Assignment to Hell (5 page)

Late in the evening of June 5, Allied planes flying wingtip to wingtip in magnificent V formations soared over Rooney’s convoy. Rooney didn’t know it, of course, but the planes were C-47 Dakota transports and gliders ferrying paratroopers of the U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions to their drop zones behind Utah Beach—the very place where Rooney and his shipmates were headed.

A few days before, General Eisenhower’s office had issued a directive urging reporters to be circumspect. There was “nothing threatening” about SHAEF’s memo, Rooney remembered. “It assumed we knew a lot and Eisenhower was simply reminding us to be careful. It also assumed, which is what made it friendly, that we were all on the same side.”
⁵⁵

In truth, Rooney didn’t know a whole lot more about the nuances of D-Day than his Fourth Division pals did. The Army had given him his
own jeep, which he spent hours weatherproofing, slapping thick grease onto its electrical connections, ignition, and generator. At the
Stars and Stripes
’ insistence, the jeep was being transported across the Channel, too. When Rooney hit Utah, he was determined to drive it over the dunes and into the farmland beyond.

Rooney spent June 6 getting snatches of invasion news from the ship’s radio, trying to avoid getting seasick as he stared across the waves and wondered at what point on French soil he and his jeep would have to begin dodging enemy fire. He’d been in the ETO for twenty-three months and had never been near a ground fight, although he’d earned an Air Medal for flying along on five combat missions.

The infantrymen huddled on the deck had a different persona than the flyboys Rooney had covered for so long. Infantry guys were less smug, a little less feisty. Yet the one thing that brought GIs and airmen together, Rooney realized, was the specter of imminent death.

“It’s hard to see the big picture,” he wrote, “and especially hard if you’re in the picture.”
⁵⁶

O
NE CORRESPONDENT WHO THOUGHT HE
understood Normandy’s big picture was Rooney’s prospective jeep mate, Harold V. “Hal” Boyle, a thirty-three-year-old reporter and columnist for the Associated Press. An Irishman who under normal circumstances was witty and gregarious, Boyle was, on the afternoon of D-Day, the “maddest man in England,” a colleague remembered.
⁵⁷
Along with a select group of reporters that included Cronkite’s UP pal McGlincy, Boyle was supposed to be on board a landing craft hitting Omaha Beach. Things went so rough on day one at Omaha, however, that officials kept the press contingent “sitting on their prats” in England, Boyle complained.

Boyle was so frustrated, he wrote his wife, Mary Frances, that he wanted to jump off Waterloo Bridge—but punned that his protest “wouldn’t make that big of a splash.”
⁵⁸
The last thing Army public relations officers (PROs) wanted was a household-name journalist like Boyle getting bloodied
at Normandy, so he spent the next couple of days helping AP pry news out of the Brits’ Ministry of War Information at the University of London.

Boyle by then was a grizzled veteran of amphibious landings, having witnessed four of them in the Mediterranean Theater. In November of ’42, he nearly drowned in the waters off Casablanca when his craft got swamped on a coral reef. Members of General George S. Patton’s armored corps fished him out. Boyle repaid the favor by praising Patton’s men and (sometimes) their combative and controversial leader on two different continents.

Guys in the trenches loved swapping stories with Boyle. He had an Irish bartender’s mug, an infectious smile, a big belly and a big belly laugh, pockets crammed with cheap cigars, chewing gum, and chocolate bars, and, most importantly, an omnipresent flask of rotgut that he was only too happy to share. He also knew how to deliver a profane punch line. His gift for salty language impressed even the most hard-bitten grunts. He was ruddy-faced and beefy, with a batch of brownish Hollywood hair that made him the envy of every aging correspondent in the ETO.

Boyle loved Big Red One infantrymen from the Big Apple as only a Midwesterner could, laboring to capture their banter in Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook, the popular column he started in late ’42. Faithful readers of Boyle—and by June of ’44 hundreds of papers back home were running his features—knew that the First Division had saved the Allies’ bacon in Tunisia and later up the gut of Sicily.
⁵⁹

As he listened to briefing officers describe the stiff resistance that Allied invaders were likely to encounter in Normandy, Boyle braced himself for the worst. The seaborne landings in Morocco and Sicily had been relative cakewalks. But getting off Italian beachheads at Salerno and Anzio had proven nightmarish. For weeks following the Anzio invasion, enemy tanks and artillery operated so close in the nearby hills that binoculars weren’t always needed to follow their movements.

W
HILE
B
OYLE STEWED IN
L
ONDON
on June 6, his friend Homer William Bigart, a thirty-seven-year-old correspondent for the
New York Herald
Tribune
, was doing his own stewing eight hundred miles southeast. The dogged Bigart, almost never without a Lucky Strike stuck between oft-stammering lips, was another veteran of the siege at Anzio. Along with other journalists who had followed the dispirited campaign of Lieutenant General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, Bigart was in freshly liberated Rome. At that moment the
Trib
reporter was trying to make sense of Clark’s curious decision to abandon pursuit of German field marshal Albert Kesselring’s Army Group C, which was finally on the run after a long and bloody stalemate.

Bigart believed in covering war, a Shakespeare-loving colleague once said, “from the cannon’s mouth.”
⁶⁰
In late May of ’44, Bigart’s bullheadedness nearly cost him his life. Cruising solo in a jeep, determined to score an exclusive, Bigart was trying to keep abreast of the Allies’ breakout through the Alban Hills south of Rome. Careering around a bend, he suddenly found himself staring at the barrel of a hostile tank. The enemy soldiers were lolling outside, taking a lunch break. They scrambled for weapons as Bigart jammed the jeep into reverse and flew back down the hill. The hair on the back of Bigart’s neck stood straight up, he admitted four decades later, until he got out of range.
⁶¹
Despite the near-death experience, Bigart got what he wanted, grabbing a story that day that trumped the
New York Times
.

A few nights later, on the evening of June 4, Bigart was following forward elements of Clark’s army as they entered the Eternal City. In the rugged prose for which he was already renowned, Bigart wrote, “[It] was a moment of such wildly primitive emotion that even now, 12 hours afterward, it is impossible to write soberly of the nightmarish scene along the Via Nazionale, where jubilation gave way to frozen panic and sudden death.” Nazi commanders, in a last-ditch effort to keep the Allies from crossing the River Tiber, hurled flak wagons—lethally armed half-tracks—into Clark’s lead column, which at that instant was engulfed by delirious Romans.

“It was like a scene from the Russian revolution,” Bigart continued. “The transition from exultation to paralyzing fear was not immediate—
there was that split second of astonishment when the throng merely stood agape, watching the tracers ricochet off the stone walls of the Palace of Rospigliosi.”
⁶²

The next morning, June 5, it was Bigart’s turn to stand agape as the squirrelly Clark insisted on posing for photographs on Capitoline Hill instead of chasing Kesselring. Clark’s bearing was so imperious that, outside his earshot, staff officers called him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus.
⁶³
When he arrived for a press conference called by his fifty-person public relations team, Clark feigned surprise that newsreel cameramen, photographers, and correspondents were waiting. The shutterbugs were strategically positioned so that they’d get shots of Clark’s left profile, the general’s “manlier” side—or so he believed.

To ensure that the photo opportunity remained an all-American affair, Clark’s staff stuck military policemen at key Roman intersections to stymie any attempt by British officials to infiltrate. It was too bad, reporters sniggered, that the general hadn’t expended that kind of energy in cutting off the enemy.

For months Clark had told the press that the aim of the Italian offensive was clear: to decimate Kesselring’s forces. Now, suddenly, the campaign seemed to have a more cynical objective: to make Mark Clark a newsreel star and a hero in the pages of
Life
and
Look
. At one point during the session, Clark spread a map on an ancient balustrade and, nodding thoughtfully, pretended to point out something to his corps commanders, a couple of whom were so embarrassed they tried to avoid making eye contact with reporters.

Bigart, cigarette undoubtedly bouncing, exchanged incredulous looks with Paul Green of the
Stars and Stripes
, Eric Sevareid of CBS Radio, and other journalists. One correspondent, quite possibly the acerbic Bigart, notorious for his cut-through-the-crap quips, averred, “On this historic occasion, I feel like vomiting.”
⁶⁴

On June 6 Mark Clark was still holed up in Rome, and so was the Fifth Army’s media entourage. Reporters were at the makeshift press headquarters banging out copy when word came over the radio that the Allies had
finally launched the cross-Channel invasion. The correspondents threw up their hands and pulled out their cigarettes. They knew they were missing the biggest story of the war.

A
T ROUGHLY 0750 ON
D-D
AY
, as LCI(L)-88 chugged out of range of shore guns, Joe Liebling went down to the well deck, hoping its injured seamen weren’t seriously hurt. He stumbled onto a grisly scene. Permeating everything was a “shooting-gallery” stench. Since enemy shells had ripped into cases of rations, much of the deck was covered with food debris.

The news wasn’t good. Bloody body parts were splattered all over; the coxswain, the aspiring journalist, never made it back onto the boat.
⁶⁵
Two Coasties were gravely wounded; one of them was the D.C. youngster, Hazel’s would-be boyfriend. The other injured man “lay on a stretcher on deck breathing hard through his mouth,” Liebling wrote. “His face looked like a dirty drum-head: his skin was white and drawn tight over his high cheekbones. He wasn’t making much noise.”
⁶⁶

Fifteen miles offshore they linked up with the
Dorothea Dix
, a transport that had been converted into a hospital ship. LCI(L)-88’s wounded men had to be lifted to the floating sick bay in wire baskets.
⁶⁷

At one point, a “Coast Guardsman reached up for the bottom of one basket so that he could steady it on its way up,” Liebling wrote. “At least a quart of blood ran down on him, covering his tin hat [and] his upturned face.… He stood motionless for an instant, as if he didn’t know what had happened, seeing the world through a film of red, because he wore eyeglasses and blood had covered the lenses.”
⁶⁸

A decade after the war ended, Liebling admitted that the unnamed Coastie had, in fact, been himself. “It seemed more reserved at the time to do it this way,” he wrote. “A news story in which the writer said he was bathed in blood would have made me distrust it.”
⁶⁹

LCI(L)-88 clung to the transport area on D-Day morning, expecting at any instant to be ordered back to Omaha. But when no instructions came, Rigg and Liebling concluded, correctly, that the boys on Easy Red and all the rest were having too tough a time.

That afternoon, Liebling spotted an undamaged can of roast beef lying on the deck. “I opened it, but I could only pick at the jellied juice, which reminded me too much of the blood I had seen that morning, and I threw the tin over the rail.”
⁷⁰

By early evening, the situation on Omaha had become less toxic; LCI(L)-88 soon began ferrying infantrymen from bigger boats to landing craft positioned closer to shore. Rigg and his men performed similar duties on D-Day plus one and plus two. On June 9, Liebling cadged a ride with a rocket-firing speedboat, which in turn transferred him to a Higgins craft that, fittingly enough, maneuvered onto Easy Red.
⁷¹

When Liebling neared the top of the cliffs he spotted bilingual signs. Above crudely drawn skulls and crossbones they snarled,
“Achtung Minen!”
and
“Attention aux Mines!”
It amused Liebling that the Germans had been caught so flat-footed they hadn’t had time to remove their own placards warning of minefields.
⁷²

Liebling had visited Normandy several times in his youth; he had always pictured the Channel a brilliant shade of blue. Now in his mind’s eye it would forever remain a dull and depressing gray.

Four years earlier, Liebling had fled his precious Paris just before the Nazis goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées. Liebling had long dreamed of a triumphant return. But now machine gun nests and pillboxes and
Panzer
tanks and half of Hitler’s Wehrmacht stood in his way.

I
T WASN’T ENEMY RESISTANCE THAT
foiled the bombing run of
Shoo Shoo Baby
and its sister planes at 0715 on D-Day so much as the weather. The formation encountered only a few bursts of flak and sporadic rocket fire. But as squadron leader Lewis “Hoss” Lyle and the Flying Fortresses in the 427th arrived over Normandy, gunning toward the bridge at Caen, the cloud cover suddenly thickened.

Cronkite, who’d been nervously searching for Luftwaffe fighters that never materialized, now looked toward the ground and could see nothing. Neither, staring through his bombsight, could bombardier Umphress. It was such a blackout that Captain Bob Sheets and his copilot, Second Lieutenant
Darwin Sayers, couldn’t see the Forts flying on either side. “Any collision,” Cronkite remembered, “would probably [have] set off a chain explosion, wiping out the squadron.”
⁷³