Assignment to Hell (2 page)

“Good heavens. How many?” I asked.

Eventually Lewis determined that there were twenty-seven John Murphys resting in ABMC gravesites: four in Margraten, Holland; three in Florence; two in Sicily; two in Normandy; two in Ardennes, France; one in Henri-Chapelle, Belgium; three in Honolulu; and ten in Manila.
¹

Twenty-seven?

World War II was so malignant that twenty-seven Americans named John Murphy are buried in ABMC cemeteries—and that doesn’t even count the John Murphys, like
our
John Murphy, resting elsewhere?

Lewis pointed out that a Sergeant John P. Murphy of New York, a member of the 299th Engineer Combat Battalion, happened to be buried at Normandy, in Plot I, Row Five, Grave Eighteen. He’d been killed on D-Day, too, not far from
our
John Murphy.

So the five of us set out through those sacred grounds to find Sergeant John P. Murphy’s gravestone. There’s something about that immaculately landscaped lawn, those thousands of pristine and geometrically precise white markers, that envelops you, that makes you feel large and small at the same time.

While we stood over Sergeant Murphy’s grave, I thought of Andy Rooney’s lovely hymn to the men interred at Colleville: “Even if you didn’t know anyone who died, the heart knows something the brain does not—and you weep.”
²

Too many of us still take the fight against Adolf Hitler and global Fascism for granted. We’re so familiar with the war’s ebb and flow—the “inevitable” Allied triumph over evil—that we’ve become inured to the sacrifice it demanded.

There was nothing inevitable about victory over Nazi Germany. It was accomplished against long odds through stirring leadership and incalculable suffering.

There was also nothing inevitable about the caliber of U.S. journalism in World War II. Much of the press coverage of America’s earlier conflicts—the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Great War of 1917–1918—had been tainted with “yellow,” appallingly shallow and propagandistic, usually concocted a healthy distance from the front lines.

Most World War II correspondents were of a different breed: conscientious journalists who insisted on being close to the action and reporting something resembling the truth. Even with intrusive censorship, the journalism they practiced during the war helped propel their postwar craft—and spawned the greatest era of press independence and integrity in American history.

We know now that Hitler’s blitzkrieg through France stopped soon after the Wehrmacht captured Paris. But the
New Yorker
’s A. J. Liebling didn’t know that when, with Stuka dive-bombers still terrorizing the French countryside, he jumped into a tiny Citroën with two other correspondents and lit out for Lisbon.

We know now that enemy resistance to the Allied landings in Morocco was comparatively light. But the Associated Press’ Hal Boyle didn’t know that when, in the dank chill of a November morning, he joined other petrified young Americans in shimmying onto a landing craft.

We know now that the Nazis were eventually pushed off the high ground surrounding the beach at Anzio. But the
New York Herald Tribune
’s
Homer Bigart didn’t know that as he spent two agonizing months on Anzio’s beachhead, constantly diving for cover as enemy gunners peppered it with artillery.

We know now that, after weeks of gruesome combat, the Germans retreated from St.-Lô in Normandy. But Staff Sergeant Andy Rooney of the
Stars and Stripes
didn’t know that when he was following GIs up savagely defended hills, dodging machine gun and mortar fire. Rooney’s bravery earned him a Bronze Star.

We know now that Hitler’s prized
Panzer
units eventually abandoned Holland. But United Press’ Walter Cronkite didn’t know that when his 101st Airborne glider crash-landed in Zon. The glider turned upside down as it slithered in a farm field, splintering in two. As Cronkite scrambled out, he could hear enemy artillery. It barely let up for weeks.

For every moment of joy in the struggle against Nazi Germany, there were dozens laced with profound grief. To be sure, covering the war to stop Hitler took journalistic skill. But mainly it took courage. It’s been an honor to tell their story.

So to Andy Rooney, who sadly left us at age ninety-two just as the manuscript was nearing completion, and to his friends and family, to the friends and families of Walter Cronkite, A. J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle, to the families of the twenty-eight blessed John Murphys, and to the hundreds of other Allied heroes celebrated in these pages, the Gay family of Vienna, Virginia, would like to say thank you.

Timothy M. Gay
December 2011

T
he June sun had barely crept over the soggy English countryside when Captain Robert W. Sheets, his nine crew members, and their surprise guest began crawling through the belly of the B-17G Flying Fortress
Shoo Shoo Baby.
Launched at Molesworth, a Cambridgeshire airdrome sixty miles north of London, that morning’s mission would mark the hellion pilot’s twenty-first raid over enemy territory.
¹

Bob Sheets loved living on the edge. On a whim four years earlier, sans passport, he had ditched the University of Oregon to swab decks on a freighter bound for the Philippines. Right after Pearl Harbor he had enlisted, but balked when the Army groomed him toward tanks; instead, he insisted on enrolling in flight school.
²
Now, just six months removed from pilot training, the wiry towhead with the sly wit had become a balls-out bomber jock for the Eighth Army Air Force. Every time Sheets went wheels up, he was bucking survival odds—and he and his crew knew it.

His boys had come to believe their new “Fort” was a talisman;
Shoo Shoo Baby
was named after a bluesy and bittersweet tune by the Andrews Sisters about a serviceman kissing his girl goodbye. Painted on the nose’s
starboard side was the obligatory “bomber gal” provocatively stretched out in a peignoir, her auburn tresses almost brushing the crude block lettering of S
HOO
S
HOO
B
ABY
. Scrawled on the port side was their squadron’s mascot, Warner Brothers wise guy Bugs Bunny, coolly munching a carrot while standing atop a plummeting bomb.
³

Bugs, the temptress, and S
HOO
S
HOO
B
ABY
⁴
shooed away flak and checker-toothed Focke-Wulf 190s and Messerschmitt (Me) 109s and the twin-engine Me 110s—or surely that’s what the men told themselves over pints of beer at Molesworth’s Cross Keys tavern when, battered and bloodied, they made it back from the Third Reich while so many pals in less providential planes hadn’t.

They were proud to belong to the 303rd Bomb Group, a rough-and-tumble outfit that defiantly called itself Hell’s Angels. The men of the 303rd may have been hell in the air, but they knew how to operate on the ground, too. More than beer guzzling went on at Cambridgeshire pubs: Molesworth produced more marriages between Englishwomen and American servicemen than any U.S. air base in Great Britain.
⁵

S
HEETS AND HIS CREW HAD
been introduced to their visitor at the preflight briefing precisely three and a half hours after midnight.
⁶
They found themselves shaking hands with a stoop-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old United Press (UP) correspondent with a husky baritone, a Gable-ish mustache, and a pair of mischievous eyes that missed nothing—especially if wire service competitors were lurking. His name was Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr., and he’d spent so much time at Molesworth he considered the dingy base his second home in England.

Around airmen, Cronkite was the soul of affability, often springing for the next round of ale and offering a sympathetic ear as he scribbled their accounts of clashes with the Nazi war machine. But in the company of rivals—reporters with Associated Press (AP) and the International News Service (INS)—he could be aloof, often curt.
⁷
Rats churned inside the young Cronkite; with a deadline looming, he suffered no fool gladly. Instead of sitting square to an Olivetti or a portable Hermès as he typed his
dispatches, he tended to perch sideways, legs crossed, furiously puffing a pipe as his fingertips crashed over the keyboard. Literally every second counted when butting heads with the competition.