Assignment to Hell (44 page)

Nevertheless, Meredith is a likable and understated Pyle. Mitchum, who earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, is believable as Lieutenant-turned-Captain Bill Walker. The movie ends with a reenactment of the death of Captain Waskow, Pyle’s most venerated column. Mitchum as Walker is killed and transported down an Italian mountain on the back of a mule. One by one, his men pay their respects, with Meredith-Pyle nearly distraught. But there’s another battle to be fought; the men are ordered to move out. As Meredith-Pyle joins the outfit’s march toward Rome, he narrates, “There’s nothing we can do, except pause and murmur, ‘Thanks, pal.’”

Ernie’s reporter buddies are in the movie for only a few seconds. Whitehead, Boyle, and what looks to be Chris Cunningham of United Press are in a scene back at press headquarters when Pyle learns he’s won the Pulitzer Prize. A big handpainted sign hangs over the headquarters door:
“Through These Portals
Pass Out
the Most Beautiful Correspondents in the World!”—a line that reflected Boyle’s sardonic touch.

The boys greet Pyle with the “I-am-not-worthy” bow (think the palm tree scene near the end of
Mister Roberts
) and needle Ernie about going uptown on them. “I regret to inform you, Mr. Pyle,” intones Whitehead in a Kentucky bourbon–honeyed baritone, “that you are no longer a noos-paper-man. You are now a dee-sting-wished journalist!” The lanky Whitehead and his Gable-like mustache steal the scene, but Boyle gets in a good line when Meredith-Pyle, feigning offense, asks why his colleagues opened the letter from the Pulitzer committee. “Well, it was marked ‘private,’ wasn’t it?” Boyle retorts, before smirking and sticking a cigar back in his mouth.

Tom Treanor of the
L.A. Times
didn’t make it, or at least his name didn’t appear in the credits, but Foisie, Bob Landry from
Life
, George Lait from INS, Clete Roberts from the Blue Network, and Robert Reuben from Reuters were all acknowledged.
⁴⁸

B
Y ALL ACCOUNTS, THE REFUGEES
from the ETO had a splendid time in Hollywood, hitting the hot spots. One night the gang autographed a menu from an L.A. restaurant and gave it to Pyle. Ernie kept that memento for the remainder of the war, proudly showing it to Boyle three months later in a press tent in Normandy. The whole California respite sounds surreal: a blur of parties for guys who’d been eating K rations in the mud of Italy for months, then trying to re-create the same deprivation on a movie lot.

Boyle put on fifteen pounds, two thirds of which he gained while binging in Hollywood saloons, he told readers. “Leaving the United States to return to the war zone is like talking about heaven,” Boyle wrote in a piece the
Star
published May 18. “Nearly everyone says he would like to go—but very few exceed the speed limit in trying to get there.”
⁴⁹

Still, Boyle had no choice: AP was flogging his return to the ETO. Its star columnist’s first eight pieces, the wire service vowed to subscribers, would compare life in preinvasion London to the America he just left.
Whenever and wherever the cross-Channel assault would take place, Boyle and his prolific typewriter would be there, AP assured customers.
⁵⁰

W
HILE
P
YLE
, B
OYLE, AND
W
HITEHEAD
were partying in Hollywood, the PROs in Major Jack Redding’s outfit were sweating over the details of invasion press relations. Redding and his deputy, Barney Oldfield, had concluded that their outfit, coupled with the First Army’s Publicity and Psychological Warfare unit, needed special invasion preparation, same as Allied troops. After scouting several locations, they settled on Clevedon in southwest England, across Bristol Channel from picturesque Cardiff, Wales.

There the young PRO-lieutenants destined to become so invaluable to reporters in French press camps—among them George Fuller, Bruce Fessenden, Sam Brightman, Jack Roach, and Roy Wilder, Jr.—were put through their paces, taught that their primary duty was to get stories and pictures back to London by whatever means necessary. Divided into teams of two, the PROs were equipped with special radio transmitters built into their jeeps, wire recorders, generators, and hand-keyed Morse code sets. They were also briefed on the schedule of Navy courier speedboats that would ferry messages to and from the massive communications complex on General Bradley’s flagship, the
Augusta
.
⁵¹
Soon dubbed Redding’s Rangers, the Clevedon men combined marching and calisthenics with elementary map reading and tent erection, plus learned to operate all the electronic equipment within their purview, much of which was new.
⁵²

B
OYLE’S TRIP ACROSS THE
A
TLANTIC
to Liverpool aboard a lightly armed freighter in a small convoy was uneventful: By May of ’44 the U-boat threat had been all but eliminated. In midocean, though, Boyle came down with a strange virus, he told Frances, and spent half the voyage in his bunk. “I don’t know what the devil was the matter with me…. All the time my stomach ached like hell. Maybe it was the change from a liquid (liquor) diet
to a solid food diet too suddenly.”
⁵³
Boyle’s saloon-scarred innards eventually improved, but the convoy ran into ugly weather as they neared England—and his stomach flip-flopped all over again.

In London, Boyle reunited with Whitehead, who’d beaten him there by a couple of days. Along with Whitehead’s friend Lieutenant Tom Siler, a onetime AP sportswriter from Chicago, they found a three-room bungalow in Chelsea for $65 a month. Its address, Whitehead never tired of bragging, was 1 Whitehead’s Grove. The trio hired a woman in the neighborhood to do their cleaning and ate shredded wheat when not scarfing down pub food.

Bob Brunelle, London’s AP bureau chief, kept Boyle “running ragged,” insisting that Hal line up his invasion accreditation and collect his field equipment and paraphernalia—all while churning out his column.

He may have been suffering the effects of excessive partying—but that didn’t stop Boyle from sampling London’s nightlife. Taxis were allowed three gallons of gas a day, only enough for about five hours’ worth of cruising, and few buses ran after ten thirty p.m., he wrote on May 23. Since it stayed light past eleven o’clock in late spring, “the wayfarer is always getting caught abroad at dusk with no way of getting back.”
⁵⁴
Getting a cab or onto the proper bus was next to impossible, Boyle wrote. “Few officers object to a moonlit stroll with a pretty girl through London’s darkened streets. It’s not the walk to her door they mind—it’s that long hike home alone in the blackout afterward, when you bump into what you take to be a lamppost and it objects with feminine stridency—‘Ere, don’t get fresh. Mind your step, man.’”
⁵⁵

Exactly one week before D-Day, May 30, 1944, Whitehead talked his buddy Boyle into going to a Soho restaurant to sample the house specialty: horse steak. It gave Boyle one last chance before the apocalypse to flash his humor.

“I thought I was hungry enough to eat a horse, but I wasn’t,” the son of a butcher told readers. “Before I could swallow it visions of all the horses I ever saw or heard of passed through my mind, and the piece of meat felt like a lump of rock as it went down. I could see Black Beauty, Man o’ War, Old Dan Patch, and Traveler. I could see Tom Mix’s Tony and the big, reproachful
eyes of Frances, the old mare who used to pull our grocery wagon around a quarter century ago in Kansas City. My ears rang with hoofbeats, and something inside me said nay. (No pun.)”

Boyle looked at Whitehead contentedly chewing and accused him of being a traitor to the equine traditions of his native Kentucky. “Lissen,” Don countered. “I used to lose quite a bit of money on these nags at the Derby. I’m just enjoying my revenge.”
⁵⁶

O
N
M
ONDAY
, M
AY
14, W
ALTER
Cronkite was having a late lunch at the Officers’ Club, which had become so popular it now went by the trendy name Willow Run. As he was being seated, he heard a ruckus and realized that Boyle and Whitehead and other AP guys were just leaving. Cronkite tried to get Boyle’s attention, but his fellow Kansas Citian was already out the door. But he did succeed in hailing Gladwin Hill and another original member of the Writing 69th, Paul Manning. Manning had just left CBS to become a “thrice-a-week” columnist for the McNaught Syndicate, Cronkite told his wife in a letter. The three commiserated over how difficult it was to get decent information out of the USAAF now that the bombing fleets were focused on invasion targets.

“Hill and I have been covering this air war so long we almost have ceased to be rivals—our problems are so similar,” Cronkite told Betsy. “[Hill] is luckier than I, though, since his desk sees fit to let him fly on The Day—a thing which the UP insists I shunt off to one of the ‘younger’ men.”
⁵⁷

By then, Cronkite, all of twenty-seven, had quite a staff of UP reporters working for him on the air beat: among them Collie Small, Doug Werner, Bob Richards and Ned Roberts. None of the “younger” guys ended up going wheels up in a bomber on “The Day.” Nor did Glad Hill, who was destined to send the first “flash” that infantrymen had indeed landed in France. Ironically, the only one who ended up with a bird’s-eye view of the whole shooting match—at least in theory—was Cronkite.

S
taff Sergeant Andrew Rooney had never been around a hostile ground fight until he wheeled his jeep onto the Cotentin Peninsula west of Utah Beach on D-Day plus four. Rooney’s previous brushes with Nazi bullets had come at twenty-five thousand feet in a B-17 and at twelve thousand feet in a B-26.
¹
Now, having landed on the beach and “turned right and up,” as he put it in a 2010 interview, he found himself constantly on his belly, diving for cover. Rooney learned in a hurry: After a couple of days on the Cotentin he could hear the rumble of big guns and distinguish American artillery from German.

The push north toward the port of Cherbourg was a bareknuckled brawl, Rooney soon discovered—an onslaught of air attacks, artillery exchanges, mortar barrages, and machine gun fire. More than a hundred thousand men—half of them doughboys from the Fourth, Ninth, and 79th
Infantry Divisions—were slugging it out on a slab of land smaller than Rhode Island. Field Marshal Rommel, knowing how essential Cherbourg was to the defense of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, demanded that its peninsula bristle with railway artillery, minefields, swollen streams, booby traps, camouflaged pillboxes, and subterranean forts. But most of Rommel’s heavy guns along the Cherbourg waterfront had been encased in concrete with their barrels pointed seaward; now that the Allies were attacking from the south and rear, the guns were rendered useless. Still, there were plenty of smaller batteries that garrison commander Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben and the remnants of his 709th Division could call upon to savage the Americans. Every German soldier, moreover, had orders from
der Führer
to fight to the death.

Upon shadowing American tanks to the
Stars and Stripes’
temporary setup in the village of Carentan, five miles south of Utah, Rooney’s first order of business was to clean the waterproofing off his jeep. It had taken him hours to lacquer its innards with thick grease; now it took him hours to de-lacquer it.
²

While Rooney was scrubbing his vehicle’s underbelly, enemy guns were pounding the tiny crossroads on the west bank of the Taute River. “Night and day German artillery poured shells in the thin strip of land we held,” Rooney wrote. By June 12, the
Stars and Stripes
was forced to move its quarters five miles northwest to Ste.-Mère-Église.

A lot of Norman hamlets in the spring and summer of ’44 would become hallowed: Ste.-Mère-Église—or St. Mare, as it was soon christened—was renowned for the church steeple from which wounded 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper John Steele hung from the cords of his chute for hours, playing dead. Steele was captured later that morning, but quickly managed to escape. His heroics became a permanent part of
The Longest Day
legend. Today, a uniformed mannequin, its parachute wrapped around the church steeple, pays homage to Steele.

The first decimated villages Rooney encountered as he scrambled to rejoin the Fourth Division infantrymen with whom he’d crossed the Channel were Valognes and Mountebourg, up the Cotentin from St. Mare.
The towns had been leveled by artillery fire from both sides and by American P-47 fighter-bombers that swarmed the peninsula, ready to pounce on any enemy target. Rooney was appalled by the wanton destruction, not comprehending that it was a harbinger of the entire campaign.
³