Liebling was a journalist for the New Yorker. The Road Back to Paris is his collected despatches from France, Britain, the US and North Africa during World War Two. The articles were written over the years 1939 to 1944 and can be read individually or as a continuing story. Journalism of such high quality becomes literature. It describes the Man and his Times and becomes in itself a source of history. Some of what he wrote would now be cancelled. “A girl may sleep with one man without being a trollop, but let a man cover one little war and he is a war correspondent.”
He is in Paris during the “Drole de Guerre”, the Phoney War, visiting the French front line on the Vosges. “In each week of disaster, there is an Indian summer of optimism” On the Fall of France “Paris reminded me of the conversational commonplace you hear when someone has died, “Why I saw him last week and he looked perfectly well””. He retreats with the French government to its temporary capitals, first Tours, then Bordeaux. “The ministers arriving from Paris with their flustered and indignant mistresses.”
He crosses into Spain and travels to Lisbon by train from where he flies to the US. He then flies with the RAF Atfero “Atlantic ferry” supplying bombers to the UK.
“All British literature, no matter how improbably it reads, is realistic… I was pleasurably impressed to find nearly all seats in the first-class carriages occupied by private soldiers and aircraftsmen. I decided that the British social revolution had at last arrived. One minute before departure all the “other ranks” yielded their seats to officers and got out. They were batsmen who had been sent ahead to hold places. I thought, in this country, don’t jump to conclusions.”
He returned to the US at the end of 1941 on a long convoy voyage on a Norwegian oil tanker. In 1940 Norway had the world’s second biggest tanker fleet after the US. The country’s King on the invasion of Norway had ordered to allied or neutral ports its merchant marine, which then carried 50% of the oil getting to Britain during the war.
During Liebling’s voyage the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour bringing the US into the war. He sails back to the UK “by another Norwegian ship, this time a fast one, without escort.”
In November 1942 he sailed to North Africa just after the US landings in Morocco. He comments on the deal between Eisenhower and the French admiral, Darlan. Darlan commanding the French navy in 1940 had refused to move its fleet in North Africa to allied ports. Fearing it would fall into German hands, Churchill gave orders for its destruction at Mers el Kebir, resulting in the severing of diplomatic relations between Pétain’s regime and the British.
Darlan became a leading figure in the Vichy state, which remained in active control of its colonies. He was in North Africa at the time of the US intervention and struck a deal with Eisenhower leading both to the Allies taking over Morocco and Algeria and to the German occupation of Vichy unoccupied France.
Early in 1943 Liebling was close to the front in southern Tunisia, witnessing the eventual defeat by an American division of a German division. With this the book ends. With American capital resources and industrial power “I knew deep down that the road back to Paris was clear.”
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