In those days after the trial, and before Hurtgen, there was absolutely no doubt that Hemingway was a changed man, and did associate himself more and more with the ordinary GI, sharing in his deprivations, his fox holes, and by associations, his dangers too. And it wasn’t only the rather strange, almost film noir experiences of his interrogation that had brought about these changes – although they were significant – but the fact that his 21 year old eldest son, Jack “Bumby” had been posted missing in action since October 28th, 1944. Hemingway was beside himself with worry.

John (Jack) Hadley Nicanor Hemingway was born on October 10th 1923, in Toronto. And by all accounts Jack’s mother, Hadley, brought the baby into the world laughing her head off, which had nothing to do with the midwife’s jokes, but to the fact that Hadley had been administered perhaps a tad too much laughing gas (Dinitrogen Monoxide) to ease the pain. Hemingway commented in a letter he wrote to Gertrude Stein (who became Jack’s Godmother) a day or two later that, “Hadley says the whole childbirth business has been greatly over-rated.”

Jack Hemingway spent his early years in the swirling, ex-pat infested Paris of the 1920s, with glorious holidays in the Austrian Alps where Hadley, and Ernest were probably happiest. To get a true feeling of those years read yet again Hemingway’s, A Moveable Feast, which includes this description of Hemingway arriving by train to join Hadley and Jack:

” When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her red hair gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.

” Oh, Tatie,” she said, when I was holding her in my arms, “you’re back and you made such a fine successful trip. I love you and we’ve missed you so.”

On the train journey Hemingway had already decided to leave Hadley, and Jack.

Jack was five when his parents divorced, and was almost immediately sent away to boarding school, as Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer started a new family, and only saw his father during the summer vacations. As the boy grew he and his father often went fishing together. Hemingway also taught his son to box. If Hemingway was too busy to spend time with Jack he’d send the boy to a dude ranch in Montana, promising to bring rifle and pistol ammunition, for when they met up for some hunting at the end of the summer.

Certainly the same pattern begins to emerge of the relationship between Hemingway and his own father (with the exception of boarding school, which may very well have been Pauline’s idea) and no doubt Hemingway told Jack the stories of his grandfathers exploits in the American Civil War.

As a teenager Hemingway introduced Jack to alcohol in the form of frozen daiquiris, which they’d drink together in Sloppy Joe’s. They also travelled to Spain and Cuba together, and there can be no doubt that Jack enjoyed his father’s company hugely.

After attending the University of Montana, and Dartmouth College, where he dropped out before taking his degree, Jack Hemingway thought he might enlist in the US Army, but before he did so travelled down to Cuba to visit his old man, and seek his advice. Hemingway agreed whole-heartedly with Jack’s idea, and over a few daiquiris in the Floridita asked Jack:

” Bumbs, you ever been laid?”

” No, sir.” Lied Jack.

” I’ll soon fix that. Can’t have a son of mine going into the US Army a virgin.”

And Hemingway was as good as his word, fixing Jack up with a Cuban prostitute by the name of Olga (which is a good Cuban name) who laughed out loud when she saw the tall skinny youngster who played the naive card beautifully, and, courtesy of his father’s money, attended to Olga for several hours in a very professional manner. When Hemingway phoned her the following day and asked how his son had performed Olga replied.

” Como un toro, senor! Como un toro!” (Like a bull!)

On his return from Cuba Jack enlisted in the army and was soon posted to North Africa where he was assigned to the military police.

With the creation of the O.S.S (Office of Strategic Services) Jack decided life in an intelligence unit that operated behind enemy lines was for him. His father began to pull whatever strings he could find and his eldest son was soon assigned to the unit. His education, languages and superb physical fitness soon ensured he was made an officer, and in early 1944 the 20 year old Captain Jack Hemingway parachuted into Nazi-occupied France where he assisted the resistance in intelligence gathering, and sabotage. He took with him a fishing rod, and a box of flies to try a little trout fishing too. He was his father’s son.

In the October of 1944 Jack’s O.S.S. unit, which also included French irregulars, was attached to General Patch’s US 7th Army as it worked its way northward from its landing beaches on the French Riviera. Jack’s unit would scout ahead of the main force sending back vital information, and it was on such a mission on the 28th of October, in the lower Vosges Mountains, close to the town of Belford (just north of the Swiss border, and about 120km south of Strasbourg) that they encountered, in a small wood, a number of retreating Germans from General Wiese’s 19th Army who, as if caught out in the cowardly act of running away, turned and laced the Americans with heavy machine gun fire, rifle fire, and grenades. Most of Jack’s unit, including the irregulars went down hit. Captain Hemingway was struck in the shoulder and right arm by five rifle bullets, and several grenade fragments. Jack’s dead and dying unit was eventually found by members of the 2nd German Gebirgsjagerdivision (an alpine search and intelligence unit not unlike Jack’s) which contained many Austrians, one of whom, a lieutenant, approached the wounded Jack, gave him a drink of water, and took a look at his dog-tags.

” Sprechen Deutsch? asked the lieutenant.

” Non, je parle francais?” replied Jack.

Then, in French, the Austrian lieutenant asked Jack, ” Were you ever in Schruns, Austria?”

” Yes, when I was a little boy.”

” Do you remember someone named, Kitty?”

” Sure do. My nurse was called Kitty, what the…?”

” Kitty was my girlfriend, and I knew your father, and your mother. You were about two years old.”" Well, I’ll be damned.”

” I am a great fan of your father’s work. Do not worry, we shall look after you.”

And they did, getting him to a hospital in Alsace where he was patched-up and then sent to a POW Camp in Germany.

When Jack’s father heard he was in a hospital just a few kilometres away from his own positions he wanted to fly in with a group of his irregulars and rescue his son. He was persuaded out of that idiotic idea, which could have resulted in the death of Jack anyway, and that his son was merely one of tens of thousands of captured Allied soldiers destined to see out the rest of the war as a POW.

Jack Hemingway was freed six months later, and after the war stayed with the US Army, firstly as a security officer in Berlin before becoming a liaison officer to the 3rd French Army Corps in Freiburg. He ended his army career as an intelligence officer at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and left with a much prized Croix de Guerre (awarded him at the end of the war by the French government), and, “plenty visible scars.”

After leaving the army in the 1950s Jack became a stockbroker, and then a fishing supplies salesman, but could never really settle into civilian life. After his father’s death he became the one who dealt most easily with the growing interest in Hemingway’s work and family. He wrote a memoir of his father called, Misadventure of a Fly Fisherman: My Life with With and Without Papa. By the time of his death Jack had completed a second volume of autobiography.

Above everything else Jack Hemingway was a great conservationist, and worked tirelessly around the world on behalf of endangered species.

Jack, and his first wife, Byra (whom he’d married in Paris in 1949, and who died in 1986) had three daughters: Joan, Margaux (who died in 1996), and Hadley (Mariel) the actress.

Jack Hemingway died on December 1st, 2000 at the New York Presbyterian Hospital after members of his family decided to remove him from life support systems that had become essential after a heart operation.