Assignment to Hell (10 page)

It wasn’t. In a mid-May
New Yorker
piece he wrote:

The new phase of the second World War was announced to Parisians at daybreak Friday…. With the dawn came the air raid sirens, startling a city that had heard no alerte during the daytime since the first week of the war. At once each of the innumerable residential squares in Paris took on the aspect of an Elizabethan theater, with tiers of spectators framed in the opened windows of every building.… All wore nightshirts, which, since the prosperity of tenants in a walkup is in inverse ratio to their altitude, appear considerably dingier on the sixth and seventh floors than on the second and third.

Soon antiaircraft guns began firing, their tracers illuminating the reddish sky. A few minutes later the
ack!-ack!
stopped and an enemy bomber was spotted so high, Liebling wrote, “that it looked like a charm-bracelet toy.”
⁵⁴

The writing was quintessential Liebling: literate, witty, and irreverent: in fact, way
too
witty and irreverent for the circumstance. The City of Light was about to be overrun by Fascist storm troopers; it was no time for Liebling to be flippant about pajamas. He was trying to write about wartime Paris the same way he wrote about peacetime New York—and discovering that it didn’t always translate. It wasn’t until he began covering combat operations in North Africa two years later that Liebling learned to harness his rococo style.

He witnessed other bombing raids in early June, but assured his mother that “no bombs fell within miles of me, so cheer up. I am perfectly safe anyway as it seems that the bastards only kill children.”
⁵⁵
On the morning of June 9, along with other American correspondents, Liebling was interviewing Jean Prouvost, the French minister of information.

“From a military standpoint,” Prouvost told reporters with a straight face, “it is improving steadily. Disregard reports of the Government quitting Paris.” At which point Prouvost promptly bolted for Tours, where the French government was setting up emergency headquarters.

Within hours Paris was in full-scale panic. “I will return,” Liebling told a French friend. “We can’t let your country die.”
⁵⁶

Liebling jumped into a tiny Citroën 11 with Waverly Root, a food critic, broadcaster, and occasional reporter with the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, and John “Tex” Elliott of the
New York Herald Tribune
. They made quite a threesome. Root, like Liebling, was a tubby glutton. Elliott, no shrimp himself, had broken his leg in a car accident a few weeks before and was still hobbled. With Root behind the wheel, Liebling weighing down the passenger seat, and Elliott trying to find room in the back to stretch his leg, they joined the onslaught of refugees streaming out of Paris. It took them eight hours to go seventy miles to Orléans.

Every spare inch of Orléans was occupied by a fleeing Parisian, including its park benches. The trio spent a miserable night in the Citroën. Whenever Root would drift off, his arm would whack the horn, waking them up all over again. At four a.m., Orléans’ air raid siren went off. Liebling allowed that he wouldn’t mind sticking around to see what would happen if the Luftwaffe did indeed attack. Root told Liebling that if he got out of the car he’d be wandering around Orléans solo. With that, they pushed off again. They spent three fitful days in Tours, praying that Hitler’s blitzkrieg would somehow bog down. When it didn’t, they got back in the car and, along with thousands of others, beat a retreat south toward Bordeaux. They spent one night in a village called Barbezieux. Liebling, streetwise in two languages, sweet-talked the town mechanic into allowing them to sleep in his house. Joe appealed to the Frenchman’s patriotism by fibbing that Elliott had been injured on the front lines while covering the
armée
.
⁵⁷

Keeping a wary eye out for Stuka dive-bombers, Liebling made his way to the Spanish border. Then he took a train to Lisbon, where the
New Yorker
had booked passage home on the Clipper.

W
HEN HE GOT BACK TO
New York, the apathy and ignorance of friends stunned him. Some of his left-wing pals had the temerity to argue that British prime minister Churchill, a fiery Tory, was as big a threat as Hitler.
⁵⁸

Liebling had lunch one day with
New Yorker
contributor Dick Boyer, who’d just returned from Berlin, where he’d covered Hitler’s depredations for the progressive newspaper
PM
. “I don’t feel like a man from Mars but like a man from earth who has landed on another planet,” Boyer commiserated. “Don’t the damn fools know what is happening on earth?”
⁵⁹

Apparently the damn fools didn’t. Liebling went to Washington in the fall of ’40 to profile General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff. Liebling penned a
New Yorker
piece that lauded Marshall’s foresight in preparing America for war. But after his article appeared, Liebling got the impression it hadn’t made a ripple: His progressive friends didn’t think much of professional soldiers.

When
McCall’s
magazine commissioned him a few months later to write an essay on propaganda, Liebling used the platform to skewer the isolationist America First movement and its apologists among Wall Street chieftains and newspaper editors, chief among them right-winger Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. But in truth the America First movement was buttressed by left-wingers, too—a reality that depressed the liberal Liebling.
⁶⁰

France “represented for me the historical continuity of intelligence and reasonable living,” Liebling reminisced after the war. “Nothing anywhere” would have meaning for Liebling until that continuity was restored.
⁶¹
A French friend who had escaped the Nazis vowed to Liebling in early ’41: “We will awake from this nightmare.”
⁶²

Despite his best efforts, Liebling couldn’t wake up America. Whether liberal, conservative, or agnostic, Americans deceived themselves into thinking that the spread of Fascism was somebody else’s problem.

I
n September 1941, just three months before the U.S. was catapulted into war, the future Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight David Eisenhower, was a colonel running training exercises at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Prospective four-star general Omar Bradley had seen more action than Ike, his West Point classmate, but most of it had come while chasing the bandit Pancho Villa in the Army’s quixotic 1916 incursion into Mexico.

Walter Cronkite in the autumn of 1941 was on the foreign desk of United Press’ New York operation, editing stories filed by correspondents abroad while groveling to get overseas himself. The worldly future anchorman had never been east of Long Island.

Andy Rooney was still a buck private being trained as an artilleryman at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Outside of Rooney’s English classes at Colgate, the future commentator had never penned a commentary, let alone a who-what-where-why-when-how news article.

Hal Boyle was a rewrite guy on the Associated Press’ night desk in New
York. The columnist who in the postwar years would travel the globe so extensively that the Overseas Press Club of America named an award in his honor, had never been outside North America.

Homer Bigart was a spot features writer for the city desk of the
New York Herald Tribune
. Bigart, too, had lived a parochial existence. Harrison Salisbury’s portrait of the early-war Bigart as a “journeyman with no foreign language, no foreign experience, no more knowledge of war or foreign affairs than he could glean from the headlines”
¹
accurately described the other three, as well. Just as World War II brought out the best in Eisenhower and Bradley, it stirred something within Cronkite, Rooney, Boyle, and Bigart that they may not have known they had.

Only Joe Liebling among the five had any background in European affairs or combat reporting. But Liebling hadn’t witnessed much actual fighting in his first go-round as a war correspondent. The French and British armies had disintegrated so quickly in Hitler’s onslaught that most of Liebling’s spring 1940 bylines limned Parisians’ weirdness as the Nazis grew closer.

The five men brought different perspectives and journalistic acumen to war coverage. Cronkite was a better writer than he gave himself credit for, but at heart he was a meatball journalist, a guy who learned his craft in no-nonsense newsrooms and wrote in a rat-a-tat style that he never completely abandoned, but later managed to adapt for broadcast. His métier during the war was telling the story of a clash through the eyes of one or two heroic combatants.

Boyle was raised in the same bare-bones wire service world but developed a creative technique that transcended it. Indeed, during the war Boyle’s narrative helped redefine AP’s services. Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook, Boyle’s column, was second only to Ernie Pyle’s dispatches in grassroots popularity; by midwar, Boyle’s features had become a breakfast table fixture in millions of American homes. Boyle’s copy rarely addressed the larger ramifications of an Allied offensive. Instead, Boyle plowed ground that Pyle was to make famous: profiling grunts in the trenches, always looking for the human side of the war. “The fellow who
pulls the trigger on a gun is more interesting than what happens to the bullet,” Boyle remarked in midwar.
²

Rooney was a cub reporter tossed—untrained—into the biggest maelstrom in history. Through trial and error, he helped forge the
Stars and Stripes
, the wondrous “paper for Joe,” the broadsheet that chronicled the bravery and struggles of American servicemen and servicewomen caught thousands of miles from home. By war’s end, Rooney had saluted nurses, medics, motor pool mechanics, Red Cross hostesses, amateur thespians, truck drivers, cooks, tankmen, howitzer operators, air gunners, and incalculable numbers of GI Joes—not to mention Generals Eisenhower and Bradley and hundreds of field officers. But not General George Patton, for whom Rooney developed an instant—and lifelong—contempt.

Bigart, who had less classroom education than any of them, ironically became renowned for his facile grasp of geography and military tactics. No reporter in the ETO could recount a particular day’s actions, then plug them into a larger strategic framework as powerfully as Bigart. Journalism is often called the first draft of history. In Bigart’s case, and perhaps his alone among the ETO’s workaday correspondents, it was literal. Any historian studying the nuances of the Allied air war, or the campaigns in Sicily, Italy, the Riviera, and later the eleventh-hour push toward the Japanese home islands, would do well to read Bigart’s daily reportage.

Often Bigart’s stuff was featured in the right-hand column on page one of the
Herald Tribune
. Despite his remarkable success during the war, Bigart the Depression kid never felt secure at the
Trib
. Every day, he believed he had to prove himself to demanding editors. Cronkite and Boyle had also been upended by the Depression; even after they achieved fame, their letters back home were full of worries about job security.

Liebling the rich kid and Times Square raconteur had been insulated from Depression anxiety. Joe became something very different from his colleagues during the war. Unconstrained by daily deadlines and usually unconcerned about a censor lurking over his shoulder, he could still indulge his passion for oddballs and eccentrics. But his narrative was leavened by a reverence for the Allied cause and a profound gratitude for the
kids sacrificing their lives and limbs to liberate his beloved France. He pretended that combat bored him, but few could describe the bloody back-and-forth of a battle with Liebling’s panache.