Hemingway on the China Front
By Peter Moreira
Potomac Books (NYP)

In 1941 Ernest Hemingway accompanied his wife Martha Gellhorn on a war-reporting sojourn through Asia. What few knew was that the U.S. Treasury had enlisted him as a spy. The trip had been Gellhorn's brainchild, since she had wanted to chronicle the Sino-Japanese conflict. But the trip proved a bust: the only fighting they saw was a mock battle, Gellhorn was revolted by the squalor in China, and Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife proved to be a couple of despots. But Hemingway, reporting for the newspaper PM and spying for the U.S. government, proved a keen and quick observer of the forces at play in the Far East.

PAPA'S CALLING: Hemingway on Asia During World War II records Hemingway's most colorful adventure. The book reveals for the first time Hemingway's obsessive intelligence gathering for Treasury official Harry Dexter White, who was a Soviet agent. The book also records how Gellhorn would later claim to have fought with Madame Chiang, even though her articles flattered the couple. 

No biography on Ernest Hemingway or Martha Gellhorn has ever delved into these and other topics, such as Hemingway's advice to the U.S. government that the allies launch an assault from Hong Kong to try to recapture Canton; the pair’s rocky relationships with Collier's; Gellhorn's attempts to cover up her failure in China in later writing; and Hemingway brilliant job of grasping the complexities of the political, economic and military situation in Asia.