Assignment to Hell (50 page)

Casey laughed nervously, shook his head, and told Rooney to tell him all about it when he got back—if he got back.

“It was the mindless sort of thing you wouldn’t do if you considered the risk, but I was interested, curious, and somehow oblivious to danger,” Rooney remembered. “The thought of being hit never entered my mind.”
⁶⁶

Dodging mortar rounds, Rooney jogged down a road that took him past several small farms. He encountered a group of GI’s who had been left behind to secure the just-seized area. Most of the men were wearing the scarlet red patch of the 29th’s 116th Infantry Regiment, which had been fighting virtually nonstop for days.

On July 17, one of the 116th’s battalion commanders, Major Thomas D. Howie, a native South Carolinian who had been an instructor at the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, had led a predawn raid that knocked a hole in the German line at the base of Hill 122 and succeeded in rescuing an American unit that had gotten cut off from the rest of the division.
⁶⁷

Now, twenty-four hours later, Howie and the rest of the 29th’s staff officers were meeting with the big boss, Major General Charles Gerhardt. Gerhardt had a soft spot for Rooney, mainly because the gridiron buff had remembered that Gerhardt once quarterbacked West Point to a dramatic upset over Notre Dame.

Gerhardt could be a “tough old buzzard,” Rooney wrote; reporters loved him because he was sassy and contrarian. Liebling recalled that Gerhardt once ordered the divisional band to play “Roll Out the Barrel” as his men departed a solemn ceremony in a cemetery. When a chaplain protested, Gerhardt explained that after paying homage to the fallen by playing
funereal hymns, it was time to change the mood. Another time a reporter had asked why the Allies were so preoccupied with the capture of St.-Lô. “It’s a catchy name,” Gerhardt replied. “[St.-Lô] fitted well in headlines, and the newspaper took to using it every day. After that, it became a morale factor, so we had to capture it.”
⁶⁸

The morale-conscious Gerhardt was as fond of Major Howie as the men of the 116th. “After helping to relieve pressure on this [now-rescued] unit,” Boyle wrote, “[Howie] then boldly launched another attack toward the hill which dominated the northeast entrance to the city.” Howie drove his men hard, but he had a gentle heart; his guys loved him because he was never more than a step or two behind. Boyle, who’d been tailing the 116th on and off for a couple of weeks, called Howie a “tremendous soldier.”
⁶⁹

At sunup on July 18, Gerhardt asked Howie for another miracle: to take St.-Lô that day “if you have to expend the whole battalion,” Rooney recalled.
⁷⁰
The major’s last words to Gerhardt and the other officers at the 29th’s briefing were “See you in St.-Lô.”

It was Howie’s concern for the welfare of his troops that cost him his life, Boyle wrote after the war. “Before hitting the ditch during a sudden German mortar barrage, [Howie] paused to see that his men were safe—and death took him, standing.” Fragments from a shell that landed a few yards away pierced Howie’s neck and chest. He died on the spot. Word was immediately relayed to Gerhardt.

The general ordered Captain Thomas D. Neal of Richmond, Virginia, to take an ambulance and drive Howie’s body through the battered village. When Boyle first wrote about the episode, censors ironically allowed Boyle to mention Neal’s name but not Howie’s, pending notification of next of kin, or Gerhardt’s, for fear that the Germans would seek vengeance on the 29th Division.

Boyle recalled years later that “Tom’s body, still clad in full combat gear, was placed in an ambulance in the task force column.” The AP columnist followed the grimy cortège as it navigated pockmarked roads, “past stricken trees whose limbs hung down like broken arms, past meadows where no birds sang, but bullets did. Churning clouds of yellow enveloped the vehicles, sweat grimed the faces of firing soldiers.”

A sudden enemy artillery bombardment disrupted the column as it passed a cemetery. The ambulance was pressed into duty to transport wounded infantrymen. “Tom, lying on a stretcher, was transferred to a leading jeep,” Boyle remembered. “The column trundled on. It smashed through the last ring of German defenders and entered the fallen city, a sea of flaming ruins.”
⁷¹

By now, Rooney, too, had caught up with the rolling elegy. “When I finally got down into the center of St.-Lô,” Rooney recalled, “there was a knot of men by the side of the main church in town.” Given the smoke and debris, Rooney couldn’t tell, but it was the Église Notre-Dame, considered one of Normandy’s Gothic masterpieces.

“The whole side of it had been knocked out and the rubble was piled high where it had fallen,” Rooney wrote. “I hurried over and saw 10 or 15 soldiers lifting a flag-draped body laid out on a wooden door up the head of stone and mortar that been the side of the church. It would be accurate to say that St.-Lô had been leveled and the mound of stone and brick was the highest point in town. The soldiers were placing the body at the very top of the heap.”
⁷²

In death, Boyle wrote,” [Howie’s] comrades had won for the major the last goal of his life—he was the ‘first into St.-Lô.’”

Twenty-four hours later, as Rooney, Liebling, and Boyle accompanied the mop-up infantry squads into St.-Lô, Howie’s flag-draped body was still there, “lying in state on an altar of rubble,” Boyle wrote. “All the troops who went through St.-Lô that day, and there were many, heard of the young major and paid him tribute. Some doffed their helmets as they passed. Some knelt.”
⁷³

S
EVERAL MONTHS LATER
R
OONEY CAME
back to Paris from the front and was surprised to receive orders to report to Lieutenant Colonel Ensley M. Llewellyn’s office in the
Herald Tribune
building. Llewellyn was the officer in charge of the
Stars and Stripes
. After Sergeant Rooney saluted, he was confused when the boss handed him a small box and a certificate.

It was a Bronze Star, awarded per the official proclamation because Rooney had “penetrated to the heart of St.-Lô under small arms and open range artillery fire and gathered, without regard to his own safety, first hand descriptive materials for a complete and accurate story.”

Rooney didn’t know quite what to do. “I was simultaneously pleased and embarrassed. I knew that there were a lot of heroes in the war, and I knew I wasn’t one of them.” He thanked the colonel and shook his hand “as if he’d given me a diploma,” Rooney remembered.
⁷⁴

Andy never mentioned it to any of his colleagues. Nor did Llewellyn.

In 1949, Boyle visited St.-Lô and its rebuilt place of worship and admired the monument the French had erected to commemorate Tom Howie’s sacrifice. “The French people still deck the monument with flowers, and remember him in prayers,” Boyle wrote.
⁷⁵

L
IEBLING HURRIED BACK TO
V
OUILLY
on the evening of July 18, eager to share the momentous news with Mme. Hamel and beat Agence Française correspondent André Rabache to the better calvados.

When Liebling arrived, Madame was sitting in her kitchen, entertaining several neighboring farmers. “‘Madame,’ I said proudly, for I wanted her to think well of the American Army, ‘I come from St.-Lô. The city is ours! Now we can advance!’

“‘I felicitate you, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘I am happy to hear it.’”

One of the neighbors also congratulated Liebling, mistakenly referring to him as
commandant
instead of
correspondant
(the French, for whatever reason, had trouble picturing journalists embedded with the military). But then the neighbor anxiously inquired about what would happen to the pigs.

“The pigs?” Liebling asked. He was still thinking about Cota, wrapping his wound while directing traffic.

“‘Yes
, mon Commandant
, the young pigs who depend for their nourishment on the leftovers of the mess,’” the neighbor said.

Liebling, mystified, could only respond that perhaps the enemy would dig in south of St.-Lô—and that the press camp would stay rooted in Vouilly.

Mme. Hamel, turning a “disdainful eye” in her friend’s direction, came to the rescue by volunteering that the pigs were already “well launched” and would do fine without the leftover haute cuisine. To celebrate St.-Lô’s liberation, she poured calvados all around.
⁷⁶

The battle for St.-Lô had cost some forty thousand American casualties.

T
he culinary delights being served nightly at Mme. Hamel’s press camp achieved such renown that chatter about them reached Omar Bradley’s rolling command post. Bradley’s mobile CP full of maps and troop disposition charts was, at that moment, stationed not far from Vouilly. A four-foot-high mahogany railing would soon cleave Bradley’s expanded trailer, separating its lower half from its slightly elevated upper. The general’s acolytes dubbed the wooden partition the Communion Rail.
¹

Since Bradley radiated the bearing of a kindhearted—if chronically demanding—vicar, the nickname fit. A decade after the war, Liebling described Bradley as “tall, bespectacled, and Missouri-speaking” and noted that the general often seemed to project “the pleased look of a Sunday-school superintendent announcing that the cake sale had brought in eleven dollars and fifty cents more than anticipated.”
²
Bradley was so great a soldier, Liebling maintained, that “he never felt compelled to bark to prove it.”
³

The great soldier-vicar spent much of Thursday, July 20, poring over maps and contingency plans with his commander-bishop: Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower. Ike and Bradley devoted hours that day to
reviewing Bradley’s latest strategy to break out of hedgerow country, then Eisenhower returned to London. Bradley himself had been in England the day before, meeting with the joint Allied bomber command to plan the colossal bombing attack on which the offensive hinged.

On July 17, Bradley had chewed out General George Patton for bragging to the Third Army press corps about Patton’s role in the forthcoming campaign. The press guys, in turn, couldn’t help but brag about their a priori knowledge of the big operation to counterparts in the First Army press camp—all of which was a serious breach of security, ticking off Bradley no end. Patton blamed the mess on his overly aggressive chief public relations officer, Colonel Charles Blakeney, but it’s hard to imagine that Blakeney had played up Patton’s part in the plan without his boss’ okay. Remarkably, Patton had not at that point been called into battle in Normandy and had been explicitly (and repeatedly!) ordered by Eisenhower, Bradley, and even Secretary of War Henry Stimson to keep his trap shut—yet was already in trouble for yakking out of school and trying to claim credit for a plan that wasn’t his.
⁴

Late on the afternoon of July 20, after Eisenhower had left for London, Bradley decided to sample Vouilly’s chow for himself—and, while he was at it, clear up any misconceptions by giving the First Army correspondents a thorough briefing. If the press guys assigned to Bradley and Courtney Hodges were going to be covering the breakout, they should at least hear it described by its architect.

Bradley directed his personal aide, Major Chet Hansen, and his chief intelligence officer, Colonel Monk Dickson, to grab an easel and a map. The three of them hopped into Bradley’s jeep and, its three-starred pennants flapping, motored toward Vouilly.

As it had been for much of the six weeks since the Allied invasion, the weather that evening was dismal—so dreary, in fact, that it was threatening to delay Bradley’s offensive. The general’s jeep no doubt stirred a commotion as, unannounced, it clattered up the dirt lane at Mme. Hamel’s château. Reporters lounging in bunks or fumbling at typewriters must have jumped to their feet wide-eyed, tucking in shirttails as Bradley began greeting people.

“Why didn’t you tell us you wanted to hold a press conference, General?” they protested. “We would have come over to your headquarters.” In Liebling’s recollection, Bradley chuckled and said that he didn’t want to trouble such important people. But Liebling and other reporters deduced that there were legitimate security concerns behind Bradley’s decision. If several dozen reporters and their drivers suddenly began traveling en masse toward Bradley’s mobile CP, it might attract the attention of Vichy spies, who would conclude—correctly—that something big was up.

After being treated to a quick meal, Bradley, Dickson, Hansen, and their easel repaired to the shed and makeshift move theater behind the Hamels’ detached field kitchen. Thirteen years later, when Liebling visited Mme. Hamel, Joe asked if she remembered the evening that the great General Bradley had come to visit.