Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  “We were all wrong, of course—tragically and stupidly wrong,” Bradley wrote. “After the experience of Mortain, it should have occurred to at least one of us that as we pushed Germany to the wall, Hitler might very well do something crazy and desperate again. That was his style.”18 It was also Hitler’s deluded style to relive moments of Teutonic triumph: The Ardennes had not only been Hitler’s main blitzkrieg route in 1940, but also the Kaiser’s path to glory early in the Great War.

  Ultra intercepts, moreover, may have given the Allied command a sense of false security. All those months of being able to read German intentions and adjust their responses accordingly had made the Allies sloppy. At Mortain, Hitler had telegraphed all of his moves through radio signals that were easily intercepted. On the eastern periphery of the Ardennes, however, Hitler amassed four armies of forty divisions, spearheaded by seven armored units—and did it all with abject radio silence. It was a staggering coup—one that Bradley and Eisenhower did not believe Hitler capable of launching.

  Sustaining an ambush through the Ardennes, crossing the Meuse, and going all the way to the port of Antwerp—the ultimate objective—was even crazier than attempting to counterattack after the Allied breakout in Normandy. But Hitler was psychotic: Just how psychotic would become tragically apparent in the months to come.

  HAL BOYLE CHRONICLED HITLER’S DELUSIONS from the front trenches. On December 20, two days after Peiper murdered 130 local villagers, Boyle filed a piece from Stavelot that captured the heartache Allied soldiers were feeling. Boyle was with an American engineering outfit forced to blow up a bridge across the Amblève River to keep it from being exploited by Nazi tanks.

  “It was the first bridge ever blown up by Capt. James Rice and his men,” Boyle wrote.19 Rice had been compelled to operate under the cloak of darkness because enemy troops were just across the river, intently watching every move. A German machine gun raked the bridge when Rice’s squad had appeared earlier in the day; they were forced to retreat. Once it turned dark, Rice and his men crept back down to the river’s edge and snuck three fifty-pound boxes of dynamite under the structure and set four thirty-second fuses.

  “After we had run one block and dived into a building, that bridge blew up like a Roman candle. It was a beautiful explosion—knocked out windows for three blocks,” Rice told Boyle.

  The next day, still in the Stavelot area, Boyle wrote a piece about how a medic, Private Theodore Watson of Brooklyn, had smoked out eight German spies. Dressed in American uniforms, two jeeps full of Peiper-trained SS men had passed through several checkpoints. The German impersonating a captain spoke in impeccable, friendly English, sharing smokes with exhausted MPs.

  But by the time they reached Watson’s position near the front, the enemy’s smooth veneer was gone. “Like all sons of Brooklyn, [Watson] takes nothing at its face value,” Boyle wrote. Watson noticed that the jeep occupants were fidgeting, nervously craning their necks toward the German lines, obviously looking for something. The medic discreetly moved closer to eavesdrop and overheard a heavy German accent mutter, “Where is it?”

  Watson figured they were looking for a German tank that was supposed to be heading through the American lines at that moment. “They’re Germans!” Watson yelled to the GIs in nearby foxholes. “Shoot them! They’re Germans!”20

  Several GIs began firing as all eight Germans took off, running “like deer” toward their lines. Only one of the Germans was hit, but he was dragged to safety. To Watson’s chagrin, all eight escaped.

  His coverage of the Bulge was Boyle at his best. Flitting from one section of the front to the next, interviewing GIs on the fly, he memorialized their stories of courage and desperation. Every day during the Bulge, Boyle filed two or three pieces, often more. All of them painted a portrait of American officers and GIs knocked on their heels but scrambling to punch back. Not unlike Bigart’s coverage of the Italian campaign, Boyle’s reporting from the Ardennes makes for a dramatic first draft of history.

  By Christmas Day, the Bulge’s tide had begun to turn—and not just because the Third Army was on the cusp of relieving Bastogne. Boyle enjoyed a holiday repast—complete with turkey and cranberry sauce—in a small village outside Stavelot with Major Hal D. McCown of Ruston, Louisiana. McCown told Boyle the remarkable story of how he’d been taken prisoner by the Germans on December 21 when the major, his radioman, and an orderly were bushwhacked by an enemy patrol. “They were cutting grass above our heads with those machine guns,” McCown told Boyle.21

  McCown and some 140 other Americans were being held in a pen just inside the German line at La Gleize across the Amblève River. On Christmas Eve, the prisoners’ total food ration consisted of two dog biscuits and a couple of small nips of cider. But McCown and the other American prisoners were lucky: The SS officers who interrogated them slammed their sidearms down on a table for effect—but chose not to use them. The German commander, not a member of the SS, took a shine to McCown. He expressed hatred of the Russians because, he said, Soviet soldiers took no prisoners—which, given his countrymen’s behavior of the previous week, was the height of gall.

  “He was worried about our attitude toward the SS troops,” McCown told Boyle, “and wanted to know if we regarded them as criminals and gangsters, and he wanted to know if we also regarded Hitler and Himmler in this light.”22

  On December 24, when a combination of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion, the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and forward elements of the 30th Division pushed back beyond the Amblève, McCown and the other American captives were thrilled to witness a conflagration: At five-minute intervals, the eight-hundred-man German contingent torched more than 150 of their own tanks (including, McCown was pleased to observe, sixteen prized Tigers), half-tracks, and trucks rather than let them fall into American hands.

  McCown and the others were forced to retreat with the German column, marching steadily without rest. But Christmas Eve night, after several brushes with American patrols, a firefight suddenly erupted. McCown and others slipped away undetected, then raced toward friendly lines, shrieking, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  The major told Boyle: “‘My wife would be proud of my waistline now. I’ll never be so small again.’

  “And he took another helping of turkey.”23

  On the day after Christmas, Boyle interviewed thirty American medics who hid for a half day in a church while SS troops methodically murdered captured American jeep and truck drivers. “We could hear the Nazi tank commander stopping our trucks and ordering the drivers and helpers out,” Sergeant James W. Colella of Rochester, Pennsylvania, told Boyle. “Then we would hear shots. The next morning we saw the bodies of our men lying where they had been killed.”

  At one point during the night, an SS officer, under the mistaken impression that the church was occupied by German troops, opened the door and yelled into the darkness: “Is everything all right?”

  A medic who happened to be fluent in German answered, “Everything is all right.” Satisfied that things were under control in the church, the SS officer returned to the street to resume killing unarmed Americans. The next morning, the SS troops were driven from the village by American infantrymen.24

  Boyle identified neither the young lieutenant nor the village, but at some point in late ’44 or early ’45, an American intelligence officer was being housed by a Belgian family: a mother, a father, and their gorgeous college-aged daughter. It was love at first sight for the lieutenant, who had designs on bringing the young lady back to America. But try as he might, he couldn’t woo the girl or her parents. When he started to bring food to them, though, the parents warmed, at least a little. But he still wasn’t getting anyplace with the girl.

  He couldn’t understand why the young lady, a skilled pianist, would play Schubert and Bach so vigorously. Finally, one night he heard voices coming from the basement. The lieutenant went down the stairs to investigate and discovered the girl of his dreams canoodling with an enemy soldier
who had apparently been hiding. Suddenly everything became clear: The lieutenant had been in the home of German sympathizers. His romantic plans dashed, he had no choice but to arrest the soldier and turn the family in for harboring the enemy.25

  THERE WAS NO TURKEY AVAILABLE for Walter Cronkite on Wednesday, December 27, although he’d more than made up for it two days earlier. On December 27, Cronkite had tried to reach besieged Bastogne along the north-south Arlon Road with three other correspondents: Cornelius Ryan of the London Daily Telegraph, Norman Clark of the London News, and Joseph Driscoll of the New York Herald Tribune. They kept on running into artillery and mortar fire; even after they sought refuge in the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams, Jr.’s 37th Tank Battalion, shells from German 88s burst all around.

  Abrams’ CP was in a farmhouse just south of Bastogne that had been decimated by an earlier round of artillery. But the kitchen fireplace still functioned and there was enough of a wall for Abrams to tack up a map of known enemy troop locations in the area. The entire world had been transfixed by the gallant stand of the “battered bastards of Bastogne,” Cronkite’s mates from Market Garden, the 101st Airborne.

  Even at Abrams’ CP, none of them—including the lieutenant colonel and his staff—could feel safe: U.S.-German “lines” existed only in theory. Tiger tanks and hit squads were lurking everywhere.

  So when an American jeep pulled up next to the farmhouse, there was no guarantee it was friendly. The vehicle, much to their relief, turned out to be carrying Cronkite’s old friend, Major General Maxwell Taylor of the 101st. Taylor two days earlier had been in Washington, D.C., at the request of General Marshall, who wanted Taylor’s input on future airborne missions.

  The major general was still sporting the dress uniform he was wearing when word reached him that his men had been surrounded at Bastogne. On December 22, Taylor’s protégé and temporary successor, General Anthony McAuliffe, had issued his defiant response—“Nuts!”—when the German commander demanded the 101st’s surrender.

  Taylor took a series of cargo planes from Washington to Paris, then on the morning of December 27 hopped a smaller craft to Luxembourg. There he talked with Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Bedell Smith, intent on getting permission to take a glider or parachute into Bastogne. Smith relayed good news: The Fourth Armored Division was finally poised to break through. If Taylor could get to the front, he could ride into Bastogne with the Fourth’s 37th Tank Battalion.

  When Taylor finally arrived at Abrams’ CP, he sorely needed a briefing. Out of earshot of the reporters, Abrams gave him a quick rundown, then Taylor came back outside and climbed into his jeep.

  In A Reporter’s Life, Cronkite has Taylor addressing him individually and inviting him to go along on the push into Bastogne. Other accounts, including one referenced in John Eisenhower’s The Bitter Battle, Ike’s son’s history of the Bulge, have Taylor inviting all the reporters present to follow him north.

  “The story would have been great—first correspondent into Bastogne,” Cronkite recalled.

  On the other hand, how would I get the story out? There was no communication link from Bastogne, and in the days before I had my story on the wires, those correspondents monitoring military communication on the outside would be reporting the drama.

  That’s the excuse I gave to Taylor, and tried to explain to myself. But I knew the truth—and I suspect he did: Taylor’s drive to Bastogne could well have been a suicide mission. A lot of glory, perhaps, for a career officer; simply a sad footnote for a war correspondent.26

  Cronkite made the right call in turning down Taylor: A reporter unable to relay his story wasn’t worth much to a wire service. Forty-eight hours earlier, however, Cronkite had been with a super-macho “correspondent” who would not have hesitated to take up Taylor’s offer, especially since the writer didn’t have to worry much about deadlines—or about the facts, for that matter.

  Ernest Hemingway and his wife and fellow Collier’s correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, plus Cronkite’s UP colleague Collie Small, were among the revelers at a Christmas gathering at the Cravat. Of all the depressing holidays he had spent in Europe, Cronkite told Betsy, Christmas ’44 was “the worst ever, I think.” The surroundings weren’t unpleasant, he admitted, calling Luxembourg “as lovely as a postcard.” But “the fact I was alone again without you made it almost unbearable.”

  They had a big turkey dinner featuring copious amounts of liquor. “We had some eggnog and everyone but old hardworking Cronkite who had a fistful of mediocre stories to do, got pretty well pied,” Walter told Betsy. “I had a few drinks and filed my last story about midnight after which I was so tired I just collapsed into bed.”27

  Cronkite wrote the letter to Betsy on December 27, just hours after declining Taylor’s offer to go into Bastogne, so he might have been especially down on himself. Still, he couldn’t shake the blues that had plagued him for months. He was working “like a dog,” he told Betsy, but “not doing particularly well at it.” Since UP’s Small and Bob Richards were in the Belgium-Luxembourg sector, Cronkite’s own presence had been rendered “unnecessary,” he complained. Plus, he told Betsy, the other fellows—his acolytes—were better at writing combat stories than he was. Both Small and Richards can right [sic] my sort of stuff better than I can—and that ain’t good for the old morale.”28

  ANDY ROONEY’S RESPITE IN NEW York was plenty good for his morale. He not only was reunited with Margie and old friends, but also got the tip on the rumored German attempt to bomb New York. Plus the Stars and Stripes gave him the chance to craft several Once Over Lightly columns, the chatty feature that, for years, had been a staple of the paper’s sports coverage.

  On January 3, Rooney wrote a column that paid homage to the prominent athletes who’d been killed in service to their country. “It’s a sad fact that the death in combat of great American sports figures who have been in the national spotlight has done a great deal towards making the public conscious of the great toll the war is taking.”29

  Among the sports figures who had perished, Rooney wrote, were Marine Captain Charlie Paddock, the onetime fastest sprinter in the world; Navy pilot and Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick of the University of Iowa; miler Lou Zamperini (who later turned out to be alive, having survived a POW camp); some forty minor-league baseball players; and no fewer than 131 professional boxers.30

  THE NUMBER OF PRIZEFIGHTERS WHO had made the ultimate sacrifice was surely not lost on boxing aficionado Joe Liebling. After Paris was liberated in late August of ’44, Liebling spent several weeks in the French capital, interviewing members of the Maquis and compiling notes for what became La République du Silence, his bilingual compendium of stories from and about France’s courageous underground press during the Occupation.

  In the company of a photographer with the newly organized French War Crimes Commission, Liebling also traveled to central France, a region known as the Côte-d’Or, to research the massacre that had taken place on August 21, 1944, in the village of Comblanchien. Liebling talked to surviving villagers and pieced together a chilling story. A company of enemy soldiers from a troop train that had been sidetracked at Comblanchien joined with Germans from other detachments to form a spontaneous vigilante mob. They terrorized the town, torching homes and shops and butchering any local they encountered.

  The soldiers were neither members of the Waffen SS nor trained by the Gestapo; they were just bitter and scared kids. “I think it was because they were so frightened,” one man who had witnessed the German genocide that night told Liebling. “It is unimaginable how frightened they were.”31

  It was also unimaginable to Liebling that his successor as the New Yorker’s ETO correspondent would be killed in the line of duty—but it happened. In the fall of ’44, David Lardner, the son of sportswriter Ring Lardner, one of Liebling’s childhood heroes, took Liebling’s place as the magazine’s First Army correspondent. Extremely nearsighted, Lardner had been rejected for military duty, but w
as determined to get to the front as a reporter. It ran in the family: Lardner’s older brother James had been killed covering the Spanish Civil War for the New York Herald Tribune; another older brother, John, covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for Newsweek.

  Lardner had only been at the front for a matter of weeks when, on October 19, he and two other correspondents, one of whom was Richard Tregaskis of International News Service, author of Guadalcanal Diary, decided to see for themselves the devastation surrounding the German city of Aachen. Navigating through the rubble, the reporters asked their jeep driver to take a shortcut. Although American engineers had planted wooden stakes with brightly colored tape to mark mines, the jeep nevertheless ran over an explosive. The shrapnel killed Lardner but barely injured the others.

  Liebling was racked with guilt, somehow convinced that, had he been in Aachen, he would have been able to warn David of danger. Lardner’s family elected to keep David’s remains interred at the Henri-Chapelle War Cemetery in Belgium.

  Joe Liebling went back to the States before the Bulge hit. Among other things, he put the finishing touches on “Quest for Mollie” and wrote the first of his many Wayward Press columns for the New Yorker.

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN A minor miracle that Hal Boyle avoided David Lardner’s fate, given the number of times he came within a hairsbreadth of German armor in the Ardennes. On December 28, the day after Bastogne was relieved, Boyle inspected Hitler’s high-water mark, the deepest point of German penetration into Belgium. It was just three miles short of the Meuse River, near the village of Celles.

  “Here on the raw cold soil of Belgium … is spread some of the ghastliest carnage of the European war,” Boyle wrote. “Destroyed in four days of unceasing battle which kept the American armies from being chopped in half, the human and steel wreckage of the German panzer army lies in frozen ruin over miles of Belgium’s fields and woodland.”32