Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  To escape the V-1s, he had moved to a more expensive flat, which was forcing him to further drain their bank account, “and that is too damned depressing for words,” he wrote. None of his clothes fit anymore; he’d lost so much weight he looked “like hell.” His old Bostonian wingtips were so beat-up that soon his “corns would be showing.”

  All those eighteen-hour days, all those frontline communiqués he had to turn around on a dime, all those god-awful train rides to cover dead and dying airmen had taken their toll on the twenty-seven-year-old Walter Cronkite. He was so down he was taking out his frustrations on his wardrobe and wallet and in letters to his adoring wife.

  It may have been classic sublimation, but to Cronkite, there was no respite in sight. As if his letter hadn’t been gloomy enough, he saw fit to inform Betsy that it would be “many, many months perhaps stretching beyond a year” before, realistically, they could see one another.

  “Maybe I won’t mail this,” he meekly volunteered in the last line. “If I do, forgive me.”7

  He did and she did. Their marriage lasted another sixty-one years.

  Yet it would be another month, and several more bitterly false starts, before Walter Cronkite and the men of the First Allied Airborne Army would be called into action. When they were, the least of their concerns was beat-up shoes.

  AT THE MOMENT CRONKITE WAS bemoaning his fate, his friend Hal Boyle was hurtling toward the very places into which Walter was supposed to be parachuting: Dreux and Rambouillet. Boyle’s jeep had to move to the side of the road to accommodate the Red Ball Express, the vaunted transportation supply chain that kept the tanks and trucks of the 12th Army Group rolling.

  More than three quarters of the twenty-three thousand drivers and quartermasters in the Red Ball Express, named after railroad slang for a fast freight, were African American. Many of the six thousand trucks in the Express had yanked their governors so they could motor at higher speeds. Every day and night for weeks, the Express rolled virtually nonstop on blacked-out roads, the driver and the GI riding shotgun switching places literally on the move so that precious time was saved.8

  As enemy lines crumbled, Express drivers began rounding up German stragglers. Small groups of Aryan supermen had been hiding “in caves and woods like the old Quantrill raiders in Missouri and Kansas after the Civil War,” Boyle wrote in a piece that ran in the Baltimore Afro-American. Under the cloak of darkness the holdouts would try to escape along roadways—only to be corralled by their racial “inferiors,” who would jump out of their trucks, M1 carbines in hand. Red Ball Express trucks would often arrive at the front with a mixed load of supplies and prisoners.

  “Our platoon has taken about 70 prisoners while bringing up food and ammunition to the front,” one member of the Quartermaster Corps, Sergeant Edwin Kelly of Richmond, Virginia, told Boyle, “but to tell you the truth, we’d rather not take them prisoners—we’d rather fight until we can get it over with.”9

  All five correspondents wrote pieces heralding the contributions of black soldiers to the war effort, but it’s a testament to the deep-seated racism of the day that none of them—not even the outspoken Liebling—published commentaries during the war that directly deplored the second-class treatment of African-American soldiers. Only after the war did Liebling and the others condemn the U.S. for its hypocrisy on racial matters.

  BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE enemy’s racial hatred, however, was a different matter. On August 19, in the village of St.-Mars-le-Brière near Le Mans, Boyle encountered a group of some 220 Russian female prisoners of war. Ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-four, they had been taken captive in Leningrad and forced into slave labor. At gunpoint, the women were often forced to work fifteen hours a day fixing bomb-damaged railroad tracks.

  They were confined to a filthy camp surrounded by barbed wire. “Only one Russian woman—a doctor—accepted the German invitation to retreat with them,” Boyle revealed.10 The other women stayed inside the camp to be freed by their Allies. Upon greeting the Americans, many of the women asked to be sent to frontline units so they could fight their Nazi tormentors, Boyle noted.

  The next day, Boyle heard the legend of a local Maquis leader who’d blown up many of the tracks that the Russian women had been forced to repair. He was named, curiously enough, Patrick O’Neill. The O’Neills had left Ireland two centuries earlier and settled on farmland southwest of Paris. The bizarre juxtaposition gave Boyle a chance to flex his brogue and pay homage to his ancestry.

  “Sure and wouldn’t you be knowing,” Boyle’s amusing lede went, “that the leader of 5,000 French Maquis who have been playing hob with the Germans for two years has a name as Irish as Paddy’s pig. The Gallic Robin Hood goes by the Emerald Isle moniker of Patrick O’Neill and he doesn’t care if the Germans know it.”

  A graduate of St. Cyr, the French West Point, O’Neill had been wounded twice during the Nazi blitzkrieg in ’40 but never captured. In ’41 and ’42, O’Neill was living quietly along the River Loire with his wife and three young children. Appalled at how the Gestapo was enslaving young Frenchmen, O’Neill joined the Resistance in midwar; before long, he headed what was believed to be the largest Maquis chapter in France.

  O’Neill’s men gave him, Boyle wrote, “strict obedience.” Three hundred of O’Neill’s guerrillas were killed by the Germans, many of them executed in cold blood. When the Gestapo uncovered a house in the woods that was being used as a hospital for O’Neill’s men, they burned it to the ground, incinerating the seventeen wounded Resistance fighters inside.

  “We do not forget these things,” O’Neill told Boyle. O’Neill and his men fought with such fearlessness that they’d earned the respect of American GIs, Boyle said. The next day, Boyle relayed a story he’d heard from Corporal Don Cass of Waterloo, Iowa. Cass and his squad of men had some Germans cornered in an Orléans house and were cautiously moving in when six members of O’Neill’s band pulled up in a car.

  “As soon as they learned that there were Germans in the house, they ran right up and went into the building,” Cass told Boyle. “A few seconds later they came out with the Germans collared. You should have seen the expressions on the faces of some of our boys at that way of operating.”11

  Wherever O’Neill went in those glorious days, Boyle wrote, he was cheered by awed and grateful French citizens.

  BOYLE AND ROONEY HEARD A lot of villagers cheering as, on August 22, with Liebling and Wilder still on their spree in Ernée, the First Army press corps headed toward its interim camp at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur in the village of Rambouillet. Monk Dickson from General Bradley’s staff spent much of the next two-plus days briefing the press guys on the Allied progress toward Paris.12 It was just a matter of time before the capital fell, Dickson said, although reporters soon picked up on the political machinations transpiring with the French and the British. Montgomery’s troops were almost as well positioned as Bradley’s to strike at Paris—and Monty desperately wanted the credit. After much back-and-forth, with bruised feelings on all sides, it was determined that the honor of being the first Allied troops into Paris would fall to French brigadier general Jacques-Philippe Leclerc and his Second Armored Division.

  The rapprochement with Monty and Leclerc wasn’t the only politicking going on outside Paris. Andy Rooney and other First Army reporters resented the way that certain international correspondents and Third Army arrivistes barged into the Grand Veneur and began encroaching on the First’s turf. By day two in Rambouillet, tensions were running high as reporters jockeyed for scraps of information. Things got so crowded at the hotel that latecomers were forced to spread out sleeping bags on the dining room’s straw floor.

  It was in that modest eatery, Rooney recalled, where “one of the great unchronicled skirmishes of World War II took place.”13 One of the combatants was an American literary icon—and the moment forever soured Rooney’s view of him.

  Ernest Hemingway had, by that point, degenerated into self-caricature. Decked out in a C
anadian tanker’s jacket and the tricolored armband of the FFI, often sporting a .45 ostentatiously strapped to his side, Hemingway was running what amounted to his own private war. The novelist had arrived in Rambouillet well ahead of the press contingent. To accommodate his party pals and the FFI vigilantes he supposedly was “commanding,” Papa had booked ten rooms at the Grand Veneur.

  Apparently not all of those rooms were occupied on the evening of August 23 when Bruce Grant of the Chicago Sun arrived. When his request for a room was turned down, Grant, who stood six foot four and, as a onetime city editor, took guff from nobody, went looking for Hemingway. He found the writer loudly holding court at the hotel bar for a rapt audience of hero worshipers.

  Grant informed Hemingway that it was rude to hoard all those rooms when guys were being forced to bunk on the dining room floor. Hemingway, who was, to no one’s shock, already in his cups, took exception. Voices got louder; Hemingway jumped off his barstool, fists coiled, to confront Grant. AP photographer Harry Harris, no bigger than a flyweight, stepped between Grant and Hemingway as Rooney and other reporters gathered ’round, hoping for adolescent fisticuffs. Even Ernie Pyle popped off the dining room floor to take in the action.

  Although being restrained by Harris, Hemingway still wanted a piece of Grant. The writer stormed out the lace-curtained French doors that led to the Grand Veneur’s courtyard. Ten seconds or so passed before Hemingway suddenly reemerged, bellowing at Grant, “Well, are you coming out and fight?” Cooler heads prevailed. Reporters went back to figuring out how they were going to crack Paris.

  “You should never meet one of your heroes,” Rooney related. “I had greatly admired Hemingway when I read A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises but after that night in Rambouillet I laugh whenever I think of him.”14

  The vainglorious Hemingway would continue to give Rooney and friends plenty to chuckle about in the days to come.

  THE EVENING BEFORE THE SILLINESS with Hemingway and Grant, sad news had arrived at Rambouillet. Tom Treanor of the Los Angeles Times had been killed when his jeep collided with an American tank near Mantes-Gassicourt.15 It was the sort of accident that happened all the time, though it was rarely reported.

  Tall and handsome, Treanor had been a popular member of the MTO and ETO press corps, Hal Boyle observed, due in no small measure to his willingness to stick his neck out—both in combat and around fussbudget censors and PROs. Like Bigart, Treanor had done so much homework he had become something of a European cultural savant. After the war, Treanor planned to make the Continent his beat—and bring his wife and children over to share the experience.16

  Treanor was Bigart’s accomplice at Monte Cipolla, Boyle’s buddy at Monte Cassino, and Rooney’s and Liebling’s pal at St.-Lô. After all those incredibly close scrapes, he was done in by a highway mishap. His two companions in the jeep both survived with minor injuries. After the accident, Treanor, still conscious and unaware of the severity of his injuries, kept telling doctors to hurry so he could finish his story.17

  TREANOR WAS A GREAT FRIEND of “Beachhead Don” Whitehead, so it’s a double tragedy that he didn’t live long enough to see what Boyle called “one of the war’s outstanding news beats.” Boyle and the rest of the press contingent were milling outside the Grand Veneur early Thursday afternoon, August 24. A dust-covered jeep pulled up and Whitehead’s lanky exterior stiffly climbed out. Whitehead’s face, Boyle wrote, was “streaked with perspiration as he ambled unhurriedly toward the hotel’s lounge, which had been converted into a press room.”

  “Where you been, Don?” asked a correspondent sitting on a bench.

  “Paris,” Whitehead replied without fanfare.

  Whitehead was immediately surrounded by reporters, all peppering him with questions. How? Where? How far into the city? Why’d you leave?

  He returned a couple of parries, then waved off his questioners and sat down at a typewriter. Forty-five minutes later, he emerged with a 1,600-word account of his remarkable experience.

  “It was the first eyewitness story of one of the most dramatic days of the war,” Boyle wrote. When Whitehead’s story, having navigated censors, reached the U.S. the following afternoon, it caused a sensation, with bells ringing on wire service machines all over the country.

  “Whitehead got his beat through a combination of forethought, good luck and drive,” Boyle revealed. Several days before, Whitehead had arranged for a French-speaking driver, a jeep, and a small reconnaissance plane. His driver was an Evanston, Illinois, sergeant named Adrian Pinsince, who was fluent in French and, Whitehead said, the “best scrounger I ever met in the Army”—high praise indeed.18

  Instead of joining the flood of correspondents trying to enter Paris from the west, Whitehead on August 23 chose a different path, hooking up southwest of town with a French armored column that was probing north on the Grand National highway in the tiny village of Bures-sur-Yvette. Whitehead had been tipped off by one of Pinsince’s French sources that it was Brigadier General Leclerc’s outfit. The French continued pushing toward the city that afternoon and evening but were stopped by enemy shelling at Longjumeau.

  Whitehead and Pinsince spent the night in a farmhouse but were up before dawn to jump back in with Leclerc’s men. While the column was stalled near a garage in Longjumeau, Pinsince overheard a mechanic say that he’d just gotten off a telephone call with a friend in Paris. It had not occurred to Whitehead that the capital’s telephone system might still be functioning. Surely the Germans could not have been that sloppy, could they have?

  Whitehead told Pinsince to pull over and find a phone. With the translator’s help, he placed a call to “Anjou 74-60,” the American Embassy in Paris. One “Mrs. Blanchard,” who identified herself as the embassy’s housekeeper, answered.

  “Who is calling?” she inquired in English. When Whitehead told her he was an American reporter trailing the French Second Armored Division, she uttered, “Mon Dieu! Where are you?”

  Firefights were raging throughout the city between the FFI and the remaining German soldiers, Mrs. Blanchard told Whitehead. Four days earlier, a group of Germans had attacked the embassy, shooting a guard and ransacking the place. Soon after, she and the rest of the staff had barricaded the embassy; there had been no further assaults.

  “Mon Dieu!” Mrs. Blanchard repeated. “I hope the Americans move in tomorrow. I am carrying an American flag with me wherever I go. We aren’t allowed to fly the flag now, but I hope the Americans will let me help hoist the flag the first time it is flown.”19

  After bidding au revoir to the housekeeper, Whitehead and Pinsince rejoined Leclerc’s column. As they reached Porte d’Orléans on the near side of the Seine, they were held up by a mined road and antitank fire. Once the column resumed, a prickly French officer invoked de Gaulle and Leclerc in informing Whitehead that no noncombatant would be permitted to enter the city. Whitehead pondered the situation for a few moments, switched places with Pinsince, and, in full view of the martinet, jammed the accelerator.

  At precisely nine fifty-seven a.m., Whitehead told Boyle, the jeep passed through the gates of Paris. They were promptly mobbed by hysterical Parisians, who crammed every lane despite the threat of snipers.

  “The streets were like a combined Mardi Gras, Fourth of July celebration, American Legion convention, and New Year’s Eve in Times Square, all packed into one,” Whitehead wrote later that day.20 Whitehead swung the jeep behind one of Leclerc’s tanks, hoping it would provide better cover. But at one point the gunfire got so intense that he and Pinsince were forced to jump out and hide behind a small wooden shed. After fifteen minutes, with bullets still zinging all around, they decided that the shed was no safer than the road. Many of the snipers, Whitehead learned, were German soldiers disguised in civilian clothing or members of the Milice, the despised Vichyite militia. Men and women wearing the Tricolor were going from house to house, pointing to rooftops and windows, smoking them out.21

  Whitehead stayed inside the city limi
ts for about an hour before reversing course and heading to Rambouillet. But he was there long enough to claim a “Paris” dateline—and return to the Grand Veneur a conquering hero.

  Walter Cronkite wasn’t the only American correspondent who had aspired to be the “first one into Paris.” There had been hundreds groveling for the honor—and several who later claimed it. But only Don Whitehead had truly earned it.

  LIKE HIS FRIEND BOYLE, WHITEHEAD may have done some foreshadowing from time to time, anticipating certain events; most journalists did. But Boyle and Whitehead had the integrity not to issue a story until being certain that its assertions jibed with the facts on the ground.

  Not so correspondent Charles Collingwood and CBS Radio, which accidentally went live with a Collingwood story on August 24 that described in detail Paris’ liberation, with explicit accounts of jubilant crowds celebrating outside the magnificent landmarks that the dashing Murrow protégé knew almost as well as Liebling. Collingwood had marked his story “hold for release.” But there was a mix-up at CBS-London; in his zeal to get the jump on NBC and the BBC, anchor Richard C. Hottelet read Collingwood’s bulletin on the air—more than a half day before Collingwood had set foot in Paris and well before it could be declared “liberated.”22

  In an episode that marred Murrow’s legacy in London, the phony story was aired repeatedly before CBS issued an embarrassed correction. Murrow always defended Collingwood, but it was slipshod journalism at best—and outright fabrication at worst. It inevitably raised questions about the veracity of other Murrow Boys’ stories from across the conflict.

  If “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” as he was known, was chagrined, it was short-lived. The next day, the date of the real liberation of Paris, Collingwood was spotted by fellow correspondents drinking with Ernest Hemingway at an outdoor café. Surrounded by a bevy of adoring females, Papa and the Bonnie Prince were toasting the FFI—and, likely, themselves.