Assignment to Hell (49 page)

P
ROBABLY THE ONLY
A
MERICAN IN
Normandy in the summer of ’44 who actually called the ancient bushes “
bocage
” was Joe Liebling. Everybody else, Rooney recalled, called them “god-damned hedgerows.” One area two miles by four miles in size in the Cotentin was dotted with some four thousand divided fields.
⁵¹
Liebling wrote in mid-July that “the struggle for orchards and pastures is disheartening because it is so repetitious. There is, as Army men say, no observation in this country, which means that you can’t see an enemy position until you have taken the one in front of it.”
⁵²

G-2’s failure to appreciate the hazards of Normandy’s hedgerows, historian Stephen E. Ambrose argued, proved to be the most glaring intelligence
shortcoming of the war. Omar Bradley and his deputies Chet Hansen and Monk Dickson spent years kicking themselves for not properly interpreting surveillance photographs. Few places in the world were better suited for defensive action. Besides the
bocage
, Normandy had myriad stone walls, rivers, streams, bogs, and swamps—some natural, some Rommel-made.

Andy Rooney remembered ghoulish scenes where American tankmen, trapped in the narrow lanes between hedgerows, would run over anything in their path, including the dead and wounded, regardless of uniform. Boyle and Pyle both filed pieces deploring enemy tactics in the hedgerows. The vegetation was so thick that German snipers could hide in it, even amid a retreat. Once an Allied squad had maneuvered past their position, the enemy riflemen would shoot Tommies and GIs in the back.

The unlikely American hero who ultimately figured out how to punch a hole in the hedgerows was a sergeant in the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron named Curtis “Bud” Culin. Culin had grown up in Cranford, New Jersey, where he had been an apprentice mechanic before the war. Hal Boyle caught up with Culin in the early 1950s, after Dwight Eisenhower had commended the ex-sergeant in Ike’s memoir,
Crusade in Europe
. By then Culin was in his early thirties, an employee of Schenley Distillers, Inc., in New York City. Culin told Boyle the story of how he came to be an accidental inventor.

A
TTACHED TO THE
B
LUE AND
Gray Division, the 102nd Cavalry had come ashore after D-Day and immediately got bottled up in the hedgerows. “When our tanks hit [the hedgerows], it was like cracking into a stone wall,” Culin told Boyle. “And if we tried to climb over them, the under belly of the tank was exposed. The German antitank guns [enemy bazookas were called
Panzerfäuste
] then could rip us open like sardine cans. Our own tank guns were pointed at the sky—useless. We couldn’t defend ourselves.”
⁵³

During the first few weeks of fighting, field commanders sent combat engineers out to the hedgerows with sticks of dynamite. But the gambit
rarely worked—and engineers were getting picked off in alarming numbers. One day Culin’s commanding officer called a meeting of the squad’s noncoms and threw the floor open. Culin volunteered that he didn’t know much about engineering, but had been impressed by the iron roadblocks that the Germans had implanted all over Normandy. Could Allied tankers put sharpened prongs of iron on their tank fronts and try to muscle through the hedgerows?

What the hell, the officer decided, it might be worth a shot.

“They tried it,” Boyle wrote. “They welded four flanges to a crossbar, fixed it to a tank—and the 15-ton vehicle pitch-forked its way right through the nearest hedgerow.”

Word of the 102nd’s brainstorm quickly reached Omar Bradley, who’d been fretting for weeks over the Allies’ lack of progress. Bradley insisted on a demonstration, loved what he saw, alerted the Brits, swore everyone to secrecy—and immediately ordered that six hundred Allied tanks be similarly equipped. In the weeks to come, Sergeant Culin’s pronged tanks—dubbed Rhinos after their rhinoceros-like protuberances—would not only break through thousands of hedgerows, but also be instrumental in the Allies’ breakout. Boyle’s postwar piece quoted the Supreme Commander’s accolade for Culin: “He restored the effectiveness of the tank and gave a tremendous boost to morale throughout the Army.”
⁵⁴

E
VERY DAY IN NORTHERN
F
RANCE
, Boyle interviewed dozens of men like Bud Culin as he looked for stories of heroism and humor; inevitably, many of Boyle’s tributes were posthumous.

Master Sergeant Joe “Shorty” Plotnick of Baltimore, Maryland, was another Mollie, a Russian émigré who enjoyed thumbing his nose at military discipline, was never shy about bragging about himself, and rarely left a poker game without pockets stuffed full of cash. All of five foot four, Shorty had been in the U.S. Army his entire adult life; twenty-six year earlier, he’d earned a Purple Heart in the trenches outside Château-Thierry. Plotnick never knew his age because there was no official record of his birth.
“He had put away enough buck privates’ pay,” Boyle wrote in the summer of ’44, “so that he and his wife could afford more than C-rations any time he wanted to hang up his uniform.”

The crusty Plotnick was an operations noncom with an armored outfit. “[Plotnick] had the reputation of eating young ‘shavetails’ for breakfast, and every man in the unit was fond of this sawed-off, gray-haired little man with the salty voice and the tough manner,” Boyle wrote.

Shorty had hated the enemy long before he’d arrived for his first tour in France. “‘Leave me tell you,’ he said with a deeply serious look on his gnomelike face, ‘I’ll get those Germans!’” Boyle wrote.

Plotnick got more than his share of enemy soldiers—but one afternoon, as Boyle related, Shorty’s luck ran out.

“We’d just taken a town,” said his company commander, Captain James Kuhns of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, “and Shorty and two other men heard there still was a German machine-gun nest giving us trouble in one of the buildings.

“It wasn’t the concern of the operations sergeant to knock it out, but you couldn’t keep Shorty from going after those Germans. He was armed only with a pistol, but the two men with him had carbines. Shorty told them, ‘O.K, I’ll go out and draw their fire, and then you boys give it to them.’ He edged out, but the Germans caught him with the first burst and mowed him down. He died before he knew he had located and wiped out that machine-gun nest. That was like Shorty—sticking his own neck out.”
⁵⁵

Shorty Plotnick, Boyle made clear, stuck his neck out for a lot of guys. “‘He was the best damn soldier in this division,’ said Major Nathan M. Quinn of Spencer, Massachusetts.

“Shorty would rather have had that sentence over his grave than his own nameplate,” Boyle wrote, “because when he was alive he proudly thought so, too. He knew he was the ‘best damned soldier’ in any division. He wouldn’t have been Shorty if he didn’t think so.”
⁵⁶

His encomium to the immigrant who died fighting the Germans for a second time is one of the pieces that earned Hal a Pulitzer Prize.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
J
OE
L
IEBLING
saw Norm Cota shoo the two skittish GIs back toward the front lines, Liebling glimpsed the general in action again. By Tuesday, July 18, the Blue and Gray men, along with regiments from four other divisions, had fought their way from the periphery of St.-Lô into the village itself. Cota was directing the Twenty-ninth’s advance when Liebling saw the general grab at his cane-carrying arm: A German sniper had wounded him. “He shifted his stick to his other hand and stepped inside a gaping shop front while a medic put a dressing on the damaged member,” Liebling wrote.

“Cota came out in time to see the correspondents departing as rapidly as possible,” Liebling wrote, “and my last memory of that victory is of the laughing general waving his stick and yelling, ‘Don’t leave me now, boys! Don’t leave me now!’ The wound hurt worse later. When I next saw the General, he said, ‘I was standing out there to give the boys confidence, but it didn’t work out right.’”
⁵⁷

Cota’s wound notwithstanding, a lot of GIs got an injection of confidence that day. July 18, 1944, proved to be pivotal in the fight to break out of Normandy’s logjam. It was the day that St.-Lô finally fell. The strategic village was at the confluence of arterial roads from the south and east, through which the Germans might have been able to pour reserves to smother a breakthrough farther west. “Its capture,” Liebling wrote, “was like a tourniquet on an elbow, permitting an operation on the forearm.”
⁵⁸

The
New Yorker
writer used it as a metaphor, but hundreds of GIs outside St.-Lô were wearing real tourniquets. Liebling was almost one of them. On the morning of July 18, he remembered diving facedown onto St.-Lô’s cobblestones to avoid sniper fire. He looked up “to steal a glance at the man lying in front of [me], noticing that his eyes were closed, like those of a girl waiting to be kissed.”
⁵⁹

St.-Lô had frustrated Bradley and the American command since D-Day plus twelve when, Hal Boyle wrote, “the first surge from the beachhead
spent itself.”
⁶⁰
North and west of St.-Lô a series of sloping ridges posed thorny obstacles to the Americans. The two longest slopes were both Nazi artillery strongholds that Allied intelligence officials branded Hill 192 and Hill 122 in reference to the number of meters their summits were above sea level.

In the previous three weeks, U.S. artillerymen had “pulverized” Hill 192 with a thousand tons of explosives, Boyle wrote, then watched as tactical fighter-bombers “knocked another 20 feet off the crest of the hill.” Hill 192, Lieutenant Colonel Edward W. Wood told Boyle, “was a tough nut to crack with snipers and pillboxes operating almost every foot of the way.” It gave the Wehrmacht a commanding view of the entire Norman battlefield, from the Vire River on the west to Caumont in the east, including every conceivable approach to St.-Lô.

Boyle was with the Second Division under General Walter M. Robertson on July 12 when, after eleven hours of miserable combat, the Americans finally uprooted enemy artillerymen from the crest of Hill 192. A ridge less than two hundred meters high had cost that division alone 1,253 casualties.
⁶¹
“Victorious American doughboys,” Boyle wrote that night, “slept the sleep of exhaustion today in enemy positions by the bodies of German dead from whom they wrested control of this height.”

The Germans had brought up so many mortars that GIs on the outskirts of St.-Lô were reduced to advancing on their bellies. St.-Lô had become “a miniature Stalingrad,” Boyle remarked, a place with frantic Nazis retreating behind heaps of broken stone and mortar.
⁶²

Hill 122, a couple of kilometers closer to the village, had to be secured so that the Blue and Gray Division’s sustained attack from the northeast could be carried out without harassment from close-in artillery. The still-green 35th Division under General Paul Baade drew the assignment. They fought their way up the slope with such élan that after the war Andy Rooney compared their bloody sacrifice to the Marine conquest of Tarawa eight months before. “We could not get the Germans off [Hill 122], and a lot of American boys lost their lives trying to climb it in the face of withering enemy fire from bunkers at its top,” Rooney wrote.
⁶³
The battle for Hill
122 went on, unflinching, day after day, before its occupiers finally crumbled at dawn on July 18, falling back into town to continue the fight.

“Correspondents—among them me—who entered [St.-Lô] shortly after the troops saw little,” Joe Liebling wrote, “because they either hugged what they hoped would prove to be the lee of a wall or lay flat on their faces during their sojourn. The Germans, having been thrown out of the city, were reacting like a drunk who has been chucked out of a saloon and then throws a beer bottle through the window.”
⁶⁴

July 18 was also the day that, some forty miles east, Bernard Montgomery launched Operation Goodwood, Monty’s much-heralded, and eventually much-maligned, offensive to draw enemy attention to his front and away from Omar Bradley and the Americans.

It was also the day that Bradley put the finishing touches on his overhauled plan to break out of the hedgerows, dubbed Operation Cobra. Cobra was designed, as boxing maven Liebling appreciated, as the right cross that followed Goodwood’s left jab. From the outset of Overlord planning in London months before, the Allied strategy had called for Montgomery and his Brits and Canadians to keep the enemy occupied in eastern Normandy while, from the west, Bradley and the Americans wheeled south and east, rocking Rommel and Rundstedt back on their heels. But the slow going in the hedgerows had delayed the Allies’ one-two combination.

H
AVING STARTED
J
ULY 18 AT
Mme. Hamel’s farm, Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were all within relative arm’s reach. How Liebling and Boyle hitched a ride to the St.-Lô front that morning is not known. Rooney, however, recalls having escorted Liebling’s Barneville restaurant coconspirator Bob Casey of the
Chicago Daily News
. Rooney held Casey, then the grand old man of Normandy correspondents, in awe; Casey was a longtime international affairs columnist who had written some twenty books about foreign policy and his travels abroad.

Once Casey and Rooney got within a mile or two of St.-Lô, artillery shells began thumping. When Rooney spotted Blue and Gray infantrymen
joining men from the Big Red One and the Second and the Fourth Divisions and all locking horns with the Wehrmacht’s Third Parachute Division, he couldn’t wait to witness the action. “A fight between those [units] was the Super Bowl,” Rooney recalled a half century later.
⁶⁵

Rooney steered the jeep past inert bodies and burned-out vehicles. By now the noise of the battle was alarmingly close. Rooney and Casey could see plumes of smoke shooting up from buildings smouldering in St.-Lô.

“I’m just going to walk down a ways,” Rooney told his companion.