The Race for Paris

by Meg Waite Clayton

  I said, “We’re bombing our own men.”

  A bomb exploded right there, just beyond the barn, and Fletcher was pulling Liv and me both down into a trench, the cameras tumbling, too, so that the hard metal of one pressed into my stomach in the soaking brush at the bottom of the trench.

  Fletcher lay over me, his belt buckle digging into my back, my heart pounding, pounding, pounding. The loamy smell of the mud. Liv’s cheek on the rough straw beside me. Fletcher’s hand on Liv’s, deathly white.

  “Correct course, you lousy bastards,” Fletcher said, his voice close in my ear.

  I closed my eyes to the dank smell of the tomb and the suffocating press of Fletcher’s weight, to the possibility of a bomb dropping on us, exploding, with only the thin wall of earth around us and nothing but smoky sky above. Breathe, Fletcher, breathe! I thought, wanting the warmth of his breath on my earlobe, the certainty that we were alive, like Mama’s breath as she set my book aside and lifted me from the chair in the garden shed, where I sometimes fell asleep.

  Something exploded just above us. The ground shook, threatening to crumble, to collapse.

  Fletcher breathed out, a rush of hot moisture, almost a groan. His weight sank more heavily into me. For once, I was thankful for the dampness, for the muffling effect of the sodden earth, the heavy mud that allowed the blasts to sink in, that kept the shrapnel from flying quite so far.

  There was nothing to do then but listen, and feel, and pray.

  Listen to the approaching planes, the scream of bombs falling, the thunder as they struck.

  Feel the shaking of the earth, the dirt spraying across the top of the trench, the vibrating air.

  Pray for myself and for Fletcher and Liv and for everyone else, pray that somehow this mistake would be realized before it was too late. And try to forget the blackened figure falling to earth.

  Finally, Fletcher lifted his weight slightly, saying, “Bloody hell.”

  With his lips at my ear, the words hurt.

  He rolled over onto the muddy straw beside me, and Liv and I rolled over, too.

  I looked up through the steep walls of earth to the smoky sky. Planes continued overhead, but they were passing again, holding their bombs until they were farther forward and dropping them where they were meant to be dropped.

  I climbed from the trench finally, my joints corroded from the tension, my muscles locked.

  Around us, others were climbing from foxholes, looking at one another in dazed disbelief.

  Fletcher touched my arm, looked into my eyes. “Jane, are you okay?”

  He pulled me close, his other arm pulling Liv to us. I closed my eyes to all the people, to the blank stares and the muttered obscenities, the heavy exhaustion, the disbelief.

  “We’ll return to the press camp,” Fletcher said, his breath soft in my hair, his lips warm on my scalp. He turned to Liv then, and kissed the top of her head, too.

  I looked away from him, from the longing in his eyes as his lips lingered in the dusty dark of Liv’s hair. A longing for the war to be over, I told myself as I looked to the other journalists, some watching us with curiosity but most still flummoxed by the fact that they were alive.

  I called out to them, “This place is nothing like it looked in the brochure!”

  Those within hearing distance laughed, those who’d been in this war long enough to laugh when the laughing was good.

  I turned to Liv, remembering the Robert Capa quote she so loved. “Was that close enough for you, Liv?”

  She tucked away what had to be her own fear without missing a beat and said, “Pffft . . . That?”

  I wiped the dust from my lips with my muddy hands. It was everywhere around us, the gray soot: on the roof of the barn, on the water in the trough, on our helmets and uniforms and gear. Soot the gray of the newsprint that would not report this mistake the next morning because men like Charles would think the news of 111 GIs killed and 490 wounded by their own bombs was less important than the perception that this war was being won. Men who would hold tightly to that belief even when they learned that one of their own was a victim, that AP photographer Bede Irvin was killed as he was trying to retrieve his camera during the short bombing at the Saint-Lô–Périers road.

  “We have to turn back,” Fletcher said.

  We looked not backward, though, but to the horizon, to what was left of our troops digging out from the debris, taking stock, preparing to move ahead. Liv climbed back into the trench to retrieve her camera. She handed me my ruined notepad and Fletcher his camera, too, and they pulled their spent film and stuffed it into condoms, and reloaded. Fletcher lowered the cracked windshield of the jeep so it lay flat on the hood lest the glint of it attract sniper fire, and we climbed in, and we moved slowly toward what once were lines of colored cloth and beyond them, to leafless trees and dead cows not yet reeking, to empty bunkers abandoned by Germans in a moonscape of bomb craters that were sharp-edged, not yet worn smooth by the back-and-forth crush of tanks.

  BEYOND THE SAINT-LÔ-PÉRIERS ROAD

  TUESDAY, JULY 25, 1944

  The nearer the front, the easier things are—in a base section where everything is carboned in triplicate and thrown away before reading, there are shower baths, sheets and no fleas, but the cigarette ration doesn’t arrive nor the mail, there is no milk for the coffee, and no paper for the toilets which really flush. At the front there are heaps of cigarettes for everyone to help himself, matches, paper and fleas, hitch-hiking transports without signing chits, guys who hear you’re out of film and bring you theirs, coffee enough because by the time you’ve found the method of making smokeless fire to heat the water you’ve saved up enough Nescafé packets from the K ration to have plenty for seconds and thirds.

  —Photojournalist Lee Miller, from her original manuscript of “The Siege of St. Malo,” written for the October 1944 issue of Vogue

  As the sky reddened the evening after the breakthrough, we caught up to a crew operating one of the ack-acks, the 90mm antiaircraft guns charged with keeping the German airplanes away from our troops. The soldier on the phone to the command post as we arrived at their newly dug pit nodded to Fletcher and said, “Flash,” but frowned at Liv and me. He wasn’t happy to have women in his gun pit, and with a word into that receiver, the MPs would know exactly where we were.

  “Nighttime is the busy time for these chaps,” Fletcher told Liv and me. He said Liv ought to get what photos she could in the last of the evening light because she couldn’t use flash at night here, but most of the action these boys saw came after dark, with the German planes.

  “Eleven twenty,” one of the boys in the gun’s bucket seats said without pausing in his visual search of the horizon. “Set your watch.”

  “Where are your manners, Flash?” the other bucket seat boy asked in a Virginia drawl.

  “Sorry.” Fletcher set a hand on the side of the big gun and said, “Liv and Jane, may I introduce you to W-w-w-wobbly, the finest gun in Normandy.”

  The crew laughed.

  “Five W’s, not four—since I see you’re writing that down, Miss Tyler,” said a GI loading cubbyholes dug into the walls of the pit with shells.

  “Jane,” I said.

  “Jane,” he repeated. “Five W’s because we have five W’s in our crew. William—that’s me, Bill Singleton, S-i-n-g-l-e-t-o-n, but I’m a William. And Willy and Wade.” He pointed to two others on the gun team. “Walter on communications.” The fellow on the phone. “And Warren is cooking up some chow. Do tell us you’re staying for dinner? Just rations warmed over a stick fire, but the meal is included in the price of a ticket for tonight’s show. You’ve bought your tickets, right?”

  Fletcher said to the soldier with the Virginia accent, “Virginia, Liv and Jane are here to make you famous, so you might run a comb through that hair.”

  Liv photographed Virginia smiling right at her from his bucket seat, the big gun behind him. But we wouldn’t make him famous. We weren’t sending our work out so we
wouldn’t get caught, and these boys would be old news by the time Paris was freed.

  “Our ninety-millimeters are the big daddies,” Virginia said proudly. “They can shoot thirty thousand feet up and fourteen miles. We can do twenty-five rounds in a minute, too. And we don’t like to miss.”

  “Eyes on the sky, Virginia,” frowning Walter on communications reminded him.

  The night was spent like so much of the war: waiting. I asked the boys where they’d come ashore (Omaha Beach) and when (D-Day plus three) and what they’d been doing since then, and I made notes in the waning light. There hadn’t been much to do with the guns their first days in France, they said, so they’d acted as infantry, which was brutal. Now they targeted not only German planes but also ground fortifications, troop concentrations, and armored vehicles.

  At 11:20 the pit went silent as, in the distance, a plane thrummed. Perhaps just one. Perhaps not.

  I turned to Walter. It was dark now, impossible to read his expression.

  “Stand by,” he said finally. “Three rounds.”

  The big gun buzzed to life, the long barrel jerking up, down, left, right, like a barn rat sniffing the air—the aiming controlled at the other end of the electric cable. My mind jerked just as wildly, from Fletcher’s assurance that the gun pits could survive anything but a direct hit, to my mother at home without me, to an unbearable thirst and the need to listen and take up my pen. I focused on the shadow men, the energy palpable in their hushed voices.

  The gun settled.

  “On target! Three rounds! Fire!”

  I braced myself against the force of the gun, the blast, the muzzle flame illuminating the crew for a moment, beautiful and vulnerable. They shot and reloaded, shot and reloaded, shot again, the smoke thick around us.

  “A flamer!” someone said, a hushed exclamation, as if the sound of the gun weren’t enough to alert the entire German army to our position. The crew looked over the rim of the pit, and I looked with them to see a fiery airplane plummeting.

  Virginia said, “We don’t often know whether we’ve made our targets like that until someone tells us.”

  “That is fucking satisfying,” one of the W’s said. Then to Liv and me, “Excuse me. Excuse my language.”

  I thought, That is fucking satisfying.

  I opened my canteen and took a long drink, hoping none of the shells had landed beside a German field hospital, knocking out the lights in their operating room.

  We followed the tanks down the coast in the days after the breakthrough, rolling over roads and crossing open fields, always on the offensive. We drove with our windshield down and our helmets on, watching for military police and avoiding communications officers who might alert them to us as we followed Patton’s Third Army on the slow creep through French towns—Coutances on July 28, then Bréhal and Granville and Sartilly. We found relatively safe positions from which to watch minesweepers clear streets, tanks roll over cobblestones, infantry creep from house to house to find, as often as not, that the Germans had fled from the fighter planes and the bombers that cleared our way.

  By night we slept in foxholes under skies reddened by the flames from bridges the Germans burned in their retreat. Fletcher didn’t sleep much at all as near as I could tell. He and I would talk and eat chocolate together late at night while Liv slept. He sometimes went out on night patrols with the soldiers or crept forward alone in the early mornings, always to the places he insisted it made no sense for Liv and me to go. We didn’t object. We appreciated the way Fletcher positioned us to observe the war well enough without putting us in more danger than was necessary. And he always left the Webley with us.

  We continued our shooting lessons, with progressively more distant targets. “You’ll not want to be asking a German soldier to move up a bit so you can hit him,” Fletcher said, putting his arms around me to steady my aim, which was perhaps intentionally poorer than it might have been had I not known that a poor shot would bring his touch. We played poker with the soldiers. We smoked the cigarettes they let us win, and refilled our lighters from a leaking jeep tank, not ours. We won “liberated” bottles of wine and cognac, which we opened and passed until they were empty. And when soldiers asked us to “talk American” to them, we did so, trying not to think of the cemetery back at Omaha Beach and the wooden crosses we passed at the roadsides, crosses with American helmets set atop them. The ones with flowers, we were told, tended to be the minesweepers, boys killed making the way safe for everyone else.

  We gave up bathing more or less altogether. We needed the available water for our canteens, we told ourselves, but in truth no one bathed at the front. Mobility was far more important than cleanliness, and it was hard to remain mobile with your pants down. So we lowered our pants only to do our business, which we did quickly. A latrine would have been a luxury.

  When Liv and Fletcher ran low on film, Fletcher found a photography shop in one of the newly liberated towns, its door hanging loose from its hinges and the owner hiding in a basement or somewhere else altogether. Fetcher took what he and Liv needed and left behind a hundred-pound note, more than enough to cover the supplies. No one with the Allied forces was to spend money in France; that was one of the regulations about which our CO back at the field hospital had been “crystal clear.” If Allied soldiers started throwing money about in France, the civilians wouldn’t be able to afford anything. But Fletcher couldn’t do his job without film, and he couldn’t bear to take the film without leaving some payment, and he had nothing but hundred-pound notes.

  When the Third Army split, we followed the column heading west toward the port of Brest on the Brittany peninsula over Liv’s protests that we were going away from Paris rather than toward it.

  “Your American papers will want photographs of American soldiers, Liv—without the faces of the dead, of course,” Fletcher said. “If we go east to find Montgomery’s troops, your photographs will be of British chaps.”

  When she refused to be swayed by his logic, Fletcher said, simply, “I’m a military photographer, Liv. I have my orders.”

  “And your orders are to follow Americans so Jane and I can get caught and sent home heading away from Paris rather than toward it?”

  Fletcher said, “I’m sure I can find you another ride, Liv, although I can’t say that you’ll be completely happy about where they will take you.”

  “We can find our own ride,” Liv said.

  But we stayed with Fletcher, who decided not much later to turn back in the direction of Paris after all.

  We’d been able to get gasoline and rations from the Allied supply trucks when we were traveling with the troops, but finding gas on our way back toward the press camp, now at Canisy, was a challenge. The sun was high and hard in the sky, and the gas gauge read dead empty when we stopped in a small town: a square, a church on the corner, a butcher shop, a boulangerie. The town had no water, no light, no gas, and little food, but it was liberated and the café owner was happy to bring us what little she had.

  “Vous n’avez pas a me payer. Je vous l’offre,” the woman said. She wouldn’t allow us to pay.

  She served us a loaf of crispy bread, a few apples, and three glasses of eau-de-vie at a tiny outside table from which we watched a raucous crowd collect in the square. Old women and young. Children. Old men.

  “What’s happening?” Liv asked.

  A young woman emerged from a building across the square—“Commissariat de Police,” a sign over the door read—pushed by a fat, balding old man. The skin of her upper arm blanched under the grip of the man’s fingers as the crowd surged toward her, shouting “Salope! Putain!”

  Liv raised her camera and focused on the agitated face of an older woman who stood apart from the crowd, weeping as she watched the girl. Liv didn’t take the shot, though; this wasn’t the war, and she didn’t have film to waste.

  The café owner pulled off her apron and laid it across the back of a chair at another table.

  “Is the girl Germ
an?” Liv asked.

  “Est elle une femme allemande?” I asked the café owner.

  “Elle est une collaboratrice horizontale,” she answered, and she pushed toward the square, disappearing into the crowd.

  Fletcher stood and followed her, and Liv and I followed Fletcher, slipping in his wake through the circle of townspeople. In the center of the crowd, the balding old man gripped the girl by the long dark hair curling down her back. He forced her into a chair set out on the flagstone. Sitting there, she looked more womanly, thicker.

  Fletcher crossed his arms over his chest and stood watching.

  Another old man, as round and balding as the first, stood by the chair, waving something at the girl-woman. The old man who’d brought her out pushed her head down between her knees with a single rough thrust of his hand.

  “What are they doing?” Liv asked.

  But for his immobility, Fletcher might have been one of the mob.

  The sun glinted off the thing in the man’s hands—a large pair of shears.

  “Fletcher.” I echoed Liv.

  Liv focused her camera as the scissors sliced through the girl’s hair in a single, metallic shhhhht. Long dark curls tumbled to the ground. The crowd’s voices rose higher, their arms thrusting in angry triumph, “Danse avec ton soldat maintenant! Couche avec ton soldat!”

  “Help her!” Liv said, moving through the crowd before Fletcher caught her shoulder and pushed past her.

  Two men caught Fletcher’s upper arms and held him back, scolding him in French. Liv tried to raise her camera, but one of the men took it from her, saying, “Pas de photographe.” The girl in the chair sat eerily still, her gaze to the ground as the barber sliced off her hair. He set aside the shears and began with the razor, the crowd egging him on. He shaved off the last remaining stubble to leave only a patch above her left ear in the shape of a swastika.