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  ASSIGNMENT

  TO HELL

  ASSIGNMENT

  TO HELL

  The War Against Nazi Germany

  with Correspondents

  Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A. J. Liebling,

  Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle

  TIMOTHY M. GAY

  NAL CALIBER

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published by NAL Caliber, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Timothy M. Gay, 2012

  Maps by George Ward

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  NAL CALIBER and the “C” logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Gay, Timothy M.

  Assignment to Hell: the war against Nazi Germany with correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle/Timothy M. Gay.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58538-2

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Press coverage—United States. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Journalists—Biography. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Europe. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Africa, North. 5. War correspondents—United States—Biography. 6. Cronkite, Walter. 7. Rooney, Andrew A. 8. Liebling, A. J. (Abbott Joseph), 1904–1963. 9. Bigart, Homer, b. 1907. 10. Boyle, Hal. I. Title.

  D799.U6G39 2012

  070.4′49994053092273—dc23 2011049869

  Set in Minion Pro

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To my mother,

  Anne Harrington Gay,

  still going strong at eighty-five,

  Civil Air Patrol volunteer, 1942–1944.

  And to the memory of my aunt and uncle,

  Ella Harrington Cashman (1910–2009) and William Maurice Cashman, MD (1904–1989), U.S. Navy surgeon, 1941–1945.

  The best of the best generation.

  I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.

  —A. J. LIEBLING, 1962

  MOLLIE AND OTHER WAR PIECES

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: D-Day for All Their Lives

  1. Early Impressions

  2. “All Sorts of Horrors”—Crossing Torpedo Junction

  3. North Africa’s Lipless Kiss

  4. Angry Meteors in Tunisia

  5. Bombing Germany with the Writing 69th

  6. Falling Like Dying Moths

  7. Sicily—Darker Than a Witch’s Hat

  8. White Crosses Along the Red Rapido

  9. The Blitz Spirit—London and the Home Front

  10. Cherbourg and St.-Lô—Ugly Fighting Among Dead Cattle

  11. The Breakout—Merci! Merci! Merci!

  12. Rescuing the Kitten—Paris Redeemed

  13. Gasping Cough—Crashing into Holland

  14. Gray Phantoms and Murder Factories—The Bulge to Buchenwald

  Epilogue: A Good Age

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Despite all the books and movies, despite popular culture’s genuflection to the Greatest Generation, it’s still difficult for us to imagine the heartache that World War II exacted on our parents and grandparents. This story illustrates why.

  In July 2011, my wife, Elizabeth, and I took our kids—Allyson, then twenty-one, Andrew, eighteen, and Abigail, eleven—on a World War II–inspired trip through England and France. While visiting the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial at Colleville-sur-Mer, we wanted to pay our respects to the brother of Associated Press columnist Hal Boyle’s sister-in-law, Radioman Second Class John N. Murphy of Kansas City, Kansas. Young Jack was killed D-Day evening on Omaha Beach. At the visitor’s center, I approached the guide sitting behind the counter and asked for help in finding Jack’s grave. One of Boyle’s best columns was a tender tribute to Jack, written at Normandy a month after Murphy perished.

  The guide turned out to be Anthony Lewis, a patient and gracious Brit. Lewis has bushy brown hair, a ready smile, and an enviable, Joe Liebling–like facility for carrying on simultaneous conversations in English and French. He clearly enjoys helping people find the burial spots of family members and old friends of old friends on the bluff near Omaha Beach.

  “Let’s see,” he said, squinting through wire-framed glasses at the database he’d called up on his computer screen. He scrolled through endless names. “John N. Murphy of Kansas City … John N. Murphy …”

  After a few minutes, Lewis reckoned that our John Murphy was no longer buried at Colleville. Once the war had ended, Jack’s family must have requested that his remains be repatriated; the bodies of more than half the Americans killed in Europe during World War II were eventually transferred back home, Lewis explained.

  Lewis continued to eye his screen. He was “sad to report” that there were many other martyrs named John Murphy buried in the eleven cemeteries maintained around the world by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC).

  “Good heavens. How many?” I asked.

  Eventually Lewis determined that there were twenty-seven John Murphys resting in ABMC gravesites: four in Margraten, Holland; three in Florence; two in Sicily; two in Normandy; two in Ardennes, France; one in Henri-Chapelle, Belgium; three in Honolulu; and ten in Manila.1

  Twenty-seven?

  World War II was so malignant that twenty-seven Americans named John Murphy are buried in ABMC cemeteries—and that doesn’t even count the John Murphys, like our John Murphy, resting elsewhere?

  Lewis pointed out that a Sergeant John P. Murphy of New York, a member of the 299th Engineer Combat Battalion, happened to be
buried at Normandy, in Plot I, Row Five, Grave Eighteen. He’d been killed on D-Day, too, not far from our John Murphy.

  So the five of us set out through those sacred grounds to find Sergeant John P. Murphy’s gravestone. There’s something about that immaculately landscaped lawn, those thousands of pristine and geometrically precise white markers, that envelops you, that makes you feel large and small at the same time.

  While we stood over Sergeant Murphy’s grave, I thought of Andy Rooney’s lovely hymn to the men interred at Colleville: “Even if you didn’t know anyone who died, the heart knows something the brain does not—and you weep.”2

  Too many of us still take the fight against Adolf Hitler and global Fascism for granted. We’re so familiar with the war’s ebb and flow—the “inevitable” Allied triumph over evil—that we’ve become inured to the sacrifice it demanded.

  There was nothing inevitable about victory over Nazi Germany. It was accomplished against long odds through stirring leadership and incalculable suffering.

  There was also nothing inevitable about the caliber of U.S. journalism in World War II. Much of the press coverage of America’s earlier conflicts—the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Great War of 1917–1918—had been tainted with “yellow,” appallingly shallow and propagandistic, usually concocted a healthy distance from the front lines.

  Most World War II correspondents were of a different breed: conscientious journalists who insisted on being close to the action and reporting something resembling the truth. Even with intrusive censorship, the journalism they practiced during the war helped propel their postwar craft—and spawned the greatest era of press independence and integrity in American history.

  We know now that Hitler’s blitzkrieg through France stopped soon after the Wehrmacht captured Paris. But the New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling didn’t know that when, with Stuka dive-bombers still terrorizing the French countryside, he jumped into a tiny Citroën with two other correspondents and lit out for Lisbon.

  We know now that enemy resistance to the Allied landings in Morocco was comparatively light. But the Associated Press’ Hal Boyle didn’t know that when, in the dank chill of a November morning, he joined other petrified young Americans in shimmying onto a landing craft.

  We know now that the Nazis were eventually pushed off the high ground surrounding the beach at Anzio. But the New York Herald Tribune’s Homer Bigart didn’t know that as he spent two agonizing months on Anzio’s beachhead, constantly diving for cover as enemy gunners peppered it with artillery.

  We know now that, after weeks of gruesome combat, the Germans retreated from St.-Lô in Normandy. But Staff Sergeant Andy Rooney of the Stars and Stripes didn’t know that when he was following GIs up savagely defended hills, dodging machine gun and mortar fire. Rooney’s bravery earned him a Bronze Star.

  We know now that Hitler’s prized Panzer units eventually abandoned Holland. But United Press’ Walter Cronkite didn’t know that when his 101st Airborne glider crash-landed in Zon. The glider turned upside down as it slithered in a farm field, splintering in two. As Cronkite scrambled out, he could hear enemy artillery. It barely let up for weeks.

  For every moment of joy in the struggle against Nazi Germany, there were dozens laced with profound grief. To be sure, covering the war to stop Hitler took journalistic skill. But mainly it took courage. It’s been an honor to tell their story.

  So to Andy Rooney, who sadly left us at age ninety-two just as the manuscript was nearing completion, and to his friends and family, to the friends and families of Walter Cronkite, A. J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle, to the families of the twenty-eight blessed John Murphys, and to the hundreds of other Allied heroes celebrated in these pages, the Gay family of Vienna, Virginia, would like to say thank you.

  Timothy M. Gay

  December 2011

  PROLOGUE

  D-DAY FOR ALL THEIR LIVES

  I have D-Day now for all of my life … No one can ever take [it] away from me, but nobody can give me another D-Day, either.

  —A. J. LIEBLING, 1944

  LETTER TO JOE MITCHELL OF THE NEW YORKER

  The June sun had barely crept over the soggy English countryside when Captain Robert W. Sheets, his nine crew members, and their surprise guest began crawling through the belly of the B-17G Flying Fortress Shoo Shoo Baby. Launched at Molesworth, a Cambridgeshire airdrome sixty miles north of London, that morning’s mission would mark the hellion pilot’s twenty-first raid over enemy territory.1

  Bob Sheets loved living on the edge. On a whim four years earlier, sans passport, he had ditched the University of Oregon to swab decks on a freighter bound for the Philippines. Right after Pearl Harbor he had enlisted, but balked when the Army groomed him toward tanks; instead, he insisted on enrolling in flight school.2 Now, just six months removed from pilot training, the wiry towhead with the sly wit had become a balls-out bomber jock for the Eighth Army Air Force. Every time Sheets went wheels up, he was bucking survival odds—and he and his crew knew it.

  His boys had come to believe their new “Fort” was a talisman; Shoo Shoo Baby was named after a bluesy and bittersweet tune by the Andrews Sisters about a serviceman kissing his girl goodbye. Painted on the nose’s starboard side was the obligatory “bomber gal” provocatively stretched out in a peignoir, her auburn tresses almost brushing the crude block lettering of SHOO SHOO BABY. Scrawled on the port side was their squadron’s mascot, Warner Brothers wise guy Bugs Bunny, coolly munching a carrot while standing atop a plummeting bomb.3

  Bugs, the temptress, and SHOO SHOO BABY4 shooed away flak and checker-toothed Focke-Wulf 190s and Messerschmitt (Me) 109s and the twin-engine Me 110s—or surely that’s what the men told themselves over pints of beer at Molesworth’s Cross Keys tavern when, battered and bloodied, they made it back from the Third Reich while so many pals in less providential planes hadn’t.

  They were proud to belong to the 303rd Bomb Group, a rough-and-tumble outfit that defiantly called itself Hell’s Angels. The men of the 303rd may have been hell in the air, but they knew how to operate on the ground, too. More than beer guzzling went on at Cambridgeshire pubs: Molesworth produced more marriages between Englishwomen and American servicemen than any U.S. air base in Great Britain.5

  SHEETS AND HIS CREW HAD been introduced to their visitor at the preflight briefing precisely three and a half hours after midnight.6 They found themselves shaking hands with a stoop-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old United Press (UP) correspondent with a husky baritone, a Gable-ish mustache, and a pair of mischievous eyes that missed nothing—especially if wire service competitors were lurking. His name was Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., and he’d spent so much time at Molesworth he considered the dingy base his second home in England.

  Around airmen, Cronkite was the soul of affability, often springing for the next round of ale and offering a sympathetic ear as he scribbled their accounts of clashes with the Nazi war machine. But in the company of rivals—reporters with Associated Press (AP) and the International News Service (INS)—he could be aloof, often curt.7 Rats churned inside the young Cronkite; with a deadline looming, he suffered no fool gladly. Instead of sitting square to an Olivetti or a portable Hermès as he typed his dispatches, he tended to perch sideways, legs crossed, furiously puffing a pipe as his fingertips crashed over the keyboard. Literally every second counted when butting heads with the competition.

  Two years into covering the war, Cronkite’s waistline was thinning almost as rapidly as his hair. He complained in letters to his wife, Betsy, that the combination of round-the-clock reporting, food rationing, and dreadful English cuisine made it tough to keep on weight. Cronkite was just under six feet tall; his weight that spring had dipped alarmingly south of 160 pounds.8 He was so haggard he looked “like hell,” he confided to Betsy.9 The faux officer’s uniform commissioned by the U.S. military—a dark olive suit coat with War Correspondent stitched over the left breast pocket and on the left shoulder patch—now bagged around his neck
like the blazers he had once borrowed from his dad for Chi Phi fraternity dances at the University of Texas.10

  Cronkite may have been emaciated, but from the deft way he fastened his flak jacket and “Mae West” life preserver, then hoisted himself through Shoo Shoo Baby’s starboard-side waist hatch and wriggled past the ammunition box, the two waist-gun emplacements, the aperture to the Sperry ball-turret gunner’s post, the radar and radio compartments with their wires jutting every which way, then negotiated the narrow metal beam that spanned the bomb bay, inched past the ladder to the top-turret gunner’s perch, and—skirting the elevated cockpit—finally lowered himself into the Plexiglas nose with the bombardier and the navigator, it should have been apparent to his new friends that he was hardly a rookie.

  Fifteen months earlier, on his first combat foray in a Flying Fortress, Cronkite had manned the starboard nose machine gun, hammering away at German fighter planes in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of noncombatants. It seemed absurd, Cronkite later said, to observe the niceties of international law while being attacked by a malevolent enemy. He may not have wounded any Nazi fliers (“Boy, they came at you!” he remembered years later11), but as Cronkite climbed out of the B-17 he had the satisfaction of wading through hundreds of spent shells.12

  By midwar, in fact, Cronkite had gone up in practically every crate the Yanks and Brits had in their fleets—trainers and two-man fighters and medium and heavy bombers and reconnaissance rattletraps that hawked enemy Unterseebooten (U-boats) in Torpedo Junction, the treacherous waters surrounding the British Isles. In November of ’42, desperate to outscoop a wire service foe, he’d even squeezed into a pontoon plane catapulted from the deck of the battleship USS Texas.13

  Cronkite was proud to be a straitlaced Missourian, but he was ultracompetitive; part of him had always been a daredevil. Whether on a two-laner in Jackson County or a blacked-out country road in East Anglia, the future auto racing buff drove like a banshee.14