Assignment to Hell (71 page)

But of them all, I think the best symbol of the American army overseas is the Fighting First infantry. We call them the “Brooklyn bums” but they came from every state in America. They have fought their way many more miles against more Germans than any unit in the American army.

They left their dead by the hundreds in Tunisia, Sicily, France, Belgium, and Germany. And when the final surrender came, they were still killing Nazis. Their battle achievements dwarf their losses.

But you can’t forget those soldiers who died on the rough, long road of victory. We can reconvert our war factories for peace—but how can we ever reward those lost, magnificent men?
⁶⁰

Fortunately for Boyle, the war in the Pacific was virtually over by the time he got there. Hal didn’t have to witness the sacrifice of more magnificent young Americans. All he had to deal with was a dismembered Japan and the dawning of the atomic age.

E
very Allied reporter on the deck of the USS
Missouri
that epochal Sunday morning noticed that the head of the Japanese delegation limped as he struggled with an artificial leg. But only a writer with the acuity of Homer Bigart could turn the foreign minister’s disability into a metaphor for Japan’s abject defeat.

“Japan, paying for her desperate throw of the dice at Pearl Harbor, passed from the ranks of the major powers at 9:05 a.m. today when Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signed the documents of unconditional surrender,” Bigart wrote from atop Tokyo Bay.

“If memories of the bestialities of the Japanese prison camps were not so fresh in mind, one might have felt sorry for Shigemitsu as he hobbled on his wooden leg toward the green baize-covered table where the papers lay waiting,” Bigart observed. “He leaned heavily on his cane and had difficulty seating himself. The cane, which rested against the table, dropped to the deck of the battleship as he signed.”
¹

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Homer Bigart had been an anonymous grunt on the city beat of the
New York Herald Tribune
. By Sunday,
September 2, 1945, Bigart had become a journalistic giant, a newspaperman held in awe by editors, peers, military PROs, and thousands of discerning readers back home.

One of the many ironies of World War II journalism is that Bigart’s Pulitzer was awarded for his coverage of the Pacific Theater, which was not nearly as gripping as his descriptions of the predawn commando raids on Monte Cipolla and the Îles d’Hyères, nor as poignant as his portrayals of the bloody debacles at Anzio and San Pietro.

The war in the Pacific was different, Bigart and his friend Hal Boyle both discovered: cannibalistic in one sense, eerily impersonal in another. Still, the two reporters witnessed plenty of history in the final stages of the war against Tojo and the Rising Sun. Bigart covered the assaults on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the rescue of the Allied prisoners at Los Baños in the Philippines, and was among the first reporters allowed into Hiroshima a month after the atomic blast. Boyle arrived at the Pacific front only days before the
Enola Gay
took off; nevertheless, Hal was one of the few reporters in Germany for V-E Day and in Japan for V-J Day.

In his first dispatch from the Philippines in mid-November 1944, Bigart wrote,

This correspondent, coming from the European fronts, has been impressed by the weakness of the Japanese artillery, and the failure of the enemy to employ mines with anything like the diabolical thoroughness of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s army in Italy…. Here you can drive right up to the front line in broad daylight without drawing a storm of artillery or getting blown sky high by Teller mines. And that is precisely why more correspondents have been killed here than in any comparable period in the European theater.
²

One of those correspondents killed in the Pacific was Ernie Pyle, another Pulitzer winner. Pyle was picked off by a sniper on the island of Ie
Shima off the coast of Okinawa, six days after President Roosevelt died. Between FDR and Ernie, millions of Americans thought they had lost dear friends.

With Shigemitsu’s signature the most horrific conflict in history, a conflagration that had raged on six of the world’s seven continents, mercifully came to a close. Every few seconds for six years someone somewhere in the world was killed—some sixty million people in all. For every soldier snuffed out in the line of duty, three innocents perished. Four hundred thousand Americans died, fifty-one of whom were reporters.

B
OB
S
HEETS, WHO PILOTED
C
RONKITE
across the Channel on D-Day, remarkably survived another fourteen combat missions. Before war’s end, he was promoted to major, then lieutenant colonel, and, having reached the threshold of thirty-five raids, was given command of the 427th Bomb Squadron. After the war Sheets went back to Oregon, used the GI Bill to finish his business administration degree in Eugene, married his sweetheart Colleen, and spent a career as an accomplished executive in the export-import industry. His last job, ironically, was for a company based in Japan. For decades Sheets commanded an air reserve unit; well into the 1970s he led weekend drills at the 403rd Air Base in Portland.
³

In the early 1990s, Sheets sent Walter Cronkite an amusing note telling the legend that had the pilot known his surprise D-Day passenger was going to become famous, he would have had Cronkite autograph something. Cronkite responded by scribbling on a photo taken that auspicious morning: “To Captain Bob Sheets: With a lifetime of gratitude for getting us back! Walter Cronkite.” Colleen and Bob had six kids and six grandkids. Bob suffered a stroke in 1996 and passed away four years later.
⁴

Back in early 1944, Second Lieutenant Jack Watson, Sheets’ coconspirator in the Yankee Stadium flyover, had gotten a telegram from New York Mayor La Guardia. His Honor had read a Cronkite-authored story about how Watson single-handedly piloted back to England a badly shot-up B-17. “All is forgiven,” the mayor had wired. “Congratulations. I hope you never
run out of altitude.” Watson had responded: “Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and it can’t be too soon for me. We’d sort of like to go back together someday and drop in on the Rose Bowl game.”
⁵

Coast Guard captain Bunny Rigg, who deposited Carusi’s Thieves on Omaha Beach despite murderous fire, was awarded the Silver Star and the Legion of Merit.
⁶
Carusi also won a Silver Star to go with the Purple Heart he had earned on the evening of D-Day plus one on Easy Red. His Thieves won the Croix de Guerre from a grateful French government. After recovering from his wounds, Carusi went back to practicing law in the nation’s capital. He died in 1987 at age eighty-two.

In peacetime Rigg became the editor of
Skipper
magazine, a mainstay of the Annapolis Yacht Club, a three-time winner of the prestigious Bermuda yacht race, and a founder of the annual hundred-mile sailing competition around Chesapeake Bay. Bunny and his wife, Marjorie, built a handsome colonial on Meredith Creek near the bay. Almost no one in Annapolis knew that Bunny was a D-Day hero.
⁷
Like so many of that generation, he never talked about the war. Rigg passed away in 1980, thirty-six years after he ordered Joe Liebling topside while their landing craft plunged toward Omaha Beach.

A
LL FIVE OF OUR CORRESPONDENTS
witnessed far too much of what Bigart called bestiality. But only Cronkite among the five covered in detail the ultimate exhumation of bestiality, the Nuremberg trials.

Cronkite missed the opening of the trials. En route to Germany in early December 1945, he was diverted by UP to cover what proved to be George Patton’s fatal automobile accident in Luxembourg. The maniacal commander who had survived Great War tank battles in the Meuse-Argonne, amphibious assaults in Morocco and Sicily, and Luftwaffe attacks on two continents was ironically done in by a wayward truck driver. Boyle later wrote of Patton’s burial marker at Hamm, Luxembourg, which, out of deference to Patton’s rank, was moved away from the graves of ordinary soldiers: “His real monument was ruthless personal honesty. He believed that people, being what they are, made war inevitable.”
⁸

By January Cronkite was in Nuremberg, studying the faces of loathsome criminals who also believed in the inevitability of war. Cronkite was soon to be joined—at last!—by Betsy. After three years of heartache, the Cronkites were finally together in Europe. Betsy was credentialed to cover the trial for UP.

Every day the Cronkites sat in the Palace of Justice’s second-floor courtroom, a few feet away from Hermann Göring and the other Nazi swine.

The defendants sat before eight judges—two each from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain. Cronkite and other reporters could barely contain their contempt for Hitler’s enablers.

“I wanted to spit on them,” Cronkite wrote. “I wouldn’t spit on the street, but now I would spit on them, to show, subconsciously, I suppose, that I thought them lower than the dirt on the street.”
⁹

Cronkite had not covered with his own eyes the liberations of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Hitler’s other concentration camps. But now he watched, in horror, one Signal Corps film after another documenting Nazi atrocities. Almost as appalling as the film footage, Cronkite remembered, was the testimony from innocent-looking people who had contributed to the extermination of millions. The boss of Auschwitz, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, described in clinical detail the operation of gas chambers.

When Höss was asked if he felt any guilt, Cronkite recalled that the Waffen SS henchman replied, “Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things.… It was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything. We were all so trained to obey orders that the thought of disobeying an order would never have occurred to anybody.”
¹⁰
Each day brought a harrowing new glimpse into Nazi depravity.

For nine of those days, Hermann Göring was on the witness stand, badgering, tormenting, and—in the view of Cronkite and other trial observers—outwitting the chief prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Göring, a slick operator despite his heroin addiction, used his testimony, at least in Cronkite’s eyes, to provide the next generation of Nazi leaders with a road map. Without a flicker of remorse, Göring
acknowledged Hitler’s gaffes, in effect telling young Nazi adherents, “Here’s how
not
to do it next time.”

It infuriated Allied reporters that Jackson, a capable jurist but an inexperienced prosecutor, let Göring get away with it. It also incensed them that the architect of the Nazi terror bombing of London managed to swallow a cyanide pill just hours before his appointment with the gallows. Nuremberg should have been Göring’s moment of reckoning. Instead, on too many days it had the feel of
der Reichsführer
getting the last laugh.

Every night in Nuremberg eateries, Betsy, Walter, and their friends debated the moral underpinnings of the trial and whether it was prudent for the Allies to be prosecuting Nazis for “crimes against humanity.” It was, of course, but that didn’t make Göring’s antics any easier to take.

One of Cronkite’s searing memories of Nuremberg was going to the Luitpoldhain, the hundred-thousand-seat Nazi showcase where Albert Speer organized worshipful Nazi rallies and director Leni Riefenstahl filmed her chilling
Triumph of the Will
. In early May of ’46, Nuremberg’s mayor had asked special permission to use the arena for a prayerful gathering on the first anniversary of Germany’s surrender. Immense marble and brass bowls stood at each end of the stage. As the solemn ceremony got under way, the mayor noticed that some youngsters had climbed into the bowls.

Cronkite recalled: “The mayor’s first words—the first German words spoken in the stadium since the fall of Nazism—were ‘Will the children please come down from the sacrificial urns.’”
¹¹

A
NDY
R
OONEY WASN’T AT THE
Luitpoldhain that day, but he, too, covered the trials—but only briefly—while on assignment with
Holiday
. It was the first time Rooney had ever had the chance to study the
Nuremberg Laws on Race and Citizenship
, the 1935 polemic that empowered Hitler to persecute people of Jewish ancestry. Rooney, with Thekla’s blackened corpses still fresh in mind, was horrified to learn how methodically the Nazis had instituted racial hatred.