Assignment to Hell (6 page)

Flying blind, the squadron zoomed over what should have been Caen, but no one could tell for sure. Then Lyle ordered a second pass, this time at a perilously low altitude, hoping there’d be a break in the clouds.
⁷⁴
There wasn’t. Lyle had no choice but to call off the attack.

Under normal conditions the bombers would have jettisoned their packages over enemy territory, but strict orders forbade that: D-Day planners didn’t want bombs dropped anywhere near Allied paratroopers. Dumping their load over the Channel wasn’t permitted on D-Day, either: There were too many Allied planes flying at too many altitudes; accidents would have been inevitable. So the squadron had no choice but to execute a big bank, climb many thousands of feet—no easy trick in zero visibility—and return to Molesworth. All of which meant Bob Sheets’ worst nightmare: Setting down his plane on a fog-shrouded runway while armed with live ordnance. “Now, that was a hairy landing,” Cronkite recalled.
⁷⁵

There was little time to exchange pleasantries with
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s crew: A quick photo was taken, then Cronkite raced back to London to file his story. His bosses at UP had been frantically searching for him, convinced, Cronkite recalled, that he’d “been up to no good in Londontown.”
⁷⁶

“Where were you shacked up last night?!” they screeched as Cronkite rushed into the UP offices in the News of the World building on Bouverie Street off Fleet.
⁷⁷
They calmed down when Cronkite informed them his ass had been over the Channel and back in a B-17.

Hal Leyshon, it turned out, had been mistaken: flashes about the Allied assault had already hit the wires. One of them was from Cronkite’s archrival, Gladwin Hill of Associated Press—a turn of events that rankled him no end.

Cronkite had never been so disappointed, he confided a few days later to Betsy. “Why, we [
Shoo Shoo Baby
] didn’t even get shot at,” his letter grumbled. Not being able to drop bombs on Caen was “like taking only one drink on New Year’s Eve.”

H
AL
B
OYLE DIDN’T GET ASHORE
at Omaha until June 9, the same day as his buddy Liebling. Although both were angry that they’d been kept off invasion beaches, in truth, only a handful of correspondents had beaten them there. One was their friend Ernie Pyle, the sainted Scripps Howard columnist. Pyle’s stature earned him a prize spot on the USS
Augusta
, the flagship of General Omar Bradley, the commander of U.S. invasion ground forces. On the morning of June 7, Pyle wangled a ride to shore.

Ernie’s encomium to the men of Omaha Beach should be chiseled in the American pantheon of journalism. “As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood,” Pyle wrote. “They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.”
⁷⁸

On D-Day plus three, as Boyle arrived at Omaha for a brief visit before returning to England, he could hear artillery fire unnervingly close. Among the first things Boyle spotted was the way the Germans had implanted concrete-encased guns on the bluffs that towered above the beach. Many of the enemy 88s, Boyle noticed, had bloated barrels; in midbattle, American attackers had bravely disabled the guns by jamming grenades down their mouths.
⁷⁹

Twenty-six days later, Boyle was back at Omaha. For a year, through two theaters of the war, he had been looking for Navy seaman and fellow Kansas Citian John Murphy, his brother’s brother-in-law.

“Today I found him at last,” Boyle wrote in a column that rivaled Pyle at his most powerful.

“John was stretched flat on his strong young back under five feet of Normandy soil. He was lying in Plot B, Row Five, Grave Eighty-four of the first American cemetery in France in World War II.”

Radioman Second Class Murphy, Boyle learned in talking to a surviving
member of the Sixth Naval Beach Battalion, had been killed some twelve hours after being dumped on Easy Red. Hauling his equipment in one hand and a tommy gun in the other, young Jack had eluded machine gun fire and mortar shells while pounding up the beachhead to set up his radio. Within minutes, he had established shore-to-ship contact so Navy artillery gunners could effectively concentrate their barrages. All day, amid Easy Red’s mayhem, John raced from hot spot to hot spot, directing fire over his radio. At about seven o’clock that night, an 88 that hadn’t yet been disabled found a foxhole in which Murphy and another radioman were dug in. Both were killed.

“That Murph was a popular Irishman,” one of his buddies from the Sixth told Boyle. “Everybody liked him. He was a tall fellow and good-looking. Had a pink face. He was a helluva good ballplayer, too.”

Of Murphy’s thirty-five-man platoon that Joe Liebling had watched assault Omaha Beach on D-Day morning, five were killed and ten were wounded.

Seven years earlier, when Boyle’s older brother Ed had married Monica Murphy, Jack was still in his midteens. Now, Boyle wrote, “there was a mound of earth above his body and in it was stuck a stake bearing his identifying “dog tag.” And tangled in the wire which held his dog tag was a withered Normandy rose left there by French peasants who have put a flower over every one of the two thousand American graves in the cemetery.”
⁸⁰

Back in Kansas City, Monica took the column as it appeared in the hometown
Star
and pasted it into a scrapbook she was lovingly keeping on the war. When she had started the album two years earlier, it had never occurred to her that her brother-in-law would someday write a eulogy to her brother.

O
N
J
UNE 10, WHEN
A
NDY
Rooney drove his greased-up jeep onto Utah Beach, there were scattered artillery salvos—but nothing that caused him to flinch; the nearest fighting was some two miles inland. Utah had been captured on D-Day without Omaha’s horrific bloodshed. Yet signs of death
were everywhere: The Graves Registration Unit had placed rows of dead GIs in the sand just above the high-tide mark.

“They were covered with olive-drab blankets, just their feet sticking out at the bottom. I remember their boots—all the same on such different boys,” Rooney wrote in unwitting homage to Pyle.
⁸¹

While sitting in his jeep that first evening in France, Rooney pulled out a notepad and scrawled a poem. His first verse imagined a future battleground guide lecturing a “bus-load of people about events that never happened in a place they never were.”
⁸²

In the decades to come, Rooney would visit Normandy many times. As he watched visitors listening in a variety of languages to guides not yet born in 1944, he was struck by the prescience of his poem.

“Even if you didn’t know anyone who died, the heart knows something the brain does not—and you weep,” Rooney wrote of his pilgrimages. “If you think the world is selfish and rotten go to the cemetery at Colleville overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on June 6, 1944.”
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F
IFTEEN MONTHS BEFORE
D-D
AY, WHEN
Homer Bigart, joined by friends Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, flew on his first bombing mission, he used an inimitable Bigartism—“stoogeing around over a particularly hot corner of the Third Reich”
⁸⁴
—to describe how their formation staggered in the skies over Lower Saxony before turning to attack a U-boat base. Together, the journalists celebrated in these pages stooged around some of the European war’s hottest corners.

Beginning in London in late ’42, their paths frequently intersected. Four of them covered the air campaign against the Nazis, taking the train out to East Anglia’s airdromes and then, on the ride back to London, trying not to think about the young men who hadn’t made it back. The reporters were stationed together in Britain for long stretches, appraising bomb damage and standing shoulder to shoulder at briefings conducted by Allied leaders. All five knew their way around blacked-out Piccadilly; often in the company of Army and Navy press officers, they closed down their
share of pubs. In some capacity, they all covered the North African offensive, which for the first time threw American infantrymen into the fight against Hitler.

They often shared the same datelines, beachheads, and flasks of whiskey, covered the same horrific scenes, and tried to make sense of the same apocalyptic world. Sometimes they scribbled notes in the same trench or hovel; at other times they were separated by dozens or hundreds of miles, pursuing different story lines. Yet they dodged the same shrapnel, suffered the same heartache, battled the same censors, and spoke to the same anxious readers.

To be sure, our five weren’t alone: Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle; the
Los Angeles Times
’ Tom Treanor; the
New York Times
’ Harold Denny; CBS’ Edward R. Murrow, Bill Downs, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid; AP’s Don Whitehead, Noland “Boots” Norgaard, Ken Dixon, and Wes Gallagher; UP’s Chris Cunningham and Hank Gorrell; the
Chicago Daily News
’ Robert Casey; the
Chicago Daily Tribune
’s Jack Thompson;
Life
’s Margaret Bourke-White;
Collier’s Weekly
’s Martha Gellhorn and her (sort of) husband, Ernest Hemingway; the
New York Herald Tribune
’s John “Tex” O’Reilly; and untold others made brilliant contributions to the journalism of World War II.

But there was a certain bond among the five men of this book; in many ways, they were a journalistic band of brothers. Cronkite, Bigart, and Rooney formed the core of the “Writing 69th,” the coterie of reporters trained by the Army Air Force in early ’43 to fly on bombing raids. Throughout much of the North African campaign, Liebling and Boyle traveled in the same jeep. Boyle and Bigart bunked in the same tents in Sicily and Italy. Boyle, Liebling, and Rooney were credentialed to cover the First Army after Normandy; they were together almost every day in the sweep across France. Boyle and Cronkite covered Operation Market Garden in Holland and later slogged through the bloody snows of the Ardennes. Rooney and Boyle together uncovered the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps.

Allied correspondents had to wrestle with constantly changing censorship rules; inevitably, especially given the wickedness of the enemy and the
rightness of the Allied cause, their reporting at times bordered on propaganda. Yet they weren’t vacuous cheerleaders; their copy was surprisingly pointed, sometimes irreverent. They ticked off their share of Allied commanders.
⁸⁵

The newspaper business that four of them had entered before the war was a provincial backwater: outlets for their owners’ ideological breast-beating or parochial business agendas or just voyeuristic rags—or often, all three rolled into one. Each was determined to make journalism an honorable profession. To a remarkable degree in postwar America, they succeeded—at least for a time.

Four of the five started on the humblest rung of journalism’s ladder: covering local news. It was training that served them well. “Any reporter who can do justice to a four-alarm fire can do well by a war, which is merely a larger fire affecting more people,” Boyle once remarked.
⁸⁶
Boyle did so much justice to World War II firefights that he earned a Pulitzer Prize. So did his friend Bigart.

All five were characters in their own F. Scott Fitzgerald saga, inventing themselves in an America stumbling toward greatness. A wartime colleague said of Boyle that he “had the drive of a locomotive”
⁸⁷
—an appellation that applied to the other four as well.

I
N FEBRUARY 1943, FOLLOWING THE
Writing 69th’s bombing raid over Nazi Germany, Bigart asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. “I think I’m going to say,” mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell, a hell at 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire.…”

Bigart, who prided himself on his taut writing style, stared at Cronkite, incredulous that his colleague would resort to such purple prose. “You—you—w-w-wouldn’t,” Bigart stammered.
⁸⁸
But Cronkite would. His story (the
New York Times
headlined it “Hell 26,000 Feet Up”) got huge pickup in the States and dominated the British tabloids. It was so successful, in fact, that for the next half century Bigart and Rooney felt obliged to give their pal unmerciful guff about it.

“When I want to remind Cronkite that he is mortal man,” Rooney wrote in the 1990s, “I quote him a few sentences from his United Press story that day.”
⁸⁹

Over his esteemed career, Walter Cronkite issued millions of words for public consumption. But he never wrote or uttered a truer phrase. Covering the Allies’ struggle against Nazi Germany was, indisputably, an “assignment to hell.”