Assignment to Hell (51 page)

“Yes,” she recalled. “There were no movies that night.”
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Instead of watching a Humphrey Bogart potboiler, reporters sat in the shed and witnessed an eyes-only briefing of the Allies’ pending offensive. It was called Operation Cobra, Bradley explained, and was a modification of what had been planned all along to “stove in,” as Liebling put it, Hitler’s left wing in Normandy.

Bradley began by swearing everyone to secrecy, then prefaced his presentation with a typically self-effacing remark: “I may be sticking my neck out in predicting it,” but this operation would effectively destroy the German Seventh Army. Using boxing imagery that delighted Liebling, Bradley proceeded to spell out the plan.

General [Joe] Collins’ VII Corps, so reinforced that it virtually constituted an army—four infantry and two armored divisions, I think—was to make the strike, amputating the arm that [General Charles] Gerhardt [of the 29th Division] had bound off. Then Patton’s Third Army was to come into official being—it already existed incognito, behind the First Army line—and race through the hole south and west into Brittany. (The plan worked even better than that, of course, but a fighter starting a
combination of blows can’t know in advance the other fellow’s capacity to absorb them.)
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This was no mere feint, Bradley said, but a real haymaker: an all-out pummeling designed to flatten the Wehrmacht in northern France. The American breakout, Bradley said, was being carefully coordinated with Monty’s renewed Operation Goodwood. If everything worked, Bradley’s right hook and Monty’s left cross would trap the enemy southeast of St.-Lô.

Pyle, Boyle, and Rooney were seated near Liebling in Mme. Hamel’s shed that night, too. The four reporters had long admired Bradley and had seen the fruits of his leadership on two continents. But they didn’t often get to see Bradley, logistician extraordinaire, in his element. It was only the third time that Liebling had watched Bradley deliver a lecture. The first occasion was in the spring of ’43 in Béja, Tunisia, where Bradley, then the brand-new commander of II Corps, explained via maps how his army would ensnare the Nazis. The second came in February of ’44 at Bradley’s First Army headquarters in Bryanston Square, London. Without disclosing how or where, Bradley described the rationale behind D-Day—the way Allied seaborne and airborne troops would gain a toehold in
Festung Europa
.

Bradley’s ascent through the ranks had been breathtaking—in less than a year and a half, he had gone from being an Eisenhower advisor without a portfolio to commanding the largest army in American history—but his demeanor hadn’t changed. Liebling wrote that Bradley was the same “benevolent, pedagogical, and slightly apologetic” guy he’d always been.
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Professor Bradley may have lacked Eisenhower’s charisma and Patton’s prickliness, but he was long on substance. His presentation skills had been honed as a mathematics instructor at West Point, then under the exacting eye of George Marshall, as both a pupil and an instructor at Marshall’s officers’ training school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

In classic Fort Benning style, without consulting notes, that night Bradley walked reporters through a riveting overview of Cobra, citing from memory avenues of attack, key transportation arteries, the locations and
strength of enemy troops, the likely German response, and how the Allies would seek to take advantage of different contingencies.

Pyle remembered Bradley pinpointing an area west of St.-Lô about five miles wide. “In that narrow segment we would have three infantry divisions, side by side,” Ernie wrote later. “Right behind them would be another infantry and two armored divisions. Once a hole was broken, the armored divisions would slam through several miles beyond, then turn right toward the sea behind the Germans in that sector in the hope of cutting them off and trapping them.”
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Bradley circumscribed a three-and-a-half-mile-by-one-mile rectangle south of the Périers–St.-Lô road and said that bombing and artillery fire would be concentrated there. A conventional artillery barrage or tactical bombing run would not be sufficient to dislodge the enemy. Instead, to kick off the assault, he was calling for something virtually unprecedented: a massive aerial bombardment from the “heavies.” After the war, Liebling facetiously called Bradley’s Cobra raid “the most impressive assemblage of air power ever up to then on view outside a Howard Hughes production.”
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Pointing at the east-west highway, Bradley said he’d been adamant that Allied bombers use the road as a line of demarcation between friend and foe, keeping it as a compass point by approaching it from the west. The 366th Tactical Fighter Group, then stationed at Grandcamp, would lead the attack, dropping red smoke bombs to mark the enemy position. American troops would be pulled back some 1,500 yards—almost a mile—north of the road to give the heavies room to operate, Bradley said.

Bradley may or may not have disclosed that the day before (July 19), he had flown to England to meet with the joint bomber command brass at Stanmore, north of London. Bradley sat down with Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, pored over maps and weather forecasts, and got Leigh-Mallory’s personal assurance—or so Bradley thought—that Allied bomber pilots would fly parallel to the road, then veer off south to drop their loads into the rectangle where the mechanized
Panzer Lehr
outfit and its lethal tanks lay concealed in the woods.

If Liebling, Boyle, Rooney, or Pyle, observers who knew firsthand the imprecision of airborne attacks, had qualms about Bradley’s claims, there’s no record that they broached them in Mme. Hamel’s shed. Cobra would uncoil, Bradley promised, as soon as the weather cooperated.

As the briefing broke up, the correspondents stood in line to wish the general well, “like members of a congregation shaking hands with their minister,” Liebling wrote.
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The parishioners resolved to get as close to the front lines as public relations officers would allow so they could get what Pyle called “a worm’s-eye view” of the aerial kickoff. But the weather stayed nasty—and Cobra wasn’t launched for what turned out to be four long days.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1957, Liebling returned to the Château de Vouilly to thank Mme. Hamel for her hospitality during the war. The chatelaine was sitting outside under the shade of one of her poplars when Liebling arrived. Mme. Hamel greeted Liebling with a shout, telling him that she always knew that one day he would return.

“She rose,” Liebling wrote, “a trifle heavier but even more impressive than I had remembered her, like a great, noble Percheron mare, white with age, getting up in a field.”
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Mme. Hamel proudly showed Liebling scrapbook clippings about the château’s role in the war. She also shared guest book inscriptions from Hal Boyle and Monk Dickson, both of whom had come back to Vouilly to pay their respects.

“To the good family of the Château de Vouilly,” Dickson had scribbled, “which was the repository for a week of the secret of Cobra.”
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W
HEN
C
OBRA FINALLY STRUCK, ITS
first two bites proved disastrous, nearly poisoning the entire operation. On Sunday evening, July 23, Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory flew in from Stanmore to eyeball the next morning’s scheduled bombardment.

The weather was passable before dawn but soon turned ugly. By the time Leigh-Mallory unilaterally scrubbed the mission because of thick
cloud cover, the tactical bombers in Normandy and some 1,600 heavies from different airfields in East Anglia had already taken off, armed to the gills. Bradley was aghast when most of the bombers came in due north, perpendicular to the Périers–St.-Lô road, not parallel from the west, as he had been promised. Still, for the most part, Leigh-Mallory’s bombers pounded the correct targets that morning, even in a futile cause.

Joe Liebling was positioned with an artillery unit four miles behind the Thirtieth Division’s jump-off spot. Once the smoke disappeared, he and other reporters couldn’t understand why the armored units at the 30th spearhead weren’t plunging ahead. It wasn’t until later in the day that correspondents were told that Cobra had been postponed for twenty-four hours. And it wasn’t until much later that they learned that some sixteen Allied heavies had tragically dropped their ordnance onto friendly trenches. The lead plane in that particular gaggle experienced mechanical problems with its bomb release; when the bombardier finally managed to unjam it, he dropped his load early—and the other fifteen bombardiers followed suit.
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One hundred twenty-six members of the 30th were wounded by the misdirected bombs; some thirty were killed.

The awful accident and the slipshod coordination with bomber command did not deter Bradley from pushing forward with the planned attack once the weather cleared the following morning. After one more heated discussion on the evening of July 24, Bradley conceded defeat in his tug-of-war with Leigh-Mallory. It was too dangerous, the air brass argued, for the bombers to expose themselves to enemy antiaircraft batteries for that length of time by flying in on the parallel. The armada would again come in on the perpendicular and hope that the red markers from the 366th’s P-47s would delineate the target.

This time there was no postponement in midmission. It was an awesome spectacle: No raid during the war, Andy Rooney wrote, called for so many planes to drop so many bombs in such a tiny area.
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More than a thousand U.S. Eighth Air Force Forts and Libs and a comparable number of RAF Lancasters, Wellingtons, and Halifaxes, joined by nearly four hundred medium bombers and scores of P-47s armed with fragmentary bombs and a lethal new weapon known as napalm, came zooming in from the
north. The P-47s dropped their red markers right in the heart of the enemy rectangle. When the heavies appeared, their bombs triggered such a deafening noise that each thud shook the curtains of the home a mile from the front that Bradley and Joe Collins were using as a forward command post.
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The impact was devastating. Within minutes, the
Panzer Lehr
’s forest had been reduced to a lunarscape; the strikes were so intense that afterward it was hard to distinguish the rims of bomb craters. So many trees were splintered that thousands of German soldiers were wounded by the wood that spewed from them. Thousands more were killed or deafened by the bombardment and the artillery barrage that immediately followed.

But as Rooney recalled, “Unfortunately for U.S. forces, there was a strong wind blowing from east to west. The heavy line of smoke and dust heaved into the air by the first wave [of bombers] was blown in a uniformly straight line directly west. Clouds of it obscured the new positions to which American forces had withdrawn.”
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It all meant catastrophic confusion for the pilots, navigators, and bombardiers in subsequent waves. A disaster ensued that morning that was four times worse than the day before. There were three separate short-drop incidents, one of which nearly obliterated Ernie Pyle. The columnist was near the Fourth Division’s leading edge; he heard something in the skies overhead that he’d never heard before: a “gigantic rattling noise as of huge ripe seeds in a mammoth dry gourd.”

Pyle and everyone around him dove for cover, spreading out “like the cartoons of people flattened by steam rollers.” He tried to squirm his way under a nearby wagon but gave up when bombs crashed too close.
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Nearly five hundred American soldiers were wounded in the short drops; more than 110 lost their lives, many of them in the 30th Division, the same guys who’d been hit the day before. One victim was the highest-ranking American Army officer killed in action during the war, sixty-one-year-old Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair.
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McNair’s body had absorbed a direct hit. His remnants had been thrown some twenty-five yards from the slit trench in which he’d taken cover; he was identified only by his three-starred shoulder patch and a scarred rifle butt that bore his initials. Since McNair’s presence in France
was a secret, he wasn’t even afforded a burial with military honors. The short drops along the ill-starred Norman roadway turned out to be among the worst friendly-fire episodes of the war, in a league with Patton’s paratrooper debacle in Sicily twelve months earlier.

Bede Irvin, the AP photographer and Boyle sidekick who’d shared a room with Andy Rooney at Grandcamp, was also killed by friendly fire on July 25. It took two days for the sad news to reach Rooney.

Rooney had left his barracks bag and some personal effects at Grandcamp, so in late July Andy returned. Irvin’s belongings had already been shipped off to his widow in the States. He dejectedly sat on his cot, thinking about his pal Bede, wondering what Irvin might do if the situation were reversed. “My eyes stopped at the top of the four-drawer dresser Bede and I had shared. The picture! The picture of Margie that I had put there was gone! They had shipped my wife’s picture along with Bede’s possessions, back to
his
wife. When she unpacked them, she was going to be confronted by a picture of a pretty stranger that Bede had never mentioned to her.”
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Rooney placed a series of “frantic” calls to AP in London. Irvin’s effects were already en route, but were going through AP’s offices in New York. He was able to have Margie’s framed photograph removed before Bede’s boxes were delivered to the grieving Kath Irvin.

Irvin was buried with full military honors at a cemetery in La Cambe, France, on what would have been his thirty-fourth birthday.
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L
IEBLING WITNESSED THE
C
OBRA BOMBARDMENT
from the top-floor window of a Normandy farmhouse about five miles north of ground zero. Three ridges separated the farmland from Bradley’s front line. Liebling watched squadrons of heavies zoom in from both sides, fly beyond the third ridge, and, unseen, release their bombs. “For two hours the air was filled with the hum of motors, and the concussions of the bombs that, even though they were falling five miles away, kept my sleeves fluttering.”
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