Assignment to Hell (55 page)

E
LEVEN DAYS LATER, BIGART
took his act to another special amphibious operation, this one in the French Riviera—and it was almost as harrowing as the August 1943 raid on Monte Cipolla in Sicily. Dragoon planners determined that the German artillery garrison on the Îles d’Hyères, a trio of desolate islands that guarded the western approach to the invasion beaches, had to be silenced at the outset.

“Aerial reconnaissance had disclosed what appeared to be four medium coastal guns near a lighthouse on a bald knob,” Bigart told readers. “No ship could the reach the western sector of the beachhead in safety as long as this battery was able to fire.” Knocking out these coastal guns, Bigart wrote, demanded “an amphibious operation unusual for its emphasis on stealth rather than overwhelming firepower.”
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Descendants of two gritty commando outfits, the U.S. Army’s Darby’s Rangers and the U.S.–Canadian Devil’s Brigade, the raiders had trained long and hard at Lake Albano south of Rome and later at Santa Maria di Castellabate. In early August, the commandoes moved to their staging area off the island of Corsica. Bigart joined them there, watching them daub their faces with paint and charcoal, then noiselessly climb into the transport ships anchored three miles off the coast.

The
Herald Tribune
reporter settled in a small rubber boat as the commandoes silently paddled to the Île du Levant and its tiny sister island, Île de Port-Cros. They landed undetected.

“Long trained in mountain fighting, they scaled the rocky bluffs in darkness and, wrestling with the dense tangle of maquis undergrowth, emerged on a trail that brought them to the rear of strong enemy positions dominating the only beach available to landing craft,” Bigart wrote.

Île du Levant was about a mile across; a thin dirt path up its spine linked the lighthouse and harbor to an abandoned penitentiary and to the remnants of a long-deserted nudist colony. It took Bigart’s column two hours of “stumbling and groping” to reach the dirt track.

The commandoes were getting ready to launch their ground assault
when “the sky went suddenly red,” Bigart wrote. They learned later that a German patrol boat leaving its base at Toulon had struck a mine and exploded.

Incredibly, there was still no sign that the Germans had been alerted to their presence. “There had been a few nervous bursts from a machine gun on our left, but nothing at all from the direction of the main objective on our right,” Bigart reported. “Toward dawn there was a lively chatter of small-arms fire and a few mortar shells came slamming down.”
⁵⁵

As the sky began to brighten, the Allied commandoes captured their first prisoner, an ack-ack gunner from Poland who’d been forced into duty years earlier. The Pole gladly guided them to the dugouts where the German commander and most of his nineteen-man crew were still asleep.

The commander of Île du Levant was, curiously, a young lieutenant, Bigart noticed—not the caliber of officer who should have been in charge of a key coastal battery, although the lieutenant did have the wherewithal to toss a machine gun down a well so the Allies couldn’t seize it intact. His artillery and antiaircraft crew consisted entirely of Polish conscripts; like their compatriot, they couldn’t wait to throw their hands up.

Île de Port-Cros’ mainly Canadian invaders had a tougher slog. An old French couple who lived inside the lighthouse were convinced that the Germans had secreted themselves in the island’s caves. It turned out that the enemy soldiers, many heavily armed, had hunkered down in dilapidated cabins that belonged to the old nudist settlement, which in its heyday had spread across both islands. Four Devil’s Brigade members were killed before HMS
Ramillies
was called on to provide a well-targeted rocket attack.

Within hours, Île de Port-Cros belonged to the Allies, too. A formidable threat to Dragoon had been eliminated.

D
RAGOON WAS DUBBED THE
C
HAMPAGNE
Campaign because the invasion was fought around Cannes and St.-Tropez and other exotic places in the Riviera. Today, it has been virtually forgotten, which is a shame because the Allied fighting was exemplary and the contributions of the Resistance were extraordinary.

Two days after he arrived on the French mainland following the raid on the Îles d’Hyères, Bigart interviewed a German prisoner, an
Oberstleutnant
from Koblenz. The two of them were gazing at an unnamed harbor—almost assuredly St.-Tropez—jammed full of Allied ships being unloaded.

“I have seen more American equipment in one day,” the German officer told Bigart, “than of our own in the last six months. I have a relative in America, and if I had had enough money, I would have gone there, too.”
⁵⁶

Bigart’s interviewee was not alone. Many Germans fought hard in the south of France, but more than a few were as eager to surrender as the Polish conscripts on Île du Levant. The Allied invasion of some two hundred thousand men was headed by Lieutenant General Alexander “Sandy” Patch, a personal favorite of George Marshall.

Patch was chosen after Mark Clark’s wobbly performance in Italy. Clark’s military and political judgment remained dubious: He was as adamantly opposed to Dragoon as Churchill. Instead of attacking the south of France, Clark advocated an Allied invasion across the Adriatic onto the Balkan Peninsula, a view he must have known would exasperate his bosses. Patch’s job was to drive a wedge in the German defenses in southern France, surging north through the Rhône Valley and linking up as quickly as possible with Patton’s Third Army. On balance, Dragoon lived up to its name: It imprisoned thousands of enemy soldiers and helped implode German resistance on the western front.

After being stuck in Italy’s muck for much of ’43 and ’44, it must have been exhilarating for Bigart to be on the move. “This afternoon I watched French troops march through a town which Americans had liberated a few hours before,” he wrote on August 18. “The townspeople waved and cheered the Americans with genuine warmth, but the reception accorded the first French [unit] to enter the town was completely uninhibited. On the Boulevard Marshal Pétain—soon to be renamed—crowds alternatively wept and cheered as the column passed by. The gallery was mostly feminine, since every male over fourteen was out in the brush, armed with Luger pistols and tommy-guns and hunting Germans.”
⁵⁷

As the Seventh Army slugged up the Rhône, Bigart became infatuated with the same story line that animated his colleagues in the north: the role
of the French Resistance in wiping out the Nazis. In what amounted to Bigart’s valedictory in the ETO, almost all of his final dispatches dealt with the implausible moxie of the Maquis turned FFI.

The Gestapo that summer had conducted a reign of terror in the south of France, rounding up anyone suspected of harboring Partisan sympathies. When word of the Riviera landings reached the Gestapo commandant in Marseille eighty miles north, he tortured and jailed hundreds of Frenchmen, putting them on a starvation diet while making hasty plans to evacuate the city. Bigart heard about the plight of the Marseille Partisans from their compatriots in Cannes. On August 20, he wrote that the Marseille prisoners had been rescued and released by an FFI band that stormed police headquarters once the enemy had abandoned Marseille for Vichy farther north.

The day before, Bigart had filed a remarkable story about Émile Mauret and his seventeen-year-old son, who along with ten other Partisans saved American troops from being ambushed. Four years earlier, in the spring of 1940, reserve lieutenant Mauret had watched the Maginot Line crumble. But now the roles were reversed: It was Mauret and his fellow FFI guerrillas who had the Nazis scurrying for cover.
⁵⁸

Émile and the FFI came to the rescue just outside their home village east of Toulon. An American outfit commanded by Major Clayton C. Thobro of Rock Springs, Wyoming, was probing down a village road. Unbeknownst to the Americans, two hundred yards from the hill, cleverly concealed on a wooded spur, eighty Germans lay armed with machine guns and two thirty-seven-millimeter antitank guns. A Sherman tank with infantrymen aboard was chugging precariously close to the enemy stronghold when young Mauret raced up on his bicycle to warn them. Émile followed a minute later on foot to reinforce his son’s message. An American lieutenant, George E. Stripp of Newark, New Jersey, didn’t understand French but was savvy enough to call a halt until an interpreter could be summoned. Once the translator arrived, the Maurets explained the danger to Stripp and his commanding officers; together they devised a plan to smoke out the Germans.

Young Mauret led the GIs through a concealed gully that brought them behind the German position. “Only two of the Partisans were armed and all they had were little .25-caliber pistols,” Stripp told Bigart. “But they all took off, whooping and yelling after the Germans. I saw one kid shoot a German and grab the kraut’s gun before he even stopped kicking. You never saw a more eager bunch of fighters. In a few minutes they had killed enough Germans so that all the Partisans had tommy guns and Lugers. Then they rushed the nearest gun and shot up the whole crew. They didn’t have a casualty.”
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Two days later, Bigart was with the Third Division as it entered Aix-en-Provence, at that point the biggest French city yet liberated in the Champagne Campaign. The city was “shimmering like a Cézanne canvas” in the morning sunlight, Bigart wrote, as American tanks rumbled through its ancient streets. “The boulevard leading down to the shuttered Casino was empty and deserted except for a smoldering Nazi truck which Partisans had fired last night. But by midmorning the street was swarming with people and every building flaunted the Tricolor,” he wrote. Bigart watched a Great War veteran solemnly raise the Stars and Stripes while thousands of his countrymen sang the “Marseillaise.”
⁶⁰

There hadn’t been much singing the day before when the Germans blew up buildings, booby-trapped others, and tried to sabotage the town’s power grid.
⁶¹
Earlier, when the Resistance had destroyed a pair of bridges north of Aix-en-Provence, the Germans had rounded up twenty-three suspects and tossed them in jail. A few days before the Americans arrived, Maquis leaders had developed an ingenious rescue plan: Two German speakers impersonating Gestapo officers strode menacingly into police headquarters and ordered the suspects released. Their ruse worked: The Partisans were turned loose.
⁶²

But Aix-en-Provence’s “Vichy hoodlums,” as Bigart called them, weren’t done: They kidnapped, tortured, and shot eight suspected Maquis leaders, including the head of the local Communist party. The Partisans were machine-gunned in a field outside town, yet two men survived by feigning death.
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The back-and-forth reprisals were repeated twenty-four hours later in Marseille. By the time Bigart got into the heart of the city with the conquering heroes, most of the remaining Germans had already been imprisoned; they were forced at gunpoint to march past jeering crowds. “I saw four Partisans leading 40 Germans at rifle-point down a narrow alley, while thousands of spectators whistled and hooted,” Bigart wrote.
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It turned out that Marseille’s Partisans had been funded, in part, by wealthy American expatriates. One of them was Mrs. Henry Clews, formerly of Philadelphia, the widow of a prominent sculptor. “She is 63-years-old, wears ankle-length dresses and Queen Mary hats and rides a bicycle,” Bigart told readers. A gardener who did work for Mrs. Clews and other wealthy American expats was a nighttime Resistance warrior, running what amounted to an “Underground rest home,” Bigart wrote. Mrs. Clews and her American friend, Princess Alexandra Chica, the erstwhile Hazel Suger of Chicago, funneled money to Maquis leaders through the gardener.

The Clews villa was ransacked by the Gestapo, but somehow Mrs. Clews escaped suspicion. Her friend, the princess, wasn’t as fortunate. The Gestapo imprisoned her for two weeks before the Riviera invasion. When she took ill in her jail cell, the Gestapo granted her request to be hospitalized. She got out in the nick of time: On August 15, the morning of the invasion, the Gestapo tossed all the hospital’s political prisoners into a courtyard and shot them. Among the victims was a twenty-one-year-old pregnant woman.

A third American woman, Eleanor Pell, formerly of New York, was warned by Partisans that the Gestapo was hunting for her: she successfully hid in the woods for weeks, subsisting on whatever scraps Maquis fighters could spare.
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In Grenoble a day later, Bigart watched FFI leaders force German soldiers to dig up the remains of French citizens massacred two weeks before by the Gestapo. “There was a stench like that of rotted potatoes as the Germans clawed the earth from the bodies of three Maquis Partisans and six Poles and Czechs, deserters. Nearby in rough pine coffins, lay twenty-three Maquis youths removed from another pit two days ago.”

Bigart interviewed a German noncommissioned officer, originally from Munich, who was part of the exhumation crew: “An ordinary German would not do a shameful thing like this,” he told Bigart. “It’s the business of the Gestapo and the S.S.”
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The “business” of the Gestapo, the SS, German regulars, and the Vichy militia got more feverish as Bigart and the Seventh Army surged farther north. The last article that Homer Bigart wrote in the European Theater of Operations was datelined Lyon, France, September 4. The
Trib
’s page-one header was A
LLIES
S
WEEPING
B
EYOND
L
YON IN
P
URSUIT OF
N
AZIS
. His lede was pure Bigart: literate and penetrating.

We crossed the Rhone River into the center of Lyon yesterday on a slender thread of concrete hung from bank to bank after the Germans had blown up the middle span of the Pont Wilson. Like a column of purposeful ants on a twig, workers from the industrial quarter of La Guillotiere crawled over the span, intent on slaughtering the small bands of Joseph Darnand’s Vichyite militiamen still holding out on the roofs of big department stores near the Place de Commerce.