Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  Instead this Sunday I slept until noon (what, come to think of it, is “instead” about that) finally got up, bathed and washed my hair leaving too much soap in it so it now stands out like a Communist party badge, and began the tortuous process of going downstairs. Don’t think that isn’t tortuous, too. With typical British impracticality, there are 3 lifts in the Park Lane, and none of them have interconnecting signal systems. They are about a half-block apart, it seems, so you run from one to the other pressing buttons while nothing happens. The signal system telling you what floor they are on also has been on the blink since the blitz, so that doesn’t give you any hint as to which, if any, of them are running. Then when one finally does arrive at your floor, which in my pitiful case is the top, you are invariably at the other end. By the time you have run down the hall to catch the elevator that is there, it isn’t. The boy—who, of course, is 95 and hence undraftable—has looked out and not finding you standing right there ready to hop in, started down again. Then you start the whole business over again.

  Well, in the elevator this morning I ran into Bill Richardson, who used to be with the UP in NY and now is managing editor of Yank, the army magazine. He was with a girl he introduced as Ricky Richardson, which meant nothing to me but who later turned out to be a rather famous English model—sort of the London edition of Jinx Falkenburg. She’d make a good Mr. Hyde to Jinx’ Dr. Jekyll. But that is beside the point. We stopped in the lounge downstairs for a morning drink and since he introduced her as [illegible] Richardson [illegible] wedding ring, I assumed that she was his wife, and made some such asinine remark as “I didn’t know you were married” or “When did this happen” or something like that, which turned out to be a little embarrassing, since both are married but not to each other, etc. Thus did a typical day begin.

  They were on their way to a picture show, probably “Casablanca” but I wasn’t interested in a show so we parted company. I was just going out the hotel door to find a spot where I could still get lunch at that hour—it was then about 2 o’clock—when Tom Wolf, who recently came over for NEA, came in. He said he was looking for me, thought I might like to go to a concert. He had had lunch, but agreed we would have time to stop into a snack bar (which would be the equivalent of our hamburger joint, if they had hamburgers over here. It is a joint where you can get spam and cheese sandwiches and a cup of tea …) Over the tea we began to equivocate about the concert. You guessed it. We ended up by going to see “Casablanca” instead of the National Symphony Orchestra. Did you see the picture? It was really swell. I wasn’t expecting much, but it turned out to be an all-star cast and really great. Bogart and Rains and supporting characters whose names I never remember but always like.

  It is the 3rd picture I have seen here. First, I seem to get so very very little time off and second the shows cost so much. We sat in the last row of the balcony today after having stood in the queue for a half hour and the seats cost us 5/6 five shillings six pence, or $1.10. For choice seats you queue up too, but they cost 10/6—$2.10. Last week I saw “In Which we serve” which, like today’s movie, was worth the price of admission—if you have it …

  Piccadilly Circus truly looks like a World Congress of Uniforms these days. Every nationality but German and Italian (thank God) are represented either by their national uniform or in the case of some of the refugee governments with British uniforms and shoulder patches explaining their national heritage. You see kilts of the Highland Regiments and the six-footers of the Grenadier Guards. And you see an occasional well-dressed Scottish civilian, or maybe even English, in good-looking tweeds. I shall never get used to kilts and never shall adopt them although I must admit that some of the plaids are beautiful. I will say, however, that my knees could not be nearly as unlovely as some I’ve seen around here …

  I got two more letters from you last week and now I have high hopes of getting them on a fairly regular basis from here on out. They told of your interview with Wellington and your getting out on your own in that desperate search for features, which I suppose you know is the absolute hardest part of all newspapering. I hope by now you have gotten on, because you deserve it and I know that the Star could use you. Just like you said, though, these exchange of letters seem to take so long that any advice I could give now would arrive much too late to help. And anyway, you are far the cleverer and advice from me would be purely superfluous. You know I’m praying and wishing you the best of luck.

  I had quite a day Thursday in running into old friends. First of all Roy Roussel, my old city editor on the Houston Press, telephoned and without identifying himself gave me hell for missing the Home Edition with that tax assessment story. I admit complete bafflement until he identified himself. He had just read in Stars and Stripes a squib to the effect that I was at this air corps training school and immediately looked me up. By that time, however, he only had a few more hours leave in London—he is a captain in the air corps—so we only had time for breakfast together, but we spent that hour and a half jawing over the old Houston Press crowd and I enjoyed it immensely …

  Then that same noon I was back at the officers club for lunch and thought I recognized a major standing over in a corner talking with another officer. I walked by him a couple of times staring and he stared back. Then I gathered up my nerve and asked if he wasn’t Tilden Wright, which he was and gave the recognition signal by saying, “And you’re Cronkite.” He was a frat brother at UT and visited me in Houston in 1935 on his way to West Point. He’s a pilot but is stuck in some sort of administrative job and very unhappy about it all.

  Strange that I should meet those 2 the same day when I haven’t met anyone else I knew from the really old days since I’ve been here. I haven’t seen Roussel since 1936 and Wright since that day in 1935 …

  I must go now … Even more men are being sent over from home and that doesn’t add up to my getting back very soon. I’m thinking constantly of you …

  ALTHOUGH DATED MARCH 8, 1943, from the context, and the reference to the “big story” he was about to embark upon, Cronkite’s letter to Betsy that follows was clearly written prior to the February 26 Wilhelmshaven raid, an experience he would describe in a subsequent letter also dated March 8.

  March 8, 1943

  If this v-mail trails off into paragraphs of expletives, blame it all on that old anathema of mine—fire-building. I’m at this Fortress base somewhere in England and I’m living in one of the cells of a long, wooden, one-story barracks building. Bigart of the Herald-Tribune shares this room with me, and the other rooms of the building are shared by pilots and administrative officers. It really isn’t too uncomfortable—except for this smoking, pot-bellied, coal stove that Bigart and I try to keep going. Bigart could no more qualify for the fire-building merit badge than I could and we are sweating so much by the time we almost get a fire going that we no longer need the damned thing. It seems that we spend more than half our time chopping kindling, gathering up coal, or slaving (and worrying) over that darned fire. It is much more understandable to me now why the British officers have their own batmen. The officers could never get around to fighting a war if they had to build and maintain fires themselves.

  Bigart and I are at this base waiting for the “go” signal on that big story. Yesterday we drew our flying equipment—almost a day-long job. We got the works: heavy, leather, fur-lined jackets, pants and overshoes, flying coveralls, fur-lined cap, goggles, oxygen masks, Mae Wests. We are all set to go now and are just waiting for the word. There is no need, however, for you to worry inasmuch as by the time you get this it will be all over, the story written and published.

  We have written two stories since we have been here and the rest of the time, with the exception of the fire-building, we loaf at the officers club, go to the movies in the gymnasium, and gather background material by bulling with the pilots and crews. We planned to shoot some skeet this afternoon but that was canceled for one of the many Army reasons that I never seem to understand. So, instead, Homer and I
bicycled about five miles to the country surrounding the base. The principal means of transportation in these airdrome areas is bicycling and Homer and I were fortunate enough to draw a couple of them. This has been one of England’s mildest winters and this afternoon was almost springlike. Right outside the airbase we hit a small hill which led down into a valley and a tiny, old English town. The houses were built next to the road. They had thatched roofs and dirty curtains in the windows and old men tending the tiny gardens. In one an old gnome-like woman stood in the doorway which was barely large enough to allow her four-foot frame to pass and she leaned, so help me, on an old-fashioned, home-made broom like the witches ride on Halloween cards. The Crossed Keys Inn, the village pub, was, according to the sign hanging outside, “Established in this building in 1800.” Of course, it wasn’t open, the hour being four o’clock and pub hours being between eleven and three and five and ten-thirty. (The damned fire’s going out. Nuts!) We hope to visit the pub some night and sample British village opinion.

  I talked to the office by telephone today and they said I had a letter from you. They are sending it up tomorrow by army courier … Walter

  AMERICAN REPORTERS HAD been pushing for permission to go along on bombing raids since the early days of the war. In January 1943, New York Times correspondent Jamie MacDonald, a Scotsman, flew in a Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber on a raid on Berlin, and that same month Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White flew in a B-17 raid on a German airfield in Tunis. The Eighth Air Force, always publicity-conscious, decided to allow reporters a firsthand look at its air fleet’s prowess in carrying the war to the German homeland. Eight reporters, six civilians, and two military were chosen to undergo a week’s training the first week in February to prepare them to accompany a bombing mission. William Wyler would go on to direct the documentary Memphis Belle, chronicling the 25 missions flown by a B-17 crew in the air war.

  Cronkite in flying gear, circa 1943

  On February 26, six of the eight members of the Writing Sixty-Ninth, including Cronkite, boarded bombers and took off for an attack on a target in Germany—only the second such attack by the Eighth Air Force. The strike force consisted of 76 B-17s and 17 B-24s; all the correspondents except for Bob Post of the New York Times flew on the B-17s. The original target for the mission, an aircraft factory in Bremen, was covered by dense clouds, so the bombers were diverted to Wilhelmshaven, their secondary target.

  Cronkite flew in a B-17 named S-for-Sugar and commanded by Maj. Glenn E. Hagenbuch, commanding officer of the 427th Bomb Squadron, 303rd Bomb Group, based at Molesworth. The other crew members included co-pilot Lt. John C. Barker, navigator Lt. Walter M. Soha, bombardier Lt. Albert W. Dieffenbach, engineer Technical Sgt. Charles E. Zipfel, radioman Staff Sgt. Clarence S. Coomes, and gunners Staff Sgt. Durward L. Hinds, Staff Sgt. George W. Henderson, Staff Sgt. Jack Belk, and Sgt. Edward Z. Harmon. The American planes came under heavy aerial and ground antiaircraft fire; German fighter planes introduced a new tactic, air-to-air bombing of the attacking bombers. Cronkite’s plane was attacked by German fighters, as well as antiaircraft fire. He flew in the Plexiglas nose of the B-17, manning a gun.

  Seven of the planes on the raid were shot down, including the B-24 Liberator carrying Bob Post. He had fatalistically told a friend the day before that he thought he would die on the raid, and his intuition proved correct. He was the 12th American war correspondent killed during the war, one of 37 all told who would lose their lives before it was over, and the second from the New York Times. One hundred and twelve other war correspondents were wounded, for a total of 149 casualties. The U.S. government accredited only 1,646 reporters for overseas posting, so approximately one in every 11 American war correspondents was a casualty by war’s end. The most famous correspondent to die in the war was Ernie Pyle, of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, who was killed by a sniper on Iwo Jima in April 1945.

  Harrison Salisbury was waiting at Molesworth to greet Cronkite and the other correspondents when they returned from the raid, although he had opposed the assignment. “It had been set up before I arrived in London,” Salisbury recalled. “I was not happy about it, but a dozen elephants could not have kept Walter out of the B-17.” He was struck by Cronkite’s uncharacteristically grim appearance and the lack of his usual wisecracks. Salisbury, in his version, accompanied Cronkite to a window-less room set aside for the correspondents at the base and stood over him as he wrote the story of the raid. Cronkite’s letter to Betsy provides a different, and probably more accurate, account—that the two of them drove to London, where the story was written under the watchful eyes of military censors at the Ministry of Information. In either case, Salisbury recalled that Cronkite “was wound up like a top.” It didn’t help that people kept coming in with reports on the missing Bob Post. Salisbury also recalled suggesting the story’s lead paragraph to Cronkite: “American Flying Fortresses have just come back from an assignment to hell—a hell 26,000 feet above the earth …,” but Cronkite never acknowledged his help, if indeed that’s the origin of the line. That was the kind of lead, in any case, that UP reporters were trained to use. Early in the war, UP president Hugh Baillie sent out a cable to his European news manager with these instructions: “Tell those guys out there to get the smell of warm blood into their copy. Tell them to quit writing like retired generals and military analysts, and to write about people killing each other.”

  With their own correspondent a fatality of the raid, the New York Times ran Cronkite’s account on the front page, one of only three times that Cronkite’s byline would appear in the Times during the war.

  HELL 26,000 FEET UP

  By Walter Cronkite

  United Press Correspondent

  AT A UNITED STATES FLYING FORTRESS BASE in England, Saturday, February 27 (UP)—American Flying Fortresses have just come back from an assignment to hell—a hell 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire, of crippled Fortresses and burning German fighter planes, of parachuting men and others not so lucky. I have just returned with a Flying Fortress crew from Wilhelmshaven.

  We fought off Hitler’s fighters and dodged his guns. The Fortress I rode in came out without damage, but we had the element of luck on our side.

  Other formations caught the blast of fighter blows and we watched Fortresses and Liberators plucked out of the formations around us.

  We gave the ship repair yards and other installations at the great German submarine and naval base on the North Sea a most severe pasting. As we swept beyond the target and back over the North Sea from which we came we saw great pillars of smoke over the target areas.

  Six of us represented the American news services, newspapers and radio—“The Writing Sixty-ninth”—after undergoing special high altitude flight training. A seventh correspondent could not go because of illness and the plane taking another had to turn back because of technical difficulties.

  Actually the impressions of a first bombing mission are a hodgepodge of disconnected scenes like a poorly edited home movie—bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one motor limping along thousands of feet below, a tiny speck in the sky that becomes an enemy fighter, a Focke-Wulf peeling off above you somewhere and plummeting down, shooting its way through the formation; your bombardier pushing a button as calmly as if he were turning on a hall light, to send our bombs on the way.

  Our bombardier was First Lieutenant Albert W. Diefenbach, 26, of Washington, D.C. His job began at that thrilling moment when the bomb bay doors swung open on the lead ship and on down the lines to us.

  That signaled that we were beginning the bomb run. Then we swept over Wilhelmshaven. There were broken clouds but through them there appeared a toy village below which was really a major seaport and I thought:

  “Down there right now people are scurrying for shelters—which means interrupting work on vital submarines and ships and dockyards.”

  Lieutenant Diefenbach’s left
hand went out to the switch panel alongside him and almost imperceptibly he touched a button and said calmly over the communications system:

  “Bombs away.”

  That was it. Our mission was accomplished—our bombs were on their way to Hitler.

  What Cronkite couldn’t tell his readers was that he had been firing a machine gun at approaching enemy fighters during the raid (a violation of the Geneva Conventions, since he was a civilian and not a military crew member); on returning to England, he could barely exit the plane, because he found himself, as he would write in A Reporter’s Life, “up to my hips in spent .50-caliber shells.”

  This was not the last time that Cronkite would come under fire during the war. Afterward, however, he was always careful to distinguish his own experiences from those of the fighting men he covered. “Personally, I feel I was an overweening coward in the war,” Cronkite told an interviewer from Playboy magazine in 1973. “I was scared to death all the time. I did everything possible to avoid getting into combat. Except the ultimate thing of not doing it. I did it. But the truth is that I did everything only once. It didn’t take any great courage to do it once. If you go back and do it a second time—knowing how bad it is, that’s courage.”

  After the war Cronkite obtained a copy of the Eighth Air Force’s official record for the bombing raid on Wilhelmshaven. It rated the bombing results as “fair to good” and also provided a detailed account of American losses:

  Of the B-17s, 12 returned early and 5 are missing. Of the B-24s, 6 returned early, 2 are missing and 3 failed to bomb. In addition, one B-24 crash-landed at Ludham … In the B-17 crews, 11 were wounded, and 52 are missing. In the B-24 crews 3 were wounded and 21 are missing. Total: 14 wounded, 73 missing.