IT WASN’T ENEMY RESISTANCE THAT foiled the bombing run of Shoo Shoo Baby and its sister planes at 0715 on D-Day so much as the weather. The formation encountered only a few bursts of flak and sporadic rocket fire. But as squadron leader Lewis “Hoss” Lyle and the Flying Fortresses in the 427th arrived over Normandy, gunning toward the bridge at Caen, the cloud cover suddenly thickened.
Cronkite, who’d been nervously searching for Luftwaffe fighters that never materialized, now looked toward the ground and could see nothing. Neither, staring through his bombsight, could bombardier Umphress. It was such a blackout that Captain Bob Sheets and his copilot, Second Lieutenant Darwin Sayers, couldn’t see the Forts flying on either side. “Any collision,” Cronkite remembered, “would probably [have] set off a chain explosion, wiping out the squadron.”73
Flying blind, the squadron zoomed over what should have been Caen, but no one could tell for sure. Then Lyle ordered a second pass, this time at a perilously low altitude, hoping there’d be a break in the clouds.74 There wasn’t. Lyle had no choice but to call off the attack.
Under normal conditions the bombers would have jettisoned their packages over enemy territory, but strict orders forbade that: D-Day planners didn’t want bombs dropped anywhere near Allied paratroopers. Dumping their load over the Channel wasn’t permitted on D-Day, either: There were too many Allied planes flying at too many altitudes; accidents would have been inevitable. So the squadron had no choice but to execute a big bank, climb many thousands of feet—no easy trick in zero visibility—and return to Molesworth. All of which meant Bob Sheets’ worst nightmare: Setting down his plane on a fog-shrouded runway while armed with live ordnance. “Now, that was a hairy landing,” Cronkite recalled.75
There was little time to exchange pleasantries with Shoo Shoo Baby’s crew: A quick photo was taken, then Cronkite raced back to London to file his story. His bosses at UP had been frantically searching for him, convinced, Cronkite recalled, that he’d “been up to no good in Londontown.”76
“Where were you shacked up last night?!” they screeched as Cronkite rushed into the UP offices in the News of the World building on Bouverie Street off Fleet.77 They calmed down when Cronkite informed them his ass had been over the Channel and back in a B-17.
Hal Leyshon, it turned out, had been mistaken: flashes about the Allied assault had already hit the wires. One of them was from Cronkite’s archrival, Gladwin Hill of Associated Press—a turn of events that rankled him no end.
Cronkite had never been so disappointed, he confided a few days later to Betsy. “Why, we [Shoo Shoo Baby] didn’t even get shot at,” his letter grumbled. Not being able to drop bombs on Caen was “like taking only one drink on New Year’s Eve.”
HAL BOYLE DIDN’T GET ASHORE at Omaha until June 9, the same day as his buddy Liebling. Although both were angry that they’d been kept off invasion beaches, in truth, only a handful of correspondents had beaten them there. One was their friend Ernie Pyle, the sainted Scripps Howard columnist. Pyle’s stature earned him a prize spot on the USS Augusta, the flagship of General Omar Bradley, the commander of U.S. invasion ground forces. On the morning of June 7, Pyle wangled a ride to shore.
Ernie’s encomium to the men of Omaha Beach should be chiseled in the American pantheon of journalism. “As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood,” Pyle wrote. “They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.”78
On D-Day plus three, as Boyle arrived at Omaha for a brief visit before returning to England, he could hear artillery fire unnervingly close. Among the first things Boyle spotted was the way the Germans had implanted concrete-encased guns on the bluffs that towered above the beach. Many of the enemy 88s, Boyle noticed, had bloated barrels; in midbattle, American attackers had bravely disabled the guns by jamming grenades down their mouths.79
Twenty-six days later, Boyle was back at Omaha. For a year, through two theaters of the war, he had been looking for Navy seaman and fellow Kansas Citian John Murphy, his brother’s brother-in-law.
“Today I found him at last,” Boyle wrote in a column that rivaled Pyle at his most powerful.
“John was stretched flat on his strong young back under five feet of Normandy soil. He was lying in Plot B, Row Five, Grave Eighty-four of the first American cemetery in France in World War II.”
Radioman Second Class Murphy, Boyle learned in talking to a surviving member of the Sixth Naval Beach Battalion, had been killed some twelve hours after being dumped on Easy Red. Hauling his equipment in one hand and a tommy gun in the other, young Jack had eluded machine gun fire and mortar shells while pounding up the beachhead to set up his radio. Within minutes, he had established shore-to-ship contact so Navy artillery gunners could effectively concentrate their barrages. All day, amid Easy Red’s mayhem, John raced from hot spot to hot spot, directing fire over his radio. At about seven o’clock that night, an 88 that hadn’t yet been disabled found a foxhole in which Murphy and another radioman were dug in. Both were killed.
“That Murph was a popular Irishman,” one of his buddies from the Sixth told Boyle. “Everybody liked him. He was a tall fellow and good-looking. Had a pink face. He was a helluva good ballplayer, too.”
Of Murphy’s thirty-five-man platoon that Joe Liebling had watched assault Omaha Beach on D-Day morning, five were killed and ten were wounded.
Seven years earlier, when Boyle’s older brother Ed had married Monica Murphy, Jack was still in his midteens. Now, Boyle wrote, “there was a mound of earth above his body and in it was stuck a stake bearing his identifying “dog tag.” And tangled in the wire which held his dog tag was a withered Normandy rose left there by French peasants who have put a flower over every one of the two thousand American graves in the cemetery.”80
Back in Kansas City, Monica took the column as it appeared in the hometown Star and pasted it into a scrapbook she was lovingly keeping on the war. When she had started the album two years earlier, it had never occurred to her that her brother-in-law would someday write a eulogy to her brother.
ON JUNE 10, WHEN ANDY Rooney drove his greased-up jeep onto Utah Beach, there were scattered artillery salvos—but nothing that caused him to flinch; the nearest fighting was some two miles inland. Utah had been captured on D-Day without Omaha’s horrific bloodshed. Yet signs of death were everywhere: The Graves Registration Unit had placed rows of dead GIs in the sand just above the high-tide mark.
“They were covered with olive-drab blankets, just their feet sticking out at the bottom. I remember their boots—all the same on such different boys,” Rooney wrote in unwitting homage to Pyle.81
While sitting in his jeep that first evening in France, Rooney pulled out a notepad and scrawled a poem. His first verse imagined a future battleground guide lecturing a “bus-load of people about events that never happened in a place they never were.”82
In the decades to come, Rooney would visit Normandy many times. As he watched visitors listening in a variety of languages to guides not yet born in 1944, he was struck by the prescience of his poem.
“Even if you didn’t know anyone who died, the heart knows something the brain does not—and you weep,” Rooney wrote of his pilgrimages. “If you think the world is selfish and rotten go to the cemetery at Colleville overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on June 6, 1944.”83
FIFTEEN MONTHS BEFORE D-DAY, WHEN Homer Bigart, joined by friends Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, flew on his first bombing mission, he used an inimitable Bigartism—“stoogeing around over a particularly hot corner of the Third Reich”84—to describe how their formation staggered in the skies over Lower Saxony before turning to attack a U-boat base. Together, the journalists celebrated in these pages stooged around
some of the European war’s hottest corners.
Beginning in London in late ’42, their paths frequently intersected. Four of them covered the air campaign against the Nazis, taking the train out to East Anglia’s airdromes and then, on the ride back to London, trying not to think about the young men who hadn’t made it back. The reporters were stationed together in Britain for long stretches, appraising bomb damage and standing shoulder to shoulder at briefings conducted by Allied leaders. All five knew their way around blacked-out Piccadilly; often in the company of Army and Navy press officers, they closed down their share of pubs. In some capacity, they all covered the North African offensive, which for the first time threw American infantrymen into the fight against Hitler.
They often shared the same datelines, beachheads, and flasks of whiskey, covered the same horrific scenes, and tried to make sense of the same apocalyptic world. Sometimes they scribbled notes in the same trench or hovel; at other times they were separated by dozens or hundreds of miles, pursuing different story lines. Yet they dodged the same shrapnel, suffered the same heartache, battled the same censors, and spoke to the same anxious readers.
To be sure, our five weren’t alone: Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle; the Los Angeles Times’ Tom Treanor; the New York Times’ Harold Denny; CBS’ Edward R. Murrow, Bill Downs, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid; AP’s Don Whitehead, Noland “Boots” Norgaard, Ken Dixon, and Wes Gallagher; UP’s Chris Cunningham and Hank Gorrell; the Chicago Daily News’ Robert Casey; the Chicago Daily Tribune’s Jack Thompson; Life’s Margaret Bourke-White; Collier’s Weekly’s Martha Gellhorn and her (sort of) husband, Ernest Hemingway; the New York Herald Tribune’s John “Tex” O’Reilly; and untold others made brilliant contributions to the journalism of World War II.
But there was a certain bond among the five men of this book; in many ways, they were a journalistic band of brothers. Cronkite, Bigart, and Rooney formed the core of the “Writing 69th,” the coterie of reporters trained by the Army Air Force in early ’43 to fly on bombing raids. Throughout much of the North African campaign, Liebling and Boyle traveled in the same jeep. Boyle and Bigart bunked in the same tents in Sicily and Italy. Boyle, Liebling, and Rooney were credentialed to cover the First Army after Normandy; they were together almost every day in the sweep across France. Boyle and Cronkite covered Operation Market Garden in Holland and later slogged through the bloody snows of the Ardennes. Rooney and Boyle together uncovered the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps.
Allied correspondents had to wrestle with constantly changing censorship rules; inevitably, especially given the wickedness of the enemy and the rightness of the Allied cause, their reporting at times bordered on propaganda. Yet they weren’t vacuous cheerleaders; their copy was surprisingly pointed, sometimes irreverent. They ticked off their share of Allied commanders.85
The newspaper business that four of them had entered before the war was a provincial backwater: outlets for their owners’ ideological breast-beating or parochial business agendas or just voyeuristic rags—or often, all three rolled into one. Each was determined to make journalism an honorable profession. To a remarkable degree in postwar America, they succeeded—at least for a time.
Four of the five started on the humblest rung of journalism’s ladder: covering local news. It was training that served them well. “Any reporter who can do justice to a four-alarm fire can do well by a war, which is merely a larger fire affecting more people,” Boyle once remarked.86 Boyle did so much justice to World War II firefights that he earned a Pulitzer Prize. So did his friend Bigart.
All five were characters in their own F. Scott Fitzgerald saga, inventing themselves in an America stumbling toward greatness. A wartime colleague said of Boyle that he “had the drive of a locomotive”87—an appellation that applied to the other four as well.
IN FEBRUARY 1943, FOLLOWING THE Writing 69th’s bombing raid over Nazi Germany, Bigart asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. “I think I’m going to say,” mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell, a hell at 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire.…”
Bigart, who prided himself on his taut writing style, stared at Cronkite, incredulous that his colleague would resort to such purple prose. “You—you—w-w-wouldn’t,” Bigart stammered.88 But Cronkite would. His story (the New York Times headlined it “Hell 26,000 Feet Up”) got huge pickup in the States and dominated the British tabloids. It was so successful, in fact, that for the next half century Bigart and Rooney felt obliged to give their pal unmerciful guff about it.
“When I want to remind Cronkite that he is mortal man,” Rooney wrote in the 1990s, “I quote him a few sentences from his United Press story that day.”89
Over his esteemed career, Walter Cronkite issued millions of words for public consumption. But he never wrote or uttered a truer phrase. Covering the Allies’ struggle against Nazi Germany was, indisputably, an “assignment to hell.”
ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 6, 1946, the second anniversary of D-Day, A. J. Liebling was at the Palace Bar and Grill, a West Forty-fifth Street watering hole run by a cigar-chomping barkeep named Joe Braun. Liebling loved his saloon chum; Braun spoke Liebling’s language, the gritty patois of “side-street New York.”90 The New Yorker writer had come alone to Braun’s joint that night, beleaguered by thoughts of Easy Red and Normandy.
Liebling sat on a barstool and drank quietly. After a while he looked up and asked Braun, “Have you ever seen a deck awash with blood and condensed milk?” Braun didn’t say anything and went off to chip ice and serve someone else. Liebling, thinking his friend callous, was irked.
But a few moments later Braun stood in front of Liebling, put his cigar on the bar, and said, “If you seen that, Joe, it will stay with you.” Liebling, Cronkite, Rooney, Bigart, and Boyle “seen” much in the Allies’ crusade to right a world gone hideously wrong—and it stayed with them.
A decade after the war ended, Liebling wrote that if you leave memories alone, “they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them. In time, they recur in forms so implausible that you must go back and make sure the events they represent were real.”91
CHAPTER 1
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers.
—A. J. LIEBLING, 1947
THE WAYWARD PRESSMAN1
For a stubby man with flat feet, Joe Liebling was amazingly agile. Acquaintances in London during the war were startled to see him jogging through Hyde Park, a towel tucked inside his sweatshirt, tossing jabs and uppercuts, à la a boxer doing roadwork. While covering combat in North Africa and France, Liebling surprised reporter pals and platoon sergeants with his stamina and quickness afoot.
Still, whether at the Hotel Aletti in Algiers, Scott’s Bar in Piccadilly, or a dumpy café in La Rive Gauche, Joe Liebling did some of his best work sitting on a barstool. It was in a gin joint near the New Yorker offices in the fall of 1939 that Liebling wheedled his way to Paris. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s longtime Paris correspondent who wrote under the pseudonym Genêt, had a family situation that required her to return to the States. Liebling, who’d studied at the Sorbonne in 1926 and adored everything French, had always coveted the Parisian beat, especially now that his héros in the French army were, for the second time in two decades, facing down their foe from the east.
His immediate superior, fellow writer St. Clair McKelway, was impressed by anyone who could converse in a foreign tongue. So after Liebling plied him with alcohol and began not only babbling in French but also offering paeans to Gaulic culture and cuisine, McKelway, who’d been cool to the idea of his chubby thirty-five-year-old friend heading to Paris with Hitler’s forces massed along the Maginot Line, crumbled.
But before Liebling could book passage on the Pan Am Clipper, the move had to be blessed by Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s irasc
ible founder. Ross loved Liebling’s writing but fretted that Joe’s appetite for ooh la la! might do him in. “But for God’s sake stay away from the low-life!” Ross barked as the ebullient Liebling plotted his return to the City of Light.2
In truth, it was Liebling’s passion for New York’s raffish underground that made him such an invaluable contributor to Ross’ magazine. There was no shortage of New Yorker writers familiar with Manhattan’s upscale haunts. But no one else at the journal knew the city’s gambling dens and boxing havens and forbidden speakeasies.3
Indeed, it was a back-alley assignment that got Liebling hired in the first place. That and the fact that McKelway was almost as big a screwup—which, given Liebling’s checkered academic and professional past, was saying a lot. McKelway, remembered New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, had been assigned a 1935 story about a black evangelical faith healer accused of bilking his flock. Although a gifted stylist, McKelway was a slipshod interviewer and note taker. Liebling, who could be methodical when he put his mind to it and had connections to bunko artists that could prove helpful, was signed on as McKelway’s legman.4 Their partnership worked beautifully, the story turned out edgy, and Liebling was given a job at the only publication in America suited to his tastes and talent.
His New Yorker colleague Brendan Gill marveled at one of Liebling’s devastating interview techniques: Joe liked to sit in stony silence, his ovoid head cocked to one side, staring at the interviewee, until the poor thing cracked.5 It was said of Ring Lardner, one of Liebling’s sportswriting idols, that he talked in grunts. Liebling, wrote First Army public relations officer Lieutenant Roy Wilder, Jr., was the obverse: Joe talked in chuckles.
When provoked, however, chuckling Joe was prone to fisticuffs. One night at Bleeck’s Artist and Writers saloon on West Fortieth, John Parsons O’Donnell, a lippy America Firster with the New York Daily News, loudly disparaged the Roosevelt Administration. Liebling unleashed a couple of haymakers before friends hauled him away.6 Another night at Bleeck’s he flattened a loudmouth—supposedly with one punch—who was spewing anti-Semitic garbage. It was one of Joe’s prouder moments.
Assignment to Hell Page 4