The crew of the B-17 Shoo Shoo Baby, June 6, 1944. From left: 1st Lt. F. E. Umphress, Jr. (bombardier), Capt. Robert W. Sheets (pilot), Cronkite, Technical Sgt. Francis X. Neuner (engineer).
Back in London later on D-Day, Cronkite pounded out the story of the air effort supporting the invasion, but left out any mention of his own experience. That he saved for his letter to Betsy of June 12, 1944.
“A few days” after the invasion, according to Cronkite’s memoir, he flew back to Normandy in a small plane, this time landing on a hastily laid-down landing strip on the high ground above Omaha Beach. Ostensibly he was writing about the building of the landing strip, but he really was more tourist than reporter. He caught up with several colleagues who had covered the landings on June 6 and listened to the terrifying stories they passed on about that historic day. He envied them the experience. After several days he returned reluctantly to London, carrying with him a musette bag crammed with Camembert cheese, a souvenir of Normandy. Since his June 12 letter makes no mention of the hop to Normandy, his trip must have come later in the month.
In any case, what is perfectly clear from his letters to Betsy that summer was his eagerness to return to the continent, this time to stay and cover the ground fighting.
From the front page of the Daily News of Huntington, Pennsylvania, June 6, 1944:
BRITISH BOMBERS BLAST ENEMY WITH HEAVIEST ATTACK
By Walter Cronkite
United Press Correspondent
LONDON, June 6.—Thousands of Allied bombing planes softened up the defenses of western Europe for the Anglo-American invasion armies last night and early today, dropping more than 11,200 tons of high explosives down on the Nazi coastal fortifications in eight and one-half hours of furious assault.
It was the greatest attack launched against a single objective in the history of aerial warfare and the battered Luftwaffe took the beating without putting a plane into the skies …
From the front page of the Daily News of Huntington, Pennsylvania, June 12, 1944:
BIG FLEET U.S. PLANES HIT NAZI FIGHTER BASES BEHIND INVASION COAST
By Walter Cronkite
United Press Correspondent
LONDON, June 12—A fleet of possibly 1,750 American heavy bombers and fighters struck the chain of German fighter bases behind the French invasion coast today, while more than 3,000 other Allied warplanes swarmed over the Norman battlefields under rapidly-clearing skies that promised the embattled ground forces their strongest aerial cover since D-Day.
Striking furiously to deprive the hard-pressed German coastal armies of their last vestiges of air support, almost 1,000 American Flying Fortresses and Liberators ranged over a vast arc of northern France to bomb and burn “many” of the enemy’s vital advanced air bases …
June 12, 1944
My darlingest wife:
I really have neglected you terribly in the past couple of weeks—but then perhaps you will understand. There have been a few things happening. And I have been right where I said I would be. Maybe once there was a “Walter’s ship” or a “Walter’s plane.” I wonder if Maggie and Jack would be so proud of “Walter’s desk?” It turned out that I did fly the morning of the invasion after all but the Eighth Air Force public relations people who thought they were doing me a favor and handing me a scoop on a silver platter managed to botch things up. The result was that I went with a high altitude bombing formation instead of a low-level group, we were above a solid cloud bank all the way over the Channel and back, and although I was over the invasion beaches shortly after zero hour and on inland over Caen and Carentan, I did not see a single thing. I was never so disgusted in my life. Why, we didn’t even get shot at. A dozen bursts of flak and that was my invasion experience. It was like taking only one drink on New Year’s Eve. I have been getting pretty good play with the air war general leads which I do around the clock now. They are keeping the name in the paper, anyway. [Jim] McGlincy also is a little bitter about the invasion. He was left behind. His assignment was changed somewhat at the last minute without his knowledge and he awakened “D day” morning to find that the invasion had started without him. He has gone now, however, and I admit I miss the patter of his little feet around the house. But I’m not here at home enough now to make any difference. [Ed] Beattie, [Virgil] Pinkley and I sign the main stories of the day and the three of us work fifteen hours a day doing it. We cover three “communiqué and briefing” periods each day—at 10:30 a.m., 5:00 p.m., and 11:30 p.m. That means being at the Ministry of Information, where the communiqués are issued, by 10:15 in the morning, and getting away from there after writing the last story at 1:00 the next morning. It is a grueling pace and we are all wearing out. Effective today we are doing a little overlapping of schedules so each of us will get every other night off—after we clean up the stuff from the five o’clock conference, which usually is by seven or eight o’clock. It, of course, doesn’t mean we will have time to do anything on those nights except catch up on our sleep. Tonight I’m writing this letter to you and then turning in. I’ll write again Wednesday, honey …
CRONKITE’S FIRST POST–D-DAY letter to Betsy was dated June 12. The following day, London was struck by a new weapon, a “vengeance weapon,” or Vergeltungswaffe, as Hitler called it, the V-1 flying bomb. Purely by chance—they were in the wrong neighborhood at the right time—Cronkite and UP colleague Ed Beattie saw the first one land. Eight civilians were killed in that attack; thousands more would die over the next four months until advancing Allied armies overran the V-1 launch sites in France and Holland. An even more terrible vengeance weapon, the powerful V-2 rocket, soon began to rain down more death and destruction on the city and its inhabitants. Cronkite not only reported on the early wave of V-1 attacks but also was nearly one of their victims, as he reported in his letter to Betsy of July 9, 1944.
The V-1 bomb described in Cronkite’s letter struck the Guards Chapel of Wellington Barracks at 11:20 a.m. on Sunday, June 18, 1944. The chapel was filled with military and civilian worshippers at the morning service; 121 were killed and another 141 wounded. The dead included several high-ranking British and American officers.
Sunday, June [July] 9, 1944
My darlingest Betsy:
I suppose I can tell you, now that [Prime Minister Winston] Churchill has sounded off and revealed all the secret details, that I was bombed out of my flat a couple of weeks ago. As a matter of fact, I was bombed twice, but the first one didn’t take and they tried again, the second time with a little more success. It was revealed today so you have read by now that one of the buzz bombs hit the Guards Chapel of Wellington Barracks. That was on a Sunday morning and at that time I had not yet seen one of the infernal instruments. So when I heard it approaching I threw open the window of my flat living room and leaned out to see what I could see. Since the thing was approaching from the other side of the building I couldn’t see it but I could see all the Guardsmen leaning out their windows only a few yards from me watching it approach. Then I saw them duck back into the barracks and at the same instant the motor of the damned thing stopped. By that time we had begun to learn that we had five to fifteen seconds to get under cover between the motor shutting off and the explosion. I turned and started running like hell for the main corridor of the apartment building. I got through the tiny living room into the hall of my flat when the bomb hit. There was that terrible tinkle of falling glass like in an automobile accident only multiplied a thousand fold with the additional crumbling of plaster and ripping of wood. I felt like someone had slapped me but hard on the back, and then shoved me but hard on the chest. The front door of the flat toward which I was heading instead came over to me. It wasn’t blown clear off the hinges but the Yale lock was torn from its moorings and the door flung open. Well, a lot of windows and some window frames and doors in the building were knocked out by that one. Wonderful sidelight was that just before the incident I had rung down for Charles, the house man to come up. (“House man” indeed! Charles is a valet.
Sixtyish with winged collar, striped pants and all.) Then the bomb went. A moment later Charles came through the open door. I was hoping he was going to say, “Did you ring, sir?” But Charles disappointed me. He said instead, “Are you all right, sir?” and without awaiting an answer disappeared back into the littered hall. The next one sometime later was a real daisy though. It came while I was still asleep in the early morning. The darned things had been awakening me and sending me fleeing into the hall all night and I finally had fallen asleep of exhaustion. This one must have awaked me just before it hit because I remember in half sleep curling up in a tight ball, pulling covers over my head and clapping hands over my ears. Then it hit. All hell seemed to break loose. It seemed like fifteen minutes that debris was falling all around and I kept waiting for the ceiling and the three floors above me to come tumbling down. I suppose it was only seconds though. (more) I love you, Walter
THE ARRIVAL OF Charles the valet within moments of the V-1 bomb’s explosion is another illustration of the vagaries of memory. In the version of the story Cronkite told in A Reporter’s Life, the valet Charles became “George,” and the conversation ended with a better punch line: “There was a knock on the torn door frame. There stood George, holding a towel over a bleeding eye. And so help me, he said, ‘Did you ring, sir?’ ”
Sunday, June [July] 9, 1944
Page Two
The ceiling didn’t come down, nor did the other three floors, I am happy to be able to report. The thing landed immediately across the street, it turned out, and since my flat was on the back side of the apartment I was spared full force of the blast. But the front of the building and the shops on the ground floor were devastated. The apartment building the bomb hit was demolished, the church on the corner was wrecked. I won’t try to detail the damage any more than that. The windows and their frames were blown out of my flat, the front door was ripped from its hinges, the bathroom window, the washbowl and the tub were shattered. I wasn’t even scratched although the glass and debris was so thick in the flat, in the halls and in the street in front that I had to put on my thick army boots to safely get over it and out of the building. Fortunately, except for bottled toilet articles such as hair tonic and what-not, I didn’t lose a single possession. My books and clothes were dirtied up a little with soot and debris but nothing that washing and cleaning won’t fix. So now I’m in a nice modern hotel in a very convenient location and almost as comfortable as I was in the flat. I don’t think I had ever told you much about the flat since I had just moved into it. It was in the same building where McGlincy and I lived for so long but when he went to France I moved downstairs to this smaller one—a fortunate move since the other flat was in the front, one of those badly blasted. The building I’m now in is modern steel and concrete and my room is on a very small court so I figure I’m safe from anything but a direct hit, which is a very remote possibility.
I was interrupted in this letter. It is now Monday afternoon and I’m at my desk at the Ministry of Information where I spend more of my time nowadays. Another package just came for me today [—] containing fruit juices and shorts … Please send me more of both. I’m in very serious straits for clothing right now, but it is a matter which I want to take up with you when I have more time. I’m going to be doing more and more diplomatic stuff getting ready for the Amsterdam assignment. As such I’m going to need some clothes … But I’ll have to go into that later. Now I must run. I love you, darlingest. And Judy. Tell her for me, will you, please?
I worship you, Walter
CRONKITE’S NEW ASSIGNMENT, for which he needed better clothes, was as United Press bureau chief for the Low Countries, and he was to set up headquarters in the old prewar UP office in Amsterdam. The only hitch was that the Germans were supposed to depart Amsterdam—which they did not wind up doing until after V-E Day, in May 1945.
In his letter of August 6, 1944, Cronkite described a recent trip to France (probably his second since D-Day) as a welcome break from life in London. He wasn’t the only London-based correspondent that summer to find relief in traveling to a combat zone. Dudley Ann Harmon, one of his colleagues in UP’s London bureau, had a similar reaction. As she wrote in an undated letter to her father, sometime in July–August 1944: “Dearest Daddy: This is written from Somewhere in France … It is a great relief from buzz bombs in London and I feel as though I were on a vacation.” On the other hand, those who had left loved ones behind in London were not as pleased. Drew Middleton of the New York Times had been in the enviable position, in Cronkite’s eyes, of having his wife living with him. But as Middleton recalled in his memoir, Our Share of Night, published immediately after the war: “If you lived in London, going to the front [in the summer of 1944] presented a unique mental problem. It meant leaving my wife in far more danger, more constant, enveloping danger, than I was likely to face on the Continent. A week before I had seen what was left of seven people splattered into a red jam across the face of a broken building. It was in my mind as I said good-by and went away.”
Notwithstanding the onset of V-1 attacks, Cronkite was preoccupied as usual with schemes for bringing Betsy to London. His attitude was a reflection of post-invasion euphoria, which was widespread that summer in civilian and military circles alike. Once the American army broke out from Normandy in mid-July, followed by the landing of a second invasion force in southern France in August, Allied optimism soared. Cronkite was not alone in expecting the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany, which would, of course, bring an end to the V-1 threat to London, and make it possible for Betsy to join him there in safety.
The vital deepwater port of Cherbourg, at the end of the Cotentin peninsula in France, was captured by U.S. forces between June 26 and July 1, 1944. Before surrendering, the Germans had wrecked the harbor facilities, and when Cronkite visited in early August, Allied engineers were hard at work trying to clear debris and reopen the port.
Sunday, Aug. 6, 1944
My darlingest wife:
I’ve been over to France again this week, spending a couple of days kicking around in Cherbourg and south of there but again failing to get up into the battle area. I went over with six other newsmen and a couple of photographers on a sortie arranged by the ordinance command. We traveled by air both ways with a very high ranking officer included in the party. Everything went perfectly and it was a wonderful trip. We followed the path of the American advance up from Isigny through Carentan and Montebourg to Cherbourg. God, what desolation. It is hard to imagine a town, say the size of Sedalia, completely flattened. The towns just do not exist anymore. And everywhere convoys and the ever-present dust. Goggles like those worn in the desert are essential. The food was good and the sleeping, after “southeast England” and its buzzbombs, was heaven-sent.
When I got back your V-mailer with the questions about what to bring and what to do if you should come over was waiting for me. Unfortunately I am writing this at the office and I find I don’t have that letter with me. So I can’t go through the questions one-by-one. I’ll answer what I can remember of them. First: I’m afraid I have some disappointing news. As you know, I have been harboring a hope that I could perhaps get a few weeks home leave this summer. Well, I finally gathered my nerve and asked [Virgil] Pinkley a few days ago. His answer beat slightly about the bush in that he said he would give it consideration, but actually all of his equivocation simply added up to “no.” His point was that [Hugh] Baillie is coming over in a few weeks and he thinks it would be a very bad thing for me to be away when the Great Man is here. I think that is much malarkey, but I couldn’t very well tell Pinkley so. With all the action over in Normandy and all the people intimately connected with fast-developing political affairs here, I’m strictly a second-stringer these days and whether or not I am here is not going to make much difference to Baillie. But that is Pinkley’s answer anyway. And Pinkley went on to say: “Things are developing too fast, and it would be pretty tough if you were in the States when we suddenly needed you to go into Amsterd
am and get things rolling. It shouldn’t be too long before you are able to get Betsy over here, so I’d advise you just to sit tight.” Well, that would seem to be that. Boiling all this talk down—and for goodness sakes don’t relay this part to Mother—it looks to me like I am stuck at least for another year or so. In my opinion, chances of home leave are either right now or not again for months and months. Once Germany collapses we all are going to be so damned busy over here home leave will be out of the question for some time. That means that the only answer is for you to come here. Now let’s take up that aspect of the problem. If the [Marcel] Wallenstein letter has not grown too cold and if you still can work out something with the [Kansas City] Star, by all means do so. If that fails and you can think of any other angles, play them. I see no possibility of our being separated for very long at a time once you got over here. It looks as if I will be remaining here until time to move to the continent, and when that happens the situation should be so stabilized that I could immediately take you along …
The point is that once you got over here and I moved on into the continent, you certainly could accompany me as an UP employee if there should be some temporary ban on civilians. As far as living conditions go, I’d better repeat my earlier warning that they aren’t going to be too pleasant either here or on the continent for some time to come—perhaps for years. No one can foresee to what extent rationing will be continued—and rationing as it exists over here is plenty tough particularly so in view of the fact that it involves long queues at the butchers, at the dairy, at the greengrocer, at the drugstore, at the clothing stores. We probably would live in a flat like the one I’m in now … And for that sort of living we would use up most of our salary and living allowance. (Although the way things are going right now, I’m just about doing that on my own. I hate to be a sissy but I still believe the safety of the present building is worth the thirty two dollars a week I’m paying for it.)
Cronkite's War Page 23