Assignment to Hell (58 page)

B
OYLE AND
R
OONEY HEARD A
lot of villagers cheering as, on August 22, with Liebling and Wilder still on their spree in Ernée, the First Army press corps headed toward its interim camp at the Hôtel du Grand Veneur in the village of Rambouillet. Monk Dickson from General Bradley’s staff spent much of the next two-plus days briefing the press guys on the Allied progress toward Paris.
¹²
It was just a matter of time before the capital fell, Dickson said, although reporters soon picked up on the political machinations transpiring with the French and the British. Montgomery’s troops were almost as well positioned as Bradley’s to strike at Paris—and Monty desperately wanted the credit. After much back-and-forth, with bruised feelings on all sides, it was determined that the honor of being the first Allied troops into Paris would fall to French brigadier general Jacques-Philippe Leclerc and his Second Armored Division.

The rapprochement with Monty and Leclerc wasn’t the only politicking going on outside Paris. Andy Rooney and other First Army reporters resented the way that certain international correspondents and Third Army arrivistes barged into the Grand Veneur and began encroaching on the First’s turf. By day two in Rambouillet, tensions were running high as reporters jockeyed for scraps of information. Things got so crowded at the hotel that latecomers were forced to spread out sleeping bags on the dining room’s straw floor.

It was in that modest eatery, Rooney recalled, where “one of the great unchronicled skirmishes of World War II took place.”
¹³
One of the combatants was an American literary icon—and the moment forever soured Rooney’s view of him.

Ernest Hemingway had, by that point, degenerated into self-caricature. Decked out in a Canadian tanker’s jacket and the tricolored armband of the FFI, often sporting a .45 ostentatiously strapped to his side, Hemingway
was running what amounted to his own private war. The novelist had arrived in Rambouillet well ahead of the press contingent. To accommodate his party pals and the FFI vigilantes he supposedly was “commanding,” Papa had booked ten rooms at the Grand Veneur.

Apparently not all of those rooms were occupied on the evening of August 23 when Bruce Grant of the
Chicago Sun
arrived. When his request for a room was turned down, Grant, who stood six foot four and, as a onetime city editor, took guff from nobody, went looking for Hemingway. He found the writer loudly holding court at the hotel bar for a rapt audience of hero worshipers.

Grant informed Hemingway that it was rude to hoard all those rooms when guys were being forced to bunk on the dining room floor. Hemingway, who was, to no one’s shock, already in his cups, took exception. Voices got louder; Hemingway jumped off his barstool, fists coiled, to confront Grant. AP photographer Harry Harris, no bigger than a flyweight, stepped between Grant and Hemingway as Rooney and other reporters gathered ’round, hoping for adolescent fisticuffs. Even Ernie Pyle popped off the dining room floor to take in the action.

Although being restrained by Harris, Hemingway still wanted a piece of Grant. The writer stormed out the lace-curtained French doors that led to the Grand Veneur’s courtyard. Ten seconds or so passed before Hemingway suddenly reemerged, bellowing at Grant, “Well, are you coming out and fight?” Cooler heads prevailed. Reporters went back to figuring out how they were going to crack Paris.

“You should never meet one of your heroes,” Rooney related. “I had greatly admired Hemingway when I read
A Farewell to Arms
and
The Sun Also Rises
but after that night in Rambouillet I laugh whenever I think of him.”
¹⁴

The vainglorious Hemingway would continue to give Rooney and friends plenty to chuckle about in the days to come.

T
HE EVENING BEFORE THE SILLINESS
with Hemingway and Grant, sad news had arrived at Rambouillet. Tom Treanor of the
Los Angeles Times
had been killed when his jeep collided with an American tank near Mantes-Gassicourt.
¹⁵
It was the sort of accident that happened all the time, though it was rarely reported.

Tall and handsome, Treanor had been a popular member of the MTO and ETO press corps, Hal Boyle observed, due in no small measure to his willingness to stick his neck out—both in combat and around fussbudget censors and PROs. Like Bigart, Treanor had done so much homework he had become something of a European cultural savant. After the war, Treanor planned to make the Continent his beat—and bring his wife and children over to share the experience.
¹⁶

Treanor was Bigart’s accomplice at Monte Cipolla, Boyle’s buddy at Monte Cassino, and Rooney’s and Liebling’s pal at St.-Lô. After all those incredibly close scrapes, he was done in by a highway mishap. His two companions in the jeep both survived with minor injuries. After the accident, Treanor, still conscious and unaware of the severity of his injuries, kept telling doctors to hurry so he could finish his story.
¹⁷

T
REANOR WAS A GREAT FRIEND
of “Beachhead Don” Whitehead, so it’s a double tragedy that he didn’t live long enough to see what Boyle called “one of the war’s outstanding news beats.” Boyle and the rest of the press contingent were milling outside the Grand Veneur early Thursday afternoon, August 24. A dust-covered jeep pulled up and Whitehead’s lanky exterior stiffly climbed out. Whitehead’s face, Boyle wrote, was “streaked with perspiration as he ambled unhurriedly toward the hotel’s lounge, which had been converted into a press room.”

“Where you been, Don?” asked a correspondent sitting on a bench.

“Paris,” Whitehead replied without fanfare.

Whitehead was immediately surrounded by reporters, all peppering him with questions. How? Where? How far into the city? Why’d you leave?

He returned a couple of parries, then waved off his questioners and sat down at a typewriter. Forty-five minutes later, he emerged with a 1,600-word account of his remarkable experience.

“It was the first eyewitness story of one of the most dramatic days of the
war,” Boyle wrote. When Whitehead’s story, having navigated censors, reached the U.S. the following afternoon, it caused a sensation, with bells ringing on wire service machines all over the country.

“Whitehead got his beat through a combination of forethought, good luck and drive,” Boyle revealed. Several days before, Whitehead had arranged for a French-speaking driver, a jeep, and a small reconnaissance plane. His driver was an Evanston, Illinois, sergeant named Adrian Pinsince, who was fluent in French and, Whitehead said, the “best scrounger I ever met in the Army”—high praise indeed.
¹⁸

Instead of joining the flood of correspondents trying to enter Paris from the west, Whitehead on August 23 chose a different path, hooking up southwest of town with a French armored column that was probing north on the Grand National highway in the tiny village of Bures-sur-Yvette. Whitehead had been tipped off by one of Pinsince’s French sources that it was Brigadier General Leclerc’s outfit. The French continued pushing toward the city that afternoon and evening but were stopped by enemy shelling at Longjumeau.

Whitehead and Pinsince spent the night in a farmhouse but were up before dawn to jump back in with Leclerc’s men. While the column was stalled near a garage in Longjumeau, Pinsince overheard a mechanic say that he’d just gotten off a telephone call with a friend in Paris. It had not occurred to Whitehead that the capital’s telephone system might still be functioning. Surely the Germans could not have been that sloppy, could they have?

Whitehead told Pinsince to pull over and find a phone. With the translator’s help, he placed a call to “Anjou 74-60,” the American Embassy in Paris. One “Mrs. Blanchard,” who identified herself as the embassy’s housekeeper, answered.

“Who is calling?” she inquired in English. When Whitehead told her he was an American reporter trailing the French Second Armored Division, she uttered, “
Mon Dieu!
Where are you?”

Firefights were raging throughout the city between the FFI and the remaining German soldiers, Mrs. Blanchard told Whitehead. Four days earlier, a group of Germans had attacked the embassy, shooting a guard
and ransacking the place. Soon after, she and the rest of the staff had barricaded the embassy; there had been no further assaults.

“Mon Dieu!”
Mrs. Blanchard repeated. “I hope the Americans move in tomorrow. I am carrying an American flag with me wherever I go. We aren’t allowed to fly the flag now, but I hope the Americans will let me help hoist the flag the first time it is flown.”
¹⁹

After bidding au revoir to the housekeeper, Whitehead and Pinsince rejoined Leclerc’s column. As they reached Porte d’Orléans on the near side of the Seine, they were held up by a mined road and antitank fire. Once the column resumed, a prickly French officer invoked de Gaulle
and
Leclerc in informing Whitehead that no noncombatant would be permitted to enter the city. Whitehead pondered the situation for a few moments, switched places with Pinsince, and, in full view of the martinet, jammed the accelerator.

At precisely nine fifty-seven a.m., Whitehead told Boyle, the jeep passed through the gates of Paris. They were promptly mobbed by hysterical Parisians, who crammed every lane despite the threat of snipers.

“The streets were like a combined Mardi Gras, Fourth of July celebration, American Legion convention, and New Year’s Eve in Times Square, all packed into one,” Whitehead wrote later that day.
²⁰
Whitehead swung the jeep behind one of Leclerc’s tanks, hoping it would provide better cover. But at one point the gunfire got so intense that he and Pinsince were forced to jump out and hide behind a small wooden shed. After fifteen minutes, with bullets still zinging all around, they decided that the shed was no safer than the road. Many of the snipers, Whitehead learned, were German soldiers disguised in civilian clothing or members of the Milice, the despised Vichyite militia. Men and women wearing the Tricolor were going from house to house, pointing to rooftops and windows, smoking them out.
²¹

Whitehead stayed inside the city limits for about an hour before reversing course and heading to Rambouillet. But he was there long enough to claim a “Paris” dateline—and return to the Grand Veneur a conquering hero.

Walter Cronkite wasn’t the only American correspondent who had aspired to be the “first one into Paris.” There had been hundreds groveling
for the honor—and several who later claimed it. But only Don Whitehead had truly earned it.

L
IKE HIS FRIEND
B
OYLE
, W
HITEHEAD
may have done some foreshadowing from time to time, anticipating certain events; most journalists did. But Boyle and Whitehead had the integrity not to issue a story until being certain that its assertions jibed with the facts on the ground.

Not so correspondent Charles Collingwood and CBS Radio, which accidentally went live with a Collingwood story on August 24 that described in detail Paris’ liberation, with explicit accounts of jubilant crowds celebrating outside the magnificent landmarks that the dashing Murrow protégé knew almost as well as Liebling. Collingwood had marked his story “hold for release.” But there was a mix-up at CBS-London; in his zeal to get the jump on NBC and the BBC, anchor Richard C. Hottelet read Collingwood’s bulletin on the air—more than a half day
before
Collingwood had set foot in Paris and well before it could be declared “liberated.”
²²

In an episode that marred Murrow’s legacy in London, the phony story was aired repeatedly before CBS issued an embarrassed correction. Murrow always defended Collingwood, but it was slipshod journalism at best—and outright fabrication at worst. It inevitably raised questions about the veracity of other Murrow Boys’ stories from across the conflict.

If “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” as he was known, was chagrined, it was short-lived. The next day, the date of the
real
liberation of Paris, Collingwood was spotted by fellow correspondents drinking with Ernest Hemingway at an outdoor café. Surrounded by a bevy of adoring females, Papa and the Bonnie Prince were toasting the FFI—and, likely, themselves.

The Murrow Boys weren’t the only U.S. correspondents who got into hot water while trumpeting Paris’ redemption. Cronkite’s longtime roommate, UP reporter Jim McGlincy, had his press credentials stripped for a month by Major Jack Redding and the 12th Army Group brass. On day one of the liberation, McGlincy and five other reporters, Larry LeSueur of CBS, Paul Manning of Mutual, Seaghan John Maynes of Reuters, and Robin Duff and Howard Marshall of the BBC, sidestepped PRO strictures by
using Radio Nationale de France to transmit their stories—uncensored and unapproved.
²³
McGlincy had a knack for getting into trouble, especially when Cronkite wasn’t around to help him.

T
HE SITUATION INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
Paris was in such a state of flux that Omar Bradley’s deputies, on the fly, held another press briefing at the Grand Veneur first thing on August 24. Rooney, Boyle, and the other reporters heard Chet Hansen and Monk Dickson confirm reports that thousands of Free French fighters were fomenting insurrection. The street fighting between Resistance members and the Miliciens—unleashed just as the craven Vichy leaders were fleeing to Belfort—was said to be particularly bitter.
²⁴

It took days before the Miliciens threat was snuffed out. G-2 reports, said Hansen and Dickson, indicated that just eleven thousand or twelve thousand Germans were left—many of them administrative personnel believed to be on the verge of cracking. Mrs. Blanchard, the embassy housekeeper, had been right: Men and women wearing the Tricolor had forced the enemy to abandon big chunks of the city and were winning gun battles all over town. The Paris police, whose loyalties had been called into question, were now fighting side by side with the Maquis. The battle for the heart of town, the Île de la Cité around Notre Dame, was especially heated.