Assignment to Hell (47 page)

Despite the damage, his building stayed open until a second attack occurred a week later.
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This time, Cronkite told Betsy, it was a “real daisy”—a flying bomb that smashed into a nearby structure. It came in the early morning, with Cronkite still in bed. All night long Cronkite had heard buzz bombs—or at least thought he had. Each time, he’d jump out of bed and sprint toward the hallway—as he had the previous Sunday morning during the barracks attack. Finally, exhausted by false alarms, he had fallen fast asleep.

“This one must have awakened me just before it hit because I remember in half sleep curling up in [a] tight ball, pulling covers over my head and clapping hands over my ears,” he wrote Betsy. “Then it hit. All hell seemed to break loose.”

The explosion was so devastating that it seemed like fifteen minutes before debris finally stopped falling. But in truth it was only a few seconds; the ceiling, to Cronkite’s amazement, didn’t cave. There were so many shards of jagged glass that Cronkite put on boots to exit the apartment. Miraculously, the only possession he lost was a bottle of hair tonic, which broke after it fell off the bathroom counter. His books and clothes were covered with soot—“but nothing that a little washing and cleaning won’t fix,” Cronkite wrote.
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W
HILE HIS FRIEND
C
RONKITE WAS
ducking doodlebugs in London, Andy Rooney was on the Cotentin eluding artillery fire. Once he headed southeast from Cherbourg, Rooney started angling to get what his confidant Joe Liebling already had: credentials to cover the day-to-day movements of the
First Army, which was still hunkered down in Normandy’s hedgerow country. While Rooney waited for the PROs to process his request, he bunked at Grandcamp, in barracks next to the Ninth Air Force’s A-1 airstrip that Cronkite had admired three weeks before.

Scores of P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51 Mustangs now called Grandcamp and its chicken wire runways home. Rooney marveled at the way the pilots would shriek overhead, touch down, rearm, refuel, grab something to eat, then head off on their next sortie. “For the P-47 pilots, zooming in with their eight machine guns blazing on a line of trucks bringing up ammunition and food, it was a vicious but satisfying business,” Rooney wrote. “They made it impossible for the Germans to move anything on wheels in daylight hours. A P-47’s firepower could turn over a heavy truck, cut a horse in half, knock the steeple off a church, or pierce the walls of a stone house and kill its occupants.”
³⁰
Normandy’s church steeples were a constant target; the dirty deed had to be done, Rooney learned, because the enemy used anything above ground level as an observation post.

Rooney’s roommate at Grandcamp was an Associated Press photographer named Bede Irvin, who filled their hovel with pictures of his wife, Kath. They weren’t the only journalists around: a savvy Ninth Air Force public relations officer named Ben Wright, realizing that there were a lot of reporters and photographers without accreditation, like Irvin and Rooney, roaming around Normandy, provided them with food and shelter in exchange for an article or two or some pictures of Grandcamp’s flyboys in action.

I
N LATE
J
ULY AND EARLY
August, Cronkite again got a quick glimpse at Normandy. Along with six other newsmen and two photographers, he flew in a military transport with an unnamed “very high ranking officer.” The group spent two days touring the Cotentin, retracing the American advance from Isigny-sur-Mer through Carentan and Montebourg to Cherbourg.

“God, what desolation!” Cronkite told Betsy. “It is hard to imagine a town, say the size of Sedalia [Missouri], completely flattened. The towns
just do not exist anymore. And everywhere convoys and the ever-present dust. Goggles like those worn in the desert are essential.”

Cronkite was glad to be away from southern England and its omnipresent buzz bombs, at least for a few days. With the nearest German soldier a couple dozen miles away, things were quiet, the nighttime rest “heaven-sent.” And in a commentary on London’s putrid cuisine, Cronkite told Betsy that the Army field chow tasted damned good.
³¹

Back in London, Cronkite waited for the momentous call that would bring him to the Continent for good. It turned out to be a far longer wait than he wanted.

H
AL
B
OYLE GOT TO AN
American marshaling camp outside a Channel port in the south of England seven days after D-Day. He was filing stories about the staggering amount of Allied personnel and equipment being ferried to Normandy. To stay dry, he spent the stormy night of June 22 stuffed into the seat of a supply truck, sans blanket, hankering, he told Frances, for his bunk and bunkmate on Waverly Place.
³²
Five days later the Army finally deposited him at a Normandy beachhead. Like Rooney two and a half weeks earlier, Boyle immediately turned right and up.

Boyle was eager to see for himself the final stages of the Cotentin operation—and to sample some of Fort du Roule’s liquor. On June 29 he caught up with the infantrymen in the Ninth Division as they rounded up the German holdouts at Cap de la Hague, eight miles northwest of Cherbourg. After Italy’s depressing quagmire, Boyle was thrilled to be on the march. He hitchhiked his way to the front and watched the spectacle of the largest German surrender in the West since Tunisia thirteen months earlier.

As his ride pushed northwest through the now-liberated peninsula, Boyle passed hundreds of prisoners huddled in the rain; he then counted sixteen Allied trucks carrying scores of other enemy soldiers. The “fanatical Nazi” who commanded the Cap de la Hague garrison had lied to his men, Boyle learned, telling them that a counteroffensive would rescue them. A few days earlier, German commander von Schlieben had told Joe
Collins that, given Hitler’s orders, he could not compel his officers and men to give up their arms.

The Nazis might have held out even longer if their liquor supplies hadn’t run dry, “judging from the condition of a goodly number of prisoners,” Boyle told readers. But besides cognac, the enemy had run out of ammunition, too.

Boyle quoted a public relations officer from Columbia, Tennessee, named Lindsey Nelson that Germans trapped in the upper reaches of the Cotentin became so desperate they began firing “star shells”—artillery casings without explosives embedded inside. The defanged shells made a “hell of a” hole but did not inflict any damage unless they happened to land directly on top of a trench, Captain Nelson told Boyle. “The only effect they had was to puzzle hell out of our infantry in their foxholes. They keep waiting for the real shells that never came.”
³³

The onetime newspaperman with the hometown
Columbia Daily Herald
later joined the ETO press corps as a journalist with the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
and palled around with Boyle and company in three different countries. After the war, Nelson became a noted sportscaster and the eventual voice of the New York Mets and University of Notre Dame football highlights.

It had taken the better part of a month, but the Americans had finally silenced the railway artillery guns that had menaced so many GIs on the peninsula. Even after Cherbourg fell, the rail guns disrupted the work of Army and Navy engineers as they tried to salvage the port. Some 4,200 enemy soldiers, many of them burrowed into hideaways not unlike the Japanese on Saipan and Peleliu, became casualties in those final days on the Cotentin as the VII Corps mopped up with flamethrowers, grenades, and bayonets.

On July 1, Boyle spotted a German prisoner being interrogated in Cap de la Hague. “Standing straight as a ramrod, the tall blond said he was from Württemberg and was a Nazi sergeant and a party member.” Through an interpreter, the sergeant shared with Boyle his view of American battle tactics. “Your American artillery is wonderful, wonderful and terrible,” the enemy noncom said. “Why, it never dares attack without heavy preliminary
artillery bombardment. If it was not for that artillery one of our machine gun crews could hold back a whole company of your infantry.” The American interpreter let the prisoner’s words soak in, then parried: “Well, sergeant, our way seems to get results. Wouldn’t your soldiers like to have all that artillery supporting them, too?”
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B
OYLE WAS DELIGHTED TO BE
reunited with old chum Don Whitehead. At boss Wes Gallagher’s direction, the AP duo was working in sync, divvying up assignments and making sure Normandy’s best stories got covered. By early July, the Allied line ran west to east over some seventy miles, from the Cotentin through Bayeux to St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte and the Gulf of St.-Malo. The British and Canadians in Bernard Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group were on the eastern one third of the line; the American First Army under Courtney Hodges and Omar Bradley was positioned forty-some miles along the western front. The U.S. line bulged amid Caumont’s marshlands and again in the Nazi-flooded swamps of Carentan and St.-Lô.
³⁵
As Joe Liebling pointed out, the line ironically did not face east toward Germany, but instead aimed south and, in certain respects, west—an ironic twist of fate that a month later bedeviled George Patton.

The product of much back-and-forth politicking, the Allies had come up with a compromise, a bizarre chain of command. Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander, with Montgomery the overall Allied commander of invasion forces and Bradley the U.S. commander. But once troops arrived en masse in France, the arrangement called for Bradley to become commander of the 12th Army Group, a promotion that would make him Monty’s coequal. It was a peculiar construct, rife with problems from the outset. Within weeks, it would prove untenable.

W
ES
G
ALLAGHER AND FELLOW
AP editor Bob Brunelle wired Boyle from London that Boyle was to concentrate on his column—and let colleagues worry about spot coverage. But Boyle continued to file multiple pieces—profiles, interviews, battle flashes, skirmish descriptions, and more—
virtually every day. His letters to Frances complained about the frustrations of covering a battlefield as complex as Normandy’s and the energy it took to chase down infantrymen every day.

“We have been as busy as a flea in a dogshow the last few days, and I am not sure which is going to end first, me or the campaign,” Boyle wrote on July 10.

There is so much news to cover that it would take fifty newsmen for an agency to cover it all adequately. They won’t allow us but two men with the First Army—Don and I—so we have to work as hard and as long each day as we can, writing everything we come across and let the rest go. I am so glad to be over here and working on this story that I don’t mind the effort. I only hope I can keep up the pace. I don’t have quite the same endurance I did when I started off in this business almost two years ago. Tunisia, Sicily and Italy have taken something out of me. Still I have been going from eight a.m. until one or two a.m. steady for two weeks and haven’t collapsed yet—thanks to your vitamin pills and “hog” throat tablets.
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Boyle had plenty of accomplices with whom to share Frances’ elixir, not the least of which was his drinking buddy Joe Liebling. The two of them picked up where they’d left off in Tunisia fourteen months before; Liebling couldn’t wait to show his fellow gourmand the epicurean glories of France. In Barneville, a tiny Cotentin crossroads a dozen miles removed from the fighting at La Haye du Puits, locals had tipped off Liebling that the female chef at the Hôtel de Paris, though temperamental, was superb.

“She was a scrawny, enameled ex-soprano, whose extravagant circumspection inspired doubts about her past,” Liebling wrote. To wangle decent wines, Liebling, Boyle, and other correspondents “had to pay her a bit of court.” Robert Casey of the
Chicago Daily News
spoke no French but possessed matinee-idol good looks. Liebling put Casey to work sucking up to the chef. While sampling her appetizers, “Casey would roll his eyes and
emit terrifying groans, representing passion, and I would order up the last bottles of Nuits-St.-Georges ’37,” Liebling recalled.
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On the weekend of July 8 and 9, Liebling, Boyle, and Casey piled into a jeep intent on sampling the Hôtel de Paris’ delicacies. En route they bumped into a 79th Infantry Division intelligence officer. The officer was excited about the potential for a major breakthrough in that day’s battle for La Haye and invited the three correspondents to witness history. La Haye du Puits was the place GIs had dubbed Hooey da Pooey; it was at the far western end of the U.S. line, almost to the coast. Its German occupiers, crowded by the sea, were staving off annihilation by putting up a hellacious fight.

“Casey and Boyle and I all felt it would be callous to tell the G-2 we were cutting his battle in order to eat
sole bonne femme
and
tournedos Choron
. We decided therefore, to attend the battle, but not until after lunch, when we would be in a better frame of mind for it.”
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They washed down their four courses with two bottles of Burgundy, one white and one red, then drove south past summer villas on a blue-skied afternoon. Tank and jeep traffic was surprisingly light. “It was a little like going to Jamaica in time to have a bet on the third race, when most of the crowd had already gone through,” Liebling wrote. As they neared La Haye, however, the roads became congested and the sound of battle was so loud they had to shout to be heard. At a Medical Corps clearing station they watched two combat-fatigued GIs grind their heads against a wall as they balked at getting into an ambulance.

With shells bursting nearby, the three of them gingerly drove around a bend in the road, then sought shelter in a big home—Liebling guessed it was a sanatorium—surrounded by landscaped grounds. The enemy had used it as a barracks and later a redoubt; the place stank, Liebling remembered.

“The German Army had two smells—one of sour cabbage, which permeated even its sweat-soaked blankets, and one resembling a blend of a camel house and raw ether, which attached even to fragments of shot down aircraft. I don’t know yet what that one was, but it was known from Norway to Cyrenaica as the ‘Boche smell.’”