Assignment to Hell (21 page)

Her brother had been a busboy and bartender at Jimmy Kelly’s, a Greenwich Village nightclub. Mollie, it turned out, had been an outspoken union guy who looked out for fellow workers. When Mollie had had a little downtime, he chatted up well-heeled patrons. “The customers didn’t seem to mind,” a bartender told Liebling. “[Mollie] had a nice way about him.”
⁴³

Mollie’s old mates had howled when Liebling told them about the wad of bills that Mollie always had in his pocket in Tunisia. While working at Kelly’s, he had been forever bumming money, but they had been so fond of him they didn’t care.

Liebling loved New Yorkers who dreamed big and lived large. Mollie, Liebling wrote, was “fond of high living, which is the only legitimate incentive for liking money…. I lived with him so long that I once half-convinced myself he was not dead.”

At one point Liebling became so infatuated with Mollie that he began writing a play about him until theater friends pointed out that “it is customary for the protagonist of a work of that nature to remain alive until the last act.” Instead, Liebling ended up giving Private First Class Karl C. Warner a eulogy for the ages.

When I walk through the East Side borderland between Times Square and the slums, where Mollie once lived, I often think of him and his big talk and his golf suit grin. It cheers me to think there may be more like him all around me—a notion I would have dismissed as sheer romanticism
before World War II. Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
⁴⁴

“Quest for Mollie” became a Liebling signature, an essay that, at least for a time, appeared in anthologies. The piece is dedicated to Boyle, Liebling’s friend and Tunisian jeep mate. Had Hal been less affable and less keen to kibbitz with GIs, Liebling never would have spotted Mollie’s corpse.

A
NDY
R
OONEY HAD GOTTEN TO
know Homer Bigart in early ’43 on the trains going back and forth to East Anglia while covering the bombing war. Like every reporter who read Bigart’s stuff, Rooney was awed by his friend’s “incomparable” writing.
⁴⁵

Harrison Salisbury, the United Press editor, had arrived in London two weeks after Bigart. Salisbury first encountered the
Herald Tribune
reporter in an ancient University of London lecture hall that had been reconfigured as a press bullpen by the Ministry of Information.

“[Bigart] was alone, a slim, almost frail figure hunched over his Olivetti, slowly punching with two or three fingers, often pausing, often X-ing out words, often consulting notes, often looking out into space before resuming. He gave no sign that he saw me nor the oak-stained walls…. He was alone in the corridors of his mind.”
⁴⁶

The solitary figure’s reporting on air operations was so penetrating that peers knew instantly that Bigart was destined to achieve great things. Cronkite may have been the first to glimpse Bigart’s genius, since the UP reporter read his friend and “rival’s” copy almost every day for months as they went back and forth to Molesworth. In Salisbury’s mind, Bigart became
the
war correspondent of the ETO.
⁴⁷
Rooney, for his part, always regarded Bigart and Liebling as the two best reporter/writers operating in Europe, with Boyle not far behind.

Bigart and Rooney got a break from their coverage of the air war in late May 1943. Along with other correspondents, they were flown from London to Oran to witness King George VI’s triumphant visit to Allied troops. The British brass pulled out all the stops; newsreel cameramen and photographers
captured every moment of the king’s interaction with Tommies and GIs, just three weeks removed from obliterating the Wehrmacht.

Bigart and Rooney were assembled at a British officers’ club with fourteen other members of the press. Flustered PR advance men insisted that the reporters stand at awkward attention as the monarch made his way toward the receiving line.

“It is important to this story to remind you,” Rooney wrote in his memoirs, “that both King George and Homer stammered badly. Both of them had great difficulty getting out their words.”

The first correspondent the king singled out was International News Service’s Bob Considine, the prominent sports columnist and author of the Doolitle raid account,
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
.

“How … how … how … da … da … do you … you do?” the king inquired. “Who … who … whom… da … da … do you … rep… rep … repre … represent?”

And so it went for half dozen or more awkward exchanges. Finally His Highness reached Bigart.

“How … how … are … are ya … ya … you?” the king said, then moved on without lingering.

Later, Homer, who always put everyone listening to him at ease with his sense of humor, said, “It’s a ga … it’s a ga … dodamn … good thing, ta too. There ca … could … ha … have … ba been … an inter … international … in … incident.”
⁴⁸

A
FTER THE AXIS SURRENDER AT
bizerte, an impromptu victory celebration formed as Allied troops marched back toward the Mediterranean. Cheering Tunisians were lined up on both sides of the road. The scene reminded Hal Boyle of the torchlight parades that Boss Pendergast organized in Kansas City to rally the party faithful, with Boyle’s old man proudly leading the pack.

Boyle happened to be riding in a jeep equipped with a loudspeaker. In midparade, probably after a few pulls on his flask, Boyle grabbed the microphone, stood up, and began chanting:

Vote for Boyle, son of toil!
Vote for Hal, the A-rab’s pal!

The vast majority of his audience, of course, had no idea of what Boyle was yelling, but they were nevertheless tickled by his performance. “Vote for Boyle!” they parroted to the clueless British troops marching in Hal’s wake.
⁴⁹

A
FTER ENCOUNTERING
M
OLLIE
, L
IEBLING HOLED
up at the Hotel Aletti in Algiers to organize his Tunisian notes. By Manhattan standards, the Aletti’s amenities were crude, but after weeks of bunking in the field they seemed to Liebling like the Ritz. One could also “receive female visitors if they stood in well with the concierge,” which was Liebling’s euphemistic way of saying that if you hooked up with a lady of the evening, the Muslim clerk could be paid to look the other way.

Its milieu made the Hotel Aletti special—especially the view from the terraces overlooking the Mediterranean. “In the twilight, as we walked to our dinner, German planes would come like swallows out of Sicily, far away, and jettison their bombs before reaching the center of our magnificent antiaircraft display, like a beehive drawn in lines of orange tracer,” Liebling recalled.
⁵⁰

He wasn’t alone: Hal Boyle, Ernie Pyle, Jack Thompson, Boots Norgaard, John Daly of CBS, Don Coe of UP, Graham Hovey of INS, and John Steinbeck of the
Herald Tribune
were among the many U.S. correspondents who at one point or another that spring sipped black-market brandy on their Aletti verandas, watching Allied pilots duel with the Luftwaffe.
⁵¹

“Then, in the dark after the third Armagnac,” Liebling reminisced, “we
would steal away to a place of enchantment called The Sphinx, where girls would act charades that graying members of the American Legion still dream of with nostalgia in Terre Haute.”
⁵²

In its seven months, Operation Torch had run the gamut from Hal Boyle clinging to a coral reef in Morocco to Joe Liebling knocking back liquor on a hotel porch in Algiers. In between, the Allies had scored a bizarre but decisive victory over Adolf Hitler. For the first time, the Wehrmacht was on the run.

A
ndy Rooney had been in the wartime Army for nearly two years, yet until that instant had never seen a bullet fired in anger. Now, suddenly, as the B-17
Banshee
cleared the Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast, thrumming toward Germany, a slew of Messerschmitts appeared out of nowhere, spitting orange-red death.

“Peeling out of the sun came shining silver German fighter planes, diving at one bomber in the formation and disappearing below the cloudbanks as quickly as they had come. They seemed tiny, hardly a machine of destruction, and an impossible target,” Rooney wrote the next day, February 27, 1943, in a page-one
Stars and Stripes
story headlined How It Feels to Bomb Germany. The piece ran with a head-and-shoulders photo of a grim-faced Rooney that was only marginally more flattering than the wanted-dead-or-alive mug shot taken a year earlier.

While in air combat, Rooney took the advice of crewmates and sat or stood on the heavy flak jacket that he’d been issued: Many airmen feared castration more than wounds to the chest. Rooney was crouched in the
Banshee
’s plastic nose, feeling claustrophobic as he craned his neck to spot enemy aircraft.

Two-thirds of the way across the North Sea, Rooney saw what he thought from his recognition training was an Me 109. “It whipped down through the clouds to our left,” Rooney wrote. “From that time until three and one half hours later, when we were halfway home, no one had to look far to see German fighters.” Rooney was amazed that
Banshee
’s crew could somehow follow the path of enemy fighters, calmly communicating over the intercom as their tormentors careered in and out of clouds.

“Here comes one at 2 o’clock, Elliot,” Lieutenant Bill Casey, the pilot, told the top-turret gunner. “Get the son-of-a-bitch!” The gunner, Technical Sergeant Wilson Elliot of Detroit, was the only member left from
Banshee
’s original crew; the others, Rooney noted, had all been disabled or taken out of commission. And
Banshee
had been flying raids over the Third Reich for less than three months.

As it neared the U-boat pens at Wilhelmshaven, just north of Hamburg on the coast, the formation began to draw flak. “Deadly black puffs began to appear around us,” Rooney wrote. “It seemed as though they were ‘air mines’ that were touched off as we came to them. A puff would appear to our right and then in quick succession a row of five more black splotches flowered out, each one closer as they caught up to us.” After the mission, Rooney learned that the Germans had unveiled a deadly new antiaircraft weapon that day: “parachute flak” shrapnel that would be shot from cannisters on the ground, reach a certain elevation, then open its chute and explode.

Rooney marveled as pilot Casey toggled
Banshee
from side to side. “Lt. Casey zigged, and the puff appeared in the track of our zag. He was one jump ahead of the flak.”
¹

Suddenly the zigzagging Casey’s luck ran out.
Banshee
was rocked by a deafening hit. To Rooney, it seemed like the explosion took place six feet in front of the nose.

As the plane staggered, the Plexiglas appeared to Rooney to disintegrate. With shards of plastic spewing all around, Rooney watched bombardier Malcom Phillips, Jr., of Coffeyville, Kansas, fling his gloves over his
eyes. It took Phillips a few seconds to recover from the shock and realize that he hadn’t been hurt.

Rooney’s eyes shot forward, fearing that he’d see the nose torn clean away. To his amazement, the damage seemed fairly minimal; the Plexiglas was intact, save for a jagged hole the size of a man’s fist. Rooney watched as Phillips, on his first mission, violated a cardinal rule of high-altitude flying by taking off his gloves and trying to stuff the hole with them. Within seconds, the bombardier had lost feeling in his fingers; soon they were nearly frostbitten.

As his wits returned, it occurred to Rooney that despite the mayhem, the U.S. bombers had stayed together. From far above, Rooney was surprised to see farmers tending fields.

Navigator William H. Owens of Tullahoma, Tennessee, suddenly began struggling with a damaged oxygen tank. “I was healthy but helpless,” Rooney confided.