I love you, honey. Much more later. Always, Walter
JACK FRITSCHE, MENTIONED in Cronkite’s letter of August 19, 1943, was Cronkite’s cousin (his mother’s brother’s son) and an Eighth Air Force officer.
Thursday, August 19, 1943
… Tuesday night the hired car that takes late shift workers home from the office arrived just as I finished my letter to you—and not a moment too soon, either. I never have been so tired. I was close to collapse, and I’d just had a terrific fight with the deskman about the way he was trying to save cable tolls and cutting all the good color stuff out of the air war story. Wednesday morning I slept until eleven when I hopped up and rattled out an “experter” on the shuttle raid and called it into the office, then got involved in a half dozen long distance calls dispersing our legmen force for the day’s activities, if any. I had lunch with [Jim] McGlincy at the officer’s mess, and a soup bowl haircut (the only kind obtainable in this benighted land) at the Park Lane Hotel. Barbers, here … are no different than those at home. They tell you how the war should be conducted, interspersing their comments with lengthy sales arguments on singeing, shampoos, etc. But prices are certainly an improvement over New York seventy-five centers. Two shillings here—forty cents. Then into the office where I was corralled by [Hugh] Baillie for an afternoon of errands. I had a pretty good time, though. I was arranging his Clipper passage home. First to the Air Force to wangle a better priority number, then to Pan American for tickets and a chat with Jack Kelly, their local manager who has damned interesting stories of the early war days in Lisbon when the refugees were queued in front of the Pan American office there and Kelly’s principal job was to keep them from smashing his plate glass windows. Then to the British Overseas Airways Corporation for the ticket to Foynes. Eleven hundred bucks for the round-trip ticket—wow! Start saving that money, darling. Baillie was pleased with the office boy service I rendered, and congratulated me again on the CBS decision. McGlincy and I then had a drink at El Vino’s in Fleet street with Bill Dickinson and his gal, Hilde Marchant, Daily Mirror (London) columnist. Mack and I then grabbed a “hamburger” in a Leicester Square joint decorated with bad imitations of Wimpy and went to see Striptease Lady at the Odeon, having a couple of their less expensive seats—six shillings ($1.20). Then home where we had a couple more sandwiches and turned in. Today I raced around catching an early train and am now back in my up-country base where I’ll probably be for a couple of days before returning to London. On the way up from the rail station to this base, by the way, we passed an entrancing pub—the “Wait for the Waggon” … Walter
LT. JAMES NIX, mentioned in Cronkite’s letter of August 20, 1943, was a B-17 pilot with the 303rd Bomb Group who was shot down on a “milk run” over Holland on August 19. Following wartime convention, Cronkite’s UP dispatches on the air war almost invariably tried to hit a positive note, but in his letters to Betsy he felt free to express his dismay and sorrow over the ever mounting casualties in the Eighth Air Force.
August 20, 1943, Friday
I’m over at another headquarters now, surrounded by competition. Gladwin Hill of the AP is here and we’re bunking together, it looks as if, for a couple of days. Yesterday I covered a mission whereon I lost another good friend, this time Lt. Jimmy Nix with whom I was scheduled to fly on one trip some time ago but which never came off. He was on what was to have been his last operational trip. The boys in the other ships believe they saw ten ’chutes come out of Jimmy’s plane which at that time was a couple of miles back out over the channel on the way home. But they also saw a Focke-Wulf go down and circle the chutes and they have some fear that the Nazi might have been shooting at our boys. It seems almost phenomenal the number of good friends that have come and gone in the eight months I’ve been covering the Air Force …
FROM THE FRONT page of the New York World-Telegram:
BLOCKBUSTERS SMASH LARGE PART OF BERLIN
47 Are Lost; War Now is in 5th Year
By Walter Cronkite
United Press Staff Correspondent
LONDON, Sept. 1—British four-engined bombers, hundreds strong, smashed another huge section of Berlin into blazing ruins last night in a 45-minute blockbuster and incendiary assault that marked the end of the fourth year of the war …
Waves of allied planes also swept across the English southeast coast in daylight today to carry a non-stop Anglo-American aerial offensive against Hitler’s European fortress into its second day.
American Flying Fortresses attacked an airfield at Amiens-Glisy in northwestern France last evening to climax yesterday’s raids …
Staff Sgt. Chris Giassullo of 2931 Yates Ave., the Bronx, tail gunner on the Fortress Charley Horse, said the American bombs “tore the runway to hell,” while Flight Officer E.E. Clark of Pasadena, Cal., pilot of the same Fortress, reported the bombers “smacked the target on the nose.”
Sergeant Giassullo, 22, a tail gunner, is a son of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Giassullo, 2931 Yates Ave., the Bronx. Before the war he worked in a butcher shop.
The August 31, 1943, Royal Air Force raid on Berlin involved 613 heavy Lancaster bombers and nine Mosquitos (the latter bomber so named for being fast and light). As Cronkite reported, 47 aircraft were lost on the raid. The August and September raids on Berlin were merely a foretaste of the all-out offensive the RAF would carry out in November and December 1943, sending as many as 764 bombers on a single night’s raid. Thousands of Berliners were killed and tens of thousands were made homeless. But British losses in planes and aircrew were unsustainable, and the 1943 RAF bombing offensive against the city was regarded as a failure.
In the summer and fall of 1943 Cronkite’s dispatches increasingly carried “LONDON” as their place of origin rather than “A FLYING FORTRESS STATION SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND” or the like. As Cronkite noted in his September 11, 1943, letter, his superiors wanted him to concentrate on turning out “air experters,” like his September 1 dispatch about RAF attacks on Berlin. His heart was in the field, but until the invasion of the continent the next spring opened up new opportunities, he was increasingly tied down to the “desk job” that he had told Betsy in his very first letter from England he was determined not to settle for.
Sept. 11, 1943
… I’ve been staying in town this week doing comparatively easy work at the office, thus getting plenty of rest, and eating regularly. I’ve averaged about 10 hours sleep a night, and that helps. I feel fine. Exactly what the status is going to be around the office I don’t know yet. That is, we’re pondering right now whether I’m to stick around town and do the air experters, or get back out in the field and continue with the leg work. I like the latter business best … There are a couple of flights coming up that I want to go along on, but the office seems to have taken a definite line forbidding further operational trips, so it looks as if I’m grounded.
I’m of course itching for some action, but it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be permitted to get in any. I’ll probably just go along writing these air stories warlong, which gets a bit dull personally …
I really need both shirts and sox, honey, if you could send them in the next package. That is, civilian stuff, of course. Thanks to you and the presence of the PX I’m plentifully fixed for uniform stuff. I could also use some regular underwear. I’m stocked with enough longies for the winter months, but there are many days when plain shirts and shorts are more comfortable.
Also with the coming of winter some more Nestles Instant Chocolate would sure be welcome, if it is still available. Darling, I know that such things must be getting pretty short there, if not absolutely disappearing, and you understand, I hope, that I positively forbid your using any of your rations, or going to any extra searches, to fill up my packages. All in all, we get along pretty well over here, and nobody is suffering …
There is only one kind of tobacco on which I’m really short here, and that is good pipe tobacco, such as my favorite Bond Street. The PX has it for a couple of weeks every
three or four months …
A picture is enclosed for you, taken by an Army photographer at a base evacuation hospital where I was picking up a story about the boy also in the picture. He had been wounded in the tail (of his Fortress) but stuck by the gun until all the enemy had ceased …
Tell little Judy and all the family that I miss them too … Walter
ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1943, the New York World-Telegram carried a dispatch from Cronkite headlined “Fortresses Rip Emden U-Boat Base, ‘Pathfinder’ Method Used for First Time.” It began:
LONDON, Sept. 27—Flying Fortresses dropped 1000 tons of bombs on the U-boat base at Emden today in the heaviest American raid of the war on a single target, and started a new pattern of all-weather attacks—“area bombing”—on the Nazi European fortress … In delivering the massive weight of high explosive bombs and incendiaries to a fountainhead of the resumed U-boat war, the Fortresses for the first time used the RAF Pathfinder method of setting up the target.
One group of Forts went on ahead of the main formations, found the area marked for destruction and ringed it with flares. Heretofore the Fortresses have “pin-pointed” targets—that is, dumped their bombs at a specific factory or airfield after lining up the target in the bombsights.
Cronkite’s story did not reveal that the B-17s in the newly created 482nd Bombardment Group, known as Pathfinders, were equipped with an air-to-ground radar system that the British had been using since 1940 for their night attacks. The Americans would soon employ an improved version of the British system, which would enable bomber raids even when northern Europe was covered in the usual heavy cloud layer of the winter months. Cronkite’s UP colleague Collie Small had gotten wind of the Eighth Air Force’s decision to employ the Pathfinder technique, and when Cronkite learned that Pathfinders had led the way to Emden, he was determined to break the story. Military censors at first killed it. Cronkite recounted what happened next in A Reporter’s Life: “I appealed to the chief U.S. censor [and] pointed out that the Germans at Emden sure as the devil knew that there was complete cloud cover through which those bombs tumbled.” The censor finally agreed to clear the story. But when it appeared in the newspapers the next day, Gen. Ira C. Eaker of the Eighth Air Force was “apoplectic with rage,” according to Cronkite. “I had violated security. I had ruined the Allied air strategy, possibly lost the war to the Germans. My war correspondent credentials were to be lifted. I was to be sent home in disgrace.” General Eaker eventually calmed down and let the matter drop. Cronkite concluded that the entire flap had been “politically inspired”—that General Eaker had failed to brief the White House on the new strategy in advance and wanted to prove the effectiveness of the Pathfinders before revealing to either official Washington or the general public what essentially meant the end of the U.S. commitment to precision, or “pin-point,” bombing.
In his letter of October 17, 1943, Cronkite again complained about being tied down in London, seeing neither a rapid end to the war nor any opportunity for a more exciting assignment until the invasion. He once again urged Betsy to consider joining him in England, perhaps if she could arrange it as a women’s news correspondent for the Kansas City Star, her former employer. Marcel Wallenstein, mentioned in the letter, was the Kansas City Star correspondent in London. The “pinks” that went so well with Cronkite’s new green shirt probably refers to the Army officer’s trousers that went with the “greens” of the jacket of the Army officer’s (and war correspondent’s) winter semi-dress uniform.
Sunday, October 17, 1943
My darlingest wife:
I got back from another week with the RAF yesterday to find two packages and a bundle of mail waiting for me. What a wonderful “homecoming” after a pretty unsatisfactory week. The contents of the packages were just what I wanted and needed. The green shirt is perfect, and I’m wearing it today. Personally, I think they are handsome as hell with pinks but maybe it is my old color-blindness. I was tickled to get the hats, shirts and sox and extra handkerchief. Although the lined Stetson will have to be cleaned and blocked, the allegedly crushable light felt hat I wore last night in the rain because it looked the part and I now call it my “go-to-hell-fog-hat.” The pipe cleaners and American chocolate looked like gifts from a lost world. The soap was welcome, too, although at this particular moment the PX is stocking American-brand soaps. How long that will last I don’t know, though, and I’m glad to build up a reserve …
Week before last, I think I told you, I was up watching the RAF on its night missions. Last week I spent with RAF fighters, intruders, interceptors and train-busters. I ran across a lot of Canadians, some Americans, French, Belgium, Dutch, Australians. They are a heluva good lot. These single-seater single-engined pilots are of entirely different temperament than the bomber boys. They are more like the carefree, devil-may-care stuff we used to see in the movies of World War I aces. I suppose that is because they don’t shoulder the responsibility for the lives of nine or so other men every time they lift their wheels.
The fogs set in last week. Almost all week there was solid overcast, clearing perhaps for a few minutes in the late afternoon, but closing back in again at night. Friday I made my first trip south of London since I have been here and I was very anxious to see the Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire countryside, but the fog was like a blackout curtain drawn along the train windows and it was all you could do to make out the telephone poles ten feet from the tracks. So I just sat in the first-class carriage I was sharing with an RAF officer and argued with him about pasteurization, inoculation and circumcision. He didn’t believe in any of them. Dope! I went all the way down within a couple of miles of the south coast not far from Plymouth. The day cleared a little and by yesterday when I started home I could finally see the countryside. Whereas the trip down had taken an hour and a half, I was mistakenly put on a local on the way back and had to change three times, each time on a colder platform, and the whole journey took three and a half hours.
Also I was a little disappointed in the country. It is, compared to the rest of England, extremely flat and looks much more like most of our mid-western scenery. However, compared to the rest of England it is very clean, almost immaculate. The houses seem more modern. In other words, it comes a lot closer to the American idea than anything north of London. For scenic beauty, picturesque towns, intriguing old England, we’ll have to go north, though, honey, when you finally get over here …
I hate to be pessimistic about things, but I see absolutely no hope of a cessation of hostilities within another twelve months. You’ve read the statements by both military leaders here and at home that indicate there won’t be a second front until spring. That leaves the only chance of ending the war before summer up to either the Russians or aerial bombardment, and while if I were a Heinie I wouldn’t want to face either, I don’t think either is likely to cause Hitler or cohorts to throw up their hands in the next several months. Likewise I don’t see the slightest hope of my getting into any more active theater at least until the second front opens, and, unless there is some drastic reshuffling of assignments before then, even at that time I’ll be here more than I’ll be there by the very nature of my air coverage.
So I wondered how you feel now about coming over. I’m so lonely for you and it seems almost unbearable to look forward to another long siege of months apart. I may be awfully selfish in even suggesting that you come. I don’t know that it would be entirely pleasant over here. The blackout in winter, closing down at five o’clock and lifting at eight, is no fun. Living conditions are pretty punk. Fireplaces smoke. “Geezers”—hot-water heaters (honest, that’s what they call them) have to be lighted every time you want a drop. Pull-chain plumbing, of which there is no other, only works half the time and then with such gasps it gives you nervous disorders. If you go out at night and stay later than last bus or last tube around eleven o’clock, you pray for a taxi but bloody well end up hiking. And the newspaper crowd here is no different than any other. All they do is ru
sh from office to pub to appointment to Ministry of Information to pub to office. I’m shuttling up and down country most of the time and hours are pretty uncertain.
All I can offer against that is (1) we’d be together again, which seems pretty darned important at this stage, and (2) everybody here would love you and, except for the family, I don’t think even if I were out of town you’d be lonely.
Well, I suppose this sounds like all you have to do is cable “Yes” to cinch the deal. Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a single idea in mind—that is a definite one—on how to get you here. BUT if you were interested, with your back ground and training, I’m sure there is a publication somewhere that would be damned glad to have a London correspondent for whom they wouldn’t have to pay a small fortune, for whom, in fact, they would only have to give proper certification to the War Department, pay or arrange for transportation over, and then space rates thereafter. Actually what in hell is wrong with the Star. They’ve got [Marcel] Wallenstein here, sure, but he has been a resident of London so long perhaps he has lost a lot of the common touch of Kansas City. Besides there are ten-thousand women’s angles here, and women’s angles to a lot of otherwise male stories—Kansas City males, too. And don’t think you couldn’t do it. Why you can beat the pants off a half dozen of these females running around here, and off a lot of the men.
Cronkite's War Page 13