About that letter from Virgil: Them are awfully kind words, but take them with a grain of salt. Virgil is slightly on the effusive side. I’m sure I’m in solid with him, and I think my work probably is satisfactory, but as far as any editors crying for my copy or considering me the greatest living authority on the American air force in England—nuts! And, beside if I were so darned brilliant I’d be efficient enough to be able to do the UP job and still find time to write the hundred articles and the two or three books which are whirling through my head but are slowly becoming lost forever in the impenetrable forest of time. The book that Jim [McGlincy] and I half finished is molding in the drawer for lack of time to finish it. There is one incontrovertible fact: Not a single correspondent has written a book while actively engaged in covering his beat. Everyone has take time out—and I haven’t managed that yet.
Give my love to the family. Yours always, Walter
ON THE NIGHT of February 19, 1944, the Luftwaffe launched the heaviest air raid against London since 1941. More attacks followed over the next few nights. Cronkite referred to a colleague whose house was destroyed by an “ME”: the reference was probably to a German fighter-bomber, a Messerschmitt or ME 110.
Monday, February 21, 1944
My darlingest:
Some fun! We all had a little taste Friday night and again last night of what London went through in the blitz and an even smaller taste of what Berlin must be going through now. And, believe you me, a taste is enough. I have no hankering for a full size meal of that! Friday night I had dinner with Roy Roussel at the Grosvenor House and was with him in his room there when the alert sounded and the guns started going. It sounded like just another noisy barrage like the dozens we have had recently until it was all over and I got ready to leave. Then I saw the dozen glows in the sky where the German raiders had planted their incendiaries. I took a cab to one of the areas where a couple of blocks of flats were burning. I asked a girl fire guard there if anyone was hurt and she said that most of the flats were unoccupied but that three old women had been evacuated from one and at that moment were in the parlor of a flat across the street. I went over to have a look in on them. Here were these three old gals, all of whom looked to be in their nineties, with a few pitiable possessions they had saved stacked around them. There was no light in the parlor. It was lit only by the reflection of the three old ladies’ burning flat across the street. But the three old ladies were huddled around a quart of Irish whiskey. And when I looked in one was just wiping her lips, laughing uproariously, and cackling: “Gol blimey, if it ain’t just like the good old days.” I guess that is the blitz spirit we read about. And the firemen here. I didn’t hear them shout a single order. They went about the work with more calm, and about as fast, as a bunch of WPA workers digging a sewer. And this with magnesium incendiaries still burning in the streets beside them. Last night’s was another little daisy. I was busy writing about the American raid on Germany so didn’t get to the top of the News of the World Building during the raid, but later I got up there and could see the fires burning in several sections of the city, illuminating the skyline like a full moon. Jim [McGlincy] and I went to one of the fires in an industrial section but it was no fun with the sparks, whipped by a high wind, flying down the narrow streets like Fourth of July sparklers. We were so busy dusting them off our clothes and snatching them with gloved hands from our hats that we didn’t get to see much of the fire. And it was bitterly cold as it has been here the last week or so. One of our boys has been bombed out and others have had narrow squeezes. Jim and I have had a couple of high explosives and a few incendiaries within a few block radius of us, but Johnny Parris’ building is the only one standing in his block after last night’s affair and there aren’t any windows in his flat. Herb Radzick, a Polish fellow who files one of our European wires, had an ME in his back yard that left him only one room of his house. So, all in all, it is getting more interesting …
CRONKITE’S LETTER OF February 25, 1944, came at the end of “Big Week,” during which the Eighth Air Force flew more than 3,000 sorties against German aviation industry targets. American bomber losses were high but sustainable. German fighter losses were high and unsustainable.
Between January and April 1944 the Germans ratcheted up their bombing raids on London and southeast England in what was sometimes described as the “Little Blitz” or “Baby Blitz.” In the third week in February, the days leading up to Cronkite’s letter, bombs damaged the Treasury, Admiralty, War Office, Scottish Office, and the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street.
A “Bofors” is an antiaircraft gun.
Friday, Feb. 25, 1944
My darlingest wife:
I finally collapsed today after the worst week I have ever put in. The greatest week of the air offensive has meant never less than a twelve hour day for me and most of the time a fourteen to sixteen hour pull. I’ve been getting into the office between ten a.m. and noon and not leaving until two or three the next morning. That way I miss breakfast here at the house and the busiest part of the evening is right at dinner time, so I miss dinner too. I get a good lunch (as good as you can get around here these days) but only have a couple of hot meat pies and bottle of beer for dinner and eating it off the desk while I’m hopping up to the phone booth to take some more information and slipping back to the typewriter to write it. The last good meal I had was noon yesterday when [Ed] Beattie and I took a guy named Satterwhite from the Embassy to lunch. Last night was another fierce one on the desk from which I got away about two-thirty. I didn’t get up until noon today and by the time I bathed, shaved and dressed it was almost two o’clock. So I missed lunch, too. And when you miss a meal right at feeding time in this country you are out of luck. No drug stores exist where you can slip in for a roasted cheese sandwich and malted milk. You just starve until the next meal hour. A pub (El Vino’s) was open in Fleet street though and I thought perhaps a couple of glasses of wine might give me a little strength until dinner time. But they bounced back in a hurry and I got so damned sick at the office I had to come home. Now it is three hours later, I’ve had dinner here at the flat, and I feel fine. I’m just debating going back to the office, since the air war still continues tonight, but probably will decide to stay home and direct it as best I can from here by telephone.
For the first time I really feel the limitations of censorship. I would like to tell you so much about the air raids that I’m told is censorable—stuff like where the bombs fell and the damage that was done. Some of the nights this week I have been too busy writing about our raids on them to even worry about the raids here, but other nights at the office I have been able to take a few minutes to don my helmet and go up to our rooftop observation post from which you can see all over London. Fourth of July celebrations will really be picnics after this. Hundreds of searchlights, cones of light occasionally catching a twisting, diving plane, great chandelier flares that light up whole sections of the city, sticks of incendiaries burning their way down through the sky, small balls of red fire where Bofors gunners are trying to shoot out the flares, tiny twinkling stars that actually are huge bursts of flak five miles high, and the rocket guns that burst in a barrage you expect to cover the whole sky before it is through. And the terrific noise. Then George Washington Crossing the Delaware in Six Beautiful Colors and you get to go home for another year. I adore you, my darling. Don’t forget to love me too, and remind me to Judy. Forever, Walter
WITH “BIG WEEK” OVER, Cronkite enjoyed a day of rest. “Manning Coles” was the pseudonym for the writing team Adelaide Manning and Cyril Coles, who, beginning in 1940, turned out a series of novels about the adventures of a fictional British spy named Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon.
Sunday, Feb. 27, 1944
My darlingest wife:
This is a truly lovely Sunday. It is nice and cold and wet and gloomy outside, there is no air war for me to worry about, I have no where to go and nothing to do, there are no air force sources in town I hav
e to have a drink with, and I’m sitting here at home reading the Sunday papers and a good book. It is now four o’clock in the afternoon and I haven’t even splashed any water on my face. Now if I just had a red-haired wife and a red-headed dog to sit here with me, I’d be perfectly content. This is the first Sunday—the first day, for that matter—I have had off in more than three weeks and, after the particularly grueling last six days of never less than fourteen hours a day, it is most welcome. It is nice, too, to be able to sit and digest the papers without having to glance through hurriedly to see if you have missed anything and then hurry on to something else. The book I am reading is a good one, too. It is by the mystery author on to which Herman Allen sicked us and whom we liked so much—Manning Coles. Remember “Drink to Yesterday” and “Toast to tomorrow” and how we tried unsuccessfully to get the third in the trilogy? Well, this is the fourth, it says here on the fly-leaf entitled “Without Lawful Authority” and in which our old friend, Tommy Hambledon, of the Secret Service appears again, although this time in a minor role. It isn’t as good as the other books and really classifies as just another thriller. If you want it, though, and can’t get it there let me know and I’ll send it along. Incidentally, along that line, I would like any good correspondents’ books you run across. Frequently they are printed over here, too, but when they are the book shops seem to sell out their limited quota in a terrible hurry. I’d like particularly Bob Casey’s “You Meet Such Interesting People” and [Vincent] Sheean’s “Between the Thunder and the Sun.” Also if there any good books kicking around about Austria. I think you probably could send them to me through the APO.
I was awfully sorry, honey, to hear about your flu. I hope you are really over it now without your bumbling husband there to irritate you with his helplessness. I do wish, though, that you would let me know immediately when you are ill rather than holding off until you are well again …
I love you, Walter
FROM THE New York World-Telegram, March 4, 1944:
ATTACK SUCCEEDS THROUGH CLOUD BANK 30,000 FEET HIGH
By Walter Cronkite
United Press Staff Correspondent
LONDON. March 4—American Flying Fortresses bombed Berlin by daylight today in the first attack of the war on the German capital by United States bombers …
After “Big Week” the Eighth Air Force shifted its attention to Berlin, once again seeking to lure the Luftwaffe into an aerial war of attrition.
From the front-page lead story of the New York World-Telegram, March 9, 1944:
YANKS RANGE OVER CAPITAL AT WILL, STOKE VAST FIRES STARTED 24 HOURS EARLIER
By Walter Cronkite
United Press War Correspondent
LONDON, March 9.—Powerful American bomber fleets skimmed the top of a four mile-high cloud layer over Europe today, converged on Berlin from many directions, and without a challenge by the German air force stoked the great fires they had started in the Nazi capital 24 hours earlier …
From the front page of the New York World-Telegram, March 13, 1944:
U.S. STRIVES TO FORCE NAZIS TO FIGHT IN AIR
By Walter Cronkite
United Press War Correspondent
LONDON, March 13.—Flying Fortresses bombed northern France today without challenge by the German air force and a high official source said Lt. General Carl A. Spaatz might start announcing his targets in advance as a challenge to the Nazis to come up and fight …
A clue to the content of Betsy’s letters to Cronkite that spring can be found in his reply of March 7, 1944, as he sympathizes with her being “down in the dumps.”
Charles “Bill” Higginbotham was a United Press correspondent in London.
The mistaken attribution of several of Cronkite’s dispatches to UP colleague Phil Ault went on for several weeks before he was able to straighten the matter out. As Cronkite commented to Betsy, “UP pays half your salary in by-lines,” which was to say, since United Press was notoriously stingy in its pay scale, UP writers expected to see their names displayed on their dispatches as compensation.
Tuesday, March 7, 1944
My darlingest wife:
I got your February 21 letter today. You wrote it when you were down in the dumps. I’m so sorry, honey. But I wonder if maybe we are getting into a new stage of long-distance telepathy and pathetic reactions with the help of V-mail? Because the last twenty-four hours have been among my worst over here, and as a result I was pretty low myself when I got your letter. Of course, there is always that constant gnawing of separation from you and Judy but added to that this time was office problems. I won’t bore you with all the details but yesterday on the biggest single day of the air war—our first mass attack on Berlin—everything I touched seemed to simply fall apart. To complicate all my other problems, we had some new boy, even more stupid than the rest and that is reaching a new moronic low, on the switchboard. After Doug Werner and Collie Small at the bomber bases and Bill Higginbotham at a fighter base finally managed to get priority calls through to the office where we were panting to hear from them, this lout cut me off time and again. To top even that, our wireless circuit to New York went out midway in the evening but the New York receiving post neglected to tell us for three hours and all of that air copy was delayed by that much. Besides that I get what I, but no one else, thought was a pretty snotty message from Boyd Lewis, our acting foreign editor in New York, and I fired an equally snotty one back. I’d gone in at eight in the morning and finally got home about eleven-thirty feeling pretty sick about the whole thing. Well, it turns out today that AP must really have been lousy on the story because we get at least an equal break with them. Our story was played in the Monday afternoon World-Telegram and in the morning Daily News in New York, which is a pretty good barometer of play countrywide. But there arose another thorn off that too-big bush to prick me. Phil Ault was signed by the New York desk to the afternoon story. He had nothing to do with it. The afternoon story was completely my work. The morning story, to which I was signed, was the joint work of Werner, Small, Higginbotham and Cronkite. I really hit the ceiling then. Maybe I am getting to be a prima donna but, after all, UP pays half your salary in by-lines and I want a full paycheck when I’m turning in twelve to as many as sixteen hours a day.
Well, now I feel better that I have cried on your shoulder. I guess that did a lot of good in snapping you back. Crying on yours and the censor’s shoulders, that is. I hear they are really fine-tooth-combing our letters these days. I suppose it is a good idea but the thought annoys me that the order for such searching probably went out from some gleeful general who has always thought newspapermen were a bunch of spies unless they put his name in the paper. Of course, while the newsmen took his story he shouted that he didn’t want any publicity—then got up two hours early to see the morning papers.
ROBIN DUFF OF the BBC, Cronkite’s new flatmate, won fame in 1940 for his coverage of the Blitz.
Wednesday, March 8, 1944
Darlingest Betsy:
The other day I mailed you an air mail letter with some pictures and clippings enclosed … I thought of a funny thing when I was mailing those pictures. Remember that somewhat dark winter of 1936–37 when everything seemed to be all haywire—and in February, when things were darkest, I said I was going down to Cairo (Illinois) and free-lance cover the Mississippi flood—and you and Betty derided me and said I wouldn’t have the nerve? Well, it is funny how “little” things, say the bloodiest war in history, for instance, bring out the fact that some guys can overcome fear to go after a story, or after Freedom. I was thinking about a rather screwball bombardier, a little older than most, whose father runs a newspaper in Indiana. He was a very nervous type and talked a blue streak trying to cover up what everybody, even on his own base, thought was cowardice. Well, that boy is now in a hospital here without ears, without a nose without a face, virtually blind, his hands gone and his toes missing. He is that way because, although he knew that to expose yourself for long to the fifty below ze
ro temperatures at 26,000 feet is virtual suicide, he stayed over his bombsight until his bombs were away despite the twenty millimeter shell that took the Plexiglas nose away.
But how did I get into that? There are more immediate problems. Such as the reason why I’m writing this hunched over my trunk where my typewriter precariously rests. It seems that a week or so ago—it is beginning to seem like a year—Robin Duff of British Broadcasting Corporation got bombed out of his flat. Good old big-hearted McGlincy, extending the helping hand, says “come live with us until you get squared away.” Robin, I gather, likes it here although he is sleeping on the divan in the living room. At least he has made no effort to move. Tonight he is using the desk for his typing. Actually he is a pretty nice sort of bloke. It is just that McGlincy and I are getting a little tired of patting each other on the back and saying: “Boy, that’s doing your part. We all have to stick together in these crises—extend the helping hand, keep the old chin up, white tie, tails, what be.” The gag is wearing out much faster, to be honest, than Robin’s welcome …
CRONKITE WAS PUTTING in long hours as the furious aerial assault on Germany continued unabated through March. The promise of postwar professional advancement was partial compensation, as his next letter suggests.
Sunday, March 19, 1944
My darlingest wife:
We have been having some nice weather in recent days, forerunners of Spring which is going to be another unbearable period without you and little Judy to go picnicking and golfing and bicycling and, later, swimming. It is now three-thirty in the afternoon and the sun has been out from behind the morning clouds for a couple of hours. The temperature is still in the overcoat bracket but it is a help to see the sun again. It shines rarely enough in this country and during the winter with the industrial haze hanging over this city it seldom makes an appearance …
Cronkite's War Page 20