BOYLE AND LIEBLING, TWO LITERATI who enjoyed slugging alcohol while ruminating over great books, or boxing, or women, became fast friends. Liebling referenced Boyle in several pieces, expressing admiration for his pal’s combat profiles and light writing touch. Boyle, for his part, loved Liebling’s wry sense of humor. The New Yorker writer was with Boyle one day when, just as a German artillery shell exploded “with a fearful bang,” someone offered Liebling a drink of water. “No, thanks,” Liebling rejoined, “but would you mind throwing a little in my face?”32
Boyle recounted Liebling’s quip in late April in the column he had begun calling Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook. Without consulting his AP superiors, Boyle started the column while still in Morocco in late ’42. The title was meant to evoke another one of Boyle’s poet heroes, Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass. Sometimes Boyle’s feature was a collection of amusing anecdotes about soldiers’ lives; at other times, it was a deadly serious look at the human cost of war. It proved enormously popular, not only with readers but with editors, too. One week in early ’43 Boyle failed to submit a column and his editors dashed off a wire asking why. Between his round-the-clock combat reportage and his column, Boyle was the most prolific correspondent in North Africa. Ernie Pyle faced deadline pressures with his near-daily column, but Pyle never had the kind of hour-to-hour coverage responsibilities that Boyle experienced.
The Irish shanachie was never afraid to engage in a little showmanship for the sake of a good story. Two weeks after Rommel’s breakthrough at Kasserine, Boyle hit on a column idea reminiscent of the peacetime Pyle: Hal would start hitchhiking in Tunisia and see how far he could get in twenty-four hours. His “thumb voyage” began in midafternoon when he was picked up by a weapons carrier tugging a thirty-seven-millimeter gun. It ended twenty-three hours and four hundred miles later when he was dropped off by a twenty-eight-year-old WAAC who was transporting a group of Army Air Force fliers in her jeep. Along the way he encountered artillerymen, medical officers, a black quartermaster sergeant who had a truck full of chewing gum, signal corpsmen, two British military policemen, a French civilian driving a fancy car, a C-47 pilot evacuating wounded GIs, and, finally, Sergeant Joan James of Brighton, Massachusetts, and her jeep full of flyboys.
“You start off in a jolting weapons carrier and four hundred miles later a pert brunette WAAC drives you to your journey’s end in a jeep. What other country—even wide, bountiful America—has hitch-hiking like that?”33 The Kansas City Star ran the column with a cartoon showing a grinning Boyle waving to Sergeant James.
BOYLE DIDN’T NEED TO HITCHHIKE to see George Patton. Sizing up George Smith Patton, Jr., became something of a Rorschach test for Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) and ETO reporters. Andy Rooney saw Patton as a pathetic bully—an extension of the abusive officers he’d despised as an enlisted man. Rooney so disliked Patton that he was still hurling brickbats—and getting into a public pissing match with the general’s survivors—six decades later. Homer Bigart saw Patton at his worst in Sicily and concluded he was bloodthirsty and megalomaniacal. Joe Liebling was offended by the way Patton and his Third Army glory-hogged their way through France in the late summer of 1944. Walter Cronkite, on the other hand, had a more tolerant view: Cronkite saw Patton at his best, rescuing the besieged 101st Airborne at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in late ’44.
But of our five principals, only Hal Boyle covered Patton extensively before he became an American idol. In fact, Boyle’s early articles from North Africa helped forge the Patton mystique. Boyle saw a side of Patton that the others didn’t: the savior of the demoralized II Corps. As Boyle put it a year later, “[Patton] took a defeated but still fighting American force after the Kasserine debacle, shook it back into shape, gave it confidence, and led it to victory at Gafsa and El Guettar.”34
Indeed, as early as day four of the Moroccan operation, Boyle’s bosses were requesting a profile of the prickly invasion commander who supposedly tough-talked Vichy into a quick submission. When a Darlan sycophant wielding a white flag approached Patton about negotiating a surrender, Boyle quoted the general as saying, “I will discuss an armistice when the troops in front of my troops lay down their guns! Not before!”35
Boyle was on hand as first Moroccan and then Algerian potentates fêted Patton in their palaces, giving the general a chance to flaunt his impeccable French and show off a chestful of medals. The AP reporter was close to the front lines on March 16 and 17 when Patton’s troops surged toward Gafsa. Boyle described Gafsa as an Allied “victory,” but in truth, the Axis forces, mainly Italian, fled before the attack was launched. “The Dagoes beat it” before he got there, a disgusted Patton told his diary.36
For Boyle, however, Patton’s most affecting moment in North Africa came a few days later at El Guettar. Hollywood’s depiction of El Guettar in the biopic exaggerated both Patton’s role and the skirmish’s importance in the North African campaign. In truth, it wasn’t all that pivotal and it was fought, from the U.S. perspective, strictly on the defensive. American forces held the high ground and were smart enough not to leave it. Still, Omar Bradley called El Guettar “The first solid, indisputable defeat we inflicted on the German army in the war.”37 American GIs drove from the field a battle-hardened Tenth Panzer Division that had decimated Polish, British, and French troops.
But the real heroes at El Guettar, Bradley recognized, were the men defending Keddab Ridge that early morning: the Brooklyn Bums, the boys in the Big Red One. “The Hun will soon learn to dislike that outfit,” Eisenhower gloated.38
Boyle was standing near Patton at El Guettar when the general got the news that his aide, young Captain Richard Jensen, had been killed. The artillery shell that struck Jensen came dangerously close to hitting Omar Bradley, too. Jensen was, Boyle explained to readers, Patton’s “personal aide and member of a California family closely allied to the Pattons for three generations.” 39 Patton sobbed when told the news and continued breaking down for days afterward. It became one of Boyle’s most powerful memories of the war, a story he told numerous times to his wife, Frances, and daughter, Tracy.40
“CONFUSION IS NORMAL IN COMBAT” went a hoary military saying. Joe Liebling became so taken with the adage—and with the resilient First Division infantrymen who lived it day after day—that he used it as the title of a collection of his pieces on North Africa.
Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 1943, Liebling and Boyle were riding in a jeep along la piste forestière, the dirt “foresters’ track” that connected Cap Serrat on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast to villages two dozen miles inland. They were anxious to get back to the press camp before nightfall: Once the sun disappeared, their jeep would have to give way to two-and-a-half-ton supply trucks barreling down the blacked-out road. With tanks and troops clogging almost every inch, it would have been quicker to walk, Liebling concluded. There was plenty of time for Boyle to climb out of the jeep and buttonhole soldiers.
Boyle was chatting with passing GIs when his companion spotted a body lying by the side of the road. Liebling got out to inspect.
“A blanket covered his face, so I surmised that it had been shattered, but there was no blood on the ground, so I judged that he had been killed in the brush and carried down to the road to await transport,” Liebling observed. He asked a sergeant, a “hawk-nosed, red-necked man with a couple of front teeth missing,” about the corpse’s identity.
“That’s Mollie. Comrade Molotov. The Mayor of Broadway,” blurted the sergeant. “Didn’t you ever hear of him? Jeez, Mac, he once captured six hundred Eytealians by himself and brought them all back along with him. Sniper got him, I guess.”41
So began Joe Liebling’s tortured “Quest for Mollie,” the story that consumed him for the rest of his life. When Liebling learned that most of the sergeant’s improbable account was true—that Private Mollie had (more or less) single-handedly brought in hundreds of Italian prisoners and was indeed a slippery character from t
he shadows of Broadway, Liebling became obsessed with piecing together Mollie’s story. Boyle, too, wrote about Mollie, but the story never haunted him the way it did his friend.
By happenstance a few weeks later, on board a steamer heading back to the States, Liebling ran into some wounded men from Mollie’s company. No one seemed to know what his real name was, but everybody had a couple of Mollie stories.
A GI confined to a wheelchair remembered how irked Mollie had been to discover, upon arriving in North Africa, that he couldn’t telegraph his racetrack bets to his bookie. “‘Vot a schvindle!’ That was his favorite saying—‘Vot a schvindle!’ He was always bitching about something. He used to go out scouting with [field] glasses, all alone, and find the enemy and tip Major [Michael] Kauffman off where they were,” the disabled man told Liebling.
Mollie packed a stash of cash and wasn’t shy about telling people it was illicit booty—that he’d gotten rich from some “racket.” He supposedly never shot craps for less than fifty bucks a roll. But for Liebling, the clincher came when the writer learned that Mollie swore he never saluted an officer ranked beneath brigadier general or screwed a woman below an actress.42
At least in fervid imagination, Mollie became Liebling’s kind of guy: a big-talking New York immigrant kid who, much like the writer’s Bowery-bred old man, knew how to play street con. In memoriam, Mollie became Liebling’s beau ideal: GI Joe by way of Damon Runyon.
A couple of pals on the troopship thought Mollie’s real name had been something like Carl Warren. Whether Mollie or Warren, Liebling confirmed through his company commander, now Lieutenant Colonel Michael S. Kauffman, that the private had, in fact, been instrumental in the capture of more than six hundred Italian troops.
At dawn on March 23, 1943, in the hills surrounding Sened Station, a remote Tunisian rail depot, Mollie and an Italian-speaking buddy, Private First Class De Marco, watched as skittish Italian infantrymen began surrendering in singles and pairs. It occurred to Mollie and De Marco that others might be similarly persuaded. Bearing a white flag, they crawled up to the enemy trenches. With De Marco serving as translator, they managed to coax 147 enemy infantrymen down the hill. Once Mollie directed artillery fire to pound the enemy position, the remaining Italians got the message. Soon some five hundred other soldati were scrambling down the hill, hands held aloft. The incredulous Kauffman put Mollie in for a Distinguished Service Cross, but Mollie’s record was too checkered. He had to settle for a Silver Star, which ended up being awarded posthumously.
Back in New York in the summer of ’43, Liebling played a hunch that Carl Warren was Karl C. Warner, a private listed in the New York Times as killed in action in Tunisia. Liebling found Warner’s sister, a Mrs. Ulidjak, living in a downscale tenement on East Eighty-eighth Street. “A thin, pale woman with a long, bony face and straight blond hair pulled back into a bun came to the apartment door,” Liebling wrote.
Mrs. Ulidjak had heard a few weeks before of her brother’s demise. She asked if he had been killed fighting Japs and seemed disappointed when Liebling told her no, that her brother was slain fighting Germans and Italians. Warner, it turned out, had been a Mollie pretense: Their family name was Petuskia. They were Russian immigrants who’d settled in coal-country Pennsylvania before moving to the city. When told of Mollie’s heroics outside Sened Station, his sister, in the presence of neighbors of Italian descent, exclaimed: “Six hundred wops!”
Her brother had been a busboy and bartender at Jimmy Kelly’s, a Greenwich Village nightclub. Mollie, it turned out, had been an outspoken union guy who looked out for fellow workers. When Mollie had had a little downtime, he chatted up well-heeled patrons. “The customers didn’t seem to mind,” a bartender told Liebling. “[Mollie] had a nice way about him.”43
Mollie’s old mates had howled when Liebling told them about the wad of bills that Mollie always had in his pocket in Tunisia. While working at Kelly’s, he had been forever bumming money, but they had been so fond of him they didn’t care.
Liebling loved New Yorkers who dreamed big and lived large. Mollie, Liebling wrote, was “fond of high living, which is the only legitimate incentive for liking money…. I lived with him so long that I once half-convinced myself he was not dead.”
At one point Liebling became so infatuated with Mollie that he began writing a play about him until theater friends pointed out that “it is customary for the protagonist of a work of that nature to remain alive until the last act.” Instead, Liebling ended up giving Private First Class Karl C. Warner a eulogy for the ages.
When I walk through the East Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, I often think of him and his big talk and his golf suit grin. It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.44
“Quest for Mollie” became a Liebling signature, an essay that, at least for a time, appeared in anthologies. The piece is dedicated to Boyle, Liebling’s friend and Tunisian jeep mate. Had Hal been less affable and less keen to kibbitz with GIs, Liebling never would have spotted Mollie’s corpse.
ANDY ROONEY HAD GOTTEN TO know Homer Bigart in early ’43 on the trains going back and forth to East Anglia while covering the bombing war. Like every reporter who read Bigart’s stuff, Rooney was awed by his friend’s “incomparable” writing.45
Harrison Salisbury, the United Press editor, had arrived in London two weeks after Bigart. Salisbury first encountered the Herald Tribune reporter in an ancient University of London lecture hall that had been reconfigured as a press bullpen by the Ministry of Information.
“[Bigart] was alone, a slim, almost frail figure hunched over his Olivetti, slowly punching with two or three fingers, often pausing, often X-ing out words, often consulting notes, often looking out into space before resuming. He gave no sign that he saw me nor the oak-stained walls…. He was alone in the corridors of his mind.”46
The solitary figure’s reporting on air operations was so penetrating that peers knew instantly that Bigart was destined to achieve great things. Cronkite may have been the first to glimpse Bigart’s genius, since the UP reporter read his friend and “rival’s” copy almost every day for months as they went back and forth to Molesworth. In Salisbury’s mind, Bigart became the war correspondent of the ETO.47 Rooney, for his part, always regarded Bigart and Liebling as the two best reporter/writers operating in Europe, with Boyle not far behind.
Bigart and Rooney got a break from their coverage of the air war in late May 1943. Along with other correspondents, they were flown from London to Oran to witness King George VI’s triumphant visit to Allied troops. The British brass pulled out all the stops; newsreel cameramen and photographers captured every moment of the king’s interaction with Tommies and GIs, just three weeks removed from obliterating the Wehrmacht.
Bigart and Rooney were assembled at a British officers’ club with fourteen other members of the press. Flustered PR advance men insisted that the reporters stand at awkward attention as the monarch made his way toward the receiving line.
“It is important to this story to remind you,” Rooney wrote in his memoirs, “that both King George and Homer stammered badly. Both of them had great difficulty getting out their words.”
The first correspondent the king singled out was International News Service’s Bob Considine, the prominent sports columnist and author of the Doolitle raid account, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
“How … how … how … da … da … do you … you do?” the king inquired. “Who … who … whom… da … da … do you … rep… rep … repre … represent?”
And so it went for half dozen or more awkward exchanges. Finally His Highness reached Bigart.
“How … how … are … are ya … ya … you?” the king said, then moved on without lingering.
Later, Homer, who always put everyone listening to him at ease with his sense of humor, said, �
�It’s a ga … it’s a ga … dodamn … good thing, ta too. There ca … could … ha … have … ba been … an inter … international … in … incident.”48
AFTER THE AXIS SURRENDER AT bizerte, an impromptu victory celebration formed as Allied troops marched back toward the Mediterranean. Cheering Tunisians were lined up on both sides of the road. The scene reminded Hal Boyle of the torchlight parades that Boss Pendergast organized in Kansas City to rally the party faithful, with Boyle’s old man proudly leading the pack.
Boyle happened to be riding in a jeep equipped with a loudspeaker. In midparade, probably after a few pulls on his flask, Boyle grabbed the microphone, stood up, and began chanting:
Vote for Boyle, son of toil!
Vote for Hal, the A-rab’s pal!
The vast majority of his audience, of course, had no idea of what Boyle was yelling, but they were nevertheless tickled by his performance. “Vote for Boyle!” they parroted to the clueless British troops marching in Hal’s wake.49
AFTER ENCOUNTERING MOLLIE, LIEBLING HOLED up at the Hotel Aletti in Algiers to organize his Tunisian notes. By Manhattan standards, the Aletti’s amenities were crude, but after weeks of bunking in the field they seemed to Liebling like the Ritz. One could also “receive female visitors if they stood in well with the concierge,” which was Liebling’s euphemistic way of saying that if you hooked up with a lady of the evening, the Muslim clerk could be paid to look the other way.
Its milieu made the Hotel Aletti special—especially the view from the terraces overlooking the Mediterranean. “In the twilight, as we walked to our dinner, German planes would come like swallows out of Sicily, far away, and jettison their bombs before reaching the center of our magnificent antiaircraft display, like a beehive drawn in lines of orange tracer,” Liebling recalled.50
Assignment to Hell Page 14