Boyle signed the first page of the scrapbook: “To my nephew, Edward Michael, and to his mother, Monica, who made this book. With love, Hal Boyle, March 15, 1944.”44
Monica reminded Hal to keep an eye out for her little brother Jack, who was a radioman with a naval amphibious unit that had landed in North Africa and Sicily. He’s in England someplace, she told Hal. Maybe you’ll run into him. Four months later, Boyle did.45
NEXT STOP FOR FRANCES AND Hal was Hollywood. Somewhere along the line, they were joined by dear friends Don and Marie Whitehead. Associated Press did a good job flacking the Southern California visit of their two star correspondents: The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter and photographer to Union Station as the Whiteheads and the Boyles disembarked on St. Patrick’s Day, probably after a few club car toasts to the Old Sod. Despite the impasse in the mountains of Italy, the Fifth Army was “still killing a hell of a lot of Germans,” Whitehead told the Times. “There’ll have to be lots more fighting—and lots more casualties—before we win in that area.”
Whitehead and Boyle told the paper they were looking forward to seeing their friend, Times reporter Tom Treanor, due in L.A. any day to read his part in the Pyle movie. Boyle explained that Treanor had been the first U.S. correspondent to make it to the summit of Cassino.
“Are we in the town [Cassino proper] right now, on this spot?” Boyle had Treanor asking the company commander at the fateful moment. When told they were, Treanor took one step toward the German lines, drew a line in the dirt with his boot, and said, “Now let’s get the hell out of here! We’ve BEEN in Cassino!” Having accomplished his objective of being able in good conscience to dateline his story “Cassino,” Treanor beat a retreat.46
WHEN NOT POOLSIDE WITH THEIR wives or on the United Artists’ lot with Pyle, Meredith, costar Robert Mitchum, and director William Wellman, Whitehead and Boyle were hitting the hustings. On March 28, the pair addressed a crowded Hotel Biltmore Ballroom at a luncheon sponsored by the Advertising Club of Los Angeles. Sharing the Biltmore’s lectern was G.I. Joe’s producer, Lester Cowan.47 Producer Cowan had eclectic tastes, having produced everything from the comedic farces of W. C. Fields to actress Mary Pickford’s melodramas. Director Wellman, a World War I aviator, was also in the midst of a distinguished career, having started in the early ’20s on silent pictures.
Cowan, Wellman, Pyle, and their military advisors—a list that nominally included Lieutenant General Lesley McNair—set out to capture the gritty realities of combat as endured by American GIs in North Africa and Italy. Fifteen minutes into the movie, the humiliation of the U.S. retreat at the Kasserine Pass was depicted.
Mitchum, playing a popular but tough officer, grabs a battle-fatigued GI by the shoulders and tries to shake him out of his daze. The film also graphically portrays the caveman-like existence that Allied soldiers lived for months at Monte Cassino.
Still, G.I. Joe is hamstrung by the same hackneyed story lines that plague other war movies: the outfit adopts a dog in Tunisia and (perhaps out of deference to the vote-for-Boyle story) nicknames it Ay-rab; a GI marries a nurse and promptly gets killed on patrol; a sergeant heartsick for his wife and baby boy flips out and has to be restrained before throwing himself at the enemy lines; and in midmovie Mitchum delivers the obligatory “It’s quiet out there … too quiet” cliché. Cowan’s production had a modest budget, relying on stock Army footage of artillery battles and firefights, so it has that bumpy quality of so many war films.
Nevertheless, Meredith is a likable and understated Pyle. Mitchum, who earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, is believable as Lieutenant-turned-Captain Bill Walker. The movie ends with a reenactment of the death of Captain Waskow, Pyle’s most venerated column. Mitchum as Walker is killed and transported down an Italian mountain on the back of a mule. One by one, his men pay their respects, with Meredith-Pyle nearly distraught. But there’s another battle to be fought; the men are ordered to move out. As Meredith-Pyle joins the outfit’s march toward Rome, he narrates, “There’s nothing we can do, except pause and murmur, ‘Thanks, pal.’”
Ernie’s reporter buddies are in the movie for only a few seconds. Whitehead, Boyle, and what looks to be Chris Cunningham of United Press are in a scene back at press headquarters when Pyle learns he’s won the Pulitzer Prize. A big handpainted sign hangs over the headquarters door: “Through These Portals Pass Out the Most Beautiful Correspondents in the World!”—a line that reflected Boyle’s sardonic touch.
The boys greet Pyle with the “I-am-not-worthy” bow (think the palm tree scene near the end of Mister Roberts) and needle Ernie about going uptown on them. “I regret to inform you, Mr. Pyle,” intones Whitehead in a Kentucky bourbon–honeyed baritone, “that you are no longer a noos-paper-man. You are now a dee-sting-wished journalist!” The lanky Whitehead and his Gable-like mustache steal the scene, but Boyle gets in a good line when Meredith-Pyle, feigning offense, asks why his colleagues opened the letter from the Pulitzer committee. “Well, it was marked ‘private,’ wasn’t it?” Boyle retorts, before smirking and sticking a cigar back in his mouth.
Tom Treanor of the L.A. Times didn’t make it, or at least his name didn’t appear in the credits, but Foisie, Bob Landry from Life, George Lait from INS, Clete Roberts from the Blue Network, and Robert Reuben from Reuters were all acknowledged.48
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, THE REFUGEES from the ETO had a splendid time in Hollywood, hitting the hot spots. One night the gang autographed a menu from an L.A. restaurant and gave it to Pyle. Ernie kept that memento for the remainder of the war, proudly showing it to Boyle three months later in a press tent in Normandy. The whole California respite sounds surreal: a blur of parties for guys who’d been eating K rations in the mud of Italy for months, then trying to re-create the same deprivation on a movie lot.
Boyle put on fifteen pounds, two thirds of which he gained while binging in Hollywood saloons, he told readers. “Leaving the United States to return to the war zone is like talking about heaven,” Boyle wrote in a piece the Star published May 18. “Nearly everyone says he would like to go—but very few exceed the speed limit in trying to get there.”49
Still, Boyle had no choice: AP was flogging his return to the ETO. Its star columnist’s first eight pieces, the wire service vowed to subscribers, would compare life in preinvasion London to the America he just left. Whenever and wherever the cross-Channel assault would take place, Boyle and his prolific typewriter would be there, AP assured customers.50
WHILE PYLE, BOYLE, AND WHITEHEAD were partying in Hollywood, the PROs in Major Jack Redding’s outfit were sweating over the details of invasion press relations. Redding and his deputy, Barney Oldfield, had concluded that their outfit, coupled with the First Army’s Publicity and Psychological Warfare unit, needed special invasion preparation, same as Allied troops. After scouting several locations, they settled on Clevedon in southwest England, across Bristol Channel from picturesque Cardiff, Wales.
There the young PRO-lieutenants destined to become so invaluable to reporters in French press camps—among them George Fuller, Bruce Fessenden, Sam Brightman, Jack Roach, and Roy Wilder, Jr.—were put through their paces, taught that their primary duty was to get stories and pictures back to London by whatever means necessary. Divided into teams of two, the PROs were equipped with special radio transmitters built into their jeeps, wire recorders, generators, and hand-keyed Morse code sets. They were also briefed on the schedule of Navy courier speedboats that would ferry messages to and from the massive communications complex on General Bradley’s flagship, the Augusta.51 Soon dubbed Redding’s Rangers, the Clevedon men combined marching and calisthenics with elementary map reading and tent erection, plus learned to operate all the electronic equipment within their purview, much of which was new.52
BOYLE’S TRIP ACROSS THE ATLANTIC to Liverpool aboard a lightly armed freighter in a small convoy was uneventful: By May of ’44 the U-boat threat had been all but eliminated. In midocean, though, Boyle came down
with a strange virus, he told Frances, and spent half the voyage in his bunk. “I don’t know what the devil was the matter with me…. All the time my stomach ached like hell. Maybe it was the change from a liquid (liquor) diet to a solid food diet too suddenly.”53 Boyle’s saloon-scarred innards eventually improved, but the convoy ran into ugly weather as they neared England—and his stomach flip-flopped all over again.
In London, Boyle reunited with Whitehead, who’d beaten him there by a couple of days. Along with Whitehead’s friend Lieutenant Tom Siler, a onetime AP sportswriter from Chicago, they found a three-room bungalow in Chelsea for $65 a month. Its address, Whitehead never tired of bragging, was 1 Whitehead’s Grove. The trio hired a woman in the neighborhood to do their cleaning and ate shredded wheat when not scarfing down pub food.
Bob Brunelle, London’s AP bureau chief, kept Boyle “running ragged,” insisting that Hal line up his invasion accreditation and collect his field equipment and paraphernalia—all while churning out his column.
He may have been suffering the effects of excessive partying—but that didn’t stop Boyle from sampling London’s nightlife. Taxis were allowed three gallons of gas a day, only enough for about five hours’ worth of cruising, and few buses ran after ten thirty p.m., he wrote on May 23. Since it stayed light past eleven o’clock in late spring, “the wayfarer is always getting caught abroad at dusk with no way of getting back.”54 Getting a cab or onto the proper bus was next to impossible, Boyle wrote. “Few officers object to a moonlit stroll with a pretty girl through London’s darkened streets. It’s not the walk to her door they mind—it’s that long hike home alone in the blackout afterward, when you bump into what you take to be a lamppost and it objects with feminine stridency—‘Ere, don’t get fresh. Mind your step, man.’”55
Exactly one week before D-Day, May 30, 1944, Whitehead talked his buddy Boyle into going to a Soho restaurant to sample the house specialty: horse steak. It gave Boyle one last chance before the apocalypse to flash his humor.
“I thought I was hungry enough to eat a horse, but I wasn’t,” the son of a butcher told readers. “Before I could swallow it visions of all the horses I ever saw or heard of passed through my mind, and the piece of meat felt like a lump of rock as it went down. I could see Black Beauty, Man o’ War, Old Dan Patch, and Traveler. I could see Tom Mix’s Tony and the big, reproachful eyes of Frances, the old mare who used to pull our grocery wagon around a quarter century ago in Kansas City. My ears rang with hoofbeats, and something inside me said nay. (No pun.)”
Boyle looked at Whitehead contentedly chewing and accused him of being a traitor to the equine traditions of his native Kentucky. “Lissen,” Don countered. “I used to lose quite a bit of money on these nags at the Derby. I’m just enjoying my revenge.”56
ON MONDAY, MAY 14, WALTER Cronkite was having a late lunch at the Officers’ Club, which had become so popular it now went by the trendy name Willow Run. As he was being seated, he heard a ruckus and realized that Boyle and Whitehead and other AP guys were just leaving. Cronkite tried to get Boyle’s attention, but his fellow Kansas Citian was already out the door. But he did succeed in hailing Gladwin Hill and another original member of the Writing 69th, Paul Manning. Manning had just left CBS to become a “thrice-a-week” columnist for the McNaught Syndicate, Cronkite told his wife in a letter. The three commiserated over how difficult it was to get decent information out of the USAAF now that the bombing fleets were focused on invasion targets.
“Hill and I have been covering this air war so long we almost have ceased to be rivals—our problems are so similar,” Cronkite told Betsy. “[Hill] is luckier than I, though, since his desk sees fit to let him fly on The Day—a thing which the UP insists I shunt off to one of the ‘younger’ men.”57
By then, Cronkite, all of twenty-seven, had quite a staff of UP reporters working for him on the air beat: among them Collie Small, Doug Werner, Bob Richards and Ned Roberts. None of the “younger” guys ended up going wheels up in a bomber on “The Day.” Nor did Glad Hill, who was destined to send the first “flash” that infantrymen had indeed landed in France. Ironically, the only one who ended up with a bird’s-eye view of the whole shooting match—at least in theory—was Cronkite.
CHAPTER 10
CHERBOURG AND ST.-LÔ—UGLY FIGHTING AMONG DEAD CATTLE
Each [Allied soldier] who landed within the first twenty-four hours knew a small part of the story in intimate detail…. They knew the first names of ten who drowned, five who hung dead in the barbed wire off-shore and two who lay unattended, the blood draining from holes in their bodies…. That was about all they knew, and to many of the fighting men the Invasion seemed a hopeless catastrophe.
—ANDY ROONEY, 1962
THE FORTUNES OF WAR
Staff Sergeant Andrew Rooney had never been around a hostile ground fight until he wheeled his jeep onto the Cotentin Peninsula west of Utah Beach on D-Day plus four. Rooney’s previous brushes with Nazi bullets had come at twenty-five thousand feet in a B-17 and at twelve thousand feet in a B-26.1 Now, having landed on the beach and “turned right and up,” as he put it in a 2010 interview, he found himself constantly on his belly, diving for cover. Rooney learned in a hurry: After a couple of days on the Cotentin he could hear the rumble of big guns and distinguish American artillery from German.
The push north toward the port of Cherbourg was a bareknuckled brawl, Rooney soon discovered—an onslaught of air attacks, artillery exchanges, mortar barrages, and machine gun fire. More than a hundred thousand men—half of them doughboys from the Fourth, Ninth, and 79th Infantry Divisions—were slugging it out on a slab of land smaller than Rhode Island. Field Marshal Rommel, knowing how essential Cherbourg was to the defense of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, demanded that its peninsula bristle with railway artillery, minefields, swollen streams, booby traps, camouflaged pillboxes, and subterranean forts. But most of Rommel’s heavy guns along the Cherbourg waterfront had been encased in concrete with their barrels pointed seaward; now that the Allies were attacking from the south and rear, the guns were rendered useless. Still, there were plenty of smaller batteries that garrison commander Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben and the remnants of his 709th Division could call upon to savage the Americans. Every German soldier, moreover, had orders from der Führer to fight to the death.
Upon shadowing American tanks to the Stars and Stripes’ temporary setup in the village of Carentan, five miles south of Utah, Rooney’s first order of business was to clean the waterproofing off his jeep. It had taken him hours to lacquer its innards with thick grease; now it took him hours to de-lacquer it.2
While Rooney was scrubbing his vehicle’s underbelly, enemy guns were pounding the tiny crossroads on the west bank of the Taute River. “Night and day German artillery poured shells in the thin strip of land we held,” Rooney wrote. By June 12, the Stars and Stripes was forced to move its quarters five miles northwest to Ste.-Mère-Église.
A lot of Norman hamlets in the spring and summer of ’44 would become hallowed: Ste.-Mère-Église—or St. Mare, as it was soon christened—was renowned for the church steeple from which wounded 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper John Steele hung from the cords of his chute for hours, playing dead. Steele was captured later that morning, but quickly managed to escape. His heroics became a permanent part of The Longest Day legend. Today, a uniformed mannequin, its parachute wrapped around the church steeple, pays homage to Steele.
The first decimated villages Rooney encountered as he scrambled to rejoin the Fourth Division infantrymen with whom he’d crossed the Channel were Valognes and Mountebourg, up the Cotentin from St. Mare. The towns had been leveled by artillery fire from both sides and by American P-47 fighter-bombers that swarmed the peninsula, ready to pounce on any enemy target. Rooney was appalled by the wanton destruction, not comprehending that it was a harbinger of the entire campaign.3
Omar Bradley had hoped to take Cherbourg by D-Day plus four or five. But just as Caen to the s
outheast had proved an elusive objective for Bernard Montgomery and the British Second Army, the march to Cherbourg became chaotic for Bradley’s able lieutenant, General J. Lawton Collins and his VII Corps. Every few yards, it seemed, there was another hedgerow to punch through, another machine gun nest to silence, another minefield to mark and sidestep. The Germans were fighting furiously; they knew that, given the Allies’ utter dominance of sea and air, there would be no chance of a German Dunkirk, of their escaping Cherbourg via the Channel.
Collins had been handpicked by Eisenhower and Bradley for this moment. The forty-eight-year-old Collins had the one irreplaceable asset for which the Supreme Command was looking: combat experience. On Guadalcanal, Collins had moved his men with such speed that the press had dubbed him Lightning Joe; fortunately for Collins, the nickname stuck.
Operation Overlord, the D-Day master plan, called for Collins’ VII Corps to strike directly at Cherbourg by moving north from just inland of Utah Beach. But it soon became apparent that large numbers of enemy troops were reinforcing the northern part of the Cotentin by slipping up its western periphery—and that the same area could eventually serve as an escape route if it weren’t cut off. Bradley did what he did best: adapt his strategy. Collins’ corps was sent west to lock down the peninsula’s base.
By June 16, Collins’ guys had battered their way through the Orglandes-St.-Sauveur region and reached the sea just east of Cherbourg.4 The next day, GIs captured St.-Lô-d’Ourville and Barneville on the peninsula’s western coastal road, ripping enemy defenses in two.5 Still, the Germans held on. In Brix, a tiny village on the Channel, American troops stumbled upon a cache of unarmed V-1 rocket bombs and what they later deduced was a V-2 launch site.
With Rooney and AP’s Don Whitehead among the correspondents shadowing its advance elements, the Americans cracked Cherbourg’s outer rim on Tuesday, June 20—D-Day plus fourteen. From a distance of some four miles, Whitehead and Rooney could hear a “thunder of explosions.”6 The Germans had begun their systematic demolition of Cherbourg’s port facilities—the very scenario that Eisenhower and Bradley had wanted to avoid. The German dynamite was so deadly that it took nearly three months for Allied engineers to get Cherbourg’s port back up and running. Against the distant roar of piers and buildings blowing up, the VII Corps crept forward, buttressed by air attacks from Marauders and seaborne shelling.
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