Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  The trip was swell. As perhaps you have learned, I was in the biggest convoy ever to cross the Atlantic. The only newspaperman on the trip, I occupied the admiral’s cabin on the escorting battleship—private bedroom, lounge with desk, and private bath, all on the main deck. We encountered no enemy action and the weather, although extremely cold in the North Atlantic, was rather calm. The last couple of days on the way over we ran into some roughness but apparently I’m not subject to seasickness and I weathered it with no difficulty. We were 10 days in the British isles during which I saw London, a couple of counties south of London, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland. At most of those spots I stayed in the American officer clubs—all the British Isles cities are filled with Americans, it seems—and had a gay time. In London I visited with newspaper friends, some of whom I had known back here, and toured the usual tourists sites and bombed areas …

  The trip back was just like a cruise as far as the weather was concerned, in fact, it was just a little boring. We did get a little action, however, about which I’m sorry I can’t tell you just yet. I’ve got a pretty good story on my hands when and if I can fight it through censorship.

  CRONKITE’S “PRETTY GOOD STORY,” which was datelined September 3 and ran in American newspapers on September 9, concerned the burning of the Navy transport ship U.S.S. Wakefield, which Cronkite witnessed from the deck of the Arkansas. The Wakefield, formerly the luxury liner S.S. Manhattan, was returning to the United States from England when it caught fire. All hands and passengers were rescued, although the ship was reduced to a burned-out hulk. (After extensive repairs in Boston Harbor, the ship was returned to duty in the spring of 1944.)

  “My story, by some miracle, got past the censors,” Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, A Reporter’s Life, “and made the banner headline in a lot of American papers. I had lucked into early recognition as a war correspondent.” Cronkite wrote a few other stories during the trip, including glimpses of wartime life in London. The main story, about the convoy itself, fell a little flat, as suggested in its lead sentence, “A successful convoy is a boring convoy.”

  Cronkite’s second overseas assignment that fall provided better material, as he covered the first combat landing of American troops outside the Pacific theater. President Roosevelt and his military advisers were eager to engage the Nazis in Europe, hoping to take pressure off the Red Army, which was bearing the brunt of the fight against Hitler’s armies. But the British adamantly opposed what they regarded as a premature and potentially disastrous landing on the European continent. As an alternative, Churchill proposed an Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, with landings in Morocco and Algeria, then controlled by the collaborationist Vichy government in France. From there the Allies could move eastward through Tunisia, netting German and Italian forces in North Africa in a pincer attack, coordinated with British forces already stationed in Egypt and Libya. It wasn’t quite the full-scale “second front” that Roosevelt and his advisers had hoped for, but at least Americans were fighting the Nazis, which was important as a symbol of American resolve in the European theater.

  On October 19, 1942, Cronkite found himself flying in a Navy transport plane from New York to Norfolk, Virginia, to join the convoy loading men and supplies for Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. “And now the story begins to unfold!” Cronkite wrote excitedly the next day in a journal he kept during the assignment. “And what a terrific story, what an amazing assignment! This, it begins to appear, is the second front!”

  The convoy set sail on October 23, 1942, part of the Northern Attack Group commanded by Gen. George S. Patton, with overall command of the invasion entrusted to Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Cronkite crossed the Atlantic aboard the battleship U.S.S. Texas. His assignment during the invasion was to cover the Navy’s role in the operation; other correspondents were assigned to go with the landing forces to the beaches and beyond. Secretly, he planned to jump ship after the initial landing and help cover any ground fighting, although the invasion planners hoped that the Vichy French forces would refrain from firing and switch sides against the Germans.

  Cronkite celebrated his 26th birthday, November 4, 1942, en route, four days before the scheduled landings. On November 8, the landing craft headed for shore. The ships did not unleash a preliminary naval bombardment, again hoping that the French would welcome the invasion, but those hopes were disappointed, and three days of costly fighting ensued. Eventually the big guns of the U.S.S. Texas were brought to bear on the French lines. Cronkite went ashore with a naval party to assess the effectiveness of the bombardment, which turned out to have missed its intended target, a French ammunition dump.

  Cronkite might have stayed onshore, as part of his plan to cover the U.S. ground assault, but he heard that the Texas was sailing to Casablanca, where more fighting was expected. Once aboard the ship, he discovered to his dismay that it was heading directly back to the U.S., cutting short his coverage of the invasion. Making the best of a bad situation, he decided he could still claim a scoop by being the first war correspondent to return to the U.S. from North Africa. The problem was that a correspondent from the International News Service was also headed home, aboard a ship scheduled to arrive before the Texas. Cronkite stole a march on his rival by hitching a ride on the Texas’s catapult-launched observation floatplane when they were within flying distance of Norfolk, Virginia. From there he hitched another ride to New York City. “After the emotional telephone calls to Betsy and my mother in Kansas City,” he wrote in A Reporter’s Life, “I sat down to rewrite my previous stories [which had been radioed from the Texas to Allied military headquarters on Gibraltar, but had not been forwarded to the States as planned]. They hit the wires with an editor’s note saying that I was the first correspondent back from North Africa and these were the first uncensored stories from that historic landing.” Cronkite’s report, proudly labeled by the United Press as the “exclusive account of how the Americans took Port Lyautey in a bitter three-day battle,” was datelined November 11 and ran in American newspapers two weeks later.

  Betsy, who had moved back to Kansas City when her husband left for North Africa, joined her husband in New York City at the end of November, but their time together was brief. One year later, on December 12, 1943, Cronkite wrote to Betsy to mark the anniversary of their latest separation:

  Another gloomy Sunday, this time made even lonelier by the fact that it is just a year ago today that I left you on this last, longest trip of all. I knew then, when they said I was going to London, that the easy days of the Navy assignment with frequent returns to the United States were over, but I held a secret hope—almost a belief—that nothing could really keep us apart for long and that somehow we would be together before many more months had passed. Well, now it has been a year and, although some say the end is in sight, it still seems to be a far stretch down the road. Every day of this last year, and every day until we are together again, I miss you more, love you more, and [am] more lonely for you … It hasn’t been much fun. It won’t be fun until we can be together again.

  THEIR NEXT REUNION was still a long, long time in the future. The letters to Betsy between 1943 and 1945 that are reprinted in the chapters that follow provide a vivid record of the Cronkites’ “personal war.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE WRITING

  SIXTY-NINTH

  JANUARY-MAY 1943

  In the winter and spring of 1943 Walter Cronkite’s life changed forever. When he arrived in London, two days before New Year’s Day, he was an obscure United Press correspondent. By March, as he marveled in a letter to Betsy, he found himself a celebrity. He was assigned to cover the fast-expanding air offensive by the U.S. Eighth Air Force against Nazi Germany, the biggest story in the European theater of operations. Less than two months after arriving in England, he risked his life in accompanying a dangerous bombing mission against the U-boat base at Wilhelmshaven, Germany. His letters home chronicle his professional advance as well as the
personal side of life as a correspondent in wartime London. The letters also reveal Cronkite’s acute unhappiness because of his separation from his wife.

  Cronkite shipped out from New York on December 11, 1942, for a hazardous journey across the Atlantic aboard the 25-year-old Dutch passenger ship Westernland. German U-boats attacked the convoy, sinking several of the slow-going and vulnerable freighters and tankers, but the Westernland reached port in Glasgow unscathed. Despite his relief at the safe passage, Cronkite wrote on arrival that the trip aboard the “old crate” was “abominable from every other standpoint.”

  The Writing Sixty-Ninth: From left, Gladwin Hill, William Wade, Robert Post, Walter Cronkite, Homer Bigart, and Paul Manning. Andy Rooney and Denton Scott, the other two members of the group, are not shown.

  The British Isles were the staging area for a planned two-pronged Allied assault on Nazi-ruled Europe. The air war had already been launched, and the cross-channel invasion of France was eagerly awaited, though it would not take place for another year and a half. Cronkite was one of the three million Americans, most of them young men in uniform, who made the lone Allied outpost in western Europe their home between January 1942 and June 1944.

  Cronkite reminded Betsy in his first letter from Britain that their correspondence would be subject to military censorship, and that consequently she should write on only one side of the paper (lest a censor’s scissors inadvertently eliminate information on the other side of the page).

  From Glasgow, Cronkite traveled by train to London, arriving on December 30, where he found lodging for his first night in the Savoy Hotel. Located on the Strand in central London, the venerable and luxurious Savoy was a favorite stopping place for American correspondents during the war. It was also known for the comfort of its air-raid shelters. But the hotel was far too expensive for a reporter like Cronkite surviving on a salary and an expense account meted out by the notoriously penny-pinching United Press. Finding permanent lodgings in London was his first priority.

  12-30-42

  This is just a brief note to tell you I’m safe and fairly sound. At the moment I’m in my fiftieth hour without sleep (Oh, perhaps 20 nods but they didn’t add up to more than a full hour, I’m sure) and as a result I’m pretty dead on my feet. The trip over was without incident as far as the enemy was concerned but was abominable from every other standpoint, and since arrival on land I’ve been battling constantly against transportation and housing difficulties. Passage across was just as dirty and uncomfortable as that old crate looked and I’ll try to tell you more of that when I can keep the eyelids propped up. Here I’ve got a room at the Savoy for one night … I must vacate by 10 am tomorrow, New Year’s Eve. God knows what I’ll do then inasmuch as the hotel situation here on New Year’s Eve is just as it is at home.

  I’m sure I shall get no more kick out of celebrating the advent of a New Year without you than I did out of Christmas. We had a Christmas tree on the ship but it was a pretty cold gruesome business compared with those wonderful holidays at home. Thanks so much for the gifts, Darlingest. Vitamins, cufflinks, chewing gum, etc. and the swell note …

  I hope a letter is on the way, written on one side of the paper only, so that the censor’s scissors don’t ruin it.

  CRONKITE FOUND THAT London was a city under aerial siege. In the first four months of the German bombing campaign, the “Blitz,” more than 13,000 of the city’s residents had been killed, and nearly 18,000 seriously injured. By May 1941 more than a million of the city’s homes had suffered bomb damage, and one-sixth of the population was at least temporarily homeless. Among the iconic images defining the war were London citizens sleeping on the city’s Underground subway platforms and St. Paul’s Cathedral lit up by the flames of nearby burning buildings.

  By the time Cronkite arrived in London, Americans had developed a strong sense of identification with and affection for the city. In large measure this feeling resulted from the reporting by Edward R. Murrow and other war correspondents during the autumn of 1940, the beginning of the Blitz bombing campaign. “In 1940,” British historian David Reynolds wrote in Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945, his 1995 account of American-British relations during World War II, “Britain’s best propagandists were in fact the American media.”

  “This is London,” Murrow began his broadcasts from the embattled city for CBS Radio, and listeners at home sometimes heard the sounds of antiaircraft fire and exploding bombs in the background. The image of Britain popular in much of prewar America—as a land of haughty aristocrats and surly workingmen, an arrogant imperial power undeserving of sympathy or help—was replaced by that of plucky, stoic, and heroic Londoners, carrying on with their lives in the face of a brutal, unending assault. Another American correspondent, Collier’s Weekly editor Quentin Reynolds, narrated a short documentary/propaganda film about the first five weeks of the Blitz, London Can Take It!, which was widely viewed in the United States in 1940–41 and credited with helping sway American popular sympathies toward providing aid to Britain. He described the residents of London as a “people’s army” and concluded with an uplifting salute to their spirit and prospects:

  I am a neutral reporter. I have watched the people of London live and die ever since death in its most ghastly garb began to come here as a nightly visitor five weeks ago. I have watched them stand by their homes. I have seen them made homeless. I have seen them moved to new homes. And I can assure you there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town. There is nothing but determination, confidence, and high courage among the people of Churchill’s island.

  By the time Cronkite was posted to London, Reynolds’s unconvincing pose of neutrality was no longer one required of American reporters. London was the front line in the battle against the common enemy. Wartime Anglophilia, a projection of American patriotism, idealism, and internationalism, was in full flower.

  London was not the first, or the only, urban British target of German bombers. Port cities and industrial cities throughout the island were also hit, often with heavy damage and high casualties. All told, more than 60,000 British civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands injured. The country’s housing stock was severely damaged. But the impact on its industrial production and military capabilities was far from decisive, and the impact on British civilian morale, from the German perspective, perversely counterproductive. Indeed, the strongest support for the war was found in the bombed cities. By 1942, German air raids on London had receded to the level of occasional nuisance; more bombs were dropped monthly on the city in the winter of 1940–41 than in all of 1942. Still, the occasional bombing raid, combined with the vast stretches of urban rubble left in the wake of the earlier heavy bombing, made a deep impression on American newcomers like Cronkite.

  United Press advertisements celebrating the role of reporters in the war effort appeared in popular magazines on the home front during World War II.

  During the war, the United Press advertised its reporters as “Shock Troops of the Press,” who risked their lives to bring news of America’s military exploits from the front lines to the readers back home. One advertisement depicted a civilian correspondent, typewriter in hand, leading armed troops in an assault on an enemy beach, which gave new meaning to the term “adversarial journalism.” Toward their own government during the war, however, most American journalists were anything but adversarial. They sometimes chafed under the restrictions of wartime censorship but rarely questioned the larger aims of the U.S. war effort. “We were all on the same side then,” Cronkite recalled in his memoir, A Reporter’s Life, “and most of us newsmen abandoned any thought of impartiality as we reported on the heroism of our boys and the bestiality of the hated Nazis.”

  Notwithstanding their allegiance to the Allied cause, the United Press reporters covering the war in Europe sought to convey to their readers the realities of the grim and bloody struggle. By 1943 the war was taking the lives of scores and sometimes hundreds of young Americ
ans every week, both on the convoys ferrying men and supplies across the Atlantic and in the air war over Europe.

  As in all circumstances, reporters were always on the lookout for a good story that could advance their careers. The journalists who staffed the United Press office in London were ambitious young men who had grown up during the Great Depression; their new assignment was the greatest career opportunity that had ever come their way. “London was the road to my future,” Cronkite’s fellow United Press reporter Harrison Salisbury wrote frankly in A Journey for Our Times, his postwar memoir, “the path to making a name for myself, to propelling myself to fame and fortune.”

  When Cronkite sailed to London, he expected he would continue to cover the Battle of the Atlantic as before. What he didn’t want was a desk position. He hoped, he told Betsy, that the “Navy job” would prove “big enough to keep me out of the office most of the time.” Instead, the rapidly expanding U.S. air war over Europe became his main beat. And he made the most of the opportunity. As he wrote in A Reporter’s Life, “I was lucky enough to be assigned to cover the American and British air forces.” The air war was the only war in northwest Europe during that long year of 1943 and the five months of 1944 before the landings in Normandy. Stories of aerial warfare shared the headlines at home with the fierce battles fought in North Africa, Italy, and the island-hopping invasions in the Pacific.

  Walter and Betsy in 1942

  Andy Rooney, who as an enlisted man reported the war for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, later became a CBS colleague of Cronkite’s and one of his closest friends. He wrote in My War, his 1997 memoir of the war, “Anyone who thinks of Walter Cronkite today as the authoritative father figure of television news would be surprised to know what a tough, competitive scrambler he was in the old Front Page tradition of newspaper reporting.”