Assignment to Hell (68 page)

T
HERE WAS NO TURKEY AVAILABLE
for Walter Cronkite on Wednesday, December 27, although he’d more than made up for it two days earlier. On December 27, Cronkite had tried to reach besieged Bastogne along the north-south Arlon Road with three other correspondents: Cornelius Ryan of the
London Daily Telegraph
, Norman Clark of the
London News
, and Joseph Driscoll of the
New York Herald Tribune
. They kept on running into artillery and mortar fire; even after they sought refuge in the command post of Lieutenant Colonel Creighton W. Abrams, Jr.’s 37th Tank Battalion, shells from German 88s burst all around.

Abrams’ CP was in a farmhouse just south of Bastogne that had been decimated by an earlier round of artillery. But the kitchen fireplace still functioned and there was enough of a wall for Abrams to tack up a map of known enemy troop locations in the area. The entire world had been transfixed by the gallant stand of the “battered bastards of Bastogne,” Cronkite’s mates from Market Garden, the 101st Airborne.

Even at Abrams’ CP, none of them—including the lieutenant colonel and his staff—could feel safe: U.S.-German “lines” existed only in theory. Tiger tanks and hit squads were lurking everywhere.

So when an American jeep pulled up next to the farmhouse, there was no guarantee it was friendly. The vehicle, much to their relief, turned out to be carrying Cronkite’s old friend, Major General Maxwell Taylor of the 101st. Taylor two days earlier had been in Washington, D.C., at the request of General Marshall, who wanted Taylor’s input on future airborne missions.

The major general was still sporting the dress uniform he was wearing when word reached him that his men had been surrounded at Bastogne. On December 22, Taylor’s protégé and temporary successor, General Anthony McAuliffe, had issued his defiant response—“Nuts!”—when the German commander demanded the 101st’s surrender.

Taylor took a series of cargo planes from Washington to Paris, then on the morning of December 27 hopped a smaller craft to Luxembourg. There he talked with Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Bedell Smith, intent on getting
permission to take a glider or parachute into Bastogne. Smith relayed good news: The Fourth Armored Division was finally poised to break through. If Taylor could get to the front, he could ride into Bastogne with the Fourth’s 37th Tank Battalion.

When Taylor finally arrived at Abrams’ CP, he sorely needed a briefing. Out of earshot of the reporters, Abrams gave him a quick rundown, then Taylor came back outside and climbed into his jeep.

In
A Reporter’s Life
, Cronkite has Taylor addressing him individually and inviting him to go along on the push into Bastogne. Other accounts, including one referenced in John Eisenhower’s
The Bitter Battle
, Ike’s son’s history of the Bulge, have Taylor inviting all the reporters present to follow him north.

“The story would have been great—first correspondent into Bastogne,” Cronkite recalled.

On the other hand, how would I get the story out? There was no communication link from Bastogne, and in the days before I had my story on the wires, those correspondents monitoring military communication on the outside would be reporting the drama.

That’s the excuse I gave to Taylor, and tried to explain to myself. But I knew the truth—and I suspect he did: Taylor’s drive to Bastogne could well have been a suicide mission. A lot of glory, perhaps, for a career officer; simply a sad footnote for a war correspondent.
²⁶

Cronkite made the right call in turning down Taylor: A reporter unable to relay his story wasn’t worth much to a wire service. Forty-eight hours earlier, however, Cronkite had been with a super-macho “correspondent” who would not have hesitated to take up Taylor’s offer, especially since the writer didn’t have to worry much about deadlines—or about the facts, for that matter.

Ernest Hemingway and his wife and fellow
Collier’s
correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, plus Cronkite’s UP colleague Collie Small, were among
the revelers at a Christmas gathering at the Cravat. Of all the depressing holidays he had spent in Europe, Cronkite told Betsy, Christmas ’44 was “the worst ever, I think.” The surroundings weren’t unpleasant, he admitted, calling Luxembourg “as lovely as a postcard.” But “the fact I was alone again without you made it almost unbearable.”

They had a big turkey dinner featuring copious amounts of liquor. “We had some eggnog and everyone but old hardworking Cronkite who had a fistful of mediocre stories to do, got pretty well pied,” Walter told Betsy. “I had a few drinks and filed my last story about midnight after which I was so tired I just collapsed into bed.”
²⁷

Cronkite wrote the letter to Betsy on December 27, just hours after declining Taylor’s offer to go into Bastogne, so he might have been especially down on himself. Still, he couldn’t shake the blues that had plagued him for months. He was working “like a dog,” he told Betsy, but “not doing particularly well at it.” Since UP’s Small and Bob Richards were in the Belgium-Luxembourg sector, Cronkite’s own presence had been rendered “unnecessary,” he complained. Plus, he told Betsy, the other fellows—his acolytes—were better at writing combat stories than he was. Both Small and Richards can right [
sic
] my sort of stuff better than I can—and that ain’t good for the old morale.”
²⁸

A
NDY
R
OONEY’S RESPITE IN
N
EW
York was plenty good for
his
morale. He not only was reunited with Margie and old friends, but also got the tip on the rumored German attempt to bomb New York. Plus the
Stars and Stripes
gave him the chance to craft several Once Over Lightly columns, the chatty feature that, for years, had been a staple of the paper’s sports coverage.

On January 3, Rooney wrote a column that paid homage to the prominent athletes who’d been killed in service to their country. “It’s a sad fact that the death in combat of great American sports figures who have been in the national spotlight has done a great deal towards making the public conscious of the great toll the war is taking.”
²⁹

Among the sports figures who had perished, Rooney wrote, were Marine Captain Charlie Paddock, the onetime fastest sprinter in the world;
Navy pilot and Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick of the University of Iowa; miler Lou Zamperini (who later turned out to be alive, having survived a POW camp); some forty minor-league baseball players; and no fewer than 131 professional boxers.
³⁰

T
HE NUMBER OF PRIZEFIGHTERS WHO
had made the ultimate sacrifice was surely not lost on boxing aficionado Joe Liebling. After Paris was liberated in late August of ’44, Liebling spent several weeks in the French capital, interviewing members of the Maquis and compiling notes for what became
La République du Silence
, his bilingual compendium of stories from and about France’s courageous underground press during the Occupation.

In the company of a photographer with the newly organized French War Crimes Commission, Liebling also traveled to central France, a region known as the Côte-d’Or, to research the massacre that had taken place on August 21, 1944, in the village of Comblanchien. Liebling talked to surviving villagers and pieced together a chilling story. A company of enemy soldiers from a troop train that had been sidetracked at Comblanchien joined with Germans from other detachments to form a spontaneous vigilante mob. They terrorized the town, torching homes and shops and butchering any local they encountered.

The soldiers were neither members of the Waffen SS nor trained by the Gestapo; they were just bitter and scared kids. “I think it was because they were so frightened,” one man who had witnessed the German genocide that night told Liebling. “It is unimaginable how frightened they were.”
³¹

It was also unimaginable to Liebling that his successor as the
New Yorker
’s ETO correspondent would be killed in the line of duty—but it happened. In the fall of ’44, David Lardner, the son of sportswriter Ring Lardner, one of Liebling’s childhood heroes, took Liebling’s place as the magazine’s First Army correspondent. Extremely nearsighted, Lardner had been rejected for military duty, but was determined to get to the front as a reporter. It ran in the family: Lardner’s
older brother James had been killed covering the Spanish Civil War for the
New York Herald Tribune
; another older brother, John, covered World War II in North Africa and Europe for
Newsweek
.

Lardner had only been at the front for a matter of weeks when, on October 19, he and two other correspondents, one of whom was Richard Tregaskis of International News Service, author of
Guadalcanal Diary
, decided to see for themselves the devastation surrounding the German city of Aachen. Navigating through the rubble, the reporters asked their jeep driver to take a shortcut. Although American engineers had planted wooden stakes with brightly colored tape to mark mines, the jeep nevertheless ran over an explosive. The shrapnel killed Lardner but barely injured the others.

Liebling was racked with guilt, somehow convinced that, had he been in Aachen, he would have been able to warn David of danger. Lardner’s family elected to keep David’s remains interred at the Henri-Chapelle War Cemetery in Belgium.

Joe Liebling went back to the States before the Bulge hit. Among other things, he put the finishing touches on “Quest for Mollie” and wrote the first of his many Wayward Press columns for the
New Yorker
.

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN A
minor miracle that Hal Boyle avoided David Lardner’s fate, given the number of times he came within a hairsbreadth of German armor in the Ardennes. On December 28, the day after Bastogne was relieved, Boyle inspected Hitler’s high-water mark, the deepest point of German penetration into Belgium. It was just three miles short of the Meuse River, near the village of Celles.

“Here on the raw cold soil of Belgium … is spread some of the ghastliest carnage of the European war,” Boyle wrote. “Destroyed in four days of unceasing battle which kept the American armies from being chopped in half, the human and steel wreckage of the German panzer army lies in frozen ruin over miles of Belgium’s fields and woodland.”
³²

Some 1,200 German prisoners had been taken, but untold hundreds more had been killed or wounded, Boyle reported. He walked the battlefield
and counted sixty-three smoldering enemy tanks and 177 vehicles damaged or captured.

“It is a sight to sicken any pageant loving human who is taught only the glory of war and never the price of defeat. That price is spread everywhere on this wintry landscape of torn flesh and bomb and shell blasted guns,” he wrote.

Twenty-five months of covering combat hadn’t dulled Boyle’s poetic sensibilities. “A light snow lies on crisp fields and ice sheathed roads. It has collected in little ridges and around the blackened yellow bellies of burnt-out German tanks and wheels of silent breech-blown German guns. It goes unheeded on [the] spent chill faces of German soldiers stretched in death’s perpetual frost.”
³³

D
EATH’S PERPETUAL FROST SPREAD EVERYWHERE
in Belgium. On December 23, it hit correspondent Jack Frankish, Cronkite’s UP colleague and Boyle’s First Army counterpart. Two months earlier the wire service rivals had been photographed frolicking with other reporters on Kaiser Wilhelm’s bed in Spa. Now Boyle sat down to write a tribute to his friend.

Not many Americans were done in by the Luftwaffe late in the war but, sadly, Jack Frankish was. He and other American correspondents, including Liebling’s Manhattan buddy Harold Denny of the
New York Times
and George Hicks of the Blue Network, were temporarily holed up at a hotel in Chaudfontaine, Belgium.
³⁴
Frankish had come down with a fever that made him laryngitic; ailing, he’d skipped the chance to go to the front that day to coordinate UP’s coverage from the press setup at the hotel.

Without warning, four enemy dive-bombers attacked Chaudfontaine’s railway station. Frankish and the other reporters ran outside onto a gravel path to investigate. They got there in time to see the bombers make a second run. Frankish spied a plumeting bomb and tried to race back into the hotel. But it was too late: The bomb hit less than twenty feet away; the shrapnel struck Frankish in the back just short of the doorway. He was instantly killed—as were three GIs in the 113th Cavalry Group. Hicks and Denny suffered only superficial wounds, as did twenty other soldiers.

“A bespectacled reporter with a likable grin, [Frankish] was popular in the press corps,” Boyle wrote. “Frequently, after a day’s work was done, he would entertain his colleagues with dialect stories.”
³⁵

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Frankish had been a fraternity brother of Rod Dedeaux, a Trojan shortstop destined to become a legendary coach at USC and mentor to many future major leaguers. One of the two children that Jack Frankish left behind, a son named Brian, became a movie producer. Young Frankish ended up producing the baseball epic
Field of Dreams
. By sheer coincidence, Frankish hired Dedeaux to make the movie’s baseball scenes more authentic. When Dedeaux heard Frankish’s last name, he asked about the identity of Brian’s father. Brian related the story. Dedeaux smiled and said, “Your dad was one of my best friends.”
³⁶

B
ELGIUM STAYED A MESS LONG
after the immediate threat of the Bulge ebbed. Lines between friend and foe continued to be bollixed up.

In late January, Boyle told the story of First Sergeant Percy L. Imbody of Perkiomenville, Pennsylvania, the noncom with “the million dollar fist.” Imbody was in a frontline trench at five thirty a.m. when he heard an “American” voice shriek, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” A commotion was going in front of Imbody but in the darkness he couldn’t quite make out what it was.

When he moved up to investigate, he realized that a German soldier had grabbed a member of Imbody’s platoon and was using the GI as a human shield to bludgeon his way through the American lines. Before Imbody could sound the alarm, another Nazi soldier grabbed him.