{"id":16504,"date":"2016-06-21T04:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T09:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=16504"},"modified":"2016-06-21T04:00:41","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T09:00:41","slug":"world-war-ii-history-when-hemmingway-stashed-bazookas-in-a-parisian-hotel-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/21\/world-war-ii-history-when-hemmingway-stashed-bazookas-in-a-parisian-hotel-room\/","title":{"rendered":"World War II History: When Hemmingway Stashed Bazookas In A Parisian Hotel Room"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"storytext\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-16505\" src=\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/06\/ernest-hemingway-ww2-war-reporter_557.jpg\" alt=\"ernest-hemingway-ww2-war-reporter_557\" width=\"557\" height=\"418\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Troops marched in Rambouillet, kicking up dust just outside of Paris as the war correspondent dotted around town on assignment. Ernest Hemingway was there, ostensibly, as a reporter, not a combatant. But he may have been stretching the boundaries of press freedoms while commanding a group of French Resistance fighters and journalists to help liberate the capital in 1944.<\/p>\n<p>The big story of how the Illinois native arrived in Paris as a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/flashback\/a-journalist-who-made-kissinger-shudder\/40251\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">journalist<\/a>, faced a military tribunal and nearly got booted out of France is a lesson in the hazy ethics that govern embedded reporters still today. And the truth, like much of Hemingway\u2019s life, remains blurry. \u201cIf you model your journalism after Hemingway, you have some sort of complex,\u201d says Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. And yet, that role was intrinsic to the famed author\u2019s image of himself: \u201cHemingway saw himself as a journalist\u201d all his life, says James Nagel, a Dartmouth scholar and former president of the Ernest Hemingway Society.<\/p>\n<p>Launching his career when he was a mere teenager, Hemingway wrote without bylines for the <em>Kansas City Star<\/em>. The recent high school grad was known to \u201cdash around the city compulsively, wanting always to know where the ambulance had [gone],\u201d says Hemingway expert Kelley Dupuis. On one assignment, bystanders refused to touch a man sick with some contagious disease, and when an ambulance didn\u2019t arrive quickly, Hemingway reportedly took action. \u201cWhy, I wouldn\u2019t treat a dog like that,\u201d he said, according to an account in Matthew Bruccoli\u2019s <em>Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter<\/em>, before picking the sick man up, ordering a taxi and taking him to the hospital himself \u2014 later expensing the cab fare.<\/p>\n<p>The incident foreshadowed a lifetime of throwing himself into the very news he was meant to simply report. After a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I that saw him return home a hero \u2014 the first American injured on the Italian front, headlines proclaimed \u2014 Hemingway settled down as a writer for the <em>Cooperative Commonwealth<\/em> magazine in Chicago. Next was a cushy gig <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/rising-stars\/the-haute-dining-scene-in-paris-tacos-fried-chicken-and-cocktails\/67626\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in Paris<\/a> as the European correspondent for the <em>Toronto Star<\/em>, which he was fired from after he got caught publishing articles concurrently in another publication. By now a commercial success for his fiction, having published both <em>A Farewell to Arms <\/em>and <em>The Sun Also Rises<\/em>, Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War for a North American wire service, sparking controversy in 1940 by penning <em>For Whom the Bell Tolls. <\/em>The story\u2019s protagonist, a guerrilla soldier, invited criticisms that the novelist was writing about himself \u2014 playing soldier rather than serving as an objective observer.<\/p>\n<p>At the start of World War II, Hemingway found himself unemployed in Havana and bitter that Martha Gellhorn, his new and third wife, was covering the conflict as a correspondent for <em>Collier\u2019s Weekly<\/em>. \u201c<em>He<\/em> was supposed to be the celebrity reporter, not Martha,\u201d Nagel says. Hemingway got the call a year later, also from <em>Collier\u2019s<\/em>, and landed on the beaches of Normandy \u2026 the day after D-Day. \u201cThe <em>Private Ryan<\/em> business had already taken place,\u201d says Nagel, and Gellhorn was actually the first reporter to land in Europe. But her editors scrapped her frontline piece, choosing Hemingway\u2019s day-after take instead for the cover. \u201cShe never spoke to him again,\u201d Nagel says.<\/p>\n<div id=\"93467\" class=\"inline_image image_size_med inline-element\">\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"picture\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pictures.ozy.com\/pictures\/768xany\/4\/6\/7\/93467_gettyimages104421243.jpg\" alt=\"Gettyimages 104421243\" \/><\/div>\n<div class=\"sharing-options\">\n<div class=\"close-button\"><em><span class=\"ozy-icon i-share-icon i-share-icon-dims\">\u00a0<\/span>The entrance to the restaurant of the Ritz Hotel, Place Vend\u00f4me in Paris, around 1948.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"meta no-icons\">\n<div class=\"caption\">\n<div class=\"sleeve\">\n<p class=\"inline_source\">Reporting from the Western Front, Hemingway reunited with a friend, Maj. Gen. Charles \u201cBuck\u201d Lanham, who gave him a front seat for the American advance on Paris. But as they neared the City of Light, Hemingway didn\u2019t get the word that liberation was to be left to French locals. So he, along with a few dozen reporters and Resistance fighters, \u201cliberated\u201d the Ritz Hotel. In truth, he was welcomed with open arms by owner Charles Ritz, an old drinking buddy from his time there in the 1920s. Luckily for Hemingway, the German lieutenants who had roomed there were long gone. He avoided trouble then, only to find it again a few weeks later when a complaint was filed accusing Hemingway of keeping<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/immodest-proposal\/ladies-get-your-guns\/61600\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">firearms<\/a>, bazookas, grenades and other weapons in his Parisian hotel room. It was a serious charge and suspected violation of the Geneva Convention\u2019s rules insisting that news correspondents avoid compromising their status as noncombatants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Faced with the embarrassing possibility that he\u2019d be expelled, Hemingway did what he did best: spun a tale. He argued that the hefty arsenal of Resistance weaponry was only in his possession because \u201cstorage space was in short supply,\u201d Dupuis says. Although Hemingway was known to carry a rifle, he said he never took part in any fighting. He was cleared of the charges, and in 1949 the rules advising correspondents not to carry arms were clarified.<\/p>\n<p>A true legend, it\u2019s foolish to think Hemingway wouldn\u2019t toe the line between reality and fiction even in death. After his passing, scholars discovered his unpublished short story,<em>Black Ass at the Crossroads<\/em>. The gist? \u201cA story about a group of journalists who are fired upon by the Germans,\u201d Nagel says. \u201cThese guys have weapons. And they fight back.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Read the Original Article at <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ozy.com\/flashback\/when-hemingway-stashed-bazookas-in-a-parisian-hotel-room\/68954?utm_source=dd&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=06202016&amp;variable=39fe65539224826abd35ed3f9ee054f5\">OZY<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Troops marched in Rambouillet, kicking up dust just outside of Paris as the war correspondent dotted around town on assignment. Ernest Hemingway was there, ostensibly, as a reporter, not a combatant. But he may have been stretching the boundaries of press freedoms while commanding a group of French Resistance fighters and journalists to help liberate&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[5773,7697,5713,1899],"tags":[12365,12366,12367,12368,4296,3122],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}