AT THE SAME TIME, ON Liebling’s fourth day with the div arty, Joe happened upon a farmhouse where a dead soldier from a Schutzstaffel (SS) division had been left behind—a sure sign that the Germans had bolted in a hurry, because they normally took care of their dead. By then Liebling had seen more than his share of decaying bodies—and he reveled in playing de Maupassant. The wannabe coroner-detective went in for a postmortem.
There was a typewritten form in one of the dead man’s pockets that the soldier had filled out but apparently had not given his commander. It requested emergency leave to go home. Under “reason,” the man had written, “Bombing deaths in family—urgent telegram from wife.”35
Jumping from one abandoned French home to another gave Liebling more investigative opportunities. The retreating Germans, having ripped though every drawer and cupboard looking for food and liquor, left behind chaos. A family’s history—photo albums, personal mementoes, church and school records—would be strewn all over the house by the time Liebling’s div arty got there.
Most reporters would have ignored the clutter to trade slugs of calvados with the artillerymen or jump into a cribbage game. Not Liebling. With his affection for French culture and custom, he was able to piece together the lives of these uprooted families.
One family’s young son had been a prisoner of war since the spring of ’40, Liebling deduced after juxtaposing a 1915 baptismal notice with a 1940 leaflet describing how French families could communicate with loved ones now imprisoned in Germany. It was Liebling at his best, taking mundane details and making them magnificent.
UNLIKE A LOT OF JOURNALIST-HISTORIANS, Liebling never skewered World War II generals, even after the war when he could have settled scores with arrogant commanders who’d snubbed him. Joe found pointless the contentious debate, which continues to this day, over the action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the Allied high command in early to mid-August 1944. In Liebling’s view, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley did the best job they could defeating an odious enemy; engaging in after-the-fact recrimination served no purpose. Andy Rooney, for his part, was resentful of “scholars” who rewrite history by arguing that the Allies squandered a big chance to end the war then and there.
Rooney, Liebling, and Boyle were eyewitnesses to the byzantine events that occurred in northern France that month. All three began August out west in Brittany as American armored units pushed toward the ports of Brest and St.-Malo, then moved south and east as General Bradley hustled his troops to exploit new opportunities.
By August 7, Boyle was with General Troy Middleton’s U.S. Eighth Corps as it attacked the German sea supply base at St.-Malo. The next day, Boyle went up in a Piper Cub to survey the situation. “From this sky perch besieged St.-Malo can be seen billowing black and white smoke, stabbed with flashes of flame,” he wrote. “American tanks and infantry advance behind a rolling artillery barrage and smash in street battles toward the port’s fortress citadel, where the Nazis have barricaded themselves in a Stalingrad-like stand.” In his two years of covering the war, it was one of the most spectacular sights he’d seen, Boyle told readers.36
In St.-Malo, Boyle was subjected to the same frustrating German defiance that Private Donald McKay had encountered in Rennes the week before: an obdurate German refusal to give up. Boyle and other reporters soon came to call the commander of the German holdouts, Andreas von Aulock, the Mad Colonel. Aulock, whom enemy prisoners described as a pathetic drunk, refused to listen to reason, despite repeated pleas. On August 10 Boyle filed a piece about how the beleaguered defenders of St.-Malo eventually had no choice but to shoot their officers so they could surrender and avoid annihilation.37
Prisoners told Boyle that they’d hoped the German counterattack at Mortain, launched on the nights of August 6 and 7 some forty miles east, would come to their rescue. It didn’t come anywhere close, of course: Mortain was lunacy.38 Had Hitler ordered a strategic retreat to the Seine, it would have given the battered Wehrmacht a natural barrier beyond which to regroup and make a creditable stand. Instead, der Führer sacked Field Marshal Rundstedt, who in Hitler’s eyes had committed treason by advocating a withdrawal, and replaced him with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, a more pliable sycophant. Erwin Rommel had been hospitalized on July 17 after being severely wounded by an Allied fighter-bomber, so von Kluge was operating without the two chief architects of the German defenses in Normandy. Hans Speidel, Rommel’s chief deputy, was as appalled by Hitler’s reckless strategy as von Rundstedt had been.
A cabal of German officers that included, at least peripherally, Speidel and Rommel attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20 at Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”), der Führer’s command outpost in East Prussia. Hitler barely survived the bomb blast, which killed four and wounded two dozen others.
Two weeks later, Hitler’s stooge von Kluge was told to attack westward toward Avranches through the slim corridor between the See and Sélune Rivers. Hitler’s stated objective was to drive a wedge between the Allied armies in Normandy and Brittany. He called it Operation Lüttich, after the Belgian battle where the Kaiser’s forces had scored an early and decisive victory in the Great War.
The historic talisman didn’t work. There was so much radio traffic between Berlin and von Kluge that the Ultra intercept teams at Bletchley Park and in northern France were able to predict the time and location of the German assault. Omar Bradley had the better part of three days to prepare a riposte, even confiding to Chet Hansen that the desperate Hitler had become the Allies’ best ally.
Hitler sent the remnants of three and a half Panzer units, plus other underequipped outfits, against the U.S. 30th Division, the same GIs who two weeks earlier had been twice bombed by their own planes. The Germans fought gamely, ripping a hole in the 30th’s line that ultimately proved too small to exploit. Bradley checkmated every move, hurling reinforcements and armaments into the fight that von Kluge didn’t have. Patton’s Third Army entered the Mortain fray, capturing Le Mans to the south on August 8, although its heroics weren’t publicly acknowledged until midmonth.
At noon on August 9, the omnipresent Ninth Air Force struck again, its Jabos raining mayhem on von Kluge’s mechanized units. The RAF’s rocket-firing Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers proved invaluable in the Mortain campaign, too, destroying dozens of tanks running out in the open. By August 13, the Germans had reversed course and were limping away.39
Suddenly Bradley was presented with the stuff of every commander’s dreams: a panicked enemy on the run. The best-case scenario he’d broached three weeks earlier with the First Army press corps had actually come to pass: There was now a distinct prospect of linking up with the Canadians and Brits on the north and east and trapping the retreating Germans in a pocket. The meeting point for the entrapment was not far from where Bradley had anticipated, near the villages of Falaise and Argentan.
It would take sharp coordination between Patton’s Third, wheeling north and east from Le Mans, with the British Second and the Canadian First, slugging south and west, having at last broken free from the outskirts of Caen. With Patton rapidly closing the gap, Bradley at that moment issued his most contentious order of the war, a move that, decades later, still draws the ire of many historians. The 12th Army Group boss called a halt to Patton’s advance. Patton had, with his usual hubris, gone farther north than Bradley had directed, encroaching on territory that had been given to Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group. Bradley’s other ostensible reason for reining in the Third Army was that it had already outrun its supply lines. But Bradley surely feared a reprise of the friendly-fire debacle along the Périers–St.-Lô road two weeks earlier. The notorious “gap” was not closed until August 19—day six of the German retreat—when Canadian and Polish troops finally moved into the village of Falaise and the Americans captured Dreux.40 Somewhere between twenty thousand and forty thousand German soldiers—estimates vary wildly—slipped through the pocket.
Andy Rooney was advancing with the 90th Infa
ntry Division and arrived near Dreux in time to see firsthand the dismemberment of the German army. The Jabos, P-51 Mustangs, Typhoons, and Allied artillerymen did a murderously effective job in strafing the fleeing enemy.
“I’ve tried to compare what I’ve read in the history books to what I saw and there’s no comparison,” Rooney wrote after the war. “What do you historians want, anyway? In an area thirty miles long and twenty miles wide, 30,000 Germans were killed and 92,000 were taken prisoner. A lot of them were from the elite Fifth and Seventh Panzer Divisions. Is that a big failure?”41
Rooney’s enemy casualty figures may be a bit inflated, but his view of Allied operations around Falaise in mid-August 1944 wasn’t: a better name for “gap” would have been “trap,” he always maintained. By the time Rooney got there, watching from nearby hills, the pocket had been stitched. When, under the cloak of darkness on August 20, several thousand Germans emerged from the Forêt de Gouffern near Chambois and tried to skulk out of the valley, Allied artillery decimated them. “It was a shooting gallery,” Rooney remembered. “I can’t believe anything in the war, including Stalingrad, was any worse for German troops.” When the carnage finally ended, Rooney pointed out, the better part of the three dozen–plus enemy divisions in northern France had been “chopped up and sent into disorganized flight.”42
On August 13 Hal Boyle was with the Fifth Division of Patton’s Third Army as they pushed through Argentan on their way to Chartres. “From a wheat field overlooking Argentan,” Boyle wrote, “I could see the vanguard of the great Nazi retreat try to stab its way through a bottleneck twelve miles wide between this town and the city of Falaise.” Boyle called the Allied envelopment “a steel vise.” Every enemy escape route was under heavy artillery fire, he wrote.
Through field glasses, Boyle watched an artillery unit “beat to pieces” a German convoy. An Army captain named Albert G. Kelly from San Jose, California, was in constant radio contact with the P-51s circling overhead. As soon as Kelly received word via walkie-talkie that German tanks were trying to break through at the head of the valley near Carrouges, he got on the radio and dispatched the Mustangs. As the P-51s dove on the enemy tanks, the artillery and tank guys cheered.43
On the road toward the ancient city of Chartres, Patton’s forward units found themselves mobbed by ecstatic villagers who “bombarded the grinning tankmen with roses and besieged them with wine,” Boyle wrote. When they reached the walled city three days later, there was trepidation that its magnificent Gothic cathedral had been seriously damaged. Through his binoculars, however, Boyle could see the cathedral’s tower looming over the city’s rubble. The GIs sent into Chartres to mop up the remaining enemy snipers were told to use only small arms and aim their fire away from the church.
The cathedral had sustained only superficial wounds—some bullet scrapes, a few windows broken, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed, Boyle noted. A priest and the head of the seminary took Boyle on a tour, proudly pointing out that at the start of the war, they’d had the foresight to hide the cathedral’s precious stained glass.44
LIEBLING, WHO ALSO WAS CLOSE to the action, always thought the controversy about the Falaise Gap was much ado about nothing. In mid-August ’44, he was still attached to the First Division artillery unit that was jumping almost daily to different reconnaissance posts. Among the correspondents in northern France at the time, the enemy’s slipping away at Falaise wasn’t considered a big deal. Only in the postmortem following the Battle of the Bulge, when it surfaced that some of the German soldiers steamrolling through the Ardennes had slipped Falaise’s noose, did the issue become a cause célèbre. Omar Bradley inflamed the debate by somewhat second-guessing himself in his memoirs, intimating that perhaps he had been too cautious in the wake of the rout at Mortain. The three scribes on the spot—Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney—would have none of it. Nor does contemporary historian John McManus, who correctly calls Falaise a great, if flawed, victory.45
IN AUGUST BOYLE, AND TO a lesser degree Rooney, yo-yoed between covering Patton’s Third Army and Courtney Hodges’ First. Liebling, though, stayed exclusively with the First and its Big Red One; most nights Joe spent at the First Army press camp, wherever it happened to be. After the breakout, the camp moved from Vouilly about twenty miles southeast, to a muddy apple orchard outside Canisy. The boys were roughing it again: The palmy days of Mme. Hamel’s bottomless spigot were over; the mess tent reverted to pedestrian Army chow.
Hodges’ guys were moving so quickly that within a few days the press camp was uprooted to a shabby mansion farther south, on the periphery of Forêt de St. Sever, not far from Vire. By now the traveling carnival and their PRO roustabouts—Roy Wilder, Jr., and Jack Roach among them—had it down to a science: the tents were pitched behind the house, the wireless trucks and equipment were positioned out front, and the censors and reporters set up shop “amid the shards of elegance” of the formerly opulent château, as Leibling put it.
Liebling and his colleagues spent their days in hot pursuit of the best stories about the battered Germans and the brave troops chasing them. In the evenings, as they banged away on their typewriters, they had to carefully choose chairs; many in the St. Sever house would disintegrate if plopped in too quickly. Vire had been one of Liebling’s favorite Norman haunts as a young man. Now he had to avert his eyes when driving through the town: It had been virtually annihilated. It broke Liebling’s gluttonous heart that most of Vire’s restaurants had been bombed out of business, since he’d been bragging about Vire’s brasseries for weeks.
Within five days, however, Liebling and company were off to the First Army’s next press camp, at a down-at-the-heels lake resort at Bagnoles de l’Orne. There, they actually got to stay indoors with something approximating running water. It was still Normandy, but steadily, irrevocably, Joe Liebling’s road was leading back to Paris.46
ON AUGUST 15, 1944, AS Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were fixated on events around Falaise, their old friend Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune had finally set foot in France, albeit five hundred miles south. Bigart was covering the Allies’ clandestine assault on the Îles d’Hyères islands, part of the long-debated and long-delayed Operation Dragoon—the invasion of southern France.
Churchill had never been enamored of attacking the Riviera; earlier that summer, in fact, the prime minister had pleaded with Roosevelt and Marshall to scrub the operation, claiming a second offensive in France was no longer needed to deliver a knockout blow. The prime minister for good reason was overruled: Dragoon hastened the German demise and liberated a swath of the occupied Reich that had been terrorized by the Gestapo.
Once Rome had fallen in early June, Bigart stayed in the Eternal City for several weeks, filing stories about war-ravaged Italy’s struggles to recover from two decades of Mussolini. At one point Bigart was covering the interim Italian parliament’s effort to “abolish” Fascism. When a government aide ran up to inform Bigart and other journalists that there had been a delay in the proceedings, Homer turned to his colleagues and cracked that the Italians probably needed more time “to p-p-put in the l-l-loopholes.”47 Thirteen months in the Mediterranean Theater hadn’t dulled his mordant wit.
Nor had it dulled Bigart’s appreciation for culture and antiquity. In a piece filed a week after Rome was redeemed, he pointed out that the Nazis may have been respectful toward the capital’s art, but had senselessly ransacked museums a few miles south. Ironically, the Lake Nemi relics of the Emperor Caligula had been salvaged by Mussolini in 1929 but savaged by Il Duce’s partners fifteen years later. Before retreating north, German soldiers torched galleries, lopped off the heads of ancient statuary, and confiscated or desecrated some of the most revered paintings in Italian history. When Bigart visited on June 11, all that was left of Lake Nemi’s national museum was “a handful of ashes and some bronze nails.”48
Three days later, Bigart told the story of two American air gunners who were among the fifteen Allied prisoners of war “enjo
ying asylum” inside the Vatican. Sergeants Anthony Brodniak of New Jersey and Bernard Scalisi of New Orleans had been on a bomber shot down over Viterbo in April. They managed to elude capture for a week as they snuck forty miles south to Rome. Finding the sanctuary of the Vatican was the dream of every shot-down flier and escaped POW in the Mediterranean; hundreds tried, but few got to experience it. Brodniak and Scalisi scaled the sacred venue’s twelve-foot-high wall and were safeguarded by Vatican officials.
Bigart was told by Archbishop Testa that during the course of the war nineteen Allied soldiers had succeeded in making it inside the Vatican: eleven Britons, two Canadians, two Poles, one Australian, one New Zealander—and Scalisi and Brodniak. “They had a good time here,” Testa told Bigart, smiling. “They walked in the Vatican gardens and got rations of cigarettes.”49
On July 11, art aficionado Bigart was back, this time with a piece about how the Nazis had absconded with two paintings by Titian as well as Raphael’s Madonna of the Divine Love. In all, a dozen canvases worth more than $3 million had been stolen from galleries from Naples to Monte Cassino. Members of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, perhaps acting on orders from their art-loving (and thoroughly corrupt) namesake, were suspected of being the culprits. Bigart’s source on art thievery was Major Ernest T. DeWald, who in peacetime served as a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University. DeWald helped direct the Allied Control Commission on antiquities and monuments, a big job given the depth of Nazi thieving. There could be no doubt, DeWald told Bigart, “that the paintings were stolen by persons who knew just what they wanted.” The price tag on the purloined treasures would be added to the Germans’ postwar reparations bill, Bigart informed readers.50
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