Assignment to Hell (59 page)

Leclerc and the sixteen thousand men in the French Second Armored Division, already at the city’s gate, would indeed spearhead the Allied assault, Bradley’s guys confirmed, followed quickly by General Raymond Barton’s Fourth Infantry, with the 102nd Cavalry Group at the point and the 28th Infantry not far behind.

Andy Rooney smartly recognized that the best story might come by catching up to the French—not by waiting for the guys in the Fourth or 28th as nearly all of his colleagues were doing. General Charles de Gaulle, Eisenhower’s designated French leader-in-waiting, was in Rambouillet, too, intent on basking in the glory—and deflecting at least some of it away from his rival Leclerc.

N
OT SUPRISINGLY, THE ROAD TO
Paris was perilous that morning, Rooney remembered. At pivotal spots amid the hills, the enemy had secreted pillboxes. Tanks and eighty-eight-millimeter artillery pieces were camouflaged in the woods.

Rooney’s jeep was well back in the procession when artillery fire erupted. He jumped out of the jeep so quickly he forgot to grab his helmet. Bent over, he ran into a field on his right. The French tanks in front of him fanned out and began firing at a concrete-and-steel bunker perched in the hills. Feeling exposed, Rooney hustled down an embankment, hoping to gain better cover behind a stone wall.

After a minute or two, Rooney realized that there was someone else hunkered alongside the wall. Crouching about twenty yards away was a guy wearing a familiar green Canadian tanker’s jacket and a leather-brimmed officer’s cap.

The fellow turned to Rooney and barked, “There’s another one right over the hill,” meaning another artillery bunker.

Suddenly Rooney recognized who it was: the frustrated pugilist from the night before! “Jesus,” Rooney remembered thinking, “here I am behind a stone wall with Ernest Hemingway.” Rooney couldn’t help but chortle over the “ridiculous” specter of being pinned down with the world-famous novelist turned romantic guerrilla fighter. “You could tell he was having the time of his life playing war,” Rooney wrote.
²⁵

Hemingway inched closer to Rooney and pulled out a makeshift map. Papa’s FFI contacts had pinpointed the location of all the German strongholds bordering Paris. Gesturing toward the map, Hemingway told Rooney, “We’re going to be here for a while.” A half hour or so elapsed before Hemingway could get back to his French-operated half-track and Rooney could return to his jeep.

By late afternoon on August 24, the midportion of the two thousand vehicles in Leclerc’s column had reached the cobblestone streets of St.-Cloud on the near side of the Seine; its forward elements, as Don Whitehead had experienced, had already penetrated the north side of the
river. Ecstatic Parisians showered the men surrounding Rooney with wine, cheese, and cakes. Rooney used his Albany Academy–honed French to ask one family to borrow its bathroom, where he struggled with the peculiar invention that is the French toilet. He traded a couple of boxes of K rations for a half loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of unlabeled red wine. In honor of the august occasion, the teetotaling Rooney quaffed the wine—and enjoyed every drop.

That part of the column spent the night in St.-Cloud, its vehicles still strung along the roadside in front of the bridges. Rooney’s jeep was squeezed between two Sherman tanks; he curled up in the passenger’s seat, fearing that if he left the jeep to find a more a restful spot, the column might leave without him—and he’d lose his big story. His nap was interrupted a couple of times by small-arms fire that seemed to be coming from up ahead.

When they moved out that morning, Rooney saw what had happened: Two big German troop trucks had tried to make a break for it over the river. It was a “slaughter,” Rooney remembered. The Germans had been so badly shot up that nearly three dozen of them were lying dead, “their blood still dripping through the grillwork into the Seine.” Andy Rooney’s introduction to the City of Light was the image of enemy corpses grotesquely splayed over a bridge.
²⁶

T
WO OTHER CORRESPONDENTS WHO HAD
wandered away from the journalistic pack on the push into Paris—the
New Yorker
’s Joe Liebling and the
Stars and Stripes
’ Allan Morrison—navigated the sixteen miles from Montlhéry on the 25th to arrive by early afternoon, despite the pandemonium. Liebling had braced himself to see his darling city going up in smoke. To Joe’s astonishment, Paris appeared more or less unmolested.

After the war, Liebling was not surprised to learn that Hitler had ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, Paris’ military governor, to torch the capital. When von Choltitz balked, Hitler court-martialed him from afar. “Since Leclerc [through the FFI] sent von Choltitz a warning that he would hold him personally responsible for any damage to the city,” Liebling
cracked years later, “it is possible that the German preferred the
in absentia
kind of trouble.”
²⁷

As driver Jack Roach’s Chevy crawled through the Porte d’Orléans, the procession was suddenly greeted by hundreds of bicyclists who were openly defying their oppressors by pedaling out to greet the troops. They were almost all women, a spectacle that made Liebling weep. “[T]o make a woman truly beautiful, liberate her,” he wrote. “She visibly exudes a generalized good will that makes you want to kiss her.”
²⁸
More than a few
femmes
bussed Liebling, Morrison, and Roach that day. An older woman insisted they decorate the Chevy with a Tricolor banner. The homemade bunting was “big enough to drape a hearse,” Liebling recalled.
²⁹

Roach was eager to report for his public relations duties at the Hôtel Scribe near the Opéra. But as they approached the intersection of the Avenue de l’Observatoire and the Boulevard du Montparnasse, they stopped for a few moments to get their bearings and determine if the path to the Scribe was safe. Liebling had never been enamored of that particular neighborhood, but it looked gorgeous to him that afternoon. “Any liberated place acquires a special charm,” he wrote, “like a kitten recovered from the town dump.”
³⁰

As they idled the Chevrolet to figure out their next move, they heard reports that the Germans were about to officially surrender—and practically around the corner! The ceremony was supposed to take place, they were told, in a waiting room at the Gare Montparnasse train station.
³¹

The three flashed credentials and gained entrance to the nondescript rail shed where Leclerc, American General Leonard T. Gerow of V Corps, von Choltitz, and a dozen of the
Kommandant
’s staff officers waited for Charles de Gaulle’s belated arrival. Von Choltitz was a “worried, fat little soldier,” Liebling noted; his sycophants wore dress uniforms with flat-visored caps and impeccably shined boots, which contrasted with the mud-stained appearance of Leclerc and Gerow.

The imperious de Gaulle was making Leclerc wait, no doubt causing his adversary to grind his teeth. Liebling glanced up to see two more American correspondents—both of whom happened to be old friends from New York—jogging down the train platform: the sports scribe turned fiction
writer Paul Gallico, then writing for
Vanity Fair
, and Harold Denny of the
New York Times
.

Denny looked at the faces in the crowd and quickly realized that he was the only American correspondent from a daily paper. “When Denny spotted the Germans, he reacted like a redbone hound to a tree full of raccoons,” Liebling wrote. “He saw that he had a scoop of historic dimensions.”

The
Times
’ man fired up a cigarette, pulled out his typewriter, ran his hands through his hair for inspiration, and started banging away, the sound of his keys rattling around the depot. He was so excited that Liebling swore that at one point he actually yelled, “Boy!”
³²

When de Gaulle finally arrived, striding down the platform with his usual stiff-backed pomposity, he had the look, Liebling thought, of a “poker player hauling in his first big pot of the evening and trying not to show how good he feels.”
³³
Free French leaders, worried that the U.S. State Department would play the same disingenuous game it had played in North Africa with Darlan, were delighted that de Gaulle participated. To the FFI and its many Communist members, de Gaulle was far preferable to any number of Fascist French enablers the U.S. could have chosen, Liebling noted.

The surrender ceremony itself took only a few minutes and was remarkably bereft of ritual. Sirens blaring, von Choltitz and company were whisked away to captivity in French army jeeps.

Roach had to hustle Denny’s exclusive through the censors and out over the wire, both of which were at that moment being set up at the Scribe. Sadly for Denny, the
Times
never got his big beat; somewhere along the line there was a mechanical problem.

Since Morrison had reportorial duties in the streets of Paris, Liebling was solo again. Joe grabbed his sleeping bag/valise out of Roach’s Chevrolet and checked into the Scribe, intent on savoring an evening for the ages.

B
Y THEN
, H
AL
B
OYLE AND
Andy Rooney, too, were being overwhelmed by celebrants. On liberation’s eve, Boyle conducted an informal poll and determined that American GIs were “about equally divided on what they
preferred to see first—the Eiffel Tower or a bottle of chilled champagne in a French bar.”
³⁴
Within his first few hours in the city, Boyle did both, hiking all the way to the top of the Tower and quipping, “I understand now why Paris fell so easily to Allied troops. The Germans were just too plumb worn out from climbing the Eiffel Tower to defend the city.”
³⁵
The editors of the
Kansas City Star
were so delighted with the hometown boy’s treatment of the French capital’s emancipation that they ran it in huge print on page one of that Sunday’s edition.
³⁶

On his last night at Rambouillet, Boyle had gotten approval from Major Barney Oldfield, the acting PRO of the 12th Army Group, to mail home the enemy contraband that Hal had picked up in the sweep across France. A typewritten note, dated August 24, acknowledged that Boyle’s stash did not include explosives or firearms. Among other items, Boyle had squirreled away a Nazi canteen, a gas mask, and a helmet.
³⁷
Much more was to come: Boyle had an eye for swag. Toward the end of the war, his collection would include plenty of “forbidden” firearms.

Rooney by midafternoon on August 25 was wading through a sea of humanity down the Avenue Clichy near the Arc de Triomphe. People “shouted with joy, they laughed, they hugged, they kissed, they threw flowers, they held out champagne,” he remembered. As Rooney’s jeep got closer to the Arc de Triomphe, the mood turned darker. German prisoners, hands clasped on their heads, were being paraded by the FFI and French regulars. Most Parisians displayed restraint and restricted their protests to catcalls and obscenities. But Rooney watched a burly Frenchman smash a wine bottle over the head of a helmetless German soldier, a moment of bloody vengeance that triggered other vigilantism.

“The occupational forces were spit on, punched, and hooted at as enthusiastically as the French crowds had cheered us,” Rooney recalled. “I’d never seen hatred so deep.”
³⁸
The Parisians called the German women in uniform
souris grises
, “gray mice,” and treated them, Rooney observed, with almost the same level of derision.
³⁹

Rooney had a fabulous story and visions of it being splashed all over page one. Now the trick was to get it back to Rennes—a couple hundred miles west—where the
Stars and Stripes
had set up its interim field office.
He found a French army message center whose English-speaking officer assured Rooney he could get his copy back to the First Army’s old press headquarters at Rambouillet, where it could be relayed to Rennes. Rooney also bumped into an American Piper Cub pilot who’d been tasked with ferrying documents from the front line to rear-echelon headquarters. Fortuitously, the pilot was headed toward Rennes; he took a carbon copy of Rooney’s article and promised to personally deliver it to the
Stars and Stripes
office.

So Rooney was feeling good about getting his copy in print when he waded back into the mob gathered around the Place de l’Opéra. In the middle of the bedlam he ran into Larry LeSueur of CBS; Rooney was delighted when Larry invited him to share a few of his liberation experiences on the air. CBS was borrowing the French Radio Nationale microphone at the Tuileries near the Louvre—the hookup that got LeSueur crosswise with the Army brass. Rooney, perhaps unaware that he was violating the rules, did a three-minute interview. It was one of only a handful of times during the war that Rooney appeared on a radio broadcast and his first time ever on CBS.
⁴⁰

If anything, the party in the streets was getting more frenzied now that day was heading toward evening. Rooney didn’t recognize anyone at the Scribe but spotted his pal Ernie Pyle, beatifically smiling at the throng from a second-floor veranda at the Hôtel Le Grand.