When all female journalists were denied press accreditation to report on the 1944 Normandy landings, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn donned a disguise.
She posed as a nurse, snuck onto a hospital ship and locked herself in the bathroom until the ship departed for France. She became the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day – and was arrested by military police on her return to England as a result.
Her then husband, Ernest Hemingway, was similarly something of a hindrance to her career.
After Gellhorn left him in Havana in 1943 for the Italian front he wrote to her, petulantly: “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?”
But Gellhorn did not, reportedly, view time in bed with Hemingway with much favour. As she later said: “My whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses, and failing that, the hope that it would soon be over.” They divorced in 1945.
