Assignment to Hell (52 page)

By then Liebling had hooked up with the headquarters battery of an artillery unit in the Big Red One. The unit’s enlisted men were watching
the aerial assault from the sloping ground underneath Liebling’s window; they were rolling on the grass “with unsportsmanlike glee,” Liebling wrote.

“Their emotion was crude but understandable. ‘The more bombs we drop, the less fight there’ll be left in them,’ a soldier said, and, remembering the first bombs on Paris in 1940 and the bombings I have seen decent people undergo since then, I could not feel ashamed of the men’s reaction.”
²²

Liebling, Pyle, Rooney, and Boyle had all hoped, like their hero Bradley, that the four-mile-wide gap opened by Cobra’s bomb carpet would immediately put the Germans on the run. But it didn’t. A crestfallen Bradley had to report to Eisenhower on the night of the 25th that the Ninth Division had advanced only about a mile and a half, and the Fourth and the 30th approximately half that distance. Lightning Joe was at that point still bottled up. There was as yet no hole through which Patton and his Third Army tanks could surge.

But as Liebling could appreciate, that day’s action was only the first exchange of blows. Within days, the enemy was back on its heels in a pell-mell retreat; the U.S. Army, cornered in hedgerows for nearly two months, was finally getting a chance to throw some haymakers.

T
HE DAY AFTER
C
OBRA STRUCK
, Hal Boyle wrote a story about Lieutenant Homer W. “Benny” Bennett, a reconnaissance pilot whose unarmed Piper Cub (fighter pilots dismissively called the Cubs Maytag Messerschmitts) was jumped by a covey of Focke-Wulfs—yet somehow survived. Bennett, from Sioux City, Iowa, and his observer, Lieutenant Edwin Maxey from Lincoln, Nebraska, were trolling over the crumbling enemy front at two thousand feet, pinpointing German gun and troop positions for artillery units.

“The first thing I knew,” said Bennett, “eight Fw 190s were swarming around me, two coming directly toward me firing and a couple more from the sides. There was a terrific clatter from the engines and guns. I thought I was a goner.”

Bennett had no choice but to do something bold. He turned his “grasshopper”
directly into the flight path of the first two Focke-Wulfs, causing them to overshoot. “I did some dives, wingovers, and some other stuff that’s never been named trying to get into the protection of our ack-ack batteries,” Bennett told Boyle.

“[Bennett] slipped from beneath the nose of one overeager Nazi plane and it crashed into the ground and burst into flames,” Boyle wrote. “The friendly ack-ack knocked down another German and then some wandering P-47 Thunderbolts pitched in on his side and sent the rest of the Nazis racing back toward Berchtesgaden [Hitler’s Bavarian retreat].”
²³

Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe didn’t often show up in northern France in the summer of ’44—and when it did, its planes were usually manned by inexperienced pilots, which might explain how Lieutenants Bennett and Maxey lived to tell Boyle their tale.

Five days later Boyle encountered a group of Frenchwomen scavenging through the debris left behind by enemy soldiers fleeing the
Jabos
, the dreaded P-47s. “Farm wives and girls paw happily through the disordered and scattered personal effects left by the Nazis. They save everything from strings to bandages. From German uniforms they fashion clothing for themselves or suits for their children.

“But the prize discoveries in this harvest of ruin,” Boyle wrote, “are long bars of precious laundry soap and fine pairs of leather shoes and rubber boots.”
²⁴

The harvest of ruin was quickly spreading west, south, and east. Outside the German railway center at Rennes on August 3, Boyle heard about the exploits of a twenty-nine-year-old doughboy Hal began calling the Sergeant York of Brittany. By Boyle’s reckoning, Private Donald McKay of Grand Island, Nebraska, had in the previous forty-eight hours killed six German soldiers, captured twenty-eight, and had twice been voluntarily led blindfolded to an enemy command post to plead with Nazi officers to give up.

Boyle arrived on the scene just as Private McKay was returning to the American lines outside Rennes after his second attempt to persuade the Germans to abandon their last-ditch efforts.

“They still want to make a fight of it,” reported McKay to Lieutenant Colonel William Bailey of Danville, Virginia. “They can have a fight then,” replied Bailey. “We will blow some sense into them.”

A few moments later Boyle watched as artillery shells began thudding with deadly accuracy into the German redoubt, blowing a big enough hole in the line that Bailey’s unit could muscle through. Rennes soon fell.

Later, Boyle sat down with McKay and got the blow-by-blow on the private’s amazing day. McKay began sheepishly.

“I don’t know how my commander is going to feel about all this,” he said, acknowledging that he had no one to blame but himself for getting separated from his unit twenty-four hours earlier. “Yesterday, I was caught up in an acre of high grass by a German outfit. They were spraying bullets everywhere and I had to pick my spots and keep moving to keep from being killed.

“I picked off two of them with my rifle. Then I saw two Germans lying by a machine gun. I shot and hit one, breaking his back. That unnerved the other, an officer, and he stood up and waved a white handkerchief.”

The Wehrmacht officer had no idea that McKay was by himself. So when McKay barked orders to have the officer and his men come out with their hands up, they obliged.

McKay was stunned when more than two dozen men emerged from the weeds, all yelling “
Kamerad
,” which suggests that most were Eastern European conscripts. Suddenly a group of French Resistance fighters came running up and helped McKay disarm the enemy soldiers. McKay tied twenty-two pistols to a tent rope and gave them to the FFI guerrillas. He was marching the prisoners back toward the American lines when four of them abruptly made a break for it. But they stayed bunched up, making themselves easy targets. McKay killed three and wounded the other in the hind end.

He delivered his prisoners to the first substantial American unit he saw, then went off to find his company. Across the next field a French girl warned him that German soldiers were lurking close by, but McKay continued on. An enemy helmet suddenly came into view and McKay fired,
his bullet pinging off the helmet. Someone with a German accent shouted, “Don’t do that!”

McKay looked around and realized that he was surrounded. A dozen or more enemy soldiers had him covered from every angle.

“No shoot?” they hollered at McKay. “No shoot!” McKay answered.

Then the Nebraskan tried to argue with them to surrender, pointing out the futility of fighting on. They grudgingly agreed but said they had orders to fight to the death. When McKay volunteered to take the argument to their commander, they blindfolded him and marched him through their lines. The one English-speaking officer in the company wasn’t there, however, so McKay agreed to come back in an hour, this time accompanied by an interpreter. The Germans escorted him back through their lines and McKay told them to wait there: he’d be back soon.

North of Rennes McKay found Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, who sent him back toward the front under a white flag, escorted by translator Art Kallman, a private from Erie, Pennsylvania. The pair was shot at a couple of times by sniping Germans but Kallman bellowed, in German, “Safe conduct!” and they proceeded without incident through the enemy position.

The same group of German soldiers that McKay had left an hour before were there to greet them. Again blindfolded, the two GIs were led to the German command post, which turned out to be in a dank basement three floors underground, the better to escape the constant artillery pounding and
Jabo
attacks. The enemy colonel opened the dialogue by asking why the Americans were there. Through Kallman, McKay urged the Germans to give up to avert “much bloodshed and death.” The commander responded: “This is war.” To which McKay rejoined, “But we will go through you.” The commander conceded that the Americans were good soldiers but said that the Germans were better and were fully prepared to fight to the end. He complimented McKay and Kallman on their bravery before sending them back to deliver his defiant message.

As McKay, with Lieutenant Colonel Bailey nearby, finished relating his death-defying story to Boyle, the private expressed concern that his commanding officer would prosecute him for being a “straggler.”

“‘You stay with us,’ said [Bailey] with a grin,” Boyle wrote. “‘I think we can fix things up with your commander.’”
²⁵

A
NDY
R
OONEY AND HIS JEEP
were in Brittany, shadowing Sherman tanks that belonged to the Third Army. Outside the walled medieval village of Vannes on August 3, Rooney uncovered an extraordinary story—but had to sit on it for two weeks. When the censors finally allowed the
Stars and Stripes
to publish Andy’s piece, it must have delighted Joe Liebling.

A French paratroop battalion of 120 hardened commandoes had been dropped outside Vannes on D-Day eve. Their mission was to lay low, if possible, and arm and train Brittany’s FFI, disrupting enemy communications and supply lines whenever possible. Twelve days after their drop, the battalion was holed up at a big farmhouse and barn near Puy-Maladroit, well behind enemy lines. Some four hundred FFI members were holed up with them.

The local German garrison commander became suspicious when Allied planes were spotted dropping parachutes of supplies around the farm. At four a.m. on June 18, a force of several hundred enemy soldiers, mainly unhappy Georgian conscripts, marched on the farm. The French paratroopers and their FFI compatriots were lying in wait with machine guns. They let the enemy close to within a few yards before opening up. “The withering burst cut the German ranks in two,” Rooney wrote, “and the
remainder retreated in disarray.”

The garrison commander returned to the farm with a much stronger contingent—some three thousand men—and launched one attack after another. The battle raged all day and into the night as the Frenchmen fought off each assault. Before long, some five hundred Germans bodies were stacked up in a bloody circle around the farmhouse. Finally, sometime after midnight, the French paratroopers and their FFI compatriots took advantage of a lull to slip away, vanishing into the forests of “friendly Brittany,” as Rooney put it.
²⁶

Although the Germans put big prices on their heads, the paratroopers remained undetected until early August when, with Vannes now under siege by the Americans, they suddenly materialized to fight side by side with GIs. By August 5, Rooney and the FFI were inside Vannes’ ancient walls, toasting the French paratroopers.

J
OE
L
IEBLING AND
L
IEUTENANT
R
OY
Wilder, Jr., a First Army PRO, jeep driver, and hell-raising buddy of many a reporter, were also offering thanks in Brittany that week. For a month, Liebling had been extolling the pleasures of a certain bordello in Rennes, claiming that in the ’20s, it had had no peer in France.

As their jeep approached Rennes in early August of ’44, however, the pair got depressed: The city had been so flattened by bombs and artillery that almost no building had escaped damage. They feared the worst. But as the ninety-six-year-old Wilder related in 2011, as their jeep crept into downtown Rennes, Liebling practically jumped for joy: The brothel was not only intact, but open for business!

Liebling turned to Wilder and proclaimed: “The Lord takes care of the pure of heart.”
²⁷

T
HAT SAME WEEK
, B
OYLE, TOO
, unearthed a story of French defiance, this one a band of five youths operating undercover on the Cotentin Peninsula not far from Valognes. The five youngsters, some farmers, others students, escaped into the woods one night when a Maquis leader informed them that one of their fathers had been killed on a Resistance raid; as a reprisal, the Gestapo was rounding up the young men of Valognes and forcing them into slave labor.

For four months, the boys “played Robinson Crusoe,” as Boyle put it, southeast of St.-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in the thick foliage known as the
bois de Limore
. After the night of June 5 the boys emerged to help lost Allied paratroopers and expose enemy strongholds, “which American guns promptly wiped out,” Boyle wrote.
²⁸
One GI mortar attack on a hidden
enemy machine gun nest killed three German soldiers and forced the rest to flee. The boys bunked one night with members of an airborne outfit that had gotten disoriented.

Earlier, the boys had survived in the woods by trapping small game, mainly rabbits. They had found an old woodcutter’s shed and spent cold nights there, although they didn’t dare light a fire for fear of being discovered.
²⁹

Boyle interviewed a “freckled blond-haired boy of twenty” whom he called Pierre but never identified by his real name because the surviving members of the family feared retribution. Pierre’s older sister and brother-in-law were both active in the Paris Maquis—and easy targets for the Gestapo in the still-occupied capital if Boyle even hinted at their identity. It was Pierre’s father who’d been killed by the Germans while performing Resistance work. He was also the lad who had escorted fifty American paratroopers into a town on the Cotentin, then watched as weeping villagers gave them garlands of flowers. The GIs were embarrassed as Pierre led the liberators to the next enemy hideout across some marshland; once out of sight, they dumped their wreaths.

Joe Liebling, too, saw delirious Frenchwomen hand out flowers and bushels of kisses to GIs, some of whom were sheepish and others who didn’t hesitate to lock lips. By early August Liebling was riding down the same road to Coutances and Avranches that he’d taken four years and two months earlier, when he’d escaped Paris in the company of Tex O’Reilly and Waverly Root, forlornly watching tens of thousands of refugees resign themselves to their fate.