Assignment to Hell (42 page)

There was a serious element of danger in using aircraft to transport the wounded. Rooney pointed out that the Geneva Conventions expressly forbade attacks on hospital ships marked with the traditional red-and-white symbol; there were no such protections for planes, however.
²⁸

USAAF markings were part of a special three-week display at Selfridges
department store on London’s Oxford Street that Rooney wrote about in January of ’44. Seven thousand people a day visited the exhibit, which public relations–conscious Eighth Air Force officials had organized to help Britons appreciate why their country had been turned upside down. The cockpits of B-17s and B-24s were re-created, along with the ball turrets and radar and radio compartments.

Four air gunners, each of whom had won the Distinguished Service Cross, greeted visitors. The sergeant-guides were amazed at how much English kids knew about the bombers.

Not long after the exhibit opened, Rooney noted, Technical Sergeant Rob Bryson, of Stockport, Iowa, watched a small boy walk in with his mother. She approached Bryson and asked if he might be available to speak with her son. “‘You bet,’ Bryson said, ‘come over here and I can show it to you better.’

“The boy’s mother hesitated a minute and then said, ‘I’m sorry, but could you just explain? My son is blind.’

“Bryson spent half an hour with the twelve-year-old, taking him to every part of the exhibit and letting the boy touch every piece of equipment which to the average visitor was forbidden with ‘Please Do Not Handle’ signs.”
²⁹

The boy told Bryson that he had a complete set of RAF model planes and had learned to identify them by feel. Bryson promised to get the youngster a B-17 model.
³⁰

A
S THE WAR DEEPENED
, so did Walter Cronkite’s stress. He was chronically pooped, often working fifteen hours or more a day, shuttling among UP’s offices, the Ministry of Information, East Anglia, and his Buckingham Gate flat. By mid-’44, he had a staff of four reporters working for him on the air war beat; still, it was Cronkite’s job to synthesize their dispatches into one lead story about that day’s bombing efforts. At one point, Cronkite learned he was being undercut by a cabal at UP–New York, which was crediting his copy to a different reporter. Here he was working around the clock—and he had to fight just to get proper acknowledgment!

He spent untold hours at the Ministry, hawking the communiqués that the Allied command issued three times daily: at ten thirty a.m., at five p.m., and at eleven thirty p.m. Often he had to cover all three announcements, writing his final story well after midnight. Once asleep, he would typically be interrupted two or three times a night by calls from UP’s overnight desk guys, asking about this story or that or confirming information about past bombing campaigns that only Cronkite knew.

He spent months trying to get Betsy over to London, either as a UP or
Kansas City Star
reporter or as a new hire by another organization. At one point, with his UP boss Virgil Pinkley back in the States, Cronkite arranged for Pinkley to stop at Kansas City’s Union Station on his way west so he could meet Betsy and conduct a job interview on the fly. The elaborate planning for the Kansas City rendezvous went on for weeks: Walter relayed to Pinkley that the redheaded Betsy would be wearing a certain hat and dress. But the station was so crowded when Pinkley’s train arrived that the two missed each other.

The Cronkites were crushed. Neither the
Star
prospect nor the UP gambit went anyplace: The couple continued to pine for one another 4,500 miles apart.

Betsy never did get to London during the war—and Walter, alone among our five correspondents, never got a stateside vacation. In July ’44, Cronkite finally screwed up the nerve to ask Pinkley for a respite. His boss was empathetic but after “beating around the bush,” as Cronkite put it, made it clear that UP couldn’t afford to let its star reporter get away that summer or fall; he was too valuable. Plus UP president Hugh Baillie was scheduled to arrive in London a few weeks hence; Pinkley didn’t want the big boss to see UP’s ETO operation without one of its (better compensated) luminaries.

Pinkley’s decision was “so much malarkey,” a bitter Cronkite wrote Betsy, but Walter was hardly in a position to defy him. Once Germany was defeated, UP-Europe would be so damned busy, Cronkite wrote, that there’d be no chance to get home for many months afterward.
³¹
Late in the war, a fatalistic Cronkite wrote to Betsy and urged her not to sit around
waiting for him, but to go out dining and dancing with friends in Kansas City.

Mrs. Cronkite ended up becoming an editor and featured contributor to the
Hallmark Military News
, a weekly newsletter put out by the greeting card company that kept the home fires burning.

A
S LATE
M
AY OF
1944 approached, the fifty-eight media professionals who’d been given invasion-day or immediate-aftermath assignments were told to “wander up” to an unmarked townhome at 38 Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge near Brompton Oratory.
³²
But they were warned to knock on the door solo, not show up in groups of three or four; bunches of uniformed correspondents might have stirred attention from German spies.

There was no placard outside to indicate that 38 Egerton Gardens had been commandeered by U.S. Army public relations, but inside the crowded flat a bevy of PROs under the command of Majors Jack Redding and Barney Oldfield was coordinating first-wave press relations, trying to square away the thousand-and-one details required to pull off such a massive undertaking.

Redding and Oldfield insisted that the media professionals swear an oath of confidentiality, fill out personal information forms including data on next of kin, keep Army PR apprised of their whereabouts at all times, pack a musette bag of bare essentials, and, as the pièce de résistance, directed that each reporter, photographer, radioman, and newsreel cameraman write his (or her) own obituary.
³³

William Stoneman of the
Chicago Daily News
balked when Oldfield parked him in front of a typewriter. When told that his archrival, H. R. Knickerbocker of the
Chicago Sun
, had filed a four-and-a-half-page obit listing every battle and skirmish he’d ever witnessed, Stoneman told the PROs to “just say I was all the places Knick was—and usually filed first, too.” Acme photographer Bert Brandt gave Oldfield’s staff formal “laying out” instructions. “Part my lips in a smile,” Brandt said. “That’s the way everyone would remember me. If they ever find me.”

Ernie Pyle, who liked to make wan jokes about his own demise, wrote a bare-bones account of his remarkable career, then volunteered: “And when it becomes necessary to release this information, please inform my syndicate so it can break the news to my wife.”
³⁴

A
LAS
, J
IM
M
C
G
LINCY’S SELF-COMPOSED OBIT
has not survived. But McGlincy was Joe Liebling’s kind of guy: a tempestuous Irishman who wrote like a dream (Cronkite always said that his roommate had “the news in his head”) but drank and fought way too much for his own good. Cronkite’s letters back home were full of stories about McGlincy picking pub fights, ticking off the landlord, sleeping off hangovers, missing deadlines, and generally making himself persona non grata at the London UP bureau.

But Cronkite glimpsed a side of McGlincy that few others saw—and loved his wicked wit. Cronkite took care of his friend, rescuing him in bars, sobering him up, and making sure his copy got to the bosses.

McGlincy had a flair for funny features that put him almost in the same league as Hal Boyle. In the late fall of ’43, Pinkley told McGlincy to check out what had become known as “Ladies, Excuse Me” dances—social gatherings where English lasses would entertain American servicemen on leave. They were labeled “Excuse Me” because they required constant cutting in by the girls.

“Wow, whatta assignment!” McGlincy exclaimed at the top of a piece played up by the
Stars and Stripes
. “Soft lights, sweet music, and waltzing women.…

“‘Find out something about these “Ladies, Excuse Me” dances,’ said the boss, who apparently had been hitting the phonograph needle again. ‘How’d they start? What’re they like?’”

So off McGlincy went to the Opera House in Covent Garden, the same place Cronkite had visited nine months earlier with Harrison Salisbury to celebrate Cronkite’s scoop on the Wilhelmshaven raid. After being comped his thirty pence cover charge, McGlincy learned from an Opera House manager that the special dance had a long tradition in England. Since there were often more women than men at community dances, they decided that
during certain songs, women could cut in on couples, say “Excuse me,” and waltz away with the man.

Amid McGlincy’s “vision of buck-toothed buffaloes with horn-rimmed glasses saying, ‘Excuse me,’” the manager approached the orchestra leader to request the dance.

“I shuddered, gulped, and blanched,” McGlincy wrote, “but before I could say, ‘Look, chum, let’s not carry this thing too far,’” they were announcing the dance over a microphone. McGlincy soon found himself on the floor with “a couple of thousand other people—not tripping lightly, just tripping.”

His first partner was a blonde named Edna. “The conversation turned out to be a brilliant tirade of scintillating talk, consisting entirely of the questions (from her) ‘Do you like it over here?’ and (from me) ‘How do you like Americans?’ and the answers (from both of us) ‘Yes.’”

Soon enough “a neat little number with black hair and big bright eyes” cut in. McGlincy suspected that the manager had sent her his way—but he wasn’t objecting. “‘Do you like it over here?’ asked my new partner. Playing it safe, I said ‘Yes’ and followed right up with ‘Do you like Americans?’”

She turned out to be named Vicki, a waitress at a Leicester Square eatery. McGlincy felt his heart melting and was just about to ask what Vicki was doing the next night when he “was seized by what felt like a vise but turned out to be a pair of arms hanging on a buxom, brown-haired girl with a lot of teeth.”

As soon as McGlincy could free himself, he went looking for Vicki but found “the little vixen” cozily chatting with an American GI. It wasn’t their first encounter, McGlincy realized: They were clearly an item.
³⁵

C’est la guerre
.

A
S THE WINTER OF
’44 turned to spring, Omar Bradley (“Brad”) and Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”) were contending with far weightier U.S.-Anglo relations. The cross-Channel invasion plan they’d inherited from an Allied team led by British general Frederick Morgan was well thought out in terms of location and timing, but woefully inadequate in what Ike called
“wallop.”
³⁶
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, and Bradley, the commander of U.S. ground forces, effectively doubled the size of the initial seaborne assault force (from three divisions to five), demanded much heavier and broader naval gunfire and
strategic bombing support, and insisted on the aggressive use of airborne troops.

After leaving the U.S.’s Italy operation in the unsteady hands of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, Ike and Brad met nearly every day in the Norfolk House on the east side of St. James’s Square.
³⁷
Ike and Brad had witnessed in Sicily the hazards of paratroop operations. The more they studied maps of Normandy and assessed intelligence reports of the Wehrmacht’s deployment in northern France, however, the more convinced they became that it was imperative to land airborne divisions behind the beachheads. Without troopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st and the British Sixth harassing enemy troops and seizing key arteries, it would be nearly impossible for the seaborne infantry to push inland, Bradley and Eisenhower believed. Allied paratroopers had to be in position to disrupt enemy counterattacks; without them,
Panzer
units and the other outfits the German field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was holding in reserve would have an unbroken line to vulnerable beachheads.

T
HROUGHOUT THAT WINTER AND SPRING
, St. James’ Square would attract onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous American generals. One of the hangers-on was Joe Liebling, who would often take a workout jog through the square and nearby Hyde Park.

In November ’43, Liebling had again crossed the Atlantic without benefit of military escort, arriving in Liverpool aboard a cramped Norwegian fruit ship. “My notion,” he wrote a few years later, “was to get to England early in order to be sure of a good spot in the invasion. I did not want to get caught up in some ancillary theater and then not be able to transfer out in time for the main event, and as the lone correspondent of the
New Yorker
I had to fight my own campaign against red tape and the stuffy lay bureaucrats.”
³⁸
Liebling endeared himself to the
New Yorker
’s London correspondent,
Mollie Panter-Downes, by bringing her dozens of nylons—a luxury impossible to find at Selfridges or Harrods.

When not beseeching SHAEF public relations officers for an invasion berth, Liebling enjoyed London’s hedonistic charms. Again he found lodging at Flemings in Piccadilly. He got chummy enough with the blokes who ran Shepherd Market that he managed to sometimes score gulls’ eggs and black-market seafood delicacies. He even re-created his Runyonesque life in the Big Apple by frequenting a back-alley bar called Toby’s. It was a smoky joint that featured a raffish clientele who, despite a little distraction like a world war, still managed to find their way to the track.

Acting as if nothing had happened, he resumed his relationships with the two women he’d known in ’42: a lady from Yorkshire and a Wren, a British servicewoman, from Nottingham. The fact that the Wren had been impregnated by somebody else didn’t appear to daunt Liebling. The Yorkshire woman, whom Liebling snidely called “the canary” in letters to Joe Mitchell, convinced Liebling to write a story about the bomb damage in Hull, her hometown.