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Hemingway Goes to War
Ernest Hemingway, literary giant of the 20th century, was renowned as a hard-drinking man of action. As the fighting reached its climax in the closing ten months of World War II, he spent time as a US war correspondent based in London, Paris and Luxembourg. It was during that period, by his own account, that he participated in the D-Day landings and saw action in the frontline at the Battle of the Bulge with the US Army. He also claimed to have flown on bombing raids with the Royal Air Force. This text examines Hemingway's trail through war-torn Europe during World War II, chronicling his tangled personal life and assessing the impact that first-hand experience of war had on him both as a writer and as a man.
292 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
Charles Whiting
256 books52 followersCharles Whiting was a British writer and military historian and with some 350 books of fiction and non-fiction to his credit, under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms including Ian Harding, Duncan Harding, K.N. Kostov, John Kerrigan, Klaus Konrad, and Leo Kessler.
Born in the Bootham area of York, England, he was a pupil at the prestigious Nunthorpe Grammar School, leaving at the age of 16 to join the British Army by lying about his age. Keen to be in on the wartime action, Whiting was attached to the 52nd Reconnaissance Regiment and by the age of 18 saw duty as a sergeant in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany in the latter stages of World War II. While still a soldier, he observed conflicts between the highest-ranking British and American generals which he would write about extensively in later years.
After the war, he stayed on in Germany completing his A-levels via correspondence course and teaching English before being enrolled at Leeds University reading History and German Language. As an undergraduate he was afforded opportunities for study at several European universities and, after gaining his degree, would go on to become an assistant professor of history. Elsewhere, Whiting held a variety of jobs which included working as a translator for a German chemical factory and spells as a publicist, a correspondent for The Times and feature writer for such diverse magazines as International Review of Linguistics, Soldier and Playboy.
His first novel was written while still an undergraduate, was published in 1954 and by 1958 had been followed by three wartime thrillers. Between 1960 and 2007 Charles went on to write over 350 titles, including 70 non-fiction titles covering varied topics from the Nazi intelligence service to British Regiments during World War II.
One of his publishers, Easingwold-based Rupert Smith of GH Smith & Son said he was a quiet man and prolific writer.
"He's one of a band of forgotten authors because he sold millions of copies and still, up to his death was doing publishing deals.He was the kind of man who was very self-effacing, one of Britain's forgotten authors, still working at 80 years of age, with his nose down and kicking out books."
Charles Henry Whiting, author and military historian died on July 24 2007, leaving his wife and son.
Born in the Bootham area of York, England, he was a pupil at the prestigious Nunthorpe Grammar School, leaving at the age of 16 to join the British Army by lying about his age. Keen to be in on the wartime action, Whiting was attached to the 52nd Reconnaissance Regiment and by the age of 18 saw duty as a sergeant in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany in the latter stages of World War II. While still a soldier, he observed conflicts between the highest-ranking British and American generals which he would write about extensively in later years.
After the war, he stayed on in Germany completing his A-levels via correspondence course and teaching English before being enrolled at Leeds University reading History and German Language. As an undergraduate he was afforded opportunities for study at several European universities and, after gaining his degree, would go on to become an assistant professor of history. Elsewhere, Whiting held a variety of jobs which included working as a translator for a German chemical factory and spells as a publicist, a correspondent for The Times and feature writer for such diverse magazines as International Review of Linguistics, Soldier and Playboy.
His first novel was written while still an undergraduate, was published in 1954 and by 1958 had been followed by three wartime thrillers. Between 1960 and 2007 Charles went on to write over 350 titles, including 70 non-fiction titles covering varied topics from the Nazi intelligence service to British Regiments during World War II.
One of his publishers, Easingwold-based Rupert Smith of GH Smith & Son said he was a quiet man and prolific writer.
"He's one of a band of forgotten authors because he sold millions of copies and still, up to his death was doing publishing deals.He was the kind of man who was very self-effacing, one of Britain's forgotten authors, still working at 80 years of age, with his nose down and kicking out books."
Charles Henry Whiting, author and military historian died on July 24 2007, leaving his wife and son.
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April 27, 2022
I am engaged in (and finally the end is in sight) a project called The Hemingway Enigma: How Did A Middling Writer Achieve Such Global Fame — https://hemingway-pfg.blogspot.com/p/... — and came across Charles Whiting’s book in my ‘research’ (the posh word for nosing around the internet).
It was exactly what I wanted at that point: I am including a potted biography of Hemingway in my account and had got to the point where he finally got off his arse in Cuba, stopped his ridiculous ‘sub-hunting’ and took himself off to ‘cover the war in Europe’ in 1944.
The facts of what he did there, between mid-May 1944 and the end of March 1945, are known, but in my reading of the various biographies I’ve come to realise that in a sense some of those ‘facts’ are variable, especially when they contradict each other.
So Whiting’s book was welcome, especially as he proved to be as sceptical of ‘Papa’ Hemingway as I am. (Hemingway awarded himself that nickname and insisted everyone use it — even his wives did so — to help to underline the impression he liked to give of being an expert on everything.)
But I soon hit upon a problem. Within the first few pages, Whiting’s is guilty of a real howler: he writes that Hemingway was given the middle name ‘Hadley’ in honour of his maternal grandfather whose surname was ‘Hadley’.
But it wasn’t and his grandfather wasn’t: Hemingway’s middle given name was ‘Miller’ and his grandfather’s surname was Hall. ‘Hadley [Richardson] was the name of his first wife. Now, Mr Whiting, that is a very bad one.
There are further glitches, though none of that magnitude. At one point, the White Tower, the Soho, London, restaurant in which Hemingway first met his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, inexplicably becomes the White House for one mention, before reverting to its real name.
Throughout the text there are also literals and misspellings (‘fist’ for ‘first’, ‘in’ for ‘on’ etc), and though these last are primarily the fault of the publisher’s proofreader (though Whiting will also have been given proofs to check), that first, initial howler, is Whiting’s alone. And there’s the rub.
It might be the only ‘fact’ Whiting got badly wrong for all we know, but the problem is that at a stroke, and whether unfairly or not, it rather undermines the author: the question is now always at the back of the reader’s mind: if he got THAT so badly wrong, what else has he got wrong? And there is no way of knowing.
That is crucial because the portrait Whiting gives of Hemingway is that of a drunken, boorish, egoistic lout.
As it happens that was exactly what Hemingway was at times, and especially as he got older, but it most certainly was not the full story.
Other biographers also highlight rather less well-known aspects of Hemingway’s character, especially before he turned 40: the shyness, the — believe it or not — occasional modesty, the kindness, the generosity, his wide reading and his intellect (which, though, he actively liked to play down, desperate to persuade the world that he was a rough-and-tumble regular guy, a desire which to my mind betrays a deep-rooted inferiority complex).
But Whiting doesn’t. Whiting’s Hemingway is pretty much irredeemable.
On the night of May 25/26, 1944, and after a long party, Hemingway injured his head badly in a car crash in Belgravia in the black-out while drunk (again) and being driven to his hotel (the Dorchester).
He was diagnosed with concussion (as well as other injuries) but stayed in hospital for just a few days before reportedly discharging himself because he didn’t want to miss D Day. The doctors wanted him to remain in hospital.
For the next few months he suffered continual bad headaches and about ten weeks later banged his head again on a rock at the side of the road when he leapt off a motorcycle to avoid being shot. It is thus quite possible that he underwent some kind of change in personality as a result of those injuries.
What is certain, whether a Hemingway sceptic or supporter, is that he drank an extraordinary amount, day-in, day-out, beginning at breakfast.
It is not just Whiting who suggests that rather than ‘covering’ the war for Collier’s magazine (and he filed just six pieces in ten months), Hemingway was ‘playing at being a soldier’ (as he had previously played at ‘hunting U-boats off the north coast of Cuba).
But there can be no doubt at all that he did put himself in harm’s way and for a short few days in the disastrous Hürtigenwald advance that the end of November and beginning of December 1944 (which claimed an unbelievably high number of US soldiers’ lives) Hemingway was actively ‘fighting’.
As an accredited war correspondent he should not have been, of course, and had just a month earlier survived a court martial by doing what he so rarely did, underplaying his ‘achievements‘. He also — apparently on the orders of General Patton — lied under oath.
What also saved him, writes Whiting, was the testimony of an OSS commander (the OSS was the fore-runner of the CIA) who declared Hemingway had at all times simply been doing his duty as a patriotic American. That clinched it: the court martial did not want to be seen to take against a supposed ‘patriot doing his duty‘. That would not have been a good look (as we say today).
Yet even the less sceptical biographers — which certainly does not include Whiting — openly wonder whether Hemingway was ‘being brave’ or simply insanely reckless.
There is one account (though not in Whiting’s book) of him during the Hürtigenwald advance walking upright and crossing open ground towards Germans hidden in a woody copse blasting a machine gun at the enemy while himself being under fire. All around him regular US GIs were lying flat on the ground to avoid being hit. Reckless or brave? Who knows?
But Hemingway’s stints ‘at the front’, to be frank mainly in the Hürtigenwald campaign, did not last long and he was soon back at the Ritz Hotel in Paris (which he did not ‘liberate’) living it up and retailing all his supposed exploits to an adoring crowd who were all too keen to be seen with ‘the famous author’. (His fame also gained him certainly privileges from the US army). Whiting claims his longest time ‘at the front’ was just over two weeks before he was back in Paris again and carousing.
Other biographers tend to bear out various Whiting’s claims — what Hemingway got up to is known, though interpretations vary — though none (except for an extremely hostile Richard Bradford in The Man Who Wasn‘t There) is quite as censorious of Hemingway as Whiting.
Whiting has himself served in with the British in the war and for some time worked as as military historian at several universities worldwide. He finally became a full-time writer and was immensely prolific, turning out — possibly that should be ‘churning out‘ — a huge number of war novels, under several pseudonyms.
From what I can gather this was bon-fide pulp fiction which, as on commentator put it delicately, would never have been reviewed in the London Guardian.
And although I have read none of Whiting’s potboilers, and frankly don’t want to as they are not at all my number, he has a lively, if occasionally, lazy style.
So Hemingway Goes To War (which was first published as Papa Goes To War) is worth reading rather than not. But please bear in mind Whiting’s huge howler and if you read this have to hand a large pinch of salt. It might not be necessary, of course, but sadly there is just no way for you or I to know.
One last concern is that Whiting appears — I have to be careful here even though he is dead — to have lifted passages from Kenneth S Lynn’s biography of Hemingway almost word-for-word. Lynn’s book was published three years before Whiting’s first appeared. Now that is not good or professional. I have just compared several passages and it does certainly seem to be the case.
Thus Whiting’s book, despited being readable and entertaining — and it is certainly that — gets just 2/10 for readability. It might have been given 3/10 or even 4/10 had it not been for the doubts I have and the apparent plagiarism.
PS Whiting’s references to the various US armies, division, brigades, companies and all the rest, can be a tad confusing for the lay reader, but the going isn’t too bad.
It was exactly what I wanted at that point: I am including a potted biography of Hemingway in my account and had got to the point where he finally got off his arse in Cuba, stopped his ridiculous ‘sub-hunting’ and took himself off to ‘cover the war in Europe’ in 1944.
The facts of what he did there, between mid-May 1944 and the end of March 1945, are known, but in my reading of the various biographies I’ve come to realise that in a sense some of those ‘facts’ are variable, especially when they contradict each other.
So Whiting’s book was welcome, especially as he proved to be as sceptical of ‘Papa’ Hemingway as I am. (Hemingway awarded himself that nickname and insisted everyone use it — even his wives did so — to help to underline the impression he liked to give of being an expert on everything.)
But I soon hit upon a problem. Within the first few pages, Whiting’s is guilty of a real howler: he writes that Hemingway was given the middle name ‘Hadley’ in honour of his maternal grandfather whose surname was ‘Hadley’.
But it wasn’t and his grandfather wasn’t: Hemingway’s middle given name was ‘Miller’ and his grandfather’s surname was Hall. ‘Hadley [Richardson] was the name of his first wife. Now, Mr Whiting, that is a very bad one.
There are further glitches, though none of that magnitude. At one point, the White Tower, the Soho, London, restaurant in which Hemingway first met his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, inexplicably becomes the White House for one mention, before reverting to its real name.
Throughout the text there are also literals and misspellings (‘fist’ for ‘first’, ‘in’ for ‘on’ etc), and though these last are primarily the fault of the publisher’s proofreader (though Whiting will also have been given proofs to check), that first, initial howler, is Whiting’s alone. And there’s the rub.
It might be the only ‘fact’ Whiting got badly wrong for all we know, but the problem is that at a stroke, and whether unfairly or not, it rather undermines the author: the question is now always at the back of the reader’s mind: if he got THAT so badly wrong, what else has he got wrong? And there is no way of knowing.
That is crucial because the portrait Whiting gives of Hemingway is that of a drunken, boorish, egoistic lout.
As it happens that was exactly what Hemingway was at times, and especially as he got older, but it most certainly was not the full story.
Other biographers also highlight rather less well-known aspects of Hemingway’s character, especially before he turned 40: the shyness, the — believe it or not — occasional modesty, the kindness, the generosity, his wide reading and his intellect (which, though, he actively liked to play down, desperate to persuade the world that he was a rough-and-tumble regular guy, a desire which to my mind betrays a deep-rooted inferiority complex).
But Whiting doesn’t. Whiting’s Hemingway is pretty much irredeemable.
On the night of May 25/26, 1944, and after a long party, Hemingway injured his head badly in a car crash in Belgravia in the black-out while drunk (again) and being driven to his hotel (the Dorchester).
He was diagnosed with concussion (as well as other injuries) but stayed in hospital for just a few days before reportedly discharging himself because he didn’t want to miss D Day. The doctors wanted him to remain in hospital.
For the next few months he suffered continual bad headaches and about ten weeks later banged his head again on a rock at the side of the road when he leapt off a motorcycle to avoid being shot. It is thus quite possible that he underwent some kind of change in personality as a result of those injuries.
What is certain, whether a Hemingway sceptic or supporter, is that he drank an extraordinary amount, day-in, day-out, beginning at breakfast.
It is not just Whiting who suggests that rather than ‘covering’ the war for Collier’s magazine (and he filed just six pieces in ten months), Hemingway was ‘playing at being a soldier’ (as he had previously played at ‘hunting U-boats off the north coast of Cuba).
But there can be no doubt at all that he did put himself in harm’s way and for a short few days in the disastrous Hürtigenwald advance that the end of November and beginning of December 1944 (which claimed an unbelievably high number of US soldiers’ lives) Hemingway was actively ‘fighting’.
As an accredited war correspondent he should not have been, of course, and had just a month earlier survived a court martial by doing what he so rarely did, underplaying his ‘achievements‘. He also — apparently on the orders of General Patton — lied under oath.
What also saved him, writes Whiting, was the testimony of an OSS commander (the OSS was the fore-runner of the CIA) who declared Hemingway had at all times simply been doing his duty as a patriotic American. That clinched it: the court martial did not want to be seen to take against a supposed ‘patriot doing his duty‘. That would not have been a good look (as we say today).
Yet even the less sceptical biographers — which certainly does not include Whiting — openly wonder whether Hemingway was ‘being brave’ or simply insanely reckless.
There is one account (though not in Whiting’s book) of him during the Hürtigenwald advance walking upright and crossing open ground towards Germans hidden in a woody copse blasting a machine gun at the enemy while himself being under fire. All around him regular US GIs were lying flat on the ground to avoid being hit. Reckless or brave? Who knows?
But Hemingway’s stints ‘at the front’, to be frank mainly in the Hürtigenwald campaign, did not last long and he was soon back at the Ritz Hotel in Paris (which he did not ‘liberate’) living it up and retailing all his supposed exploits to an adoring crowd who were all too keen to be seen with ‘the famous author’. (His fame also gained him certainly privileges from the US army). Whiting claims his longest time ‘at the front’ was just over two weeks before he was back in Paris again and carousing.
Other biographers tend to bear out various Whiting’s claims — what Hemingway got up to is known, though interpretations vary — though none (except for an extremely hostile Richard Bradford in The Man Who Wasn‘t There) is quite as censorious of Hemingway as Whiting.
Whiting has himself served in with the British in the war and for some time worked as as military historian at several universities worldwide. He finally became a full-time writer and was immensely prolific, turning out — possibly that should be ‘churning out‘ — a huge number of war novels, under several pseudonyms.
From what I can gather this was bon-fide pulp fiction which, as on commentator put it delicately, would never have been reviewed in the London Guardian.
And although I have read none of Whiting’s potboilers, and frankly don’t want to as they are not at all my number, he has a lively, if occasionally, lazy style.
So Hemingway Goes To War (which was first published as Papa Goes To War) is worth reading rather than not. But please bear in mind Whiting’s huge howler and if you read this have to hand a large pinch of salt. It might not be necessary, of course, but sadly there is just no way for you or I to know.
One last concern is that Whiting appears — I have to be careful here even though he is dead — to have lifted passages from Kenneth S Lynn’s biography of Hemingway almost word-for-word. Lynn’s book was published three years before Whiting’s first appeared. Now that is not good or professional. I have just compared several passages and it does certainly seem to be the case.
Thus Whiting’s book, despited being readable and entertaining — and it is certainly that — gets just 2/10 for readability. It might have been given 3/10 or even 4/10 had it not been for the doubts I have and the apparent plagiarism.
PS Whiting’s references to the various US armies, division, brigades, companies and all the rest, can be a tad confusing for the lay reader, but the going isn’t too bad.
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