D-Day Women

From the BBC:
"The women reporters determined to cover World War Two"

Seventy years ago, a group of American women journalists made history when they covered the greatest story of their generation. They called them the D-Day Dames.  "It is necessary that I report on this war," writer Martha Gellhorn fumed in an angry letter to military authorities. "I do not feel there is any need to beg as a favour for the right to serve as the eyes for millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves."  She was writing from London in June 1944, where she and other women war correspondents gathered in anticipation of the Normandy landings on the French coast which marked the start of a major offensive against Germany. Like any major news event today, there was an extraordinary buzz among journalists waiting in the city, hanging out in hotels such as the elegant Dorchester in the heart of London.

And a group of US women, gutsy and glamorous, was part of it - they were fighting their own battles on every front to overcome the ban on women going to the front lines in the Second World War.  "They were all watching each other and there was a huge sense of competitiveness," wrote Martha Gellhorn's biographer Caroline Moorehead. "Even Martha who was not very interested in scoops was affected by this huge sense of excitement."  Gellhorn had her scoop - a remarkable one - when she smuggled herself onto a hospital ship to get to Normandy, locked herself in a toilet, and became the first woman to report on the invasion.  "When night came the water ambulances were still churning into the beach, looking for the wounded. We waded ashore in the water to our waist," she wrote.

Gellhorn made her way to Europe at a young age. "I wished to be a foreign correspondent and it seemed to me to be the most natural thing in the world to set off with $50 or so," she said. "I was 21 and on those days 21 was younger than it is now."  Her first experience of war reporting was in Spain in the 1930s when she covered the civil war with her future husband Ernest Hemingway.   This was a historic period, marking a turning point for women reporting from warzones. They reached front lines, sent despatches from Normandy, entered newly liberated Paris and later visited concentration camps across Europe.

^ It's interesting to see these kind of stories especially at a time when women weren't supposed to do anything or go anywhere and yet they went right into the thick of the fighting to get the true story rather than sit on the sidelines. ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27677889