Assignment to Hell (66 page)

“‘It’s the guy you never see who gets you’ is the first rule of street fighting,” Boyle wrote after “sweating out sniper bullets from every doorway, window-ledge and rubble heap” in Aachen.
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The stalemate along the German-Belgian border precipitated the primal combat in the Hürtgen Forest. It was a fifty-square-mile stretch of woodland just east of the Rhine that was so primeval sunlight could barely penetrate. Boyle spent days shadowing the Third Armored and the Ninth Infantry as they attempted to push forward in the Hürtgen, stymied by enemy soldiers squatting in pillboxes and calling down presighted artillery fire. Many of the German shells had fuses designed to detonate at treetop level—a tactic that proved more devastating than the explosive itself. Thousands of First Army GIs were hurt or killed by splintered limbs. The best way to survive an artillery onslaught in the Hürtgen was by hugging a tree.
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A few weeks later, as Boyle and Cronkite learned firsthand, there weren’t enough trees in the Belgian forest to save all the GIs in jeopardy from the biggest enemy counterattack of the war. And even if there had been, it would not have done them much good.

T
he jeep carrying the Associated Press’ Hal Boyle and
Time
’s Jack Belden slowed to a crawl as it approached the Belgian crossroads of Malmédy. At any moment, the correspondents feared, a Tiger tank would come roaring out of the woods, its turret grinding as the barrel swiveled to take dead aim.

For the two reporters, throwing their hands up and yelling,
“Korrespondent! Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!”
would be futile. On day two of the Germans’ lethal counteroffensive, it was distressingly clear that Hitler’s legions were taking few prisoners.

Boyle and Belden spent much of December 17, 1944, wrapped in towels and blankets, trying to stave off the bitter cold as they scoured the woods for signs of enemy armor. The winds of the Ardennes Forest were so frigid, Boyle recalled a decade later, that Belgian farmers put woolen covers on the backs of cows.
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Between the vicious cold and ugly rumors that Nazi tanks were everywhere, it made for a long day in the jeep. The pair kept passing
wide-eyed American GIs trudging through the ice and mud, anxiously peering over their shoulders. For Boyle, it brought back memories of the panicked retreat he’d witnessed twenty-two months earlier in Tunisia’s Grand Dorsal Mountains.

Waffen SS units led by fanatical Nazi Joachim Peiper’s Blowtorch Battalion had come blasting through the Ardennes, spreading terror as they battered the American lines. One advance enemy unit got so deep into Belgium that it eventually overran General Courtney Hodges’ headquarters in Spa—and with it, the First Army’s press camp. Hodges narrowly evaded likely capture and execution—and so did the correspondents. Most reporters jumped into the retreat caravan stumbling west toward Brussels. But Boyle and Belden somehow managed to point their jeep back toward the front.

As the pair neared Malmédy, they had no way of knowing that earlier the same day at Five Corners, a crossroads on the outskirts of the village, Peiper had ambushed and massacred, in cold blood, nearly a hundred members of Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. To keep
Standartenführer
Peiper, one of Hitler’s favorite henchmen, from wreaking even more havoc, American troops had chopped down two big trees to block a road near the village.

Belden and Boyle were barely out of their jeep when told the bone-chilling story. The two reporters were led to a small group of shivering GIs huddled at a clearing station; they were Battery B men who had somehow escaped the slaughter.

Hal Boyle was, by happenstance, the first daily newspaperman on the scene of the most appalling combat atrocity perpetrated in the European Theater. He may well have been surprised when Army PROs not only okayed his story, but encouraged him to tell it in gory detail; the Army wanted the world to learn about Nazi brutality. Frontline orders were issued that day, in fact, that no SS prisoners were to be taken for the next week.
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Sitting in a hovel, the Allies’ front caving in around him, no doubt blowing on his fingers to keep them warm, Hal Boyle fashioned one of the
most heartrending stories of the war. Millions of Americans learned of the Malmédy Massacre from his AP account. Here’s how the
Kansas City Star
played Boyle’s story on page one.

KILL GI WOUNDED

Nazi Tank Force Brutally Mows Down 150 Helpless
American Prisoners
Survivors Sob in Rage
Only by “Playing Dead” Did a Few Escape Murder by the Germans
Herded into a Field Lacking Heavy Weapons, Yank Unit Is Overpowered by Enemy Armor

by
HAL BOYLE

A
N
A
MERICAN
F
RONT
-L
INE
C
LEARING
S
TATION
, B
ELGIUM
, D
EC
. 17 (D
ELAYED
)

Weeping with rage, a handful of doughboy survivors described today how a German tank force ruthlessly poured machine-gun fire into a group of about 150 Americans who had been disarmed and herded into a field in the opening hours of the present Nazi counteroffensive.

“We had to lie there and listen to German noncoms kill with pistols every one of our wounded men who groaned or tried to move,” said T-5 William B. Summers of Glenville, W. Va., who escaped by playing dead.

The bloodbath had begun, Summers told Boyle, when a German officer pulled out a pistol and, point-blank, emptied it into a group of prisoners. Within seconds the Germans were slaughtering the whole unit with machine guns mounted on half-tracks and armored cars. The only recourse for Summers and his mates was to flop down and play dead.

“They were cutting us down like guinea pigs,” Private William F. Geem of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, told Boyle. “Then those German noncoms began walking around knocking off our wounded. I kept my head down, but after they had emptied their pistols I could hear them click fresh cartridges in their hands while they were reloading.”
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The bodies of the eighty-four men executed in Malmédy were not recovered until the 30th Division pacified the area a month later. Engineers were forced to use metal detectors to find corpses buried under piles of snow.
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Malmédy, sadly, was far from the Blowtorch Battalion’s only massacre in the Ardennes. That same day, in fact, Peiper’s men murdered nineteen GIs who’d surrendered at Honsfeld and later shot fifty disarmed Americans at Büllingen. The next day, December 18, Peiper executed 130 Belgian civilians in the village of Stavelot, including forty-seven women and twenty-three children. Their only “crime” had been to harbor American troops.
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“Like gray phantoms the crouching German infantry slithered through the woods,” Boyle wrote a decade after the Battle of the Bulge. “Then came the coughing roar of endless panzers, their path lit by the artificial moons of giant floodlights.”
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SS men were so venerated by the Reich at that point in the war, Boyle reported, that after one firefight in early December, German burial units scooped up only the bodies of dead SS soldiers. “Regular” soldiers were left to rot—and eventually to be interred by the Allies.
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W
ALTER
C
RONKITE WAS IN BED
at his apartment in Brussels early on the morning of December 16 when the phone rang. UP-Paris was calling to say that the Germans appeared to be on the march along the Luxembourg-Belgium border. They wanted Cronkite, then still attached to Montgomery’s army, to check things out and get back to them. Cronkite was supposed to be traveling to Paris that day—a trip he hoped to extend
through the Christmas holidays, perhaps to meet up with his old roomie Jim McGlincy. (McGlincy’s new best gal, an Irish lass, was a “volunteer” with the Catholic Women’s League, an ironic happenstance that should induce “loud, cynical laughter,” Walter joked with Betsy.) But a reunion with McGlincy in Paris was now by the boards.

No sooner had Cronkite hung up than UP’s First Army correspondent Jack Frankish was rapping on the apartment door. Frankish looked a mess: unshaven, splattered with mud, and, not surprisingly under the circumstances, “considerably shaken,” Cronkite remembered.
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“This goddamn thing is real,” Frankish told Cronkite. “We have a headlong retreat.”
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When reports hit of enemy tanks steamrolling toward Spa, Frankish had no choice but to join the flight to the rear. Now he wanted to get back to the fighting as soon as possible but needed Cronkite’s help to get his story out.

Frankish gave Cronkite a quick blow-by-blow on the German surge; the two of them cobbled together a piece for Walter to run through the traps. Then Frankish jumped back into his jeep and managed to get back to the front, driving upstream against a deluge of men, jeeps, and trucks.

Ironically, despite their yeoman effort, Frankish’s dispatch never made it onto the wire. That morning, Cronkite sent word to his bosses in Paris that he, too, would be heading toward the action.

Only after Cronkite departed did he learn the office had sent a return cable: “Communications difficult,” it read. “Can you coordinate coverage of front?”

The message was absurd. “Hell,” Cronkite remembered, “communications weren’t difficult, they were nonexistent.”
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Rather than buck the “maelstrom,” as he put it, Cronkite consulted a map and navigated side roads to reach Namur, Belgium, a few miles west of the now-reeling American line. U.S. military police guarding a Namur intersection demanded that Cronkite repeat the password.

“I didn’t have any goddamned idea what the password was,” Cronkite recalled. But he sweet-talked his way through the checkpoint and got to Luxembourg City a few hours later.

When the full depravity of the invading Germans came to light, Cronkite realized how fortunate he’d been. Peiper and other Waffen SS hit men had trained and equipped squads of English-speaking soldiers—roughly two thousand men in all. They had American jeeps, uniforms, dog tags, rifles, grenades, and—because so many real GIs had been captured so quickly at gunpoint—often the password command and response. It soon reached the point where American soldiers could not trust the password exchange to identify friend from foe.

MPs and others began asking any “American” unit they encountered questions like, “Who won this year’s World Series?” “How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit in his best year?” And hearkening back to junior high geography, “What’s the capital of Nebraska?” Detained at a checkpoint, three-star General Omar Bradley nearly met his maker when he mistakenly identified Chicago as the capital of Illinois.
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Cronkite was fortunate that he’d run into a kindly MP—and not a hard-ass or, far worse, one of Peiper’s stooges.

The UP reporter was stunned by Luxembourg City’s eerie calm; the city dwellers seemed oblivious to the threat raging a few miles away. Cronkite checked into the Grand Hôtel Cravat—a move that proved fortuitous when Patton’s Third Army started moving north; suddenly Luxembourg became crowded with Allied correspondents.

“For the rest of the Battle of the Bulge,” Cronkite wrote a half century later, “several of us who were fast enough to get ensconced [at the Cravat] commuted from that fur-lined foxhole to the war each day, suffered through the snowstorms and the terrible cold that were bedeviling our troops, and returned each night to a bottle of champagne, a hot bath, and a warm bed. We got out of our warm beds and put on all our old clothes and got in the open jeeps and went out to battle, and came back to champagne and hot baths every night. If Episcopalians are supposed to suffer guilt from such selfish indulgence, I’m afraid I missed that day at Sunday school.”
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