Assignment to Hell (69 page)

“That was bad judgment,” Boyle wrote. The two brawled near an abandoned German tank. Imbody, a husky welterweight, had a right hand the size of a ham, Boyle noted. The sergeant coldcocked his tormentor, splattering him against the tank, then rescued his buddy when the other German, wanting no part of Imbody, lit out toward the Rhine.
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When the weather cleared, troops of every nation were surging toward the Rhine: The bridges that spanned the river were the real prizes. If they
could somehow be seized intact, the path into Germany’s industrial heartland would be made that much easier. Thanks in no small measure to Hal Boyle’s reporting, the
Kansas City Star
and many other U.S. newspapers charted the Allies’ progress to and over the Rhine.

On March 3, Boyle was in Neuss, not far from Düsseldorf, as three historic bridges were blown up by Nazi engineers just as the U.S. 83rd Infantry was preparing assaults. “The destruction of the bridge was in itself an admission by the German high command that the battle for the Rhineland has been lost and that the legendary river which every Teuton loves again has become the western frontier of a rapidly shrinking Reich,” Boyle wrote.
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Three days later, forty kilometers or so downriver from Boyle, Andy Rooney got to witness the Reich shrink a little faster. Rooney was with a pack of other correspondents on the Rhine near Cologne. There they witnessed a bloody confrontation between the Shermans of the Third Armored Division and Tiger tanks desperate to keep the Americans at bay. In Cologne the correspondents had unearthed their biggest cache of liquor since encountering the underground delights of Fort du Roule in Cherbourg eight months earlier. The stash had been discovered beneath the wine cellar of the Hotel Excelsior: endless cases of champagne and cognac from all over Europe.

While their colleagues were sampling the Excelsior’s booty on the afternoon of March 7, Rooney and Howard Cowan of Associated Press got one of the hottest tips of the war: Twenty miles farther south, at Remagen, the Ludendorff Bridge, one of prewar Europe’s busiest railroad spans, had miraculously been captured while still standing. Cowan and Rooney were told that GIs were already heading across the bridge.

They jumped into Rooney’s jeep. With all the tanks on the road, it took more than an hour. But when they got there and looked around, they were thrilled to discover that they were the first reporters on the scene.

There were so many American soldiers atop the trestle that “it looked like the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson at rush hour,” Rooney remembered. If he could figure out a way to get his scoop back to the
Stars and Stripes
’ headquarters in Paris, he knew he’d have one of the
best stories of the war—an exclusive that might help ease the frustration of the failure to get his liberation-of-Paris story in print.

Rooney and Cowan learned that German engineers had lashed powerful explosives under the bridge, intent on detonating them as soon as the Allies got close. But U.S. specialists, in a moment of still-unsung heroism, rappelled under the bridge, defusing by hand most of the explosives as German soldiers a few hundred yards away were desperately hitting their detonators. Some of the dynamite went off—but not enough to knock down the bridge.
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I
T WAS A FORTUITOUS MOMENT
for SHAEF, too. Omar Bradley, unexpectedly, was able to push thousands of troops across the Rhine, slamming a dent in the German defenses, forcing a debilitating enemy pullback, and causing such tumult that Hitler again cashiered
Generalfeldmarschall
Gerd von Rundstedt—this time for good.

Bradley was especially gratified. Capturing the bridge at Remagen gave him the chance to revive the “two-thrust” assault into Germany that he had been advocating for months. In the wake of the Bulge, Montgomery in early ’45 had persuaded Eisenhower to cede American troops to Monty’s Twenty-first Army Group. Monty wanted the main thrust onto German soil to come from the British position in the north. By early March, Ike had incensed Bradley by assigning much of the American First Army as part of Monty’s “reserves” for Operation Plunder, the Brits’ long-delayed northern offensive.

All that changed, however, with the news from Remagen. “Hot dog, Courtney!” Bradley exulted when Hodges called him with the news about the Ninth Armored Division’s seizure of the Ludendorff Bridge. “Shove everything you can across it. And button up the bridgehead tightly.”
⁴⁰

Ike was having dinner with his airborne generals, Matthew Ridgway, James Gavin, and Maxwell Taylor, when Bradley called with the remarkable bulletin. “It’s the best break we’ve had,” Ike said. “To hell with the planners. Sure, go on, Brad, and I’ll give you everything we’ve got to hold that bridgehead.”
⁴¹
Bradley immediately began plotting a full-blooded right hook.

R
OONEY HAD MORE THAN A
ringside seat to watch Bradley’s right hook take shape; he was inside the ropes—and he stayed there for more than a week. With all the planes and trucks heading from the bridgehead back to Paris, Rooney was almost guaranteed that his multiple daily dispatches would get through. The Ninth Armored Division’s PRO, Charles Gillett, was savvy enough to recognize a PR bonanza; Gillett helped Rooney every way he could. On day one, Gillett arranged for Rooney and Cowan to get across the bridge, even though the Germans were still taking potshots from the hillside on the opposite bank. Rooney remembered crouching and running across the span, being careful that his boots didn’t slip into the six-inch gaps between slats.

Every hour seemed to bring a different enemy response; the artillery fire never abated, but it came from different spots amid the hills along the eastern edge of the river. At several points, the Luftwaffe attacked the bridge, sometimes launching dive-bombs, sometimes strafing, hoping the weakened structure would collapse.

Anticipating that the bridge would eventually be rendered useless, American engineers performed another miracle by constructing a long pontoon bridge two hundred yards upstream. Rooney jogged across the new span twice, each time ducking as German artillery raked the Rhine. “[The shells] fell like huge raindrops into still water,” he wrote, “exploding, for reasons I don’t understand, as they struck the water.”
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For days on end Rooney remained at Remagen, hustling to stay on top of the story as other correspondents began to arrive. The world was engrossed by the specter of the bridge that refused to die—but the story was constantly plagued by misinformation. Reporters who weren’t there were writing that the original bridge had been completely rebuilt, or that the railway span had been closed down in favor of the new pontoon bridge.

Rooney’s coverage in the
Stars and Stripes
turned out to be one of the few consistently accurate accounts of what was going on at the bridgehead. Every day the span got creakier—but every day, thousands of troops and hundreds of vehicles would make it across.

Finally, on day ten of the drama, St. Patrick’s Day, 1945, the inevitable happened: The bridge collapsed. Rooney was interviewing GIs on the western side of the Rhine when there was a “great grinding roar” as the middle part of the span gave way. Rooney raced to the river’s edge, cursing himself for not having brought his camera. Then he spotted an engineer with a camera strapped around his neck.

Rooney introduced himself to the man, who turned out to be Marcus Hoffman from San Francisco. Had Hoffman taken before-and-after pictures of the now-downed bridge? He had, he told Rooney. If Hoffman would permit Rooney to send the roll of pictures to Paris, Rooney promised to get him free glossies—plus arrange a nice photo credit in the
Stars and Stripes
. Hoffman agreed but only reluctantly, since that particular roll also contained personal shots of guys in his unit.

The
Stars and Stripes
editors back in Paris couldn’t believe their good fortune. Andy’s copy the next day was featured along with Hoffman’s wonderful photo of the bridge half-submerged in the Rhine. S
HE’S
U
P
, the caption read on the upper left; S
HE’S
D
OWN
, it read on the upper right.

Alas, by the time the glossies got back to Remagen, Hoffman’s unit had moved on—and Rooney couldn’t track him down. For decades, a guilt-ridden Rooney kept the Remagen pictures in a file drawer, swearing one day he’d get them back to Hoffman. That day came in 1995, when Rooney recounted the story in the original edition of
My War
. One thing led to another, and soon Hoffman, still alive and still living in San Francisco, had tracked Rooney down—and Rooney air-expressed the pictures to him. After fifty years, Rooney again could sleep with a clear conscience, he joked in the next edition of his book.
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T
HREE WEEKS AFTER THE BRIDGE
collapsed, at about nine o’clock on the evening of April 11, Rooney was typing up some notes in the dining room of a dilapidated hotel in Weimar that the First Army was using as a press camp. There was no one else around when his pals Hal Boyle of AP and Jack Thompson of the
Chicago Tribune
suddenly burst in.

“Here were two experienced newsmen who had seen everything in a
lifetime of reporting and they were in an uncharacteristic state of high excitement,” Rooney remembered.
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The usual MO for reporters with a big scoop was to keep their mouths shut and quietly type their stories. But Boyle and Thompson were so overwhelmed by what they had seen that they had to share it with a friend. Two days earlier, Boyle had been among the first reporters on the scene when U.S. troops liberated a ghastly Nazi camp at an insane asylum near Limburg. It was a “murder factory,” Boyle had written, a place where sadistic guards tortured slave laborers and where as many as twenty thousand Jews, political prisoners, and Gypsies had been executed.
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But Limburg paled in comparison to what Boyle and Thompson had seen outside Weimar at a camp called Buchenwald. That morning Boyle and Thompson had driven south of the First Army lines and met up with the Third Army’s Sixth Armored Division. Some tankmen told them a harrowing story about a death camp they’d unearthed that morning, one littered with thousands of skeletons. They drove over to Buchenwald to investigate.

As Thompson and Boyle typed their stories, they would hand Rooney each completed page.

They described the bodies, piled like cordwood, in open graves. They told me of having seen the house in which Ilse Koch, the camp commander and so-called Bitch of Buchenwald, lived. They described the lampshades there that they had been told were made of human skin.
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Boyle and Thompson told Rooney more than enough information for Andy to compile his own story. But Rooney decided that in good conscience he could not file a piece without seeing the nightmarish scene for himself. The next day Boyle’s account of Buchenwald’s liberation ran on page one of the
Stars and Stripes
and hundreds of other papers back home.

“That’s the way it should have been,” Rooney recalled. “Hal was one of the best.”
⁴⁷

Rooney, remembering the Allies’ Great War propaganda about phony
“atrocities” committed by the Central Powers, wasn’t the only correspondent that spring skeptical about reports of Hitler’s genocidal camps. When he got to Buchenwald, and two weeks later to the horrific slave labor camp at Thekla, Rooney felt ashamed that he’d ever doubted the reports—and even more ashamed that he’d ever flirted with pacifism. His left-wing Colgate professor had been dead wrong: Any peace was
not
better than any war.

George Patton, Rooney’s bête noire, in one of his finer moments of the war, ordered his men to round up Buchenwald’s villagers and force them to see what they’d pretended not to see for all those years.

Rooney walked through Thekla with Frederick Graham, a reporter with the
New York Times
. Graham and Rooney were struck by the contrast between the prim and gardened cottages in the village, just a few hundred yards away, and the lurid scene inside the camp’s barbed wire. When Thekla’s SS guards had realized that U.S. troops were rapidly descending on the camp, they herded three hundred prisoners into a hut, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. Somehow, a few dozen men, literally on fire, “clawed their way out of the burning barracks,” as Rooney put it.

The burned and blackened bodies of about sixty men were hanging in contorted positions from the needle-point barbs of the wire. When one part of the body burns, the skin and muscles contract and the body, in death, lies warped like a board left out in wet ground in the sun. A few—the lucky few—had bullet holes through them.
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Rooney and Graham walked into the village. “The people of Thekla said that to us endlessly. ‘We didn’t know.’ They said it until we felt like kicking them down the street and into the compound themselves. If they didn’t know, which seemed impossible, they should have known.”
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