Assignment to Hell (54 page)

Andy Rooney was advancing with the 90th Infantry Division and arrived near Dreux in time to see firsthand the dismemberment of the German army. The
Jabos
, P-51 Mustangs, Typhoons, and Allied artillerymen did a murderously effective job in strafing the fleeing enemy.

“I’ve tried to compare what I’ve read in the history books to what I saw and there’s no comparison,” Rooney wrote after the war. “What do you historians want, anyway? In an area thirty miles long and twenty miles wide, 30,000 Germans were killed and 92,000 were taken prisoner. A lot of them were from the elite Fifth and Seventh Panzer Divisions. Is that a big failure?”
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Rooney’s enemy casualty figures may be a bit inflated, but his view of Allied operations around Falaise in mid-August 1944 wasn’t: a better name for “gap” would have been “trap,” he always maintained. By the time Rooney got there, watching from nearby hills, the pocket had been stitched. When, under the cloak of darkness on August 20, several thousand Germans emerged from the Forêt de Gouffern near Chambois and tried to skulk out of the valley, Allied artillery decimated them. “It was a shooting gallery,” Rooney remembered. “I can’t believe anything in the war, including Stalingrad, was any worse for German troops.” When the carnage finally ended, Rooney pointed out, the better part of the three dozen–plus enemy divisions in northern France had been “chopped up and sent into disorganized flight.”
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On August 13 Hal Boyle was with the Fifth Division of Patton’s Third Army as they pushed through Argentan on their way to Chartres. “From a wheat field overlooking Argentan,” Boyle wrote, “I could see the vanguard of the great Nazi retreat try to stab its way through a bottleneck twelve miles wide between this town and the city of Falaise.” Boyle called the Allied envelopment “a steel vise.” Every enemy escape route was under heavy artillery fire, he wrote.

Through field glasses, Boyle watched an artillery unit “beat to pieces” a
German convoy. An Army captain named Albert G. Kelly from San Jose, California, was in constant radio contact with the P-51s circling overhead. As soon as Kelly received word via walkie-talkie that German tanks were trying to break through at the head of the valley near Carrouges, he got on the radio and dispatched the Mustangs. As the P-51s dove on the enemy tanks, the artillery and tank guys cheered.
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On the road toward the ancient city of Chartres, Patton’s forward units found themselves mobbed by ecstatic villagers who “bombarded the grinning tankmen with roses and besieged them with wine,” Boyle wrote. When they reached the walled city three days later, there was trepidation that its magnificent Gothic cathedral had been seriously damaged. Through his binoculars, however, Boyle could see the cathedral’s tower looming over the city’s rubble. The GIs sent into Chartres to mop up the remaining enemy snipers were told to use only small arms and aim their fire away from the church.

The cathedral had sustained only superficial wounds—some bullet scrapes, a few windows broken, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed, Boyle noted. A priest and the head of the seminary took Boyle on a tour, proudly pointing out that at the start of the war, they’d had the foresight to hide the cathedral’s precious stained glass.
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L
IEBLING, WHO ALSO WAS CLOSE
to the action, always thought the controversy about the Falaise Gap was much ado about nothing. In mid-August ’44, he was still attached to the First Division artillery unit that was jumping almost daily to different reconnaissance posts. Among the correspondents in northern France at the time, the enemy’s slipping away at Falaise wasn’t considered a big deal. Only in the postmortem following the Battle of the Bulge, when it surfaced that some of the German soldiers steamrolling through the Ardennes had slipped Falaise’s noose, did the issue become a cause célèbre. Omar Bradley inflamed the debate by somewhat second-guessing himself in his memoirs, intimating that perhaps he had been too cautious in the wake of the rout at Mortain. The three scribes on the spot—Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney—would have none of it. Nor does
contemporary historian John McManus, who correctly calls Falaise a great, if flawed, victory.
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I
N
A
UGUST
B
OYLE, AND TO
a lesser degree Rooney, yo-yoed between covering Patton’s Third Army and Courtney Hodges’ First. Liebling, though, stayed exclusively with the First and its Big Red One; most nights Joe spent at the First Army press camp, wherever it happened to be. After the breakout, the camp moved from Vouilly about twenty miles southeast, to a muddy apple orchard outside Canisy. The boys were roughing it again: The palmy days of Mme. Hamel’s bottomless spigot were over; the mess tent reverted to pedestrian Army chow.

Hodges’ guys were moving so quickly that within a few days the press camp was uprooted to a shabby mansion farther south, on the periphery of Forêt de St. Sever, not far from Vire. By now the traveling carnival and their PRO roustabouts—Roy Wilder, Jr., and Jack Roach among them—had it down to a science: the tents were pitched behind the house, the wireless trucks and equipment were positioned out front, and the censors and reporters set up shop “amid the shards of elegance” of the formerly opulent château, as Leibling put it.

Liebling and his colleagues spent their days in hot pursuit of the best stories about the battered Germans and the brave troops chasing them. In the evenings, as they banged away on their typewriters, they had to carefully choose chairs; many in the St. Sever house would disintegrate if plopped in too quickly. Vire had been one of Liebling’s favorite Norman haunts as a young man. Now he had to avert his eyes when driving through the town: It had been virtually annihilated. It broke Liebling’s gluttonous heart that most of Vire’s restaurants had been bombed out of business, since he’d been bragging about Vire’s brasseries for weeks.

Within five days, however, Liebling and company were off to the First Army’s next press camp, at a down-at-the-heels lake resort at Bagnoles de l’Orne. There, they actually got to stay indoors with something approximating running water. It was still Normandy, but steadily, irrevocably, Joe Liebling’s road was leading back to Paris.
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O
N
A
UGUST 15, 1944, AS
Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were fixated on events around Falaise, their old friend Homer Bigart of the
New York Herald Tribune
had finally set foot in France, albeit five hundred miles south. Bigart was covering the Allies’ clandestine assault on the Îles d’Hyères islands, part of the long-debated and long-delayed Operation Dragoon—the invasion of southern France.

Churchill had never been enamored of attacking the Riviera; earlier that summer, in fact, the prime minister had pleaded with Roosevelt and Marshall to scrub the operation, claiming a second offensive in France was no longer needed to deliver a knockout blow. The prime minister for good reason was overruled: Dragoon hastened the German demise and liberated a swath of the occupied Reich that had been terrorized by the Gestapo.

Once Rome had fallen in early June, Bigart stayed in the Eternal City for several weeks, filing stories about war-ravaged Italy’s struggles to recover from two decades of Mussolini. At one point Bigart was covering the interim Italian parliament’s effort to “abolish” Fascism. When a government aide ran up to inform Bigart and other journalists that there had been a delay in the proceedings, Homer turned to his colleagues and cracked that the Italians probably needed more time “to p-p-put in the l-l-loopholes.”
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Thirteen months in the Mediterranean Theater hadn’t dulled his mordant wit.

Nor had it dulled Bigart’s appreciation for culture and antiquity. In a piece filed a week after Rome was redeemed, he pointed out that the Nazis may have been respectful toward the capital’s art, but had senselessly ransacked museums a few miles south. Ironically, the Lake Nemi relics of the Emperor Caligula had been salvaged by Mussolini in 1929 but savaged by Il Duce’s partners fifteen years later. Before retreating north, German soldiers torched galleries, lopped off the heads of ancient statuary, and confiscated or desecrated some of the most revered paintings in Italian history. When Bigart visited on June 11, all that was left of Lake Nemi’s national museum was “a handful of ashes and some bronze nails.”
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Three days later, Bigart told the story of two American air gunners who
were among the fifteen Allied prisoners of war “enjoying asylum” inside the Vatican. Sergeants Anthony Brodniak of New Jersey and Bernard Scalisi of New Orleans had been on a bomber shot down over Viterbo in April. They managed to elude capture for a week as they snuck forty miles south to Rome. Finding the sanctuary of the Vatican was the dream of every shot-down flier and escaped POW in the Mediterranean; hundreds tried, but few got to experience it. Brodniak and Scalisi scaled the sacred venue’s twelve-foot-high wall and were safeguarded by Vatican officials.

Bigart was told by Archbishop Testa that during the course of the war nineteen Allied soldiers had succeeded in making it inside the Vatican: eleven Britons, two Canadians, two Poles, one Australian, one New Zealander—and Scalisi and Brodniak. “They had a good time here,” Testa told Bigart, smiling. “They walked in the Vatican gardens and got rations of cigarettes.”
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On July 11, art aficionado Bigart was back, this time with a piece about how the Nazis had absconded with two paintings by Titian as well as Raphael’s
Madonna of the Divine Love
. In all, a dozen canvases worth more than $3 million had been stolen from galleries from Naples to Monte Cassino. Members of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, perhaps acting on orders from their art-loving (and thoroughly corrupt) namesake, were suspected of being the culprits. Bigart’s source on art thievery was Major Ernest T. DeWald, who in peacetime served as a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University. DeWald helped direct the Allied Control Commission on antiquities and monuments, a big job given the depth of Nazi thieving. There could be no doubt, DeWald told Bigart, “that the paintings were stolen by persons who knew just what they wanted.” The price tag on the purloined treasures would be added to the Germans’ postwar reparations bill, Bigart informed readers.
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B
Y MID
-J
ULY
B
IGART HAD REJOINED
Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark’s belated push north. On July 18, the day that Liebling, Rooney, and Boyle watched St.-Lô fall, Homer reported on the Fifth Army’s breakthrough behind the Renaissance city of Livorno, a key Tyrrhenian port. Buttressed by
the “equally spectacular” Polish spearhead along the Adriatic, the Allies were now closing in on two of ancient Italy’s gems: Pisa and Florence.
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In the six weeks since the capture of Rome, the Fifth Army had progressed some one hundred miles. Yet beyond pushing ever farther north, nearly a year into the Italian campaign there was still no clear-cut military objective.

Eleven days after Livorno fell, Bigart was with New Zealand troops as they locked horns with the 15th Regiment of the Panzer Grenadier Division on the heights five miles southwest of Florence. After all those months of watching Field Marshal Albert Kesselring counterpunch, Bigart had developed an appreciation for his rearguard brilliance.
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It was evident that Kesselring was buying time; Florence and the guts of the Gothic Line would fall soon. When the line collapsed five days later, Bigart was with a South African regiment in the Eighth Army as they entered the City of Lilies. Bigart had been telling readers for months that the Nazis had declared Florence a “neutral” city; art devotees had hoped that meant Kesselring’s forces would forgo wanton destruction. Those hopes were dashed on August 4, when Bigart revealed that, although the bejeweled Pitti Palace had escaped serious damage, the Germans had cruelly blown up five of the city’s six ancient bridges.

The only bridge left intact, the professorial Bigart explained, was so narrow it could not have been used by Allied mechanized units. It was the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge,” with its hoary jewelry shops. As the Allies fought their way to the banks of the Arno, the Germans detonated explosives on the five wider bridges, all of which dated to the thirteenth century.
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How Bigart managed to do his homework on these antiquities amid artillery and mortar fire is unclear. It’s not as if there was a tour guide handing out brochures as the Germans strung their dynamite. But what’s remarkable is the seamless way he was able to weave cultural and historical references into his combat narratives.

In one paragraph, he would define the heroes of that day’s skirmishing, being careful to identify GIs by name and hometown. Then he would shift gears to explain how the present battle was linked to a larger Allied strategy, then juxtapose that with another historical allusion to Roman times or the First World War. It was all testament to Bigart’s voracious appetite
for learning, to his eclectic knowledge of just about everything, and to his infamous play-dumb act, the unending asking of questions.