Dee Sullivan

Woman of the Day and one of the most celebrated war correspondents of her day Martha Gellhorn, born in OTD in 1908 in St Louis, was nearly a Not-The-WOTD. She persuaded public sector workers to break windows to make a point — well, I am a taxpayer after all — but it was a just cause AND she was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day. Martha’s suffragist mother took her eight year old daughter to a rally in St Louis in 1916 where 7,000 women in yellow sashes lined the delegates’ route to the Democratic Party’s National Convention. The number of states in favour of votes for women were represented by those wearing white and the rest by those in grey and black. Martha represented the future woman voter. Guess how many were dressed in white? Seven. She went to France in 1930 to work at the United Press Bureau in Paris as a foreign correspondent but was fired after reporting sexual harassment. I’d say that thankfully after nearly a century later, this kind of thing doesn’t happen any more but you’d know I was being sarky. I could tell you how in 1936 in Key West, Martha met a heavy-drinking womanising author and journalist with a couple of divorces behind him and they travelled to Barcelona to report on the Spanish Civil War, but even though she married him in 1940, his only value is that during this period, she found her niche: war correspondent. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it.” I could also tell you how Martha reported on the rise of the Nazis and how, lacking the official press credentials needed to witness the Normandy landings, she impersonated a stretcher bearer, hid in a hospital ship bathroom till it reached Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944, and waded ashore to collect casualties and assist medical teams. “Everyone was violently busy on that crowded, dangerous shore…We walked with the utmost care between the narrowly placed white tape lines that marked the mine-cleared path, and headed for a tent marked with a red cross…Everyone agreed that the beach was a stinker, and that it would be a great pleasure to get the hell out of here sometime.” But this is about Martha becoming a Federal Emergency Relief Administration investigator in 1934, travelling around the USA to file eyewitness reports about the grim conditions in which people were living. She found a corrupt contractor exploiting relief workers (jobless small farmers and ranchers) on a FERA project in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He had them shovelling dirt pointlessly from one place to another, then collected the shovels, threw them in the lake, and pocketed a commission on an order for replacements. The workers were left idle and unpaid and had to submit to a humiliating means test for direct relief.⁠ It wasn’t the first such instance. Martha was ready to resign in protest but what she didn’t know was that her boss at FERA had been sending her eyewitness reports painstakingly documenting abuses to Eleanor Roosevelt. He urged her to go and speak to the First Lady. This deeply impressive woman invited her to dinner at the White House, told her husband to listen up, and persuaded Martha to keep going. I confess that every time I learn something new about Eleanor Roosevelt and the many, many ways she found to support other women, it just reinforces my deep respect for her. Martha went back to Idaho, bought the men a beer and persuaded a few to break the windows of the local FERA office at night so that Washington would investigate their grievances. The FBI saw the damage as a possible communist uprising and questioned the men, who admitted that she had suggested it. The contractor was arrested for fraud, the men got their tools and work back, but Martha was branded a “dangerous Communist”, recalled to Washington and fired from FERA. She shrugged it off as “an honourable discharge”. When Eleanor Roosevelt learned that Martha had been fired and the FBI were so hostile towards her, she invited her to come and live at the White House till she found her feet. Martha helped Eleanor with her correspondence and the “My Day” column. Martha was one of the first journalists to report from Dachau when it was liberated by American troops in April 1945 and she covered the liberation of Paris, but that was the year her husband tried to block her career. He wanted a stay-at-home wife. She didn’t want to stay at home. After he refused to help her secure a press pass to return to the USA from Germany by plane in 1945, she was left with no choice but to board a ship laden with explosives. It was the last straw. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolled for him. She divorced him that year. After WW2, she covered every major theatre of war for over fifty years: Vietnam, the Arab/Israeli conflict, the American invasion of Panama. The only reason she didn’t report on the Balkan conflict in the 1980s is because she was nearly blind by then. She died in London at the age of 89. To the end, Martha refused to be remembered merely as some bloke’s wife. “I was a writer before I met him, and I have been a writer for 45 years since. Why should I be a footnote to someone else’s life?”