He also confided that the deeper they got into enemy territory, the more he sensed the hatred felt by the German people. Boyle was still busy, he told Frances, responsible for both spot coverage and for his near-daily column. If he concentrated strictly on the column, he’d have to give up his accreditation at the front, he explained, which was something that at this point in the war, Boyle was loath to do.52
Boyle was outside Torgau along the Elbe River on April 27 when units of the First Army’s Fighting 69th Division hooked up with Soviet troops. Captured German soldiers told Boyle that they had been ordered to shoot only Soviets, not Americans. By then, Nazi infantrymen were streaming west, surrendering in droves to the oncoming Americans and praying not to be ensnared by Russian patrols, where they would have been executed on sight. Hal stayed with the First long enough to witness the victory party thrown by General Alexei Zhadov of the Red Army’s Fifth Guards on April 30. A Russian military band greeted General Courtney Hodges and his First Army staff with the “Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by the Soviet anthem. Zhadov presented Hodges with a plaque the Fifth Guards had been given by Premier Joseph Stalin. Hodges reciprocated by giving Zhadov a battle-stained flag the First had carried across Western Europe.
It was Hal Boyle’s kind of bash: a drunken brawl with a lot of sentimental singing. After the obligatory toasts saluting Allied solidarity, Russian female soldiers began bringing in heaping trays of sausages, suckling pig, and various fish delicacies, all leavened with champagne, cognac, and vodka. Male and female Russian folk dancers and singers entertained until all hours. Only at dawn did they “call quits,” as Boyle put it. The last revelers—the Russian performers joined by a couple of hearty American lads—were “twined around three leftover bottles of vodka in one corner of the room” as Boyle reluctantly exited the premises.53 After weeks of covering apocalyptic scenes in concentration camps and the ritualistic suicides of the Hitler Youth, it must have been a relief for Boyle to cover an event that had the feel of Sig Ep parties at the Columbia Log Cabin tourist camp.
On May 1, the day before Hitler killed himself in the Führerbunker in Berlin, Boyle wrote about a lone American infantryman who had single-handedly captured more than two hundred enemy soldiers. Sergeant Hubert Baine of Norfolk, Virginia, a member of the Ninth Infantry’s 39th Regiment, was on a patrol through some “fluid” (meaning an undetermined enemy presence) woods outside the village of Henrode when a young girl got his attention.
“There’s a German soldier in the woods over there who wants to surrender,” the girl said.
Baine followed her through the forest. Suddenly, out from some shadows stepped a Nazi general, who stiffly came to attention, raised his right arm, clicked his heels, and barked, “Heil Hitler!”
“I was kind of confused at that point,” Baine told Boyle. “So I just tossed him back an offhand GI highball.”
After the awkward exchange, the German general, who must have been unfamiliar with American insignias of rank, asked Baine if he was an officer. “Yes,” noncom Baine fibbed. The nearest 39th Regiment officer was miles away; Baine didn’t want to gum up the works over niceties.
The general yelled a command toward the woods; out came scores of enemy infantry, each with hands up. None appeared to be armed nor eager to escape.
Baine figured that some of the soldiers might change their minds, so he briskly marched them toward Henrode, where the 39th was bivouacked.
Similar scenes were happening all over as German soldiers moved away from advancing Russians. That same day Boyle interviewed a corporal from Georgia who had encountered a German colonel adamantly refusing to surrender to anyone of inferior rank.
“Suh, if you don’t cut out that damned foolishness,” the kid said, “we are mighty apt to bury you right here,” and gestured toward a ditch alongside the road. With a flamoyant gesture, the colonel handed the corporal his saber.54
ANDY ROONEY EXPERIENCED HIS OWN scare accepting the surrender of a German infantryman. He was alone in his jeep in late March near Paderborn, the village where Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists perfected the V-1 and V-2 rockets, when an enemy soldier suddenly appeared, alone, a rifle in his upraised hand. The unarmed Rooney didn’t know what to do: If he sped up, he could be shot in the back; if he slowed down, he could get shot in the front.
Rooney gambled that the soldier wanted to surrender. He did. The soldier turned out to be as scared as Rooney was. Affecting a menacing look, Rooney grunted to the German to dump his rifle in the back. The soldier offered no resistance. It was only after Rooney had shifted the jeep into second gear that he realized his captive still had a pistol strapped to his waist.
“All he had to do to have a jeep of his own and an American uniform to wear—with a bullet hole in it—would have been to shoot me,” Rooney recalled. “My mother told me never to pick up hitchhikers.”
Again mustering bravado, Rooney demanded that the soldier hand over the sidearm. Andy took the gun—it turned out to be a .32 caliber semiautomatic—back to the States with him as a souvenir.55
Boyle, too, had a close shave in the eleventh hour of the war. Hal and Jack Thompson spotted a cache of captured paraphernalia that had been dumped in a roadside quarry. They thought it curious that no GIs were around to guard the weapons. But they couldn’t resist the chance to grab more loot on top of the contraband they’d already collected. Boyle and Thompson had picked out a couple of sporty handguns and helmets when they noticed a pair of armed German soldiers staring down at them from the rim of the quarry. Like Rooney, they put on their toughest-looking faces and told the Germans to drop their weapons. They did.
Sadly, many of Boyle’s wartime mementoes were sold after his death by his daughter, Tracy. Tracy’s decision to barter her father’s keepsakes caused friction with her cousins that contributed to her estrangement from the family.56
ON TUESDAY, MAY 8, 1945, the banner headline on the front page of the Stars and Stripes read:
It’s Over
Over Here
Two reporters got page-one bylines that morning. Charles Kiley, Andy’s buddy from Bristol Harbour in early June of ’44, was in Reims to cover the actual surrender ceremony. Kiley’s lede was classic Stars and Stripes, strictly meat and potatoes: “The Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to the Allies here at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s forward headquarters at 9:41 a.m. Monday.”
Unlike Associated Press’ Edward Kennedy, Kiley and the Stars and Stripes actually adhered to the embargo that the Allies had attached to the surrender story—a delay to allow the victorious governments ample time to announce the news. Sixty-five years after Kennedy jumped the gun, Rooney was still steamed about it. Kennedy always claimed it was inadvertent, but his detractors are legion.
Rooney, for his part, somehow managed to be in the French Riviera when General Alfred Jodl, representing the new (and instantly deposed) Führer, Admiral Karl Dönitz, signed the surrender papers. Yet Andy got a page-one byline interviewing suddenly triumphant and, presumably, well-tanned doughboys. American GIs were in one of the world’s great resorts, yet when told the news about Germany quitting, one of them fumed: “Good! When do we leave this hole and go home?” Which is how the Stars and Stripes chose to headline Andy’s piece.
“Soldiers who read it, who heard the announcement over the BBC or who got the news second-hand from a usually reliable friend, were happy but generally undemonstrative,” Rooney wrote of V-E Day. “There was very little dancing or hugging by frontline soldiers in the area. They quietly talked over what it meant among themselves.
“At MP headquarters the sergeant on the desk, Julius Lavontiev of Perth Amboy, N.J., said, ‘We’re going to lock this place up tonight and let ’em tear the town down.’”57
Where Hal Boyle was that week the towns had—literally—been torn down—but not out of jubilation. Boyle was several hundred miles northeast of Rooney when the news hit that Hitler had committed suicide.
“There is little exuberance,
little enthusiasm, and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago,” Boyle wrote.
“It has been a long and bloody trail—the 800-mile march from the beaches of Normandy in less than eleven months. It has drained much from the men who made it—much from their bodies and much from their spirit. They are physically and emotionally tired.”
One apprehension drove almost every soldier, Boyle noted: “Will I be sent to the Pacific?”58 Most of them weren’t, but Hal Boyle was.
The Kansas City Star’s headline on May 7, 1945, in huge print was:
Germany Surrenders;
London V-Day Tuesday
BOYLE GOT WORD THAT HE’D won the Pulitzer Prize a few days later when he stopped at the First Division’s command post after a quick trip to Prague with Cy Peterman of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Captain Maxie Zera, a First Army PRO, offered “congratulations” to Boyle in his nasal Bronx accent.
According to Don Whitehead, who got it secondhand, the exchange went something like: “Congratulations for what?” Boyle asked.
“Winning the Pulitzer Prize,” Zera volunteered.
“Aw, horsefeathers!” Boyle replied, although given Hal’s propensity for colorful language, his response was almost certainly more graphic.
“No, it’s true,” Zera said, showing Boyle a copy of that day’s the Stars and Stripes.
“They must have made a mistake!” Boyle protested.59
But it was no mistake. No reporter ever worked harder or more resourcefully or moved more readers. Boyle was honored for his 1944 work in Italy, France, and Belgium, but in truth the medal dated back to the moment Boyle grabbed onto the coral reef in Fedala Harbor, Morocco, in November 1942.
It didn’t take Boyle long to get home for a quick break before he was sent to the Pacific. Soon after V-E Day, Boyle sat down for a radio interview with Roy Potter of NBC. For two and a half years, Potter told listeners, Boyle had been living and marching with American combat troops. The Potter interview had none of the contrived schmaltz that had tainted Boyle’s 1944 interview with Quentin Reynolds of CBS.
After his thirty-month assignment to hell, Hal spoke from the heart. He also spoke for his four friends and for every ETO correspondent.
All I can remember with any feeling of pride in this whole sorry business of war is the courage and fortitude of the men who fought it.
Certain battle units I remember best, not because they were the finest but because I lived with them and shared a few of their dangers. But I don’t think the nation … will ever forget the First, Second, or Third armored divisions, or the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth, 34th, 36th, or 45th infantry divisions, or the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions. There is a roll call of honor from Casablanca to Bastogne to Prague.
But of them all, I think the best symbol of the American army overseas is the Fighting First infantry. We call them the “Brooklyn bums” but they came from every state in America. They have fought their way many more miles against more Germans than any unit in the American army.
They left their dead by the hundreds in Tunisia, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany. And when the final surrender came, they were still killing Nazis. Their battle achievements dwarf their losses.
But you can’t forget those soldiers who died on the rough, long road of victory. We can reconvert our war factories for peace—but how can we ever reward those lost, magnificent men?60
Fortunately for Boyle, the war in the Pacific was virtually over by the time he got there. Hal didn’t have to witness the sacrifice of more magnificent young Americans. All he had to deal with was a dismembered Japan and the dawning of the atomic age.
EPILOGUE
A Good Age
War, being the ultimate competition, often calls forth qualities a man has never had occasion to see in himself before. He accomplishes physical feats he did not know his body was capable of, and thinks of things with both an ingenuity and a depth that were not called for in peace.
—ANDY ROONEY, 1962
THE FORTUNES OF WAR
Every Allied reporter on the deck of the USS Missouri that epochal Sunday morning noticed that the head of the Japanese delegation limped as he struggled with an artificial leg. But only a writer with the acuity of Homer Bigart could turn the foreign minister’s disability into a metaphor for Japan’s abject defeat.
“Japan, paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 a.m. today when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the documents of unconditional surrender,” Bigart wrote from atop Tokyo Bay.
“If memories of the bestialities of the Japanese prison camps were not so fresh in mind, one might have felt sorry for Shigemitsu as he hobbled on his wooden leg toward the green baize-covered table where the papers lay waiting,” Bigart observed. “He leaned heavily on his cane and had difficulty seating himself. The cane, which rested against the table, dropped to the deck of the battleship as he signed.”1
On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Homer Bigart had been an anonymous grunt on the city beat of the New York Herald Tribune. By Sunday, September 2, 1945, Bigart had become a journalistic giant, a newspaperman held in awe by editors, peers, military PROs, and thousands of discerning readers back home.
One of the many ironies of World War II journalism is that Bigart’s Pulitzer was awarded for his coverage of the Pacific Theater, which was not nearly as gripping as his descriptions of the predawn commando raids on Monte Cipolla and the Îles d’Hyères, nor as poignant as his portrayals of the bloody debacles at Anzio and San Pietro.
The war in the Pacific was different, Bigart and his friend Hal Boyle both discovered: cannibalistic in one sense, eerily impersonal in another. Still, the two reporters witnessed plenty of history in the final stages of the war against Tojo and the Rising Sun. Bigart covered the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the rescue of the Allied prisoners at Los Baños in the Philippines, and was among the first reporters allowed into Hiroshima a month after the atomic blast. Boyle arrived at the Pacific front only days before the Enola Gay took off; nevertheless, Hal was one of the few reporters in Germany for V-E Day and in Japan for V-J Day.
In his first dispatch from the Philippines in mid-November 1944, Bigart wrote,
This correspondent, coming from the European fronts, has been impressed by the weakness of the Japanese artillery, and the failure of the enemy to employ mines with anything like the diabolical thoroughness of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s army in Italy…. Here you can drive right up to the front line in broad daylight without drawing a storm of artillery or getting blown sky high by Teller mines. And that is precisely why more correspondents have been killed here than in any comparable period in the European theater.2
One of those correspondents killed in the Pacific was Ernie Pyle, another Pulitzer winner. Pyle was picked off by a sniper on the island of Ie Shima off the coast of Okinawa, six days after President Roosevelt died. Between FDR and Ernie, millions of Americans thought they had lost dear friends.
With Shigemitsu’s signature the most horrific conflict in history, a conflagration that had raged on six of the world’s seven continents, mercifully came to a close. Every few seconds for six years someone somewhere in the world was killed—some sixty million people in all. For every soldier snuffed out in the line of duty, three innocents perished. Four hundred thousand Americans died, fifty-one of whom were reporters.
BOB SHEETS, WHO PILOTED CRONKITE across the Channel on D-Day, remarkably survived another fourteen combat missions. Before war’s end, he was promoted to major, then lieutenant colonel, and, having reached the threshold of thirty-five raids, was given command of the 427th Bomb Squadron. After the war Sheets went back to Oregon, used the GI Bill to finish his business administration degree in Eugene, married his sweetheart Colleen, and spent a career as an accomplished executive in the export-import industry. His last job, ironically, was for a company based in Japan.
For decades Sheets commanded an air reserve unit; well into the 1970s he led weekend drills at the 403rd Air Base in Portland.3
In the early 1990s, Sheets sent Walter Cronkite an amusing note telling the legend that had the pilot known his surprise D-Day passenger was going to become famous, he would have had Cronkite autograph something. Cronkite responded by scribbling on a photo taken that auspicious morning: “To Captain Bob Sheets: With a lifetime of gratitude for getting us back! Walter Cronkite.” Colleen and Bob had six kids and six grandkids. Bob suffered a stroke in 1996 and passed away four years later.4
Back in early 1944, Second Lieutenant Jack Watson, Sheets’ coconspirator in the Yankee Stadium flyover, had gotten a telegram from New York Mayor La Guardia. His Honor had read a Cronkite-authored story about how Watson single-handedly piloted back to England a badly shot-up B-17. “All is forgiven,” the mayor had wired. “Congratulations. I hope you never run out of altitude.” Watson had responded: “Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and it can’t be too soon for me. We’d sort of like to go back together someday and drop in on the Rose Bowl game.”5
Coast Guard captain Bunny Rigg, who deposited Carusi’s Thieves on Omaha Beach despite murderous fire, was awarded the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit.6 Carusi also won a Silver Star to go with the Purple Heart he had earned on the evening of D-Day plus one on Easy Red. His Thieves won the Croix de Guerre from a grateful French government. After recovering from his wounds, Carusi went back to practicing law in the nation’s capital. He died in 1987 at age eighty-two.
In peacetime Rigg became the editor of Skipper magazine, a mainstay of the Annapolis Yacht Club, a three-time winner of the prestigious Bermuda yacht race, and a founder of the annual hundred-mile sailing competition around Chesapeake Bay. Bunny and his wife, Marjorie, built a handsome colonial on Meredith Creek near the bay. Almost no one in Annapolis knew that Bunny was a D-Day hero.7 Like so many of that generation, he never talked about the war. Rigg passed away in 1980, thirty-six years after he ordered Joe Liebling topside while their landing craft plunged toward Omaha Beach.
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