Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  EVERY DAY IN NORTHERN FRANCE, Boyle interviewed dozens of men like Bud Culin as he looked for stories of heroism and humor; inevitably, many of Boyle’s tributes were posthumous.

  Master Sergeant Joe “Shorty” Plotnick of Baltimore, Maryland, was another Mollie, a Russian émigré who enjoyed thumbing his nose at military discipline, was never shy about bragging about himself, and rarely left a poker game without pockets stuffed full of cash. All of five foot four, Shorty had been in the U.S. Army his entire adult life; twenty-six year earlier, he’d earned a Purple Heart in the trenches outside Château-Thierry. Plotnick never knew his age because there was no official record of his birth. “He had put away enough buck privates’ pay,” Boyle wrote in the summer of ’44, “so that he and his wife could afford more than C-rations any time he wanted to hang up his uniform.”

  The crusty Plotnick was an operations noncom with an armored outfit. “[Plotnick] had the reputation of eating young ‘shavetails’ for breakfast, and every man in the unit was fond of this sawed-off, gray-haired little man with the salty voice and the tough manner,” Boyle wrote.

  Shorty had hated the enemy long before he’d arrived for his first tour in France. “‘Leave me tell you,’ he said with a deeply serious look on his gnomelike face, ‘I’ll get those Germans!’” Boyle wrote.

  Plotnick got more than his share of enemy soldiers—but one afternoon, as Boyle related, Shorty’s luck ran out.

  “We’d just taken a town,” said his company commander, Captain James Kuhns of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, “and Shorty and two other men heard there still was a German machine-gun nest giving us trouble in one of the buildings.

  “It wasn’t the concern of the operations sergeant to knock it out, but you couldn’t keep Shorty from going after those Germans. He was armed only with a pistol, but the two men with him had carbines. Shorty told them, ‘O.K, I’ll go out and draw their fire, and then you boys give it to them.’ He edged out, but the Germans caught him with the first burst and mowed him down. He died before he knew he had located and wiped out that machine-gun nest. That was like Shorty—sticking his own neck out.”55

  Shorty Plotnick, Boyle made clear, stuck his neck out for a lot of guys. “‘He was the best damn soldier in this division,’ said Major Nathan M. Quinn of Spencer, Massachusetts.

  “Shorty would rather have had that sentence over his grave than his own nameplate,” Boyle wrote, “because when he was alive he proudly thought so, too. He knew he was the ‘best damned soldier’ in any division. He wouldn’t have been Shorty if he didn’t think so.”56

  His encomium to the immigrant who died fighting the Germans for a second time is one of the pieces that earned Hal a Pulitzer Prize.

  TWO DAYS AFTER JOE LIEBLING saw Norm Cota shoo the two skittish GIs back toward the front lines, Liebling glimpsed the general in action again. By Tuesday, July 18, the Blue and Gray men, along with regiments from four other divisions, had fought their way from the periphery of St.-Lô into the village itself. Cota was directing the Twenty-ninth’s advance when Liebling saw the general grab at his cane-carrying arm: A German sniper had wounded him. “He shifted his stick to his other hand and stepped inside a gaping shop front while a medic put a dressing on the damaged member,” Liebling wrote.

  “Cota came out in time to see the correspondents departing as rapidly as possible,” Liebling wrote, “and my last memory of that victory is of the laughing general waving his stick and yelling, ‘Don’t leave me now, boys! Don’t leave me now!’ The wound hurt worse later. When I next saw the General, he said, ‘I was standing out there to give the boys confidence, but it didn’t work out right.’”57

  Cota’s wound notwithstanding, a lot of GIs got an injection of confidence that day. July 18, 1944, proved to be pivotal in the fight to break out of Normandy’s logjam. It was the day that St.-Lô finally fell. The strategic village was at the confluence of arterial roads from the south and east, through which the Germans might have been able to pour reserves to smother a breakthrough farther west. “Its capture,” Liebling wrote, “was like a tourniquet on an elbow, permitting an operation on the forearm.”58

  The New Yorker writer used it as a metaphor, but hundreds of GIs outside St.-Lô were wearing real tourniquets. Liebling was almost one of them. On the morning of July 18, he remembered diving facedown onto St.-Lô’s cobblestones to avoid sniper fire. He looked up “to steal a glance at the man lying in front of [me], noticing that his eyes were closed, like those of a girl waiting to be kissed.”59

  St.-Lô had frustrated Bradley and the American command since D-Day plus twelve when, Hal Boyle wrote, “the first surge from the beachhead spent itself.”60 North and west of St.-Lô a series of sloping ridges posed thorny obstacles to the Americans. The two longest slopes were both Nazi artillery strongholds that Allied intelligence officials branded Hill 192 and Hill 122 in reference to the number of meters their summits were above sea level.

  In the previous three weeks, U.S. artillerymen had “pulverized” Hill 192 with a thousand tons of explosives, Boyle wrote, then watched as tactical fighter-bombers “knocked another 20 feet off the crest of the hill.” Hill 192, Lieutenant Colonel Edward W. Wood told Boyle, “was a tough nut to crack with snipers and pillboxes operating almost every foot of the way.” It gave the Wehrmacht a commanding view of the entire Norman battlefield, from the Vire River on the west to Caumont in the east, including every conceivable approach to St.-Lô.

  Boyle was with the Second Division under General Walter M. Robertson on July 12 when, after eleven hours of miserable combat, the Americans finally uprooted enemy artillerymen from the crest of Hill 192. A ridge less than two hundred meters high had cost that division alone 1,253 casualties.61 “Victorious American doughboys,” Boyle wrote that night, “slept the sleep of exhaustion today in enemy positions by the bodies of German dead from whom they wrested control of this height.”

  The Germans had brought up so many mortars that GIs on the outskirts of St.-Lô were reduced to advancing on their bellies. St.-Lô had become “a miniature Stalingrad,” Boyle remarked, a place with frantic Nazis retreating behind heaps of broken stone and mortar.62

  Hill 122, a couple of kilometers closer to the village, had to be secured so that the Blue and Gray Division’s sustained attack from the northeast could be carried out without harassment from close-in artillery. The still-green 35th Division under General Paul Baade drew the assignment. They fought their way up the slope with such élan that after the war Andy Rooney compared their bloody sacrifice to the Marine conquest of Tarawa eight months before. “We could not get the Germans off [Hill 122], and a lot of American boys lost their lives trying to climb it in the face of withering enemy fire from bunkers at its top,” Rooney wrote.63 The battle for Hill 122 went on, unflinching, day after day, before its occupiers finally crumbled at dawn on July 18, falling back into town to continue the fight.

  “Correspondents—among them me—who entered [St.-Lô] shortly after the troops saw little,” Joe Liebling wrote, “because they either hugged what they hoped would prove to be the lee of a wall or lay flat on their faces during their sojourn. The Germans, having been thrown out of the city, were reacting like a drunk who has been chucked out of a saloon and then throws a beer bottle through the window.”64

  July 18 was also the day that, some forty miles east, Bernard Montgomery launched Operation Goodwood, Monty’s much-heralded, and eventually much-maligned, offensive to draw enemy attention to his front and away from Omar Bradley and the Americans.

  It was also the day that Bradley put the finishing touches on his overhauled plan to break out of the hedgerows, dubbed Operation Cobra. Cobra was designed, as boxing maven Liebling appreciated, as the right cross that followed Goodwood’s left jab. From the outset of Overlord planning in London months before, the Allied strategy had called for Montgomery and his Brits and Canadians to keep the enemy occupied in eastern Normandy while, from the west, Bradley and the Americans wheeled south and east, rockin
g Rommel and Rundstedt back on their heels. But the slow going in the hedgerows had delayed the Allies’ one-two combination.

  HAVING STARTED JULY 18 AT Mme. Hamel’s farm, Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were all within relative arm’s reach. How Liebling and Boyle hitched a ride to the St.-Lô front that morning is not known. Rooney, however, recalls having escorted Liebling’s Barneville restaurant coconspirator Bob Casey of the Chicago Daily News. Rooney held Casey, then the grand old man of Normandy correspondents, in awe; Casey was a longtime international affairs columnist who had written some twenty books about foreign policy and his travels abroad.

  Once Casey and Rooney got within a mile or two of St.-Lô, artillery shells began thumping. When Rooney spotted Blue and Gray infantrymen joining men from the Big Red One and the Second and the Fourth Divisions and all locking horns with the Wehrmacht’s Third Parachute Division, he couldn’t wait to witness the action. “A fight between those [units] was the Super Bowl,” Rooney recalled a half century later.65

  Rooney steered the jeep past inert bodies and burned-out vehicles. By now the noise of the battle was alarmingly close. Rooney and Casey could see plumes of smoke shooting up from buildings smouldering in St.-Lô.

  “I’m just going to walk down a ways,” Rooney told his companion.

  Casey laughed nervously, shook his head, and told Rooney to tell him all about it when he got back—if he got back.

  “It was the mindless sort of thing you wouldn’t do if you considered the risk, but I was interested, curious, and somehow oblivious to danger,” Rooney remembered. “The thought of being hit never entered my mind.”66

  Dodging mortar rounds, Rooney jogged down a road that took him past several small farms. He encountered a group of GI’s who had been left behind to secure the just-seized area. Most of the men were wearing the scarlet red patch of the 29th’s 116th Infantry Regiment, which had been fighting virtually nonstop for days.

  On July 17, one of the 116th’s battalion commanders, Major Thomas D. Howie, a native South Carolinian who had been an instructor at the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, had led a predawn raid that knocked a hole in the German line at the base of Hill 122 and succeeded in rescuing an American unit that had gotten cut off from the rest of the division.67

  Now, twenty-four hours later, Howie and the rest of the 29th’s staff officers were meeting with the big boss, Major General Charles Gerhardt. Gerhardt had a soft spot for Rooney, mainly because the gridiron buff had remembered that Gerhardt once quarterbacked West Point to a dramatic upset over Notre Dame.

  Gerhardt could be a “tough old buzzard,” Rooney wrote; reporters loved him because he was sassy and contrarian. Liebling recalled that Gerhardt once ordered the divisional band to play “Roll Out the Barrel” as his men departed a solemn ceremony in a cemetery. When a chaplain protested, Gerhardt explained that after paying homage to the fallen by playing funereal hymns, it was time to change the mood. Another time a reporter had asked why the Allies were so preoccupied with the capture of St.-Lô. “It’s a catchy name,” Gerhardt replied. “[St.-Lô] fitted well in headlines, and the newspaper took to using it every day. After that, it became a morale factor, so we had to capture it.”68

  The morale-conscious Gerhardt was as fond of Major Howie as the men of the 116th. “After helping to relieve pressure on this [now-rescued] unit,” Boyle wrote, “[Howie] then boldly launched another attack toward the hill which dominated the northeast entrance to the city.” Howie drove his men hard, but he had a gentle heart; his guys loved him because he was never more than a step or two behind. Boyle, who’d been tailing the 116th on and off for a couple of weeks, called Howie a “tremendous soldier.”69

  At sunup on July 18, Gerhardt asked Howie for another miracle: to take St.-Lô that day “if you have to expend the whole battalion,” Rooney recalled.70 The major’s last words to Gerhardt and the other officers at the 29th’s briefing were “See you in St.-Lô.”

  It was Howie’s concern for the welfare of his troops that cost him his life, Boyle wrote after the war. “Before hitting the ditch during a sudden German mortar barrage, [Howie] paused to see that his men were safe—and death took him, standing.” Fragments from a shell that landed a few yards away pierced Howie’s neck and chest. He died on the spot. Word was immediately relayed to Gerhardt.

  The general ordered Captain Thomas D. Neal of Richmond, Virginia, to take an ambulance and drive Howie’s body through the battered village. When Boyle first wrote about the episode, censors ironically allowed Boyle to mention Neal’s name but not Howie’s, pending notification of next of kin, or Gerhardt’s, for fear that the Germans would seek vengeance on the 29th Division.

  Boyle recalled years later that “Tom’s body, still clad in full combat gear, was placed in an ambulance in the task force column.” The AP columnist followed the grimy cortège as it navigated pockmarked roads, “past stricken trees whose limbs hung down like broken arms, past meadows where no birds sang, but bullets did. Churning clouds of yellow enveloped the vehicles, sweat grimed the faces of firing soldiers.”

  A sudden enemy artillery bombardment disrupted the column as it passed a cemetery. The ambulance was pressed into duty to transport wounded infantrymen. “Tom, lying on a stretcher, was transferred to a leading jeep,” Boyle remembered. “The column trundled on. It smashed through the last ring of German defenders and entered the fallen city, a sea of flaming ruins.”71

  By now, Rooney, too, had caught up with the rolling elegy. “When I finally got down into the center of St.-Lô,” Rooney recalled, “there was a knot of men by the side of the main church in town.” Given the smoke and debris, Rooney couldn’t tell, but it was the Église Notre-Dame, considered one of Normandy’s Gothic masterpieces.

  “The whole side of it had been knocked out and the rubble was piled high where it had fallen,” Rooney wrote. “I hurried over and saw 10 or 15 soldiers lifting a flag-draped body laid out on a wooden door up the head of stone and mortar that been the side of the church. It would be accurate to say that St.-Lô had been leveled and the mound of stone and brick was the highest point in town. The soldiers were placing the body at the very top of the heap.”72

  In death, Boyle wrote,” [Howie’s] comrades had won for the major the last goal of his life—he was the ‘first into St.-Lô.’”

  Twenty-four hours later, as Rooney, Liebling, and Boyle accompanied the mop-up infantry squads into St.-Lô, Howie’s flag-draped body was still there, “lying in state on an altar of rubble,” Boyle wrote. “All the troops who went through St.-Lô that day, and there were many, heard of the young major and paid him tribute. Some doffed their helmets as they passed. Some knelt.”73

  SEVERAL MONTHS LATER ROONEY CAME back to Paris from the front and was surprised to receive orders to report to Lieutenant Colonel Ensley M. Llewellyn’s office in the Herald Tribune building. Llewellyn was the officer in charge of the Stars and Stripes. After Sergeant Rooney saluted, he was confused when the boss handed him a small box and a certificate.

  It was a Bronze Star, awarded per the official proclamation because Rooney had “penetrated to the heart of St.-Lô under small arms and open range artillery fire and gathered, without regard to his own safety, first hand descriptive materials for a complete and accurate story.”

  Rooney didn’t know quite what to do. “I was simultaneously pleased and embarrassed. I knew that there were a lot of heroes in the war, and I knew I wasn’t one of them.” He thanked the colonel and shook his hand “as if he’d given me a diploma,” Rooney remembered.74

  Andy never mentioned it to any of his colleagues. Nor did Llewellyn.

  In 1949, Boyle visited St.-Lô and its rebuilt place of worship and admired the monument the French had erected to commemorate Tom Howie’s sacrifice. “The French people still deck the monument with flowers, and remember him in prayers,” Boyle wrote.75

  LIEBLING HURRIED BACK TO VOUILLY on the evening of July 18, eager to share the momentous news with Mme. Hamel and beat Age
nce Française correspondent André Rabache to the better calvados.

  When Liebling arrived, Madame was sitting in her kitchen, entertaining several neighboring farmers. “‘Madame,’ I said proudly, for I wanted her to think well of the American Army, ‘I come from St.-Lô. The city is ours! Now we can advance!’

  “‘I felicitate you, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘I am happy to hear it.’”

  One of the neighbors also congratulated Liebling, mistakenly referring to him as commandant instead of correspondant (the French, for whatever reason, had trouble picturing journalists embedded with the military). But then the neighbor anxiously inquired about what would happen to the pigs.

  “The pigs?” Liebling asked. He was still thinking about Cota, wrapping his wound while directing traffic.

  “‘Yes, mon Commandant, the young pigs who depend for their nourishment on the leftovers of the mess,’” the neighbor said.

  Liebling, mystified, could only respond that perhaps the enemy would dig in south of St.-Lô—and that the press camp would stay rooted in Vouilly.

  Mme. Hamel, turning a “disdainful eye” in her friend’s direction, came to the rescue by volunteering that the pigs were already “well launched” and would do fine without the leftover haute cuisine. To celebrate St.-Lô’s liberation, she poured calvados all around.76

  The battle for St.-Lô had cost some forty thousand American casualties.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BREAKOUT—MERCI! MERCI! MERCI!

  All the Germans in the area were trying to get out at once. The chief danger we faced was being trampled to death by escaping supermen while we slept.

  —A. J. LIEBLING, AUGUST 1944

  THE ROAD BACK TO PARIS

  The culinary delights being served nightly at Mme. Hamel’s press camp achieved such renown that chatter about them reached Omar Bradley’s rolling command post. Bradley’s mobile CP full of maps and troop disposition charts was, at that moment, stationed not far from Vouilly. A four-foot-high mahogany railing would soon cleave Bradley’s expanded trailer, separating its lower half from its slightly elevated upper. The general’s acolytes dubbed the wooden partition the Communion Rail.1