“Piles of bloody clothing had been cut off and dumped out of the way in corners; coffee cups and cigarette stubs littered the decks, plasma bottles hung from cords, and all the fearful surgical apparatus for holding broken bones made shadows on the walls.”
This account drives home the horror and scale of that day that other accounts dont really match. It is always the reporting on the wounded, the innocents and the personal suffering that hits the hardest. This focus on the consequences of all the sacrifice on that day does more to honor the people who did the sacrificing than any story of the glory or tactics or generals ever could. Gellhorn says:
"There has to be a better way to run the world, and we had better see that we get it."
It is never more important than now to remember that. War is horrible. It is our collective responsibility to promote reason, compassion and peace in the hope of preventing as much war as we can. This was a good article.
> It is never more important than now to remember that. War is horrible. It is our collective responsibility to promote reason, compassion and peace in the hope of preventing as much war as we can.
Agreed, though...
"When the last person who remembers the last great war is dead, the next great war becomes inevitable."
Indeed. This means upholding international law wherever possible as thats the biggest single mechanism thats kept us in something approaching peacetime for all these years. This means holding our allies to a higher standard than those who oppose us. This means being willing to oppose tyrants and hostile actors.
We cant get complacent about these things because thats how we do get WW3. Lets all work to prevent that. Lets give Ukraine what they need to fight. Lets be more strict and hold Israel to a higher standard. Lets strengthen our presence in the south china sea and lets do it visibly and believably.
Caroline Moorehead has a pretty well written biography on her called: "Martha Gellhorn: A Life".
It's a pretty even-keeled look at Gellhorn and Hemingway, peeling back the layers of personality and some of the mythos to reveal how they were not always nice people to be around (although, Hemingway does come across as particularly boorish). Gellhorn was incredibly precocious and driven and often hard-headed. The sheer distance she traveled in her life and the things she got up to were almost impossible for your average woman in America to fathom at that time. She probably needed to adopt a near insane sense of self-confidence to go through with some of the things. She had incredible expectations for herself and, unfortunately, the later years of her life never seemed to match what she wanted out of her life and come across as quite depressing. Then again, few birth-to-death biographies have entertaining later years.
True, though that's a mostly-modern phenomenon. Back when life expectancy was far shorter, and sudden-ish death due to injury or disease was far more common...
Just when you think HN is a place for enlightened commentary about science and technology, you get misogynistic comments like this. It still amazes me that in 2024 these attitudes still exist.
What is the most useful-to-HN-method to remove the derailment attempts?
Downvote, flag, move on?
I just wish there were more effective tools across the web, (i.e. not just HN) to tackle the people who are trying to cause division by derailing threads with argumentative comments.
Yup, and in egregious cases, email hn@ycombinator.com. The latter has the downside that it depends on how online we happen to be, but the upside of guaranteed message delivery. If the email is short and includes a link and a brief statement of what's being reported, it's often easy to do something quickly, even if it takes us (er, me) longer to reply.
> Gellhorn’s story ran in the August 5 issue with the headline “The Wounded Come Home.” No mention was made of the fact that she was the only female journalist on the ground at Omaha Beach.
As it shouldn't, as her sex is hardly relevant for the story she wrote.
Likewise, it doesn't matter for the story to mention that Gellhorn was arrested by military police for traveling to Normandy without permission after she returned to England. It's interesting for this article, but why should any information surrounding the author be mentioned in her “The Wounded Come Home” piece?
I think you might be on the wrong side of this guideline here:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unless I'm missing something, the author isn't saying it should have been mentioned; only that it wasn't.
I honestly think I wasn't breaking the guidelines but I think this case really is up to interpretation, and do I understand where you're coming from. My interpretation of the part I quoted was that the author of the article included that second sentence with the intention of it being interpreted as "...but it should have been mentioned". But you're right, that's my reading, nowhere does it say explicitly that that information should have been mentioned.
In any event, just to clarify, I wasn't trying to troll.
That's a fine reply and settles the moderation point, so I don't mean to pile on—I hope that's clear! But I want to say some more about that guideline because this is a useful example.
You and I came up with different interpretations of this line: "No mention was made of the fact that she was the only female journalist on the ground at Omaha Beach":
Interpretation #1 (yours*): the author thinks the article should have mentioned that, and is perhaps implying something about sexism.
Interpretation #2 (mine): the author just finds it interesting that a striking fact was omitted.
Both our interpretations are plausible—I dare say equally plausible. But the guideline includes a "tie-breaker" for such cases: the word "strongest". This means that when there is more than one plausible interpretation, you should choose the one that makes for the strongest counter-argument to your criticism**.
In this case, #2 is clearly a stronger answer to the criticism "her sex is hardly relevant for the story she wrote" than #1 is, so the tie-breaker would favor #2.
This assumes that the commenter (you in this case) actually thinks of both #1 and #2 in the first place. Often this is not so. But at a meta level the guideline is also saying: "please think of as many interpretations you can and then choose the strongest one etc."
* I might not have phrased this fairly and in that case you can invoke the same guideline against me :)
** This is sometimes called "steelmanning" or "principle of charity".
Thanks for clarifying once again. This confirmed what I understood you meant.
I think your tie-breaker argument is totally fair which is why I didn't even try to contest it. But now that I'm thinking about it a little bit more, I do see a small issue with the guideline. Namely, for me as a commenter, it is ususally unclear whether my interpretation is indeed the strongest plausible one - for one, because what is "strongest" is, at least to a certain degree, subjective. But also, because it is unlikely that a commenter will ever be in a position to realize all possible interpretations of something they would like to comment on.
But like in this case, I don't have a problem in general with you (or someone else) barging in and flagging one of my comments, as long as it's fair, which in this case I think it was.
The upside of his guideline is that commenters should think twice before hitting the keyboard: is there perhaps an interpretation that I missed? I kinda doubt that that's going to become the new way to interact on the internet, but if it did, it would certainly be an improvement.
In context, I believe interpretation number 1 stands on firmer ground than yours.
In the previous paragraph:
> Unlike his wife, Hemingway never went ashore at Normandy. On June 6, all he could do was watch from a landing craft as American soldiers fought their way onto Omaha Beach.
> Even though Gellhorn scooped Hemingway, his story ran first. “Voyage to Victory,” proclaimed the cover of Collier’s July 22, 1944, issue. The article identified Hemingway as “Collier’s famed war correspondent” and included a photo of the whiskered writer with Allied soldiers.
Only then does the section conclude with the line in question
> No mention was made of the fact that she was the only female journalist on the ground at Omaha Beach.
You can argue that the author just finds these and other facts interesting, and nothing more. I think that is ignoring the clear subtext present in the writing. The author is certainly making the case that she was not given the recognition she deserved; either because of her sex or her proximity to Hemingway. Because the author himself invoked her sex in the final line, I am inclined to think the former.
"As a female war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn was not allowed to accompany the Allied invasion force .... and so, the night before the invasion, she finagled a spot on a hospital ship by telling military police she was there to interview nurses. Once aboard, Gellhorn found a bathroom, locked the door and hid until the ship was on its way to France on June 6, 1944."
"I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the 'woman’s' angle.”
There is a war going on right now, look at injury to death ratios. It would be nice to have some nurses around, maybe so many soldiers would not bleed to death!
And 20 years old woman is more physically capable than 60 years old male!
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
How does the submission fit the guidelines you posted?
It’s not relevant to hackers or startups. Why is a woman to report on d day on hacker news? Because it’s a woman? I can’t figure out what is relevant to this community
It fits the guidelines by gratifying intellectual curiosity. Your idea of what counts as on topic for HN may be a bit too narrow. Historical material has always been welcome here! What's interesting in this case is not "a woman", but the remarkable Martha Gellhorn.
Of course, it may not gratify your intellectual curiosity specifically, but no post is interesting to everybody. The goal is more to have a front page with a good probability distribution of interestingness over a wide range of smart readers. If you don't like this post, there are 29 others on the front page, and if you run out of interesting stories there, I recommend the 'past' link in the top bar, which will show you the front pages of previous 24 hour periods, going all the way back.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
In fact, that they highlight that she is the only woman does draw attention to the reality that this was a mostly male endeavor. I don’t see any erasure here, and this is a somewhat notable story.
This is one story. There are also numerous stories told about the men. And we even have a term, "The Greatest Generation". Here's a particular story of them, which you might not have heard yet.
This particular story emphasizes "woman" partly because that's a key part of the story (it was unusual, against societal roles of the time), and partly because telling these stories now is corrective in multiple ways.
(And maybe also in the headline because that will get more eyeballs on the story, because people want those previously neglected stories, and that inspiration.)
Are you really arguing that men in ww2 aren't talked about? I'm didn't bother to count how many entries there are on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_films, but at a glance it looks like it's >95% about men
One of them is people's tendency not to be aware of the negativity in their own comments (harshness, provocation, etc.), while at the same time being super aware of it in others. This skew in perception leads to the feeling:
"I am a valuable contributor, sharing insights and questions; you are a shameless troll, spewing drivel and aggression."
And its cousins:
"Me? How can you moderate me? This is bias and censorship of the worst order."
and
"Ok, I may have overstepped a little, but the other started it with their obvious abuse. Am I not supposed to defend myself? You obviously must agree with them."
In the case of divisive topics "I" becomes "we", a.k.a. "my side", but the dynamic is basically the same.
All this is human nature so it's kind of hard to do anything about.
I think this is a bit excessive especially since D-Day is such a well covered topic, but I do think it's interesting to point out that of the three D-Day/WWII stories that I found that were published around June 4th, two of them are stories about women.
This account drives home the horror and scale of that day that other accounts dont really match. It is always the reporting on the wounded, the innocents and the personal suffering that hits the hardest. This focus on the consequences of all the sacrifice on that day does more to honor the people who did the sacrificing than any story of the glory or tactics or generals ever could. Gellhorn says:
"There has to be a better way to run the world, and we had better see that we get it."
It is never more important than now to remember that. War is horrible. It is our collective responsibility to promote reason, compassion and peace in the hope of preventing as much war as we can. This was a good article.