When Ernest Hemingway made it his mission to liberate a hotel

As the Allied forces prepared to take Paris in 1944, war correspondent Ernest Hemingway was so competitive in his quest for the big story that he poached another writer’s assignment for the prestigious magazine Collier’s.

The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris
by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Then, when that same writer asked for assistance in getting a seat on the journalists’ plane to Europe, he refused, forcing the writer to instead spend 17 days as the only civilian aboard a weapons transport ship “loaded with explosives” — an incredibly risky move, as those ships had been high-value Nazi targets throughout the war, and “tens of thousands” of Allied soldiers died on them.

The writer in question, who later confronted Hemingway in a “spectacular” argument, was Martha Gellhorn — Hemingway’s wife.

“The Hotel on Place Vendome” by Tilar J. Mazzeo tells the tale of the Hotel Ritz, a landmark so imbued with glamour that it was the only hotel in Paris the Nazis ordered to stay open during the war.

The antics at and around it during World War II were often shocking, as one half was reserved for high-level Nazis — Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, morphine-addicted cross-dresser Hermann Göring, lived in its grandest suite — while the other was open for business to sympathetic celebrities and socialites and citizens of neutral countries.

Hemingway, never one to tamp down his machismo, took it upon himself to not just report the war, but fight it as well, hoping to use the Ritz, his longtime favorite, as his base of operations.

Once it was evident that the Allies were retaking Paris, Hemingway, then 45, was determined not just to be the first war correspondent back at the Ritz, but to “liberate” it from the Nazis.(Although, Mazzeo writes, the bellicose, alcoholic author was really just “keen to be the first to liberate more or less anything.”)

“Sweet-talking the commander, General Raymond ‘Tubby’ Barton, with his war stories,” she writes, “he had cobbled together his own private brigade more or less through sheer personal charisma.”

Hemingway had “a public-relations officer, a private cook, a camp photographer and his own supply of Scotch whiskey.” Forbidden from carrying a weapon as a correspondent, he “made sure his personal platoon carried every weapon imaginable, both German and American.”

He called them his band of “irregulars,” and set out to “liberate” the French village of Saint-Pois. He showed his plan to a photographer friend, who later said he had a “bad feeling” about the operation.

“The Allied regiment, as Ernest showed him, was planning to take the village from a route shown on the left. His idea was to take a shortcut on the map and drive into the village from the right, beating the military to the glory.”

Hemingway “commandeered a motorcycle with a sidecar,” and “loaded up the sidecar with whiskey and machine guns.”

Riding toward Saint-Pois, it didn’t take long until the Germans attacked.

“One shell exploded 10 yards from the motorcycle,” and the motorcycle driver hit the brakes, sending Hemingway flying into a ditch.

Bullets landed all around him as a Panzer tank made its approach, but he was saved when the Nazis diverted their attention to “an Allied regiment on the other flank.”

Having failed to liberate the town, Hemingway set his sites back on the Ritz, hoping to arrive there to cover France’s liberation before the rest of the press corps.

He took a four-man crew, “met up with another dozen or so French Maquis fighters,” and decided that they would “fight their way into the capital as a private militia.” Despite their ragtag nature, this militia had uniforms, as Hemingway, he wrote to a paramour, “clothed them with clothing of cavalry recon outfit which had been killed.”

Hemingway was basically playing soldier — in opposition to every rule governing the behavior of war correspondents. His entourage having grown to also include a colonel in the OSS (the precursor to the CIA), two Army historians, and a resistance fighter, Hemingway even killed some Nazis, as he “had purportedly blown up with a hand grenade some Germans hiding in a cellar.”

As they fought alongside him, Hemingway’s crew began to take on his mannerisms.

“The ‘irregulars’ . . . went around spitting short sentences from the corners of their mouths in their different languages,” writes Mazzeo, “[and carried] more hand grenades and brandy than a full division.”

The famed author and his bizarre band of brothers went out nightly to “harass the remaining Germans between Rambouillet and Paris.” Later, Hemingway took his crew toward Paris via back roads, hoping to beat the US troops into the city and was finally stopped when someone informed Gen. George S. Patton of his activities.

The US Army commander surrounded the press camp with military police and told the reporters, “If any of you make a move toward Paris before the troops do, I’ll court-martial you!”

Ultimately, Hemingway was not the first journalist back to Paris, perhaps because “his march on Paris seemed to be punctuated with long, winey stops,” Mazzeo writes.

“By the time their Jeep had even reached the River Seine, [one of the war historians] counted 67 bottles of champagne in it.”

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