Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  The Herald Tribune, with considerable fanfare, announced that Bigart would become a featured correspondent in the Pacific. Ironically, the one reporter best equipped to capture the military and geographic import of the Allied sweep across northern France never got the chance. Bigart’s best work was devoted to covering World War II’s forgotten campaign, the Allies’ rudderless advance up the Italian peninsula. No dysfunctional conflict ever had a better Boswell.

  AS THEIR FRIEND BIGART WAS pushing his way up the Rhône Valley, Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were watching Omar Bradley administer a coup de grâce of his own. On Monday evening, August 21, 1944, they hustled to see Bradley conduct another press briefing. It was convened near the general’s headquarters in Laval, an hour’s drive or so from the First Army’s press camp at Bagnoles de l’Orne. Bradley had chosen Laval to park his trailer because it overlapped the zones of the First and Third Armies, both of which he commanded.

  Since Bradley’s briefing would not end until after dark and the correspondents didn’t want to be caught traveling on a blacked-out road with speeding supply trucks, Liebling’s colleagues entrusted him with booking them hotel rooms along the way to Laval. Naturally, Joe booked the coziest setup for himself and his PRO driver (and fellow babe-hound), Lieutenant Roy Wilder, Jr., a colorful Carolinian known as “Chitlin.”69 Joe and Chitlin’s hotel was in Ernée, a charming spot that had been spared artillery damage. Ernée sported a brasserie that might, the boys figured, hold certain attractions later in the evening.

  The Third Army’s correspondents would be on their own that night, which was fine by Liebling. A feisty and not always friendly competition had sprung up between reporters covering the First and Third. Rooney, Boyle, and Liebling resented the way the Third’s correspondents, fanned by Old Blood and Guts’ PROs, embellished Patton’s exploits. To hear the Third guys tell it, Liebling joked, Patton’s men were already on the outskirts of Vienna.70

  SHAEF’s original plan was to bypass Paris. The capital had no intrinsic military value; planners, moreover, were worried that seizing Paris would overstrain Allied supply lines. But Free French leaders persuaded Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery that Paris and its inhabitants had to be protected from Nazi carnage.71 It turned out that the German occupation of Paris, although harsh, was less malevolent than in other places.

  “[Laval] was the most cheerful briefing I had yet attended,” Liebling wrote, acknowledging that Bradley had proven prescient at his Vouilly conference thirty days before. Bradley began by smiling and volunteering that he knew they all wanted to find out when the Allies would be getting to Paris. The most important objective was to destroy von Kluge’s army; the next was to secure Paris in as intact a condition as possible. Bradley’s deportment stood in cool contrast to Mark Clark’s grandstanding in Rome ten weeks earlier.

  Pointing to a map, Bradley said the First Army’s Fourth and 28th Divisions would hopefully force the German garrison to pull out or surrender without much of a fight. “A Third Army correspondent said that General Patton had bet him five dollars the Third would be in Paris before the First,” Liebling recalled, “and General Bradley remarked that he might just take it into his head to tell General Patton to go someplace else.” The Missourian assured reporters that, in any case, no Allied army would be making a rush for Paris.

  Bradley had what psychiatrists call a “therapeutic personality,” Liebling wrote. As the correspondents stood in line to pay their respects, Liebling remembered a colleague—it sounds like Hal Boyle—saying, “General, I’m always glad to see you, because you always make me feel good.”72

  Secure in the knowledge that the City of Light would not be freed anytime soon, Liebling and Wilder drove back to Ernée, hoping a couple of belles femmes would be frequenting the café. Sure enough there were; Joe and Roy spent much of that night and most of the next day pursuing them. Alas, they struck out—or so, years later, Liebling claimed.

  When Liebling and Wilder returned to the press camp in Bagnoles de l’Orne on Wednesday afternoon, August 23, they were flabbergasted. The place was almost deserted: Rooney, Boyle—everyone—was gone. Only a couple of PROs were left—and they were hurriedly packing up equipment.

  “Where is everyone?” Liebling asked. His heart sank when he learned there’d been an unexpected breakthrough; all the correspondents were, at that moment, gunning toward Paris. The new press headquarters would be at the Hôtel Scribe, near the Place de l’Opéra.

  Liebling was seething: The liberation of Paris had been his obsession for more than four years—and now, because of his own sybaritic stupidity, he was going to miss it! Wilder later confided in Andy Rooney that Liebling was so upset he actually shed tears.73

  Joe ran upstairs and stuffed his things into a sleeping bag, then groveled for a ride. Wilder was in the doghouse; Roy and his jeep had already been reassigned. But Liebling was in luck: First Lieutenant Jack Roach, a former press association reporter from Philadelphia, was available. Roach had somehow wangled a Chevrolet sedan that had belonged to a German officer. If they hurried, Liebling promised Roach, they could still catch the best of the celebration—even if Paris had already been freed.

  So the two of them set out for La Ville Lumière, hoping they could get there that night if the roads stayed clear. After a couple of hours it hit them that they hadn’t brought any food. But as they passed a stretch with a lot of military traffic, they discovered that an Army Quartermaster Corps outfit was handing out K rations in an inspired way. A black soldier stood atop a moving two-and-a-half-ton supply truck that would pull alongside jeeps and vehicles and dump boxes of food into the backseat. With visions of Paris dancing in his head, Liebling pretended the K rations were caviar and smoked partridges; he savored every morsel.

  As they passed through a village crowded with excited townspeople, Liebling recognized African-American Stars and Stripes reporter Allan Morrison trying to flag a ride. Morrison had endeared himself to Liebling two weeks earlier when both reporters were covering the siege at St.-Malo. The German commander was “loaded,” Morrison told Liebling and the other press guys. “When he finishes his last bottle of sauce, they’ll run up a white flag.” They did.

  Liebling and Roach relayed to Morrison the word they’d heard in Bagnoles de l’Orne: that Paris was on the verge of collapse and that the other First Army reporters were probably partying in the city by now. Morrison, who’d been near the front for days, was immediately skeptical. Roach responded by saying that the rumor had to be true, otherwise he and Liebling would have run into their buddies on the road someplace. Morrison remained unconvinced.

  “Maybe some prison-camp paper in Germany is going to have a hell of a staff,” Morrison cracked.

  Liebling closed his eyes and hearkened back to a boyhood fantasy of being Confederate cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart, galloping toward a raid behind enemy lines. But the porky Liebling was no cavalryman and the Chevy sedan was hardly a horse.

  Soon they noticed that they were alone on the road—suspiciously alone.

  “If we keep on going, we’re bound to meet someone,” Liebling volunteered.

  “That is exactly what I am afraid of,” replied Morrison.

  Not long after, they ran into two GIs in a jeep, who told them they could find the Seventh Armored Division camped for the night off a side road up ahead. There they learned from the tankmen at the spearhead of the American assault that they were now as close to the front lines as anyone. Ironically, they found out later, they were actually ahead of the other First Army correspondents, whose caravan had taken a wrong turn that afternoon.

  Liebling, Morrison, and Roach stayed near the leading edge of the American advance the next day, Thursday, August 24, as it ground ever closer to Paris. They spent that night in the village of Montlhéry, sixteen miles southwest of the capital. It was on the road to Orléans, the same thoroughfare that Liebling and tens of thousands of others had taken in shame four years earlier, going in the opposite direction.74

>   Too wound up to sleep, Liebling was awake before dawn. It would be the greatest day of his life; he wanted to relish every moment. At the top of the tallest hill in Montlhéry stood the Tower, an ancient lookout that had been built on a medieval moat. With ruthless efficiency, the Nazis had slapped a listening post on top of the relic. The Germans were gone, but their eyesore remained.

  Liebling climbed the hill and was squinting toward Paris when he heard an American voice shout, “Good morning!” A Signal Corps officer was standing on the Tower’s platform, gesturing for Liebling to come up. “Neither voice (Philadelphia, perhaps) nor lieutenant (five ten, pale under a black stubble, serious mouth) was distinctive, but he was a man I won’t forget,” Leibling wrote.

  The lieutenant told Liebling that he’d been up in the Tower since the day before, tasked with monitoring enemy movements. There hadn’t been movements to monitor, at least none that the lieutenant could see. But he had enjoyed looking at Paris through his powerful Signal Corps binoculars.

  “God, I just can’t take my eyes off it!” the officer gushed. “Come over here and I’ll show it to you.” Offering Liebling his field glasses, he guided Joe over to the platform’s northern edge.

  “Paris was there, all right—there in the same place I had left it four years, two months, and fifteen days before,” Liebling wrote.

  The lieutenant unrolled a map, but proudly informed Liebling that he didn’t need to refer to it anymore. He now knew Paris’ iconic landmarks by heart.

  “Now, over here,” he went on, pointing to the Dome of the Invalides, “is the Opera House. Once you get that clear, you have your orientation.

  “And over there,” he continued, pointing now to the Opéra, “is the City Hall—you know, the Chamber of Deputies. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

  The lieutenant got the Eiffel Tower right. “I suppose you know what that beautiful white church is up on the hill?” he next said, swiveling my elbow into line with Sacré-Coeur. I was going to name it, but something warned me not to, so I shook my head.

  “Why, it’s Notre Dame, of course!” he said, and I was glad that I had kept my mouth shut.

  “I can’t wait to get down there,” the lieutenant said. “It’s the most beautiful city in the world.”

  I thanked him from the bottom of my heart. I hope he made it.75

  CHAPTER 12

  RESCUING THE KITTEN—PARIS REDEEMED

  I had never been to Paris, and I was unaware that I was about to experience three of the most eventful days of an eventful life. It’s better if you don’t know you’re going to be in on history.

  —ANDY ROONEY, 1995

  MY WAR

  As the C-47 taxied out to the runway, the noise from its propellers was so piercing that Walter Cronkite stuffed scraps of tissue in his ears. By midsummer ’44, Cronkite had squeezed aboard almost every kind of Allied warplane. In the weeks following D-Day, the wannabe pilot had even finangled space on two transports that shuttled VIPs from London to the Ninth Air Force’s makeshift air base at Grandcamp.

  But until Wednesday afternoon, August 16, 1944, Cronkite had never sat shoulder to shoulder among grease-faced paratroopers, helmet and parachute pack securely strapped, ready to pounce into the Third Reich. Cronkite’s letter to Betsy the night before had hinted that he was going to be part of a pivotal operation.

  “I am writing tonight from an airbase somewhere in England,” his missive began, spoofing the furtive dateline required by censors.

  Soon I will be leaving on an assignment that is back down the ole groove, something of the type of February, 1943, that you will remember. Well, not exactly like that, so don’t try to gather too much from that feeble bit of information. By the time you get this letter, you probably will know all about it. At any rate, I hope so.

  What I want to say though, darling, is that there is considerable danger involved in this job. I don’t feel that I am unnecessarily worrying you by reporting that, inasmuch as it will all be over before you ever get this note.1

  By alluding to “assignment” (from his signature lede), “back down the ole groove” (from his letter eighteen months earlier describing editor Harrison Salisbury’s typewriter-side cheerleading), and “February, 1943” (the date of the Writing 69th’s famous foray), Cronkite was employing code, telling Betsy that he was about to go wheels up on another dramatic mission along the lines of the Wilhelmshaven raid, his original “assignment to hell.” But by volunteering that it was “not exactly like” his previous duty, he hoped that she would deduce that he was going on a paratroop jump.

  The only other American newspaperman assigned to the big mission, Cronkite told Betsy, was AP’s Bill Boni. That week, Boni and Cronkite had both been given minimal training in airborne warfare. Neither had made an actual drop, but at least they had jumped off a platform, practiced landing and rolling, gotten reasonably comfortable with the bulky equipment, and learned how to gather a grounded chute.

  When UP boss Virgil Pinkley, after being tipped off by SHAEF officials in early August, offered the airborne slot to Cronkite, Walter leapt. “As perhaps you have been able to read between the lines of my too infrequent letters, I have been in terrible doldrums since D-Day, with everyone else in action and my sitting by on the SHAEF desk,” Cronkite told Betsy. “Now at last, I am getting into the show and with a splurge that may prove bigger than any correspondent has had since the original landing.”2

  It’s clear from his letter that covering the bombing war from the ground in England hadn’t cut it. In Cronkite’s mind, he hadn’t made enough of a “splurge” since his days as a charter member of the Writing 69th. His reputation as a war correspondent needed a jump start—or so he was convinced. The parachute jump into France would be a career maker, the story of a lifetime; after being cooped up for so long, Cronkite couldn’t wait.

  Knowing how worried Betsy would be, he tried to buoy her spirits by joking about how the USAAF guys wouldn’t let him or Boni buy any rounds of drinks—which was fine by Cronkite, since he’d forgotten to grab English currency as he left London and only had a couple hundred dollars’ worth of U.S. traveler’s checks.

  “I’ll write again, honey, just as soon as I can,” his V-mail ended. Knowing it might be the last time they’d ever share sweet nothings, Cronkite closed with: “Meantime, darling, remember that I love you very, very much.… Forever, Walter.”3

  CRONKITE COULDN’T TELL HIS WIFE, but he was on the cusp of becoming one of the first Allied correspondents to enter still-occupied Paris. Boni and Cronkite had been invited to cover a remarkable operation that the Allied command had code-named Transfigure. SHAEF’s strategy was to throw a dagger into the backside of retreating Germans, divide and disrupt the enemy line of defense, and accelerate the capture of the French capital.

  On August 2, Supreme Commander Eisenhower had authorized the creation of the First Allied Airborne Army, which at that point combined elements of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, and the British 52nd (Lowland) Division, a specially trained infantry outfit that could be rushed into battle via transports once an airstrip had been captured.

  “Transfigure” was apt because it described the First Allied Airborne’s mission: to fundamentally alter the battle configuration in northern France. If Transfigure caught the enemy napping, planners hoped it might not only hasten the liberation of Paris, but also end the war in Europe that much quicker.

  The operation’s immediate objective was an enemy air base near the Forêt de Rambouillet, some thirty miles west of Paris. The 101st and the Polish First would parachute and glider in en masse, overpower the relative handful of German troops defending the airstrip, and pave the way for the Lowlanders to be flown in, some on transports, some on gliders. Together, the Allied troops would create a fissure pointing toward the River Seine that might cause the entire German line to disintegrate.

  The “go” order for Trans
figure officially came down at 0845 on August 16.4 At one point the C-47 carrying Cronkite taxied out to the runway—where it and many more like it sat for four long hours before the mission was postponed for a day. It was pushed back another day on August 17, yet another twenty-four hours on August 18, and finally scrubbed for good late on Saturday August 19.

  Cronkite was crushed, but Eisenhower and his brain trust had good reason to forgo Transfigure. By the time the paratroop planes were revving on August 16, the First and Third Armies were moving eastward so quickly that they’d almost reached the western edge of the Rambouillet Forest. The 12th Army Group was picking up such huge chunks of territory that Hal Boyle told Frances that its camp followers were suffering “travel fatigue.”5

  When Dreux fell on August 19, Transfigure was rendered moot; the village had been one of the First Allied’s paratroop targets. The German line was collapsing so quickly that the airborne operation was no longer needed to foist extra pressure on Paris’ defenders. After nearly a week of on-again, off-again drama, the men of the First Allied Airborne were told to stand down and await further orders: The Supreme Command still had big plans for them.

  On Sunday, August 20, Cronkite commiserated with Betsy that the mission’s cancellation was “one of the bitterest disappointments of my life.” Her husband still couldn’t share details, but if the operation had come off, he “probably would have been the first American correspondent into Paris, although I might have had to share the honor with Bill Boni of AP,” he wrote.6

  Cronkite didn’t bother to mask his dejection. “So here I am back at the same old stand in the same old slough of despond which has been growing deeper and blacker ever since D-Day left me standing on the platform holding the sack.” He was worried that his “doldrums” were hampering his productivity—and that Pinkley had grown disenchanted. On top of that, he was worried about the cost of an eventual move to Amsterdam; he fretted that he and Betsy wouldn’t be able to afford life in the Netherlands.