Assignment to Hell (48 page)

The house had just been captured; it was full of dead German soldiers.
One of them was a tall man who’d dragged a wicker chaise longue onto a hillock in the garden. “There he had sprawled himself, binoculars in hand, to look about for likely places on which to call down fire. It was flat country, and even this slight elevation was serviceable. A fragment from an air burst [of artillery] had saved him the trouble of getting up.”

As evening approached, the three friends followed infantrymen into the decimated streets of La Haye. “Street fighting, in my limited experience, is not particularly dangerous unless you want to fight personally. Observation is limited, and there is defilade everywhere. You sprint from shelter to shelter. Even while I was running, I felt that it was a game that did not in any way affect survival.”

Liebling’s skepticism notwithstanding, the three of them ran through and around smoking debris until they happened upon a company command post in a burned-out café. The commander was delighted to have such distinguished company, so they stuck around for a while, “rather at a loss for conversation, and then left, feeling that we had atoned for our good lunch,” Liebling wrote.
³⁹

F
IRST
A
RMY REPORTERS WERE RARELY
at a loss for conversation that summer—and there was no shortage of fine meals, either. Along with Ernie Pyle, Bob Casey, and nearly two dozen others, by early July Rooney, Boyle, and Liebling were staying at a press camp set up by the First Army’s public relations staff. None of the reporters could identify it in articles or letters, of course, but they were encamped at the Hamel estate outside the tiny village of Vouilly, a couple of miles southeast of Isigny-sur-Mer and some fifteen miles north of a strategic crossroads called St.-Lô. Rooney and the others enjoyed referring to the farm and its twenty-room stone manse as Château d’Hamel or Château de Vouilly, but the place was hardly in its heyday—upkeep hadn’t been easy during the Occupation. Still, a picturesque poplar-lined lane led to a stone bridge over an ancient moat.

For five full weeks beginning in early summer, much of the Western world’s press, including an incumbent and several prospective winners of the Pulitzer Prize, was bivouacked at Mme. Hamel’s farm. The
correspondents’ tents stood next to a field that belonged to a herd of red-and-white steers, dozens of dairy cows, and hundreds of pigs. “If you have a little victory garden in the windows this summer, I can sell you all the manure you want,” Boyle joked with Frances. “It’s fresh and I can get it for you wholesale.”
⁴⁰

Vouilly was the first of three press camps that First Army PROs established between Normandy and Paris. The PROs were indebted to Mme. Hamel because they’d approached her out of the blue about handing over her home and farm for an indefinite period of time—and she’d consented. At any given moment, there were two or three dozen reporters staying at Vouilly, bunking in one of six big tents pitched in the orchard beyond the old field kitchen.

Mme. Hamel’s largest room included several long walnut tables and a series of smaller desks, which made for a superb makeshift pressroom. Censors were installed in an adjoining room. Reporters, therefore, had their dream scenario: one-stop shopping.

The tent nearest the château had six distinguished occupants: Hal Boyle of AP, Ernie Pyle of Scripps Howard, Hank Gorrell of UP, Jack Thompson of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, Bill Stoneman of the
Chicago Daily News
and later the
Christian Science Monitor
, and photographer Bert Brandt of Acme Pictures. The six stayed together in the same setup through all the First Army press camps in northern France.
⁴¹

Since retreating Germans had ransacked the place, the food situation for humans and animals alike was “pretty grim”—at least at the outset, Boyle wrote. Tired of Army rations, certain correspondents were deputized to scour the countryside for fresh eggs and vegetables. Naturally, Liebling and his silver French tongue were commissioned to procure a local chef. Before long the camp’s cafeteria-style mess was producing suppertime swill “of a magnificence unparalleled in that thrifty countryside,” Liebling recalled.

Joe insisted on such heaping portions for everyone that there were plenty of leftover scraps. Starved for years under the Occupation, Mme. Hamel’s pigs had never had it so good. The same could be said for the correspondents. On those mornings when eggs and bacon were available, Pyle
treated his camp mates to breakfast. Rooney called Pyle the press camp’s “den mother.”
⁴²

“The press-association boys constantly competed among themselves on a strict time basis, like milers,” Liebling wrote. He recalled an unnamed United Press reporter (given the time and circumstance, it was almost assuredly Hank Gorrell, whom, Rooney recollected in 2011, could be a little thick and crabby) inside a tent at Mme. Hamel’s, proudly reading a cable from London that may well have come from Virgil Pinkley.

“Beat nearest competitor one minute forty-five. Kudos, kudos, kudos!” the cable read. The UP reporter looked up from his dramatic reading.

“What does ‘kudos’ mean?” he inquired.

“It means they’ve decided not to give you a raise,” cracked someone, probably Liebling.
⁴³

Liebling, by then in his late thirties, was in all likelihood the second-oldest correspondent at the camp, bettered only by Bob Casey. Mme. Hamel’s farm would become a recurring Liebling milieu, a place that loomed almost as large in his imagination as the tony precincts of Long Island had loomed in Fitzgerald’s. In the years to come, Liebling never tired of extolling the farm and its temporary and permanent occupants.

Mme. Hamel’s guests lived a strange existence. After grabbing coffee or one of Ernie’s breakfasts, they’d leave in twos and sometimes threes in jeeps driven by young PRO deputies to cover the action outside St.-Lô. The reporters’ commute south became as routine, Liebling wrote, as a taxi ride from uptown to downtown Manhattan.

Rooney, who kept the same jeep from Utah Beach to the Rhine, often gave Boyle and Liebling a lift to the front. Boyle’s boss Gallagher hated for his star columnist to be in the same jeep as a wire service competitor, so for Boyle, Gorrell’s vehicle was out; so was INS’ Clark Lee’s. But the
Stars and Stripes
wasn’t a competitor of AP; it was a customer—and Gallagher certainly wasn’t worried about Boyle being “scooped” by Liebling’s egghead weekly. On top of that, the three men enjoyed each other’s company. When they got near the front, as artillery exchanges got louder and closer, his mates admired Rooney’s gritty driving.

By early suppertime they’d return, looking to enjoy that evening’s
repast and a lively discourse about women, boxing, and dirty books. Or maybe they’d watch a movie in the tin-roofed shed behind the field kitchen. To abide by blackout rules, the Army had hung a tarpaulin on the back and sides of the shed.

Naughty limerick composition—at which Boyle had no peer—was another favorite pastime. The correspondents tried to stump one another with obscure and difficult-to-rhyme names. One night someone came up with Frank Gervasi, a
Collier’s
reporter with whom Boyle and Liebling had served in North Africa.

Boyle, whose dirty poetry skills had been honed in late-night sessions at the Sig Ep house at the University of Missouri, no doubt took another slug and another tug on his cigar, and intoned:

There once was a whore from Bengazi
Who slept with a frog and a Nazi
A wog and a dog
And a razorback hog,
But she drew the line at Gervasi.
⁴⁴

Andy Rooney once heard Boyle remark that the great thing about being a newspaperman was that you got to meet such fascinating people—most of them other newspapermen.

The evening bull sessions in Vouilly were invariably fueled by liquor. Not only did they still have some of the stash they’d commandeered in Cherbourg, but Mme. Hamel also had a basement full of fermented calvados that somehow the Germans had failed to snatch. Charmed by Liebling’s appreciation of Norman culture, Mme. Hamel opened her cellar to Joe and his friends. Each night the reporters passed around jugs. A field kitchen spigot plugged into a cider barrel had been dormant during the Occupation; in honor of the Liberation, Mme. Hamel had it cranked up again, so the reporters had constant access to fresh hooch.

One of the Hamel sons walked with a limp. While in the French army in the summer of ’40 he’d been taken prisoner. Months later, in blatant
violation of the Geneva Conventions, he was forced to clear a minefield in Alsace-Lorraine and was wounded by shrapnel; six of his POW comrades were killed. His disability made him useless to the Third Reich, so he was freed to return to Vouilly.
⁴⁵

His mother, the proprietress, then in her early sixties, “looked like a proper chatelaine,” Liebling wrote, “tall and straight, with a high forehead, a long, straight nose, bright-blue eyes, and white hair.” For much of the Occupation, she’d put up with enemy soldiers camped on her property. The only reason that the Germans hadn’t seized her estate is that she’d tricked them into believing that a child staying at the house was violently ill and contagious—a phony diagnosis “confirmed” by a friendly local doctor.
⁴⁶

Although Liebling wrote, perhaps disingenuously, that Mme. Hamel had no “direct contact” with the Resistance, at any given moment during the Occupation she had harbored between two and six young men evading forced labor. She and her family also defied the Gestapo by listening almost every night to the forbidden BBC.
⁴⁷

At one point in the summer of ’44, Mme. Hamel shared with Liebling the Occupation “proclamations” that the conquering Germans and their Vichy puppets had foisted on Normandy. On August 17, 1941, some thirteen months into the Occupation, a German
Kommandant
had vowed vengeance for an act of sabotage his circular blamed on “Jews and Communists.”

Her cavernous room, which the PROs and reporters had taken over with telephones, typewriters, walkie-talkies, and hookups to the wireless vehicles parked in the pasture, was bigger than the city room of the
Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin
, Liebling claimed. “Scores of millions of people in America had hung on the stories of the ugly fighting among the dead cattle, and every word had gone out through the mysterious wireless trucks on Madame’s farm,” Liebling wrote fourteen years later.
⁴⁸

The whole experience was “dichotomous,” as Liebling called it in
Normandy Revisited
. Here they were, a dozen miles from some of the war’s fiercest fighting, yet leading pampered lives. Despite the proximity of the Wehrmacht, there was little danger on Normandy’s roads and next to none at the farm: By midsummer, the plane-strapped Luftwaffe had virtually
stopped strafing runs; the Germans, moreover, weren’t likely to waste precious artillery shells by lobbing them into Vouilly. It was the obverse of North Africa, when reporters kept tremulous eyes and ears on the horizon. At the Army’s insistence, the press guys maintained a blackout during Normandy’s short summer nights—but felt silly as they threw blankets over Mme. Hamel’s windows.

At one point Liebling went into the village and bought a huge wheel of Camembert cheese at the little grocery-café. Camembert stunk to high heaven but was nevertheless considered a Norman delicacy. It was so obnoxious, in fact, that Liebling couldn’t persuade any of his mates to partake, so he would melt a big chunk of it and stick his finger in the pot while lying on his cot, reading or scribbling notes. One night Ernie Pyle dug underneath Liebling’s bunk and—in a gesture universally applauded by the Vouilly press camp brethren—tossed Joe’s stinking cheese to the animals.

B
RIGADIER
G
ENERAL
N
ORMAN
C
OTA OF
the 29th Division (soon to be commander of the 28th) had weightier matters than cheese to worry about in mid-July of ’44. The soldiers of the German Third Parachute Division and other crackerjack German units were putting up a stout defense at St.-Lô, throwing everything they had at the famed Blue and Gray division and other U.S. troops. The Allied offensive had become so bogged down in hedgerow country—the
bocage
, as the Normans called it—that Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery were worried that another stalemate like the one in Italy was taking root. But unlike in Italy, an impasse in Normandy would have had catastrophic consequences on the outcome of the war.

On Sunday morning, July 16, Liebling had spotted Cota north of St.-Lô, a mile or so short of the enemy right flank, near a decimated village called St.-André-de-l’Épine. Cota, eyes narrowed, was stopping GIs skulking away from the firing line.

“‘Where are you going, boys?’ I heard him ask a pair of stragglers, and they pulled up sharp when they noticed the star on the helmet of the
spindle-shanked, Roman-nosed old man alone in the road with his walking stick,” Liebling recalled.

“‘The lieutenant bugged out, sir, and we thought we might as well, too,’ one of them said.

“‘Harses! Harses!’ the General said in a non-Harvard New England accent.
⁴⁹
‘I haven’t seen any lieutenant coming this way. Get up there before he notices you’ve been away.’”

The two men that Cota shooed back to the front trenches weren’t the only GIs who’d grown weary of the carnage outside St.-Lô. For weeks on end, their daily progress had been measured in yards, not miles. Normandy’s hedgerows proved to be far more daunting obstacles than Allied intelligence had reckoned. Irregular in length and height, the hedgerows had been designed two millennia before, during Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, to mark property boundaries and keep Norman cattle from wandering. “Six to ten feet high and five feet thick, made of roots twisted around dirt and stone, they were natural barriers to the movement of men and machines,” Rooney remembered. “German gunners leaned up against them, their rifles poking over the top, their bodies protected. A tank coming down the narrow lane between two hedgerows separating fields on either side was a sitting duck for an 88-mm artillery piece at the end of the lane.”
⁵⁰