Assignment to Hell (35 page)

By the time Bigart got into San Stefano, the locals had already broken into Fascist headquarters for the obligatory defacing of Il Duce portraits. As Bigart’s company resumed its march toward Messina, villagers showered them with grapes and figs; more importantly, they showed them a mine-free passage across the river.

H
OW
H
OMER
B
IGART MANAGED TO
repeatedly slip provocative copy past censors remains a mystery. Cronkite, Rooney, and Boyle witnessed both
Homer’s play-dumb act, where his sometimes-affected stammer enabled him to pry information out of unsuspecting sources; and his cunning MO with censors, which apparently consisted of outwitting and outwaiting them.

Just before Bigart left for the Mediterranean, Cronkite watched as Homer sweated out his copy, then dueled with the censor over the appropriateness of certain references. When the sergeant finally okayed the piece, the stammering Bigart asked: “Wo-wo-wo-would you mi-mi-mind re-re-reading this to my off-off-office?”

The censor, Cronkite observed, “performed an almost impossible physical feat. He slouched upward, assuming a position nearly erect.” “Why can’t you read it?” the kid indignantly asked Bigart. “Da-da-da-dammit,” Homer countered, “C-c-can’t you s-s-see? I’m de-de-de-deaf!”
⁶²

In combat zone press tents, most reporters would compose their stories at night, usually in the presence of a young public relations officer or noncom who doubled as a censor. Once the correspondent finished typing his piece, he would submit it to the censor, who, under strict orders from superiors, would delete anything viewed as unduly “critical” of the Allied war effort or that might betray information useful to the enemy, such as the size or direction of a certain offensive.

Inevitably, arguments erupted over what the censor had deemed
too
disruptive or
too
revealing. Almost every night, one frustrated reporter or another would loudly defend his copy.

Invariably, Bigart would be the last reporter in the tent, perspiring over his copy. Fellow correspondents remembered how Bigart would stare into space, rhythmically tapping the space bar, cigarette ashes dripping, racking his brain for the right word or phrase. The censor, anxious to join his buddies for a beer, would get more and more annoyed as Bigart played his sly waiting game.

By the time Bigart finally got around to showing the censor his copy, the kid was tired of bickering. Bigart, no fool, would also tug on the youngster’s heartstrings by playing up the stammer. Between the pity and the censor wanting to wrap it up, Bigart would often get his way.

A classic example is an article Bigart filed from amid north-central
Sicily’s Peloritan Mountains on August 10, the same day he left for the amphibious assault on Monte Cipolla. The lede that somehow got past the censors was signature Bigart, jagged and taut.

“The Sicilian campaign is a month old. The final days of the slow and undramatic progress toward Messina, and of anticlimactic victories over the Axis forces still clinging to the northeast peninsula, will exasperate a lot of Americans who cannot understand why so powerful an Allied ground force with unlimited superiority cannot swiftly annihilate the German divisions.”
⁶³

No reporter could insinuate big-picture considerations into an account of tactical combat like Bigart. His August 12 piece recounted the frustrations of infantry commanders, who lamented that a small number of enemy gunners could conceal themselves in Sicily’s high country. A well-hidden machine gun nest could inflict lethal damage, holding up an offensive for hours, sometimes days, officers told Bigart.

“In such a country tanks are useless and emplacements for heavy guns are exceedingly hard to find. There is still the air force, but bombers must have a suitable target. Six Germans and a machine gun tucked away on a rocky crag of the Peloritan Mountains would be tough to liquidate from the air.”
⁶⁴

The Allies moving across Sicily faced essentially the same challenge as the Japanese attacking Bataan in the Philippines, noted Bigart. The difference, of course, was that the Americans eluding the Japanese on the Bataan peninsula had no means of getting away, “where the Axis force can escape across the narrow Messina Strait. As far south as Taormina on the Ionian coast and as far west as Falcone on the Tyrrhenian, numbers of landing craft have been observed evacuating unessential German personnel.”
⁶⁵

Bigart’s passage has two noteworthy dimensions. First, if by August 10 reporters not only had deduced that the enemy was ferrying men across the strait but were also permitted to write about it, then why weren’t Allied commanders able to muster a more formidable assault from air and sea to discourage it? Concerted attacks from surface ships and submarines might have impeded the evacuation. A steady barrage of heavy bombing attacks
on both sides of the strait, moreover, could have destroyed the docks and the enemy’s capacity to launch ferries.
⁶⁶

In their memoirs, both Eisenhower and Bradley kicked themselves for not cutting off the enemy’s escape route. Indeed, while the Sicilian battle was still extant, Eisenhower confided to aides that history would never forgive him for letting huge numbers of German troops get away. Allied intelligence knew as early as August 1 that the enemy was plotting its escape from Siciliy.
⁶⁷

The second remarkable facet of Bigart’s passage was its geographic literacy. Bigart was writing for the
Trib
’s upscale readership: cosmopolitan denizens of upper Manhattan and Westchester County. The
Trib
, as Betsy Wade likes to say, was proud to be a “writer’s paper,” a place that gave its reporters leeway without intrusive editing. It encouraged Bigart to show off his mastery of European culture and geography. Not bad for a guy who started out as a pariah in the
Trib
’s newsroom and never came close to completing college.

W
AR ALWAYS BEGETS BARBARISM ON
both sides, but Sicily is where the European conflict took an ugly turn. There were two separate instances in Sicily where American GIs executed large numbers of enemy prisoners; neither episode was properly prosecuted.
⁶⁸

Moreover, Sicily is where George Patton forever sullied his own legacy. On the afternoon that Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s raiders were hanging by a thread on Monte Cipolla, the man who sent them into harm’s way was visiting the 93rd Evacuation Hospital near San Stefano. There, for the second time in a week, Patton confronted a soldier suffering the effects of battle fatigue. Patton slapped the private twice as he loudly ordered that he be removed. A reporter from the
London Daily Mail
followed Patton back to his staff car. The correspondent overheard Patton tell a doctor, “There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews.”
⁶⁹

Omar Bradley, Patton’s deputy, was alerted about both incidents—and so, eventually, were various correspondents, including Hal Boyle and, almost
assuredly, Homer Bigart. Reporters agreed to keep it quiet, as Bradley promised them the matter would be addressed with superiors—and that Patton would be duly punished.

Weeks later Patton’s deeds finally became public when Washington columnist Drew Pearson ran a scathing column. It sparked calls for Patton’s head. Before reassigning him, Eisenhower ordered Patton to apologize to both soldiers—and to his men at large. Before five separate audiences of GIs, Patton delivered profanity-laced “apologies” that left his bewildered men staring at one another, since he never explained what had triggered his appearance before them in the first place.
⁷⁰

B
EFORE HOSTILITIES ENDED IN
S
ICILY
, Homer Bigart encountered another ghastly tunnel—this one even more pestilential than the one in Castel di Tusa. On August 18, while most reporters, including Boyle, were fixated on Patton and the Seventh having finally beaten Montgomery and the Eighth to Messina, Bigart was writing about the human tragedy he’d witnessed in a long tunnel at the end of the Via Protorolia. For many weeks, thousands of Messina’s citizens had sought refuge in the underground warren to escape the wrath of Allied bombing and German guns across the strait.

“The siege claimed three more victims,” Bigart wrote. “A seven-month-old baby starved, two old people died of dysentery. Their bodies lay somewhere in the black recesses, jostled by the crawling mass of the living. Not one of the survivors, estimated at 5,000, had the energy or will to drag the corpses out into the sun and to the cemetery up the hill. They were unmourned. People living in a black hole for months are not apt to waste pity on the dead.”

A distraught doctor was pleading for the American liberators to give him disinfectants, iodine, bandages, anything that might alleviate suffering. The physician took Bigart inside the tunnel. “A swarm of black flies, sticky with filth, spread infection to every portion of the cave. Children were afflicted with malnutrition and scabies and looked almost as dirty as Arabs. Their parents quarreled and fought over scraps of food pillaged from stores.”
⁷¹

The rest of what was left of the city was only marginally less abhorrent. “This correspondent walked two hours in the heart of Messina and found fewer than a score of buildings unscathed and none habitable. From end to end, the Via Garibaldi was a wide lane of rubble between walls of blackened stone.”
⁷²

Much of the Sicily that Homer Bigart and Hal Boyle saw in July and August 1943 was a wide lane of rubble. Five thousand Allied soldiers, nearly ten thousand Axis soldiers, and untold civilians perished on the island in the hellish summer of 1943. Yet compared to what was to come, the Sicilian campaign was a cakewalk.

S
training his eyes as he peered through the binoculars, Hal Boyle could barely make out the two American soldiers tramping through the dank gloom along the swollen river. It was cold and foggy, as it had been practically every day that benighted winter. Everything around the riverbed reeked of death.

The two soldiers—David Kaplan, a thirty-year-old medical officer from Sioux City, Iowa, and Arnold Fleischman, a twenty-year-old private from Wood Haven, Long Island—were carrying a makeshift Red Cross banner stretched between two sticks. “Amid a deathly silence,” Boyle watched as they “marched through battered no-man’s-land to the brink of the bloody Rapido River.”

A rubber raft was supposed to be waiting. But in typical Army fashion, as Kaplan conceded later, there’d been a screwup. Kaplan and Fleischman were forced to scavenge their own vessel. There were plenty of choices: the river’s edge was littered with abandoned boats. They picked one that wasn’t too badly shot up, grabbed a discarded oar, and paddled their way
across the angry Rapido, making sure to keep the Red Cross banner in full view.

With thousands of pairs of field glasses trained on every step, Kaplan and Fleischman trudged another eight hundred yards through the mire. As they picked their way over corpses, they were careful to tread near exploded mine craters. Their theory was that the craters would mark a safe path through the muck, since the Germans weren’t likely to place deadly explosives one on top of the other.

Eventually they came up against a barbed-wire barrier. After making Kaplan and Fleischman wait an uncomfortably long time, an officer from the 15th Panzer Grenadiers emerged from hiding. He was from the same Wehrmacht unit that at Brolo five months earlier had nearly martyred Homer Bigart. Kaplan and Fleischman later told Boyle that the German officer was wearing a crisply pressed uniform and freshly shined boots, which stood in stark contrast to their own filthy garb.

Private Fleischman’s German was so impeccable that the enemy negotiator, impressed, asked where he had learned it. “In school,” Fleischman fibbed, loath to admit he’d spent his childhood in the Fatherland. With Fleischman interpreting, both sides affirmed a three-hour truce to remove their dead and wounded.
¹

Did Hitler’s surrogate appreciate the irony of the Americans sending soldiers of probable Jewish ancestry to negotiate the truce? Boyle, observing from the opposite bank of the Rapido, never got the chance to ask.

Once white flags were bared, some seventy-five American medics and litter carriers crossed the river to help Kaplan and Fleischman comb through the detritus. They were joined by a smaller contingent of Germans. One enemy soldier bummed a cigarette from an American private, proudly revealing in broken English that his brother had emigrated to Brooklyn before the war. Another German, perhaps a minion of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, took footage of the surreal scene with a motion picture camera. At one point the officer with the shiny boots eyed an Allied observation plane hovering nearby, sputtered “This is very unfair!” and demanded that the Piper Cub be grounded since it was violating
terms of the truce. Kaplan ordered a runner to scurry across the river, but by then the plane had disappeared. A few minutes later a muffled burst of gunfire sent men from both sides sprawling—but it turned out to be from a distant German gunner at a different spot on the battlefield.