Assignment to Hell (62 page)

Cronkite knew nothing of the plan until the morning of September 16, when he got a call from a PRO inviting him to come along on “that picnic we’d been talking about.” As instructed, he showed up at 20 Grosvenor
Square dragging his full combat regalia. There to his surprise was Stanley Woodward, Homer Bigart’s colleague at the
New York Herald Tribune
, one of America’s most prominent—and pretentious—sports columnists. Cronkite had never met Woodward but knew him on sight. Brand-new to England and war reporting, Woodward was playing “foreign correspondent” to the hilt, decked out in ridiculous pink trousers and oxford shoes that made him appear even more out of shape than he was.

The only reason that Woodward had shown up at 20 Grosvenor was that he’d intercepted a phone message at the
Trib
’s London office intended for its regular airborne beat guy, Ned Russell, who was on assignment in Paris. Woodward didn’t have a clue about the “picnic” to which Russell had been invited; he was beginning to get surly with PRO staffers when Cronkite tugged at his elbow, whispering that he’d explain everything once they were in the car heading to Newbury, the 101st’s headquarters forty miles west of London. When Cronkite volunteered to the
Trib
’s sedentary columnist that, in all likelihood, they would be parachuting behind enemy lines, “[Woodward] was astounded. He stared long and hard at me through his bottle-thick glasses.”
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The officers of the 101st were in prejump party mode when Cronkite and Woodward got to Newbury. They plied Woodward with alcohol as he regaled them with stories of sporting legends. Cronkite drifted away and was delighted, in middebauch, when the 101st’s commander, General Maxwell Taylor, decided to hold an impromptu briefing. Cronkite tried to find Woodward in the bar, came up empty, and assumed that the PROs had come to their senses and told the chubby windbag that he couldn’t go to Holland.

The next day, outside Zon, after watching the P-51s pulverize enemy batteries, Cronkite went looking for a wooded area beyond the rallying point where company headquarters was supposed to be situated. Part of the HQ setup was a radio that Cronkite could use to transmit his stories. He almost stumbled over a flabby fellow lying prostrate at the end of the gully.

His helmet was pushed back on his head; although unhurt, he was writhing. Suddenly Cronkite realized who it was.

“Stan?” Cronkite asked. “Is that you, Stan?”

Woodward peered at Cronkite through bloodshot eyes, “the picture of a man with a raging hangover.

“‘Nobody told me,’ he mumbled, ‘that it was going to be like this.’”

The night before, Woodward, dead-ass drunk, had apparently passed out. His new pals decided to have some fun. They replaced his pink trousers with standard-issue khakis that were so small they wouldn’t close at the fly. Instead of a belt, Woodward’s pants were held up by a hunk of rope. And they jammed on a jacket so tight it split at Woodward’s shoulders. After all that, they poured him into a glider. Woodward may not have come to until the glider was airborne.

Once sober, Woodward turned out to be an okay correspondent and a decent companion, although his paunch and poor eyesight proved to be hindrances. At one point, Cronkite and Woodward crossed the canal on a raft; Woodward needed a shove on the derriere to scale the slippery far side of the canal wall.
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The 101st’s immediate objective was the Zon bridge over the Wilhelmina. But with Cronkite just upstream, the Germans blew it up, forcing American engineers to slap together a temporary span. U.S. troopers had to cross the canal in rafts made from empty fuel tins. Despite the strong enemy resistance, the 101st achieved most of its mission, capturing four bridges in and around Eindhoven and holding on while British armored units came up from the south. A few miles north at Nijmegen, the 82nd had a rougher go, but was able to capture intact two more bridges and clear most of the road north.

But the British First Airborne at Arnhem was plagued by Murphy’s Law. The towropes carrying thirty-odd gliders full of armored jeeps and other essential equipment broke. Three battalions were forced to advance on foot; it took them four full hours to reach the Maas. All of which gave the
Panzer
units time to get into position.

Another impediment to Allied troops was the jubilant Dutch. After more than four years of occupation, the people of the Netherlands couldn’t contain themselves. Despite still-lurking Wehrmacht snipers, they raced out to greet their liberators, brandishing orange flags and tossing tulips.
The only “wound” Cronkite sustained in three years as a war correspondent was a scrape inflicted by a wayward batch of flowers. Whenever the sniping would start back up, the tulip throwers would retreat to their attics.

I
T WAS
C
RONKITE’S FIRST EXPOSURE
to on-the-ground combat reporting. As he related to Betsy that fall, he found the experience jarring. Under the best of circumstances, it was difficult to put day-to-day skirmishing into perspective. Under circumstances like those that existed during Market Garden—sketchy information, agitated commanders, ever-changing battle lines, and a campaign that quickly turned sour—it was next to impossible. Cronkite found himself mimicking Hal Boyle by profiling the human side of GIs caught in battle. It’s apparent from Cronkite’s letters that he worried his “mediocre stuff” wasn’t up to snuff.

The UP correspondent clearly wasn’t Bigart when it came to gauging the import of a given battle. And his features on grunts at the front weren’t as poignant or amusing as Boyle’s. But those same criticisms could be leveled at almost every other reporter in the ETO, including Andy Rooney.

Cronkite’s early dispatches with an Eindhoven dateline were too rosy, full of stirring accounts of how U.S. paratroopers had ousted the enemy from the lower Meuse and were on the verge of linking up with British tankmen driving north.
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They stayed “on the verge” for days on end. When it finally happened, Eindhoven’s narrow roads and wily German defenses made a rapid advance through the Dutch corridor tough—a thorny reality that the 101st’s censors would not have permitted Cronkite to address. Yet even a week into the campaign, when it was clear that Arnhem would stay in enemy hands and that much of the Dutch corridor remained impenetrable, Cronkite, prodded by Allied PROs, was writing wishful pieces that the Germans were fighting what amounted to a holding action to preserve their escape route into Germany. In truth, despite the Allied paratroopers’ courageous efforts, they hadn’t dislodged the enemy.

It should not have been hard for Cronkite to spot Market Garden’s defects. When the first English patrol arrived near Eindhoven, Cronkite watched 101st deputy commander Brigadier General Gerald J. Higgins
greet a cheeky English lieutenant. Higgins’ engineers were busily rebuilding the canal bridge that the Germans had destroyed on day one. But just upstream was a smaller span, still in German hands. Buttonholing the young Brit, Higgins began laying out a strategy to seize the bridge.

“I say, General,” the lieutenant replied, “you know my chaps have been going since dawn and we haven’t had our tea yet.” Cronkite watched an incensed Higgins fumble for a wrench attached to the side of the lieutenant’s jeep, intent on bullying the youngster into action. But at that instant the Germans blasted the bridge.
¹³
Higgins’ menacing gesture had been rendered moot.

A day later the forward elements of the XXX Corps arrived in Eindhoven, a “bumper-to-bumper parade,” Cronkite recalled, that crowded the north-south thoroughfare and crammed the village’s narrow streets. At dusk that night, the Luftwaffe suddenly appeared, strafing the exposed British column. “The ammunition trucks turned all of Eindhoven into a display of deadly fireworks,” Cronkite remembered.

As the dive-bombers struck, Cronkite was in a jeep with his old UP pal from Kansas City, bespectacled CBS Radio correspondent Bill Downs, the reporter that Murrow had wanted Cronkite to replace in Russia. Cronkite and Downs were driving near the Philips Electric works complex when bombs began falling. They jumped out of the jeep and vaulted over a tall fence into a park. There they huddled behind chopped-down trees as bombs pounded all around. Neither knew how, but they became separated.

With incendiary fires raging, Eindhoven looked sickeningly familiar to Cronkite: London during the Little Blitz. Cronkite knew about the Luftwaffe’s dastardly “butterfly” bombs that tended to lodge in trees and bushes before detonating. So as he went looking for Downs, he had one eye peeled on the limbs overhead and the other scoping the ground for mines.

Cronkite decided to get out of the woods and go back to the jeep. When he retraced his steps, he was astounded to find that the fence over which he and Downs had scrambled was more than seven feet tall. Without an adrenaline surge like the one he’d had earlier, Cronkite couldn’t possibly climb it. He had to find a downed tree whose trunk was close enough to the fence to use as a makeshift stepladder.

Downs was nowhere to be found. Cronkite even checked Eindhoven’s bomb shelters; no one had seen him. In one shelter a Dutch family with sobbing children spotted Cronkite’s uniform and began pressing him about when the bombing would stop—which, of course, he couldn’t answer. He went back to the jeep, found Downs’ tape machine, and recorded a heartfelt tribute, praying someone would find it—and, eventually, Downs’ body, too.

Then Cronkite hitched a ride to Brussels, where he hoped to find a warm bath, better wire facilities, and more malleable censors than the 101st’s tight asses, which barely let reporters acknowledge that the division was in Holland and cramped their time on transmitters.

Cronkite found a room at Brussels’ Hôtel Métropole and, still dirty head to toe, decided to toast his departed friend with a quick drink at the bar. “There stood Downs,” Cronkite recalled, “immaculate in a clean dress uniform.

“‘Damn, Bill, I spent all that time at risk of life and limb from those mines yelling for you, looking for you, and you just up and left me there.’”

Downs’ excuse was that, after a few minutes of rasping “Cronkite! Cronkite!” it occurred to him that his friend’s name sounded disconcertedly like the German word for “sickness.” If any enemy soldiers encountered Downs, “They would have figured I was sick and hustled me off to a hospital in Berlin.” Cronkite couldn’t help but laugh.
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A few days later Downs and Cronkite were back in Holland with the 101st, which was fighting off another German attempt to regain control of the highway north of Eindhoven. In the midst of lethal mortar fire, Downs and Cronkite leapt into a ditch.

“We had been there a while when Downs, lying behind me, began tugging at my pants leg. I figured he had some scheme for getting us out of there, and I twisted my neck around to look back at him,” Cronkite recalled.

“Just think!” Downs hollered. “If we survive them, these will be the good old days!”
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Sometimes the Germans would succeed in seizing a section of Dutch turf—only to forfeit it a few hours later after a bloody counterattack by Allied troopers.

A night or two after his gully episode, Cronkite and his jeep driver were on that same stretch when they heard the oncoming
clank-clank
of tank treads. As far as Cronkite knew, there weren’t any friendly armored units in the area. So they pulled the jeep off the road and tried to stay very still. Five German tanks thumped past, with several drivers shouting greetings.

“They apparently assumed we were German. They rumbled on and we breathed again,” Cronkite recalled.
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Cronkite’s best early dispatch from Zon-Eindhoven came six days after the initial attack. Eleven members of the 101st were rescued on September 23 after having spent nearly a week behind enemy lines, successfully concealed by Dutch Partisans. Private John Kessel of Detroit told Cronkite that ack-ack had hit the motor of his glider’s towplane just seconds into Dutch territory on September 17. “The pilot immediately climbed the ship as fast as he could to give us altitude to try to make a landing. These two pilots gave their lives to do that, [because] that plane crashed a minute later. We all landed, but were quite a few miles from the other gliders and were completely cut off.”

Among the eleven troopers were two airmen who had survived the crash of Kessel’s towplane. Four other troopers were from a glider that had managed to sever itself from a damaged C-47. Another survivor jumped from another burning tow ship; the others were crewmen from wayward gliders and planes.
¹⁷

Soon it became apparent that they were surrounded by the enemy. Dutch Resistance fighters hid them in dense woods, bringing them milk, beer, and food. At one point, they were almost ensnared in a firefight between British paratroopers and a German company dug in not far from their hideout. After the skirmish, a German patrol came within a few feet of where Kessel and another trooper, Private Kitterman of Indiana, were cloaked in the woods. “He and I were so quiet I don’t think our hearts were beating,” Kessel told Cronkite.

On day five, a Partisan leader said he’d snuck through enemy lines and reached a British company. Help would be coming tomorrow, the Resistance head promised. The next day the eleven troopers were escorted to safety by six British Bren gun carriers and an unarmed Red Cross jeep.
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