Assignment to Hell (86 page)

Rooney, Cronkite, and Bigart never tired of extolling the heroism of air gunners. Rooney and his
Stars and Stripes
colleague Bud Hutton wrote a book about them.

Bigart carrying his bedroll and typewriter during the dispiriting Italian campaign of ’44. For writing the truth, Homer and other reporters incurred the wrath of Allied commanders Sir Harold Alexander and General Mark Clark.

A V-1 “doodlebug” like this one nearly killed Cronkite on Sunday, June 18, 1944. Instead of striking Cronkite’s apartment building, it landed next door at the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks near Buckingham Palace. More than a hundred Sunday worshippers were killed—the worst V-1 attack of the war.

Rooney was always proud of this photograph that he took of intrepid St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which, despite merciless bombing and rocket attacks, was never destroyed.

From a distance, Cronkite, Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney all saw V-2 rockets like this one being fired from their launching sites in the Reich. Unlike the V-1, which could be heard as it approached, the V-2 struck with no warning and could set an entire city block ablaze.

A D-Day predawn briefing at Thurleigh, Rooney’s “home” air base and the site of the 306th Bomb Group squad. Bigart and Cronkite covered the action at the 303rd base a few miles away at Molesworth. When they learned the invasion was finally on, men hooted and hollered.

Rooney with his great
Stars and Stripes
buddy and D-Day partner Charlie Kiley. The two reporters were billeted with the Fourth Division in Bristol Harbour, landing at Utah Beach four days after D-Day.

German soldiers are led out of a cavern in Cherbourg two and a half weeks after D-Day. The Nazi genius for underground architecture was uncovered during the Cotentin operation. Liebling, a connoisseur, helped fellow correspondents “liberate” particularly choice bottles of champagne and cognac.

A month after D-Day, American infantrymen slug their way through what Joe Liebling and historians called the
bocage
. GIs, Rooney remembered, called them “god-damn hedgerows.” The thick underbrush stymied the Allied advance for weeks.

Rooney took this shot of Major Tom Howie’s corpse lying in
state atop the debris in St.-Lô, France, on July 18, 1944, the day Howie was killed helping to liberate the Norman village. The three-week siege at St.-Lô caused some forty thousand American casualties; it was covered from its inception by Rooney, Liebling, and Boyle.

Hal Boyle of the Associated Press (
left
), Ernie Pyle of Scripps Howard, Gordon Gammack of the
Des Moines Register
, and Don Whitehead (
right
) of the Associated Press pictured at Vouilly, Normandy, on the site of the First Army’s press camp in July and August 1944. Rooney called Pyle the camp’s “den mother.” It rained continually that summer.

Just days after the liberation of Paris in September 1944, Hal Boyle (
left
) and Ernie Pyle exchanged notes on the veranda of the Hôtel Le Grand with the Opera House looming in the background. Boyle and Pyle were the most popular columnists in the European Theater. Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944; Boyle in 1945. Seven months after this photo was taken, Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper.