Assignment to Hell (12 page)

Cronkite’s setup was spare but sumptuous by Navy standards: a single bed, a wall chair, a strangely large chest of drawers, plus a tub and shower.
²⁴
He learned the hard way that a metal beam ran a couple of feet over the head of his bed. Captain Bryant liked to have his men practice shooting their three-inch and fifty-millimeter guns at odd hours; their
wham
-
wham!
would cause the snoozing Cronkite to bolt upright, bashing his head on the beam.

“I must have hit that thing three times before I got smart enough to get up gradually. It was my first wound as a noncombatant,” Cronkite laughed in 1995.

Captain Bryant didn’t know what to do with Cronkite, so he ordered the ship’s chaplain, a genial Unitarian named Irwin Stultz, to show the reporter around. When the junior officers with whom Cronkite and Stultz were dining the night before their departure learned that reveille would be at three bells, they greeted the news with stony silence, which Cronkite interpreted as a substitute for the moaning and groaning of seamen. Cronkite knew the captain meant business when he broke up the card and dice games in the wardroom before ten p.m. and told everyone to get a good night’s sleep—they’d need it.

At precisely 0430, the task force went anchors aweigh, with Cronkite standing on the sky lookout above the captain’s bridge, transfixed by how Bryant and his crew would navigate the channel’s submarine nets. It didn’t take long for Cronkite’s heart to jump into his throat: just ten minutes out, the task force experienced its first scare.

The destroyer
Roe
, on the convoy’s far left position as it exited the harbor,
signaled to the
Arkansas
that its radar had detected an unidentified object underwater off Fire Island. Bryant sounded general quarters and ordered the entire convoy to execute an emergency starboard turn, no mean feat in a near blackout. He also instructed the destroyer to drop four depth charges on the suspicious bogey. The
Roe
wasn’t sure what it uprooted—but it clearly wasn’t a U-boat. A yellowy substance that Cronkite’s diary described as “disagreeable” soon floated to the surface. It looked and smelled like lemon extract; in all probability, the
Roe
had unearthed an old cargo ship that had been at the bottom of the channel for eons.

After the
Roe
reported no danger, Bryant ordered the convoy back onto its prescribed course; the picket line of destroyers and cruisers was restored. In single file formation, they headed north; once they swung clear of land, the convoy assumed its regular “box” formation, screened on all four sides by destroyers.

Their destination was Halifax, where they were scheduled to refuel and pick up additional troops and escort ships. Army Air Forces bombers and Navy scout planes flew overhead as the convoy hugged the New England and then Canadian shore, scouring the sea for submarines. When the ocean was calm, the task force steamed at 20 knots—a handsome clip.

Reveille was at 0330 sharp, with the chow line queuing up immediately. Cronkite, who enjoyed a hearty breakfast and prided himself on his ability to move in a hurry, couldn’t understand why so many men were beating him to the mess. Then he noticed facial hair on a lot of sailors; it occurred to him that guys must have been forgoing a shave until they had a break later in the day. Cronkite started doing the same and soon was among the first in line every morning. Correspondents marveled at how servicemen managed to eat in rough seas; Hal Boyle described the heaving tables and clattering dishes as pastiche from an old Mack Sennett movie. You could eat off six plates as they hurled past you, Boyle joked.

Once the sun came up, the
Arkansas
’ Bryant kept crew members on their toes by constantly rehearsing various antisubmarine and antiaircraft drills. Each day, Bryant would throw out a different set of scenarios: a U-boat firing torpedoes off the port bow, enemy dive-bombers attacking from the starboard side, etc. Cronkite got a kick out of Reverend Stultz’s
designated role during attack drills: the chaplain served as the
Arkansas
’ official historian, recording a blow-by-blow rundown of the action.

After a couple of days, Bryant took Stultz aside and told the preacher that his correspondent friend was welcome to watch drills—but that Cronkite had to remove his hands from his pockets. The captain didn’t want any seamen thinking that a uniformed “officer” had idle time. By midvoyage, Cronkite wrote in his diary, he had created an attack drill task for himself: When the bridge got too noisy, Cronkite would hand a megaphone to Bryant so that the captain’s orders could be heard by officers and men standing below. It might have technically violated Cronkite’s noncombatant status, but at least it kept his hands occupied. Most of Cronkite’s days on the
Arkansas
were spent shooting the breeze with enlisted personnel, scribbling notes, and banging on his typewriter—a routine he would continually repeat through the duration of the war.

It took two days for the flotilla to reach Nova Scotia, where it was greeted with rough seas and a killer fog. The weather was so nasty that, after refueling, the convoy’s departure was delayed a day. They inched out of Halifax Harbor in a pea-soup mist that demanded lookouts on every bridge. As the
Arkansas
gingerly drew abreast of one troopship, a musical combo of doughboys, wailing away from the top deck, saluted the seamen with a screechy rendition of “Anchors Aweigh.” The sailors hooted their approval. “The music was not good,” Cronkite noted in his journal, “but it didn’t have to be.”
²⁵
The seas stayed jagged for several days. But the captain explained to Cronkite that bad weather helped keep U-boats at bay by making the convoy tougher to track. The first night out of Nova Scotia, a catapult plane from the light cruiser
Brooklyn
spotted several overturned lifeboats, clearly from a sunken Allied ship. But the pilot waited until he was back on board before quietly issuing his report. Had the pilot used regular radio channels to describe the depressing scene, it would inevitably have leaked to crew members, hurting morale, Cronkite explained.

No signs of life were visible, but even if there had been, the convoy likely would not have stopped, officers told Cronkite. “To do so would risk the lives of thousands in the convoy to perhaps save the life of one person
in the lifeboat,” Cronkite typed that night. He was learning the unsparing arithmetic of world war.

By midocean the competitive Cronkite had proudly mastered a form of elementary backgammon called acey-deucy; he got so good at it he started drubbing senior officers, including the captain.

Every day seemed to bring at least one phantom enemy sighting; nerves were beginning to get frayed. Now that the convoy was approaching Great Britain, Cronkite sensed a change in Captain Bryant: he was chuckling less and dressing down underlings more. The thirty-two-year-old “Arky,” as the men called the ship, was showing her age, gasping and shuddering. Cronkite couldn’t wait to see land, especially when he learned from Bryant that their destination was Scotland.

Cronkite’s task force essentially aped the same route as Rooney’s convoy had taken the previous month. Instead of heading to Liverpool, however, Cronkite’s fleet steamed to the Royal Navy base at Greenock, which had been turned into a major axis for transatlantic convoys. Greenock’s train tracks came practically to the water’s edge, then fanned north, south, and east. Cronkite was granted permission by the U.S. Navy to go ashore, but once there was told by British Admiralty officials that he couldn’t use a telephone. Nor would he be permitted, in any article for publication, to describe the convoy’s size, location, or purpose.

During his ten-day stay in the U.K., Cronkite got his first look at destruction wreaked by the Luftwaffe. Fifteen months earlier, in May 1941, the village of Greenock and its rail hub on the bluff overlooking the Firth of Clyde had been viciously attacked. Three hundred enemy planes, many of them lethal Heinkel (He) 111s, strafed and bombed anything in close proximity to the Royal Navy yard. Nearly three hundred people were killed and more than 1,200 injured.
²⁶

As Cronkite walked its cobblestone streets, the village still had a pockmarked look; many of its buildings remained bombed-out shells.

Cronkite got a three-day pass to visit London and boarded an overnight train, an experience he found intimidating. “It was a very great thrill” to visit the British capital, but “I didn’t know my way around [London], and
I found the language peculiar.”
²⁷
He wandered through the city before showing up at the UP offices on Bouverie near Fleet Street, in the News of the World building.

His UP colleagues encouraged him to see London’s bomb damage firsthand and to interview a few of its plucky souls. Cronkite was told that to clear censors, he would have to compose and file his articles at the British Ministry of War Information, set up in the Senate building at the University of London. He wrote a couple of pieces about the
Arkansas
convoy that, though toothless, were still stymied by censors—and stayed that way for a couple of months.

Cronkite arrived in London just as recriminations over the disastrous August 19 Dieppe raid on the English Channel were reaching a fever pitch.
²⁸
Some blamed Churchill and his deputy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of Combined Operations, for carrying out a doomed operation to placate Soviet premier Joseph Stalin on the one hand, and, on the other, to show Roosevelt and Marshall the perils of a cross-Channel attack. Others attributed the debacle to poor leadership, mainly Canadian, at the beachhead. Either way, nearly 3,400 Allied troops were killed or captured in a mission that had no chance to succeed.

Even if Cronkite had wanted to, he couldn’t have filed a piece critical of Churchill’s Dieppe planning; censors would never have allowed it. Saluting the gritty spirit of Londoners, however, was a different story.

In a bylined article that ran in the
Los Angeles Times
and other U.S. papers—the first of hundreds of London-based articles that Cronkite would file during the war—Cronkite noted that Brits “expect at least one more blitz” from the Luftwaffe “regardless of the course the war takes.” The German bombing raids of two years before triggered a “fatalistic philosophy” among the British. “There is no sense being afraid of bombs,” Cronkite quoted one Londoner. “Either they have your number on them or they haven’t.” German bombs had the numbers of forty-three thousand Britons during the nine-month Blitz of 1940–1941.
²⁹

Yet by the summer of ’42, many Londoners weren’t even bothering to seek shelter during air raids. “They glance at the sky and seeing no canopy
of Swastika-marked bombers like those of September 1940, go about their business,” Cronkite wrote.
³⁰

Except for the ubiquitous barrage balloons hanging over the city and fewer cars on the streets, it was difficult at first glance to know that London was at war. Gasoline rationing had virtually eliminated private vehicles, Cronkite noted, except those marked with signs “explaining their continued operation: ‘Doctor,’ ‘Press,’ ‘Apothecary,’ and the like.”
³¹

Cronkite observed that many of London’s passenger cars were American vehicles that had been shipped across the Atlantic. These Detroit-made sedans were operated by “pretty girls”—chauffeurs with the British army, navy, and air force auxiliaries. Red placards were placed in the back windows of American vehicles that warned “Danger, Left-hand drive, No signals.”
³²

After his quick trip to London, Cronkite hustled back to Greenock to rejoin the task force. The troop transports and most of the escort vessels departed in late August for their return voyage. Nine days later, as the U.S. coast loomed beyond the horizon, the flotilla gave Cronkite his first major scoop.

Cronkite was the only correspondent around when a converted luxury liner, the
Wakefield
, caught fire one evening and was the subject of a remarkable ocean rescue. The
Wakefield
hadn’t been attacked by a U-boat or any enemy vessel; the conflagration, a Navy officer told Cronkite, was probably caused by sloppy disposal of cigarettes. It was carrying 1,600 passengers and crew, including several hundred U.S. military specialists and construction personnel who had been providing technical help to the British.

The skipper of the light cruiser
Brooklyn
courageously steered his bow against the burning ship and, along with several destroyers, saved all of the
Wakefield
’s passengers. Most of the
Wakefield
’s seamen stayed aboard and eventually managed to quell the blaze.

Cronkite had covered dozens of fires in Austin, Kansas City, and other places. He knew what readers wanted: a graphic description of the blaze coupled with a salute to the firefighters.

Datelined E
AST
C
OAST
P
ORT
, Cronkite’s story earned him front-page bylines in newspapers all over the country. A note at the top of the article, no doubt scripted by Cronkite, acknowledged that “Walter Cronkite, United Press staff correspondent assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, was the only newspaperman to witness the burning at sea of the big naval transport Wakefield.”

Cronkite’s copy was consummate wire service stuff: crisp and evocative. “We have just brought home the flame-scarred hulk of the United States Navy transport Wakefield … victim of a fire which spouted from a passenger’s cabin and raced across her decks as our convoy neared the end of what otherwise would have been a most successful journey.

“We also have brought home the Wakefield’s 810 passengers and 750 brave crew members—all of them rescued by escort vessels which nosed so close to the stricken ship their paint was scorched and blistered by the intense heat and their hulls bruised from bouncing against the Wakefield.”

Cronkite watched the inferno through his field glasses from a distance of a thousand yards. Fire hoses were soon turned loose. “But from where I watched, the water seemed only to feed the fire. Within 10 minutes the big ship was shrouded in smoke. Our vessel and the rest of the convoy, risking the danger of lurking submarines, circled the burning liner.” To get to the
Brooklyn
,
Wakefield
passengers clambered over rope ladders and makeshift gangways.