Assignment to Hell (65 page)

By then, American and French soldiers had struck up friendly relations with young ladies in Brittany, who would bring wine and bread to the trenches. On weekends when the Allied boys could get passes, impromptu parties would break out.

In mid-October, a “small scrap” transpired when an American patrol ran into a German squad. When they reached the battlefield under a Red Cross banner, German medics had more wounded than they had estimated; they were short two litters. A German medical officer talked his American counterpart into “loaning” him two litters, with the proviso, Rooney noted, that the stretchers would be returned twenty-four hours later to the same spot.

Next day the U.S. medic returned, but the German officer didn’t show up. Instead he sent a man with a note: He was very sorry he had not showed up with the litters but could he please, because of the acute litter shortage on the German side, keep the two U.S. litters?

The American, annoyed at being stood up in his rendezvous with the German medic, returned an indignant note. Certainly the Germans could not keep the two litters. Who did the German officer think the U.S. quartermaster was supplying, anyway? The following day the German office humbly returned with the two borrowed litters.
⁴⁹

B
OTH SIDES NEEDED TOO MANY
litters that autumn as the fighting inside the Hürtgen Forest and outside Aachen, Metz, and other places became bitter. Over the holidays, Rooney got the same break that Boyle had gotten the previous spring and Cronkite sorely needed—a trip home. The
Stars and Stripes
had instituted a rotation system to give their ETO correspondents
a respite. Rooney spent almost two months back in the States, mixing reportorial duties with joyous R & R time with his wife, Margie, and friends.

Along with old pal Bob Ruthman, Margie and Andy headed out in late November to see friends at Colgate. A blizzard that killed dozens along northeastern highways that weekend nearly proved fatal to them, too. Stranded in a roadside snowbank, they were beginning to panic when they spotted the flashing light of a wrecker, which took them to safety. They never did make it to Colgate.
⁵⁰

Rooney did, however, make it to the
Stars and Stripes
’ East Forty-second Street offices, where he got to file several sports-related articles, including a piece trumpeting West Point football coach Earl “Red” Blaik’s prediction of victory (which proved to be correct) in the 1944 Army-Navy game.

On Rooney’s second day in New York, he happened to bump into an old Army friend, an intelligence officer, at Grand Central Station. “In an excited subway whisper,” Rooney’s acquaintance related an astonishing story: The day before, Election Day, radar screens had detected the Germans launching a missile aimed at New York from a U-boat several hundred miles out into the Atlantic. East Coast air defenses had been scrambled. Rooney’s friend saw the projectile on the radar screen. It was traveling some 250 miles per hour when it disappeared off the screen, either falling short of its target or shot down by an alert pilot. The Nazi threat had not come as a complete shock, Rooney’s friend said. War planners had long feared that Hitler would use one of his
Vergeltungswaffen
weapons against the continental U.S. It was not outside the realm of possibility that German scientists could arm a U-boat with some variation of a V-1 buzz bomb or a V-2 rocket.

Staff Sergeant Rooney by then was a savvy reporter: he knew what to do with a hot tip. That same afternoon, he went out to Mitchel Field, the USAAF’s stateside headquarters on Long Island, under the guise of wanting to do an article on pilot training. He worked his way up the chain of command to a colonel. Rooney pitched him on the training story, which the colonel okayed. Then Rooney nonchalantly mentioned the previous
day’s episode as if it were common knowledge and asked if the colonel had heard “any more dope” about it.

In a piece published in
Harper’s Magazine
in March 1947, twenty-two months after V-E Day, Rooney described what happened next.

The colonel jumped up from behind his desk, closed the door, and looked around the office as though it might have been wired.

“Look,” he said, the way colonels said
look
to sergeants, “where did you hear this silly story? Don’t ever repeat it.” He was trying to shout at me in a whisper. “Now get of here and don’t say a word about it to anyone. It isn’t true. I don’t know a thing about it. I don’t even deny it.”
⁵¹

The next day’s
New York Times
was fascinating, Rooney thought. On page nineteen, an “obscure little story” with a Washington dateline quoted a War Department spokesman. Although officials were not issuing a warning, German attempts to attack New York City “are entirely possible,” the article said. The same issue of the
Times
mentioned that Navy Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, a key strategist who was soon named commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, had been unexpectedly called to Washington.

Rooney returned to Mitchel Field a day later and was surprised to see the hangar and tarmac crowded with fighter planes. It looked to Rooney as if most of the fighters stationed on the East Coast had been transferred—literally overnight—to Hempstead.

He kept after the story, traveling to Washington in hopes of interviewing Major General Clayton Bissell, the Assistant Chief of Staff of G-2 Intelligence. One of Bissell’s aides, a colonel, gave Rooney a brush-off not unlike the one he’d gotten at Mitchel Field. There was absolutely nothing to this story, Rooney was told—but it would be his ass if he breathed a word of it. “It was the same vigorous ‘non-denial,’” Rooney told
Harper’s
readers in March of ’47.

Despite Rooney’s best efforts to pin down something tangible and get it past censors, the story lay fallow—at least for the next few weeks. On
January 8, 1945, however, Admiral Ingram lent credence to Rooney’s information by giving a press conference while aboard his command ship. Ingram curiously volunteered, “It is not only possible, but
probable
that both New York and Washington would be the target of robot bomb attacks ‘within thirty to sixty days.’” Such an attack would not inflict much damage, Ingram assured. “It would certainly cause casualties in the limited area where the bomb might hit, but it could not seriously affect the progress of the war.”
⁵²
Then the admiral added: “There is no reason for anyone to become alarmed. Effective steps have been taken to meet this threat.”
⁵³

Once Ingram’s statement hit the wires and radio airwaves, train and bus stations suddenly became crowded with people trying to get out of New York and D.C. The Navy quickly issued an emphatic, if curious, denial. “There is no more reason now to believe Germany will attack us with robot bombs than there was November 7, 1944,” the Navy Department statement said. Why the peculiar wording and why the gratuitous mention of Election Day? Rooney wondered.

After Rooney returned to Europe in early ’45, he was too busy to pursue the story. But following V-E Day, Rooney was sitting in the Paris bureau of the
Herald Tribune
when it occurred to him that, since censorship had been lifted, the story about the Nazis’ rumored attempt to bomb New York would make a compelling now-it-can-be-told feature.

The
Stars and Stripes
trumpeted Rooney’s story on page one on May 15 under the header N
AZIS
T
RIED TO
B
OMB
N.Y.—B
UT
F
AILED
. The piece got good play on the wires and was boxed on the front pages of several New York dailies. The War Department, naturally, issued another refutation, denying any knowledge of the episode.

There the story sat, undisturbed, for more than a year until Rooney returned to Germany as a civilian correspondent for
Holiday
. He was spending a few days at Wannsee, a resort lake outside Berlin, when he got acquainted with a former German submarine officer. The German was fluent in English, having spent two years before the war studying medicine at Columbia University.

Rooney chatted with him about several topics, winning his confidence, before broaching the New York rumor. “As a matter of fact,” the former
U-boater proudly informed Rooney, “mine was one of the freighter subs in the Atlantic which was refueling the smaller subs lying off the coast of America.”

Ramps had been constructed on the decks of “several” German submarines; New York and Washington, he said, had both been targeted.

“I have heard from my friends that they launched the first projectile before they were caught but they don’t know what happened to it,” he told Rooney, before speculating that the attacking U-boats had been “immobilized” by radio beams that somehow disrupted their electric motors. “They [the U-boat crews] couldn’t move and they were all captured alive,” he said.
⁵⁴

Nearly another full year passed before Rooney filed his
Harper’s
article. The magazine piece was triggered by a conversation Rooney had in the winter of ’47 with a friend who’d served as a USAAF air traffic controller at Mitchel Field in November ’44. Out of the blue the controller and his colleagues were directing “frantic” traffic over and around Long Island. “All [the onetime controller] knew,” Rooney wrote in his
Harper’s
piece, “was that the fighter pilots were directed to be on the lookout for pilotless robot planes flying toward New York.”

Rooney told readers in early ’47 that he’d pretty much given up on ever getting a straight story out of U.S. military officials. His article ended with “I’d like to know the real answer.”

H
AL
B
OYLE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT
Nazi submarine sleuthing off the Long Island coast in the fall of ’44. He knew all about the German stand outside Aachen and Metz, however, and was hearing firsthand about Nazi atrocities from bitter French, Belgian, and Dutch citizens. “People know how to hate along the border,” Boyle wrote in a column in mid-October. The newly liberated could not fathom why Allied troops weren’t being as ruthless with the German populace as the Nazis had been to them when “Hitler was in his heyday,” as Boyle put it.
⁵⁵

One fall morning the AP columnist was driving toward the front with Captain Harry Volk of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, when they stopped in the Belgian village of Aubel, a few kilometers west of the German border.
Stretching their legs, they spotted a charming confectionary store and decided to buy some pastries. The proprietress, Mme. Lardinois, a lovely mother of three, insisted that the Americans stay for lunch. She prepared a feast of local delicacies that Boyle said tickled “palates weary of the sterile monotony of regular rations.” They also enjoyed a bottle of red wine and homemade cookies.

After the dishes were cleared, Mme. Lardinois explained to Volk and Boyle how she had become a widow—and why she would always despise the Nazis. To Boyle’s amazement, her eyes remained dry and her voice never cracked.

Her husband, Joseph, a handsome man with a black mustache, had been a grocer in Aubel when Hitler’s storm troopers poured across the border in May 1940. The Lardinois family bundled themselves into their car and, along with other villagers, headed toward Brussels and safety—or so they hoped.

There were no Belgian or French troops in their caravan, nor were there any military vehicles. But that didn’t stop forty Nazi fighter planes from diving on them. With everyone shrieking, Joseph got his wife and kids out of the car and into a roadside ditch. Four more times the planes came back. On the third pass, Joseph was wounded in the shoulder and chest, the bullets puncturing his lungs. Once the fighters left, Joseph was able to get back into the car and get to the next town. But there were so many wounded locals from that attack and others that Joseph didn’t receive treatment for six hours. He died later that day.

“Much as I grieve for my husband, I feel sorrier still for the young mother who tried to run to safety with her baby in her arms,” Mme. Lardinois told Boyle. “One bullet struck her child in the head and scattered its brains all over her. I will never forget the sounds that that young woman made.”
⁵⁶

Boyle’s column ended with Marie Jose, one of the Lardinois boys, telling him and Volk: “You Americans are too easy with the Germans now. You really don’t know them. You will live to regret your kindness.”
⁵⁷

N
EITHER
A
ACHEN NOR
M
ETZ
was all that far from Aubel—and the Germans were being anything but kind to Allied invaders. The fighting in and around both cities that fall was fierce, inflicting thousands of casualties as the Allied advance stagnated. Nazi units that hadn’t stopped to fire in weeks were suddenly laying down lethal artillery torrents. Boyle wrote from First Army headquarters on October 18 that the Germans defending Geilenkirchen, ten miles north of Aachen, were counterattacking virtually every day and tossing down “the heaviest barrage” along the barely breached Siegfried Line.
⁵⁸
The next day Boyle likened the GIs’ experience in the Aachen-Geilenkirchen corridor to climbing into the ring with Joe Louis. Except, Boyle wrote, foot soldiers couldn’t always see their adversaries.