OPINION: HOLY COW! HISTORY: The woman who crashed D-Day

Dwight Eisenhower had reached his decision. And when Ike put his foot down, that was the end of things. After all, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, personally responsible for planning the largest military invasion in human history, his plate was overflowing with priorities.

But that didn’t fly with a feisty 35-year-old newspaper reporter. So when Eisenhower decreed that no women journalists would accompany the initial Allied landings on French beaches during the coming D-Day invasion, Martha Gellhorn shrugged it off. There was no way someone was going to keep her from missing out on not only the biggest story of the year but one of the biggest of the entire war. She would simply switch to Plan B.

All she had to do now was come up with Plan B.

The daughter of a prominent doctor in St. Louis, Gellhorn was fascinated by world events from an early age. She dropped out of Bryn Mawr College to become a journalist. Writing first for The New Republic, she eventually landed her dream job as a foreign correspondent for United Press in Paris. It turned into a nightmare when a male co-worker sexually harassed her. As so often happened in those decades long before the #MeToo movement, she was fired for reporting it.

Gellhorn was down, but far from out.

After spending a year wandering Europe, writing for newspapers back home, and covering fashion for Vogue magazine, she dabbled in the pacifist movement and even wrote a book about it.

Somewhere along the way, she had managed to become friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady offered her a job assisting with writing Mrs. Roosevelt’s popular “My Day” newspaper column. In fact, she even invited Gellhorn to live in the White House for a while. Talk about having connections!

She later took a job traveling the country with a New Deal government agency and lost it when a bit of social activism went too far.

And that was when Ernest Hemingway entered her life.

It was a star-crossed romance from the start. They went to Spain together and, in between writing news stories and ducking fascist bullets during that country’s civil war, they fell in love.

It was an on-again, off-again relationship for four years until they decided to tie the knot in 1940. It was her first marriage, but Hemingway’s third (of four). And although both Hemingways covered World War II, “Papa,” as he was nicknamed, increasingly resented Gellhorn’s long absences. “Are you a war correspondent or my wife?” he demanded in 1943 as she left their Cuban estate to follow the fighting in Italy.

The breaking point came in the spring of 1944. Husband and wife were in England, though separately, each reporting on mounting tension in the buildup to the anticipated invasion. Hemingway had tried to stop her from reaching Britain. When Gellhorn got there (after a nerve-racking journey through U-boat-infested waters), she told him their marriage was over.

Then came Ike’s edict: No women reporters allowed to cover the Allied landings in France.

A marriage that had just failed, a potentially career-ending dead end. A lot of people would have given up. Not Martha Gellhorn. Ike or no Ike, she was going to Normandy.

She was fully aware of the consequences. Being caught disobeying a general’s orders could have landed her in Leavenworth for a long time. And that was the least of it: A civilian caught without permission inside Army ranks would be liable to face espionage charges.

Gellhorn didn’t care. The story was too big.

She drove to southern England, persuaded American MPs that she was a nurse who had missed her ride back to the base, and bluffed her way onto a hospital ship. Once onboard, she hid inside a bathroom, hoping against hope she wouldn’t be discovered.

Her ruse worked. She made it. Two days later, Gellhorn was in a party that went ashore near Omaha Beach. She worked alongside medics recovering wounded GIs and ferrying them back across the English Channel. Once in port, she jumped ship and wrote what she had seen as the only woman journalist to land at Normandy on June 6.

The military was furious. She was briefly arrested and stripped of her war correspondent credentials. When the brass cooled down, she returned to the front line in Italy and was among the first journalists to report on the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp when it was liberated. “I followed the war wherever I could reach it,” she said later.

Gellhorn and Hemingway divorced in 1945. She married again, raised an adopted son, and covered almost every major conflict in the world over the next 40 years. She was 81 when she reported on the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1990.

A U.S. postage stamp was issued in her honor in 2008, and the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism continues to perpetuate her remarkable legacy today.

J. Mark Powell is a former television journalist. His nonfiction book “Witness to War: The Story of the Civil War Told by Those Living Through It” is available at jmarkpowell.com. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.