Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  He got to Paris about ten thirty that night, filthy from exhaust grime, and collapsed at a Red Cross officers’ club at the Hôtel Edouard VII on the Avenue de l’Opéra. The next morning, he stopped by UP’s Paris office, where a colleague named Sam Hales took him to the USO’s Rainbow Room at the Hôtel de Paris, a replica of its famous forebear in London. For lunch they headed over to the press headquarters at the Hôtel Scribe, which Cronkite enjoyed so much he had dinner there, too.

  Cronkite played tourist all day, taking a horse-drawn carriage down the Boulevard des Capucines and the Champs-Élysées. At one point he sipped a couple of cognacs while watching Parisians and American soldiers parade past.

  “Paris appears unaffected by war,” he told Betsy. “The women are the most fabulously dressed people I have ever seen, complete with silk stockings, cosmetics (of which there are few in England), beautiful clothes and insane hats and shoes. And all carrying long, rolled parasols with lace frills or leading dogs as insane as the hats.” Then in words that would have delighted Joe Liebling, Cronkite wrote, “Many dressed like that pedal by on bicycles with their skirts up to their thighs. Most disturbing!”40

  He and his correspondent pals allowed themselves to be disturbed by other leggy sights that evening as they went to Montmartre to take in the much-anticipated reopening of cancan dancing at the Bal Tabarin. Cronkite was surprised that the Bal Tabarin was not the sophisticated theater that he had imagined but rather a “glorified Coney Island dime-a-dance joint.” Paris was bereft of liquor but there were endless supplies of champagne, so that’s what everyone drank that night, he told Betsy.

  Cronkite was now covering the British Second Army out of Montgomery’s back-of-the-line setup in Brussels—and not thrilled about it. The dream of covering an Allied army surging into the Ruhr had given way to the reality of settling in behind a static line.

  He wrote Betsy that he “felt like a damned baby” in Brussels. Cronkite was kicking himself for not having stuck with French at the University of Texas. It was “lonely and discouraging” to be a daily newspaperman without being able to read daily newspapers, he wrote.41

  Twice a day he would attend British Second Army briefings and, much like his experience at the Ministry of Information in London, write up the newsworthy communiqués for the UP wire. But in truth, by October there was little in the way of significant movements of troops.

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE CRONKITE took in the cancan, Hal Boyle wrote a story that the Allied high command had dreaded: The Nazis’ fierce stand after two months of backpedaling had come as a shock to Allied soldiers.

  Boyle talked to dozens of grunts every day. “‘Once we drive them back to their own country they’ll come to their senses,’ has been the thought and consolation of most soldiers ever since invasion day last June,” Boyle wrote. “‘Then we’ll have a walkway parade to Berlin and the war will be over. They will never fight in their own country.’

  “But they are. And it’s making the American soldier angrier, tougher, and more eager to smash through to Berlin every day. Many of these combat troops have been overseas for two years or more and secretly had hoped their reward for a quick victory might be to return home by Christmas. Now they realize that is an outside chance, and they are uncomfortably aware of the possibility that the European war may well last through a cold and forlorn winter.”42

  Sergeant J. D. Peel from Geneva, New York, told Boyle that, “The American dogface is a poor hater.” But Peel and the other men in his outfit were appalled by the apparent willingness of German leaders to drag their country down with them. “If they had an honorable leader among them,” Peel said, “he would give up and save his country.”43

  German prisoners were telling interrogators that, were it up to them, the war would already be over. “They are all afraid of the SS officers and the Gestapo and they say [SS head] Heinrich Himmler himself is running the army,” Boyle told readers. “They all say they are sorry that Hitler wasn’t killed.” Enemy prisoners were also jaded about the Goebbels boast of “secret weapons” that would turn the tide of war. “Don’t kid us about those secret weapons,” Boyle quoted one prisoner. “We know such talk is silly.” The cynicism was in striking contrast to the “pugnacious faith” Boyle consistently heard from captured members of the Wehrmacht in Normandy.44

  A FEW DAYS AFTER INTERVIEWING the prisoners in early October, Hal Boyle spent time at Spa, Belgium, the old vacation spot that had lent its name to the mineral-waters-resort craze of the nineteenth century. Along with several other First Army correspondents in Spa, Boyle was photographed cavorting atop a bed in which Kaiser Wilhelm had spent a nervous night before fleeing to Holland as the German lines crumbled in the fall of 1918.

  Two bodies down the Kaiser’s bed from Boyle was a horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing UP reporter named John Frankish, who had just arrived in the ETO a few weeks earlier. The reporters didn’t bother to untie their combat boots as they mugged for the camera. Walter Cronkite didn’t know his UP colleague well but had helped show the young University of Southern California grad the ropes when Frankish45 was getting acclimated in London before being assigned to ground troops. One night at Cronkite’s flat, much to the host’s dismay, Frankish and another UP reporter got into a bottle of bourbon that Cronkite had been saving for a special occasion.46 Even when not fueled by liquor, Frankish had a wicked sense of humor; like Joe Liebling, he was a dead-on mimic.

  As October turned toward November, Boyle had a columnist’s prerogative: He continued to shuttle from Holland to Belgium and from France to Luxembourg—wherever the best Allied human interest story was. Cronkite settled in Brussels to sift through Montgomery’s self-aggrandizing statements, while their new friend Frankish stayed closer to the U.S. front lines near Belgium’s Ardennes Forest.

  Andy Rooney that fall stayed with the First Army but spent a lot of time editing stories at the Stars and Stripes’ offices in Paris. In late October, the paper sent Rooney back to Brittany, where, remarkably, the Germans were still holding out, nearly five months after D-Day.

  “Five hundred miles behind the bitter battle for the Siegfried Line and the plains of the Rhine, there is a milder war, a war almost forgotten,” Rooney wrote.”47 Two south Brittany peninsula ports that the Germans had converted into U-boat lairs, St.-Nazaire and Lorient, remained uncaptured, despite near-constant artillery and bombing attacks. They were the last German outposts left in France in late ’44; between them, some fifty thousand near-starving enemy troops were hunkered down.

  Many of the enemy soldiers had operated antiaircraft batteries with such ferocity that Allied pilots had nicknamed St.-Nazaire Flak City.48 Back in August, General George Patton’s Third Army had been tasked by Omar Bradley with seizing the Brittany ports, part of Bradley’s insistence on keeping Allied supply lines fully open. But once Patton realized that the enemy had dug in along the coast—and that martial glory lay elsewhere—he pulled up stakes. Eleven weeks later, the Allied “siege” consisted of one lone American tank outfit supported by FFI troops. The ragtag army encircled each port to ensure that there was no enemy breakout. Something of a bizarre rapprochement had settled in: No serious Allied effort had been launched in weeks to try to uproot the enemy; the Germans, in turn, only made halfhearted efforts to return artillery fire, although on occasion a gunboat would zoom up the Loire, fire a few rounds, then disappear.

  By then, American and French soldiers had struck up friendly relations with young ladies in Brittany, who would bring wine and bread to the trenches. On weekends when the Allied boys could get passes, impromptu parties would break out.

  In mid-October, a “small scrap” transpired when an American patrol ran into a German squad. When they reached the battlefield under a Red Cross banner, German medics had more wounded than they had estimated; they were short two litters. A German medical officer talked his American counterpart into “loaning” him two litters, with the proviso, Rooney noted, that the stretchers would be returned twenty-four hours later
to the same spot.

  Next day the U.S. medic returned, but the German officer didn’t show up. Instead he sent a man with a note: He was very sorry he had not showed up with the litters but could he please, because of the acute litter shortage on the German side, keep the two U.S. litters?

  The American, annoyed at being stood up in his rendezvous with the German medic, returned an indignant note. Certainly the Germans could not keep the two litters. Who did the German officer think the U.S. quartermaster was supplying, anyway? The following day the German office humbly returned with the two borrowed litters.49

  BOTH SIDES NEEDED TOO MANY litters that autumn as the fighting inside the Hürtgen Forest and outside Aachen, Metz, and other places became bitter. Over the holidays, Rooney got the same break that Boyle had gotten the previous spring and Cronkite sorely needed—a trip home. The Stars and Stripes had instituted a rotation system to give their ETO correspondents a respite. Rooney spent almost two months back in the States, mixing reportorial duties with joyous R & R time with his wife, Margie, and friends.

  Along with old pal Bob Ruthman, Margie and Andy headed out in late November to see friends at Colgate. A blizzard that killed dozens along northeastern highways that weekend nearly proved fatal to them, too. Stranded in a roadside snowbank, they were beginning to panic when they spotted the flashing light of a wrecker, which took them to safety. They never did make it to Colgate.50

  Rooney did, however, make it to the Stars and Stripes’ East Forty-second Street offices, where he got to file several sports-related articles, including a piece trumpeting West Point football coach Earl “Red” Blaik’s prediction of victory (which proved to be correct) in the 1944 Army-Navy game.

  On Rooney’s second day in New York, he happened to bump into an old Army friend, an intelligence officer, at Grand Central Station. “In an excited subway whisper,” Rooney’s acquaintance related an astonishing story: The day before, Election Day, radar screens had detected the Germans launching a missile aimed at New York from a U-boat several hundred miles out into the Atlantic. East Coast air defenses had been scrambled. Rooney’s friend saw the projectile on the radar screen. It was traveling some 250 miles per hour when it disappeared off the screen, either falling short of its target or shot down by an alert pilot. The Nazi threat had not come as a complete shock, Rooney’s friend said. War planners had long feared that Hitler would use one of his Vergeltungswaffen weapons against the continental U.S. It was not outside the realm of possibility that German scientists could arm a U-boat with some variation of a V-1 buzz bomb or a V-2 rocket.

  Staff Sergeant Rooney by then was a savvy reporter: he knew what to do with a hot tip. That same afternoon, he went out to Mitchel Field, the USAAF’s stateside headquarters on Long Island, under the guise of wanting to do an article on pilot training. He worked his way up the chain of command to a colonel. Rooney pitched him on the training story, which the colonel okayed. Then Rooney nonchalantly mentioned the previous day’s episode as if it were common knowledge and asked if the colonel had heard “any more dope” about it.

  In a piece published in Harper’s Magazine in March 1947, twenty-two months after V-E Day, Rooney described what happened next.

  The colonel jumped up from behind his desk, closed the door, and looked around the office as though it might have been wired.

  “Look,” he said, the way colonels said look to sergeants, “where did you hear this silly story? Don’t ever repeat it.” He was trying to shout at me in a whisper. “Now get of here and don’t say a word about it to anyone. It isn’t true. I don’t know a thing about it. I don’t even deny it.”51

  The next day’s New York Times was fascinating, Rooney thought. On page nineteen, an “obscure little story” with a Washington dateline quoted a War Department spokesman. Although officials were not issuing a warning, German attempts to attack New York City “are entirely possible,” the article said. The same issue of the Times mentioned that Navy Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, a key strategist who was soon named commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, had been unexpectedly called to Washington.

  Rooney returned to Mitchel Field a day later and was surprised to see the hangar and tarmac crowded with fighter planes. It looked to Rooney as if most of the fighters stationed on the East Coast had been transferred—literally overnight—to Hempstead.

  He kept after the story, traveling to Washington in hopes of interviewing Major General Clayton Bissell, the Assistant Chief of Staff of G-2 Intelligence. One of Bissell’s aides, a colonel, gave Rooney a brush-off not unlike the one he’d gotten at Mitchel Field. There was absolutely nothing to this story, Rooney was told—but it would be his ass if he breathed a word of it. “It was the same vigorous ‘non-denial,’” Rooney told Harper’s readers in March of ’47.

  Despite Rooney’s best efforts to pin down something tangible and get it past censors, the story lay fallow—at least for the next few weeks. On January 8, 1945, however, Admiral Ingram lent credence to Rooney’s information by giving a press conference while aboard his command ship. Ingram curiously volunteered, “It is not only possible, but probable that both New York and Washington would be the target of robot bomb attacks ‘within thirty to sixty days.’” Such an attack would not inflict much damage, Ingram assured. “It would certainly cause casualties in the limited area where the bomb might hit, but it could not seriously affect the progress of the war.”52 Then the admiral added: “There is no reason for anyone to become alarmed. Effective steps have been taken to meet this threat.”53

  Once Ingram’s statement hit the wires and radio airwaves, train and bus stations suddenly became crowded with people trying to get out of New York and D.C. The Navy quickly issued an emphatic, if curious, denial. “There is no more reason now to believe Germany will attack us with robot bombs than there was November 7, 1944,” the Navy Department statement said. Why the peculiar wording and why the gratuitous mention of Election Day? Rooney wondered.

  After Rooney returned to Europe in early ’45, he was too busy to pursue the story. But following V-E Day, Rooney was sitting in the Paris bureau of the Herald Tribune when it occurred to him that, since censorship had been lifted, the story about the Nazis’ rumored attempt to bomb New York would make a compelling now-it-can-be-told feature.

  The Stars and Stripes trumpeted Rooney’s story on page one on May 15 under the header NAZIS TRIED TO BOMB N.Y.—BUT FAILED. The piece got good play on the wires and was boxed on the front pages of several New York dailies. The War Department, naturally, issued another refutation, denying any knowledge of the episode.

  There the story sat, undisturbed, for more than a year until Rooney returned to Germany as a civilian correspondent for Holiday. He was spending a few days at Wannsee, a resort lake outside Berlin, when he got acquainted with a former German submarine officer. The German was fluent in English, having spent two years before the war studying medicine at Columbia University.

  Rooney chatted with him about several topics, winning his confidence, before broaching the New York rumor. “As a matter of fact,” the former U-boater proudly informed Rooney, “mine was one of the freighter subs in the Atlantic which was refueling the smaller subs lying off the coast of America.”

  Ramps had been constructed on the decks of “several” German submarines; New York and Washington, he said, had both been targeted.

  “I have heard from my friends that they launched the first projectile before they were caught but they don’t know what happened to it,” he told Rooney, before speculating that the attacking U-boats had been “immobilized” by radio beams that somehow disrupted their electric motors. “They [the U-boat crews] couldn’t move and they were all captured alive,” he said.54

  Nearly another full year passed before Rooney filed his Harper’s article. The magazine piece was triggered by a conversation Rooney had in the winter of ’47 with a friend who’d served as a USAAF air traffic controller at Mitchel Field in November ’44. Out of the blue the controller and his colleag
ues were directing “frantic” traffic over and around Long Island. “All [the onetime controller] knew,” Rooney wrote in his Harper’s piece, “was that the fighter pilots were directed to be on the lookout for pilotless robot planes flying toward New York.”

  Rooney told readers in early ’47 that he’d pretty much given up on ever getting a straight story out of U.S. military officials. His article ended with “I’d like to know the real answer.”

  HAL BOYLE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT Nazi submarine sleuthing off the Long Island coast in the fall of ’44. He knew all about the German stand outside Aachen and Metz, however, and was hearing firsthand about Nazi atrocities from bitter French, Belgian, and Dutch citizens. “People know how to hate along the border,” Boyle wrote in a column in mid-October. The newly liberated could not fathom why Allied troops weren’t being as ruthless with the German populace as the Nazis had been to them when “Hitler was in his heyday,” as Boyle put it.55

  One fall morning the AP columnist was driving toward the front with Captain Harry Volk of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, when they stopped in the Belgian village of Aubel, a few kilometers west of the German border. Stretching their legs, they spotted a charming confectionary store and decided to buy some pastries. The proprietress, Mme. Lardinois, a lovely mother of three, insisted that the Americans stay for lunch. She prepared a feast of local delicacies that Boyle said tickled “palates weary of the sterile monotony of regular rations.” They also enjoyed a bottle of red wine and homemade cookies.

  After the dishes were cleared, Mme. Lardinois explained to Volk and Boyle how she had become a widow—and why she would always despise the Nazis. To Boyle’s amazement, her eyes remained dry and her voice never cracked.

  Her husband, Joseph, a handsome man with a black mustache, had been a grocer in Aubel when Hitler’s storm troopers poured across the border in May 1940. The Lardinois family bundled themselves into their car and, along with other villagers, headed toward Brussels and safety—or so they hoped.