Assignment to Hell (64 page)

When it became apparent that the Americans were there not to brutalize but to liberate, the children of Roetgen came out of hiding and began asking GIs for gum and candy. “Kids of all nations seem to be internationalists, minus fear or hate,” Rooney wrote. “Some German mothers dragged waving children from the streets.”
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Rooney’s piece ended with a poignant moment of irony. A U.S. medical officer, Captain Jack Blinkoff, who had studied in Bonn before the war, was asked by a German farmer if it was all right to kill one of the farmer’s pigs.

“Go ahead, kill the pig,” Blinkoff replied in German. “Why ask me?”

The farmer explained that the Nazis would exact severe punishment on any German civilian who slaughtered animals without a license.

Four days later Rooney was still inside Germany, saluting the first Americans who had breached the Fatherland’s defenses. After all the talk about the “impervious” border barrier, First Lieutenant Bob Kolb of Paducah,
Kentucky, “took his company through it without a casualty.”
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Kolb’s infantry unit helped open the floodgates for armored units that were now “pouring” through the gap, Rooney observed.

The first American scout who slipped through the “vaunted line” was Private First Class Alvin O. Kenyon of Seattle. Soon Kolb’s entire company was across, followed quickly by an armored unit with tanks and M10 (artillery) support. Rooney was one of the first American correspondents to eyeball the Siegfried Line’s obstacles.

“In the hilly country of the border, roads run through the valley, and the Germans placed the fortified concrete igloos [pillboxes] in positions which commanded the only possible entry for vehicles. On both sides of the roads, concrete ‘dragon’s teeth’ extend for miles, preventing tanks from rolling over the open country between the road networks.

“‘We knocked out about 15 or 20 pillboxes, I guess,’ Kolb said. ‘Our M10 fired at some of the them from about 20 yards and blasted them wide open.’

“There was no artillery at all in any of the pillboxes Kolb’s company encountered. Most of the outdated fortifications had gun positions built for nothing bigger than the old German 47-millimeter antitank gun,” Rooney’s piece concluded.
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R
OONEY DIDN’T KNOW IT, BUT
he was chronicling the apex of the Allied advance in 1944. Given the fierceness of the German stand along the Rhine and the supply difficulties of sustaining the Allied offensive, Eisenhower’s thrust had run out of steam.

Hitler’s empire in September ’44 was a fraction of its size two years earlier. In the east, the Russians had recaptured half of Latvia and Lithuania, close to two-thirds of Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and were beginning to zero in on eastern Germany. In the West, almost all of France and Belgium had been liberated; a few select American units like Rooney’s friends in the Second Battalion had pounded their way past the Siegfried Line. But Eisenhower and Bradley knew that unless something dramatic happened, they would be hunkering down on the western side of the Rhine for the winter.

That something dramatic did not happen in Holland. Rooney was sent to Maastricht, Holland, on September 21 and the next day unearthed a remarkable story about how the resourceful Dutch had preserved many of the world’s artistic masterworks, including memorable canvases by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Rubens, and Van Dyck.

“In the far recesses of a mountain cave where the Dutch villagers cart horse manure in which to grow mushrooms are 800 of the world’s finest paintings,” went Rooney’s lede.
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The paintings had been secretly moved from museums in Amsterdam and Rotterdam at the outbreak of the war and hidden all over the Netherlands. In April 1941, under the noses of the Nazis, the works were transferred to a climate-controlled vault built into a subterranean cavern near Maastricht. The cave was ingeniously designed, Rooney observed. On one side of the hill, workers dragged heavy carts full of manure through a series of winding passages to the mushroom beds. On the other side, cleverly disguised steel doors guarded the art treasures.

Inside the metal doors, the Dutch had designed a gauntlet of five steel barricades, each guarded by a gendarme. In the art room itself, the temperature was controlled at 15 degrees centigrade; each painting was mounted on a specially designed steel rack. Rembrandt’s
Night Watch
was attached to a special drum because the canvas was too big to be mounted on a rack. The drum was turned daily so the canvas wouldn’t lose its shape.

Rooney noted that the canvases, many of them painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were in “perfect” condition. Somehow, despite Hermann Göring’s twisted obsession with magnificent art and bootlicking sycophants looking to ingratiate themselves with
Herr Reichsmarschall
, the Nazis never found the Dutch treasure trove. Allied troops now stood guard over the cavern to ensure that any enemy commando raid would be thwarted.
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P
LAYING DEFENSE IS ABOUT ALL
the Allies could muster in Holland after Market Garden bogged down. The Allies ended up sustaining more
casualties in Holland—some seventeen thousand in all—than they suffered on D-Day’s beaches.
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Market Garden may have backfired, but that didn’t dilute Walter Cronkite’s affection for the Netherlands and its people. “I’m absolutely in love with Holland—what I’ve seen of it, and even the residents of that portion claim that it is the ugliest section of the country,” he told Betsy in a letter on October 3.
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On Friday, September 29, Cronkite had gone to Brussels for some R & R with a couple of
Yank
correspondents. They somehow managed to acquire a captured
Wasserwagen,
an amphibious Volkswagen jeep, and decided—what the hell!—they’d hit Paris for the weekend. Cronkite had never been to Paris, so he was thrilled.

About six o’clock that night, thirty miles north of the capital in the middle of the Compiègne Forest, the “damned car,” as Cronkite put it, broke down. The threesome had talked their way into going southwest on a highway that the military police had restricted to northeast-bound supply traffic. So now Cronkite had to hitchhike the “wrong” way, yet still got to the next town, where he told the MPs where they could find his stranded buddies.

He got to Paris about ten thirty that night, filthy from exhaust grime, and collapsed at a Red Cross officers’ club at the Hôtel Edouard VII on the Avenue de l’Opéra. The next morning, he stopped by UP’s Paris office, where a colleague named Sam Hales took him to the USO’s Rainbow Room at the Hôtel de Paris, a replica of its famous forebear in London. For lunch they headed over to the press headquarters at the Hôtel Scribe, which Cronkite enjoyed so much he had dinner there, too.

Cronkite played tourist all day, taking a horse-drawn carriage down the Boulevard des Capucines and the Champs-Élysées. At one point he sipped a couple of cognacs while watching Parisians and American soldiers parade past.

“Paris appears unaffected by war,” he told Betsy. “The women are the most fabulously dressed people I have ever seen, complete with silk stockings, cosmetics (of which there are few in England), beautiful clothes and insane hats and shoes. And all carrying long, rolled parasols with lace frills
or leading dogs as insane as the hats.” Then in words that would have delighted Joe Liebling, Cronkite wrote, “Many dressed like that pedal by on bicycles with their skirts up to their thighs. Most disturbing!”
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He and his correspondent pals allowed themselves to be disturbed by other leggy sights that evening as they went to Montmartre to take in the much-anticipated reopening of cancan dancing at the Bal Tabarin. Cronkite was surprised that the Bal Tabarin was not the sophisticated theater that he had imagined but rather a “glorified Coney Island dime-a-dance joint.” Paris was bereft of liquor but there were endless supplies of champagne, so that’s what everyone drank that night, he told Betsy.

Cronkite was now covering the British Second Army out of Montgomery’s back-of-the-line setup in Brussels—and not thrilled about it. The dream of covering an Allied army surging into the Ruhr had given way to the reality of settling in behind a static line.

He wrote Betsy that he “felt like a damned baby” in Brussels. Cronkite was kicking himself for not having stuck with French at the University of Texas. It was “lonely and discouraging” to be a daily newspaperman without being able to read daily newspapers, he wrote.
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Twice a day he would attend British Second Army briefings and, much like his experience at the Ministry of Information in London, write up the newsworthy communiqués for the UP wire. But in truth, by October there was little in the way of significant movements of troops.

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
C
RONKITE
took in the cancan, Hal Boyle wrote a story that the Allied high command had dreaded: The Nazis’ fierce stand after two months of backpedaling had come as a shock to Allied soldiers.

Boyle talked to dozens of grunts every day. “‘Once we drive them back to their own country they’ll come to their senses,’ has been the thought and consolation of most soldiers ever since invasion day last June,” Boyle wrote. “‘Then we’ll have a walkway parade to Berlin and the war will be over. They will never fight in their own country.’

“But they are. And it’s making the American soldier angrier, tougher, and more eager to smash through to Berlin every day. Many of these combat
troops have been overseas for two years or more and secretly had hoped their reward for a quick victory might be to return home by Christmas. Now they realize that is an outside chance, and they are uncomfortably aware of the possibility that the European war may well last through a cold and forlorn winter.”
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Sergeant J. D. Peel from Geneva, New York, told Boyle that, “The American dogface is a poor hater.” But Peel and the other men in his outfit were appalled by the apparent willingness of German leaders to drag their country down with them. “If they had an honorable leader among them,” Peel said, “he would give up and save his country.”
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German prisoners were telling interrogators that, were it up to them, the war would already be over. “They are all afraid of the SS officers and the Gestapo and they say [SS head] Heinrich Himmler himself is running the army,” Boyle told readers. “They all say they are sorry that Hitler wasn’t killed.” Enemy prisoners were also jaded about the Goebbels boast of “secret weapons” that would turn the tide of war. “Don’t kid us about those secret weapons,” Boyle quoted one prisoner. “We know such talk is silly.” The cynicism was in striking contrast to the “pugnacious faith” Boyle consistently heard from captured members of the Wehrmacht in Normandy.
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A
FEW DAYS AFTER INTERVIEWING
the prisoners in early October, Hal Boyle spent time at Spa, Belgium, the old vacation spot that had lent its name to the mineral-waters-resort craze of the nineteenth century. Along with several other First Army correspondents in Spa, Boyle was photographed cavorting atop a bed in which Kaiser Wilhelm had spent a nervous night before fleeing to Holland as the German lines crumbled in the fall of 1918.

Two bodies down the Kaiser’s bed from Boyle was a horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing UP reporter named John Frankish, who had just arrived in the ETO a few weeks earlier. The reporters didn’t bother to untie their combat boots as they mugged for the camera. Walter Cronkite didn’t know his UP colleague well but had helped show the young University of Southern
California grad the ropes when Frankish
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was getting acclimated in London before being assigned to ground troops. One night at Cronkite’s flat, much to the host’s dismay, Frankish and another UP reporter got into a bottle of bourbon that Cronkite had been saving for a special occasion.
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Even when not fueled by liquor, Frankish had a wicked sense of humor; like Joe Liebling, he was a dead-on mimic.

As October turned toward November, Boyle had a columnist’s prerogative: He continued to shuttle from Holland to Belgium and from France to Luxembourg—wherever the best Allied human interest story was. Cronkite settled in Brussels to sift through Montgomery’s self-aggrandizing statements, while their new friend Frankish stayed closer to the U.S. front lines near Belgium’s Ardennes Forest.

Andy Rooney that fall stayed with the First Army but spent a lot of time editing stories at the
Stars and Stripes
’ offices in Paris. In late October, the paper sent Rooney back to Brittany, where, remarkably, the Germans were still holding out, nearly five months after D-Day.

“Five hundred miles behind the bitter battle for the Siegfried Line and the plains of the Rhine, there is a milder war, a war almost forgotten,” Rooney wrote.”
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Two south Brittany peninsula ports that the Germans had converted into U-boat lairs, St.-Nazaire and Lorient, remained uncaptured, despite near-constant artillery and bombing attacks. They were the last German outposts left in France in late ’44; between them, some fifty thousand near-starving enemy troops were hunkered down.

Many of the enemy soldiers had operated antiaircraft batteries with such ferocity that Allied pilots had nicknamed St.-Nazaire Flak City.
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Back in August, General George Patton’s Third Army had been tasked by Omar Bradley with seizing the Brittany ports, part of Bradley’s insistence on keeping Allied supply lines fully open. But once Patton realized that the enemy had dug in along the coast—and that martial glory lay elsewhere—he pulled up stakes. Eleven weeks later, the Allied “siege” consisted of one lone American tank outfit supported by FFI troops. The ragtag army encircled each port to ensure that there was no enemy breakout. Something of a bizarre rapprochement had settled in: No serious Allied effort had been
launched in weeks to try to uproot the enemy; the Germans, in turn, only made halfhearted efforts to return artillery fire, although on occasion a gunboat would zoom up the Loire, fire a few rounds, then disappear.