Assignment to Hell (57 page)

A
s the C-47 taxied out to the runway, the noise from its propellers was so piercing that Walter Cronkite stuffed scraps of tissue in his ears. By midsummer ’44, Cronkite had squeezed aboard almost every kind of Allied warplane. In the weeks following D-Day, the wannabe pilot had even finangled space on two transports that shuttled VIPs from London to the Ninth Air Force’s makeshift air base at Grandcamp.

But until Wednesday afternoon, August 16, 1944, Cronkite had never sat shoulder to shoulder among grease-faced paratroopers, helmet and parachute pack securely strapped, ready to pounce into the Third Reich. Cronkite’s letter to Betsy the night before had hinted that he was going to be part of a pivotal operation.

“I am writing tonight from an airbase somewhere in England,” his missive began, spoofing the furtive dateline required by censors.

Soon I will be leaving on an assignment that is back down the ole groove, something of the type of February, 1943,
that you will remember. Well, not exactly like that, so don’t try to gather too much from that feeble bit of information. By the time you get this letter, you probably will know all about it. At any rate, I hope so.

What I want to say though, darling, is that there is considerable danger involved in this job. I don’t feel that I am unnecessarily worrying you by reporting that, inasmuch as it will all be over before you ever get this note.
¹

By alluding to “assignment” (from his signature lede), “back down the ole groove” (from his letter eighteen months earlier describing editor Harrison Salisbury’s typewriter-side cheerleading), and “February, 1943” (the date of the Writing 69th’s famous foray), Cronkite was employing code, telling Betsy that he was about to go wheels up on another dramatic mission along the lines of the Wilhelmshaven raid, his original “assignment to hell.” But by volunteering that it was “not exactly like” his previous duty, he hoped that she would deduce that he was going on a paratroop jump.

The only other American newspaperman assigned to the big mission, Cronkite told Betsy, was AP’s Bill Boni. That week, Boni and Cronkite had both been given minimal training in airborne warfare. Neither had made an actual drop, but at least they had jumped off a platform, practiced landing and rolling, gotten reasonably comfortable with the bulky equipment, and learned how to gather a grounded chute.

When UP boss Virgil Pinkley, after being tipped off by SHAEF officials in early August, offered the airborne slot to Cronkite, Walter leapt. “As perhaps you have been able to read between the lines of my too infrequent letters, I have been in terrible doldrums since D-Day, with everyone else in action and my sitting by on the SHAEF desk,” Cronkite told Betsy. “Now at last, I am getting into the show and with a splurge that may prove bigger than any correspondent has had since the original landing.”
²

It’s clear from his letter that covering the bombing war from the ground in England hadn’t cut it. In Cronkite’s mind, he hadn’t made enough of a “splurge” since his days as a charter member of the Writing 69th. His reputation
as a war correspondent needed a jump start—or so he was convinced. The parachute jump into France would be a career maker, the story of a lifetime; after being cooped up for so long, Cronkite couldn’t wait.

Knowing how worried Betsy would be, he tried to buoy her spirits by joking about how the USAAF guys wouldn’t let him or Boni buy any rounds of drinks—which was fine by Cronkite, since he’d forgotten to grab English currency as he left London and only had a couple hundred dollars’ worth of U.S. traveler’s checks.

“I’ll write again, honey, just as soon as I can,” his V-mail ended. Knowing it might be the last time they’d ever share sweet nothings, Cronkite closed with: “Meantime, darling, remember that I love you very, very much.… Forever, Walter.”
³

C
RONKITE COULDN’T TELL HIS WIFE
, but he was on the cusp of becoming one of the first Allied correspondents to enter still-occupied Paris. Boni and Cronkite had been invited to cover a remarkable operation that the Allied command had code-named Transfigure. SHAEF’s strategy was to throw a dagger into the backside of retreating Germans, divide and disrupt the enemy line of defense, and accelerate the capture of the French capital.

On August 2, Supreme Commander Eisenhower had authorized the creation of the First Allied Airborne Army, which at that point combined elements of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, and the British 52nd (Lowland) Division, a specially trained infantry outfit that could be rushed into battle via transports once an airstrip had been captured.

“Transfigure” was apt because it described the First Allied Airborne’s mission: to fundamentally alter the battle configuration in northern France. If Transfigure caught the enemy napping, planners hoped it might not only hasten the liberation of Paris, but also end the war in Europe that much quicker.

The operation’s immediate objective was an enemy air base near the Forêt de Rambouillet, some thirty miles west of Paris. The 101st and the Polish First would parachute and glider in en masse, overpower the relative
handful of German troops defending the airstrip, and pave the way for the Lowlanders to be flown in, some on transports, some on gliders. Together, the Allied troops would create a fissure pointing toward the River Seine that might cause the entire German line to disintegrate.

The “go” order for Transfigure officially came down at 0845 on August 16.
⁴
At one point the C-47 carrying Cronkite taxied out to the runway—where it and many more like it sat for four long hours before the mission was postponed for a day. It was pushed back another day on August 17, yet another twenty-four hours on August 18, and finally scrubbed for good late on Saturday August 19.

Cronkite was crushed, but Eisenhower and his brain trust had good reason to forgo Transfigure. By the time the paratroop planes were revving on August 16, the First and Third Armies were moving eastward so quickly that they’d almost reached the western edge of the Rambouillet Forest. The 12th Army Group was picking up such huge chunks of territory that Hal Boyle told Frances that its camp followers were suffering “travel fatigue.”
⁵

When Dreux fell on August 19, Transfigure was rendered moot; the village had been one of the First Allied’s paratroop targets. The German line was collapsing so quickly that the airborne operation was no longer needed to foist extra pressure on Paris’ defenders. After nearly a week of on-again, off-again drama, the men of the First Allied Airborne were told to stand down and await further orders: The Supreme Command still had big plans for them.

On Sunday, August 20, Cronkite commiserated with Betsy that the mission’s cancellation was “one of the bitterest disappointments of my life.” Her husband still couldn’t share details, but if the operation had come off, he “probably would have been the first American correspondent into Paris, although I might have had to share the honor with Bill Boni of AP,” he wrote.
⁶

Cronkite didn’t bother to mask his dejection. “So here I am back at the same old stand in the same old slough of despond which has been growing deeper and blacker ever since D-Day left me standing on the platform holding the sack.” He was worried that his “doldrums” were hampering his productivity—and that Pinkley had grown disenchanted. On top of that,
he was worried about the cost of an eventual move to Amsterdam; he fretted that he and Betsy wouldn’t be able to afford life in the Netherlands.

To escape the V-1s, he had moved to a more expensive flat, which was forcing him to further drain their bank account, “and that is too damned depressing for words,” he wrote. None of his clothes fit anymore; he’d lost so much weight he looked “like hell.” His old Bostonian wingtips were so beat-up that soon his “corns would be showing.”

All those eighteen-hour days, all those frontline communiqués he had to turn around on a dime, all those god-awful train rides to cover dead and dying airmen had taken their toll on the twenty-seven-year-old Walter Cronkite. He was so down he was taking out his frustrations on his wardrobe and wallet and in letters to his adoring wife.

It may have been classic sublimation, but to Cronkite, there was no respite in sight. As if his letter hadn’t been gloomy enough, he saw fit to inform Betsy that it would be “many, many months perhaps stretching beyond a year” before, realistically, they could see one another.

“Maybe I won’t mail this,” he meekly volunteered in the last line. “If I do, forgive me.”
⁷

He did and she did. Their marriage lasted another sixty-one years.

Yet it would be another month, and several more bitterly false starts, before Walter Cronkite and the men of the First Allied Airborne Army would be called into action. When they were, the least of their concerns was beat-up shoes.

A
T THE MOMENT
C
RONKITE WAS
bemoaning his fate, his friend Hal Boyle was hurtling toward the very places into which Walter was supposed to be parachuting: Dreux and Rambouillet. Boyle’s jeep had to move to the side of the road to accommodate the Red Ball Express, the vaunted transportation supply chain that kept the tanks and trucks of the 12th Army Group rolling.

More than three quarters of the twenty-three thousand drivers and quartermasters in the Red Ball Express, named after railroad slang for a fast freight, were African American. Many of the six thousand trucks in
the Express had yanked their governors so they could motor at higher speeds. Every day and night for weeks, the Express rolled virtually nonstop on blacked-out roads, the driver and the GI riding shotgun switching places literally on the move so that precious time was saved.
⁸

As enemy lines crumbled, Express drivers began rounding up German stragglers. Small groups of Aryan supermen had been hiding “in caves and woods like the old Quantrill raiders in Missouri and Kansas after the Civil War,” Boyle wrote in a piece that ran in the
Baltimore Afro-American
. Under the cloak of darkness the holdouts would try to escape along roadways—only to be corralled by their racial “inferiors,” who would jump out of their trucks, M1 carbines in hand. Red Ball Express trucks would often arrive at the front with a mixed load of supplies and prisoners.

“Our platoon has taken about 70 prisoners while bringing up food and ammunition to the front,” one member of the Quartermaster Corps, Sergeant Edwin Kelly of Richmond, Virginia, told Boyle, “but to tell you the truth, we’d rather not take them prisoners—we’d rather fight until we can get it over with.”
⁹

All five correspondents wrote pieces heralding the contributions of black soldiers to the war effort, but it’s a testament to the deep-seated racism of the day that none of them—not even the outspoken Liebling—published commentaries during the war that directly deplored the second-class treatment of African-American soldiers. Only after the war did Liebling and the others condemn the U.S. for its hypocrisy on racial matters.

B
LOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE
enemy’s racial hatred, however, was a different matter. On August 19, in the village of St.-Mars-le-Brière near Le Mans, Boyle encountered a group of some 220 Russian female prisoners of war. Ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-four, they had been taken captive in Leningrad and forced into slave labor. At gunpoint, the women were often forced to work fifteen hours a day fixing bomb-damaged railroad tracks.

They were confined to a filthy camp surrounded by barbed wire. “Only one Russian woman—a doctor—accepted the German invitation to retreat
with them,” Boyle revealed.
¹⁰
The other women stayed inside the camp to be freed by their Allies. Upon greeting the Americans, many of the women asked to be sent to frontline units so they could fight their Nazi tormentors, Boyle noted.

The next day, Boyle heard the legend of a local Maquis leader who’d blown up many of the tracks that the Russian women had been forced to repair. He was named, curiously enough, Patrick O’Neill. The O’Neills had left Ireland two centuries earlier and settled on farmland southwest of Paris. The bizarre juxtaposition gave Boyle a chance to flex his brogue and pay homage to his ancestry.

“Sure and wouldn’t you be knowing,” Boyle’s amusing lede went, “that the leader of 5,000 French Maquis who have been playing hob with the Germans for two years has a name as Irish as Paddy’s pig. The Gallic Robin Hood goes by the Emerald Isle moniker of Patrick O’Neill and he doesn’t care if the Germans know it.”

A graduate of St. Cyr, the French West Point, O’Neill had been wounded twice during the Nazi blitzkrieg in ’40 but never captured. In ’41 and ’42, O’Neill was living quietly along the River Loire with his wife and three young children. Appalled at how the Gestapo was enslaving young Frenchmen, O’Neill joined the Resistance in midwar; before long, he headed what was believed to be the largest Maquis chapter in France.

O’Neill’s men gave him, Boyle wrote, “strict obedience.” Three hundred of O’Neill’s guerrillas were killed by the Germans, many of them executed in cold blood. When the Gestapo uncovered a house in the woods that was being used as a hospital for O’Neill’s men, they burned it to the ground, incinerating the seventeen wounded Resistance fighters inside.

“We do not forget these things,” O’Neill told Boyle. O’Neill and his men fought with such fearlessness that they’d earned the respect of American GIs, Boyle said. The next day, Boyle relayed a story he’d heard from Corporal Don Cass of Waterloo, Iowa. Cass and his squad of men had some Germans cornered in an Orléans house and were cautiously moving in when six members of O’Neill’s band pulled up in a car.

“As soon as they learned that there were Germans in the house, they ran right up and went into the building,” Cass told Boyle. “A few seconds
later they came out with the Germans collared. You should have seen the expressions on the faces of some of our boys at that way of operating.”
¹¹

Wherever O’Neill went in those glorious days, Boyle wrote, he was cheered by awed and grateful French citizens.