Assignment to Hell (29 page)

Liebling returned to London and his flat at the Flemings in the late fall of ’43. By January, he began asking the Ninth Air Force to let him fly along on a bombing operation over his cherished France. “I wanted to fly one mission and write a story about it, and pretend to myself that I was a big man,” Liebling wrote later.

It took weeks, but his request was finally granted in early March of ’44. Liebling was told to show up at an Essex airdrome in the northeast of London;
he was assigned to a B-26 Marauder crew whose pilot, Liebling noted with great élan, was a left-leaning bookworm who harbored ambitions to become a writer. The captain had nicknamed his ship
Typographical Error
.

The
New Yorker
correspondent arrived at Essex on a Tuesday in the midst of dreadful weather. For three days running, the squadron’s raids were scrubbed. Liebling hung out in the officers’ hut, swapping stories about politics and literature with the erudite young captain; he became fond of the crew guys who poked fun at the pair’s high-minded discourse.

By Friday, though, Liebling was antsy about getting back to Flemings; he had a date with a WAAC officer he’d met at the hotel pub. Urged on by his new pals, he decided to take the noon train back to Piccadilly.

As Liebling packed his duffel, the men were lounging in their bunks. Before leaving the hut, he made a point to shake hands with each. He was struck by the strong grip of the wannabe writer.

A few nights later Liebling was at Flemings having a drink with a Ninth Air Force intelligence officer named Kobold. The lieutenant waited a bit to break the bad news: When the weather cleared the day after Liebling left Essex, the squadron’s mission was green-lighted.
Typographical Error
was shot down a few miles into France; the entire crew was lost.

“They had all their bombs aboard,” Kobold explained. Squadron mates spotted “one big hell of a cloud of smoke, and then parts of the plane falling out if it. No chutes—no time for them. The other boys brought back wonderful pictures of it. Poor bastards,” he said.

Kobold was an “oldish lieutenant,” Liebling noted, well overdue for promotion and not happy about it. He was “talking loudly, a little truculently, because he wanted a couple of B-17 pilots at the other end of the bar to hear him,” Liebling wrote. “The heavy-bomber people sometimes talked as if they had all the losses; the lieutenant wanted to impress this pair. He never flew on operations himself.”
⁴¹

Liebling felt guilty about having missed the fatal mission, but even that, he thought, was an “ignoble” consideration. At Kobold’s suggestion, he returned to Essex and eventually went up with another B-26 crew. The plane was dubbed
Roll Me Over
after the popular British jingle that was a staple of pub and cinema sing-alongs.

Curiously, Liebling chose not to write about his air adventure until war’s end. Even more curiously, he decided to create a fictional personality to assume the role of war correspondent in the story. Liebling’s account “was all true,” he wrote in his introduction, “except that I made the chief character a more obvious fraud than I am, by lending him some of the characteristics of correspondents I disliked.”
⁴²

It took some doing in late ’45 to persuade
New Yorker
editor Harold Ross to add an element of fiction to straight journalism, but eventually Ross went along. They didn’t know it, but the two of them were pioneering what would come to be known as New Journalism.

Liebling playfully called his creation Allardyce Meecham and gave him his own misshapen torso, skinny legs, literary pretensions, and weakness for food and drink. Meecham was supposed to be a New York drama critic who’d grown weary of newspaper colleagues bragging about their war exploits. Liebling’s artifice was so devoted to left-wing causes that, back in the ’30s, he’d gone so far as to attend “several cocktail parties” to raise money for Spanish freedom fighters. So Liebling had Meecham pull some strings, get fitted for a uniform at Abercrombie & Fitch, and, looking very fierce, loll around the lobby of the Algonquin for a few days, hoping to be spotted by well-connected friends before heading off to London.

Creating a blowhard like Meecham allowed Liebling to poke fun at himself and those correspondents who were prone to puffing themselves up, embellishing the dangers they found themselves in. Flying on a combat mission, Liebling wrote to Joe Mitchell that spring, “confirmed my opinion that the blood-and-guts correspondents are a lot of shit and just make that stuff up: there’s nothing much to it unless you get hit and maybe nothing much to it if you do get hit either.”
⁴³
Meecham was also a way for Liebling to relate his own physical and emotional inadequacies without coming across as maudlin. He hinted to Mitchell that he’d gone on the B-26 raid out of respect for the airmen—many of them now dead—whom he’d befriended in North Africa.

No matter the motivation, Liebling’s account of the B-26 raid on the enemy airfield at Montdidier in northern France remains among his most compelling wartime pieces. The account of the attack begins before sunrise,
with Meecham nervously stirring in his cot, then fumbling around the blacked-out base, hunting for the mess tent.
⁴⁴

Meecham sat at the breakfast table with his
Roll Me Over
crewmates. He felt guilty about being repelled by the oily eggs and bacon until one of his mates commented, “This is pisspoor chow.” After breakfast, the crew hoisted Meecham onto a weapons carrier that took them en masse to the preflight briefing.

The briefing itself, Meecham thought, was reminiscent of a compulsory college course. It was filled with airmen not paying much attention; most of the crews had been on multiple missions to Montdidier and knew its geography and defenses by heart. The final G-2 briefer reminded the men that the enemy had the approach to the Mondidier airdrome armed with six medium-sized antiaircraft guns.

While being transported to the cinder path that encircled the planes, the men in the troop carrier began singing a profane song whose first line was “How’s your love life?” Liebling’s alter ego put on a bulky flying suit over his AAF-issue pants and sweater, then watched airmen go through their rituals to ward off the cold, some rubbing hands, some stomping feet.

The chubby Meecham was relieved that it wasn’t difficult to grab the metal stirrups on either side of the hatch to hoist himself into the plane. He was also thankful that he didn’t have to crawl once inside the fuselage. “There’s a hell of a lot of room in these [B-26] things. More than in a Fort,” the bombardier said in motioning for his guest to sit near a pile of parachutes in a compartment behind the nose.

Once the propellers began revving they made such a racket that conversation became impossible, although a shouted monosyllable could be understood. Meecham had been told that the squadron had been armed with thirty hundred-pound fragmentary bombs. “We drop them on the runway and dispersal area to take care of planes and personnel,” the bombardier calmly explained to Meecham through earphones. “Sometimes we carry a couple of big ones, but today frags.” A fragmentary bomb packed less wallop than a five hundred pounder but spewed more shrapnel over a smaller area. In the late winter and spring of ’44, tens of thousands of frags were dropped on enemy installations all over northern France.

After they got airborne, the pilot and copilot waved for Meecham to come forward to the cockpit, “and he did, scrunching his torso and hams down behind the [pilot’s] seat, while his legs extended over behind the [copilot’s].”
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Above the cloud cover, Liebling wrote in one of his ineffable similes, “the sky was as blue as the Bay of Naples on the wall of a spaghetti joint, and it was full of B-26s.” The squadron was flying in its favorite configuration, “loose fives,” a series of five-plane subgroups.

Meecham tried to count all the bombers within view. He got to sixty-seven before he realized it was hopeless; more kept appearing. The pilot plucked Meecham’s elbow, signaling for him to look down. They were heading over the Channel, “which looked not blue but had, at its English edge, the color of a puddle of rain water glistening in sunlight. Then it became lead color.”

All the attention was beginning to embarrass Meecham/Liebling: “the crew was treating him like a grandfather on a Sunday auto ride.”

Montdidier was a village of four thousand in the Somme region north of Paris, the sacred ground that had proved so difficult for the
Boches
to conquer in the Great War. Now it had been under the heel of German oppression for four years.

The bombardier tapped Meecham on the shoulder and pointed out tiny dots on the horizon. Fearing they were enemy fighters, Meecham braced himself for onrushing Focke-Wulfs, but soon recognized that they were puffs of flak. He heard a new sound over the engines. It was a “sharp ‘Pak!’ like a champagne cork popping and then ‘S-s-s’ like half the wine in the bottle fizzing out. The ‘Pak!’ was the shell bursting, and the fizz was the flight of the fragments.” At one point Meecham was startled when the pilot threw a hand up in front of his face, but no shrapnel penetrated the cockpit.

Soon the copilot was pointing forward: the B-26s up ahead were already dropping their frags. The bombs looked to Meecham “like chewing-gum nuggets out of a vending machine.” Within seconds
Roll Me Over
’s frags were away, too—and suddenly the flak stopped. The bombardier began shouting. Through gestures Meecham asked if he’d landed his bombs
on target. The bombardier answered by chortling and joining his thumb and forefinger:
Roll Me Over
had hit the bull’s-eye.

Meecham was heartened when he glanced at the airspeed indicator in the cockpit and saw 330 miles per hour. There were no incidents on the way home, but it seemed to take five times longer than the trip out.

Back at Essex, as they climbed out of the plane, the pilot and copilot started muttering curses about their squadron mates’ apparent inability to maintain a steady course. “What a ratfuck!” the pilot spat. When asked, the pilot explained that “a ratfuck was ‘a rat race, but all bollixed up.’”

Meecham “felt unreasonably exalted. After all, he told himself reprovingly, he had only escaped from a danger that he had got himself into. And not a great danger, either, he thought. I didn’t see one plane shot down. Still, he couldn’t help thinking, pretty good for a dramatic critic.”

Liebling threw everything—a novelist’s eye, startling insights into wartime London, and his deep self-loathing—into the story’s close. Meecham was still feeling euphoric when he got to the Chelmsford train station that afternoon. The train to London was packed, but when a group of American enlisted men spotted Meecham’s war correspondent badge, they invited him to join them in their compartment.

“They were all Fortress men,” Liebling wrote, “who, it appeared, had been on dozens of twelve-hour missions over Germany, from almost all of which they had returned with their ships aflame and three engines out. Meecham was ashamed to tell them he had been only as far as France that morning. By the time the train arrived at Liverpool Street station his exuberance was waning.”

Feeling hungry, Meecham/Liebling stops in a fish restaurant, sits at the bar, and orders a dozen oysters. He wants to order a second dozen, but the barkeep tells him the Ministry of Food prevents them from selling more than eight bob worth to a customer.

“Meecham felt a certain resentment; he had half a mind to tell the man where he had been that morning. That would show him. But perhaps the man had a son in the R.A.F., so he would not be impressed. Or three R.A.F. sons, all killed in the Battle of Britain, so he would be pained by any reference to flying.” Meecham/Liebling left the restaurant to hail a taxi. “He
hoped his girl was in town and had no date for the evening. After all, this ought to impress her.”
⁴⁶

A
MERICAN
B-26
S HIT THE
M
ONTDIDIER
airfield several times in the windup to D-Day. So did British Lancashire and Halifax bombers. The Montdidier missions, in fact, were all part of Eisenhower’s strategic bombing campaign, the Supreme Allied Commander’s controversial insistence on making enemy fortifications in northern France and the Low Countries a bigger early-’44 bombing priority than bases and factories inside Germany. As Chester Wilmot revealed in
The Struggle for Europe
, Ike’s demand that targets in Normandy and contiguous areas be repeatedly bombed set off one of the war’s biggest internal squabbles.
⁴⁷

Siding with Ike was Omar Bradley, the commander of D-Day’s U.S. seaborne infantry, and two of Churchill’s leading air war advisors: Air Chief Marshals Sir Arthur Tedder and Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. On the other side was practically everyone else in the Anglo-American strategic bombing brain trust: Harris, Arnold, Spaatz, Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay—all of whom believed that the Allies were on the cusp of winning the war because Germany was being bled dry. Some even believed that bombing German oil fields would render superfluous a cross-Channel invasion—an absurd notion that nevertheless was given widespread currency.

Ike prevailed, but only after Churchill, Roosevelt, and Marshall were forced to intervene. In late winter, the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed to place the air forces under Ike’s operational “direction,” but not quite control. The heavies were soon hitting rail marshaling yards and bases like Montdidier with brutal regularity.

As the years went by, nothing made Eisenhower prouder than discussing his role in softening enemy defenses in and around Normandy in the months leading up to the invasion. For a twentieth-anniversary documentary on D-Day, Ike told CBS News that he believed the strategic bombing campaign had made a huge difference in enabling the Allied invaders to gain a toehold in France. His interviewer was a newsman who’d covered the campaign up close, one Walter Cronkite.