Assignment to Hell (20 page)

“As a result,” Boyle wrote in early ’43, “reporters who used to have to hunt for a foxhole out of the wind to spread their blankets for a night’s sleep now are quartered in a small tent city which can accommodate up to 50 correspondents with cots, good Army food, a place to work and—at the moment—even a place to swim and sun themselves.”
²⁸

Liebling and Boyle both befriended the bearded Jack “The Bear” Thompson of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. Thompson told Boyle that the press camp had changed his own modus operandi so much it was “like hunting buffaloes in a place and coming back later and finding it in the middle of an oil boom.”
²⁹

The press camp made their lives easier—but it didn’t make gathering news any easier, Boyle told readers. Reporters spent much of their day “in open-air jeeps, riding sometimes 100 miles to reach a fresh battle sector. It is usually necessary to spend most of the day visiting various frontline units, interviewing soldiers on their experiences and learning at first hand the details and progress of the operation. In such positions correspondents are as exposed as the average soldier to battle injury and death. Then after collecting the news the correspondent must ride 100 miles back to the press headquarters, keeping a watchful eye out all the way for strafing enemy planes which like to pick off jeeps because they are easy targets. Before he can eat he often must sit down and write his news dispatch by wavering candlelight to make a deadline. After a cold dinner he is usually too tired then to do anything else but crawl into his bedroll.”
³⁰

His piece lauding the new operation was a testament to Boyle-ian detail, listing the name and hometown of practically every jeep driver, mess cook, and motor pool mechanic. “Upon the broad shoulders of stocky Acting Sergeant Frank Lazio, 27, of 18 Independence Ave., Freeport, Long Island, falls the heaviest grief of the whole setup—the task each morning of putting 30 to 45 correspondents and photographers, each with his own idea of what part of the battlefront he wants to cover, into fourteen hardworking little jeeps. ‘Sometimes I dream of heaven,’ says Frankie, a former women’s clothing designer in New York to whom everyone, correspondents, army officers and local Arabs, bring their troubles. ‘[Heaven] is a place with one thousand jeeps with self-filling gas tanks and self-repairing tires, and only five correspondents to put in them.’”
³¹

B
OYLE AND
L
IEBLING, TWO LITERATI
who enjoyed slugging alcohol while ruminating over great books, or boxing, or women, became fast friends.
Liebling referenced Boyle in several pieces, expressing admiration for his pal’s combat profiles and light writing touch. Boyle, for his part, loved Liebling’s wry sense of humor. The
New Yorker
writer was with Boyle one day when, just as a German artillery shell exploded “with a fearful bang,” someone offered Liebling a drink of water. “No, thanks,” Liebling rejoined, “but would you mind throwing a little in my face?”
³²

Boyle recounted Liebling’s quip in late April in the column he had begun calling Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook. Without consulting his AP superiors, Boyle started the column while still in Morocco in late ’42. The title was meant to evoke another one of Boyle’s poet heroes, Walt Whitman and his
Leaves of Grass
. Sometimes Boyle’s feature was a collection of amusing anecdotes about soldiers’ lives; at other times, it was a deadly serious look at the human cost of war. It proved enormously popular, not only with readers but with editors, too. One week in early ’43 Boyle failed to submit a column and his editors dashed off a wire asking why. Between his round-the-clock combat reportage and his column, Boyle was the most prolific correspondent in North Africa. Ernie Pyle faced deadline pressures with his near-daily column, but Pyle never had the kind of hour-to-hour coverage responsibilities that Boyle experienced.

The Irish shanachie was never afraid to engage in a little showmanship for the sake of a good story. Two weeks after Rommel’s breakthrough at Kasserine, Boyle hit on a column idea reminiscent of the peacetime Pyle: Hal would start hitchhiking in Tunisia and see how far he could get in twenty-four hours. His “thumb voyage” began in midafternoon when he was picked up by a weapons carrier tugging a thirty-seven-millimeter gun. It ended twenty-three hours and four hundred miles later when he was dropped off by a twenty-eight-year-old WAAC who was transporting a group of Army Air Force fliers in her jeep. Along the way he encountered artillerymen, medical officers, a black quartermaster sergeant who had a truck full of chewing gum, signal corpsmen, two British military policemen, a French civilian driving a fancy car, a C-47 pilot evacuating wounded GIs, and, finally, Sergeant Joan James of Brighton, Massachusetts, and her jeep full of flyboys.

“You start off in a jolting weapons carrier and four hundred miles later
a pert brunette WAAC drives you to your journey’s end in a jeep. What other country—even wide, bountiful America—has hitch-hiking like that?”
³³
The
Kansas City Star
ran the column with a cartoon showing a grinning Boyle waving to Sergeant James.

B
OYLE DIDN’T NEED TO HITCHHIKE
to see George Patton. Sizing up George Smith Patton, Jr., became something of a Rorschach test for Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) and ETO reporters. Andy Rooney saw Patton as a pathetic bully—an extension of the abusive officers he’d despised as an enlisted man. Rooney so disliked Patton that he was still hurling brickbats—and getting into a public pissing match with the general’s survivors—six decades later. Homer Bigart saw Patton at his worst in Sicily and concluded he was bloodthirsty and megalomaniacal. Joe Liebling was offended by the way Patton and his Third Army glory-hogged their way through France in the late summer of 1944. Walter Cronkite, on the other hand, had a more tolerant view: Cronkite saw Patton at his best, rescuing the besieged 101st Airborne at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in late ’44.

But of our five principals, only Hal Boyle covered Patton extensively
before
he became an American idol. In fact, Boyle’s early articles from North Africa helped forge the Patton mystique. Boyle saw a side of Patton that the others didn’t: the savior of the demoralized II Corps. As Boyle put it a year later, “[Patton] took a defeated but still fighting American force after the Kasserine debacle, shook it back into shape, gave it confidence, and led it to victory at Gafsa and El Guettar.”
³⁴

Indeed, as early as day four of the Moroccan operation, Boyle’s bosses were requesting a profile of the prickly invasion commander who supposedly tough-talked Vichy into a quick submission. When a Darlan sycophant wielding a white flag approached Patton about negotiating a surrender, Boyle quoted the general as saying, “I will discuss an armistice when the troops in front of my troops lay down their guns! Not before!”
³⁵

Boyle was on hand as first Moroccan and then Algerian potentates fêted Patton in their palaces, giving the general a chance to flaunt his impeccable
French and show off a chestful of medals. The AP reporter was close to the front lines on March 16 and 17 when Patton’s troops surged toward Gafsa. Boyle described Gafsa as an Allied “victory,” but in truth, the Axis forces, mainly Italian, fled before the attack was launched. “The Dagoes beat it” before he got there, a disgusted Patton told his diary.
³⁶

For Boyle, however, Patton’s most affecting moment in North Africa came a few days later at El Guettar. Hollywood’s depiction of El Guettar in the biopic exaggerated both Patton’s role and the skirmish’s importance in the North African campaign. In truth, it wasn’t all that pivotal and it was fought, from the U.S. perspective, strictly on the defensive. American forces held the high ground and were smart enough not to leave it. Still, Omar Bradley called El Guettar “The first solid, indisputable defeat we inflicted on the German army in the war.”
³⁷
American GIs drove from the field a battle-hardened Tenth Panzer Division that had decimated Polish, British, and French troops.

But the real heroes at El Guettar, Bradley recognized, were the men defending Keddab Ridge that early morning: the Brooklyn Bums, the boys in the Big Red One. “The Hun will soon learn to dislike that outfit,” Eisenhower gloated.
³⁸

Boyle was standing near Patton at El Guettar when the general got the news that his aide, young Captain Richard Jensen, had been killed. The artillery shell that struck Jensen came dangerously close to hitting Omar Bradley, too. Jensen was, Boyle explained to readers, Patton’s “personal aide and member of a California family closely allied to the Pattons for three generations.”
³⁹
Patton sobbed when told the news and continued breaking down for days afterward. It became one of Boyle’s most powerful memories of the war, a story he told numerous times to his wife, Frances, and daughter, Tracy.
⁴⁰

“C
ONFUSION IS NORMAL IN COMBAT”
went a hoary military saying. Joe Liebling became so taken with the adage—and with the resilient First Division infantrymen who lived it day after day—that he used it as the title of a collection of his pieces on North Africa.

Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 1943, Liebling and Boyle were riding in a jeep along
la piste forestière
, the dirt “foresters’ track” that connected Cap Serrat on Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast to villages two dozen miles inland. They were anxious to get back to the press camp before nightfall: Once the sun disappeared, their jeep would have to give way to two-and-a-half-ton supply trucks barreling down the blacked-out road. With tanks and troops clogging almost every inch, it would have been quicker to walk, Liebling concluded. There was plenty of time for Boyle to climb out of the jeep and buttonhole soldiers.

Boyle was chatting with passing GIs when his companion spotted a body lying by the side of the road. Liebling got out to inspect.

“A blanket covered his face, so I surmised that it had been shattered, but there was no blood on the ground, so I judged that he had been killed in the brush and carried down to the road to await transport,” Liebling observed. He asked a sergeant, a “hawk-nosed, red-necked man with a couple of front teeth missing,” about the corpse’s identity.

“That’s Mollie. Comrade Molotov. The Mayor of Broadway,” blurted the sergeant. “Didn’t you ever hear of him? Jeez, Mac, he once captured six hundred Eytealians by himself and brought them all back along with him. Sniper got him, I guess.”
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So began Joe Liebling’s tortured “Quest for Mollie,” the story that consumed him for the rest of his life. When Liebling learned that most of the sergeant’s improbable account was true—that Private Mollie had (more or less) single-handedly brought in hundreds of Italian prisoners and was indeed a slippery character from the shadows of Broadway, Liebling became obsessed with piecing together Mollie’s story. Boyle, too, wrote about Mollie, but the story never haunted him the way it did his friend.

By happenstance a few weeks later, on board a steamer heading back to the States, Liebling ran into some wounded men from Mollie’s company. No one seemed to know what his real name was, but everybody had a couple of Mollie stories.

A GI confined to a wheelchair remembered how irked Mollie had been to discover, upon arriving in North Africa, that he couldn’t telegraph his racetrack bets to his bookie. “‘Vot a schvindle!’ That was his favorite
saying—‘Vot a schvindle!’ He was always bitching about something. He used to go out scouting with [field] glasses, all alone, and find the enemy and tip Major [Michael] Kauffman off where they were,” the disabled man told Liebling.

Mollie packed a stash of cash and wasn’t shy about telling people it was illicit booty—that he’d gotten rich from some “racket.” He supposedly never shot craps for less than fifty bucks a roll. But for Liebling, the clincher came when the writer learned that Mollie swore he never saluted an officer ranked beneath brigadier general or screwed a woman below an actress.
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At least in fervid imagination, Mollie became Liebling’s kind of guy: a big-talking New York immigrant kid who, much like the writer’s Bowery-bred old man, knew how to play street con. In memoriam, Mollie became Liebling’s beau ideal: GI Joe by way of Damon Runyon.

A couple of pals on the troopship thought Mollie’s real name had been something like Carl Warren. Whether Mollie or Warren, Liebling confirmed through his company commander, now Lieutenant Colonel Michael S. Kauffman, that the private had, in fact, been instrumental in the capture of more than six hundred Italian troops.

At dawn on March 23, 1943, in the hills surrounding Sened Station, a remote Tunisian rail depot, Mollie and an Italian-speaking buddy, Private First Class De Marco, watched as skittish Italian infantrymen began surrendering in singles and pairs. It occurred to Mollie and De Marco that others might be similarly persuaded. Bearing a white flag, they crawled up to the enemy trenches. With De Marco serving as translator, they managed to coax 147 enemy infantrymen down the hill. Once Mollie directed artillery fire to pound the enemy position, the remaining Italians got the message. Soon some five hundred other
soldati
were scrambling down the hill, hands held aloft. The incredulous Kauffman put Mollie in for a Distinguished Service Cross, but Mollie’s record was too checkered. He had to settle for a Silver Star, which ended up being awarded posthumously.

Back in New York in the summer of ’43, Liebling played a hunch that Carl Warren was Karl C. Warner, a private listed in the
New York Times
as killed in action in Tunisia. Liebling found Warner’s sister, a Mrs. Ulidjak, living in a downscale tenement on East Eighty-eighth Street. “A thin, pale
woman with a long, bony face and straight blond hair pulled back into a bun came to the apartment door,” Liebling wrote.

Mrs. Ulidjak had heard a few weeks before of her brother’s demise. She asked if he had been killed fighting Japs and seemed disappointed when Liebling told her no, that her brother was slain fighting Germans and Italians. Warner, it turned out, had been a Mollie pretense: Their family name was Petuskia. They were Russian immigrants who’d settled in coal-country Pennsylvania before moving to the city. When told of Mollie’s heroics outside Sened Station, his sister, in the presence of neighbors of Italian descent, exclaimed: “Six hundred wops!”