Assignment to Hell (56 page)

In midwar, Vichy strongman Darnand had taken a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler; he was made a full major in the Waffen SS. Darnard cofounded the Milice, the genocidal vigilante outfit that by the summer of ’44 claimed thirty-five thousand members across the south of France. The Milice fought viciously up and down the Rhône—even
after
their German protectors had fled.

Having dodged mortar fire in snaking across the Rhône with the Partisans, Bigart tailed them into Lyon. The scene was nightmarish.

“There is nothing more blood-chilling,” he wrote, “than street fighting between undisciplined trigger-happy civilians. Units of the regular [French] army were in town, but mostly the mopping-up of Fascists had been left to the townspeople. It seemed like a good idea, because Lyon
required a blood purge. It was here that the Gestapo and Darnand Fascists perpetrated their worst excesses. Months of festering hatred needed a release.”
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One Vichy militiaman who’d killed a French soldier minutes before dropped his revolver and tried to blend in with the Patriots mobbing the streets. A female Partisan spotted him, shrieked to warn the others, and began chasing him as he frantically bounded away. Eventually he was thwarted by a succession of locked doors.

“He turned to the crowd and, seeing no hope of mercy in their snarling faces, collapsed on the stoop,” Bigart observed. “Someone bashed his head with the metal handle of a Sten gun. He lay moaning, while an officer brushed the crowd aside and drawing his revolver, administered the coup de grace.”
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Bigart would soon leave to record the final throes of a different conflict—but one every bit as brutish. The difference in the Pacific Theater, though, was that Bigart no longer got to witness joyous scenes of liberation or the persecuted rising up against their oppressors. Instead, Bigart wrote about the debilitating grind of soldiers jumping from rock to rock, dueling a suicidal foe that should have surrendered years earlier.

The
Herald Tribune
, with considerable fanfare, announced that Bigart would become a featured correspondent in the Pacific. Ironically, the one reporter best equipped to capture the military and geographic import of the Allied sweep across northern France never got the chance. Bigart’s best work was devoted to covering World War II’s forgotten campaign, the Allies’ rudderless advance up the Italian peninsula. No dysfunctional conflict ever had a better Boswell.

A
S THEIR FRIEND
B
IGART WAS
pushing his way up the Rhône Valley, Liebling, Boyle, and Rooney were watching Omar Bradley administer a coup de grâce of his own. On Monday evening, August 21, 1944, they hustled to see Bradley conduct another press briefing. It was convened near the general’s headquarters in Laval, an hour’s drive or so from the First Army’s press camp at Bagnoles de l’Orne. Bradley had chosen Laval to park his
trailer because it overlapped the zones of the First and Third Armies, both of which he commanded.

Since Bradley’s briefing would not end until after dark and the correspondents didn’t want to be caught traveling on a blacked-out road with speeding supply trucks, Liebling’s colleagues entrusted him with booking them hotel rooms along the way to Laval. Naturally, Joe booked the coziest setup for himself and his PRO driver (and fellow babe-hound), Lieutenant Roy Wilder, Jr., a colorful Carolinian known as “Chitlin.”
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Joe and Chitlin’s hotel was in Ernée, a charming spot that had been spared artillery damage. Ernée sported a brasserie that might, the boys figured, hold certain attractions later in the evening.

The Third Army’s correspondents would be on their own that night, which was fine by Liebling. A feisty and not always friendly competition had sprung up between reporters covering the First and Third. Rooney, Boyle, and Liebling resented the way the Third’s correspondents, fanned by Old Blood and Guts’ PROs, embellished Patton’s exploits. To hear the Third guys tell it, Liebling joked, Patton’s men were already on the outskirts of Vienna.
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SHAEF’s original plan was to bypass Paris. The capital had no intrinsic military value; planners, moreover, were worried that seizing Paris would overstrain Allied supply lines. But Free French leaders persuaded Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery that Paris and its inhabitants had to be protected from Nazi carnage.
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It turned out that the German occupation of Paris, although harsh, was less malevolent than in other places.

“[Laval] was the most cheerful briefing I had yet attended,” Liebling wrote, acknowledging that Bradley had proven prescient at his Vouilly conference thirty days before. Bradley began by smiling and volunteering that he knew they all wanted to find out when the Allies would be getting to Paris. The most important objective was to destroy von Kluge’s army; the next was to secure Paris in as intact a condition as possible. Bradley’s deportment stood in cool contrast to Mark Clark’s grandstanding in Rome ten weeks earlier.

Pointing to a map, Bradley said the First Army’s Fourth and 28th Divisions would hopefully force the German garrison to pull out or surrender
without much of a fight. “A Third Army correspondent said that General Patton had bet him five dollars the Third would be in Paris before the First,” Liebling recalled, “and General Bradley remarked that he might just take it into his head to tell General Patton to go someplace else.” The Missourian assured reporters that, in any case, no Allied army would be making a rush for Paris.

Bradley had what psychiatrists call a “therapeutic personality,” Liebling wrote. As the correspondents stood in line to pay their respects, Liebling remembered a colleague—it sounds like Hal Boyle—saying, “General, I’m always glad to see you, because you always make me feel good.”
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Secure in the knowledge that the City of Light would not be freed anytime soon, Liebling and Wilder drove back to Ernée, hoping a couple of
belles femmes
would be frequenting the café. Sure enough there were; Joe and Roy spent much of that night and most of the next day pursuing them. Alas, they struck out—or so, years later, Liebling claimed.

When Liebling and Wilder returned to the press camp in Bagnoles de l’Orne on Wednesday afternoon, August 23, they were flabbergasted. The place was almost deserted: Rooney, Boyle—everyone—was gone. Only a couple of PROs were left—and they were hurriedly packing up equipment.

“Where is everyone?” Liebling asked. His heart sank when he learned there’d been an unexpected breakthrough; all the correspondents were, at that moment, gunning toward Paris. The new press headquarters would be at the Hôtel Scribe, near the Place de l’Opéra.

Liebling was seething: The liberation of Paris had been his obsession for more than four years—and now, because of his own sybaritic stupidity, he was going to miss it! Wilder later confided in Andy Rooney that Liebling was so upset he actually shed tears.
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Joe ran upstairs and stuffed his things into a sleeping bag, then groveled for a ride. Wilder was in the doghouse; Roy and his jeep had already been reassigned. But Liebling was in luck: First Lieutenant Jack Roach, a former press association reporter from Philadelphia, was available. Roach had somehow wangled a Chevrolet sedan that had belonged to a German officer. If they hurried, Liebling promised Roach, they could still catch the best of the celebration—even if Paris had already been freed.

So the two of them set out for La Ville Lumière, hoping they could get there that night if the roads stayed clear. After a couple of hours it hit them that they hadn’t brought any food. But as they passed a stretch with a lot of military traffic, they discovered that an Army Quartermaster Corps outfit was handing out K rations in an inspired way. A black soldier stood atop a moving two-and-a-half-ton supply truck that would pull alongside jeeps and vehicles and dump boxes of food into the backseat. With visions of Paris dancing in his head, Liebling pretended the K rations were caviar and smoked partridges; he savored every morsel.

As they passed through a village crowded with excited townspeople, Liebling recognized African-American
Stars and Stripes
reporter Allan Morrison trying to flag a ride. Morrison had endeared himself to Liebling two weeks earlier when both reporters were covering the siege at St.-Malo. The German commander was “loaded,” Morrison told Liebling and the other press guys. “When he finishes his last bottle of sauce, they’ll run up a white flag.” They did.

Liebling and Roach relayed to Morrison the word they’d heard in Bagnoles de l’Orne: that Paris was on the verge of collapse and that the other First Army reporters were probably partying in the city by now. Morrison, who’d been near the front for days, was immediately skeptical. Roach responded by saying that the rumor
had
to be true, otherwise he and Liebling would have run into their buddies on the road someplace. Morrison remained unconvinced.

“Maybe some prison-camp paper in Germany is going to have a hell of a staff,” Morrison cracked.

Liebling closed his eyes and hearkened back to a boyhood fantasy of being Confederate cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart, galloping toward a raid behind enemy lines. But the porky Liebling was no cavalryman and the Chevy sedan was hardly a horse.

Soon they noticed that they were alone on the road—suspiciously alone.

“If we keep on going, we’re bound to meet someone,” Liebling volunteered.

“That is exactly what I am afraid of,” replied Morrison.

Not long after, they ran into two GIs in a jeep, who told them they could
find the Seventh Armored Division camped for the night off a side road up ahead. There they learned from the tankmen at the spearhead of the American assault that they were now as close to the front lines as anyone. Ironically, they found out later, they were actually
ahead
of the other First Army correspondents, whose caravan had taken a wrong turn that afternoon.

Liebling, Morrison, and Roach stayed near the leading edge of the American advance the next day, Thursday, August 24, as it ground ever closer to Paris. They spent that night in the village of Montlhéry, sixteen miles southwest of the capital. It was on the road to Orléans, the same thoroughfare that Liebling and tens of thousands of others had taken in shame four years earlier, going in the opposite direction.
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Too wound up to sleep, Liebling was awake before dawn. It would be the greatest day of his life; he wanted to relish every moment. At the top of the tallest hill in Montlhéry stood the Tower, an ancient lookout that had been built on a medieval moat. With ruthless efficiency, the Nazis had slapped a listening post on top of the relic. The Germans were gone, but their eyesore remained.

Liebling climbed the hill and was squinting toward Paris when he heard an American voice shout, “Good morning!” A Signal Corps officer was standing on the Tower’s platform, gesturing for Liebling to come up. “Neither voice (Philadelphia, perhaps) nor lieutenant (five ten, pale under a black stubble, serious mouth) was distinctive, but he was a man I won’t forget,” Leibling wrote.

The lieutenant told Liebling that he’d been up in the Tower since the day before, tasked with monitoring enemy movements. There hadn’t been movements to monitor, at least none that the lieutenant could see. But he had enjoyed looking at Paris through his powerful Signal Corps binoculars.

“God, I just can’t take my eyes off it!” the officer gushed. “Come over here and I’ll show it to you.” Offering Liebling his field glasses, he guided Joe over to the platform’s northern edge.

“Paris was there, all right—there in the same place I had left it four years, two months, and fifteen days before,” Liebling wrote.

The lieutenant unrolled a map, but proudly informed Liebling that he
didn’t need to refer to it anymore. He now knew Paris’ iconic landmarks by heart.

“Now, over here,” he went on, pointing to the Dome of the Invalides, “is the Opera House. Once you get that clear, you have your orientation.

“And over there,” he continued, pointing now to the Opéra, “is the City Hall—you know, the Chamber of Deputies. Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

The lieutenant got the Eiffel Tower right. “I suppose you know what that beautiful white church is up on the hill?” he next said, swiveling my elbow into line with Sacré-Coeur. I was going to name it, but something warned me not to, so I shook my head.

“Why, it’s Notre Dame, of course!” he said, and I was glad that I had kept my mouth shut.

“I can’t wait to get down there,” the lieutenant said. “It’s the most beautiful city in the world.”

I thanked him from the bottom of my heart. I hope he made it.
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