Assignment to Hell (53 page)

But now he was moving in the other direction—and villagers by the thousands were flooding the roads to embrace their saviors.

“Last week, as four years ago, the road was choked with vehicles moving as slowly as a trickle of water through dust,” Liebling told
New Yorker
readers in a letter dated August 4, “but this time, instead of autobuses and pitiful automobiles loaded with civilians, the traffic was half-tracks, empty ambulances, tank destroyers, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, the small, track carriers (called ‘weasels’) that take ammunition across country, and, scattered through all the heavy stuff, jeeps.”
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Liebling, like every veteran of North Africa, marveled at the sudden impotence of the mighty Luftwaffe. Early in the war, Allied troops and reporters had constantly cast nervous eyes skyward, searching for marauding Messerschmitts like the ones that spoiled Liebling’s breakfast at Thélepte. But by mid-’44, “soldiers grinned every time they heard an airplane motor,” Liebling wrote.
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Even after the breakout, when there were spectacular triumphs at every point on the Allied front, Joe stayed loyal to his personal security detail: the boys in the Big Red One.

“Wherever the First was, the best story was sure to be,” Liebling wrote. “Because it was the most thoroughly tested American division, it had to go into the trickiest places. This saved a reporter the trouble of trying to divine official intentions; while my colleagues stared helplessly at maps … I had only to stick to the First and the Great Riddle would come clear in due course.”
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Divisional artillery commands were nicknamed “div artys.” For most of that month, Liebling’s First Division div arty hopscotched from one observation spot to the next, usually a tall farmhouse or dwelling that had somehow escaped destruction. In one five-day period, Liebling’s unit moved to a different CP four times, including a couple of places that the Germans had occupied (and nearly wrecked) just a day or two before. Every div arty team had a switchboard, a set of maps, and a ton of communications gear. They would arrive at a new location, instantly set up their equipment, communicate with their bosses, quickly run through the calculations needed to establish a target, phone it to the guys manning the guns—and await the go-ahead to authorize firing.

That first week after the breakout, armored divisions and the infantries in their wake were moving so fast that there was almost no safe place to aim big guns. “It was an artillerist’s nightmare,” Liebling wrote. “[T]here was no place they could shoot without fear of hitting some of our own people.” Corps headquarters had marked “no fire” zones in red on their situation maps; pretty soon all the maps looked like a big lipstick smear.

Artillerymen, Liebling observed, led a strange existence. A cribbage game would often break out at night, even when there were targets to fire
at. The phone would ring, an officer would get up from the cribbage table, mutter “uh-huh” a couple of times, hang up the phone, then share something like, “Infantry patrols report some sort of Jerry movement at that road junction at 4124. Mediums can reach it.” The officer would then grab a different telephone, bark the command, and return to the cribbage match. “Outside, in the night, twelve hundred pounds of high explosive [would] scream toward the dark crossroad twenty-five times, at short, irregular intervals,” Liebling wrote.
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O
N DAY FIVE OF
B
RADLEY’S
offensive, Boyle and John MacVane of NBC found themselves in Hautteville along the Norman coast, caught in a traffic jam with members of an American armored unit. They were trying to chase the enemy, Boyle wrote, “like remorseless steel bloodhounds.” It was a Saturday evening, and Boyle watched a priest who had been active in the Resistance lead a procession of villagers to a roadside shrine. Many of the women were dressed in black to mourn loved ones buried in 1940; the children were wearing their Sunday best.

“They grouped around the slender concrete pillar surrounded by a life-sized crucifix,” Boyle wrote. “In the bar of the cross were stuck French, British, and American flags.”

The priest led his parishioners in singing a hymn of thanksgiving to their liberators. A pair of French policemen whom MacVane and Boyle had given a ride joined in the chorus. As soon as the priest began offering his benediction, the GIs, who’d been observing in uncomprehending silence, took off their helmets and knelt in prayer. One of the gendarmes translated for Boyle: “We pray that these men who have left their land and crossed the sea to liberate us will return to the home in which they live with safety and with peaceful hearts.”

As he spoke, the priest pointed to the figure of Christ on the crucifix. “Remember, you have known torture, too, for four years, but you held out, dear friends. Now that is ended, thanks to our allies, who have brought us liberation. It is for us now to sacrifice together until the war is ended.”

The priest turned to the American soldiers, held out his arms, and said, “Goodbye.
Au revoir. Merci! Merci! Merci!
”

“[The priest] came over and shook hands with many of the tankmen and then returned to his parishioners,” Boyle’s column concluded. “They followed him in the setting sun across waving wheat fields to their homes. Soon the tank column started down the road to battle.”
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A
T THE SAME TIME, ON
Liebling’s fourth day with the div arty, Joe happened upon a farmhouse where a dead soldier from a Schutzstaffel (SS) division had been left behind—a sure sign that the Germans had bolted in a hurry, because they normally took care of their dead. By then Liebling had seen more than his share of decaying bodies—and he reveled in playing de Maupassant. The wannabe coroner-detective went in for a postmortem.

There was a typewritten form in one of the dead man’s pockets that the soldier had filled out but apparently had not given his commander. It requested emergency leave to go home. Under “reason,” the man had written, “Bombing deaths in family—urgent telegram from wife.”
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Jumping from one abandoned French home to another gave Liebling more investigative opportunities. The retreating Germans, having ripped though every drawer and cupboard looking for food and liquor, left behind chaos. A family’s history—photo albums, personal mementoes, church and school records—would be strewn all over the house by the time Liebling’s div arty got there.

Most reporters would have ignored the clutter to trade slugs of calvados with the artillerymen or jump into a cribbage game. Not Liebling. With his affection for French culture and custom, he was able to piece together the lives of these uprooted families.

One family’s young son had been a prisoner of war since the spring of ’40, Liebling deduced after juxtaposing a 1915 baptismal notice with a 1940 leaflet describing how French families could communicate with loved ones now imprisoned in Germany. It was Liebling at his best, taking mundane details and making them magnificent.

U
NLIKE A LOT OF JOURNALIST-HISTORIANS
, Liebling never skewered World War II generals, even after the war when he could have settled scores with arrogant commanders who’d snubbed him. Joe found pointless the contentious debate, which continues to this day, over the action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the Allied high command in early to mid-August 1944. In Liebling’s view, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley did the best job they could defeating an odious enemy; engaging in after-the-fact recrimination served no purpose. Andy Rooney, for his part, was resentful of “scholars” who rewrite history by arguing that the Allies squandered a big chance to end the war then and there.

Rooney, Liebling, and Boyle were eyewitnesses to the byzantine events that occurred in northern France that month. All three began August out west in Brittany as American armored units pushed toward the ports of Brest and St.-Malo, then moved south and east as General Bradley hustled his troops to exploit new opportunities.

By August 7, Boyle was with General Troy Middleton’s U.S. Eighth Corps as it attacked the German sea supply base at St.-Malo. The next day, Boyle went up in a Piper Cub to survey the situation. “From this sky perch besieged St.-Malo can be seen billowing black and white smoke, stabbed with flashes of flame,” he wrote. “American tanks and infantry advance behind a rolling artillery barrage and smash in street battles toward the port’s fortress citadel, where the Nazis have barricaded themselves in a Stalingrad-like stand.” In his two years of covering the war, it was one of the most spectacular sights he’d seen, Boyle told readers.
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In St.-Malo, Boyle was subjected to the same frustrating German defiance that Private Donald McKay had encountered in Rennes the week before: an obdurate German refusal to give up. Boyle and other reporters soon came to call the commander of the German holdouts, Andreas von Aulock, the Mad Colonel. Aulock, whom enemy prisoners described as a pathetic drunk, refused to listen to reason, despite repeated pleas. On August 10 Boyle filed a piece about how the beleaguered defenders of St.-Malo
eventually had no choice but to shoot their officers so they could surrender and avoid annihilation.
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Prisoners told Boyle that they’d hoped the German counterattack at Mortain, launched on the nights of August 6 and 7 some forty miles east, would come to their rescue. It didn’t come anywhere close, of course: Mortain was lunacy.
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Had Hitler ordered a strategic retreat to the Seine, it would have given the battered Wehrmacht a natural barrier beyond which to regroup and make a creditable stand. Instead,
der Führer
sacked Field Marshal Rundstedt, who in Hitler’s eyes had committed treason by advocating a withdrawal, and replaced him with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, a more pliable sycophant. Erwin Rommel had been hospitalized on July 17 after being severely wounded by an Allied fighter-bomber, so von Kluge was operating without the two chief architects of the German defenses in Normandy. Hans Speidel, Rommel’s chief deputy, was as appalled by Hitler’s reckless strategy as von Rundstedt had been.

A cabal of German officers that included, at least peripherally, Speidel and Rommel attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20 at
Wolfsschanze
(“Wolf’s Lair”),
der Führer
’
s
command outpost in East Prussia. Hitler barely survived the bomb blast, which killed four and wounded two dozen others.

Two weeks later, Hitler’s stooge von Kluge was told to attack westward toward Avranches through the slim corridor between the See and Sélune Rivers. Hitler’s stated objective was to drive a wedge between the Allied armies in Normandy and Brittany. He called it Operation Lüttich, after the Belgian battle where the Kaiser’s forces had scored an early and decisive victory in the Great War.

The historic talisman didn’t work. There was so much radio traffic between Berlin and von Kluge that the Ultra intercept teams at Bletchley Park and in northern France were able to predict the time and location of the German assault. Omar Bradley had the better part of three days to prepare a riposte, even confiding to Chet Hansen that the desperate Hitler had become the Allies’ best ally.

Hitler sent the remnants of three and a half
Panzer
units, plus other
underequipped outfits, against the U.S. 30th Division, the same GIs who two weeks earlier had been twice bombed by their own planes. The Germans fought gamely, ripping a hole in the 30th’s line that ultimately proved too small to exploit. Bradley checkmated every move, hurling reinforcements and armaments into the fight that von Kluge didn’t have. Patton’s Third Army entered the Mortain fray, capturing Le Mans to the south on August 8, although its heroics weren’t publicly acknowledged until midmonth.

At noon on August 9, the omnipresent Ninth Air Force struck again, its
Jabos
raining mayhem on von Kluge’s mechanized units. The RAF’s rocket-firing Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers proved invaluable in the Mortain campaign, too, destroying dozens of tanks running out in the open. By August 13, the Germans had reversed course and were limping away.
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Suddenly Bradley was presented with the stuff of every commander’s dreams: a panicked enemy on the run. The best-case scenario he’d broached three weeks earlier with the First Army press corps had actually come to pass: There was now a distinct prospect of linking up with the Canadians and Brits on the north and east and trapping the retreating Germans in a pocket. The meeting point for the entrapment was not far from where Bradley had anticipated, near the villages of Falaise and Argentan.

It would take sharp coordination between Patton’s Third, wheeling north and east from Le Mans, with the British Second and the Canadian First, slugging south and west, having at last broken free from the outskirts of Caen. With Patton rapidly closing the gap, Bradley at that moment issued his most contentious order of the war, a move that, decades later, still draws the ire of many historians. The 12th Army Group boss called a halt to Patton’s advance. Patton had, with his usual hubris, gone farther north than Bradley had directed, encroaching on territory that had been given to Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group. Bradley’s other ostensible reason for reining in the Third Army was that it had already outrun its supply lines. But Bradley surely feared a reprise of the friendly-fire debacle along the Périers–St.-Lô road two weeks earlier. The notorious “gap” was not closed until August 19—day six of the German retreat—when Canadian
and Polish troops finally moved into the village of Falaise and the Americans captured Dreux.
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Somewhere between twenty thousand and forty thousand German soldiers—estimates vary wildly—slipped through the pocket.