Assignment to Hell (67 page)

All the Sunday school prayer in America could not have saved the First Army; much of its front line had disintegrated. Patton had already volunteered to wheel his Third Army north to rescue the 101st Airborne under siege at Bastogne, Belgium.

Cronkite got reassigned to the Third, which set up its press camp in a tiny schoolhouse in Esch, a crude coal-mining hamlet just outside Luxembourg City. Patton’s press operation may have been in grimy Esch, but the general himself chose to reside at the Cravat—as, ironically, did Patton’s boss, Omar Bradley. So Cronkite was staying in the right place to get the latest dope.

The Army gave Cronkite a driver who would escort him by jeep to Esch every morning in time for the ten a.m. press briefing. Third Army PROs would inform Cronkite and other correspondents about the previous night’s action. Then the reporters would determine what sector of that day’s anticipated fighting they’d like to cover. “Once you made up your mind, you told the press officer, ‘I want to go to such and such,’” Cronkite recalled. “He either said you could or you couldn’t go.”
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Patton would not let jeeps in his command put up their windshields because the sun’s reflection might attract German snipers. So Cronkite would wrap himself in blankets, scarves, goggles—anything that might help ward off the frigid winds as his jeep bounced from skirmish to skirmish.

At one point in a village south of Bastogne, Cronkite’s jeep was part of a caravan that found itself swept up in a street firefight. Cronkite leapt out and ducked into a doorway. A GI armed with a carbine was shielded inside the door. Every few moments the plucky youngster would pop out and take a quick potshot.

Cronkite smelled a story. “What’s your name?” Cronkite shouted. “What’s your hometown?”

The kid yelled a reply over his shoulder, keeping a wary eye out.

“And what’s your unit?” Cronkite yelled back, still scribbling.

“Hell, Mr. Cronkite,” the kid replied, “I’m your driver.”

Later that same day, Cronkite’s helmet popped off while riding in the jeep. The helmet bounced into a minefield pocked with warning signs. So Cronkite continued on, helmetless—which, in George Patton’s world, was a serious breach of conduct. Cronkite’s misfortune thickened; Patton’s jeep appeared a few minutes later.

One of Patton’s toadies, a colonel, challenged Cronkite about his helmet. Cronkite explained that: a) his helmet had rolled into a minefield; b)
he wasn’t about to risk life and limb to go get it; and c) he wasn’t a soldier, he was a war correspondent.

“Stay as you are!” the officer barked, and returned to Patton’s jeep.

“We watched [the officer] gesticulate, pointing to the field and then raising his arms in the universal sign for ‘what can I do?’ hopelessness,” Cronkite wrote decades later. “Whereupon Patton uttered a single word that might have been an expletive well known among the troops. The colonel climbed in and they drove on.”
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P
ATTON’S EXPLETIVE, WHATEVER IT MAY
have been, accurately described the Allies’ situation in mid- to late December 1944. A few weeks before, there had been exultation at the prospect of ending the war before the holidays. Now generals were being forced to flee in the face of an enemy onslaught. And thousands of American GIs—many of them as green as the kids from the Kasserine Pass two years earlier—were being trampled.

One week Boyle was flipping deep into his notebook to write about GI sign painters (one painter claimed to have created seventeen thousand placards in Normandy alone: “Booby Trap!”; “Mines Cleared!”; “Supply Route,” etc.)
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and Fritz, a German shepherd of suspect loyalties who made himself a nuisance by peeing in foxholes.
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The next week Boyle was writing about SS assassination squads roaming unchallenged through the Ardennes and petrified GIs helpless to stop oncoming tanks.

The debate still rages seven decades later. Wasn’t the collapse at the Bulge avoidable? Shouldn’t Eisenhower and Bradley have seen it coming?

In truth, Eisenhower and Bradley knew their defensive line in the Ardennes was vulnerable. A few days before the German countersurge, Bradley met in his headquarters with a group of American newspaper editors. Bradley stood before a map and reviewed the entire Allied line, conceding that its weakest point was in the Ardennes. The 12th Army Group head called his Belgium-Luxembourg alignment a “calculated risk.”
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But the Germans, now once again led by the shrewd Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, would be foolish to launch an attack in such a dense forest with poor visibility and poorer roads, the Allied command believed.

“We were all wrong, of course—tragically and stupidly wrong,” Bradley wrote. “After the experience of Mortain, it should have occurred to at least one of us that as we pushed Germany to the wall, Hitler might very well do something crazy and desperate again. That was his style.”
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It was also Hitler’s deluded style to relive moments of Teutonic triumph: The Ardennes had not only been Hitler’s main blitzkrieg route in 1940, but also the Kaiser’s path to glory early in the Great War.

Ultra intercepts, moreover, may have given the Allied command a sense of false security. All those months of being able to read German intentions and adjust their responses accordingly had made the Allies sloppy. At Mortain, Hitler had telegraphed all of his moves through radio signals that were easily intercepted. On the eastern periphery of the Ardennes, however, Hitler amassed four armies of forty divisions, spearheaded by seven armored units—and did it all with abject radio silence. It was a staggering coup—one that Bradley and Eisenhower did not believe Hitler capable of launching.

Sustaining an ambush through the Ardennes, crossing the Meuse, and going all the way to the port of Antwerp—the ultimate objective—was even crazier than attempting to counterattack after the Allied breakout in Normandy. But Hitler was psychotic: Just how psychotic would become tragically apparent in the months to come.

H
AL
B
OYLE CHRONICLED
H
ITLER’S DELUSIONS
from the front trenches. On December 20, two days after Peiper murdered 130 local villagers, Boyle filed a piece from Stavelot that captured the heartache Allied soldiers were feeling. Boyle was with an American engineering outfit forced to blow up a bridge across the Amblève River to keep it from being exploited by Nazi tanks.

“It was the first bridge ever blown up by Capt. James Rice and his men,” Boyle wrote.
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Rice had been compelled to operate under the cloak of darkness because enemy troops were just across the river, intently watching every move. A German machine gun raked the bridge when Rice’s squad had appeared earlier in the day; they were forced to retreat. Once it turned
dark, Rice and his men crept back down to the river’s edge and snuck three fifty-pound boxes of dynamite under the structure and set four thirty-second fuses.

“After we had run one block and dived into a building, that bridge blew up like a Roman candle. It was a beautiful explosion—knocked out windows for three blocks,” Rice told Boyle.

The next day, still in the Stavelot area, Boyle wrote a piece about how a medic, Private Theodore Watson of Brooklyn, had smoked out eight German spies. Dressed in American uniforms, two jeeps full of Peiper-trained SS men had passed through several checkpoints. The German impersonating a captain spoke in impeccable, friendly English, sharing smokes with exhausted MPs.

But by the time they reached Watson’s position near the front, the enemy’s smooth veneer was gone. “Like all sons of Brooklyn, [Watson] takes nothing at its face value,” Boyle wrote. Watson noticed that the jeep occupants were fidgeting, nervously craning their necks toward the German lines, obviously looking for something. The medic discreetly moved closer to eavesdrop and overheard a heavy German accent mutter, “Where is it?”

Watson figured they were looking for a German tank that was supposed to be heading through the American lines at that moment. “They’re Germans!” Watson yelled to the GIs in nearby foxholes. “Shoot them! They’re Germans!”
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Several GIs began firing as all eight Germans took off, running “like deer” toward their lines. Only one of the Germans was hit, but he was dragged to safety. To Watson’s chagrin, all eight escaped.

His coverage of the Bulge was Boyle at his best. Flitting from one section of the front to the next, interviewing GIs on the fly, he memorialized their stories of courage and desperation. Every day during the Bulge, Boyle filed two or three pieces, often more. All of them painted a portrait of American officers and GIs knocked on their heels but scrambling to punch back. Not unlike Bigart’s coverage of the Italian campaign, Boyle’s reporting from the Ardennes makes for a dramatic first draft of history.

By Christmas Day, the Bulge’s tide had begun to turn—and not just
because the Third Army was on the cusp of relieving Bastogne. Boyle enjoyed a holiday repast—complete with turkey and cranberry sauce—in a small village outside Stavelot with Major Hal D. McCown of Ruston, Louisiana. McCown told Boyle the remarkable story of how he’d been taken prisoner by the Germans on December 21 when the major, his radioman, and an orderly were bushwhacked by an enemy patrol. “They were cutting grass above our heads with those machine guns,” McCown told Boyle.
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McCown and some 140 other Americans were being held in a pen just inside the German line at La Gleize across the Amblève River. On Christmas Eve, the prisoners’ total food ration consisted of two dog biscuits and a couple of small nips of cider. But McCown and the other American prisoners were lucky: The SS officers who interrogated them slammed their sidearms down on a table for effect—but chose not to use them. The German commander, not a member of the SS, took a shine to McCown. He expressed hatred of the Russians because, he said, Soviet soldiers took no prisoners—which, given his countrymen’s behavior of the previous week, was the height of gall.

“He was worried about our attitude toward the SS troops,” McCown told Boyle, “and wanted to know if we regarded them as criminals and gangsters, and he wanted to know if we also regarded Hitler and Himmler in this light.”
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On December 24, when a combination of the 291st Engineer Combat Battalion, the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and forward elements of the 30th Division pushed back beyond the Amblève, McCown and the other American captives were thrilled to witness a conflagration: At five-minute intervals, the eight-hundred-man German contingent torched more than 150 of their own tanks (including, McCown was pleased to observe, sixteen prized Tigers), half-tracks, and trucks rather than let them fall into American hands.

McCown and the others were forced to retreat with the German column, marching steadily without rest. But Christmas Eve night, after several brushes with American patrols, a firefight suddenly erupted. McCown and others slipped away undetected, then raced toward friendly lines, shrieking, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

The major told Boyle: “‘My wife would be proud of my waistline now. I’ll never be so small again.’

“And he took another helping of turkey.”
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On the day after Christmas, Boyle interviewed thirty American medics who hid for a half day in a church while SS troops methodically murdered captured American jeep and truck drivers. “We could hear the Nazi tank commander stopping our trucks and ordering the drivers and helpers out,” Sergeant James W. Colella of Rochester, Pennsylvania, told Boyle. “Then we would hear shots. The next morning we saw the bodies of our men lying where they had been killed.”

At one point during the night, an SS officer, under the mistaken impression that the church was occupied by German troops, opened the door and yelled into the darkness: “Is everything all right?”

A medic who happened to be fluent in German answered, “Everything is all right.” Satisfied that things were under control in the church, the SS officer returned to the street to resume killing unarmed Americans. The next morning, the SS troops were driven from the village by American infantrymen.
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Boyle identified neither the young lieutenant nor the village, but at some point in late ’44 or early ’45, an American intelligence officer was being housed by a Belgian family: a mother, a father, and their gorgeous college-aged daughter. It was love at first sight for the lieutenant, who had designs on bringing the young lady back to America. But try as he might, he couldn’t woo the girl or her parents. When he started to bring food to them, though, the parents warmed, at least a little. But he still wasn’t getting anyplace with the girl.

He couldn’t understand why the young lady, a skilled pianist, would play Schubert and Bach so vigorously. Finally, one night he heard voices coming from the basement. The lieutenant went down the stairs to investigate and discovered the girl of his dreams canoodling with an enemy soldier who had apparently been hiding. Suddenly everything became clear: The lieutenant had been in the home of German sympathizers. His romantic plans dashed, he had no choice but to arrest the soldier and turn the family in for harboring the enemy.
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