Most Algerians, they told Fredendall over rare wines, distrusted Jews as much as the Germans did. Many members of Algeria’s ruling class were, in fact, brownshirts; their “sturm duds,” as Liebling scorned them, had been secreted away once U.S. warships had appeared.27
Liebling surmised that turning a blind eye toward Algeria’s treatment of Jews was a quid pro quo, part of the rapprochement that Eisenhower struck with Vichy strongman Jean Louis Darlan. Consummated after weeks of covert negotiations, the Darlan Deal, as it became known in the American press, called for North Africa’s Vichy to remain in power in exchange for a laying down of arms and “cooperation” in the fight against the Axis. Darlan, an admiral in the French navy, had become rich carrying out Hitler’s sordid agenda along the southern Mediterranean. In the words of one U.S. official, Darlan was “a needle-nosed, sharp-chinned little weasel.”28 At one point in their back-and-forth, an exasperated Eisenhower wished aloud for an assassin to bag the weasel.
For three days after the landings, Darlan defied Eisenhower, only cutting a deal when a combined German/Italian army, from their stronghold across the sea in Sicily, invaded Tunisia, signaling Hitler’s contempt for Vichy’s grasp of French North Africa. The Darlan pact was “not very pretty,” declared the exiled leader of France’s patriots, General Charles de Gaulle. “I think that before long the retching will take place.”29
De Gaulle proved prophetic: the retching soon began in earnest. It wasn’t just liberal commentators who denounced the ploy: Conservative papers editorialized against it, too. The Darlan Deal not only soured many Americans on the North African campaign, but also colored their perceptions of the officer who engineered it. Enabling Darlan hadn’t been Eisenhower’s idea; he and his aide-de-camp, Mark Clark, had merely carried out the wishes of London and Washington. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted the French armed services—especially its still-potent navy—neutered and believed that accommodating Darlan was the best way to achieve it. It depressed Eisenhower that his good name had gotten dragged into the morass.
Throughout the campaign, the Supreme Commander was forced to spend too much time working political levers and too little time worrying about battlefield exigencies. Ike was so consumed by political matters, in fact, that he didn’t arrive on the front lines in Tunisia until Christmas Eve, which, by fiendish coincidence, was just hours before Darlan was assassinated.30 Darlan was supposedly done in by a demented young Algerian. Joe Liebling and Hal Boyle, however, weren’t the only Americans who suspected a broader cabal. Overnight, without benefit of a trial or collecting any evidence, a tribunal ordered the suspect executed. When news of Darlan’s death reached headquarters, one U.S. officer was heard to exult, “Merry Christmas.”
Boyle was in Algiers with the Allied press pack when the rumor hit that the Vichy leader had been murdered. Hal’s colleagues scrambled off to the Allied public relations office. But Boyle, sensing that reporters would just get the runaround, hung back. With instincts honed from covering Kansas City street crime, he slipped across the road to where he knew Darlan’s chauffeur belonged to a motor pool. Sure enough, Darlan’s driver told Boyle that the admiral had been shot and killed.
Boyle had an exclusive on one of the biggest stories of the war to date. He ran back to his typewriter, rapped out his news flash, and raced it over to the censor in the public relations office. The nervous PRO didn’t know what to make of Boyle’s story; the youngster embargoed it for a couple of hours while he tracked down his superiors. By then the competition had confirmed the story, too, but Boyle’s piece should by rights have been transmitted first, since he’d been at the head of the queue. “Bejeezus if the PRO didn’t rule there should be a drawing among the agencies to see which story got first priority,” reminisced Don Whitehead. “The AP boys screamed like demented banshees at this injustice but AP lost the draw and with it Hal’s beat.”31
The next day Boyle filed a piece that went as far as censors would allow in questioning the abrupt execution. “There was no official explanation…why [the accused] was condemned by a court-martial instead of being tried in civil courts,” Boyle wrote.
AP and Boyle never got the kudos they deserved on the Darlan story. In a way, his exclusive-that-wasn’t typified Boyle’s experience in North Africa. Most correspondents enjoyed interviewing soldiers in the field, but Boyle soon made it an art form. He drove his jeep companions crazy by constantly jumping out to grab a few words with the men marching by.32 GIs got a kick out of Boyle because he was wickedly funny and, like the feisty customers who had come into his old man’s meat shop, could curse with abandon. Boyle filled one notebook after another with the conversations he had with soldiers.
Yet for all his regular-guy bonhomie, Boyle never became as celebrated as Ernie Pyle. At the outset of Torch, Boyle was, like Cronkite, just another wire service grunt, whereas Pyle had been a commentator of note for the better part of a decade. In 1934, the Scripps syndicate, delighted with a series of offbeat stories Ernie had penned while on a cross-country trip for its Washington Daily News, commissioned Pyle to travel the back roads of Depression-era America. Pyle’s pieces on everything from his own hypochondria to Alaskan gold miners and the hobo who painted watercolors in a hovel behind the Memphis city dump were much admired.33 Ernie took that same common-man approach to his early accounts of American fighting men in North Africa, soon becoming GI Joe’s favorite reporter. Pyle put a human face on war, commiserating with officers and enlisted men fresh off the front lines or cracking wise with the beleaguered cook trying to keep a chow line fed. From day one, Pyle was careful to identify everyone’s hometown and weave a heartwarming story about the GI’s family and peacetime life. His column became an overnight sensation; every week, it seemed, dozens of papers began subscribing to Scripps.
Yet the irony is that Pyle didn’t arrive in North Africa until two weeks after Hal Boyle, Walter Cronkite, and other reporters had risked their lives in landing operations. By the time Pyle waded ashore, the nearest fighting was hundreds of miles away. Moreover, Boyle had already established his own Everyman style and nonchalant rapport with infantrymen by the time Pyle got close to the front. Boyle thumbed rides in jeeps and tanks so often that he soon earned the nickname Hal the Hitchhiker.
The difference between them was that Pyle was a known commodity with a burgeoning national platform. Boyle, on the other hand, was still trying to establish himself. And he was handicapped by AP’s insistence that he be identified as “Harold V. Boyle,” a starchy byline that made him sound like anything but a regular guy. It wasn’t until well into 1943 that AP finally granted the reporter’s plea to become “Hal Boyle.” Pyle, by contrast, became famous so quickly in North Africa that when entertainer Al Jolson came through on a USO tour, everywhere Jolson went he was asked if he knew “Ernie.”
Pyle was only in his early forties but seemed much older. He was elfin and wan. Sallow-skinned, he barely weighed a hundred pounds and was almost never without a lit cigarette and a smoker’s hack. Yet Pyle’s veneration of the American fighting man was so widely admired and imitated, A. J. Liebling wrote after the war, that Ernie had “contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, [Pyle] added GI Joe, the suffering but triumphant American infantryman.”34
Ernie’s notoriety came at a price. The more Pyle saluted the brave men in foxholes, the more his editors insisted on eyewitness accounts from the front. Being in close proximity to combat scared most journalists, but it absolutely petrified Pyle. War reporting, Liebling observed, was an “adventure” for some correspondents and an “enthrallment” for the likes of Ernest Hemingway. But for Pyle it was “unalleviated misery.” Artillery fire left Hal the Hitchhiker as shaken as anyone—but Boyle was able to mask it with jocularity and another tug on his flask. For Pyle, who suffered from melancholia, it was harder.
Boyle and Pyle finally met, the Missourian
remembered, at a seedy Oran hotel, where Pyle lay on a bed “mopping his nose and gently cursing the people who had reported that Africa was a warm country.”35 Hal got a laugh out of Pyle by saying, “I’m writing for the people who look over the shoulders of the people reading Ernie Pyle’s column.”36 Throughout the war, Boyle liked to refer to himself as the “poor man’s Ernie Pyle”—a phrase later expropriated by Hemingway.
IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS spate of stories about Darlan’s murder, Boyle filed a lighthearted piece about the arrival of the first batch of female nurses and WAAC officers in North Africa. It was a fat pitch—and the female-obsessed Boyle hit it out of the park. His story got nice pickup in the States, including the front page of the Washington Post.
“The appearance at the officers’ mess of the young women had immediate repercussions,” Boyle wrote. “When they first entered the long private dining room, looking as neat and fresh in their military garb as a Monday morning wash, all conversation halted momentarily. Heads of generals and second lieutenants alike turned as if they were on the same pivot to watch the women march a little self-consciously to their table. Gray-haired colonels, who usually gnaw their rations in grumpy austerity, dusted off their military gallantry and shamelessly sabotaged officers of lesser rank to get seats near the newcomers.”
Two correspondents—one of them almost certainly Boyle—scored a coup by getting all five WAAC officers out to dinner at a Tunisian restaurant. “Army Air Corps officers also were taken along after they begged to join the party and pledged they would pay for the food, buy the wine, and get the correspondents a free airplane ride home after the war.
“‘Listen, if you’ll fix me up with a date with that pretty little blonde—the lieutenant with the dimples—I’ll wrap you up a bomber right now,’ said one flier, ‘and what’s more I’ll give you a private hangar to keep it in.’”37
After seven weeks of being in a war zone, Boyle celebrated a “canned” Christmas at an airdrome along the Tunisian front. “We are having canned steak, canned peas, canned tomatoes, canned sweet potatoes, canned apricots, canned beets, canned biscuits, canned milk, and canned corn,” a technical sergeant from Dallas said with a grin to Boyle.
Nineteen forty-two was over. As they ate their holiday rations, American soldiers were thinking they had endured some nasty moments. But North Africa’s lipless kiss was just beginning.
CHAPTER 4
ANGRY METEORS IN TUNISIA
If there is any way you can get colder than you do when you sleep in a bedding roll on the ground in a tent in southern Tunisia two hours before dawn, I don’t know about it.
—A. J. LIEBLING, 1943
THE ROAD BACK TO PARIS
Early one morning in mid-January 1943, A. J. Liebling was trading barbs with ground crew grunts over breakfast alfresco at a hellhole of an airdrome near Thélepte in the southern Tunisia desert. The men were balancing plates of eggs on empty gasoline canisters when they heard the menacing buzz of approaching aircraft. Abruptly leaving breakfast behind, they sprinted for cover behind a knoll, with the porky Liebling leading the pack.
“They always faced eastward while they ate in the morning so that they could see the Messerschmitts come over the mountains in the sunrise,” Liebling recalled. “This morning there were nine Messerschmitts. By the time I hit the ground on the lee side of the mound, slender airplanes were twisting above us in a sky crisscrossed by tracer bullets—a whole planetarium of angry worlds and meteors.”1
The North African campaign in the first half of 1943 was full of angry projectiles. Liebling spent several weeks at Thélepte with a P-40 fighter squadron and A-20 bomber crews attached to the 47th Bombardment Group. The base got strafed so often at sunup, then again at sundown, that Liebling and fellow correspondents, among them AP’s estimable Noland “Boots” Norgaard, got used to dining in installments.
An Army Air Force major from northwestern Pennsylvania named Philip Cochran was so eerily prescient at predicting when raids would occur that it was as if he was “sensing when to hop on or off a guy who is shooting craps,” the major told Liebling. It turned out that Cochran was already something of a known commodity before Liebling profiled him. Comic artist Milton Caniff had used Cochran as the inspiration behind his balls-to-the-wall aviator “Flip Corkin” in Caniff’s popular strip Terry and the Pirates.2
Cochran was a favorite Liebling archetype: the bare-knuckled Irishman. A few weeks earlier, Cochran had defied orders and transferred his squadron to Thélepte, conducting what amounted, Liebling claimed, to a rogue war. North Africa was so chaotic that hell-raisers like Cochran were desperately needed—or so Liebling argued. “The situation [in North Africa] called for officers who were good at guessing, bluffing and guerrilla tactics,” Liebling wrote, “and Cochran found himself in the spot he had dreamed of all his military life.”3
Another controversial rogue warrior, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen, the commander of Liebling’s First Division darlings, also got the full A.J. treatment. As a young man, Allen had managed to get himself tossed out of West Point, the sort of puerile behavior that bad boy Liebling always viewed as strength of character. Liebling also liked the fact that the young Allen had boxed professionally, sometimes under an assumed name. The onetime pugilist possessed “shrewdness and dash … not acquired from textbooks,” Liebling enthused.
It was true that the pugnacious Allen was beloved by many GIs. But it was also true that Allen was sloppy, undisciplined, and constantly at loggerheads with superiors—little of which was addressed in Liebling’s fawning portrayal. A few months later in Sicily, Allen’s handling of the assault at Troina was so cavalier that Omar Bradley felt compelled to relieve him.4
Liebling, the lefty subversive, loved to tweak right-wingers. In mid-March, outside the central Tunisia oasis of Djebel Berda, while the First Division’s brass planned its next maneuver, Liebling was standing near Allen’s deputy, Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., as Army public relations magnate Lieutenant (later Captain) Ralph Ingersoll happened to wander by in the company of several engineering officers. Ingersoll, a good friend of Liebling’s, was a onetime New Yorker editor and founder of the left-wing newspaper PM, the bane of Wall Street. Despite their political differences, Liebling had grown to admire General Roosevelt, whose political leanings were considerably more conservative than those of TR Senior—and miles removed from TR junior’s distant cousin in the White House.
Ingersoll greeted Liebling, had a pleasant exchange with Roosevelt, and walked off. Once Ingersoll’s entourage was out of earshot, Liebling couldn’t resist.
“That was Ralph Ingersoll, the PM editor,” Liebling informed Roosevelt.
“The general likes to descant on the thesis that all the prominent interventionists stayed safe at home while he, a hard-shell America Firster, went to war,” Liebling wrote. “He stopped sharply. ‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I always thought that man was a sonofabitch.’”5
One of the reasons Liebling the gourmand was taken with Roosevelt was that the general always went out of his way to cultivate the mess sergeant in every outfit. “He asks the sergeant, for instance, if the company has enough baking powder. The sergeant invariably says no, and Roosevelt leaves him with the impression that if he, Roosevelt, were Secretary of War, there would be enough baking powder.”6
Liebling hooked up with Teddy, Jr., and the Big Red One in February of ’43 and stayed with them through much of the ultimately victorious Tunisian campaign. The New Yorker writer called North Africa’s scruffy terrain the Foamy Fields. Liebling saw a fair amount of action when the Fighting First finally began pushing east. Yet his only close brush with death came while still encamped at Thélepte, a few days after the Me 109 breakfast strafing.
“I have at last joined the large legion of Hairsbreadth Harries who have narrow escape stories to bore people with,” Liebling wrote to an old New York friend. At noon on the day he was scheduled to leave Thélepte, Liebling had just loaded his gear and climbed into an id
ling jeep when cannon shells began exploding.
I leaped out of the jeep and lit running and somebody yelled “Down!” and I dived for the ground so hard I tore a lot of skin off my hands and knees and elbows and lay there wishing my ass didn’t stick so far up in the air while the Messerschmitts made their first pass…. All I could think of was “Joe Liebling has been a nice guy and it’s been a pleasure knowing him,” and I was awfully sorry that I would never know how Liebling’s life was going to come out.7
As the enemy fighters reorganized to make a second run, Liebling raced across the runway and piled into a slit trench. He lay there, face buried, until the attack was over. Liebling was amazed that he hadn’t been hit: a series of shell craters “like the marks of a rake” were embedded just yards from the jeep.
THE FIRST DAY OR TWO of Hitler’s reaction to the Allied landings in French Morocco and Algiers may have been sluggish, but he made up for it in a hurry. Nazi commandoes seized the Tunisian ports, while transport planes and ferries rushed tens of thousands of reinforcements across the Mediterranean from southern France, Sicily, and Italy.8 Once the Vichy French capitulated, the Allies under Eisenhower (at least nominally: Ike never truly asserted control over the North African battle zone) began probing east toward Algeria’s border with Tunisia while the British Eighth Army under Montgomery pushed west through the Libyan desert from Egypt.
The German high command’s gambit meant that they now had the firepower to strengthen their grip on Tunisia and disrupt the Allies’ pincer movement. It also meant Germany’s onetime wunderkind, Erwin Rommel, whom Joe Liebling wrote had a “hypnotic influence” over Hitler, had time to reassemble his Afrika Korps in the remote mountains of Tunisia, plotting ways to bedevil the Allies.9
In the midst of these Nazi machinations, Churchill and Roosevelt met in mid-January under extraordinary security several hundred miles west in Casablanca. The photo opportunities were spectacular: Wire services ran shots of FDR visiting the Ninth Infantry, Churchill and FDR touring the countryside, and bitter French rivals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud exchanging a sickly handshake at the insistence of FDR, who approached byzantine geopolitics with the same cheekiness he employed to paper over differences among Democratic Party chieftains.
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