The Americans were also aided by hundreds of French patriots. Some were hard-core members of the Maquis, some were veterans of the Great War, some were just ordinary peasants desperate to rid their home of the Hun. An American officer told Whitehead: “They drifted in by ones, twos, and threes, begging us to let them help in the capture of Cherbourg. They know the country well and we see no reason why they couldn’t help fight for their homes and country. They are in a weird assortment of uniforms, but they know how to fight.”7
By June 21 the 314th Infantry had gotten close enough to cut off the Cherbourg–St.-Pierre-Église road east of town, tightening the noose. With the help of French scouts who’d watched the elaborate construction go on for years, the Americans also began to unearth a diabolical warren of tunnels, fortifications, and storage chambers. The Nazi genius for subterranean architecture (and other things) would become apparent as the war for Northern Europe went on—but it was at Fort du Roule in Cherbourg where it was first uncovered.
Fort du Roule was planted on a rugged promontory in the back end of Cherbourg. The Germans had taken the ancient Norman garrison and made it a near-impregnable bulwark. It dominated Cherbourg Harbor; the big guns protruding from its lower chambers were aimed seaward, but its upper floors had scores of mortars, artillery pieces, and automatic weapons encased in concrete pillboxes—all pointed landward.
It took many hours to control those sections of Fort du Roule visible to the eye. But that was just the beginning: now GIs had to root out the soldiers entrenched in the fort’s subterranean lair. Collins’ guys had barged into the underground city through a hidden entrance at the top of the cliff.
There they encountered something out of a Buck Rogers comic strip: deep tunnels holding immense quantities of food, ammunition, and supplies, enough to keep thousands of men going for months. The Americans also unearthed an ingenious electrical lighting system, automatically controlled ventilators and water mains, and a huge overhead crane that moved heavy equipment and armaments from one side of the complex to the other. The main tunnel connecting the underground chambers was a marvel of engineering: two hundred yards deep and thirty-eight feet high. Its corridors featured elongated shelves crammed full of foodstuffs and ammunition, all worth, Whitehead reckoned, many millions of dollars.8 Although it had been wired with dynamite, the Germans had curiously chosen not to blow up their underground fort, perhaps because so many men were still in it when the Second Battalion guys stormed inside.
Rooney happened upon Fort du Roule on June 27, the same afternoon that Collins, in halting French, handed the city back to its prewar mayor at a ceremony on the steps of the bomb-wrecked city hall. The Stars and Stripes reporter followed a set of railroad tracks leading to a hillside entrance protected by an electronically controlled metal barrier. Rooney gingerly approached, sure that he’d see German soldiers surrendering.
He saw soldiers emerging from the tunnel all right, but they were American GIs, grinning broadly as they hauled out box after box of the spoils of war. Most of it was booze, an incredible cache of thousands of cases of brandy, rare wines, champagne, sherry, and liqueurs that the Germans had stolen from the French and stored inside their cliffside hideaway. The liquor had been discovered the previous day and immediately reported to General Collins, who put it under armed guard while the big brass determined what ought to be done with it. Bradley, who took a dim view of alcohol abuse and worried about the specter of drunken GIs staggering around Cherbourg, bucked the decision to Eisenhower, who decided the only fair thing was to divide the hooch among all the divisions that had waged war up the Cotentin.
Collins’ lock on the liquor had been removed when Rooney arrived. Ecstatic GIs were loading their plunder onto trucks and jeeps. Rooney stared, incredulous: It was the first time he’d seen looting in action and the first time he’d heard “loot” used as a noun.9
Fort du Roule’s alcohol was not the sort of swill that the average American grunt—or the average American reporter—knew much about. The correspondents taking it all in, Whitehead, Ernie Pyle, and INS’ Clark Lee, among them,10 spied Rooney, remembered that he had a preppie pedigree, and began hectoring him to pick out some noteworthy hooch. But Rooney, then a teetotaler, was useless.
Clearly the moment called for a connoisseur.
Word was sent down the line that Liebling was to report to Fort du Roule posthaste. Fortunately, the New Yorker writer was nearby, having spent much of the previous two days interviewing Resistance leaders in the now-very-public FFI, Forces françaises de l’intérieur. Liebling must have arrived beaming like the Cheshire cat; he was quickly hustled down a tunnel, trailed by a phalanx of thirsty correspondents. Liebling had the time of his life pointing to this case of wine and that batch of cognac.
The GIs needed the diversion: Capturing Cherbourg had required almost three weeks and cost twenty-two thousand Allied casualties.11
When Hal Boyle finally arrived in France to stay two days after Cherbourg fell, among the first stories he filed, no doubt tipped off by his reporter buddies, was on the booze of Fort du Roule. On June 28, he wrote: “Some American soldiers believe the decline of German potency in Normandy is attributable to the deadly virulence of the Nazi army’s brand of cognac…. ‘It’s just bottled hangovers,’ said one soldier. ‘If the Germans drank that stuff regularly, it is no wonder we knocked them out of Cherbourg. We call it ‘Hitler tonic.’ One drink and you think you own the world.’”12
General Bradley was given a half case of champagne from the Fort du Roule stash that he saved until after the war. Years later, he broke it out to celebrate the christening of his grandson.
IT WAS ALONG THE COTENTIN where Andy Rooney got better acquainted with Joe Liebling. The two of them shared a room for three or four nights that late June in a three-story Cherbourg maison that had somehow escaped damage. Its stone facade was built almost on top of a narrow flagstone sidewalk not far from the heart of town.
The house’s residents were fortunate. Many of the people on the Cotentin returned to find their homes “ruined or ransacked,” Rooney noted.13
Although Rooney had been a devoted reader of the New Yorker since his teens, he wasn’t all that familiar with Liebling’s reputation. “All I knew about Joe was that he couldn’t see very well and he was a gourmand who knew a great deal about food and boxing.” Rooney soon witnessed firsthand Liebling’s voracious—and oft-disturbing—appetites.
“I didn’t learn as much as I should have from Joe,” Rooney recalled. “He had such a strange and flawed personality that it didn’t occur to me at the time that he was as good as he was. We talked at night as if we were equals.”
Rooney got so comfortable in their ruminations, in fact, that he voiced his opinion that the quality of the New Yorker was going steadily downhill. “I don’t know how I latched onto so fashionable a criticism about something I knew so little about,” Rooney laughed a half century later. One particular night Liebling polished off a bottle of calvados, the fermented applejack that was the Norman equivalent of moonshine. Between slugs, Liebling shared with the twenty-five-year-old (and stone sober) Rooney the conviction that an artist should die at the peak of his obituary value. In what must have been an unsettling moment, Liebling volunteered that he was contemplating his own demise, since he felt he was cresting his own peak. Rooney was relieved the next morning when Liebling showed up for le petit déjeuner.
The New Yorker was hard to come by on the front lines, so Rooney didn’t get to read much of Liebling’s stuff. But after the war Rooney caught up with Joe’s brilliant wartime essays.
“I cringe with greatly delayed embarrassment,” Rooney wrote in his memoir, “at some of the things I said about writing and reporting in conversations with him.”14 Liebling not only loved lippy Irishmen, but also harbored a not so secret desire to be one himself. Joe no doubt enjoyed their conversations as much as Andy did.
LIEBLING AND HIS MILITARY-ISSUE GARB cut quite a striking figure in northern France. One
First Division officer remembered: “The only Army pants big enough to button around the magisterial paunch left him with a vast, drooping seat behind a flapping void big enough to hold a beach umbrella. The legs of the pants were tucked into knee-high gaiters left over from the Spanish-American War, leading to a pair of thin-soled lounge-lizard civilian shoes.”15
After LCI(L)-88 finished its postinvasion duties on D-Day plus five, Captain Bunny Rigg, with Liebling back on board after spending June 9 and 10 at Omaha Beach, returned to Weymouth to have the craft’s ramp winch repaired. Liebling spent the better part of two weeks in London, assembling his notes for what became his New Yorker homage to the heroes of Easy Red.
Joe got back to Normandy on June 24 and immediately hitched a ride to catch up to the GI advance on Cherbourg, which at that moment was the most climactic action in northern France. “A battle lurches along until it comes to a series of grinding jerks, like a train entering a Long Island Rail Road station,” Liebling wrote years later.
With his ability to converse in near-immaculate French (and even throw out Norman colloquialisms), Liebling took advantage of the delays to visit with members of the Maquis, the Resistance fighters who, now out in the open, referred to themselves as an army of liberation, the FFI. The FFI’s symbol, displayed everywhere in Normandy, was steeped in French history: It was the Croix de Lorraine, the two-barred-cross insignia whose banner Joan of Arc had carried into battle and whose telltale ring was slipped to Paul Henreid’s character, Victor Laszlo, at Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca. At its peak some 350,000 Frenchmen belonged to various Maquis units. General Eisenhower said after the war that the Resistance was worth fifteen divisions.
Painfully emerging through Liebling’s reporting was the unspeakable truth about the Gestapo’s treatment of the French during the Occupation. It was much worse than even Liebling had feared.
Any French citizen, even priests and nuns, thought to harbor Allied sympathies—no matter how peripheral—was subject to arrest and torture. Suspected Maquis leaders would have their fingernails torn out or their testicles crushed with a hammer. The pregnant wife of one Resistance leader was beaten so severely that she lost her baby.
A pair of middle-aged men Liebling met in a café had been thrown in jail for six months—with no reason given. “[The pair] presumed that an anonymous letter had denounced them as patriots,” Liebling wrote. “They had at last been released, still without being told why they had been arrested. They didn’t seem excited; they were slightly apologetic about even mentioning it, like Londoners in a pub diffidently exchanging bomb stories. After they had finished their reminiscences, [they] began to laugh. They slapped their knees, they bent double, they choked, they wiped their eyes, and finally one of them sputtered, ‘And to think, we are rid of the bastards for good!’ Then they all had another glass of wine.”
The café’s proprietress told Liebling that German soldiers would stagger in after curfew and demand liquor, threatening her and her family if she didn’t serve them. She once had the temerity to tell a German that in her experience the British were decent people. Word reached Occupation authorities, who closed down her establishment for a month.
“A prostitute, sedately sipping an apéritif near the zinc bar, said, ‘Once I called a German soldier a Jew just to make him angry. He reported that I had called Hitler a Jew. The Gestapo arrested me, and I had thirty-three days in prison on bread and water.’”
Throughout Normandy, FFI patrols perfected a hit-and-run technique on retreating Germans. En enfilade, Resistance fighters would lie in ambush, waiting for opportune moments to pounce. Every day, Allied commanders had to figure out what to do with the droves of prisoners that the FFI was herding through the woods.
Liebling interviewed a German doctor whose hospital unit had been overrun by a handful of lightly armed FFI guerrillas.
I asked him if he thought the war was over, as far as Germany was concerned, and he said yes, the war was lost. “Three million Germans have been killed or wounded to save Europe from Bolshevism,” he said, assuming that martyred look which the Germans always used to put on when, as “reasonable men,” they discussed the last war with the Americans they took for suckers. I could see a new myth—which would replace the “stab in the back” and “the English plot”—building up in the muddy, Teutonic mind, and I felt just like kicking the doctor in the seat of the pants.16
Liebling wasn’t the only patriot in northern Europe looking to give Nazis and their collaborators a swift kick. As villages were freed that summer and fall, a fascinating ritual unfolded. Even as Allied infantrymen were flushing holdout snipers, crowds would gather to rough up the locals who had profited from the Occupation. German concubines had their heads shaved and were forced to run a gauntlet in the village square.
Prostitutes were curiously exempted from this public censure. Why? Liebling asked an FFI sergeant. “A prostitute is a prostitute and a German is a German, and each acts according to his nature,” the Resistance fighter replied, shrugging.17
WALTER CRONKITE’S NATURE WAS TO be grumpy if chained to a desk. He spent much of June ’44 annoyed at three things: the weather, which prevented him from seeing Normandy from the air early D-Day morning; the Army Air Force’s public relations office, which in his mind had reneged on its promise of an invasion-day “exclusive”; and his bosses at UP, who insisted that he stay in London rather than cover the Allies’ now-mushrooming ground operations in northern France.
On D-Day plus four or five, Cronkite finally got a chance to set foot on French soil. He and other reporters accompanied a delegation of engineers on an inspection tour of the Ninth Air Force’s brand-new runway, Advanced Landing Ground A-1, at Grandcamp on the cliffs beyond Omaha Beach’s Pointe du Hoc. The strip had been hastily patched together; pilots called the steel mesh sunk into the soggy soil “chicken wire.”18 It was more landing mat, Cronkite wrote, than true runway, but it was sturdy enough to handle fighters, liaison craft, and scout planes; in a pinch, it could be used by larger planes.
Cronkite filed a piece about the remarkable grace under pressure of USAAF engineers, then hung around the beachhead for another twenty-four hours, watching in awe as Omaha became an ersatz port through the massive Mulberries, the British-invented temporary harbors. He also watched in horror as Omaha’s invasion-day victims continued to wash ashore. Cronkite wasn’t pleased to be forced back to London.19
His fellow wire service reporter Hal Boyle was angry on D-Day, too, but mainly at the Army public relations staff that refused to make good on its commitment to take him to Normandy. Boyle was “so low he could crawl under the belly of an earthworm,” he told Frances, joking that he and the other jilted correspondents were threatening mass hari-kari.20 Because of the screwup on D-Day morning, Hal hadn’t even been part of the official the-invasion-is-on announcement at the Ministry of Information.
It was Boyle’s friend and superior Wes Gallagher who was among the select group of correspondents briefed by Allied public relations officials that fateful morning. Gallagher and his colleagues had been given exactly thirty-three minutes to file their stories at the Ministry; he crafted a 1,300-word gem and elbowed his way to the front of the high-ceilinged room. At the appointed hour, as Boyle related the next day, a British officer counted down from five, then shoved open the doors. Gallagher, Boyle wrote, was a “human torpedo”; he yelled “Gangway!” and lunged toward a hallway phone booth.21
Boyle, like Cronkite, got a brief and unsatisfying visit to Normandy. On June 9, he and other reporters were taken across the Channel for a one-day visit to the Omaha beachhead. Boyle’s entourage, which must have included British correspondents, was also driven to Montgomery’s mobile field headquarters, which at that point was three or four miles inland from the beachhead.
But Boyle, like Cronkite, was soon back in London, chomping at the bit, watching his pal Whitehead’s copy from the Cotentin campaign race across the wire. At least Boyle knew that at some point soon, he’d
receive a permanent assignment with ground troops.
Cronkite was slated to receive a permanent assignment, too—a job heading UP’s bureau in Amsterdam once the city was liberated. It was an important job since the UP planned to coordinate much of its European war and postwar coverage through the Netherlands. Still, Cronkite kept hoping to latch onto a special airborne operation or be summoned to witness a decisive offensive. For months on end, neither happened. To make the situation even more frustrating, Cronkite’s roommate Jim McGlincy, UP’s perpetual screwup, by mid-June had been assimilated with troops in Normandy and was filing wonderful profiles and spot news reports. “I admit I miss the patter of [McGlincy’s] little feet around the house,” Cronkite wrote Betsy.22
WITH HIS ROOMIE GONE, CRONKITE moved from a top-floor flat on Buckingham Gate to a smaller interior apartment three floors below. It turned out to be a fortuitous switch; it may have saved Cronkite from injury when the “doodlebugs” began hitting London. Before summer’s end, some 2,500 “robot bombs” would strike the British capital, killing nearly 5,800 Londoners.23
It’s odd that a Nazi terror weapon—something that ended up inflicting twenty-three thousand casualties, virtually all of them British civilians, and damaging one hundred thousand English homes—was given such harmless-sounding nicknames. Even “buzz bomb” doesn’t capture the two-ton V-1’s viciousness.
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