William Boyd - The New Confessions

Dateline, St.-Tropez, August 16, 1944. Yesterday, the South of France was invaded by three hundred thousand men from the U.S. and French armies. Operation Dragoon had begun. A vast armada of over twelve hundred vessels, the largest invasion fleet the Mediterranean had ever seen, assembled secretly off the golden beaches of the Riviera. Thousands of parachutists were dropped inland before dawn. Nine hundred fifty-nine aircraft pounded the coastal defenses on an invasion front that stretched from Cavalaire to Fréjus.…

I paused. I thought I had the tone just about right. I imagined it being read in an urgent “March of Time” voice, which I felt was just the sort of voice required. I did not find journalism at all easy.

I was sitting typing on the terrace of a ruined café situated on the quay at St.-Tropez Harbor. The Germans had blown up and largely demolished the port installations and had badly damaged most of the quayside buildings. The rest of the small ancient town was more or less untouched. The big white hotel — the Hôtel Sube et Continental — seemed to pulse with brightness in the midday sun. The old walls and fortifications of the citadel were sharp and distant against the washed-out blue of the sky. I drained the last of my beer, brought to me by the cheerful patron of the demolished café. Yesterday had been a very curious twenty-four hours.

The invasion force — General Patch’s Seventh Army — had been attacking three sectors of the coastline. Alpha Force was assaulting beaches at Cavalaire and St.-Tropez. Delta Force was concentrating on Ste.-Maxime, and Camel Force was divided between Fréjus and St.-Raphaël. I was assigned to a company of the 17th RCT (Regimental Combat Team), which was going in on Alpha Yellow Beach, the long strip of sand on the Baie de Pampelonne.

There was a heavy mist on August 15, so heavy it looked artificial. As I peered over the gunwale of the chugging LCI as we cruised steadily in towards Pampelonne Beach, I was reminded of that day at Nieuport when I had raised the false gas alarm. I wasn’t sure if that thick line of smog was mist or the dust raised by the bombers and the naval barrage. I suspect that whoever was at the helm was similarly inconvenienced because we landed somewhat off target, to the right of the beach in a small rocky shingled cove. I kept my eyes on Captain Loomis as he led the company off the front of the LCI into the water. It was eerily quiet for an invasion. No one was shooting at us.

I jumped in. The water was cool, thigh deep. I wore an olive-drab combat uniform, webbing with a water bottle attached and a tin helmet. I had painted PRESS across the front of this in three-inch-high white letters. A huge, envelope-sized Stars and Stripes had been badly stitched onto my left sleeve. I held aloft the pack containing my camera, film and rations. As I waded ashore I sensed the water was strangely viscous and unyielding against my thighs. I looked down. Dead fish. Inches thick. Red mullet, gray mullet, monkfish, whitebait, thousands of what looked like sardines, formed a thick piscatorial crust on the water. I sloshed out of the water and clambered across the rocks, following a furious Loomis to where we should have landed. Loomis was a young man, ludicrously proud of his role as a leader of men. He had a snub nose and soft fleshy lips, which made him look oddly effeminate and sat oddly with the constant martial frown that knitted his brows.

Along the length of the cracked, smoking beach to our left we could see the other LCIs depositing their men among the mess of tangled metal anti-invasion fortifications placed just above the tide mark. Now, from somewhere distant I could hear the pop-pop of small-arms fire. Loomis assembled his company and waited for the engineers with their mine detectors to lead us off the beaches. I wandered off through a gap in a screen of umbrella pines to urinate. The cold water had stimulated my bladder and now that the fear of opposed landings seemed groundless I had to relieve myself.

Beyond the pines was a clear patch of sand and some old yellow beach cabanas, rather knocked about by the preinvasion barrage. A sign read TAHITI PLAGE. I pissed up against this and was just buttoning up my fly when a handsome man in a beret, white shirt and blue shorts emerged from behind one of the cabanas. He carried a German submachine gun.

“ Hey-oh, Américain, ” he said. “What’s new?”

He shook me by the hand and told me in French that his name was Luc, that he was with the resistance and he was going to guide us to St.-Tropez. Then I heard Loomis shouting.

“Todd! Where the fuck are you?”

I led Luc back through the pines to Loomis. He was enraged.

“There’s fuckin’ mines everywhere, asswipe!” he shouted at me.

Luc shook his hand and said, “What’s new?”

Later I took a photograph of Luc, the cabanas and the TAHITI PLAGE sign. I liked to think that I had personally liberated this tranquil bathing beach from the German Army.

Eventually, after taped pathways had been marked through the minefields, the 17th RCT left the beachhead and moved across the scrub and pine copses of the St.-Tropez Peninsula in the direction of the town. The day became very hot. Overhead a Piper Cub spotter plane buzzed annoyingly. By ten-fifteen all firing seemed to have died away. In the woods the air was shrill with the sound of cicadas. From time to time a break in the trees or a rise in the ground afforded a view of the Gulf of St.-Tropez with the Monts des Maures in the background. In the bay sat the vast fleet, the still gray ships with the sun dancing prettily off the silver barrage balloons tethered above them. The rumble of artillery duels came across the gulf from Fréjus and Ste.-Maxime. Thin clouds of smoke rose into the air from burning buildings. I thought that it may not have been the most exciting invasion of the war, but it was certainly the most agreeable. Perhaps I had been lucky after all.

I had never got to London, you see. At the offices of the North American News Association in New York I had requested that I be sent to Normandy. I was initially dismayed when I found that I was instructed to proceed to Ajaccio, Corsica, via Casablanca and Palermo to join the U.S. Seventh Army. I traveled there on a boat filled with dynamite accompanied by two other NANA journalists, Sam M. Goodforth — so his card informed me — chief reporter of the Fort Worth Bugle , and Elmore Pico from the Hearst newspaper chain. Pico, thin and neurotic, later died on the beach at St.-Raphaël. Camel Force, to which he was assigned, saw the fiercest fighting of Operation Dragoon. Pico told me why we were going to Corsica.

“Because we don’t write for friggin’ Life , or Collier’s or McCall’s . We’re not famous; we’re not fuckin’ novelists. We don’t have important friends. All the big guys get to go to Normandy. They go by air. Us schmucks wind up in stinkin’ Corsica!”

He moaned all the way to Casablanca, where he caught dysentery. Goodforth and I reached Corsica in July. Pico caught up with us at the beginning of August. I filed reports for the Dusenberry papers regularly from Casablanca and Salerno, but later I learned they had all been spiked as too boring.

My disappointment over being assigned to the Mediterranean theater was short-lived. As I had hoped, my new job provided me with the peace of mind I had been seeking. It was enough to wear a uniform, to own a tin helmet again. I felt, in a strange way, that the step I had taken had the effect of voluntarily submitting myself to the contingencies of the universe once more. I had stopped trying to steer a course; I was content to be carried by the current. Even dark embittered Pico with his relentless bitching did not irritate me unduly.