Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  SOME OF CRONKITE’S letters to Betsy in the spring of 1944 had an apologetic tone, as if he felt guilty for their long separation. Without Betsy’s letters, it is impossible to tell whether he was merely imagining a possible estrangement or responding to a genuine dissatisfaction she was feeling with their situation. In any case, he reassured Betsy in his letter of January 23, 1944, that despite 13 months’ absence, she need not fear any waning of his feelings for her.

  In a command shake-up at the start of the year, Gen. Carl A. Spaatz was appointed overall commander of the U.S. Army Air Force in Europe, Gen. Ira C. Eaker (in an implicit demotion) was shifted from command of the Eighth Air Force in England to command of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, famed commander of the 1942 “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” raid on the Japanese capital, took over command of the Eighth Air Force.

  Cronkite’s letter was written the day after American and British soldiers landed at the port of Anzio, just south of Rome. But the Germans were able to block the Allied advance, leaving the Anzio beachhead stranded and under heavy artillery fire. Not until late May were the Allied armies able to break out from Anzio.

  Monday [Sunday], Jan. 23, 1944

  My darlingest wife:

  My good intentions to keep up a daily diary have sort of folded under the usual impact of time. But I’m continuing to try, honey, and you must know that you are constantly in my thoughts whether or not I can remind you of it every day. We have been apart nearly fifty-eight weeks—more than a year—but mere separation cannot shake the solid foundation we built in the happier years before Hoboken. There still is no sensation, no temporary joy, no observation that I do not wish you could but share with me. The sensations, the joys, the observations just don’t seem to jell without you. Betsy, I want you so, and I miss you so, and I’m disturbed because I read into your letters a fear that perhaps you still aren’t the most important thing in the world to me. You are, sweetheart, and you always will be. If I can’t convince you by letter, I shall when we are together again. I know my letter-writing doesn’t stack up with what it should be—or with what I want it to be. It probably doesn’t come near equaling the flow from some soldiers to the wives they couldn’t possibly love half as much as I love you. But whereas they have dozens of idle hours, I have none. I write to you every opportunity I get—opportunities which mostly I have to manufacture out of already crowded hours. Because I want so to feel closer to you, and I do feel closer when I am writing to you, I’d rather pound out these letters than do anything else, but that isn’t very practical, is it? And even if the most far-fetched situation existed, even if I didn’t want to write to you, I would because I want you to be happy, as happy as you can under the circumstances. I know how impossible it would be for me to go on without your letters, how the occasional week that goes by between letters is almost unbearable. I wouldn’t ever purposefully or even willfully let you suffer like that, too, honey. I adore you. I’ll always adore you. Please know that, darling …

  Forever and ever, Walter

  CRONKITE’S COMMENT ABOUT “ ‘old’ pals” among fliers of the Eighth Air Force demonstrates once again the strain he felt in seeing so many young acquaintances turn up on mission casualty lists.

  Roy Roussel was city editor of the Houston Press in the 1930s when Cronkite was starting out there as a reporter.

  The B-26 Marauder was a twin-engine medium bomber used on shorter-range and lower-altitude bombing missions than the more famous B-17s and B-24s. Most of the Marauders in England were assigned to the Ninth Air Force, the unit charged with providing tactical air support for the upcoming invasion.

  “Forts and Libs” refers to B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators.

  Thursday, February 3, 1944

  Darlingest Betsy: I love you, honey.

  You saved my life today. After a long train trip from up-country, I got to London tired and discouraged and stopped by the Army Public Relations office on my way from the station to see if I had any mail. And there was the picture of you in the new suit. The suit certainly looks stunning, and the hat, too. I do hope you like them. I didn’t think the picture was particularly good of you, but I liked it because you are so cute, and it showed you haven’t changed. You are still like a little kid in the barber chair. When that nasty man points his camera at you, you set your mouth and stick out your jaw. There’s certainly no ham in you, honey, and I say, “Thank God, we’ve got enough in this family.”

  Speaking of ham, I’m sending along a picture of Jim [McGlincy] and me taken by the same kind but stupid Army photographer who took the lousy photo I belatedly sent for your birthday.

  I had a pretty good trip this week, getting several pretty good stories and visiting a lot of old Air Force buddies I haven’t seen in several months. (They become “old” pals after you’ve known them a few weeks in this stepped-up existence where life is so cheap and sometimes so short.) Monday night I stayed with Roy Roussel, the old Houston Press managing editor, who now is a major and in a very responsible job. Tuesday night I was with Clayton Smith, a fortyish Houston oil man who I met over here and who is PRO [public relations officer] for one of the Marauder groups. He also is a major, but a great guy despite that. He’s a typical oil field lease buyer—rough-hewn but polished smooth by years of fast-talking. He’s loved by every man on the base because within a week after they had hit England he had located supplies of liquor, eggs, hotel rooms, and nice girls for Saturday night officer’s club dances—commodities that long-established bases had done without and for which they were still wangling after months over here. Wednesday Colonel Wilson Week (25) and Lieut. Col. Bill Byers (24) flew me in a Marauder up to another area where I had to go and which would have been devilishly hard to reach by train without their help. We got tangled up in some nasty weather and had to get on top of a solid overcast. When we got up there we ran smack into scores of Forts and Libs forming up for a mission. Of course I have flown over clouds before, but never above solid overcast that was without a single hole, and never when on that overcast like on an ocean of white floated a convoy of hundreds of great four-motored ships, as far as the eye could see. It really was a thrill … I love you and little Miss Judy. Walter

  WESTERN UNION

  CABLE=LONDON VIA COMMERCIAL FEB 10

  BETSY CRONKITE

  3920 AGNES KANSASCITYMO=

  MY EYES ARE RED MY HEART IS BLUE LETS GET TOGETHER CAUSE I’M MISSING YOU STOP YOULL ALWAYS BE MY VALENTINE DARLING = WALTER CRONKITE

  On February 8, 1944, Cronkite flew in a B-26 Martin Marauder named the U.S.O. from the 323rd Bomb Group’s 454th Bomb Squadron, piloted by 1st Lt. Jack W. Nye. Fifty-three B-24s hit the V-1 site at Siracourt, France, that day, and 57 bombed the site at Watten, France. It’s not clear which mission Cronkite accompanied. He described the attack as being unexciting, and none of the aircraft were lost. But the mission was not without risk; 41 of the attacking planes were damaged by flak, and ten airmen were wounded. Despite continued attacks that spring on “German secret rocket-gun emplacements,” in mid-June the Germans unleashed the V-1 flying bomb, or buzz bomb, attacks on London. Unlike the Wilhelmshaven raid a year before, Cronkite’s account of his second combat flight did not create much of a stir among American newspaper readers.

  From page 2 of the Berkshire Evening Eagle of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, February 10, 1944:

  SECRET NAZI COAST DEFENSES SEEN BY AIR REPORTER

  Cronkite, First War Correspondent to Fly Over “Invasion Coast,”

  Tells of Memorable Flight

  By Walter Cronkite

  United Press War Correspondent

  MARAUDER MEDIUM BOMBER BASE, England (UP)—I saw the secret German military installations studding the Pas de Calais coastal strip of France today, the defenses on which the Allies have heaped 10,000 tons of bombs in the past two months.

  An hour and a half ago I was over France with 1000 other young Americans. While they flew, navigated, bombed and watched the sky
for enemy fighters, I stared through binoculars while another 200 tons of explosives rocked the camouflaged acres below.

  Censorship forbids describing what I saw down there during my flight, the first by a war correspondent over the forbidding strip of coast about which secrecy and rumor have cast a fascinating air of mystery.

  Neutral sources have insisted that the installations are long range rocket gun emplacements—an assertion which tight-lipped military authorities have neither confirmed nor denied …

  CRONKITE’S DISPATCH CHRONICLING the February 10, 1944, mission against factories in Brunswick, Germany, drew more notice, as he mentioned in his letter two days later. A total of 141 B-17s flew on the mission, and 29 were lost.

  Earl Johnson was the United Press New York bureau manager.

  The 1943 film Phantom of the Opera features Nelson Eddy, Susanna Foster, and Claude Rains (the phantom). Rains is better remembered for his role as Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942), another film Cronkite saw in London.

  The reference to “hyped up dramatized shows” was to the weekly syndicated 15-minute radio program Soldiers of the Press, which featured a Cronkite dispatch in May 1943. In contrast to the actor-voiced Soldiers of the Press broadcasts, Cronkite occasionally spoke himself on CBS radio broadcasts.

  Saturday, Feb. 12, ‘44

  My darlingest Betsy:

  … This has been a pretty busy week. Maybe you have heard by now, but Wednesday I made another operational flight. I went with the Marauders (twin-engined bombers) to France, to the Pas de Calais area where we announce only that we are hitting “special military targets” but neutral sources insist are German secret rocket-gun emplacements. The trip was about as exciting as a windy day in a Piper Cub. We got no fighter attacks what with our Spitfire escort, and only a couple of score bursts of flak which, except for one or two bursts, weren’t even close enough to be exciting. Censorship permitted me to say only a little more than I have told you here, so they sort of played hob with my story. It got front-page play here in the Daily Herald, Daily Sketch and News-Chronicle and I see that a couple of papers at home used it. New York was not exactly happy about the story in that [Earl J.] Johnson and [Virgil] Pinkley forgot that they had authorized the flight two months ago and they thought that I had taken it without their approval. (I think that secretly they probably admired the initiative. At any rate, I hope so.) Thursday [Doug] Werner, [Collie] Small and I made a big splurge, however, by swarming all over the day’s big air battle over Brunswick. Werner and Small were out at the bases, and I did the rewrite job at this end. The result was a couple of congratulation cables, one from Harry Ferguson saying our story was sweeping the country and one client had reported we “covered ourselves with glory.” Pinkley said that “such reporting such writing carrying United Press banner high and higher.” Well, that’s corny, but it’s nice to hear anyway. Yesterday I finally took it a little easier. I wrote the air story again, although it wasn’t as sensational as Thursday’s, and knocked off early to see “Phantom of the Opera” which I thought stank. It just didn’t jell. There was the “Figaro and Cleo” Disney short which I had read of but never seen, and it was worth the price of admission. Also helping to break the boredom of the movie was this: Right in the middle of the scene where the prima donna is being examined by the doctors in her dressing room, a slide flashes on the screen at the Odeon asking for a doctor in the house …

  A few minutes later another slide came on the screen which said almost too calmly: “An air raid warning has been sounded. The performance will continue.” Five minutes later, after only a few persons had left the crowded theater, the gun barrage got so loud it almost drowned out the picture, but it only lasted for a moment. The warning was still on but apparently there was nothing overhead when I left the show … Tuesday morning I had to get up early to get out to an air headquarters to make arrangements for the flight the next day, and Wednesday we were aroused at five-thirty for the briefing and then the flight.

  Speaking of the flight, the biggest disappointment was the fact that Ed Murrow wanted me on CBS but New York was unable to clear the time for the broadcast. There is still just some vague hope that I might get on to the Report to the Nation broadcast Tuesday night, but since Ed said he would let me know by the end of this week, and I haven’t heard anything, I suppose that is off, too. Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a long time: How about explaining to my mother that when her friends keep telling her they heard me on the radio they are just cockeyed. Every time I’ve been on I’ve been able to let you folks know in advance. That is the main reason I like to go on, is to feel a little closer to you. These other things are either commentators quoting me (which is even standard procedure on the UP radio wire) or one of those hyped up dramatized shows …

  JUDY THE COCKER SPANIEL was clearly the surrogate child in the early Cronkite marriage. Now Cronkite began to think about the real thing, as he confessed in his letter of February 15, 1944.

  The Berlitz lessons did not pan out; Cronkite would have to cover the invasion with a command of no language beyond his mother tongue.

  Tuesday, February 15, 1944

  My darlingest Betsy: Give my love to the family. I love you.

  You are still my Valentine, aren’t you?… I sent your Valentine cable four days early and I do hope it arrived in time. Darling, remember the Valentine’s Day when we sort of formally engaged ourselves and I gave you the little jade ring under circumstances that you didn’t think were nearly romantic enough? And how we quarreled about it, and how old dumb, juvenile me didn’t get the pitch at all? We did have fun, didn’t we? We have so many wonderful memories—and what is more important, so much more fun to look forward to. This separation is awful hard to take, but there is still the Pollyana outlook; tiz: the future we’re building. I have officers tell me: “What are you bitching about? You don’t have any children. You’ll have years and years yet with your wife but I’ve been away from home two and a half years and I’m missing most of the few years I’ll ever get to spend before my children are grown up and move out on me.” And when they tell me that I get mad, because I think of little Judy and how she is getting older and how it is impossible for me to tell them that I feel pretty strongly about that, too. And children is another thing I think a lot about. Sometimes I’m crushed when I think about our not having made any start on a family. And other times I think it is probably for the best and how perhaps it would delay indefinitely your coming to me …

  My great start at even further solidifying our future with a good firm knowledge of a foreign language (this time it was German) seems to have petered out. I haven’t cracked my German book in a week, and haven’t had another lesson from Berlitz in that long. I just can’t find the time, darling. Every waking minute of every day is taken up with business. I know that sounds fantastic but it is gospel. I admit a lot of the time is spent over bars and in restaurants—but nine-tenths of the business in this town is transacted there. Remember how Gene Gillette and the others used to talk about Washington and the impossibility of even spending an evening at home if you were to keep up with your sources? Well, it is the same here. Half the evenings I work at the office until nearly midnight writing the air stories, so on the other half when I’m “free” I’ve got to take colonels and captains and civil servants from the Air Ministry and other sources to dinner, or I’m actually on an air base where if I’m to spend the time profitably I’ve got to use up the evening jawing with the fliers and intelligence officers and commanders. It is vicious, and you have no idea how wearing. I love you, my darling. Be mine forever, Walter

  CRONKITE’S LETTER OF February 17, 1944, addressed the issue of their postwar future; he had no doubt by now that they would be in Europe, at least for several years.

  Thursday, February 17, 1944

  My precious wife:

  In the last two days I’ve gotten a wad of mail from you. A couple of Valentines, a couple of regular letters and a couple of V-mailers.
Before I forget it, let’s discuss the furniture. I think the swell letter from Virgil [Pinkley] which you quoted pretty well answers the question about our post-war future, at least for a few years to come. However, it might be smart to hold on to the stuff a few weeks longer until Virgil gets back here and I have another chance to chat with him in regard to what he might have learned in New York. I am almost certain that the status is going to be quo—that is, that we are going to be destined for an European job, and that it will be good enough that we will want to accept it. Under those circumstances we certainly won’t want to hold on to the furniture. To let it mold in storage while we pay keep on it would be ridiculous. I also admit, though, that I, too, am a sissy about letting it go. I talk a good fight about getting rid of all encumbrances—but when it comes down to actually disposing of our first household belongings and the things we so tenderly picked out and paid so diligently on at Davidsons and Duff and Repp’s—well, then it begins to hurt, even if it is the smart economic move … All of this, though, I say is subject to further discussion after Virgil returns, which will be shortly …