Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

As the 60th anniversary of D-Day approaches, Rainy Day will be marking this pivotal historical event with a week of excerpts from the journalism of Martha Gellhorn, who stowed away on a hospital ship and sneaked ashore as a stretcher bearer during the landings at Normandy on 6 June 1944. Her eyewitness accounts of what happened on that long day are among the great feats of war reportage.

Who was Martha Gellhorn? When she died at her home in London on 15 February 1998, at eighty-nine years of age, she was recognized as one of the pioneering figures in 20th century journalism. Incredibly, in 1989, at the age of eighty-one, she was still out at the front — reporting on the US invasion of Panama. It was only when war came to Bosnia that she had to pass on taking an assignment, saying that she was too old and not "nimble" enough for war anymore.

Martha Gellhorn began her journalistic career during the Spanish Civil War, arriving in Madrid in 1937 with nothing but a rucksack, fifty dollars, and an assignment to cover the conflict for the American magazine Collier's Weekly. She met Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain as a war correspondent, and they married in 1940, she becoming his third wife. The marriage lasted five years, ending when Gellhorn left Hemingway, the only one of his wives to do so, by the way. From Spain, Gellhorn moved to Germany, chronicling Hitler's dictatorship and the onset of World War II. She reported from virtually every theatre of the war: Czechoslovakia, Finland, Britain, Burma, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Tomorrow, here, Martha Gellhorn on D-Day: "There was nothing to do now but wait? Everything was ready, and any moment we would be leaving for France."