The War Beat, Europe by Casey Steven

Author:Casey, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

TENSION

This time, the military’s summons to the media would be camouflaged as much as possible. As the big day approached, the planners decided that the perennial problem of limited space on the transport ships meant that a mere twenty-eight of the 530 accredited correspondents would be hitting the beaches on D-Day. Yet even this small number worried Davis’s security-obsessed PROs, especially those who remembered how the sudden disappearance from London of the big-name reporters in October 1942 had fueled the city’s hyperactive rumor mill. “Past experience,” noted one, “has shown that the general exodus of well-known writers from Fleet Street spreads immediately as an indication of forthcoming operations of importance.”

During the spring, SHAEF’s PROs employed various strategies to ensure that the same thing did not happen again. On a number of occasions, they took correspondents out of London on short notice, sending them to far-flung parts of the British Isles in order “to accustom possible enemy observers to their absence without arousing suspicion.” They also encouraged invasion-bound reporters to build up a backlog of stories that could be published in the period just before the attack, when they would be quarantined from the outside world.48

None of these gambits could dispel the mounting tension, however. On the contrary, they often heightened the reporters’ fears. Throughout May, Pyle met frequently with friends like Stoneman and Whitehead to speculate about when and where the massive Allied blow would fall. “In more pensive moments,” he admitted, “we also conjectured our chances of coming through alive.” Those who had been at Anzio were not optimistic. Whitehead came down with a bad case of “nerves”; Stoneman increasingly contemplated the awful fact that “thousands of men will not be here one week from today,” perhaps including himself. But inevitably it was Pyle who suffered the most, including “terrible periods of depression” that resulted in frequent nightmares. “All the time fear lay blackly deep down upon your consciousness,” he recalled a few weeks later. “It bore down on your heart like an all-consuming weight. People would talk to you and you wouldn’t hear what they were saying.”49

Pyle’s mood was not helped by a particularly morbid example of the military’s thorough planning. Not long before the big day, Davis’s PROs invited the assault-wave reporters to a meeting in an ordinary-looking building in South Kensington. There, an officer told them to write their obituaries in case they were needed. It was a somber moment, leavened only by gallows humor. Stoneman, as competitive as ever, waited until his Chicago Sun rival had typed out four pages and then stated baldly: just say I was all the places he was—“and usually filed first, too.” Pyle, who had long believed he would be killed in action, listed his main achievements, covered his face with his hands for a moment, and then wrote: “And when it becomes necessary to release this information, please inform my syndicate so it can break the news to my wife, rather than informing her direct.”50

As the days dragged on, some of the journalists resorted to bouts of frenetic activity to dispel dark last-minute thoughts.

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