When I think, as one often does, about what I would rescue from my house if it were burning down, one of the first things that comes to mind is the two-volume collection of World War II reporting from the Library of America. Now, when I pause to reflect, I realize that this probably wouldn’t really be one of the first items I would rescue, because I could buy another copy, whereas acquiring a new family would be both cumbersome and fraught with legal difficulties.
Still, that I think of it at all suggests the extremely high regard in which I hold these volumes.
Maybe the most striking thing about these books is the extraordinary diversity of voices in American journalism in that era. You have men and women, white reporters and black reporters, people with Ivy League degrees and people who never made it past high school. And yet every writer, it seems, has a distinctive, memorable, and compelling voice. Reading most journalism today—the hallowed pages of The Dispatch excepted, of course—is a dismal experience in comparison, since we live in a world in which almost all of the journalists whose names we know went to the same handful of schools, were educated in the same shibboleths, and have functionally the same sensibility. The great World War II reporters were the opposite of that.
Of these reporters, the most compelling to me is A.J. Liebling, who was The New Yorker’s reporter at first from Paris, then London, then North Africa, and then France again during the course of the war. During his career Liebling wrote beautifully about many things, most notably boxing and food, but he is possibly the best war journalist I’ve ever read, and his work deserves to be much more widely known than it is.
Abbot Joseph Liebling was born in New York City in 1904. His father was an Austrian Jew who had come to the United States when he was 12 years old and apprenticed to a furrier. He ended up running what appears to have been a very successful wholesale fur business and became a real estate investor. So his son grew up in comfort on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The family visited France from time to time, and young A.J.—later to be known as Joe to his friends—became quite a Francophile and an aficionado of French history. By the time he was 8 years old, he could name all of Napoleon’s marshals.
After high school he entered Dartmouth College, where he was suspended and then expelled for skipping chapel, which at the time was required. (Liebling’s parents were non-observant Jews, and he would later describe himself as “without religion.”) Eventually he made his way to Columbia University to study journalism, but on the side he took classes in French and fell in love with the Middle Ages. At one point early in his war reporting he offers this recollection, which gives you a sense of his style:
The vales, vaux, of the two little rivers, les vaux de Vire, lent their names to form the word vaudeville, according to a plausible but I am now convinced inaccurate theory I had once heard told in a course in old French at Columbia. I had arrived in Vire for the first time in 1926 because of that odd bit of information. I had always loved vaudeville at the Palace in New York. Besides, [his French friend] Henri had told me that during the last war he and another sergeant had brought some German prisoners from the front to a camp on the West Coast, and that on the return trip they had stopped off at Vire, which was the other sergeant’s hometown, and that they had descended at the Cheval Blanc and eaten and drunk wonderfully well. Since I was an amateur medievalist and a vaudeville fan and a glutton, I had gone to Vire.
This memorable visit occurred not long after Liebling lost his first job as a journalist: The New York Times sacked him because he had turned in sports stories in which he made up the names of athletes. After wandering around Europe for a while on a stipend from his father, he studied at the Sorbonne, but eventually returned to the U.S., worked for a number of newspapers that were apparently undeterred by or ignorant of his history of fabrication, and in 1935 was hired by Harold Ross, the editor of a still relatively young weekly called The New Yorker. This would be his primary journalistic home for the rest of his life, though he wrote for many other outlets.
When World War II broke out, Liebling’s fluency in French and deep knowledge of French history and culture made him the ideal reporter for the war on the Western Front. And Liebling writes beautifully about France at this vexed point in its history, when everyone knew that collapse was imminent and unavoidable, though they did not want to admit it. The emotional complexity of war—for both the soldiers themselves and the people on the home front—is something Liebling describes with, I think, unmatched precision and vividness. But he’s precise and vivid about everything. The excellence of his journalism really begins with his powers of observation and description. For instance, consider his accounts of French mustaches.
Of a farmer in Vire riding a horse: “The farmer had thick legs and a great heavy belly that rode in front of him like a sack of grain. He had a red face and a long mustache that drooped like a ship’s ensign in a dead calm.”
Of a French colonel: “He wore a brown beret which was barely balanced on the side of his head. … His cheeks were old rose and his eyes cobalt blue, and his long white mustaches did not droop, but descended in a powerful, rhythmic sweep, like the horns of a musk ox.”
Of a chef: “M. Bisque cried easily. Like most fine cooks, he was emotional and a heavy drinker. He had a long nose like a woodcock and a mustache which had been steamed over cookpots until it hung lifeless from his lip.”
These show you how funny Liebling is, but also his ability to conjure an image in your mind.
When France fell, Liebling joined the exodus from the country, making his way by automobile and train to the far south of France. In the Pyrenees he crossed over into Spain and eventually made his way to Lisbon, and from Lisbon back to the U.S. But he didn’t stay very long.
Liebling doesn’t talk about his personal life anywhere in these war reports, but there is one curious passage concerning his arrival in Spain: “The weather, so beautiful all that ghastly spring, was like a false unchanging smile. I walked for the first time in nine months without thinking of France. I became conscious of this and felt guilty, as you do when you walk out of a hospital where your wife is and in a couple of blocks catch yourself whistling.” An odd comparison, but Liebling’s wife was in a mental hospital at this time, and indeed spent much of the rest of her life there. This may help to account for his willingness to spend the next few years largely at war; soon after he returned from France he re-crossed the sea—this time to England. When he was forced back to the U.S., hitchhiking on an empty Norwegian oil tanker (his account of that voyage is very funny) it didn’t take him long before he reported for duty again: He accompanied the Allied troops in North Africa as what we would now call an embedded reporter.
On the way to Africa one of his journalistic colleagues asked him where he hoped they would land—they had been told no more than any of the soldiers about the destination—and he replied, “Someplace where resistance has ceased.” This I think understates his willingness to be on the front line and to see the fighting up close. He saw a lot of fighting up close, and especially early on much of it was ugly. In his reports he is pretty unsparing in his criticism of Allied leadership, especially the generals, in North Africa. Their performance was generally lamentable, and while, to be fair, they were learning on the job, some of them learned less than others. One example:
General Fredendall obviously did not formulate our policy for the North African theater. He got his directives from Algiers, where General Eisenhower and Robert Murphy of the State Department were running the show, and it was of course impossible to know whether they themselves were making policy or receiving it from Washington. But Fredendall’s complacency in matters of detail jarred me. I spent part of one Sunday afternoon talking to him about the Service d’Ordre de la Légion, commonly spoken of as the S.O.L., the members of which had formed an elite guard of uniformed fascism, like the German SS after which they were patterned. The next time he saw me, in the lobby of the town’s principal hotel, which had been requisitioned by the Army, he graciously approached me and said, “You don’t have to worry about those S.O.L.’s anymore. Their secret intelligence section is working with us now.” Within a few days they had probably turned in the name of every De Gaullist in Oran as a candidate for a concentration camp.
But if Liebling’s writing is shrewdly critical, it is also intensely patriotic, and patriotic in a way that I think is unimaginable in most American journalists today. He has great affection for the young American soldiers among whom he lives:
I hadn’t been with so many Americans so young in twenty years, and I thought they had an edge on my own college generation, although maybe I was less than fair in retrospect because I had been an insecure, intolerant undergraduate myself. All the boys had to do, I thought, was to look around at each other and they would understand that democracy was worth defending. The noncoms they flew with, six sergeants to a Fortress, were just as different from products of other regimes as the officers. They were all high-school men, even though in civil life they had clerked in grocery stores or driven laundry trucks. They had no idea that they were bound down in any social class, and they thought for themselves about everything they saw and did. They were good stuff.
And when in North Africa he got the chance to see an American battalion, under the command of Gen. Ted Roosevelt (son of President Teddy), decisively win a battle against a Panzer battalion, he was ecstatic:
If one American division could beat one German division, I thought then, a hundred American divisions could beat a hundred German divisions. Only the time was already past when Germany had a hundred divisions to spare from the Russian front, plus God knows how many more to fight the British, plus garrison troops for all the occupied countries. I knew deep down inside me after that that the road back to Paris was clear.
Those are the closing lines of his first book of war reporting, The Road Back to Paris.
Later he would return in memory to that North African experience: He couldn’t stop thinking about Mollie. Mollie was not a woman, but an American soldier who had been shot dead in a part of Tunisia called La Piste Forestière (the Forester’s Track). His sergeant described the soldier for Liebling:
“That’s Mollie. Comrade Molotov. The Mayor of Broadway. Didn’t you ever hear of him? Jeez, Mac, he once captured six hundred Eyetalians by himself and brought them all back along with him. Sniper got him, I guess. I don’t know, because he went out with the French, and he was found dead up there in the hills. He always liked to do crazy things — go off by himself with a pair of big field glasses he had and watch the enemy put in minefields, or take off and be an artillery spotter for a while, or drive a tank. From the minute he seen those frogs, he was bound to go off with them.”
His name wasn’t Molotov, but Liebling was at first unable to discover why his comrades called him that. Mollie seemed quite a character: He told everyone that he was a gambler and that he was a big deal on Broadway. Mollie was so vivid in Liebling’s mind —“He has become a posthumous pal”—that when he got back to New York he had to find out who Mollie was. This he did.
Mollie’s legal name was Karl Warner, though his last name at birth had been Petuskia. Before the war he was a busboy at a club called Jimmy Kelly’s on Sullivan Street in lower Manhattan. He was a member of the local waiters and waitresses union and would often speak up in dissent at meetings, though he was later banned when he stopped paying his dues. Still, the union secretary told Liebling he wanted to honor the busboy. After all, Curly, as they called him for his wavy blond hair, was the first member of that local to die in the war.
I thought how pleased Mollie would have been to be restored to good standing in the union, without even having paid up his dues. Then I thought of how much fun he would have had on the Mall in Central Park, in the summertime, if he could only have gone up there with his Silver Star ribbon on, and a lot of enemy souvenirs. I also thought of how far La Piste Forestière was from the kitchen in Jimmy Kelly’s.
The pity of war—as the great poet of the previous war, Wilfred Owen, called it—is never far from Liebling’s mind in his writings. But he also remembered his war years as among the best of his life. Afterward he wrote, “The times were full of certainties: we could be certain we were right — and we were— and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since.” And:
I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men’s memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war.
As, he implies, did he. You can buy Liebling’s collected war writings from the Library of America, and you should, but those works need to be more widely and inexpensively available. Also Joe Liebling at War should be a movie, ideally one directed by Richard Linklater. Richard: If you read this and need some help with a screenplay, get in touch. I have a lot of ideas.
