Assignment to Hell (46 page)

With his ability to converse in near-immaculate French (and even throw out Norman colloquialisms), Liebling took advantage of the delays to visit with members of the Maquis, the Resistance fighters who, now out in the open, referred to themselves as an army of liberation, the FFI. The FFI’s symbol, displayed everywhere in Normandy, was steeped in French history: It was the
Croix de Lorraine
, the two-barred-cross insignia whose banner Joan of Arc had carried into battle and whose telltale ring was slipped to Paul Henreid’s character, Victor Laszlo, at Rick’s Café Américain in
Casablanca
. At its peak some 350,000 Frenchmen belonged to various Maquis units. General Eisenhower said after the war that the Resistance was worth fifteen divisions.

Painfully emerging through Liebling’s reporting was the unspeakable truth about the Gestapo’s treatment of the French during the Occupation. It was much worse than even Liebling had feared.

Any French citizen, even priests and nuns, thought to harbor Allied sympathies—no matter how peripheral—was subject to arrest and torture. Suspected Maquis leaders would have their fingernails torn out or their testicles crushed with a hammer. The pregnant wife of one Resistance leader was beaten so severely that she lost her baby.

A pair of middle-aged men Liebling met in a café had been thrown in jail for six months—with no reason given. “[The pair] presumed that an anonymous letter had denounced them as patriots,” Liebling wrote. “They had at last been released, still without being told why they had been arrested. They didn’t seem excited; they were slightly apologetic about even mentioning it, like Londoners in a pub diffidently exchanging bomb stories. After they had finished their reminiscences, [they] began to laugh. They slapped their knees, they bent double, they choked, they wiped their eyes, and finally one of them sputtered, ‘And to think, we are rid of the bastards for good!’ Then they all had another glass of wine.”

The café’s proprietress told Liebling that German soldiers would stagger in after curfew and demand liquor, threatening her and her family if she didn’t serve them. She once had the temerity to tell a German that in her experience the British were decent people. Word reached Occupation authorities, who closed down her establishment for a month.

“A prostitute, sedately sipping an apéritif near the zinc bar, said, ‘Once I called a German soldier a Jew just to make him angry. He reported that I had called Hitler a Jew. The Gestapo arrested me, and I had thirty-three days in prison on bread and water.’”

Throughout Normandy, FFI patrols perfected a hit-and-run technique on retreating Germans.
En enfilade
, Resistance fighters would lie in ambush, waiting for opportune moments to pounce. Every day, Allied commanders had to figure out what to do with the droves of prisoners that the FFI was herding through the woods.

Liebling interviewed a German doctor whose hospital unit had been overrun by a handful of lightly armed FFI guerrillas.

I asked him if he thought the war was over, as far as Germany was concerned, and he said yes, the war was lost.
“Three million Germans have been killed or wounded to save Europe from Bolshevism,” he said, assuming that martyred look which the Germans always used to put on when, as “reasonable men,” they discussed the last war with the Americans they took for suckers. I could see a new myth—which would replace the “stab in the back” and “the English plot”—building up in the muddy, Teutonic mind, and I felt just like kicking the doctor in the seat of the pants.
¹⁶

Liebling wasn’t the only patriot in northern Europe looking to give Nazis and their collaborators a swift kick. As villages were freed that summer and fall, a fascinating ritual unfolded. Even as Allied infantrymen were flushing holdout snipers, crowds would gather to rough up the locals who had profited from the Occupation. German concubines had their heads shaved and were forced to run a gauntlet in the village square.

Prostitutes were curiously exempted from this public censure. Why? Liebling asked an FFI sergeant. “A prostitute is a prostitute and a German is a German, and each acts according to his nature,” the Resistance fighter replied, shrugging.
¹⁷

W
ALTER
C
RONKITE’S NATURE WAS TO
be grumpy if chained to a desk. He spent much of June ’44 annoyed at three things: the weather, which prevented him from seeing Normandy from the air early D-Day morning; the Army Air Force’s public relations office, which in his mind had reneged on its promise of an invasion-day “exclusive”; and his bosses at UP, who insisted that he stay in London rather than cover the Allies’ now-mushrooming ground operations in northern France.

On D-Day plus four or five, Cronkite finally got a chance to set foot on French soil. He and other reporters accompanied a delegation of engineers on an inspection tour of the Ninth Air Force’s brand-new runway, Advanced Landing Ground A-1, at Grandcamp on the cliffs beyond Omaha Beach’s Pointe du Hoc. The strip had been hastily patched together; pilots
called the steel mesh sunk into the soggy soil “chicken wire.”
¹⁸
It was more landing mat, Cronkite wrote, than true runway, but it was sturdy enough to handle fighters, liaison craft, and scout planes; in a pinch, it could be used by larger planes.

Cronkite filed a piece about the remarkable grace under pressure of USAAF engineers, then hung around the beachhead for another twenty-four hours, watching in awe as Omaha became an ersatz port through the massive Mulberries, the British-invented temporary harbors. He also watched in horror as Omaha’s invasion-day victims continued to wash ashore. Cronkite wasn’t pleased to be forced back to London.
¹⁹

His fellow wire service reporter Hal Boyle was angry on D-Day, too, but mainly at the Army public relations staff that refused to make good on its commitment to take him to Normandy. Boyle was “so low he could crawl under the belly of an earthworm,” he told Frances, joking that he and the other jilted correspondents were threatening mass hari-kari.
²⁰
Because of the screwup on D-Day morning, Hal hadn’t even been part of the official the-invasion-is-on announcement at the Ministry of Information.

It was Boyle’s friend and superior Wes Gallagher who was among the select group of correspondents briefed by Allied public relations officials that fateful morning. Gallagher and his colleagues had been given exactly thirty-three minutes to file their stories at the Ministry; he crafted a 1,300-word gem and elbowed his way to the front of the high-ceilinged room. At the appointed hour, as Boyle related the next day, a British officer counted down from five, then shoved open the doors. Gallagher, Boyle wrote, was a “human torpedo”; he yelled “Gangway!” and lunged toward a hallway phone booth.
²¹

Boyle, like Cronkite, got a brief and unsatisfying visit to Normandy. On June 9, he and other reporters were taken across the Channel for a one-day visit to the Omaha beachhead. Boyle’s entourage, which must have included British correspondents, was also driven to Montgomery’s mobile field headquarters, which at that point was three or four miles inland from the beachhead.

But Boyle, like Cronkite, was soon back in London, chomping at the bit, watching his pal Whitehead’s copy from the Cotentin campaign race
across the wire. At least Boyle knew that at some point soon, he’d receive a permanent assignment with ground troops.

Cronkite was slated to receive a permanent assignment, too—a job heading UP’s bureau in Amsterdam once the city was liberated. It was an important job since the UP planned to coordinate much of its European war and postwar coverage through the Netherlands. Still, Cronkite kept hoping to latch onto a special airborne operation or be summoned to witness a decisive offensive. For months on end, neither happened. To make the situation even more frustrating, Cronkite’s roommate Jim McGlincy, UP’s perpetual screwup, by mid-June had been assimilated with troops in Normandy and was filing wonderful profiles and spot news reports. “I admit I miss the patter of [McGlincy’s] little feet around the house,” Cronkite wrote Betsy.
²²

W
ITH HIS ROOMIE GONE
, C
RONKITE
moved from a top-floor flat on Buckingham Gate to a smaller interior apartment three floors below. It turned out to be a fortuitous switch; it may have saved Cronkite from injury when the “doodlebugs” began hitting London. Before summer’s end, some 2,500 “robot bombs” would strike the British capital, killing nearly 5,800 Londoners.
²³

It’s odd that a Nazi terror weapon—something that ended up inflicting twenty-three thousand casualties, virtually all of them British civilians, and damaging one hundred thousand English homes—was given such harmless-sounding nicknames. Even “buzz bomb” doesn’t capture the two-ton V-1’s viciousness.

The first drones raked southern England in the early morning of Monday, June 13, six days after D-Day. V-1s were the first of Hitler’s vaunted
Vergeltungswaffen
weapons to actually become operational. Controlled by an automatic “gyro-pilot,” the V-1s were the first jet-propelled aircraft in history. They didn’t always strike where they were aimed—but that made them even more terrifying.
²⁴

Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, whose radio broadcasts had been bragging ad nauseam about how Hitler’s vengeance weapons would
turn around the war, had a field day when the buzz bombs finally hit. German soldiers were told that all of London was aflame.

Some twenty-four hours after the first V-1 attacks, Cronkite attended a briefing by British officials. A big part of Britain’s countermeasures, Cronkite wrote, was to use heavy and medium bombers to disable the rocket bombs’ “take-off strips” along the Pas de Calais.
²⁵
The buzz bombs typically traveled some three-hundred-plus miles an hour—fast, but not fast enough to evade antiaircraft fire or to elude Spitfires and Mustangs, which could toggle the V-1’s wings and knock it off course.

On Sunday morning, June 18—day five of the buzz bomb hysteria—Cronkite had one of his closest shaves of the war. While still at his apartment at 11:20, he wrote Betsy that he had just rung for Charles, the building valet, to bring some coffee, when he heard an air raid siren coupled with the ominous
pssz-pssz
of an approaching V-1. He threw open his living room window and stuck his head out “to see what I could see.” Since the flying bomb was approaching from his blind side, he couldn’t spot it—but he did see many of the Guardsmen at the palace’s Wellington Barracks craning
their
necks out doors and windows, trying to eyeball the phantom.

Then I saw them duck back into the barracks and at the same instant the motor of the damned thing stopped. By that time we had begun to learn that we had five to fifteen seconds to get under cover between the motor shutting off and the explosion. I turned and started running like hell for the main corridor of the apartment building. I got through the tiny living room into the hall of my flat when the bomb hit. There was the terrible tinkle of falling glass like in an automobile accident only multiplied a thousand fold with the additional crumbling of plaster and ripping of wood. I felt like someone had slapped me hard on the back, and then shoved me but hard on the chest.
²⁶

Cronkite staggered but did not fall in the hallway. Dust and smoke were everywhere. The door of one nearby flat had been torn from its
hinges; Cronkite worried that the door was going to become its own flying bomb.

It took him a few seconds to get his bearings. Soon he realized that although some windows had been blown out, the place was not going to collapse; outside and inside, he could hear people bellowing. Sirens had begun to blare.

Two hundred yards away at the Wellington Barracks, the scene was horrific. As if manipulated by Satan, the V-1’s radio-directed jet engine had conked out directly over Guards Chapel; just as the choir was singing a Eucharistic hymn, the buzz bomb had nose-dived into the roof. Everything instantly collapsed: the ceiling, its concrete pillars and supporting walls, and the portico over the chapel’s western door. Only the apse was somehow spared. The rubble was so thick that it took rescue workers days to locate all the bodies and body parts.

It turned out to be the most devastating V-1 attack of the war. One hundred twenty-one soldiers and civilians were killed; another 141 were seriously injured. Among the dead were several senior Allied army officers and their wives. The Bishop of Maidstone, who was presiding over the service, survived, as did the candles and silver cross that hung over the altar.
²⁷

Cronkite was still coughing up dust in the hallway when Charles, the “houseman,” appeared. Though getting on in years, Charles insisted on dressing the part of the gentleman’s gentleman.

“Are you all right, sir?” Charles asked. Without waiting for an answer, the valet vanished. Cronkite, tongue in cheek, told Betsy he was disappointed that Charles hadn’t uttered the movie cliché, “You rang, sir?”

The V-1 demolition of Guards Chapel became a standard part of Cronkite’s World War II repertoire, one of the half dozen or so stories he repeatedly told interviewers. Over the years, his facts got mixed up and the circumstances embellished. Charles became “George,” and “Are you all right, sir?” became the bon mot that movie-buff Cronkite had hoped it would be: “You rang, sir?”

Maybe Cronkite inadvertently confused things or maybe he did it deliberately. Either way, Walter Cronkite was entitled to exaggerate his war stories a little, the same way any veteran is.

No exaggeration was needed to describe the chapel carnage. Surely Cronkite must have been the first reporter on the scene. He interviewed witnesses and rescue workers—knowing full well that censors would never allow him to use the material, at least not for a long while. It wasn’t until weeks later when Churchill “sounded off and revealed all the secret details,” as Walter told Betsy, that Cronkite was even able to mail a letter about the episode.