Assignment to Hell (61 page)

Cannon’s reverse psychology may have been working on Orloff until it was revealed that New York governor Thomas Dewey had pardoned Luciano. The racketeer buster was sending his old foe to Italy, hoping that
Lucky’s Mafia connections might help free Allied prisoners still being held in the mountains north of Rome. But to let bygones be bygones, the governor had given Luciano the okay to stop in Paris to visit his old friend Gay Orloff. Cannon immediately packed his duffel bag and returned to the front, where his life, Rooney commented, would be less endangered.
⁵⁵

M
ACHINE GUNS AND ARTILLERY WERE
still rumbling after dark on August 25 when Joe Liebling headed out from the Scribe to celebrate the greatest day of his life. The firing “seemed part of the summer night, like thunder,” Liebling wrote. “There was no menace in the sound, and if it were not for plaques on the walls of houses in various parts of Paris that now commemorate the deaths of Frenchmen on that very night, I would find it difficult to believe there was real combat on the evening of my stroll.”
⁵⁶

He walked down to the Boulevard du Montparnasse where, a few hours before, he’d watched von Choltitz surrender. Liebling was looking for a favorite restaurant haunt, the Closerie des Lilas, that was little more than a hole-in-the-wall. The place was blacked out, but Liebling peered through a window and could see a blue night light glowing. He banged on the door and shouted,
en français
: “It’s an old customer! An old customer! An American! An American!” After a dozen bleats, the door opened a crack; the
patron
smiled and shook Liebling’s hand. There were no customers, only the man’s family and a waitress.

Hoping it would enhance his prospects of being fed, Liebling began reminiscing about the wonderful evenings he had enjoyed at the Closerie des Lilas in the old days. It worked. The waitress brought out a steaming terrine of potato soup. As Liebling dug in, the man’s wife apologetically said there would “only” be an omelet and a salad to follow. “The
patronne
, it was plain, had never sampled a K-ration,” Liebling wrote.

As they listened in the distance to the last throes of the Nazi subjugation of Paris, the man brought out a bottle of Bordeaux and said with a fiendish grin: “A lot of good it will do them.”
⁵⁷

The Bordeaux made everyone wax sentimental. Soon the proprietor was telling Liebling that in the darkest days of the Occupation, he had
squirreled away a flask of Pernod and a bottle of scotch to break out when the Germans were finally given the boot. He gave Liebling his choice. Joe went with the Black and White, knowing that he could drink more whiskey than a sweet liqueur.

They toasted Lafayette and de Gaulle, the FFI, and every Tommy and GI who’d set foot in France. Liebling drank enough to begin lamenting lost love. “A chagrin of love never forgets itself,” the waitress mused. “You must not make bile about it.”

When they drained the scotch it was time to say
bonne nuit
. Liebling wrote that he “took an effusive leave and went out in the dark street. The bars that I had passed earlier were still busy, but I had no inclination to enter. Any further drinking that night would have been a letdown.”
⁵⁸

Joe Liebling’s road to Paris had finally, magnificently, ended.

Seven days later he got to fulfill his dream, submitting to the
New Yorker
a letter from liberated Paris.

“For the first time in my life and probably the last,” his wondrous lede went, “I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy.”
⁵⁹

O
nce the lead C-47 cut its towrope, the glider carrying Walter Cronkite, Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, and a dozen other 101st Airborne staff officers began bucking over Holland’s flatlands. Everywhere Cronkite looked he could see white-striped gliders—dozens of them—poised to crash-land in the fields just west of the Meuse River outside the Dutch village of Zon. Suddenly the sky blackened with antiaircraft bursts; as his glider plummeted, Cronkite could hear artillery fire.

September 17, 1944, was a perfect afternoon for an airborne invasion: the wind was calm and the skies were overcast enough to make it tougher on enemy gunners. CBS’ Edward R. Murrow was also flying with American paratroopers—not in a glider, but in a C-47 paratroop transport whose pilot would return Murrow to London. To make his report crackle for listeners, Murrow had brought along a tape recorder.

“You can probably hear the snap as they check the lashings on the static
line,” Murrow’s report went. “Tracers are coming up! … We’re throttling back! … Every man is out now! I can see their chutes floating gracefully down. Near a windmill next to a church. They’re like nothing so much, as I said a minute ago, as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade.”
¹

Murrow’s future CBS colleague Cronkite, at that moment in Dutch airspace a few miles south, wasn’t conjuring up similes. Cronkite had somehow been under the impression that glider flight would be soothing. Sure, the landing might be rough; from the air, he had seen remnants of gliders splintered all over Normandy. But to be snuffed out while gliding might be a good way to go to heaven, he recalled thinking, “no roaring engine, just a nice silent glide into eternity.”
²

It was all a misnomer: the last thing gliders did was “glide.” Canvas-skinned American Waco gliders were held together by flimsy aluminum tubing. “The canvas cover beat against the aluminum,” the eighty-year-old Cronkite remembered in 1996, “and it was like being inside the drum at a Grateful Dead concert.”
³

Every bump while on a glider felt like a violent jolt. Cold air rushed in; the noise was so deafening that troopers had to communicate through shouts and gestures. Once freed from the towrope, glider pilots knew they were dead ducks to German gunners. They wanted to get on the ground pronto, so they pointed the nose downward and plunged, hitting the turf almost as vertically as horizontally. Many gliders crumpled on impact; pilots would deliberately crash the nose into the ground to get the troops out quicker. “If you ever have to go to war, don’t go by glider,” Cronkite the daredevil volunteered later.
⁴

The Cronkite-McAuliffe craft thudded into a mucky potato field, flipping over and breaking up as piles of dirt came pouring in. Helmets came flying off; men grabbed the first ones they saw in the manic scramble to get away from artillery fire. If McAuliffe yelled his soon-to-be-trademark “Nuts!” Cronkite missed it.

A pair of American gliders had, seconds before, collided in midair; as Cronkite got his bearings, the sky was raining guns and human beings. Cronkite hurried toward what he’d been told in a premission briefing was
the rallying point—a drainage ditch on the periphery of the landing zone. After a few moments, he glanced behind and discovered a string of enlisted men from other gliders following him.

One of them shouted: “Hey, Lieutenant, are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” I shouted back that I wasn’t a lieutenant; I was a war correspondent. With a full GI vocabulary of unrepeatable words he advised me, rather strongly, that I was wearing a helmet with an officer’s big white stripe down its back. It was the only chance I had to lead troops in the whole war. I didn’t do badly. The drainage ditch was that way.
⁵

Enemy artillery fire along that stretch of the Meuse and its Wilhelmina Canal didn’t last long. Within minutes of “Cronkite’s platoon” rendezvousing next to the gully, a squadron of P-51s bore down on the German gun positions. Within Cronkite’s eyesight the Mustangs dove on four enemy batteries, knocking them out.

Just as he had three months earlier over the Channel and Normandy, Cronkite anxiously scanned the skies. But at least at that point in Holland, even with enemy air bases practically next door, there were no German planes in the air.

C
RONKITE HAD BEEN ON THE
periphery of ground combat in Morocco and Normandy but never in the thick of it. Until September 16, the day before the Holland mission, he had steeled himself to arrive on the Continent via parachute. After the disappointment of Operation Transfigure, Cronkite and the First Allied Airborne Army had on eight separate occasions gone on alert, he told Betsy. Several times, Cronkite had scrambled to an East Anglia airfield, reacquainting himself with his equipment and rehearsing the drop and roll, only to have the mission scrubbed at the last instant because Allied ground troops were moving too rapidly. The First Allied
Airborne’s landing targets kept on getting swallowed up by onrushing Tommies and GIs.
⁶

But the Holland campaign was different. Christened Operation Market Garden, it was the brainchild of Bernard Law Montgomery and his able lieutenant, General Miles C. Dempsey. Monty may have been ultracautious in the trenches, but his plan for Market Garden was, as Chester Wilmot put it, “bold and unorthodox”
⁷
—perhaps
too
bold and unorthodox. Monty’s scheme was to springboard the Allies over the Rhine and into Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley, long SHAEF’s ultimate aim.

To muscle into Germany, Monty urged Ike to authorize an airborne drop—code-named Market—against a series of bridges on five different waterways in Holland, including the Rhine (the Dutch called it the Rijn) farther north, along the German-Dutch border. If it worked, as Wilmot maintained, Monty could cut in two the German defenses in Holland, outflank Hitler’s Siegfried Line entrenchments, and create what Monty called a potent “pencil thrust” into the Ruhr.
⁸

The refortified First Allied Airborne Army—the U.S. 82nd and the 101st Airborne, the Polish First, and the British First Airborne—were tasked with seizing and holding the bridges for four, perhaps five days while the armored British XXX Corps—code-named Garden—rolled north through a narrow corridor in Holland. Once linked, the Allied units would turn east and push into Germany. Cronkite and the 101st were assigned five of the southernmost bridges in and around Eindhoven, just below Zon on the Meuse.

Eisenhower, fearing a stalemate, was desperate to penetrate deep into Germany ahead of cold weather. In early September ’44, SHAEF was still hopeful that Germany would surrender before year’s end. The Wehrmacht, after all, was in panicked retreat on both its western and eastern fronts. Ike and Bradley decided not to use precious space on supply trucks to send winter coats and gloves to the men at the front. The brass was gambling that thicker clothing wouldn’t be needed.

Another factor that argued for Market Garden, at least in Eisenhower’s mind, was the gutsy performance of Allied airborne troops in Normandy.
Despite being scattered all over northern France the night before D-Day, the paratroopers had succeeded in achieving their objectives—and then some. The horrific airborne casualty figures that Leigh-Mallory and others had predicted had not materialized. Eisenhower had created the First Allied Airborne Army six weeks earlier to handle the exact exigency that Monty and Dempsey were now outlining.

Ike earlier had wanted to use the First Airborne to try to leapfrog the Maastricht–Aachen perimeter—but Bradley, closer to the action, rejected it as too risky. The special airbone unit was Ike’s creation—and after all the frustrating, on-again, off-again moments of the past month, the Supreme Commander was determined to deploy it.

Ike green-lighted Market Garden on September 10—just seven days before it was scheduled to jump off. That didn’t give airborne officers much time to plan a drop more complicated than D-Day’s. Nearly 1,500 C-47 transports and five hundred gliders were scheduled to take off from two dozen different British airdromes in two gigantic streams, each escorted by more than 1,200 fighters. Before that a thousand Allied heavy and medium bombers would soften up antiaircraft defenses en route to the Netherlands and around the key bridges. In all, twenty thousand paratroopers would be dropped or glided into Holland, almost all in broad daylight. It was the first time the Allies had attempted a big paratroop drop in daytime.
⁹

T
HIS TIME
, C
RONKITE AND EVERYONE
was assured that “the party was on.” The Market Garden party stayed on even
after
G-2 unearthed evidence—including surveillance photographs—that SS
Panzer
units were now stationed precariously close to Allied drop zones. And the party stayed on even though the drop zone for the northernmost British paratroopers was changed at the last minute, to one fully ten miles from their objective, the bridge over the Maas at Arnhem.