Assignment to Hell (43 page)

By early ’44, Liebling had gone through two sets of gas masks and helmets and had ordered a new pair from Army PROs. He was so bored waiting month after month for the invasion that he thought about volunteering for Army Intelligence, but abandoned the idea when First Division commander General Clarence Huebner offered him the chance—if approved by the public relations staff—to go ashore on D-Day with the Big Red One. It didn’t help Liebling’s prospects of landing an invasion assignment that an old gout condition resurfaced, forcing him to gimp around London. His gout, his ample girth, and his thick glasses all made him look pathetic to the PROs handing out invasion slots.

Even Liebling’s boxer-inspired workouts failed to put much of a dent in his belly. His overeating was becoming more compulsive. He constantly dined at an upper-crust restaurant off St. James’s called Wiltons, whose wartime prices were obscene.

His
New Yorker
articles from London were an eclectic mix: a piece on a munitions factory that gave English laborers credit in helping to turn the
tide; an irreverent profile of “Paddy,” a Royal Air Force ace; and “V for Victory,” a valentine to the British Broadcasting Corporation for its efforts in building morale and making the V symbol an inspiration to the Resistance movement throughout Europe. During the winter of ’44 Liebling also went on his own “Eisenhower shuttle,” the B-26 raid over the Nazis’ Montdidier airdrome.

To his eternal credit, Liebling was determined to pay homage to the French Resistance. Awed by the forbidden French newspapers that were smuggled into England, he tried to piece together a definitive picture of the Maquis’ (literally “underbrush”) defiance, but given skimpy information, it was impossible. It amazed Liebling that some of France’s underground papers had circulations of fifty thousand or more. Merely to be seen reading an outlawed circular was to risk torture or a firing squad. The courage it took to actually print one under the nose of the Gestapo staggered him.

Liebling would quiz any French expatriate he encountered, picking their brains about their countrymen’s efforts to defy Hitler. The topic would become a recurring theme, Liebling’s most passionate wartime cause. Eventually he compiled his essays on the Resistance into a collection he called
The Republic of Silence
.

A
FTER EIGHT ENERVATING MONTHS IN
Sicily and Italy, Hal Boyle finally got a break. Boyle owed his respite to Ernie Pyle, whose battlefield adventures were being turned into a United Artists movie,
Ernie Pyle’s The Story of G.I. Joe
, starring Burgess Meredith as the intrepid columnist. Among the Pyle intimates slated to play themselves were Boyle and Don Whitehead of Associated Press; Chris Cunningham of United Press; Sergeant Jack Foisie of the
Stars and Stripes
, Bigart’s buddy from Sicily; and Tom Treanor of the
Los Angeles Times
, the correspondent who had climbed Monte Cipolla with Bigart and Whitehead.

AP shrewdly gave Boyle and Whitehead a few extra weeks off to make speeches, do radio interviews, and generally beat the drum for the wire service’s coverage of the war. To get home, Boyle ended up hitching a ride in Naples on a B-24 known as
The Blue Streak
, a bomber that was being
retired in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations after a record 110 missions.

“She dropped half a million pounds of bombs on enemy objectives, sank a destroyer, a tanker, and a merchant vessel,” Boyle wrote in a piece that ran on page one of the
Atlanta Constitution
. “During her 1,058 hours of combat her gunners brought down 23 enemy fighters. In her long career—she has used up 10 engines and twice been rescued from the junk heap—the big-bellied Liberator never lost one of her crewmen to German guns or German ack ack although her paint-peeling frame is pitted with 150 flak holes.”
³⁹

Boyle and
The Blue Streak
arrived in Miami on February 20, 1944. It took the Liberator forty-five hours and eighteen minutes to make the 8,100-mile flight—not that Boyle was counting. They’d flown from Naples to Dakar, where they refueled and attempted to fix a balky electrical problem that had put the navigation system on the fritz.
⁴⁰

On the tarmac at Miami’s 179th Street Airport, Boyle posed for pictures with the
Streak
’s passengers and crew. The photos moved on AP, thus serving both the wire service’s and USAAF’s interests.

By late winter ’44, Boyle had become much more than “the poor man’s Ernie Pyle”: He was regularly outperforming the master, although he never achieved Pyle’s iconic status. In any given week, Boyle put out at least twice and sometimes three times the amount of copy that came out of Pyle’s typewriter. Boyle would feed AP spot coverage updates each day, then sit down almost daily to write Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook. His column typically ran in about half the four-hundred-odd newspapers that used Pyle’s column in early ’44; still, by any measure, Boyle’s stuff got sensational pickup.

B
OYLE FLEW FROM
M
IAMI TO
New York, where he and Frances had a joyful reunion. They hadn’t seen one another in fifteen months, since Boyle had left for the Operation Torch convoy.

As part of his publicity tour, on the evening of March 7, 1944, Boyle appeared as a guest on CBS World News’
Report to the Nation
, a program hosted by “noted foreign correspondent” Quentin Reynolds. The script has
survived in Boyle’s papers and demonstrates why print journalists, Cronkite and Boyle among them, were so wary of the broadcast medium. Cronkite’s adjective, “schlocky,” doesn’t begin to describe the Reynolds–Boyle exchange. “Vapid” would be closer to the mark. Boyle’s two most celebrated moments in North Africa—his Darlan scoop and his vote-for-Boyle silliness—were distorted and reduced to specious caricatures, complete with anti-Arab slurs.

Despite the contrived patter, Reynolds did ask Boyle meaningful questions about censorship, GI spirit, and Allied antipathy toward the Nazis. Boyle allowed that he didn’t care much for censors but said they weren’t vicious, “just capricious.” When Reynolds asked about morale in Italy, Boyle said, “There’s nothing wrong with morale when they’re fighting but the boys are really aching to get home. Some of them have been away from home for two years.”

When quizzed on how he felt about the Germans, Boyle mused, “Well, as you know most of the American soldiers in Africa were a lot sorer at Japan than they were at Germany, in the beginning. However, the Nazis have managed to gain equal footing with the Japs. Our kids see the death and desolation Germans leave behind when they evacuate a town. The sick and dying women and children, the stripped hospitals, the unnecessary misery. And of course, American soldiers have seen a lot of good friends fall under German bullets.”

Boyle closed by urging folks at home to write to the men and women on the front lines. “Tell them all the news of what’s going on at home and tell ’em you know what they are going through…. You have no idea what that sort of recognition means to a kid.”
⁴¹

The Reynolds program poked fun at the very thing Hal Boyle did so superbly: doggedly gathering information and telling stories about the human drama of war. Moreover, the real news—the Nazi atrocities that Boyle had witnessed in Italy—barely merited a mention. If that’s how the great CBS conveyed wartime news under the portentous banner
Report to the Nation
, imagine what less reputable outlets were doing.

A
FTER PAINTING THE
B
IG
A
PPLE
redder, Frances and Hal worked their way west on the train, stopping in Cincinnati so Boyle could do a radio interview and address a civic group. They spent more than a week in Kansas City, seeing Hal’s mother, Margaret, and older brother Ed, who, as a thirty-two-year-old store proprietor, was the only Boyle boy not in uniform. Neil was an airman in North Africa; John an Army machine gunner who was wounded in the Pacific.

Margaret was at Kansas City’s Union Station to give her son a “good Irish welcome,” as the
Kansas City Star
put it. “Yes, it’s sure good to be back,” Boyle told the
Star
in a story that ran underneath a photo of Boyle
mère et fils
grinning from ear to ear. “We were out to a New York nightspot the other night and when we got ready to leave, the other fellow reached out and picked up the $44 check. Then I knew I was home—that’s home when the other fellow reaches for the check.”
⁴²
Boyle’s vacation included a lot of nights out at a lot of nightspots.

The Sunday, February 27,
Star
had run a front-page tribute to the war reporters and photographers that had ties to the Paris of the Plains. Boyle, of course, was featured, fêted by his boss Wes Gallagher: “[Boyle] has an unshaken faith in the American infantry and his idea of an ideal army is one with millions and millions of infantry, a couple of big guns, and an airplane. The airplane would be used only to carry his copy from the front.”
⁴³

While in Kansas City, Boyle got to admire the scrapbook that his sister-in-law, Ed’s wife, had lovingly kept since Hal climbed aboard his first troopship. Encased in a handsome beige cover with a soaring eagle on the front, the album was already crammed with four or five inches’ worth of clips and mementos. By war’s end, it would be close to two times that thick. The
Star
printed everything that moved on the AP wire with Boyle’s byline, often playing it on page one, so Monica had plenty of material.

Boyle signed the first page of the scrapbook: “To my nephew, Edward Michael, and to his mother, Monica, who made this book. With love, Hal Boyle, March 15, 1944.”
⁴⁴

Monica reminded Hal to keep an eye out for her little brother Jack, who was a radioman with a naval amphibious unit that had landed in North
Africa and Sicily. He’s in England someplace, she told Hal. Maybe you’ll run into him. Four months later, Boyle did.
⁴⁵

N
EXT STOP FOR
F
RANCES AND
Hal was Hollywood. Somewhere along the line, they were joined by dear friends Don and Marie Whitehead. Associated Press did a good job flacking the Southern California visit of their two star correspondents: The
Los Angeles Times
sent a reporter and photographer to Union Station as the Whiteheads and the Boyles disembarked on St. Patrick’s Day, probably after a few club car toasts to the Old Sod. Despite the impasse in the mountains of Italy, the Fifth Army was “still killing a hell of a lot of Germans,” Whitehead told the
Times
. “There’ll have to be lots more fighting—and lots more casualties—before we win in that area.”

Whitehead and Boyle told the paper they were looking forward to seeing their friend,
Times
reporter Tom Treanor, due in L.A. any day to read his part in the Pyle movie. Boyle explained that Treanor had been the first U.S. correspondent to make it to the summit of Cassino.

“Are we in the town [Cassino proper] right now, on this spot?” Boyle had Treanor asking the company commander at the fateful moment. When told they were, Treanor took one step toward the German lines, drew a line in the dirt with his boot, and said, “Now let’s get the hell out of here! We’ve BEEN in Cassino!” Having accomplished his objective of being able in good conscience to dateline his story “Cassino,” Treanor beat a retreat.
⁴⁶

W
HEN NOT POOLSIDE WITH THEIR
wives or on the United Artists’ lot with Pyle, Meredith, costar Robert Mitchum, and director William Wellman, Whitehead and Boyle were hitting the hustings. On March 28, the pair addressed a crowded Hotel Biltmore Ballroom at a luncheon sponsored by the Advertising Club of Los Angeles. Sharing the Biltmore’s lectern was
G.I. Joe
’s producer, Lester Cowan.
⁴⁷
Producer Cowan had eclectic tastes, having produced everything from the comedic farces of W. C. Fields to actress Mary Pickford’s melodramas. Director Wellman, a World War I
aviator, was also in the midst of a distinguished career, having started in the early ’20s on silent pictures.

Cowan, Wellman, Pyle, and their military advisors—a list that nominally included Lieutenant General Lesley McNair—set out to capture the gritty realities of combat as endured by American GIs in North Africa and Italy. Fifteen minutes into the movie, the humiliation of the U.S. retreat at the Kasserine Pass was depicted.

Mitchum, playing a popular but tough officer, grabs a battle-fatigued GI by the shoulders and tries to shake him out of his daze. The film also graphically portrays the caveman-like existence that Allied soldiers lived for months at Monte Cassino.

Still,
G.I. Joe
is hamstrung by the same hackneyed story lines that plague other war movies: the outfit adopts a dog in Tunisia and (perhaps out of deference to the vote-for-Boyle story) nicknames it Ay-rab; a GI marries a nurse and promptly gets killed on patrol; a sergeant heartsick for his wife and baby boy flips out and has to be restrained before throwing himself at the enemy lines; and in midmovie Mitchum delivers the obligatory “It’s quiet out there … too quiet” cliché. Cowan’s production had a modest budget, relying on stock Army footage of artillery battles and firefights, so it has that bumpy quality of so many war films.