Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  Things seemed to be calming down when there was a second burst of fire, triggering another manic scramble. With that, “every French tank in the square, several hundred I suppose, turned their guns toward the Crillon and started blasting away at its facade,” Rooney recalled.44

  Hal Boyle, also hugging the ground in the Place de la Concorde, wrote that day that “thousands of men of the French forces of the interior were pouring rifle, machine gun, and pistol fire at the bordering rooftops.”45 The firing quickly spread, Boyle noted, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Hôtel de Ville to Notre Dame.

  Rooney watched a dozen French commandoes race toward the Crillon to clean out the snipers. People stayed under cover for another ten or fifteen minutes before the procession resumed. Several spectators were killed; dozens more were wounded. “Paris today is like a big league Tombstone, Ariz., in the palmiest days of that wild west town,” Boyle wrote on August 26.46

  DESPITE MORE THAN OCCASIONAL FLYING bullets, the parading in Paris didn’t stop. Nor did the partying. There wasn’t much coffee or food in Paris that week, but there seemed to be limitless supplies, Boyle remarked, of champagne, cognac, wine, and chocolate truffles.47 On August 29, the smooched-up and generally hungover men of the Fourth and 28th Divisions marched with all the other liberating troops down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Since the GIs—almost to a man—would soon be whisked back to the front after their four-day divertissement, they relished every step. Again, millions of Parisians gathered to give thanks.

  Boyle positioned himself not far from the Arc de Triomphe so he could take in the panorama of the Americans marching down the world’s most famous boulevard. Looking up and down the parade route, he couldn’t help but notice that many of the “men” wearing FFI colors were barely in their teens. Much of the Resistance had been carried out by children, he wrote, with good reason: Many of their parents had been killed in the line of duty or executed by the Gestapo.

  On August 27, the bodies of fifty French policemen and members of the FFI were exhumed from mass graves in three places around the city. Days before they had been murdered by assassination squads of the Waffen SS. A Frenchman who’d been forced to serve on the burial detail but managed to escape told Boyle that his group had been ordered at gunpoint to dig their own burial pits, then made to dance around until exhausted while the SS troops, for entertainment, fired at their legs. When the dancers collapsed, the storm troopers put pistols to their heads and pulled the triggers.48

  Boyle’s column the day before had been on a lighter topic: the things that American soldiers would never forget “the first time they saw Paris.” The capital had “lived up to every man’s expectation as the most beautiful city in the world, and its daughters, too, were the most beautiful in France, especially after Normandy’s muscled sisters, many of whom are patterned after their own native, bulky hedgerows.” Boyle spotted one white-haired French lady walking Paris’ streets with a small stepladder. “Whenever she came across a parked jeep she set up the ladder, climbed up to the third step and kissed the boys sitting in the back seat,” he wrote.49

  There’s a good chance Boyle was insinuated among adoring women at the August 29 parade when the police motorcycle bore down on him. He probably never saw it coming. Boyle may well have had his back turned, jotting notes, when a gendarme on a motorbike lost control and plowed into him. Boyle was tossed high in the air and landed squarely on his back. Badly bruised, he was unable to get up for several minutes. An ambulance was summoned. Before being taken to the hospital, he managed to grind out a story by hand and get it to a colleague. It turned out he had torn several ligaments in his back, although X-rays probing for a more serious spinal injury proved negative.

  He was hospitalized for three days and took it easy for another week or so after that—the first real break he’d had since arriving in England before D-Day. The correspondent who had barely escaped drowning off Casablanca and eluded bombs, shells, and bullets in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and halfway across France was almost done in by an accident far flukier than the one that had killed his friend Tom Treanor.

  U.S. CORRESPONDENTS FELL INTO A serendipitous cash windfall on August 26—perhaps the luckiest break any group of reporters have gotten anywhere at any time. Charles Wertenbaker, a correspondent with Time, had been tasked by the home office to inspect the Paris bureau that the magazine’s employees had abruptly abandoned in June 1940. The Nazis had stormed into the capital so quickly that Time’s staff had not had the chance to safeguard $100,000 in American currency that had been stuffed into a concealed office safe. Back in ’40, Henry Luce’s bean counters in New York had claimed it as an insurance loss.

  Wertenbaker managed to get into the old Time office on the first day of the liberation. He assumed that the Gestapo, which had ransacked almost every business in Paris, had uncovered the safe and everything in it. To his astonishment, the safe was intact and the one hundred grand was sitting there, undisturbed.

  He cabled his bosses and asked what to do with the money. “Dispose of as you will—insurance company already paid off,” Wertenbaker was counseled the next day.50

  Word spread like wildfire. Wertenbaker started handing out hundred-dollar bills to reporter buddies as if they were lollipops.

  Captain Bunny Rigg, Liebling’s D-Day hero, the skipper of LCI(L)-88, managed to score a two-day pass and bummed a ride from England to France on a C-47. Rigg found Liebling at the Scribe just as news about Wertenbaker’s boon was hitting; together they hustled over to Wertenbaker’s room. Despite Liebling’s well-documented disdain for Time founder Luce’s brand of politics and journalism, Wertenbaker bankrolled them. In truth, as Liebling later pointed out, any American in Paris in August and September 1944 didn’t need a lot of dough to have a good time. It was almost impossible in those heady days, Liebling remembered, for an American to pay for a drink or a bottle of wine. Ernie Pyle had been right: There was virtually no need for any American to pay a woman for sexual favors. Joe and Bunny used their wad to treat some ballerinas to a big night on the town.

  Not long after Liebling and Rigg collected their cash, Ernest Hemingway barged into Wertenbaker’s room, demanding a big stake for him and his FFI posse. Wertenbaker, with a straight face, informed Hemingway that he’d gotten bum information; there was no such cash. A red-faced Papa stormed out, muttering well-chosen epithets.

  Hemingway’s grandstanding had finally caught up to him. “I wouldn’t give that son-of-a-bitch the sweat off my balls,” Wertenbaker snarled.51

  Papa wasn’t staying at the plebeian Scribe. He and his Resistance pals repeated their Grand Veneur ruse at the Ritz. FFI guerrillas were literally standing guard at the Ritz on August 25 when photographer Robert Capa walked up. “Papa took good hotel,” one of them told Capa. “Plenty of stuff in cellar. You go up quick.”52

  TIME’S OFFICE WASN’T THE ONLY place that the Gestapo had inexplicably overlooked. The New York Herald Tribune’s old printing press at 21 rue de Berri was also in surprisingly good shape, thanks to a Frenchwoman who had hidden its vital parts from the Germans. When her old American colleagues arrived, she presented her gift with what Cronkite heard was a coquettish swish of the skirt. It took only a week to get the old Trib facility up and running; the Stars and Stripes soon began publishing the bulk of its ETO infantry editions there.

  Jimmy Cannon, the Gotham sports columnist who wrote in the same guttural cadence as his hero, Damon Runyon, had been with the Stars and Stripes for a year when he arrived in Paris late that summer. Cannon, Rooney remembered, immediately began reprising his Runyon bit in Paris, collecting quotes from GIs that sounded suspiciously like the railbirds at Belmont Park. Rooney enjoyed Cannon’s style but Bud Hutton, the no-nonsense editor, abhorred it and distrusted its practitioner.

  Cannon came to Paris with a clear-cut objective: to hustle a transplanted New York showgirl named Gay Orloff. Gay was the sort of “prototypical dumb blonde,” Rooney remembered, “[that] Jimmy would have invented for his c
olumn back in New York.”53 Orloff had been Lucky Luciano’s squeeze before the notorious gangster was sent up the river to Sing Sing. To endear himself to Miss Orloff, Cannon pretended that he’d been up to the big house to visit Luciano, claiming that the mobster had turned his jail cell into a veritable shrine: Her pictures were everywhere, including the ceiling, so Lucky could gaze up at her as he drifted off to sleep. Then, to make himself a more attractive catch, Cannon assured Orloff that Luciano had big plans for their lives together when Lucky got out of the joint—twenty-five years hence. “Gay was not the kind of girl,” Rooney dryly observed, “who looked forward to the day she’d be starting her life at age sixty.”54

  Cannon’s reverse psychology may have been working on Orloff until it was revealed that New York governor Thomas Dewey had pardoned Luciano. The racketeer buster was sending his old foe to Italy, hoping that Lucky’s Mafia connections might help free Allied prisoners still being held in the mountains north of Rome. But to let bygones be bygones, the governor had given Luciano the okay to stop in Paris to visit his old friend Gay Orloff. Cannon immediately packed his duffel bag and returned to the front, where his life, Rooney commented, would be less endangered.55

  MACHINE GUNS AND ARTILLERY WERE still rumbling after dark on August 25 when Joe Liebling headed out from the Scribe to celebrate the greatest day of his life. The firing “seemed part of the summer night, like thunder,” Liebling wrote. “There was no menace in the sound, and if it were not for plaques on the walls of houses in various parts of Paris that now commemorate the deaths of Frenchmen on that very night, I would find it difficult to believe there was real combat on the evening of my stroll.”56

  He walked down to the Boulevard du Montparnasse where, a few hours before, he’d watched von Choltitz surrender. Liebling was looking for a favorite restaurant haunt, the Closerie des Lilas, that was little more than a hole-in-the-wall. The place was blacked out, but Liebling peered through a window and could see a blue night light glowing. He banged on the door and shouted, en français: “It’s an old customer! An old customer! An American! An American!” After a dozen bleats, the door opened a crack; the patron smiled and shook Liebling’s hand. There were no customers, only the man’s family and a waitress.

  Hoping it would enhance his prospects of being fed, Liebling began reminiscing about the wonderful evenings he had enjoyed at the Closerie des Lilas in the old days. It worked. The waitress brought out a steaming terrine of potato soup. As Liebling dug in, the man’s wife apologetically said there would “only” be an omelet and a salad to follow. “The patronne, it was plain, had never sampled a K-ration,” Liebling wrote.

  As they listened in the distance to the last throes of the Nazi subjugation of Paris, the man brought out a bottle of Bordeaux and said with a fiendish grin: “A lot of good it will do them.”57

  The Bordeaux made everyone wax sentimental. Soon the proprietor was telling Liebling that in the darkest days of the Occupation, he had squirreled away a flask of Pernod and a bottle of scotch to break out when the Germans were finally given the boot. He gave Liebling his choice. Joe went with the Black and White, knowing that he could drink more whiskey than a sweet liqueur.

  They toasted Lafayette and de Gaulle, the FFI, and every Tommy and GI who’d set foot in France. Liebling drank enough to begin lamenting lost love. “A chagrin of love never forgets itself,” the waitress mused. “You must not make bile about it.”

  When they drained the scotch it was time to say bonne nuit. Liebling wrote that he “took an effusive leave and went out in the dark street. The bars that I had passed earlier were still busy, but I had no inclination to enter. Any further drinking that night would have been a letdown.”58

  Joe Liebling’s road to Paris had finally, magnificently, ended.

  Seven days later he got to fulfill his dream, submitting to the New Yorker a letter from liberated Paris.

  “For the first time in my life and probably the last,” his wondrous lede went, “I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy.”59

  CHAPTER 13

  GASPING COUGH—CRASHING INTO HOLLAND

  Not the landing itself but the twelve days of almost constant shelling and bombing afterward really frightened me. That I plainly admit and if I can help it I have no intention of ever getting back within range of artillery again.

  —WALTER CRONKITE, OCTOBER 3, 1944

  LETTER TO BETSY

  Once the lead C-47 cut its towrope, the glider carrying Walter Cronkite, Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, and a dozen other 101st Airborne staff officers began bucking over Holland’s flatlands. Everywhere Cronkite looked he could see white-striped gliders—dozens of them—poised to crash-land in the fields just west of the Meuse River outside the Dutch village of Zon. Suddenly the sky blackened with antiaircraft bursts; as his glider plummeted, Cronkite could hear artillery fire.

  September 17, 1944, was a perfect afternoon for an airborne invasion: the wind was calm and the skies were overcast enough to make it tougher on enemy gunners. CBS’ Edward R. Murrow was also flying with American paratroopers—not in a glider, but in a C-47 paratroop transport whose pilot would return Murrow to London. To make his report crackle for listeners, Murrow had brought along a tape recorder.

  “You can probably hear the snap as they check the lashings on the static line,” Murrow’s report went. “Tracers are coming up! … We’re throttling back! … Every man is out now! I can see their chutes floating gracefully down. Near a windmill next to a church. They’re like nothing so much, as I said a minute ago, as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade.”1

  Murrow’s future CBS colleague Cronkite, at that moment in Dutch airspace a few miles south, wasn’t conjuring up similes. Cronkite had somehow been under the impression that glider flight would be soothing. Sure, the landing might be rough; from the air, he had seen remnants of gliders splintered all over Normandy. But to be snuffed out while gliding might be a good way to go to heaven, he recalled thinking, “no roaring engine, just a nice silent glide into eternity.”2

  It was all a misnomer: the last thing gliders did was “glide.” Canvas-skinned American Waco gliders were held together by flimsy aluminum tubing. “The canvas cover beat against the aluminum,” the eighty-year-old Cronkite remembered in 1996, “and it was like being inside the drum at a Grateful Dead concert.”3

  Every bump while on a glider felt like a violent jolt. Cold air rushed in; the noise was so deafening that troopers had to communicate through shouts and gestures. Once freed from the towrope, glider pilots knew they were dead ducks to German gunners. They wanted to get on the ground pronto, so they pointed the nose downward and plunged, hitting the turf almost as vertically as horizontally. Many gliders crumpled on impact; pilots would deliberately crash the nose into the ground to get the troops out quicker. “If you ever have to go to war, don’t go by glider,” Cronkite the daredevil volunteered later.4

  The Cronkite-McAuliffe craft thudded into a mucky potato field, flipping over and breaking up as piles of dirt came pouring in. Helmets came flying off; men grabbed the first ones they saw in the manic scramble to get away from artillery fire. If McAuliffe yelled his soon-to-be-trademark “Nuts!” Cronkite missed it.

  A pair of American gliders had, seconds before, collided in midair; as Cronkite got his bearings, the sky was raining guns and human beings. Cronkite hurried toward what he’d been told in a premission briefing was the rallying point—a drainage ditch on the periphery of the landing zone. After a few moments, he glanced behind and discovered a string of enlisted men from other gliders following him.

  One of them shouted: “Hey, Lieutenant, are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” I shouted back that I wasn’t a lieutenant; I was a war correspondent. With a full GI vocabulary of unrepeatable words he advised me, rather strongly, that I was wearing a helmet with an officer’s big white stripe down its back. It was the only chance I had to lead troops in the whole war. I didn’t do badly
. The drainage ditch was that way.5

  Enemy artillery fire along that stretch of the Meuse and its Wilhelmina Canal didn’t last long. Within minutes of “Cronkite’s platoon” rendezvousing next to the gully, a squadron of P-51s bore down on the German gun positions. Within Cronkite’s eyesight the Mustangs dove on four enemy batteries, knocking them out.

  Just as he had three months earlier over the Channel and Normandy, Cronkite anxiously scanned the skies. But at least at that point in Holland, even with enemy air bases practically next door, there were no German planes in the air.

  CRONKITE HAD BEEN ON THE periphery of ground combat in Morocco and Normandy but never in the thick of it. Until September 16, the day before the Holland mission, he had steeled himself to arrive on the Continent via parachute. After the disappointment of Operation Transfigure, Cronkite and the First Allied Airborne Army had on eight separate occasions gone on alert, he told Betsy. Several times, Cronkite had scrambled to an East Anglia airfield, reacquainting himself with his equipment and rehearsing the drop and roll, only to have the mission scrubbed at the last instant because Allied ground troops were moving too rapidly. The First Allied Airborne’s landing targets kept on getting swallowed up by onrushing Tommies and GIs.6

  But the Holland campaign was different. Christened Operation Market Garden, it was the brainchild of Bernard Law Montgomery and his able lieutenant, General Miles C. Dempsey. Monty may have been ultracautious in the trenches, but his plan for Market Garden was, as Chester Wilmot put it, “bold and unorthodox”7—perhaps too bold and unorthodox. Monty’s scheme was to springboard the Allies over the Rhine and into Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley, long SHAEF’s ultimate aim.