A handful of these journalists and photographers were also women.
Understandably, many female war correspondents were not happy with the ban.
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American war correspondent for theColliersmagazine.
Later, she travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
During this periodshe metErnest Hemingway, who was also in Spain as a correspondent.
They married in 1940, she becoming Hemingways third wife, and Hemingway becoming Gellhorns second husband.
Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway
Gellhorn and Hemingways marriage was troubled from the start.
When D-Day approached, their marriage was already dead in the water.
But Martha Gellhorn was not ready to bow out.
Once on board, she hid herself in the bathroom.
Still, to witness the great invasion was worth the risk.
In the chaos of the war, nobody gave a damn that Gellhorn was a woman.
Other women followed, but much later.
The first batch of womenmembers of the United StatesWomens Army Corpslanded in Normandy thirty-eight days later.
Soon after Gellhorn had filed her story toColliers, the military police arrested her.
They took away her credentials and transported her to a nurses training camp outside London.
Gellhorn escaped from the camp by convincing a British pilot to fly her to Italy.
I followed the war wherever I could reach it, Gellhorn recalled.
Martha Gellhorn continuedcovering conflictsher country was involved in.
She covered the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s.
As Gellhorn entered the late eighties, her eyesight began to fail and she became almost completely blind.
She was also suffering from ovarian cancer that had spread to her liver.
She committed suicide in 1998, at the age of ninety, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.
Martha Gellhorn in 1978, at the age of seventy.
Photo credit: Graham Harrison/Rex/Shutterstock
