Assignment to Hell (3 page)

Two years into covering the war, Cronkite’s waistline was thinning almost as rapidly as his hair. He complained in letters to his wife, Betsy, that the combination of round-the-clock reporting, food rationing, and dreadful English cuisine made it tough to keep on weight. Cronkite was just under six feet tall; his weight that spring had dipped alarmingly south of 160 pounds.
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He was so haggard he looked “like hell,” he confided to Betsy.
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The faux officer’s uniform commissioned by the U.S. military—a dark olive suit coat with
W
ar
C
orrespondent stitched over the left breast pocket and on the left shoulder patch—now bagged around his neck like the blazers he had once borrowed from his dad for Chi Phi fraternity dances at the University of Texas.
¹⁰

Cronkite may have been emaciated, but from the deft way he fastened his flak jacket and “Mae West” life preserver, then hoisted himself through
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s starboard-side waist hatch and wriggled past the ammunition box, the two waist-gun emplacements, the aperture to the Sperry ball-turret gunner’s post, the radar and radio compartments with their wires jutting every which way, then negotiated the narrow metal beam that spanned the bomb bay, inched past the ladder to the top-turret gunner’s perch, and—skirting the elevated cockpit—finally lowered himself into the Plexiglas nose with the bombardier and the navigator, it should have been apparent to his new friends that he was hardly a rookie.

Fifteen months earlier, on his first combat foray in a Flying Fortress, Cronkite had manned the starboard nose machine gun, hammering away at German fighter planes in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of noncombatants. It seemed absurd, Cronkite later said, to observe the niceties of international law while being attacked by a malevolent enemy. He may not have wounded any Nazi fliers (“Boy, they came at you!” he remembered years later
¹¹
), but as Cronkite climbed out of the B-17 he had the satisfaction of wading through hundreds of spent shells.
¹²

By midwar, in fact, Cronkite had gone up in practically every crate the
Yanks and Brits had in their fleets—trainers and two-man fighters and medium and heavy bombers and reconnaissance rattletraps that hawked enemy
Unterseebooten
(U-boats) in Torpedo Junction, the treacherous waters surrounding the British Isles. In November of ’42, desperate to outscoop a wire service foe, he’d even squeezed into a pontoon plane catapulted from the deck of the battleship USS
Texas
.
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Cronkite was proud to be a straitlaced Missourian, but he was ultracompetitive; part of him had always been a daredevil. Whether on a two-laner in Jackson County or a blacked-out country road in East Anglia, the future auto racing buff drove like a banshee.
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In the late ’30s, with the specter of war looming, Betsy and Walter had signed up for the federal government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program. Much to his chagrin, Walter had been washed out because of color blindness, but Betsy had earned her wings—and bragging rights for the rest of their lives together.
¹⁵

The color-blind correspondent’s penchant for going airborne elicited a rebuke from his UP superiors, who had already lost prized reporter Brydon Taves in a plane mishap and didn’t want to lose another. In February 1944, after Cronkite returned from a B-26 Marauder operation against nascent enemy V-1 rocket sites along the Pas de Calais coast on the English Channel, he was told in no uncertain terms to forswear combat flights.
¹⁶

Decades later, after “Uncle Walter” had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower as paterfamilias—twentieth-century America’s last (and best) surrogate dad—his CBS News underlings, astounded and a little put off by his doggedness and unflappability, dubbed him “Old Iron Pants.” It was one of those exquisite nicknames meant to convey heartfelt respect and a hint of disdain all at the same time.

But the Cronkite who wedged himself between bombardier F. E. Umphress, Jr., (front right) and navigator Kenneth Olsen (back left) in the transparent nose beneath
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s cockpit wasn’t wearing iron pants. Cronkite was plenty nervous, he later admitted. The UP reporter had been on the bombing beat for his entire tenure in England. He’d written tons of profiles about airmen like Umphress and Olsen, kid lieutenants who risked life and limb and braved subzero temperatures to take the fight
directly to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Millions of American newspaper readers, anxious to learn more about their boys in battle, hung on every word.

Cronkite was never as pious as his public persona. With a good smoke and cocktail in hand, he loved to spin yarns about his dalliances in bookie joints and topless bars and the rest of Kansas City’s steamy underbelly. Still, he’d once toyed with becoming an Episcopal minister. But he had a soft spot—and not inconsiderable envy—for hell-raisers. He was forever pulling his rakish London roommate, fellow UP reporter Jim McGlincy, out of barroom brawls and scrapes with the landlord.
¹⁷

So Cronkite was bemused to learn that
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s Bob Sheets was one of the four B-17 pilots who’d gotten in Dutch the previous fall for buzzing Yankee Stadium during the first game of the 1943 World Series.
¹⁸
Members of the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals weren’t the only ones ducking for cover that afternoon as Sheets and his wing mates, completely unannounced, came thundering in low over the Bronx. Many in the sellout crowd of sixty-eight thousand–plus thought the city was under attack. Enraged, mayor Fiorello La Guardia wanted the miscreants court-martialed, but there was too great a demand for competent bomber pilots. Sheets, his buddy Jack Watson, and their two accomplices got away with mild reprimands and seventy-five-dollar fines.
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Overnight, the Yankee Stadium quartet became legends in the hell-for-leather air corps.

Correspondents, especially wannabe pilot Cronkite, were in awe of flyboys: the bomber skippers who hustled the “swellingest gals”;
²⁰
the fighter hotshots who bragged about their duels with Luftwaffe aces over the North Sea; the bombardiers, radar technicians, radio operators, flight engineers, and navigators who, when not in their cups, would calmly dissect their planes’ performance at five miles above the earth; and, most of all, the tail-, topside-, and ball-turret gunners, the eighteen-year-old kids who stared into their beer a little too long, hands trembling as they took another gulp.

Cronkite the correspondent may have been awed, but Cronkite the human being knew enough not to get too close. Indeed, among the first things he told Harrison Salisbury when the UP senior editor (and future
New York Times
sage) arrived in London in early ’43 was to keep an emotional distance from the bomber boys. Too many wouldn’t be coming
back—or if they did, they’d be shot up, maybe crippled for life, Cronkite warned.
²¹

No reporter understood the macabre metrics of air combat survivability better than Cronkite.
S for Sugar
, the Molesworth-based B-17 in which Cronkite had flown his first mission over the Reich, was one of eleven bombers shot down in January ’44 while attacking an aircraft assembly plant in Oschersleben, Germany. The
S for Sugar
men were luckier than many Allied fliers that day: they bailed out and spent the rest of the war in a Luftwaffe-run stalag.
²²

Fully three-fourths of the American airmen who flew against Nazi Germany in 1943 and the first half of 1944 ended up as casualties of one kind or another,
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apparitions that haunted the journalists who covered East Anglia airdromes, sharing beer and small talk with doomed young men.
Stars and Stripes
reporter Andy Rooney, Cronkite’s friend and fellow air war writer, likened bombing missions to playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.
²⁴

C
RONKITE HAD BEEN AROUND
M
OLESWORTH
for a lot of missions. But he’d never seen it as frenzied as it was on that early June morning. At the last minute the brass had added a horde of new targets and demanded extra sorties, exacerbating Molesworth’s bedlam. Each of the thirty-four B-17s in
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s 427th Bomb Squadron was being loaded with a full complement of ten five-hundred-pound demolition bombs, believed to be the optimal weapons for the unprecedented low-altitude attack the squadron was being asked to undertake.

A few hours earlier, Cronkite had been alone in his London flat. Like virtually everyone in the south of England that evening, he’d heard the unstinting drone of Allied warplanes and figured something big was up. “The whole world knew that the [cross–English Channel] invasion was imminent,” Cronkite remembered a half-century later. “The secret being guarded to the very death was exactly when and where.”
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Over Cronkite’s protestations, his bosses at UP that spring had dictated
that once the assault began, he would stay in London, write the lead story, and coordinate transatlantic coverage. Their edict left him “broken-hearted,” he wrote to Betsy on May 14. “I am safe and snug and hating it,” he snarled.
²⁶
Fewer than three dozen of the five hundred Allied war correspondents in England had been “assimilated” with invasion-day troops; Cronkite, despite his stature, wasn’t one of them. Ironically, his party-boy roomie, McGlincy, was among the elite few.
²⁷

At his place on Buckingham Gate a couple of blocks from the royal palace, Cronkite was trying to nod off after midnight when he was startled by someone banging on his door. Standing there, red-faced and in full uniform, was Major Hal Leyshon, an Eighth Air Force public relations officer whom Cronkite had gotten to know from poker games and the occasional spree in Piccadilly. A postmidnight visit from Leyshon, then, was not all that unusual—but not with Hal wearing a uniform and a scowl.

A onetime New York newspaperman, Leyshon brusquely inquired about the whereabouts of McGlincy. Still half asleep, Cronkite explained that Jim was somewhere in the south of England, sequestered with an Army outfit “on maneuvers.”
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Still not satisfied, Leyshon stormed around the apartment, jerking open every closet door. “What in the devil are you doing, Hal?!” Cronkite demanded.
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Finally Leyshon growled, “Cronkite, you’ve drawn the straw to represent the Allied press on a very important mission. It will be dangerous. No guarantee you’ll get back. But if you do, you’ll have a great story. You can turn it down now, or you can come with me. And security is on—you can’t tell your office!”
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Cronkite did not hesitate. “I’m in. I’m with you,” he assured Leyshon.
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Already rehearsing an alibi, he hurriedly climbed into his ill-fitting uniform. “I figured if I made it,” he wryly recalled, “the UP would forgive me.”
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Leyshon had a sedan and driver waiting. As they tore north on blacked-out country roads, the wily public relations officer stoked his friend’s competitive fire. Leyshon promised Cronkite he’d have the hottest story in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) that day. Best of all, Cronkite would be back at UP’s offices off Fleet Street before any Allied reporter—
including his nemeses at AP and INS—had even filed a story!
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Leyshon knew his man: Cronkite was as vainly cutthroat as any correspondent in England.

T
HEY PULLED INTO
M
OLESWORTH IN
time for the premission briefing at 0330. Having been awakened ninety minutes earlier, the B-17 crew members were perched on chairs and benches, eager to learn their objectives.

G-2 intelligence officers wielding wooden pointers stood on a platform; behind them was a huge map concealed by a drape. Every briefer in Britain at that hour was smiling “like a skunk eating chocolate,” one flier recalled.
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After calling the men to attention, the officers paused for dramatic effect—then dropped the curtain.

Everyone hooted. Instead of a flight path taking them deep into the Third Reich, the tacked-up ribbons foretold a brisk run across the Channel into northern France. Colonel Kermit D. Stevens, commander of a 303rd combat wing, marched to the front of the stage and bellowed, “This is the day we have all been waiting for! Make ’em know it!”
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Along with scores of other Allied air units, the 303rd’s mission was to bomb enemy entrenchments and transportation arteries immediately behind the Calvados coast of Normandy—all aimed, they were told, at helping seaborne infantry gain a toehold on Normandy’s beaches.
Shoo Shoo Baby
’s squadron was given a daunting target: a bridge over the Orne River and its parallel canal that, left intact, would enable the Germans to rush reinforcements to the beaches. The bridge was some 10 miles inland, outside a village known as Caen.
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For weeks, Cronkite had groused about being sidelined. Now, thanks to a lucky draw and a friendship forged over watered-down bourbon, he would be an eyewitness to the twentieth century’s most epochal moment. On that day of days, Cronkite’s Fort was one of 9,500 Allied warplanes that saw action over the Channel. The Missouri daredevil was the only American correspondent that morning to fly on a bomber. During takeoff, Cronkite parked himself in the B-17’s plastic nose, the better to absorb the full adrenaline rush.
³⁷

By the time
Shoo Shoo Baby
rumbled down Molesworth’s mucky runway, jostling its men with each bump, the sun had been up for a while. Twenty-four thousand Allied paratroopers had already hurtled into the dank gloom all over Normandy. Before long Cronkite could glimpse through the clouds the “unbelievable” spectacle of vessels steaming across the Channel—so many, he wrote, that there “didn’t seem to be room for another.”
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By now it was nearing 0700, Tuesday, June 6, 1944.