Assignment to Hell (25 page)

After several minutes of stalemate, Bob Post raised his hand, cracked a weak joke about his newspaper not caring about headlines, and volunteered to ride in a B-24. Leyshon and Laidlaw were stunned that Post, never reticent in reminding people he represented the omnipotent
New York Times
, was the one that broke the impasse.

Post had already confided to his wife and friends that he’d had premonitions of death. He was assigned to
Maisie
, a B-24 flown by Captain Howard Adams of the 44th Bomb Group in Shipdham. The plane had been named after a series of B movies starring screen siren Ann Sheridan, one of which, ironically, had been based on an A. J. Liebling story in the
New Yorker
.

The Writing 69th’s orientation wrapped up February 9. For several days and nights they hung out in East Anglia, anxiously awaiting a thumbs-up that didn’t come. One night they were all cramped together in the same barracks dead asleep when a member of the fraternity tripped over a chair on the way to the restroom. Within seconds the entire gang was up, convinced the mission was on, Cronkite related to Betsy. One of them even began shaving before they discovered there was no reason to be stirring hours before reveille.
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Eventually they returned to London, where they cooled their heels for another week and a half. The fateful call finally came on February 25, so they donned their galoshes and mackinaws again and scrambled back onto the train.

CBS’ Paul Manning had contracted pneumonia and
Yank
’s Denton
Scott had received a conflicting order, but the other six were scattered at different air bases. At their respective preflight briefings in the early hours of February 26, the correspondents learned that their bombing target would be a Bremen factory that manufactured Focke-Wulf fighter planes. If that area of Lower Saxony proved cloud-covered, their fallback target would be the
Kriegsmarine
U-boat base at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea. Both outposts were heavily fortified with antiaircraft batteries and uncomfortably proximate Luftwaffe bases.

The Eighth Air Force had been attacking enemy-occupied territory for seven months, yet the Writing 69th’s sortie would mark just the third time that U.S. planes had bombed Germany proper. On January 27, four weeks before, the first U.S. bombing attack on German soil had been carried out against Wilhelmshaven. Although the Eighth Air Force had insisted that the American press trumpet the raid, in truth visibility had been poor: most of the U.S. bombers missed their targets by wide margins. More bombs fell on the village and in the sea than on Hitler’s U-boat pens. The second U.S. attack against Germany had come against the coastal fortifications near the cities of Emden and Hamm; it, too, drew big headlines but had been largely ineffectual.
⁴⁰

O
F NECESSITY, THE BOMBER FLEETS
on the morning of February 26 took off in increments, beginning at 0830, then circled the south of England, waiting for others to join. Andy Rooney likened it in his
Stars and Stripes
piece “to a pickup football team on a Saturday morning. We grew in strength as we flew, until all England seemed to be covered with bombers.” At the outset there were ninety-three bombers, but some twenty returned to England with mechanical or personnel issues, including the B-17 to which INS’ William Wade had been assigned. That left five members of the Writing 69th still airborne: Cronkite, Bigart, Rooney, Hill, and Post.

The B-17s of the 305th led the way, followed by Bigart and Cronkite in the 303rd, then the 91st, then Rooney in the 305th, followed by the B-24 groups. Post, Captain Adams, and the 44th were in the most vulnerable spot in the formation, the back end, where the planes were known as “Rear-
end Charlies.” Enemy fighters liked to attack formations from behind. Eventually the entire U.S. flotilla climbed to twenty-nine thousand feet and stayed there for most of the flight over the North Sea.

Cronkite was with Captain Glenn Hagenbuch’s crew in
S for Sugar
; Bigart with larger-than-life Arkansan Lewis “Hoss” Lyle in
Ooold Soljer
, the same officer destined to lead the 303rd’s D-Day attack on the bridge at Caen.

At precisely ten twenty-two a.m., a German radar station on the Dutch island of Texel spotted the formation and sounded the alarm. Within eight minutes, they were under attack by Focke-Wulfs stationed at Deelen, Holland, and along the Frisian Islands. The deadly harrasment continued, almost unabated, for the next two-plus hours. At one point Hoss Lyle counted thirty-five fighters “darting in from all directions,” Bigart wrote. Bigart put his machine gun training to use, manning one of the fifty-caliber waist guns on
Ooold Soljer
, but was racked with worry about accidentally hitting friendly planes. A few hundred aerial yards away in
S for Sugar
, Cronkite was in its Plexiglas nose, blasting away, conscience free, on the starboard fore-gun.

“I fired at every German fighter that came into the neighborhood,” recalled Cronkite. “I don’t think I hit any, but I’d like to think I scared a couple of those German pilots.”
⁴¹

The German skies were so cloudy that, as the formation arrived over Lower Saxony at 1100, the objective was switched from slightly inland Bremen to coastal Wilhelmshaven. The entire formation was forced to execute a sharp turn to bring the U-boat base into its bombsights.

“I could not quite make out our specific target for obliteration, the submarine pens, because at our altitude the installations along the Jade Busen (Jade Bay) seemed no bigger than a pinhead,” Bigart wrote later that day. The street pattern of the old Prussian village, on the other hand, could easily be discerned from five miles aloft, he noted.

As they approached Wilhelmshaven Bigart watched in horror as an American bomber went “down in a dizzy spin.” Only two parachutes opened.

Inside
Ooold Soljer
Bigart watched intently as the bombardier, Second
Lieutenant Reinaldo J. Saiz of Segundo, California, and the navigator, First Lieutenant Otis A. Hoyt, of Dawn, Missouri, zeroed in on the target. The reporter glanced back and for the first time in an hour couldn’t see any Focke-Wulfs on their tail. “We had a good run and we were squarely over the town. I watched Saiz crouch lower over his sight. I heard him call ‘Bombs Away!’

“Our salvo of 500-pounders plunged through the open bomb bay. From where I stood I could not see them land, but our ball turret gunner, Sergeant Howard L. Nardine, of Los Angeles, took a quick look back and saw fires and smoke.”

Bigart was less concerned about fire on the ground than the flak exploding all around
Ooold Soljer
. “Nasty black puffs” were erupting as they barreled northwest over the sea. Soon enemy fighters were swarming again; this time, the 190s and 109s gave way to the twin-engine Me 110s, which seemed to Bigart to be preying on the crippled bombers desperately weaving in and out of cloud cover.
⁴²

Banshee
,
Ooold Soljer
, and
S for Sugar
all made it back to England without incident, although as we’ve seen, Rooney’s ship,
Banshee
, was pretty shot up.

Cronkite always claimed that thirteen American bombers were lost that day, but the actual count, according to research conducted by
The Writing 69th
author Jim Hamilton, was seven. One of them, sadly, was Bob Post’s Liberator. After
Maisie
absorbed a mortal hit from an Me 109 over the outskirts of Wilhelmshaven, the crew of a companion B-24 spotted two streaming parachutes as the plane plummeted. Post never exited the stricken bomber. Later that day, his remains were found by German soldiers amid the wreckage.
⁴³

Back on the ground, Cronkite and Bigart rendezvoused by plan at Molesworth with UP’s Harrison Salisbury, Hal Leyshon, fellow Air Force PRO Jack Redding, and an army censor, identified only in Salisbury’s account as Colonel Gates. The news that Post’s plane was missing hit everyone hard; the atmosphere in the windowless shed turned gloomy. Bigart couldn’t be sure, but he wondered if the wounded bomber he’d seen spinning toward the ground outside Wilhelmshaven had, in fact, been Post’s.

Ten of them jammed into Leyshon’s sedan for the tense ride back to London. It was then that Bigart asked Cronkite if he’d drafted a lede and was incredulous to learn about his friend’s “assignment to hell” construct. As the years wore on, Salisbury claimed to have fed Cronkite the “hell” line—an assertion missing in Cronkite’s memoirs and three other detailed recollections of the mission and its aftermath.

But there’s no doubt that once they got back to the Ministry of Information, Salisbury sat at Cronkite’s elbow as the story took shape. Salisbury kept murmuring, “That’s right down the old groove, Cronkite. Now you’re cooking,” Cronkite related to Betsy.
⁴⁴

“Actually the first impression of a daylight bombing mission is a hodge-podge of disconnected scenes like a poorly edited home movie,” the grooved Cronkite wrote that night, “bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one engine thousands of feet above, a tiny speck in the sky that grows closer and finally becomes a Focke-Wulf peeling off above you somewhere and plummeting down, shooting its way through the formation.”
⁴⁵
Salisbury kept pounding Cronkite on the back as one paragraph after another poured out.
⁴⁶

Not only was Salisbury hovering, but also an anxious John Charles Daly of CBS Radio, who had arranged for the correspondent fresh off the Wilhelmshaven raid to appear on a live broadcast feed. The instant Cronkite pulled his copy out of the typewriter he raced off to the BBC studio that CBS was leasing.

Daly and his guest cobbled together a quick script for the radio program, but didn’t get it in front of the censor until ten minutes before airtime, causing Daly palpitations.

“Even as Daly was setting up the circuit to NY and they were doing the old ‘Hello, New York, Hello, New York. London calling, New York, London calling,’ censorship called and said the script was okay,” Cronkite told Betsy. They were on the air for only three minutes before the circuit failed, leaving Daly infuriated. Ten minutes later NBC used the same circuit and got its transmission through, which didn’t make Daly any happier.
⁴⁷

Rooney also appeared on radio in the aftermath of the Wilhelmshaven raid, his first-ever broadcast interview. Expatriate American actor (and
future Hollywood studio executive) Ben Lyon invited Rooney onto Lyon’s BBC show,
London Calling
. Every “Well, Ben,” and pause was carefully scripted.

“Well, Andy, suppose you give us some low-down on one of those raids?” Lyon asked Rooney as the reporter delivered pedestrian patter about the previous day’s mission. The experience was so awkward that Rooney vowed he’d never again go on the air unless he’d personally written the copy—and never did. At least Rooney was well compensated for his troubles: the BBC gave him twelve quid, more than a week’s pay at the
Stars and Stripes
.
⁴⁸

By the time Cronkite left the radio studio it was well past midnight. “I was horribly tired that night,” he wrote Betsy. “We had been routed out at [it had been scratched out by censors but was clearly “Molesworth”], for our briefing and a spot of breakfast before taking off for Germany, and then [again censored] hours in a bomber at high altitude living on pure oxygen, standing up most of the time with 50 lbs. of heavy fur flying equipment and parachute on your back, and the general exertion of shooting guns and moving about keeping out of other people’s way, is very tiring.”
⁴⁹

Cronkite’s UP story somehow got delayed in being transmitted to the States, so Glad Hill’s AP piece got bigger pickup back home. But Cronkite’s story hit huge in the British papers, which loved his repeated allusions to Hades and his evocative—if purplish—prose.

Walter, however, knew none of this when he got back to the Park Lane at five a.m. and collapsed. Four and a half hours later Salisbury was on the phone, asking Cronkite to come in to the office to write a tribute to Post, who’d been officially declared missing.

Once Cronkite finished his encomium, Salisbury insisted on treating Cronkite to a celebratory—and very liquid—lunch at the Savoy with UP deskman Bill Dickinson and Dickinson’s fiancée, a society reporter with the
London Daily Mirror
named Hilde Marchant. Marchant was instantly recognized by the Savoy’s maître d’, who proceeded to treat the party like royalty. They were given a table with a stunning view of Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament.

Afterward, Cronkite begged off and “re-collapsed,” he told Betsy, at the
Park Lane. At six thirty p.m. his phone rang; it was Salisbury again, ordering Cronkite to join the threesome for dinner at Jack’s Club, a favorite hangout of British and American correspondents. Then they were off to watch jitterbugging at the Opera House in Covent Garden, a lavish theater where Marchant had done stories about the U.S. dance craze sweeping Britain. Again, they were greeted with open arms and whisked to a box with an unobstructed view of the dance floor.

“Boy, has jitterbugging hit this land! Wow!” Cronkite enthused to Betsy.

They capped off the marathon party with a stop at the Cocoanut Grove, a nightclub where they repeatedly toasted Cronkite’s safe return. “As usual,” Cronkite laughed to Betsy, “everybody got drunk but Cronkite.”
⁵⁰
For his entire life, he prided himself on his capacity to nurse alcohol and worried about people—like his father, Jim McGlincy, and Hal Boyle—who couldn’t.
⁵¹

The sober but bushed Cronkite was again rousted out of bed Sunday morning by UP’s London bureau, this time to respond to a story idea from UP–New York. He then hustled over to the Officers’ Club just before it closed for lunch.

As he entered the club, he sensed heads turning in his direction. Soon a palpable buzz filled the room. Walter Cronkite was no longer an obscure wire service scribbler. He had, literally overnight, become Walter Cronkite, famous war correspondent. Every Sunday paper in England, it seemed, had played his Wilhelmshaven story on page one, under “great, glaring headlines,” he told Betsy.