Assignment to Hell (41 page)

Feeling like a rube, Cronkite arrived late for his luncheon with the world’s most celebrated American expatriate. Murrow, who could be prickly, was gracious. He surprised Cronkite by offering him a job as CBS’ Russian correspondent. Murrow was calling back to London Cronkite’s former UP colleague Bill Downs; he wanted Cronkite to replace Downs in covering Stalin’s government in exile at Kuibyshev. CBS was offering Cronkite a king’s ransom: $125 a week, plus “commercial fees” of some $25 almost every time Cronkite appeared on the air, which would be a lot. The CBS offer came close to tripling Cronkite’s $57.50-per-week salary with UP. Yet Cronkite had been ambivalent about his broadcast experiences in Austin, Kansas City, and Norman.

“I thought it was kind of a schlock business compared to print,” he remembered. “But I still thought, well, $125 and a chance to go to Russia, I probably ought to take it. So I accepted it, and I was going to give United Press a couple of weeks’ notice, which, frankly, wasn’t adequate in wartime.”
¹⁵

When Cronkite told his then boss, Harrison Salisbury, about Murrow’s offer, Salisbury immediately countered with a $17.50 per week raise—unheard-of largesse at UP—and promised to arrange for the wire service’s president, Hugh Baillie, to make his own plea. Sure enough, Baillie got through on the phone from New York that night—no mean feat in wartime
London—and “gave me a sales pitch like I never heard in my life,” Cronkite recalled.

“I’m going to raise you $20 a week just to show my good faith,” Baillie vowed. Cronkite inquired if the $20 was in addition to the $17.50 that Salisbury had offered—or part of it. There was a long pause. “No, no, this is on top of that,” Baillie insisted—which may or may not have been part of UP’s keep-Cronkite strategy, but was nevertheless now in its counteroffer.

Cronkite was in a position to pocket 95 bucks a week from UP—good money for a gumshoe reporter without a college degree.
¹⁶

When Cronkite broke the news to Murrow, “he didn’t take it too kindly,” Cronkite remembered. Murrow didn’t say it directly, but the inference was that Cronkite had used the CBS offer to leverage more money out of UP. “I hadn’t meant to; it wasn’t my intention when I accepted Ed’s offer,” Cronkite allowed. “But it worked out that way, and Ed had every right to feel that way about it.”
¹⁷

By mid-’43 Ed Murrow and his team were the hottest commodities in journalism—wordsmiths inventing a new medium. Murrow, the toast of the free world, wasn’t used to people saying no—especially ambitious young reporters. Cronkite’s clumsy turndown drove a wedge between them.

Although they would later spend fifteen years at CBS News as colleagues, Cronkite and Murrow were never close. Murrow and his “boys,” Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood among them, tended to look down their noses at Cronkite, the wire service grunt who—heaven forfend!—actually cared about breaking news. The Murrow Boys weren’t reporters so much as seers, urbane commentators who dined with prime ministers one day—and parachuted out of planes the next. Murrow and his minions didn’t just write and read news: They dissected it, putting it into bold historical context, giving events a passion that print journalists—even Liebling and Bigart at their best—were hard-pressed to match. And as Collingwood would later demonstrate, the Murrow guys sometimes weren’t above manipulating the facts for their own aggrandizement.

It wasn’t until after Cronkite proved himself as CBS News’ anchorman
in the early 1960s that the surviving Murrow men accepted him as a peer—and even then it was grudgingly. Cronkite always admired the Murrow Boys and what they meant to the evolution of journalism. But in the main he felt their work should be labeled “opinion”—which is what happened when Eric Sevareid, the quintessential Murrow protégé, became a regular commentator on Cronkite’s
CBS Evening News
.

A
NDY
R
OONEY AND
W
ALTER
C
RONKITE
still saw a fair amount of each other on the USAAF and SHAEF beats. But by early ’44, they weren’t sharing train rides up to East Anglia nearly as often. Allied censors, less fearful of enemy infiltration, deemed that it was no longer necessary for correspondents to compose their air war articles at the Ministry of Information in London—a move Cronkite likened to being given a new lease on life.

The edict left reporters like Cronkite and Rooney free to spend less time commuting and more time at their offices and “home” bases: in Cronkite’s case, the 303rd Bomb Group at Molesworth, in Rooney’s case, the 306th in Thurleigh. They could go for several days at a stretch, spend quality time with the airmen, write their stories, have them approved by censors more or less on the spot, then phone their copy in to their home offices in London. The field phone connections were often dreadful. Even the simplest words, Cronkite recalled, had to be loudly dictated—“Smith! ‘S’ as in ‘Sam!’ ‘M’ as in ‘Mary!’”—usually in the presence of a young sergeant-censor eager to hit the local pub. Although late-war censors tended to be somewhat less paranoid, there were still knockdown battles. By mid-’44, Cronkite’s UP protégé Collie Small had pretty much taken over the day-to-day Molesworth beat, freeing Cronkite to coordinate daily bombing coverage.

C
ENSORS WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES
frequenting nightspots. By late ’43 London had turned into a den of iniquity, a place only marginally north of Sodom and Gomorrah.
¹⁸

The city’s ambience was surreal: bomb debris, the heavy fog off the Thames, and the acrid smoke rising from thousands of chimneys combined
to give London the gothic feel of a bad Sherlock Holmes movie. Every afternoon and evening, swing bands could be heard throughout the city—young couples jitterbugging their cares away.
¹⁹

The airmen whose everyday exploits Cronkite and Rooney commemorated were especially in need of the release that only London could provide. “They had been hauling regularly,” Rooney remembered, and “had to take care of their physical needs.”
²⁰
The Eighth and Ninth Air Force guys would pile out of trains and instantly go prowling for female companionship; most weren’t overly picky. “Good time girls” offered quickie “wall jobs” for eight bucks—and didn’t lack for customers.
²¹

Cronkite recalled the sex-ploits of the Piccadilly Commandoes, the professional hookers who worked blacked-out doorways and alleyways. “[W]e could hear the click of heels announce the arrival of a lady of the night. Wearing cheap perfume, she would run her hand along our pants leg.” The prostitute’s move was pecuniary, not prurient. By grabbing trousers, streetwalkers could tell whether the target was American or British or an enlisted man or an officer. “On that determination hung the price at which she would open the bidding,” Cronkite laughed.
²²

Rooney wrote an amusing piece in April of ’44 about Lady Astor, the Virginia-born firebrand who, well into her seventies, was a self-appointed ambassador to American troops in Britain. The former Nancy Langhorne had become the first female member of Parliament in 1919 and an outspoken Tory celebrated on two continents. She regularly visited London’s canteens and clubs, sampling the humble cuisine and imploring the staff to take care of “her boys.”

“Somewhat the same spirit of aggressive maternalism is put into operation when she encounters an inebriated GI on the street,” Rooney wrote. “Without the formality of introductions she collars him, gives him a brisk lecture on the evils of rum, then, before he can figure out what is going on, piles him into a cab and sends him back to his billet.” Lady Astor’s “invariable gag” when she entered a canteen full of Yanks was to yell out, “Are there any rebels in the house?”
²³

Every day in early ’44, thousands of “rebels” visited the Rainbow Corner in Piccadilly at the intersection of Shaftesbury and Coventry. Run by
the American Red Cross, the Corner’s basement had been decorated to evoke a small-town drugstore. Cokes could be had for a nickel; hamburgers went for a dime. A jukebox constantly blared Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller; almost every night, dances were held in the big upstairs ballroom.
²⁴

The hostesses who staffed air base auxiliaries and social clubs such as the Rainbow Corner often had to multitask: soothing the spirits of one lonesome GI while simultaneously fending off the drunken advances of another. With their exquisite hair and empathetic smiles, the young women came across, Rooney remembered, as “a sort of remote combination of Rita Hayworth–and-your-best-friend’s-big-sister.”
²⁵

T
HE YOUNGSTER WHO COULDN’T WRITE
a coherent news article when he first joined the
Stars and Stripes
in late ’42 had become in short order an accomplished journalist. Once Rooney learned to trust his writing instincts and editors Bob Moora and Bud Hutton loosened their reins, he began earning regular bylines. Rooney’s accounts of bombing raids, coupled with his poignant profiles of USAAF airmen and support personnel and his entertaining features on life in London, soon made him one of the
Stars and Stripes
’ most recognizable figures. The 1944 publication of
Air Gunner
, Rooney and Hutton’s compilation of stories about courageous fliers, added to his growing stature.

He learned his craft from some of the best American journalists of his generation. Rooney watched Cronkite pry quotes out of airmen and cram the who-what-why-when-where of a bombing raid into a lead paragraph. He watched Bigart sift through a flood of data, then relate it without using a single cliché. Later in the war Rooney watched Boyle chat up half the doughboys in the First Army, juggle a dozen stories, and still meet every deadline. And over dinner at the Lamb and Lark Rooney got to pick Liebling’s brain.

Above all, Rooney learned from his older colleagues what constituted “news”—and what didn’t. In mid-’43 the
Stars and Stripes
sent Rooney to SHAEF headquarters, where General Eisenhower was scheduled to conduct a press briefing. Along with a dozen other reporters, among them
fellow Writing 69th member Gladwin Hill of Associated Press, Rooney was ushered into a mahogany conference room. At the appointed hour, the doors swung open and there stood the Supreme Commander, every bit as engaging as Rooney had imagined. “[Ike] was somehow lovable, being, at the same time, competent and bumbling,” Rooney remembered.
²⁶

Eisenhower made some staff announcements and touched on a few other topics, none particularly newsworthy, before Hill asked about the timetable for the invasion of the Continent. Ike hemmed and hawed in his rambling style, then finally allowed that the cross-Channel invasion was likely to take place “within a year.”

Rooney returned to the
Stars and Stripes
’ offices and dutifully began writing up Eisenhower’s remarks in the order in which the general had delivered them. Just then Hill’s story came crackling across the AP wire: “General Dwight Eisenhower announced today that the Allied invasion of France will take place within the year.” Hill’s story barely mentioned the other subjects that Ike had broached. It dawned on Rooney that the other announcements weren’t news, but the Supreme Commander predicting the invasion timeline, however amorphous, was
big
news.

“These reporters were my teachers although they didn’t know it. While I tried to act more like one of them than a student, I watched and listened carefully,” Rooney remembered.

R
OONEY DID MORE THAN WATCH
and listen: he emulated his mentors, consistently putting himself in harm’s way to get spectacular stories. Nine weeks after Cronkite watched B-26s bomb the Pas de Calais, Rooney went on another one of Eisenhower’s preinvasion “shuttles”—a massive bombing raid that gave the Nazis’ Channel wall “its worst pounding of the war,” Rooney wrote.

“Fortresses and Liberators poured back and forth across the English Channel in a steady stream this afternoon, and there wasn’t a moment almost up to dark that found the skies above the Channel free from the roar of the shuttling bombers or their escorts,” Rooney wrote in a piece the
Stars and Stripes
played on page one.

Rooney had flown on April 20 in a B-17 piloted by First Lieutenant Carl N. Grending of San Leandro, California. At Ike’s insistence, the USAAF threw everything it had at a forty-mile swath stretching westward from the Belgian-French border: heavy and medium bombers, P-38s, P-51s, and P-47s. Censors wouldn’t let Rooney identify the objectives, but they were doubtless troop encampments, or bridges, or rail marshaling yards, or crucial highways—the tier one targets in Eisenhower’s transportation plan.

“There was some flak, but it wasn’t up to Nazi standard, and their fighters were conspicuously absent, at least in our area,” Rooney wrote. Disappointed that enemy fighters had taken the afternoon off, badass P-47 pilots “crisscrossed the coastal area as long as their fuel held out, but no one would challenge them.”
²⁷

No news outlet could challenge Rooney and the
Stars and Stripes
in covering preinvasion mobilization—and the way it was transforming the lives of the young Americans swarming all over Britain. As early as February of ’44—almost five months before D-Day—Rooney was reporting on the extraordinary steps being taken to care for wounded invasion soldiers.

“The first complete air-evacuation group ever organized for the sole purpose of carrying wounded men is ready and waiting in England to transport thousands of Allied casualties a day from the invasion battlefields of the Continent to secure hospitals in the British Isles,” Rooney wrote in a piece about specially equipped C-47s.

The magnitude of planning that went into medical evacuation, Rooney discovered, was stunning. Censors wouldn’t permit him to pinpoint the number of evacuation squadrons now part of the Ninth Air Force, but did allow him to report that each squadron would be composed of thirteen C-47s, each capable of carrying eighteen litter patients on the stacked bunks built into both sides. At least one nurse and surgical technician had been assigned to each transport.