Ernest Hemingway and D-Day, June 6th, 1944

On the morning of Tuesday 6 June, 1944, the forty-four year old Ernest Hemingway was hanging onto the wheelhouse rail of his LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle and Personnel) feeling dreadfully hungover, a state of affairs that did nothing to help relieve the excruciating pain in his head due to a car accident in London just a few days before. The hospital doctor, after applying fifty-seven stitches, had told Hemingway that he should rest for several weeks. But Hemingway, famous and influential writer, big game hunter, would be bullfighter, infamous drinker and deep-sea fisherman, was not a resting kind of guy, and certainly not a war correspondent who was going to miss the biggest military invasion known to man.

So there he was vomiting over the side of the LCVP, taking pain killers washed down with slugs of brandy from a silver hip flask. The pain simply got worse.

” Okay, Doc,” he said to himself, ” pain killers and booze don’t mix.”

Two months earlier Hemingway had been sailing his boat, ‘Pilar’, in the warmer waters off the Gulf of Mexico looking for German U-boats as part of deal he’d done with the FBI, who’d paid him $500 a month, which could buy a lot of booze for him and his motley crew. And Hemingway’s bunch of irregulars did spot a U-boat on one occasion, managing to get the information back to the mainland, which resulted in the capture of a submarine, although it may not have been the same submarine.

Although, after the war, Hemingway made the best of those U-boat hunting days in his posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream, he did know he was pretty much wasting his time, and should be in Europe reporting  the war, as his then wife, the distinguished journalist Martha Gellhorn, was about to do.

So, after a telephone call his old employer, Collier’s Weekly, he was employed by the magazine as their chief war correspondent, with the instruction he get to Europe and onto the beaches. Within days Hemingway was on a scheduled flying boat to Britain, and a few weeks later on the New Orleans built LCVP.

Hemingway liked the tough young commander of the LCVP, US Navy Lieutenant Robert Anderson, no doubt because he reminded Hemingway of himself when he was young and driving a Red Cross ambulance in Italy during World War I. And Anderson liked Hemingway too, and not just because he admired the man’s writing, but because he gave Anderson some added expertise in military and sailing matters, and because the older man showed absolutely no sign of fear. Hemingway was a good man to have on board at dangerous times like these.