Assignment to Hell (45 page)

Omar Bradley had hoped to take Cherbourg by D-Day plus four or five. But just as Caen to the southeast had proved an elusive objective for Bernard Montgomery and the British Second Army, the march to Cherbourg became chaotic for Bradley’s able lieutenant, General J. Lawton Collins and his VII Corps. Every few yards, it seemed, there was another hedgerow to punch through, another machine gun nest to silence, another minefield to mark and sidestep. The Germans were fighting furiously; they knew that, given the Allies’ utter dominance of sea and air, there would be no chance of a German Dunkirk, of their escaping Cherbourg via the Channel.

Collins had been handpicked by Eisenhower and Bradley for this moment. The forty-eight-year-old Collins had the one irreplaceable asset for which the Supreme Command was looking: combat experience. On Guadalcanal, Collins had moved his men with such speed that the press had dubbed him Lightning Joe; fortunately for Collins, the nickname stuck.

Operation Overlord, the D-Day master plan, called for Collins’ VII Corps to strike directly at Cherbourg by moving north from just inland of Utah Beach. But it soon became apparent that large numbers of enemy troops were reinforcing the northern part of the Cotentin by slipping up its western periphery—and that the same area could eventually serve as an escape route if it weren’t cut off. Bradley did what he did best: adapt his strategy. Collins’ corps was sent west to lock down the peninsula’s base.

By June 16, Collins’ guys had battered their way through the Orglandes-St.-Sauveur region and reached the sea just east of Cherbourg.
⁴
The next day, GIs captured St.-Lô-d’Ourville and Barneville on the peninsula’s western coastal road, ripping enemy defenses in two.
⁵
Still, the Germans held on. In Brix, a tiny village on the Channel, American troops stumbled upon a cache of unarmed V-1 rocket bombs and what they later deduced was a V-2 launch site.

With Rooney and AP’s Don Whitehead among the correspondents
shadowing its advance elements, the Americans cracked Cherbourg’s outer rim on Tuesday, June 20—D-Day plus fourteen. From a distance of some four miles, Whitehead and Rooney could hear a “thunder of explosions.”
⁶
The Germans had begun their systematic demolition of Cherbourg’s port facilities—the very scenario that Eisenhower and Bradley had wanted to avoid. The German dynamite was so deadly that it took nearly three months for Allied engineers to get Cherbourg’s port back up and running. Against the distant roar of piers and buildings blowing up, the VII Corps crept forward, buttressed by air attacks from Marauders and seaborne shelling.

The Americans were also aided by hundreds of French patriots. Some were hard-core members of the Maquis, some were veterans of the Great War, some were just ordinary peasants desperate to rid their home of the Hun. An American officer told Whitehead: “They drifted in by ones, twos, and threes, begging us to let them help in the capture of Cherbourg. They know the country well and we see no reason why they couldn’t help fight for their homes and country. They are in a weird assortment of uniforms, but they know how to fight.”
⁷

By June 21 the 314th Infantry had gotten close enough to cut off the Cherbourg–St.-Pierre-Église road east of town, tightening the noose. With the help of French scouts who’d watched the elaborate construction go on for years, the Americans also began to unearth a diabolical warren of tunnels, fortifications, and storage chambers. The Nazi genius for subterranean architecture (and other things) would become apparent as the war for Northern Europe went on—but it was at Fort du Roule in Cherbourg where it was first uncovered.

Fort du Roule was planted on a rugged promontory in the back end of Cherbourg. The Germans had taken the ancient Norman garrison and made it a near-impregnable bulwark. It dominated Cherbourg Harbor; the big guns protruding from its lower chambers were aimed seaward, but its upper floors had scores of mortars, artillery pieces, and automatic weapons encased in concrete pillboxes—all pointed landward.

It took many hours to control those sections of Fort du Roule visible to
the eye. But that was just the beginning: now GIs had to root out the soldiers entrenched in the fort’s subterranean lair. Collins’ guys had barged into the underground city through a hidden entrance at the top of the cliff.

There they encountered something out of a Buck Rogers comic strip: deep tunnels holding immense quantities of food, ammunition, and supplies, enough to keep thousands of men going for months. The Americans also unearthed an ingenious electrical lighting system, automatically controlled ventilators and water mains, and a huge overhead crane that moved heavy equipment and armaments from one side of the complex to the other. The main tunnel connecting the underground chambers was a marvel of engineering: two hundred yards deep and thirty-eight feet high. Its corridors featured elongated shelves crammed full of foodstuffs and ammunition, all worth, Whitehead reckoned, many millions of dollars.
⁸
Although it had been wired with dynamite, the Germans had curiously chosen not to blow up their underground fort, perhaps because so many men were still in it when the Second Battalion guys stormed inside.

Rooney happened upon Fort du Roule on June 27, the same afternoon that Collins, in halting French, handed the city back to its prewar mayor at a ceremony on the steps of the bomb-wrecked city hall. The
Stars and Stripes
reporter followed a set of railroad tracks leading to a hillside entrance protected by an electronically controlled metal barrier. Rooney gingerly approached, sure that he’d see German soldiers surrendering.

He saw soldiers emerging from the tunnel all right, but they were American GIs, grinning broadly as they hauled out box after box of the spoils of war. Most of it was booze, an incredible cache of thousands of cases of brandy, rare wines, champagne, sherry, and liqueurs that the Germans had stolen from the French and stored inside their cliffside hideaway. The liquor had been discovered the previous day and immediately reported to General Collins, who put it under armed guard while the big brass determined what ought to be done with it. Bradley, who took a dim view of alcohol abuse and worried about the specter of drunken GIs staggering around Cherbourg, bucked the decision to Eisenhower, who decided the only fair thing was to divide the hooch among all the divisions that had waged war up the Cotentin.

Collins’ lock on the liquor had been removed when Rooney arrived. Ecstatic GIs were loading their plunder onto trucks and jeeps. Rooney stared, incredulous: It was the first time he’d seen looting in action and the first time he’d heard “loot” used as a noun.
⁹

Fort du Roule’s alcohol was not the sort of swill that the average American grunt—or the average American reporter—knew much about. The correspondents taking it all in, Whitehead, Ernie Pyle, and INS’ Clark Lee, among them,
¹⁰
spied Rooney, remembered that he had a preppie pedigree, and began hectoring him to pick out some noteworthy hooch. But Rooney, then a teetotaler, was useless.

Clearly the moment called for a connoisseur.

Word was sent down the line that Liebling was to report to Fort du Roule posthaste. Fortunately, the
New Yorker
writer was nearby, having spent much of the previous two days interviewing Resistance leaders in the now-very-public FFI, Forces
françaises de l’intérieur
. Liebling must have arrived beaming like the Cheshire cat; he was quickly hustled down a tunnel, trailed by a phalanx of thirsty correspondents. Liebling had the time of his life pointing to this case of wine and that batch of cognac.

The GIs needed the diversion: Capturing Cherbourg had required almost three weeks and cost twenty-two thousand Allied casualties.
¹¹

When Hal Boyle finally arrived in France to stay two days after Cherbourg fell, among the first stories he filed, no doubt tipped off by his reporter buddies, was on the booze of Fort du Roule. On June 28, he wrote: “Some American soldiers believe the decline of German potency in Normandy is attributable to the deadly virulence of the Nazi army’s brand of cognac…. ‘It’s just bottled hangovers,’ said one soldier. ‘If the Germans drank that stuff regularly, it is no wonder we knocked them out of Cherbourg. We call it ‘Hitler tonic.’ One drink and you think you own the world.’”
¹²

General Bradley was given a half case of champagne from the Fort du Roule stash that he saved until after the war. Years later, he broke it out to celebrate the christening of his grandson.

I
T WAS ALONG THE
C
OTENTIN
where Andy Rooney got better acquainted with Joe Liebling. The two of them shared a room for three or four nights that late June in a three-story Cherbourg
maison
that had somehow escaped damage. Its stone facade was built almost on top of a narrow flagstone sidewalk not far from the heart of town.

The house’s residents were fortunate. Many of the people on the Cotentin returned to find their homes “ruined or ransacked,” Rooney noted.
¹³

Although Rooney had been a devoted reader of the
New Yorker
since his teens, he wasn’t all that familiar with Liebling’s reputation. “All I knew about Joe was that he couldn’t see very well and he was a gourmand who knew a great deal about food and boxing.” Rooney soon witnessed firsthand Liebling’s voracious—and oft-disturbing—appetites.

“I didn’t learn as much as I should have from Joe,” Rooney recalled. “He had such a strange and flawed personality that it didn’t occur to me at the time that he was as good as he was. We talked at night as if we were equals.”

Rooney got so comfortable in their ruminations, in fact, that he voiced his opinion that the quality of the
New Yorker
was going steadily downhill. “I don’t know how I latched onto so fashionable a criticism about something I knew so little about,” Rooney laughed a half century later. One particular night Liebling polished off a bottle of calvados, the fermented applejack that was the Norman equivalent of moonshine. Between slugs, Liebling shared with the twenty-five-year-old (and stone sober) Rooney the conviction that an artist should die at the peak of his obituary value. In what must have been an unsettling moment, Liebling volunteered that he was contemplating his own demise, since he felt he was cresting his own peak. Rooney was relieved the next morning when Liebling showed up for
le petit déjeuner
.

The
New Yorker
was hard to come by on the front lines, so Rooney didn’t get to read much of Liebling’s stuff. But after the war Rooney caught up with Joe’s brilliant wartime essays.

“I cringe with greatly delayed embarrassment,” Rooney wrote in his memoir, “at some of the things I said about writing and reporting in conversations with him.”
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Liebling not only loved lippy Irishmen, but also harbored a not so secret desire to be one himself. Joe no doubt enjoyed their conversations as much as Andy did.

L
IEBLING AND HIS MILITARY-ISSUE GARB
cut quite a striking figure in northern France. One First Division officer remembered: “The only Army pants big enough to button around the magisterial paunch left him with a vast, drooping seat behind a flapping void big enough to hold a beach umbrella. The legs of the pants were tucked into knee-high gaiters left over from the Spanish-American War, leading to a pair of thin-soled lounge-lizard civilian shoes.”
¹⁵

After LCI(L)-88 finished its postinvasion duties on D-Day plus five, Captain Bunny Rigg, with Liebling back on board after spending June 9 and 10 at Omaha Beach, returned to Weymouth to have the craft’s ramp winch repaired. Liebling spent the better part of two weeks in London, assembling his notes for what became his
New Yorker
homage to the heroes of Easy Red.

Joe got back to Normandy on June 24 and immediately hitched a ride to catch up to the GI advance on Cherbourg, which at that moment was the most climactic action in northern France. “A battle lurches along until it comes to a series of grinding jerks, like a train entering a Long Island Rail Road station,” Liebling wrote years later.