Column: Andy Rooney, the humble hero of WWII
By Timothy M. Gay
Updated 11/6/2011 6:34 PM
On the morning of July 18, 1944, Andy Rooney wasn't kvetching about all the pairs of sunglasses he'd lost or speculating about whether there really was a "Mrs. Smith" behind Mrs. Smith's Pies.
Andy Rooney in the U.S. Army in 1942.
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Instead, Staff Sgt. Rooney, a combat reporter with Stars and Stripes, was dodging mortar rounds alongside members of the 116th Infantry Regiment as they attacked the Nazi stronghold at Saint-Lô in Normandy. After a grueling three-week siege, the 116th and other American outfits were pushing Adolf Hitler's Third Parachute Division back through Saint-Lô's decimated streets.
The 25-year-old Rooney had been shadowing G.I.s as they uprooted the Germans from the steep slopes north of town. The day before, one of the 116th's battalion commanders, Major Thomas D. Howie, had led a predawn raid that punctured a hole in the enemy defenses long enough to rescue a trapped American unit. On the morning of the 18th, as Rooney inched forward with Howie's men, the major was killed by an artillery burst. When the tragic news reached Major Gen. Charles Gerhardt, he ordered an ambulance to drive Howie's body through the smoldering village while the Germans retreated. Gerhardt wanted Howie to fulfill his vow to be the first American into Saint-Lô. Rooney watched as an enemy artillery barrage forced the rolling elegy to move Howie's corpse into a jeep; the ambulance was needed to transport the wounded.
"When I finally got down into the center of Saint-Lô," Rooney wrote in his marvelous memoir My War, "there was a knot of men by the side of the main church in town. I hurried over and saw 10 or 15 soldiers lifting (Howie's) flag-draped body laid out on a wooden door up the head of stone and mortar that been the side of the church. … The soldiers were placing the body at the very top of the heap."
Major Tom Howie was one of hundreds of Allied heroes that Andy Rooney, who left us Friday at 92, spent a lifetime venerating. Rooney always maintained that World War II never consumed him, but anyone reading the four books he wrote on the war — each celebrating unsung soldiers — is entitled to reach a different conclusion. Ever the curmudgeon, he also liked to downplay his role as a war correspondent. Yet he was one of the first American reporters to fly on a bombing mission, among the first into liberated Paris, literally the first on the scene when the bridge at Remagen was captured intact, and among the first to be sickened by the specter of Hitler's concentration camps at Buchenwald and Thekla.
He won an Air Medal for going on five raids over the Reich. Three months after watching Howie's body lie in state, Rooney was awarded the Bronze Star for having "penetrated to the heart of Saint-Lô under small arms and open range artillery fire and gathered, without regard to his own safety, first-hand descriptive materials for a complete and accurate story." Andy was so ambivalent about the commendation that he never mentioned it to his Stars and Stripes colleagues.
Rooney never stopped rooting for the little guy. He became the Ernie Pyle of the television age, a plain-spoken sage who championed the underdog and made pedestrian things, well, if not profound, then a little less pedestrian. Sure he complained too much — but after what he accomplished in the war and having gone, virtually overnight, from an obscure writer to one of the most popular commentators in broadcast history, he was entitled.
There really was a Mrs. Smith, and there really was a Tom Howie, and thank heavens for the rest of us that Andy Rooney was there to salute them.
Timothy M. Gay is a writer and historian. His next book, Assignment to Hell, is about Andy Rooney and four other great World War II correspondents.