Martha Gellhorn and Major General James Gavin – Berlin, 1945

They also talked a lot about living together, even about getting married, about having a dog, and a cat, and children.

During the day Martha patrolled – as she called it – the streets of Berlin and watched as a gang of German women – with dyed blond hair – dug out dead bodies from a flooded underground railway. But Martha had, since Dauchau, lost interest in the dead, especially ordinary German dead. She visited hospitals and recorded that there were 30 cases of malnutrition out of 960 patients. She didn’t care. Martha ruminated on the idea that Germany should become an American colony because they could never become a democracy on their own. She also forecast a Russian-American war, remembering how willingly captured German troops had offered to join the American Army so they could fight the Russians. Martha also notes in her diary that she danced with Gavin for nine hours one night – remembering as she danced the time she danced with Hemingway, who was no dancer, at the Floridita – and then made love for another two hours with darling James (Martha now considered Hemingway to have been no great lover), and Martha was, by all accounts, very hard to please sexually. They were happy, desperate, insane times when everything felt right and wrong and
then right again, with the smell of millions of dead still in the air, even if that was only in the mind.

One day Martha strolled into the Alexandraplatz, which was the centre of the Berlin black market – and somewhere Gavin had forbidden all Americans to go – to try and sell a dirty, creased old suit belonging to Bob Capa (who was being held captive at the Ritz Hotel in Paris because he couldn’t pay his hotel bill, and gambling debts) when she met her old friend Freddy Keller, who’d been in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, who bought Capa’s suit for the exact amount of the photographer’s debts.

When Gavin’s Berlin command came to an end, early in 1946, he asked Martha to join him in America and become his wife. Martha thought about it but then decided she couldn’t face a life of living in army married quarters and politely refused Gavin’s offer, although she knew she loved him as she had loved no one else.

She also realised it was going to be hard to live without a war to go to, in the same way Hemingway had found it hard after 1918. Martha also knew she had to find another war, and another Gavin. It was a theme she returned to again and again in her conversations, her diary, and her published writings. I guess she also realised she would probably spend the rest of her life – with other Gavins coming and going – alone.

In November 1945 Martha travelled to Nuremberg to cover the war crimes trials.

After leaving Berlin James Gavin was appointed chief of staff of the US 5th Army, then chief of staff of all Allied forces in southern Europe, and then Commanding General of the US 7th Corps in West Germany. In the 1950s he headed the US Army’s research department and became a strong opponent of the defence policies of his old boss, President Eisenhower, that relied so heavily on nuclear weapons. Gavin retired from the army in 1958, serving as US Ambassador in France from 1961-63.

Gavin became a prominent critic of the US involvement in Vietnam, and wrote three books on warfare. He died in 1990, and in the forty five years since his love affair with Martha he seldom, if ever, mentioned her name.

Gavin was one of the finest soldiers America has ever produced.