Assignment to Hell (60 page)

Rooney squirmed through the crowd. Joined by several other reporters, Pyle was chuckling at the amorous goings-on. “Ernie’s language was refined compared to that of many of the correspondents, but he looked down that day, as French girls threw themselves with wild abandon at American boys, and said, ‘Any GI who doesn’t get laid tonight is a sissy.’” Pyle’s quip was mild stuff, but when Rooney related it fifty-one years later for an ABC News documentary, never dreaming that the producer would actually use it, it stirred controversy among feminist and gay rights activists.

That night Rooney tried to check into the Scribe but was intercepted by Major Jack Redding, the big boss PRO, who unilaterally decided that as active-duty military, Sergeant Rooney did not qualify as a “correspondent”—a novel argument, given Andy’s nonstop duties in the line of fire for two
and a half months. The officious Redding went on to become President Truman’s postmaster general and the public relations head of the Democratic National Committee—but that didn’t make Rooney like him any better.

When Rooney learned the next morning that his article never made it to the
Stars and Stripes,
he was doubly pissed.
⁴¹
It turned out that the grasshopper pilot, after taking off from an open field near the Bois de Boulogne, was forced down with engine trouble. And the copy somehow didn’t get through the French message center, either. Rooney’s
Stars and Stripes
colleague Bud Kane, who’d followed the Fourth Division into Paris that afternoon, got a less colorful story onto page one. A half century later, Rooney echoed Cronkite’s Operation Transfigure frustration in remembering his Paris strikeout as “the single most disappointing event in my three years as a war correspondent.”

But Rooney would have plenty of opportunities to write about liberated Paris. The fun was just beginning.

H
AL
B
OYLE, AMID DAY THREE
of
la Lib
é
ration
, managed to get to the Louvre. He asked a curator if the Germans had destroyed any precious treasures. Just one, Boyle was told: a 4,500-year-old mummified Egyptian sheep.

“It was torn to pieces yesterday,” Boyle explained, “by a frantic [enemy] soldier in the basement as he sought shelter during the panic caused by gunfire between rooftop snipers and French patriots marching in the great liberation day parade.”
⁴²
As the wild gunplay began, 750 German prisoners were being guarded in the Louvre’s courtyard. They begged their FFI captors for protection and were rushed into the museum, where stray bullets smashed dozens of windows. Once the shooting died down, the guards combed the basement and discovered six German soldiers hiding among the Egyptian sarcophagi. Another enemy soldier had ripped open a wall panel and wormed his way into the ancient sheep mummy. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
headlined Boyle’s piece M
UMMY
S
AVES
N
AZI
.
⁴³

The Louvre wasn’t the only building in the line of fire. Led by de Gaulle and Leclerc, the parade on August 26 courted disaster. Given the number
of holdout SS snipers, desperate Vichy militiamen, and trigger-happy French regulars and FFI fighters—not to mention the possibility of the Luftwaffe suddenly showing up—a massive demonstration on the streets of Paris at that point was a monumentally bad idea.

Boyle, Rooney, Liebling, and everyone else in Paris worried that there would be assassination attempts on de Gaulle and his Free French followers. It happened in midparade.

De Gaulle got out of his vehicle to acknowledge the cheers as the parade reached the Place de la Concorde. Rooney was in his jeep trying to keep up. Suddenly there was a “staccato crackle of gunfire from the direction of the massive columns of the Hôtel de Crillon or, possibly, from the roof of the U.S. Embassy next to it.”

Everyone near Rooney dove for cover, many of them trying to get behind tanks and trucks. Unlike his moment with Hemingway two days earlier, this time Rooney remembered to grab his helmet as he tore out of the jeep. The problem was that no one was absolutely sure from where the fire was coming, so they didn’t know how to protect themselves. Mothers grabbed children and sought cover in doorways. People began scrambling underneath trucks, tanks, and jeeps, praying the vehicles would remain still. It was a terrifying few moments. Rooney kept his head down, so he missed the specter of de Gaulle standing erect, facing his would-be assassins without so much as a flinch—or so the legend goes.

Things seemed to be calming down when there was a second burst of fire, triggering another manic scramble. With that, “every French tank in the square, several hundred I suppose, turned their guns toward the Crillon and started blasting away at its facade,” Rooney recalled.
⁴⁴

Hal Boyle, also hugging the ground in the Place de la Concorde, wrote that day that “thousands of men of the French forces of the interior were pouring rifle, machine gun, and pistol fire at the bordering rooftops.”
⁴⁵
The firing quickly spread, Boyle noted, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Hôtel de Ville to Notre Dame.

Rooney watched a dozen French commandoes race toward the Crillon to clean out the snipers. People stayed under cover for another ten or fifteen minutes before the procession resumed. Several spectators were killed; dozens
more were wounded. “Paris today is like a big league Tombstone, Ariz., in the palmiest days of that wild west town,” Boyle wrote on August 26.
⁴⁶

D
ESPITE MORE THAN OCCASIONAL FLYING
bullets, the parading in Paris didn’t stop. Nor did the partying. There wasn’t much coffee or food in Paris that week, but there seemed to be limitless supplies, Boyle remarked, of champagne, cognac, wine, and chocolate truffles.
⁴⁷
On August 29, the smooched-up and generally hungover men of the Fourth and 28th Divisions marched with all the other liberating troops down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Since the GIs—almost to a man—would soon be whisked back to the front after their four-day divertissement, they relished every step. Again, millions of Parisians gathered to give thanks.

Boyle positioned himself not far from the Arc de Triomphe so he could take in the panorama of the Americans marching down the world’s most famous boulevard. Looking up and down the parade route, he couldn’t help but notice that many of the “men” wearing FFI colors were barely in their teens. Much of the Resistance had been carried out by children, he wrote, with good reason: Many of their parents had been killed in the line of duty or executed by the Gestapo.

On August 27, the bodies of fifty French policemen and members of the FFI were exhumed from mass graves in three places around the city. Days before they had been murdered by assassination squads of the Waffen SS. A Frenchman who’d been forced to serve on the burial detail but managed to escape told Boyle that his group had been ordered at gunpoint to dig their own burial pits, then made to dance around until exhausted while the SS troops, for entertainment, fired at their legs. When the dancers collapsed, the storm troopers put pistols to their heads and pulled the triggers.
⁴⁸

Boyle’s column the day before had been on a lighter topic: the things that American soldiers would never forget “the first time they saw Paris.” The capital had “lived up to every man’s expectation as the most beautiful city in the world, and its daughters, too, were the most beautiful in France, especially after Normandy’s muscled sisters, many of whom are patterned
after their own native, bulky hedgerows.” Boyle spotted one white-haired French lady walking Paris’ streets with a small stepladder. “Whenever she came across a parked jeep she set up the ladder, climbed up to the third step and kissed the boys sitting in the back seat,” he wrote.
⁴⁹

There’s a good chance Boyle was insinuated among adoring women at the August 29 parade when the police motorcycle bore down on him. He probably never saw it coming. Boyle may well have had his back turned, jotting notes, when a gendarme on a motorbike lost control and plowed into him. Boyle was tossed high in the air and landed squarely on his back. Badly bruised, he was unable to get up for several minutes. An ambulance was summoned. Before being taken to the hospital, he managed to grind out a story by hand and get it to a colleague. It turned out he had torn several ligaments in his back, although X-rays probing for a more serious spinal injury proved negative.

He was hospitalized for three days and took it easy for another week or so after that—the first real break he’d had since arriving in England before D-Day. The correspondent who had barely escaped drowning off Casablanca and eluded bombs, shells, and bullets in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and halfway across France was almost done in by an accident far flukier than the one that had killed his friend Tom Treanor.

U.S.
CORRESPONDENTS FELL INTO A
serendipitous cash windfall on August 26—perhaps the luckiest break any group of reporters have gotten anywhere at any time. Charles Wertenbaker, a correspondent with
Time
, had been tasked by the home office to inspect the Paris bureau that the magazine’s employees had abruptly abandoned in June 1940. The Nazis had stormed into the capital so quickly that
Time
’s staff had not had the chance to safeguard $100,000 in American currency that had been stuffed into a concealed office safe. Back in ’40, Henry Luce’s bean counters in New York had claimed it as an insurance loss.

Wertenbaker managed to get into the old
Time
office on the first day of the liberation. He assumed that the Gestapo, which had ransacked almost
every business in Paris, had uncovered the safe and everything in it. To his astonishment, the safe was intact and the one hundred grand was sitting there, undisturbed.

He cabled his bosses and asked what to do with the money. “Dispose of as you will—insurance company already paid off,” Wertenbaker was counseled the next day.
⁵⁰

Word spread like wildfire. Wertenbaker started handing out hundred-dollar bills to reporter buddies as if they were lollipops.

Captain Bunny Rigg, Liebling’s D-Day hero, the skipper of LCI(L)-88, managed to score a two-day pass and bummed a ride from England to France on a C-47. Rigg found Liebling at the Scribe just as news about Wertenbaker’s boon was hitting; together they hustled over to Wertenbaker’s room. Despite Liebling’s well-documented disdain for
Time
founder Luce’s brand of politics and journalism, Wertenbaker bankrolled them. In truth, as Liebling later pointed out, any American in Paris in August and September 1944 didn’t need a lot of dough to have a good time. It was almost impossible in those heady days, Liebling remembered, for an American to pay for a drink or a bottle of wine. Ernie Pyle had been right: There was virtually no need for any American to
pay
a woman for sexual favors. Joe and Bunny used their wad to treat some ballerinas to a big night on the town.

Not long after Liebling and Rigg collected their cash, Ernest Hemingway barged into Wertenbaker’s room, demanding a big stake for him and his FFI posse. Wertenbaker, with a straight face, informed Hemingway that he’d gotten bum information; there was no such cash. A red-faced Papa stormed out, muttering well-chosen epithets.

Hemingway’s grandstanding had finally caught up to him. “I wouldn’t give that son-of-a-bitch the sweat off my balls,” Wertenbaker snarled.
⁵¹

Papa wasn’t staying at the plebeian Scribe. He and his Resistance pals repeated their Grand Veneur ruse at the Ritz. FFI guerrillas were literally standing guard at the Ritz on August 25 when photographer Robert Capa walked up. “Papa took good hotel,” one of them told Capa. “Plenty of stuff in cellar. You go up quick.”
⁵²

T
IME
’S OFFICE WASN’T THE ONLY
place that the Gestapo had inexplicably overlooked. The
New York Herald Tribune
’s old printing press at 21 rue de Berri was also in surprisingly good shape, thanks to a Frenchwoman who had hidden its vital parts from the Germans. When her old American colleagues arrived, she presented her gift with what Cronkite heard was a coquettish swish of the skirt. It took only a week to get the old
Trib
facility up and running; the
Stars and Stripes
soon began publishing the bulk of its ETO infantry editions there.

Jimmy Cannon, the Gotham sports columnist who wrote in the same guttural cadence as his hero, Damon Runyon, had been with the
Stars and Stripes
for a year when he arrived in Paris late that summer. Cannon, Rooney remembered, immediately began reprising his Runyon bit in Paris, collecting quotes from GIs that sounded suspiciously like the railbirds at Belmont Park. Rooney enjoyed Cannon’s style but Bud Hutton, the no-nonsense editor, abhorred it and distrusted its practitioner.

Cannon came to Paris with a clear-cut objective: to hustle a transplanted New York showgirl named Gay Orloff. Gay was the sort of “prototypical dumb blonde,” Rooney remembered, “[that] Jimmy would have invented for his column back in New York.”
⁵³
Orloff had been Lucky Luciano’s squeeze before the notorious gangster was sent up the river to Sing Sing. To endear himself to Miss Orloff, Cannon pretended that he’d been up to the big house to visit Luciano, claiming that the mobster had turned his jail cell into a veritable shrine: Her pictures were everywhere, including the ceiling, so Lucky could gaze up at her as he drifted off to sleep. Then, to make himself a more attractive catch, Cannon assured Orloff that Luciano had big plans for their lives together when Lucky got out of the joint—twenty-five years hence. “Gay was not the kind of girl,” Rooney dryly observed, “who looked forward to the day she’d be starting her life at age sixty.”
⁵⁴