Dateline-Liberated Paris

Dateline-Liberated Paris

By Ronald Weber
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When Andy Rooney reminisced about the Hôtel Scribe and the liberation of Paris, a wistful look would come into his eyes. He would deliberately elongate the double “e-e” sound in the French pronunciation of “Scribe,” savoring the memory. And what a memory! Rooney was a young reporter for Stars and Stripes when the Allied press corps descended on the City of Light in late August 1944. Then a teetotaler, Rooney decided to celebrate Paris’s liberation by uncorking a bottle of wine. How many hundreds, nay thousands, of bottles of wine and liquor were uncorked at the Scribe during the late summer and fall of 1944?

As Ronald Weber reminds us in his delightful Dateline—Liberated Paris, the great wartime photographer Robert Capa said of those heady days in Paris: ‘Never were there so many who were so happy so early in the morning.’

It wasn’t all toasting and boasting at the Scribe bar. As Weber relates, correspondents were engaged in often-vicious battles for big stories and exclusives. Given primitive means of transmission, there was no guarantee that their bosses would actually see their stories. Rooney’s big exclusive—he was an eyewitness to the 2nd French Armored Division’s leading-edge assault into the capital—never reached his editors at Stars and Stripes.

Fortunately, most stories composed in and around the Scribe got through. Even casual WW II buffs will enjoy Weber’s charming account of the tug-of-war between correspondents and Allied military officials played out in ‘a great city where everybody is happy,’ as the New Yorker’s inimitable A. J. Liebling put it.
Timothy M. Gay, author of the Pulitzer-nominated Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A. J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle
Vividly capturing the heady times in the waning months of World War II, Ronald Weber follows the exploits of Allied reporters as they flooded into liberated Paris after four dark years of Nazi occupation. He traces the remarkable adventures of the men and women who lived, worked, and played in the legendary Hôtel Scribe, set in a highly fashionable part of the largely undamaged city. Press jeeps and trailers packed the street outside, while inside the hotel was completely booked with hundreds of correspondents. The busiest spot was the dining area, where the clatter of typewriters combined with shouts of correspondents needing hot water to brew coffee from military powder. But the basement-level bar was the hotel’s top attraction, where famed war correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite, A. J. Liebling, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Janet Flanner, Lee Miller, Marguerite Higgins, Irwin Shaw, Edward Kennedy, Charles Collingwood, Robert Capa, and many others held court while in the company of military censors and top brass. Weber uncovers the struggles between correspondents and Allied officials over censorship and the release of information, the heated press chaos surrounding the war’s end, and the drama of the second German surrender orchestrated by the Russians in shattered Berlin. The elation of total victory was mixed with the abrupt emptiness of a task finished. While work on the Continent remained for journalists, it now dealt with the slog of the occupation of Germany rather than the blood and glory of war. Yet Weber shows there were many reasons to carry on after VE Day in this delightfully entertaining account of the hotel where correspondents were regularly briefed on the war and its aftermath, wrote their stories, had them transmitted to international media outlets, and rarely neglected the pleasures of a Paris reborn until December 1, 1945, when the Hôtel Scribe was officially vacated by the American military.