"Leaving for France"
To mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day next Sunday, Rainy Day is featuring excerpts from the eyewitness reportage of the Normandy Invasion by Martha Gellhorn. Refused permission to join the forces sailing to France, Gellhorn, who had covered nearly every theatre of the war, tricked an official into letting her board a hospital ship. She then locked herself in the vessel's toilet until it set off for Normandy:
"There was nothing to do now but wait. The big ship felt empty and strange. There were 422 beds covered with new blankets; and a bright, clean, well-equipped operating room, never before used; great cans marked 'Whole Blood' stood on the decks; plasma bottles and supplies of drugs and bales of bandages were stored in handy places. Everything was ready, and any moment we would be leaving for France......There were six nurses aboard, and they were fine girls. They came from Texas and Michigan and California and Wisconsin, and three weeks ago they were in the USA completing their training for this overseas assignment. They had been prepared to work on a hospital train, which would mean caring for wounded in sensible, steady railway carriages. Now they found themselves on a ship, about to move across the dark water of the Channel.
The nurses had worked day and night for two weeks to get this ship ready to receive wounded. They had scrubbed floors and walls, made beds, prepared supplies, and now their work was finished. They went on working, inventing odd jobs to keep busy during these final empty hours before the real work began. But two tired, brave, tough girls sat on a bench inside the hall of the ship, and painted their fingernails with bright red varnish and talked about wanting their mail and worried about their missing footlockers, their valuable footlockers which had in them the vital comfortable shoes and the unvital, probably never-to-be-worn evening dresses.
Pulling out of the harbour that night, we passed a Liberty ship going the same way. The ship was grey against the grey water and the grey sky, and standing on her decks, packed solidly together, khaki, silent and unmoving, were American troops. No one waved and no one called. The crowded grey ship and the empty white ship sailed slowly out of the harbour towards France.
We crossed by daylight, and the morning seemed longer than other mornings. The captain never left the bridge and, all alone and beautifully white, we made our way through the mine-swept channel."
D-Day as witnessed by Martha Gellhorn, who was writing for the famed American magazine, Collier's Weekly, which had seen its circulation rise to two and a half million copies during the war: Tomorrow: "Then we saw the coast of France."
