Assignment to Hell (17 page)

Cronkite the Navy correspondent had gotten lucky twice over: with the
Wakefield
exclusive and now by being the first reporter back from Morocco. But both times he’d earned his good fortune. More importantly, he was earning a reputation as the kind of correspondent who would take serious risks to gain an edge on the competition. He woke up every day back then, he once remarked, determined to “beat the hell” out of AP.

T
HERE WEREN’T ANY NEWSREEL CAMERAS
around on November 9, 1942, when Joe Liebling left England on a boat “in an atmosphere thick with fog and mystery.”
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For two weeks Liebling and other U.S. correspondents stationed in Britain had been on notice that they could leave at any instant for a new war zone. When news broke over the radio on November 8 that Allied
troops had invaded French North Africa, it pained Liebling. The last thing the French devotee wanted to see was American infantrymen fighting Frenchmen.

Earlier in the war, Liebling had hoped to land a job with a big daily. But sticking with the
New Yorker
proved fortuitous: no newspaper editor would have let Liebling be Liebling like Harold Ross did.

En route to Africa, Liebling shared cramped quarters with a passel of American reporters, including Ernie Pyle of Scripps Howard, Red Mueller of
Newsweek
, Bill Lang of
Time
and
Life
, Gault MacGowan of the
New York Sun
, and Ollie Stewart of the
Baltimore Afro-American
. Liebling saw in Stewart a kindred spirit. “‘Where do you hope we land at?’ [Stewart] asked me. ‘Someplace where resistance has ceased,’ I told him. That established a perfect rapport.” They were on a big troopship transporting Air Force personnel to the Mediterranean.

Two days before the ship departed, Liebling developed ill-timed gout. “There were 52 nurses who got a first impression of decrepitude that I never consequently had a chance to overcome, because each was immediately appropriated by three Air Corps officers,” Liebling recalled. After eleven bumpy but uneventful days at sea, they docked at Mers El Kébir in Algiers, then traveled by jeep to Oran.

On Liebling’s first night in Oran he witnessed a light air raid. But that was the only action he saw for the next few weeks. He spent the better part of a month training with the First Infantry Division, the men who had captured Oran after two days of fighting. “The First had many enlisted men from the sidewalks of the Bronx and Brooklyn, and rich New York accents had new charms for me in Africa,” wrote Liebling.

“‘Give da passwoy,’ I once heard a First Division sentinel challenge.

“‘Nobody told me nuttin,’ the challenged soldier replied.

“‘What outfitchas outuv?’

“‘Foy Signals.’

“‘Whynchas get on da ball? Da passwoy is “tatched roof.”’

“‘What is it mean?’

“‘How do I know? Whaddaya tink I yam, da Quiz Kids?’”

Despite diction that seemed lifted out of a Bowery Boys short, or perhaps because of it, the Big Red One “looked and acted and talked like a good division even then,” Liebling wrote.
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The rest of the U.S. Army, Liebling wasn’t so sure about. He was appalled at the official Allied policy of coddling Vichy leaders and the Algerian plutocrats who happily embraced the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. Under Vichy, Algerian aristocrats had imposed their own version of the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws, robbing Jews of property and bank accounts and denying many of them the opportunity to hold jobs. Hundreds of innocent Jews and anti-Vichy Frenchmen who had put their lives on the line in backing the Allied cause remained in Algerian jails despite the “liberation.”

To Liebling’s disgust, the landowners lavishly entertained the top U.S. commander, General Lloyd R. Fredendall, seeking to persuade the high command that a stable Algeria depended on continued repression of Jews.

Most Algerians, they told Fredendall over rare wines, distrusted Jews as much as the Germans did. Many members of Algeria’s ruling class were, in fact, brownshirts; their “
sturm
duds,” as Liebling scorned them, had been secreted away once U.S. warships had appeared.
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Liebling surmised that turning a blind eye toward Algeria’s treatment of Jews was a quid pro quo, part of the rapprochement that Eisenhower struck with Vichy strongman Jean Louis Darlan. Consummated after weeks of covert negotiations, the Darlan Deal, as it became known in the American press, called for North Africa’s Vichy to remain in power in exchange for a laying down of arms and “cooperation” in the fight against the Axis. Darlan, an admiral in the French navy, had become rich carrying out Hitler’s sordid agenda along the southern Mediterranean. In the words of one U.S. official, Darlan was “a needle-nosed, sharp-chinned little weasel.”
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At one point in their back-and-forth, an exasperated Eisenhower wished aloud for an assassin to bag the weasel.

For three days after the landings, Darlan defied Eisenhower, only cutting a deal when a combined German/Italian army, from their stronghold across the sea in Sicily, invaded Tunisia, signaling Hitler’s contempt for Vichy’s grasp of French North Africa. The Darlan pact was “not very
pretty,” declared the exiled leader of France’s patriots, General Charles de Gaulle. “I think that before long the retching will take place.”
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De Gaulle proved prophetic: the retching soon began in earnest. It wasn’t just liberal commentators who denounced the ploy: Conservative papers editorialized against it, too. The Darlan Deal not only soured many Americans on the North African campaign, but also colored their perceptions of the officer who engineered it. Enabling Darlan hadn’t been Eisenhower’s idea; he and his aide-de-camp, Mark Clark, had merely carried out the wishes of London and Washington. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted the French armed services—especially its still-potent navy—neutered and believed that accommodating Darlan was the best way to achieve it. It depressed Eisenhower that his good name had gotten dragged into the morass.

Throughout the campaign, the Supreme Commander was forced to spend too much time working political levers and too little time worrying about battlefield exigencies. Ike was so consumed by political matters, in fact, that he didn’t arrive on the front lines in Tunisia until Christmas Eve, which, by fiendish coincidence, was just hours before Darlan was assassinated.
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Darlan was supposedly done in by a demented young Algerian. Joe Liebling and Hal Boyle, however, weren’t the only Americans who suspected a broader cabal. Overnight, without benefit of a trial or collecting any evidence, a tribunal ordered the suspect executed. When news of Darlan’s death reached headquarters, one U.S. officer was heard to exult, “Merry Christmas.”

Boyle was in Algiers with the Allied press pack when the rumor hit that the Vichy leader had been murdered. Hal’s colleagues scrambled off to the Allied public relations office. But Boyle, sensing that reporters would just get the runaround, hung back. With instincts honed from covering Kansas City street crime, he slipped across the road to where he knew Darlan’s chauffeur belonged to a motor pool. Sure enough, Darlan’s driver told Boyle that the admiral had been shot and killed.

Boyle had an exclusive on one of the biggest stories of the war to date. He ran back to his typewriter, rapped out his news flash, and raced it over
to the censor in the public relations office. The nervous PRO didn’t know what to make of Boyle’s story; the youngster embargoed it for a couple of hours while he tracked down his superiors. By then the competition had confirmed the story, too, but Boyle’s piece should by rights have been transmitted first, since he’d been at the head of the queue. “Bejeezus if the PRO didn’t rule there should be a drawing among the agencies to see which story got first priority,” reminisced Don Whitehead. “The AP boys screamed like demented banshees at this injustice but AP lost the draw and with it Hal’s beat.”
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The next day Boyle filed a piece that went as far as censors would allow in questioning the abrupt execution. “There was no official explanation…why [the accused] was condemned by a court-martial instead of being tried in civil courts,” Boyle wrote.

AP and Boyle never got the kudos they deserved on the Darlan story. In a way, his exclusive-that-wasn’t typified Boyle’s experience in North Africa. Most correspondents enjoyed interviewing soldiers in the field, but Boyle soon made it an art form. He drove his jeep companions crazy by constantly jumping out to grab a few words with the men marching by.
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GIs got a kick out of Boyle because he was wickedly funny and, like the feisty customers who had come into his old man’s meat shop, could curse with abandon. Boyle filled one notebook after another with the conversations he had with soldiers.

Yet for all his regular-guy bonhomie, Boyle never became as celebrated as Ernie Pyle. At the outset of Torch, Boyle was, like Cronkite, just another wire service grunt, whereas Pyle had been a commentator of note for the better part of a decade. In 1934, the Scripps syndicate, delighted with a series of offbeat stories Ernie had penned while on a cross-country trip for its
Washington Daily News
, commissioned Pyle to travel the back roads of Depression-era America. Pyle’s pieces on everything from his own hypochondria to Alaskan gold miners and the hobo who painted watercolors in a hovel behind the Memphis city dump were much admired.
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Ernie took that same common-man approach to his early accounts of American fighting men in North Africa, soon becoming GI Joe’s favorite reporter. Pyle put a human face on war, commiserating with officers and enlisted men
fresh off the front lines or cracking wise with the beleaguered cook trying to keep a chow line fed. From day one, Pyle was careful to identify everyone’s hometown and weave a heartwarming story about the GI’s family and peacetime life. His column became an overnight sensation; every week, it seemed, dozens of papers began subscribing to Scripps.

Yet the irony is that Pyle didn’t arrive in North Africa until two weeks after Hal Boyle, Walter Cronkite, and other reporters had risked their lives in landing operations. By the time Pyle waded ashore, the nearest fighting was hundreds of miles away. Moreover, Boyle had already established his own Everyman style and nonchalant rapport with infantrymen by the time Pyle got close to the front. Boyle thumbed rides in jeeps and tanks so often that he soon earned the nickname Hal the Hitchhiker.

The difference between them was that Pyle was a known commodity with a burgeoning national platform. Boyle, on the other hand, was still trying to establish himself. And he was handicapped by AP’s insistence that he be identified as “Harold V. Boyle,” a starchy byline that made him sound like anything but a regular guy. It wasn’t until well into 1943 that AP finally granted the reporter’s plea to become “Hal Boyle.” Pyle, by contrast, became famous so quickly in North Africa that when entertainer Al Jolson came through on a USO tour, everywhere Jolson went he was asked if he knew “Ernie.”

Pyle was only in his early forties but seemed much older. He was elfin and wan. Sallow-skinned, he barely weighed a hundred pounds and was almost never without a lit cigarette and a smoker’s hack. Yet Pyle’s veneration of the American fighting man was so widely admired and imitated, A. J. Liebling wrote after the war, that Ernie had “contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, [Pyle] added GI Joe, the suffering but triumphant American infantryman.”
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Ernie’s notoriety came at a price. The more Pyle saluted the brave men in foxholes, the more his editors insisted on eyewitness accounts from the front. Being in close proximity to combat scared most journalists, but it absolutely petrified Pyle. War reporting, Liebling observed, was an “adventure”
for some correspondents and an “enthrallment” for the likes of Ernest Hemingway. But for Pyle it was “unalleviated misery.” Artillery fire left Hal the Hitchhiker as shaken as anyone—but Boyle was able to mask it with jocularity and another tug on his flask. For Pyle, who suffered from melancholia, it was harder.

Boyle and Pyle finally met, the Missourian remembered, at a seedy Oran hotel, where Pyle lay on a bed “mopping his nose and gently cursing the people who had reported that Africa was a warm country.”
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Hal got a laugh out of Pyle by saying, “I’m writing for the people who look over the shoulders of the people reading Ernie Pyle’s column.”
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Throughout the war, Boyle liked to refer to himself as the “poor man’s Ernie Pyle”—a phrase later expropriated by Hemingway.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF HIS
spate of stories about Darlan’s murder, Boyle filed a lighthearted piece about the arrival of the first batch of female nurses and WAAC officers in North Africa. It was a fat pitch—and the female-obsessed Boyle hit it out of the park. His story got nice pickup in the States, including the front page of the
Washington Post
.

“The appearance at the officers’ mess of the young women had immediate repercussions,” Boyle wrote. “When they first entered the long private dining room, looking as neat and fresh in their military garb as a Monday morning wash, all conversation halted momentarily. Heads of generals and second lieutenants alike turned as if they were on the same pivot to watch the women march a little self-consciously to their table. Gray-haired colonels, who usually gnaw their rations in grumpy austerity, dusted off their military gallantry and shamelessly sabotaged officers of lesser rank to get seats near the newcomers.”

Two correspondents—one of them almost certainly Boyle—scored a coup by getting all five WAAC officers out to dinner at a Tunisian restaurant. “Army Air Corps officers also were taken along after they begged to join the party and pledged they would pay for the food, buy the wine, and get the correspondents a free airplane ride home after the war.

“‘Listen, if you’ll fix me up with a date with that pretty little blonde—the
lieutenant with the dimples—I’ll wrap you up a bomber right now,’ said one flier, ‘and what’s more I’ll give you a private hangar to keep it in.’”
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