The stories they hammered out on portable typewriters, close to — sometimes amid — the actual fighting, their copy wangled through the censorship and somehow back to the United States, established reputations that grew into dazzling postwar careers and lasting fame.
Each writer excelled in riveting stories of individuals fighting and dying, stories that can still move one to tears. Above the D-Day beaches in Normandy, Boyle found the fresh grave of a young family relative. “Now,” Boyle wrote, “there was a mound of earth above his body. . . . And tangled in the wire which held his dogtag was a withered Normandy rose left there by French peasants, who have put a flower over every one of the two thousand American graves in the cemetery.”
Cronkite spent months at Molesworth, an American air base in England, with bomber crews returning — and often not returning — from raids over Germany. He flew in such a raid himself, riding in the exposed Plexiglas nose bubble, even manning the machine gun to beat off Luftwaffe fighters. He said afterward, “I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell,” giving this book its title. The UP said it was too risky and ordered him to stop.
Cronkite told the story of a bombardier who, “though mortally wounded by antiaircraft shrapnel, crawled back to his bombsight and sent his bombs crashing squarely on the German U-boat yards at Vegesack.” That earned a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Rooney wrote for Stars and Stripes the story of a top-turret gunner on a B-17, whose arm was blown off at the shoulder. He desperately needed medical attention but faced a four-hour flight home. His navigator buddy secured the gunner’s parachute and tossed him out over Lower Saxony. A young German girl saw him and, defying Gestapo orders, got medical help. He was imprisoned but later repatriated to the United States for a long and fulfilling life. His story was featured in the 1949 Gregory Peck film “Twelve O’Clock High.”
Gay tells us intimately how these correspondents lived, traveled, slept, what they ate and — particularly Liebling — what they drank. A Francophile bon viveur, Liebling might have corrected certain mistakes Gay has made: Calvados is not “fermented” but distilled, Pernod is not a “sweet liqueur” but an aniseed-flavored aperitif, and the British beer is not “bitters” but “bitter.” Small matters but significant.
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