Assignment to Hell (70 page)

Hal Boyle had hundreds of similarly infuriating conversations with German citizens who professed ignorance of Nazi wrongdoing. In the war’s waning days, Boyle became fascinated with Hitler Youth and
Volksgrenadier
units, the children who marched to certain death or committed suicide rather than capitulate.

“They have been taught to be hard and cruel and ruthless—and as a class they are,” Boyle wrote from Saxony. “There is more hate in the eyes of these knee-pant legions than in all the army’s millions of trained soldiers.”
⁵⁰

Three weeks earlier Boyle had written Frances. “Well I told you so,” he began. “This bloody-by-Jesus business is getting over fast, and I don’t think it will be many weeks before I can accept your invitation to return home and spend a couple of months having breakfast lunch and dinner in bed.”
⁵¹

He and his pal Jack Thompson had eaten dinner the night before with their “favorite general,” Omar Bradley. They toasted the Third Army’s penetration over the Rhine with steak and potatoes and pineapple ice cream; Bradley and Boyle doubled up on dessert. “Being made one of the really big shots of the war hasn’t changed [Bradley] essentially a bit,” Boyle told Frances. “He seems as modest and capable—and I guess as homely, too—as he did back in Tunisia and Sicily.”

Hal and Thompson hung around Bradley’s place until nearly midnight, shooting the bull. “I suppose that will teach [Bradley] never to invite us back again,” Boyle joked. A few days later Boyle wrote to Frances that he’d been holed up at the Dreesen Hotel in Bad Godesberg, where he got to gambol on a bed in which
der Führer
had slept during his deceitful talks over the annexation of Czechoslovakia eight years earlier with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Boyle and the other press guys “liberated” a wondrous wine cellar, carting up several cases of sweet Rhine wine, which inflicted a horrible hangover, Boyle confided.

He also confided that the deeper they got into enemy territory, the more he sensed the hatred felt by the German people. Boyle was still busy, he told Frances, responsible for both spot coverage and for his near-daily column. If he concentrated strictly on the column, he’d have to give up his accreditation at the front, he explained, which was something that at this point in the war, Boyle was loath to do.
⁵²

Boyle was outside Torgau along the Elbe River on April 27 when units of the First Army’s Fighting 69th Division hooked up with Soviet troops. Captured German soldiers told Boyle that they had been ordered to shoot only Soviets, not Americans. By then, Nazi infantrymen were streaming west, surrendering in droves to the oncoming Americans and praying not
to be ensnared by Russian patrols, where they would have been executed on sight. Hal stayed with the First long enough to witness the victory party thrown by General Alexei Zhadov of the Red Army’s Fifth Guards on April 30. A Russian military band greeted General Courtney Hodges and his First Army staff with the “Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by the Soviet anthem. Zhadov presented Hodges with a plaque the Fifth Guards had been given by Premier Joseph Stalin. Hodges reciprocated by giving Zhadov a battle-stained flag the First had carried across Western Europe.

It was Hal Boyle’s kind of bash: a drunken brawl with a lot of sentimental singing. After the obligatory toasts saluting Allied solidarity, Russian female soldiers began bringing in heaping trays of sausages, suckling pig, and various fish delicacies, all leavened with champagne, cognac, and vodka. Male and female Russian folk dancers and singers entertained until all hours. Only at dawn did they “call quits,” as Boyle put it. The last revelers—the Russian performers joined by a couple of hearty American lads—were “twined around three leftover bottles of vodka in one corner of the room” as Boyle reluctantly exited the premises.
⁵³
After weeks of covering apocalyptic scenes in concentration camps and the ritualistic suicides of the Hitler Youth, it must have been a relief for Boyle to cover an event that had the feel of Sig Ep parties at the Columbia Log Cabin tourist camp.

On May 1, the day before Hitler killed himself in the
Führerbunker
in Berlin, Boyle wrote about a lone American infantryman who had single-handedly captured more than two hundred enemy soldiers. Sergeant Hubert Baine of Norfolk, Virginia, a member of the Ninth Infantry’s 39th Regiment, was on a patrol through some “fluid” (meaning an undetermined enemy presence) woods outside the village of Henrode when a young girl got his attention.

“There’s a German soldier in the woods over there who wants to surrender,” the girl said.

Baine followed her through the forest. Suddenly, out from some shadows stepped a Nazi general, who stiffly came to attention, raised his right arm, clicked his heels, and barked, “Heil Hitler!”

“I was kind of confused at that point,” Baine told Boyle. “So I just tossed him back an offhand GI highball.”

After the awkward exchange, the German general, who must have been unfamiliar with American insignias of rank, asked Baine if he was an officer. “Yes,” noncom Baine fibbed. The nearest 39th Regiment officer was miles away; Baine didn’t want to gum up the works over niceties.

The general yelled a command toward the woods; out came scores of enemy infantry, each with hands up. None appeared to be armed nor eager to escape.

Baine figured that some of the soldiers might change their minds, so he briskly marched them toward Henrode, where the 39th was bivouacked.

Similar scenes were happening all over as German soldiers moved away from advancing Russians. That same day Boyle interviewed a corporal from Georgia who had encountered a German colonel adamantly refusing to surrender to anyone of inferior rank.

“Suh, if you don’t cut out that damned foolishness,” the kid said, “we are mighty apt to bury you right here,” and gestured toward a ditch alongside the road. With a flamoyant gesture, the colonel handed the corporal his saber.
⁵⁴

A
NDY
R
OONEY EXPERIENCED HIS OWN
scare accepting the surrender of a German infantryman. He was alone in his jeep in late March near Paderborn, the village where Wernher von Braun and his team of scientists perfected the V-1 and V-2 rockets, when an enemy soldier suddenly appeared, alone, a rifle in his upraised hand. The unarmed Rooney didn’t know what to do: If he sped up, he could be shot in the back; if he slowed down, he could get shot in the front.

Rooney gambled that the soldier wanted to surrender. He did. The soldier turned out to be as scared as Rooney was. Affecting a menacing look, Rooney grunted to the German to dump his rifle in the back. The soldier offered no resistance. It was only after Rooney had shifted the jeep into second gear that he realized his captive still had a pistol strapped to his waist.

“All he had to do to have a jeep of his own and an American uniform
to wear—with a bullet hole in it—would have been to shoot me,” Rooney recalled. “My mother told me never to pick up hitchhikers.”

Again mustering bravado, Rooney demanded that the soldier hand over the sidearm. Andy took the gun—it turned out to be a .32 caliber semiautomatic—back to the States with him as a souvenir.
⁵⁵

Boyle, too, had a close shave in the eleventh hour of the war. Hal and Jack Thompson spotted a cache of captured paraphernalia that had been dumped in a roadside quarry. They thought it curious that no GIs were around to guard the weapons. But they couldn’t resist the chance to grab more loot on top of the contraband they’d already collected. Boyle and Thompson had picked out a couple of sporty handguns and helmets when they noticed a pair of armed German soldiers staring down at them from the rim of the quarry. Like Rooney, they put on their toughest-looking faces and told the Germans to drop their weapons. They did.

Sadly, many of Boyle’s wartime mementoes were sold after his death by his daughter, Tracy. Tracy’s decision to barter her father’s keepsakes caused friction with her cousins that contributed to her estrangement from the family.
⁵⁶

O
N
T
UESDAY
, M
AY
8, 1945, the banner headline on the front page of the
Stars and Stripes
read:

It’s Over
Over Here

Two reporters got page-one bylines that morning. Charles Kiley, Andy’s buddy from Bristol Harbour in early June of ’44, was in Reims to cover the actual surrender ceremony. Kiley’s lede was classic
Stars and Stripes
, strictly meat and potatoes: “The Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to the Allies here at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s forward headquarters at 9:41 a.m. Monday.”

Unlike Associated Press’ Edward Kennedy, Kiley and the
Stars and
Stripes
actually adhered to the embargo that the Allies had attached to the surrender story—a delay to allow the victorious governments ample time to announce the news. Sixty-five years after Kennedy jumped the gun, Rooney was still steamed about it. Kennedy always claimed it was inadvertent, but his detractors are legion.

Rooney, for his part, somehow managed to be in the French Riviera when General Alfred Jodl, representing the new (and instantly deposed)
Führer
, Admiral Karl Dönitz, signed the surrender papers. Yet Andy got a page-one byline interviewing suddenly triumphant and, presumably, well-tanned doughboys. American GIs were in one of the world’s great resorts, yet when told the news about Germany quitting, one of them fumed: “Good! When do we leave this hole and go home?” Which is how the
Stars and Stripes
chose to headline Andy’s piece.

“Soldiers who read it, who heard the announcement over the BBC or who got the news second-hand from a usually reliable friend, were happy but generally undemonstrative,” Rooney wrote of V-E Day. “There was very little dancing or hugging by frontline soldiers in the area. They quietly talked over what it meant among themselves.

“At MP headquarters the sergeant on the desk, Julius Lavontiev of Perth Amboy, N.J., said, ‘We’re going to lock this place up tonight and let ’em tear the town down.’”
⁵⁷

Where Hal Boyle was that week the towns had—literally—been torn down—but not out of jubilation. Boyle was several hundred miles northeast of Rooney when the news hit that Hitler had committed suicide.

“There is little exuberance, little enthusiasm, and almost none of the whoop-it-up spirit with which hundreds of thousands of men looked forward to this event a year ago,” Boyle wrote.

“It has been a long and bloody trail—the 800-mile march from the beaches of Normandy in less than eleven months. It has drained much from the men who made it—much from their bodies and much from their spirit. They are physically and emotionally tired.”

One apprehension drove almost every soldier, Boyle noted: “Will I be sent to the Pacific?”
⁵⁸
Most of them weren’t, but Hal Boyle was.

The
Kansas City Star
’s headline on May 7, 1945, in huge print was:

Germany Surrenders;
London V-Day Tuesday

B
OYLE GOT WORD THAT HE’D
won the Pulitzer Prize a few days later when he stopped at the First Division’s command post after a quick trip to Prague with Cy Peterman of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Captain Maxie Zera, a First Army PRO, offered “congratulations” to Boyle in his nasal Bronx accent.

According to Don Whitehead, who got it secondhand, the exchange went something like: “Congratulations for what?” Boyle asked.

“Winning the Pulitzer Prize,” Zera volunteered.

“Aw, horsefeathers!” Boyle replied, although given Hal’s propensity for colorful language, his response was almost certainly more graphic.

“No, it’s true,” Zera said, showing Boyle a copy of that day’s the
Stars and Stripes
.

“They must have made a mistake!” Boyle protested.
⁵⁹

But it was no mistake. No reporter ever worked harder or more resourcefully or moved more readers. Boyle was honored for his 1944 work in Italy, France, and Belgium, but in truth the medal dated back to the moment Boyle grabbed onto the coral reef in Fedala Harbor, Morocco, in November 1942.

It didn’t take Boyle long to get home for a quick break before he was sent to the Pacific. Soon after V-E Day, Boyle sat down for a radio interview with Roy Potter of NBC. For two and a half years, Potter told listeners, Boyle had been living and marching with American combat troops. The Potter interview had none of the contrived schmaltz that had tainted Boyle’s 1944 interview with Quentin Reynolds of CBS.

After his thirty-month assignment to hell, Hal spoke from the heart. He also spoke for his four friends and for every ETO correspondent.

All I can remember with any feeling of pride in this whole sorry business of war is the courage and fortitude of the men who fought it.

Certain battle units I remember best, not because they were the finest but because I lived with them and shared a few of their dangers. But I don’t think the nation … will ever forget the First, Second, or Third armored divisions, or the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Ninth, 34th, 36th, or 45th infantry divisions, or the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions. There is a roll call of honor from Casablanca to Bastogne to Prague.