American journalist Martha Gellhorn tricked the Navy so that she could write firsthand dispatches from Normandy in June 1944, she lied to get on a hospital ship so she could be a stowaway and get transported to the D Day invasion!

She had already accompanied the US Fifth Army to the front in Monte Cassino, Italy in 1943. She wasn't worried about being in the middle of the war.

Although the US military refused permission for female journalists to cover the Allied landings, Gellhorn wasn't deterred. "To me, all the people in the rear who make rules, they exist to be thwarted," she said in 1991. 

Her defiance meant she was on the first hospital ship to reach Normandy, arriving at Omaha Beach early on the morning of 7 June, and becoming the only woman correspondent on the ground at the D-Day landings.

"somebody asked me before letting me board the hospital ship, what I was there for, and I said, 'I'm just going on this ship to interview the nurses – a woman's feature.'

"You could always get by with that. It always sounded harmless and idiotic, and it worked a treat. 'I'm just doing the woman's angle,' and nobody's interested anymore. And then I just locked myself in a toilet until after we left port."

During a career that spanned 60 years, the Missouri-born journalist covered the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam War, the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Finland, and the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. 

She befriended the Roosevelts and stayed with them at the White House, cadged bed and breakfast from HG Wells, and married Ernest Hemingway

She also wrote for Vogue magazine and reported on the Great Depression for the US government, travelling through the Dust Bowl with the photographer Dorothea Lange.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260608-the-woman-who-sneaked-into-the-d-day-landings

Thanks to Don for highly recommending the movie "Hemingway & Gellhorn". Martha Gellhorn is played by Nicole Kidman.