drancourt, France. Ernest sat stoically as antiaircraft shells burst all around them. He looked down to watch his plane unload its bombs “sideways as if she were having eight long metal kittens in a hurry.” On June 29 Ernest flew on another mission with RAF Group Captain Peter Barnes.
“Ernest seemed to love the fireworks bursting all around us,” Barnes said afterward, “and he urged me to press on…I knew I was supp
osed to keep Ernest out of trouble. I pulled away in a confusion of search lights and intensive flak. As we winged over, there was a huge flash behind us, and the airplane danced around like a leaf in a whirlwind. Someone got the V-1, but not us. Ernest seemed to have loved every moment of it.”
The men Ernest served with admired his grace and courage under fire, but many of them wondered out loud why someone as famous as he was would risk his life when he didn’t have to. “Hell,” Ernest said, laughing. “I had to go to war to see my wife.”
“He was a delightful character, totally oblivious of the fame and acclaim that had been his,” said John Carlisle, a correspondent with the Detroit Free Press. “He wrote and talked as a realist. He was blunt and forceful, but everything was edged with a touch of subtle humor…he was a real, genuine guy. He didn’t talk about himself.” Underneath it all, Ernest was a fatalist. He had always believed that it was time to go when your number came up, and no one knew when that was going to be. He had a lifelong fascination with death that ran like a cancerous vein throughout his genetic makeup.
Hemingway and Gellhorn Page 21