Cronkite's War
Page 11
CHAPTER THREE
THE YOUTHFUL
DEAN OF AMERICAN
AIR-WAR WRITERS
JUNE–DECEMBER 1943
By the second half of 1943, Walter Cronkite was not simply reporting the war; he had also become a part of the story of the war. In May the weekly syndicated radio series Soldiers of the Press, which featured dramatized 15-minute vignettes based on the reporting of United Press correspondents, brought to American listeners an adapted version of a Cronkite dispatch about a U.S. bomber named Dry Martini (with an actor with a pronounced New York tough-guy accent reading Cronkite’s lines). In November the popular magazine Look ran an expanded account by Cronkite of his dangerous flight to Wilhelmshaven under the headline “My Favorite War Story,” including a photo of Cronkite looking dashing in his military correspondent uniform. And in December, the United Press sent out a dispatch to its subscribing newspapers under Cronkite’s byline, along with an editorial note introducing the author as the “youthful dean of American air-war writers in London.” Cronkite’s story began with a colorful description of the daily routine of his subordinates in the London UP office, Collie Small and Doug Werner. The portrait clearly drew as well on his own experiences traveling to American air bases like Molesworth:
Standing up in crowded trains, crawling over fog-shrouded roads in bouncing jeeps, riding bicycles over muddy lanes, American correspondents in Britain covering the air war are working night and day to keep pace with the mounting round-the-clock Allied aerial offensive … These correspondents are “musette bag and typewriter” soldiers. The musette bag slung over their shoulder contains their shaving kit, a towel, a bar of soap—with luck—a clean shirt. That and their portable typewriters are “home.”
As for his own role as newly christened dean of the air-war writers, Cronkite wrote:
In London, I am constantly kept busy assessing the facts, interviewing those “in the know” at the Air Ministry and 8th Air Force headquarters, and seeking to interpret the developing air war, as well to call future plays so that Small, Werner and myself can be at the scene when the big story breaks.
Although there was as yet no such thing as a network television news show and, of course, no such person as an “anchorman,” Cronkite’s experience as dean of air-war writers provided good preparation for his later career as managing editor of CBS Evening News.
From modest beginnings the previous summer, the American air war in Europe grew in 1943–44 into a leviathan. By the end of 1943 there were 66 U.S. air bases in Britain. It reached peak strength, just before D-Day, in June 1944, when more than 426,000 U.S. airmen were stationed in Britain. Others were stationed in the Mediterranean and, after D-Day, in France. In 1944–45 the combined total American and British air forces in Europe consisted of 1.3 million men flying or servicing an armada of 28,000 combat planes. Before the war was over, American and British bombers had dropped 2,700,000 tons of bombs on Nazi targets. In Germany, in addition to the damage done to military targets, war industries, and transportation systems, more than three million housing units were destroyed, 300,000 civilians were killed, and 780,000 were wounded. As the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey investigators concluded in 1946, “The principal German cities have been largely reduced to hollow walls and piles of rubble … These are the scars across the face of the enemy, the preface to the victory that followed.”
Cronkite measured the growth of the U.S. air war during its first year of operations in a dispatch that went out on the UP wire on June 10, 1943, noting that the Army Air Forces in Britain had doubled in size since March, and would double again by September. To illustrate the strategic implications of this vast expansion in destructive power, Cronkite quoted comments at a recent press conference by Gen. Ira C. Eaker, commander of the American Army Air Forces in the UK theater:
“The great factor, of course—and it will be the determining factor in a way—lies in the fact that we can replace our losses and the enemy cannot replace his,” General Eaker said at a press conference. “Our air force is on the build-up and his is on the wane. He has reached the peak, if, indeed, he has not passed it.”
The war wasn’t over, but Cronkite’s thoughts were increasingly focused on the postwar era. In his June 20, 1943, letter to Betsy, he noted that United Press president Hugh Baillie was coming to London on an inspection tour. Cronkite hoped to find out from his boss a hint of his peacetime prospects with the UP. “Then maybe we can lay a few plans,” he wrote.
The London UP bureau was honeycombed with talented young men, all hoping to profit from Hugh Baillie’s patronage, Harrison Salisbury among them. While Cronkite escorted Baillie on a tour of air bases, Salisbury was given the onerous, but also potentially advantageous, assignment of finding the great man suitable lodgings, entertainment, and dining opportunities while he was in London and making his appointments with government and military officials. “Baillie must have the best,” Salisbury recalled in his postwar memoir A Journey for Our Times:
He must stay in the best suite in the Savoy. He must meet Churchill and Eden, the air marshals, the U.S. brass … I must take him to dinner every night at the best restaurants and he must be seated at the best tables. There wasn’t much at the theater, but he must have the best seats at the best shows.
Salisbury did all that and more, and Baillie promised to promote him to UP European news manager. That prospect left him “walking on air” for several days, until he discovered that the promised promotion went instead to rival Virgil Pinkley. Thereafter, he and Pinkley “were strange dogs, sniffing and growling at each other,” until October 1943 when, to the relief of both, Salisbury was reassigned to cover the war in Russia. (In the long run, that proved a good career move for Salisbury, who shifted after the war to a high-profile position with the New York Times as its Soviet expert and won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow in 1955.)
June 20, 1943
Just got back from another trip up-country to find another wonderful assortment of mail from you—V-mailers and regulars … When I get an accumulation like that I carefully stack them in the order in which they were written and then read from top of stack to bottom … About the future … I ought to have a more definite idea this very week. Hugh Baillie is here and beginning tomorrow morning he and I are going out touring air bases. He wants to see the American Air Force in action and I am the guy to show him, he figures. So we will be together four or five days at least and during that time there will be many opportunities for long talks. I should get a pretty clear idea of the post-war future then, whether or not I’ll be staying over here, if so how long, whether it will be a nomad existence for years or only months after the armistice, etc. Then, maybe we can lay a few plans. More later … Walter
IN HIS LETTER written around July 10/11, 1943, Cronkite returned again to the question of when and how Betsy might join him in England. He was now convinced that given the extent and depth of his “contacts with the Eighth Air Force,” it was “highly improbable” that he would “be covering anything else war-long.” That meant, he thought, if Betsy came over, they would not be separated again by his being sent off to another assignment.
Roy Howard was president of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Prior to that he had been president of the United Press, which is probably the reason that Cronkite was going to take him on a tour of air bases, before plans changed.
The Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane in Mayfair, overlooking Hyde Park, was considered one of the safer places in London to ride out an air raid because of its sturdy construction. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was among its regular guests. The other London location Cronkite mentioned in the letter, Kinnerton Street, off which lead numerous 19th-century mews, is in the Belgravia section.
[No date, July 10/11, 1943?]
It is now ten o’clock in the morning, a slightly coolish, rainy morning, and I’m sitting here waiting for and hoping for my clean laundry so I can pack my musette bag and make the one-thirty train up-country. [Jim] McGli
ncy is on vacation so he still is sleeping soundly in the bedroom with only occasional grumbles about the typewriter. I’m using his portable, by the way, inasmuch as my poor old battered and shattered machine now sounds all the world like a faulty linotype and awakens the dead—meaning the brass hats who inhabit the Dorchester across the street.
I came back late Monday from my listening post up north … I reached the flat about ten-thirty or a quarter of eleven (it was still daylight, of course—we have almost a midnight sun these mid-summer days with the northern sky always alight) to find that McGlincy had uncovered the bottle of Port I’d been hoarding and had finished it off in solo. I didn’t even get a sip of it. It was some Portuguese wine that I had been lucky enough to get hold of through one of the officers’ messes at an airbase. Oh, well.
I’ve been taking it somewhat easy the last couple of days to make up, in part, for the impossible 126 hour weeks I’ve been putting in recently. Although with the responsibility of directing this air force coverage I can’t ever really relax from constant vigilance …
Managed to crowd in a little relaxation the last couple of nights. Tuesday night Joe Evans, head of the Newsweek bureau here, invited me to dinner at his girl’s house and we had a devil of a nice evening. She lives up Kinnerton Mews off Wilton Place in a little artists’ colony I didn’t even know existed. I say “artists colony.” What it is is a “successful artists, writers and actors’ colony.” The place is about two blocks long with one alley-way of houses running for another block off it at right angles. The little, old-world houses, packed up against each other, have been modernly redecorated inside, and they have little gardens in back. It is a little world in its own. The houses rent for around forty dollars a week furnished, slightly out of line according to our old standards but not so much more than much cheesier places in war-time London. The area is just a couple of blocks off Knightsbridge and a big business area in the West End. The big point, is, honey, that it is one of the places for us to look when you join me over here.
I’m so anxious to get you over here, darling. I find that I’m beginning to like the place and I want you to join me in it as soon as possible. I don’t know that we’ll be stationed here after the war. It might be Paris or Berlin or Antwerp or some such capital other than London, but I know we’re going to have fun wherever we are. And Judy will too. Here in England everyone takes their dog everywhere. Dogs are allowed on the busses and the subways and in practically all of the hotels. The only places they aren’t allowed, it seems, are the Post Offices, but we can buy Judy’s stamps for her and let her mail her own letters in outside boxes.
Since my talk with Baillie the other day I’ve been thinking over again the possibility of getting you over here even before the war ends. My contacts with the Eighth Air Force are such now that it seems highly improbable I’ll be covering anything else war-long. It also seems improbable that I’ll be outside England but for a very short time immediately preceding the armistice. So the most frightening prospect of all about getting you here now has somewhat diminished. That prospect was that you might no sooner get here than I would be ordered on to other theaters of war to which you couldn’t accompany me, and thus you would be stranded here without either the family or me. I think the submarine menace has so abated that the danger there is negligible. There is only one other serious consideration remaining. I’m not at all sure that if we could get you over here now we could also get Judy. We might not be able to bring her along until after the war and that would a long hard trip for her alone …
Your letter also mentioned that Betty urges you to take frequent pictures of Judy, as often as the film shortage will allow. Would you mind asking Betty to urge Judy to take pictures of you, too, as often as possible? I’d love as many pictures of both of you as I can get. Despite this tremendous activity and that constant scurrying about and, I’ll admit, the interesting things to do and people to meet, I get awfully lonesome for you and that little dog. It seems so very long since we’ve been together. Everything I see and everything I do lacks the final joy of interest it would contain if you were with me …
I had a very Sunday Schoolish night last night. I worked at the office from about four to six, having gotten into town (after standing two hours on a train) at three and having rushed home to change out of wet uniform into comfortable, dry civilian clothes. At six McGlincy and I went around to the King and Keys in Fleet street, had a couple of drinks with [Betty] Knox and Salisbury and Jack Tait of the NY Herald-Tribune. I came back out to the Deanery Club right away to meet a couple of fighter pilots to whom I’d promised a drink. That wound up with my taking them to dinner—a near four bucks down the hatch. They had to do a broadcast so I told them adieu, went down to the bar for another drink and ran into a crowd of fliers and assorted personnel en route to the Red Cross Charles Street Club for the usual Saturday night dance. I went along and had a heluva good time—playing table tennis. I played for about three hours taking on all comers and managing to win all the games. Then up stepped a challenger who I thought looked familiar. He played a heluva game of ping-pong but I managed to eke out a win there too. Then he and I went down to the snack bar and had a soft drink (the Red Cross being what it is) and a long chat. It was our very own little Robert [Manring]. He’d gotten to town in the late evening and been unable to find me. I was pretty darned tired and there wasn’t anything to do at that horrible hour of eleven o’clock when he finished playing, so I came on home here and he went down to the Red Cross Reindeer Club where he’d booked a room …
We are thinking seriously of taking a few days off together and going down to the south of England where we might be able to absorb a little sunshine. That vacation matter has become urgent now. If Bob could arrange his time off for that same period we could have an inexpensive few days on the coast (although there is no bathing on account of defense works).
Here is how the war is brought home to you these days over here. Up at the air headquarters where I’ve been hanging my hat most of these days I frequently wander around to the crossroads pub with Corporal Jim McNeil of the publicity staff. Those boys have been in that neighborhood for almost a year and they take an active part in the pub’s political and economic discussions. We were having a quick beer there and I noticed a rather decent-looking middle-aged woman wearing dark glasses fumbling around finding the glass of beer on the table in front of her. McNeil then tells me that she is a village tragedy. She had just returned from the hospital where they told her her eyes had been destroyed and she would never see again. She had been on a one-week holiday at a resort town where just one or two German sneak raiders whipped over, dropped a couple of bombs on churches and schools, and whipped home. She caught too much of the blast of one of those bombs.
I’ve got to go now, I’ve got to pack a few clean clothes available, do my best to sew a “War Correspondent” patch onto my field jacket, and be off to Waterloo Station. Tell little Judy I miss her too, and give my best to all the family. Walter.
CRONKITE’S BEAT REMAINED the air war, the main story for correspondents based in England. Elsewhere in Europe, the Allies advanced on the Nazi homeland. The last German and Italian troops fighting in North Africa surrendered in May. On July 9–10 American and British forces invaded Sicily. At the same time, the Red Army was blunting and then reversing the last German offensive on the eastern front, in the Battle of Kursk, the largest and most decisive tank battle in the history of warfare. At the start of September the British and Americans landed in Italy, leading in short order to Mussolini’s downfall, Italy’s surrender, and Germany’s occupation of its former Axis ally.
Only scattered Cronkite letters to Betsy survive for that summer. Since nothing indicates that he stopped writing, most of the letters he sent from June through August were probably lost en route or misplaced after they were received. Also lost to memory is any record of where Cronkite took his evidently unsatisfactory summer vacation in July, though it may have been the “few days on the c
oast” he mentioned in his letter of July 10/11.
July 20, 1943
… The vacation so far stinks, as I knew it would. It is raining and thus there is no golf, even if I could find someone to play with. I told you I played Sunday with McGlincy, didn’t I? It had been threatening to rain all Sunday morning and suddenly the sun burst through just long enough to sell us on the idea of going out. And, of course, as soon as we set foot on the first tee the rain started again. It was sporadic, though, and somehow we got through eleven holes … This is a lousy letter but that’s sort of the way I’m feeling today what with a vacation and no Betsy or Judy … Walter
IN HIS LETTER of August 3, 1943, Cronkite announced his intention to write every single day, so his letters would amount to a diary of his war experiences. Eight months after arriving in England, he still pined for his wife’s company and mused nostalgically on their last weeks together in the fall of 1942.
Since the “long letter” he alludes to did not survive, there is no way to know how Cronkite wound up as a guest at the London home of Lord and Lady Jersey. As he explained in his follow-up letter of August 4, Countess Jersey was, prior to her 1937 marriage to George Child-Villiers, ninth Earl of Jersey, a minor Hollywood actress named Virginia Cherrill, and briefly married to Cary Grant. Her most famous role in the movies was as a blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 feature, City Lights.
August 3, 1943
It is rather appropriate that this daily diary should begin today. It was just a year ago today, honey, that we had lunch in that rather nice restaurant in the Maritime Building and I told you goodbye and watched you walk up the street toward the subway. And then I fooled away those previous minutes that we could have had together while I waited for the boat that was to take me with Captain Bryant out into the bay for the first in this series of assignments. And that night the ship lay in the bay and I thought of you only a few miles away in Jackson Heights and I couldn’t do anything about it. That had been a hectic day, hadn’t it?—picking up the uniform, trying to get a makeshift arm band, rushing to the dock.