Assignment to Hell (4 page)

It was D-Day.

O
NE OF THE BOATS THAT
Shoo Shoo Baby
barreled past at sixteen thousand feet was LCI(L)-88, a Landing Craft Infantry, Large, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard and carrying an elite band of demolitionists from the Sixth Amphibious Naval Beach Battalion. At that precise moment, LCI(L)-88 was hovering a mile or so off a beach Allied planners had christened Omaha.

Bracing themselves against choppy seas, LCI(L)-88’s officers were standing on the bridge, peering through field glasses, trying to divine how the first wave of seaborne troops—infantrymen from the U.S. Army’s Blue and Gray Division, the Twenty-ninth—was faring. From that distance it was tough to tell, but it didn’t look good. Huge plumes of smoke billowed from German artillery and 88s, the deadly accurate antiaircraft and antitank guns. Every few seconds there was a concussive
whoosh!
as enemy gunners zeroed in on the boats in front of them. The splashes were getting closer and louder.

At exactly 0735—sixty-five minutes after H-Hour—LCI(L)-88’s job was to clear a path for the next wave of invaders scheduled to hit the heart of Omaha. Its mission was to deposit the Navy demolition team, expert engineers who’d been trained to dismantle the insidious obstacles that German commander Erwin Rommel had planted to repel an attack. Allied planners called that section of the beach, apparently without irony, Easy Red.

Perched next to the officers was a rotund thirty-nine-year-old writer with thick wire-rim glasses named Abbott Joseph Liebling. Liebling, scion of a wealthy New York family, owned a set of binoculars so powerful that he loaned them to the LCI(L)’s captain that morning.

The essayist was A.J. to readers of the
New Yorker
magazine but Joe to his friends—and in five days on board the LCI(L), four of them spent docked at Weymouth, England, Liebling had made a lot of new friends. The Coast Guard and Navy men were tickled that an intellectual with an Ivy League pedigree could talk sports—especially prizefighting—with such relish. Liebling not only knew more about boxing than most cornermen, but loved to imitate his heroes, inducing howls as his chubby carcass pranced and jabbed, bobbed and weaved. He was also a dead-on mimic, the kind of guy who could eavesdrop on a snatch of conversation and instantly spoof both ends.

One of the crew members who got a kick out of Liebling was a chunky youngster from the District of Columbia. The other Coasties needled the D.C. kid about his habit of beginning every letter to a girl back home with “Well, Hazel, here I am again.”
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The Coast Guardsman who served as the LCI(L)’s coxswain—the swabbie who lowered the ramp and plunged into the water to secure the anchor—had aspirations to be a journalist.

Among the seamen in the Navy’s amphibious force (or, as the Coasties kiddingly called it, the “ambiguous farce”
⁴⁰
) was a twenty-two-year-old radioman from Kansas City, Kansas, named John Murphy. Young Jack was the kid brother of Associated Press columnist Hal Boyle’s sister-in-law. During the North African campaign earlier in the war, Boyle and Liebling had become jeep mates and drinking buddies. Thanks to Jack and his cohorts, Normandy would soon reunite them.

Liebling was the least pretentious-looking correspondent in the ETO. Combat reporters weren’t necessarily matinee idols, but most tried to dress the part, sporting an aviator’s scarf or a tanker’s jacket or some other item that projected a martial image. Fashion affectation, though, was lost on Liebling, whose military-issue slacks fit so loosely they flapped in the breeze. Three decades later, fellow correspondent Don Whitehead remembered that Liebling “managed to look like a large, uncomfortable sack of potatoes.”
⁴¹

The potato-shaped boxing aficionado had begged the Army for an invasion assignment with foot soldiers. Liebling wanted to coldcock Hitler’s
Festung Europa
(Fortress Europe) with his First Division pals from
Tunisia—and had a personal invitation from the First’s commanding general, Clarence Huebner, to hit the beachhead at Omaha.
⁴²
Many of the men in the Big Red One, as the First Division was known, were native New Yorkers, ethnic guys with “Toidy-Toid Street” accents and attitudes to match—the streetwise cockiness that Liebling loved to celebrate in print.

After the Army press brass refused to honor Huebner’s proffer, Liebling accused them of perpetrating reverse snobbery. Nobody wanted to hand a plum invasion spot to some fat egghead from a snooty rag, he crabbed. But Liebling was lucky: Two old friends, John Mason Brown, a once and future Broadway critic, and Barry Bingham, a prewar reporter with the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, were handling the Navy’s invasion-day press relations. Lieutenants Brown and Bingham arranged for a berth for Liebling on LCI(L)-88, one of the first large landing crafts scheduled to hit Omaha.
⁴³

When Francophile Liebling, who was almost as enamored of northern France as he was of New York City, learned four days before the invasion that Normandy was the objective, he remembered feeling “as if, on the eve of an expedition to free the North from a Confederate army of occupation, I had been told that we would land on the southern shore of Long Island and drive inland toward Belmont Park.”
⁴⁴

Liebling had no idea until he arrived at Weymouth that the boat was skippered by an acquaintance. Before the war, Coast Guard captain Henry Kilburn “Bunny” Rigg had been a prizewinning sailor; on occasion, Rigg would write up his seafaring adventures for none other than the
New Yorker
. Liebling didn’t know Rigg well, but it’s likely he viewed Bunny’s presence as a heartening omen.
⁴⁵

Rigg’s gangplank greeting was so nonchalant it was “as if we were going for a cruise to Block Island,” Liebling wrote. But Rigg wasn’t leading a pleasure outing: the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had made it clear to journalists that once aboard a boat bound for the Channel, there was no getting off. The LCI(L) was a marvel of design: Its flat bottom and collapsible ramp permitted it to run right onto a beach.

Liebling’s prewar critiques of New York’s dining scene had betrayed a weakness for the good life. He was both gourmet and gourmand, and the
thin gruel of service chow took some getting used to. On his first night on LCI(L)-88, before sitting down to a repast of frankfurters and beans, Liebling made mental notes as Rigg and the commanding officer of the beach battalion rolled out a remarkably detailed map of Omaha, buttressed by reconnaissance photographs of Easy Red that showed where the Germans had dug in pillboxes and artillery guns. Rigg pointed out a blockhouse on the bluff overlooking the beach, saying they could expect menacing fire from that area.

Eleven months earlier, the captain and his crew had weathered their share of action during the dicey landing at Licata in Sicily. Liebling was also comforted by the knowledge that the Coast Guard and Navy men had, together, been rehearsing their movements for weeks.

LCI(L)-88’s goal, Rigg chuckled, was to give the Navy boys a “dry-ass landing.” Knowing that Liebling was worried about enemy guns as the craft maneuvered near the beach, the Navy commander, a Washington, D.C., attorney and Annapolis grad named Eugene Carusi, assured the writer that LCI(L)s tended “to make a fairly small target bow on.”
⁴⁶
Carusi was Liebling’s kind of guy: He detested military chickenshit. His men loved him for it; they proudly called themselves Carusi’s Thieves.
⁴⁷

R
IGG KNEW THAT
C
ARUSI’S THEORY
would be tested as, staring through Liebling’s binoculars at 0720, he sought the correct alleyway to Easy Red. If the team that had stealthily surveyed Omaha’s attack routes before dawn had done its job, LCI(L)-88 would come across colored buoys marking its path through the underwater mines, iron barriers, and concrete blocks. Not much went according to plan that morning at Omaha. But remarkably, the painted buoys were bobbing almost exactly where Rigg had anticipated.

The Coast Guard captain turned to his staff and barked, “Mister Liebling will take his station on the upper deck during action.” It was Rigg’s felicitous way of telling his friend to stay the hell out of the way. Once topside, Joe watched Rigg send the craft surging toward the buoy-marked opening “like a halfback going into a hole in the line.” Rigg had spotted,
dead ahead, two “spider” mines attached to a block of sunken concrete. He slowed LCI(L)-88 to ensure that it didn’t go anywhere near the tentacles sprouting out of the mines; the slightest brush would have been catastrophic.
⁴⁸

D-Day’s beauty and pathos is distilled into what Liebling glimped that morning from his aerie on LCI(L)-88. After the boat sped back up, it soon encountered capsized vessels, a burning LCT (Landing Craft, Tank), and infantrymen floating in bloodied water, many with their heads submerged. Other GIs were struggling in water up to their necks. Fourteen years later, Liebling was to write of the men in the water off Easy Red: “They seemed as permanently fixed in time and space as those Marines in the statue of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima.”
⁴⁹

Tracer bullets, each with a descending arc, were zinging all around as Rigg swung LCI(L)-88 to the right. With machine gun bullets battering the boat, Liebling found himself shoulder to shoulder with a pharmacist’s mate. The two flattened their backs against the pilothouse and sucked in their guts. Artillery explosions were ripping into the water; it felt like at any second the boat would founder. Noxious smoke was everywhere; the noise was deafening.

Moments later Liebling felt the craft run aground. He craned his neck toward the bow and saw that the landing ramp somehow, miraculously, was already down; his pal, the coxswain, clad only in bathing trunks and a helmet, had leapt into the surf. In spite of the pandemonium, the Navy men were rushing forward, rifles and demolition equipment in hand. Liebling could hear an officer, probably Carusi, chanting, “Move along now! Move along!” as if, Liebling wrote, “he were unloading an excursion boat at Coney Island. But the men needed no urging; they were moving without a sign of flinching.”
⁵⁰
Much of the enemy firing, Liebling surmised, seemed to be coming from the blockhouse on the right that Rigg had singled out.

Something scratched at the back of Liebling’s neck. Fearing the worst, he grabbed at it, and discovered that the ship’s cargo rigging, knocked loose by machine gun fire, had fallen around his shoulders “like a character in an old slapstick movie about a spaghetti factory.”
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As Liebling rid himself of the rope, he glanced toward the stern. There he took in “a tableau
that was like a recruiting poster.” Three enlisted men, one of them a black wardroom steward, were manning a twenty-millimeter rapid-firing gun. Fluttering behind them was a crisp American flag that Rigg had broken out for the occasion.

Amid the din, Liebling heard the welcome rattling of the stern anchor being dislodged. Seconds later the boat was rocked by a blast. It was, Liebling later learned, a seventy-five-millimeter enemy artillery shell that tore through the bulkhead and smashed through the ramp winch, disabling it.

“Pharmacist’s mates, go forward! Somebody’s hurt!” an officer yelled. Liebling’s pilothouse pal and another medic scurried below. A Coastie came running by and screeched in Liebling’s ear: “Two casualties in bow!”
⁵²
By now, they had swung clear of the beach and were chugging toward deeper water. Captain Rigg almost forgot about the spider mines as he yanked his craft away from danger; the LCI(L) limped toward a designated area mid-Channel where a hospital ship awaited.

To Liebling, whose ears ached and head throbbed, it had seemed like an eternity. But LCI(L)-88 had been anchored off Easy Red for just four excruciating minutes.
⁵³

A
S
L
IEBLING WORRIED ABOUT WHICH
of his shipmates had been wounded, his chum and acolyte, Staff Sergeant Andrew Aitken Rooney of the military publication the
Stars and Stripes
, was also aboard a warship headed for Normandy. Over dinners together at Fleet Street eateries like The Lamb and Lark, the
New Yorker
essayist had taken a shine to the kid reporter.
⁵⁴
The cocky Rooney must have reminded Liebling of the Irish pugs he loved to watch at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn.

At 0739 on D-Day, though, Rooney was still closer to Britain than France. He was billeted with a Fourth Division infantry unit floating a few miles out in the Channel. Rooney and his
Stars and Stripes
colleague Charles Kiley had been embedded with the Fourth nearly a week prior to the invasion; for the first few days, they had stayed in a Bristol couple’s home before transferring to the troopship in Bristol Harbour. Their British
hosts, in a gesture that touched Rooney and Kiley, had scrimped on ration points to treat their Yank guests to morning coffee—which they mangled by making with milk, not water.

Although it was situated on the Atlantic, not the Channel, Bristol was nevertheless a major invasion staging area and embarkation point. To get to Normandy, ships launched from Bristol had to steam west around the promontory at Land’s End before reversing course.

The men on Rooney’s boat were scheduled to come ashore at the assault’s westernmost beach, code-named Utah, on D-Day plus four. Rooney’s section of Utah was some twelve miles west and south of where Rigg and Liebling had eluded Omaha’s spider mines.

Like his friend Cronkite, Rooney had been covering the U.S. bombing campaign against Hitler almost from its outset. A former Colgate University lineman, Rooney was a pugnacious GI who had trouble keeping his lips zipped around superiors. Before being transferred to the
Stars and Stripes
in the fall of ’42, his stint in the Army had been marked by one contretemps after another with higher-ups.

Upon receiving his draft notice in the summer of ’41, Rooney had been assigned to an artillery unit that was eventually sent to North Africa. Fortunately for the upstate New York kid, by then he was in England carrying a steno pad, not in Tunisia hauling a howitzer.