Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  The 101st and 82nd Airborne remained in position in Holland for the next two months.

  The bridge at Arnhem, crossing the Rhine River into Germany, was supposed to be secured by an Allied tank column by the end of the third week of September, but it remained in German hands until it was destroyed by American bombers on October 7. The city of Arnhem would not fall to the Allies until mid-April 1945.

  From page 2 of the Dunkirk (New York) Evening Observer, September 18, 1944:

  DUTCHMEN CHEER ALLIED AIRBORNE INVADING ARMY

  … United Press War Correspondent Walter Cronkite, who landed with the first glider train, said the sky troops, most of them veterans of the Norman invasion, liberated several towns within an hour after their landing and expected to take their “first big objective” by nightfall.

  “Opposition is comparatively light,” Cronkite reported in a pooled dispatch from Holland at 4:40 p.m. yesterday. “Half an hour after we had landed the small-arms and mortar fire in our sector had ended and only the distant rumble of battle somewhere to the south—where the Allied armies are advancing toward us—was audible.

  “Some of our gliders and some C-47 tow planes went through anti-aircraft fire to reach their landing places, but our dive-bombing Mustangs and our vast aerial support silenced the enemy guns one by one.”

  From page 6 of the Billings (Montana) Gazette, September 20, 1944:

  WRITER TELLS OF NAZI THRUSTS AGAINST ALLIED AIRBORNE UNITS

  By Walter Cronkite

  WITH THE ALLIED AIRBORNE FORCES IN HOLLAND, September 19—The heavily-reinforced Germans in eastern Holland, facing entrapment between Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton’s air-borne army and the British advancing from Belgium, opened counterattacks Tuesday morning.

  We knew that men, guns and tanks had arrived in the German lines. Throughout Monday night the artillery roared on the perimeter of our own air-borne island.

  Steadily the Germans lobbed shells at a river crossing the loss of which would seriously delay the push of the British armor through Holland to our men far behind the enemy lines … As I write, the Germans are bringing up their heavy artillery—105–millimeter and 166-millimeter guns and 88-millimeter mortars …

  From page 15 of the Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun, September 21, 1944:

  EINDHOVEN, HOLLAND, GETS VICIOUS NAZI AIR POUNDING AFTER WELCOMING ALLIES

  City “Gets It” While Deliriously Greeting Its American and British Liberators

  By Walter Cronkite

  For Combined American Press

  EINDHOVEN, Holland, Sept. 21 (UP)—This city of 100,000, that 30 minutes before was wildly cheering its American and British liberators, took a vicious pounding last night in a German air raid.

  Dutch flags that were brought out of hiding after four years and hung—for 24 gay, carefree hours—today hang in burned tatters on charred poles.

  Streets where children danced to the music of an accordionist, where people crowded around American vehicles so thickly that traffic was halted, are now littered with glass, brick, stone and cherished possessions …

  I was dining with Bill Downs of CBS when he first noticed panicky civilians running toward their homes. We learned that some of the army was ordered out and decided to go to headquarters to verify it. Enroute we picked up Henry Standish, an Australian newspaperman.

  The city was almost deserted as we drove through. The Dutch, fearful that the Germans might be returning, had removed their flags and pictures of Queen Wilhelmina from many windows. Most of the American and British troops appeared to have left. Only a few civilians were standing in wonder before their homes. They had discarded the carnival hats and false noses they had been wearing so happily only a few minutes before.

  It was a strange feeling and one had a hunch something was about to happen. It did. Just before we reached headquarters a lone German twin-engined bomber swept over, dropping orange yellow and green flares.

  We sped toward open country but only got as far as the city park when the first bombers came in. The first bombs landed within 10 feet of us. We lay huddled on the ground while bombs ringed us. At least three more sticks hit home near us. The last bomb showered us with twigs, branches and dirt …

  Cronkite’s first letter to Betsy since the start of Operation Market Garden was sparing in details of his combat experiences. Perhaps he wished to relieve her worries by keeping his time under fire vague. He devoted but a single paragraph to what had happened in Holland. In contrast, he lavished details on the visit to Paris that followed, with a chronology of famous tourist sites visited and a description of fashionably dressed ladies, their parasols, and their dogs.

  Joe Grigg was a veteran United Press correspondent who had covered the start of the war from Berlin; after the war he would become the UP Paris bureau manager. Ronald Clark was a United Press correspondent.

  Tuesday, Oct. 3, 1944

  My darlingest wife:

  At last at least a brief moment in which to write you although God knows how long it will be before you get this letter. I am now assigned for the duration of the war or, at least, the campaign in Holland, to the British Second Army and most of my mail will go and come through its public relations unit. How much of a delay that is going to mean, I have no idea. All we can do is hope for the best.

  By now, I suppose, you know that I made the airborne landing with the Americans in Holland two weeks ago Sunday. There really isn’t much more to tell except that which has appeared in the papers. Except that I was scared. Not the landing itself but the twelve days of almost constant shelling and bombing afterward really frightened me for the first time in this war. That I plainly admit and if I can help it I have no intention of ever getting back within range of artillery again. I don’t suppose I shall be able to avoid it on some limited occasions, but I intend to keep such operations to the absolute minimum.

  I’m absolutely in love with Holland—what I’ve seen of it, and even the residents of that portion claim that it is the ugliest section of the country. “You must go north, and over toward Amsterdam and The Hague to see the real Holland,” they all say. But I like the area around Eindhoven all right. The people are so friendly and, in contrast to so many others with whom I have associated in the last couple of years, so clean and neat. And they are modern. I have seen rural kitchens in Holland that beat the all-electric ones in the General Electric ads. The women are homely as hell but they have such wonderful personalities that they seem to have acquired a certain redeeming ugly beauty. Most of the men are equally unattractive but equally personable.

  Friday the airborne story was pretty well told and I drove on down here to Brussels with a couple of Yank correspondents for a little rest. When we got here they decided to go on to Paris, so I figured that after what I had been through, plus all those weeks in London without a day off, I was entitled to that fun too. We left here about noon Friday in this open Volkswaggon (captured German jeep), stopped at a little town down the road for lunch, and had reached the Compèigne forest about thirty miles north of Paris about six o’clock when the damned car broke down. In our haste to get to Paris we had talked our way onto the broad highway that the military police had made a one-way northbound road for convoys—talked our way onto it with a story of having to make a broadcast in Paris. So there we were stranded, going the wrong way on a one-way highway and in the middle of a forest. Hitchhiking south on a north-bound line is pretty hopeless, but I got a ride to the next town where I told the MP’s to send a repair car after my pals.

  Then I kept on hitchhiking. I reached Paris about ten-thirty, dirty and deadly tired. I didn’t even bother to look anyone up that night but collapsed in a Red Cross officer’s club at the Hotel Edouard VII on the Avenue de l’Opera. Saturday morning I went to the office to find that Sam Hales was in charge temporarily while Joe Grigg was on business back in London. I had not had breakfast because it is almost impossible to get a meal through normal commercial channels in Paris and I had gotten up too late for the A
rmy mess, so Sam took me back to the Red Cross Rainbow Corner (a beautiful club for enlisted men in the fancy Hotel de Paris) where we had doughnuts and coffee. We had lunch at the Hotel Scribe which has been taken over as the newspaperman’s hotel and the headquarters of the public relations people and the wireless transmitting offices. They operate a mess and bar for the Press in the hotel and although for the most part it is limited like all the other allied messes to army rations, it is not too bad and you don’t quite starve to death if you eat there regularly. I had all the rest of my meals while in Paris at the Scribe as well as most of my drinks. I continued to stay at the Edouard VII however. It doesn’t make much difference where you stay—no place has any hot water. There is virtually no fuel in Paris and it looks like a cold winter for the boys and girls there.

  Sam had to work Saturday afternoon. I ran into a Red Cross girl, Irene Starke, I had known in London, and Bill Downs, former United Presser in Kansas City (his home town) and now with CBS. There are no taxis in Paris either, and the few horse-drawn hacks and “velo taxis” (bicycle-drawn jobs for two) are terribly expensive. So we hired a horse-drawn hack to take us down the Boulevard Capucines, Boulevard Madeleine, Rue Royale to the Place de la Concorde and then up the Champs Elysees to the Arch de Triomphe. We got out there and walked back down through some side streets to the Champs Elysees again where we had a couple of cognacs at a sidewalk café and watched the Parisians (and American soldiers) parade past. Except for essentials such as food, heating and transportation, Paris appears unaffected by war. The women are the most fabulously dressed people I have ever seen complete with silk stockings, cosmetics (of which there are few in England), beautiful clothes and insane hats and shoes. And all carrying long, rolled parasols with lace frills or leading dogs as insane as the hats. Many dressed like that peddle by on bicycles with their skirts up to their thighs. Most disturbing!

  We walked half-way back to the Scribe and finally gave it up and got a couple of velo taxis. At the Scribe we had drinks and dinner and found that a lot of the correspondents were planning on taking in the reopening of the Bal Tabarin, home of the famous Can-Can, that night. So we all went up to Montmarte. The Bal Tabarin turned out to be sort of a glorified Coney Island dime-a-dance joint but it had two good bands as hot as anything I’ve heard in the States, and, of course, the Can-Can which was a little less than terrific. They are short of many liquors in Paris but there is plenty of champagne. So that is what we drank.

  Honey, I had to interrupt this for some work. Now I am back but must again dash off. Briefly, Sunday I had a wonderful sightseeing trip over Paris and yesterday morning flew back here to Brussels. [Hugh] Baillie was here until this morning and I have been very busy with him. He had a message from [Virgil] Pinkley—the first from anyone I have seen since the landing—which said in part: “Tell Walt Cronkite his material simply terrific playedest omniwheres [Pinkley was telling Cronkite in ‘cablese’ that his dispatches were widely published] stop also he’s assigned british second army stop clark Wilson mcmillan Cronkite gave us outstanding superior report exbritish second army airborne operations.”

  I’ll write about Sunday in Paris later today. Write me at least for the time being as follows: “Walter Cronkite, United Press War Correspondent, With Second Army, Care Press Relations Group 5, British Liberation Army, London.”

  I love you and miss you terribly. Your—Walter

  Tell Miss Judy I love her too.

  P.S. Well, I didn’t get this letter mailed in my haste after all. This is a horrible mess here. I stepped in absolutely cold on the thousand and one little jobs that the regular Brussels man, Ronald Clark, handles, and he took off immediately for three days in London to get some winter clothes. So here I am with the serious difficulty of not knowing the language or anything about the sources of the news, the transmission channels, or even the locations and times of the official British army briefings. Besides for the first time in two years I am out here without a single close friend around and am terribly, terribly lonely. That will pass, I assume, when I get back toward the front.

  I’m not going to try and tell you the rest of the story about Paris right here because I want to get this letter back into its envelope and ready to go when next I get summoned out of this hotel room to another conference. The place for mailing is miles away and there is no transportation. Love, Walter

  THE BRITISH SECOND ARMY, commanded by Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey, under the overall command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, had fought in the Normandy campaign in June and July and then liberated much of Belgium, including Brussels and Antwerp, in the early days of September. In Operation Market Garden, Second Army armored units were unable to push through German defenses in Holland in time to relieve the airborne forces holding the bridge at Arnhem—the famous “bridge too far.” For the remainder of 1944, the British soldiers fought to hold and expand their salient on the German flank. Because Cronkite was charged with reestablishing the United Press presence in the Low Countries, he was also assigned to cover the Second Army.

  From page 2 of the Wisconsin State Journal, October 5, 1944:

  YANKS REACH COLOGNE PLAIN

  … United Press Correspondent Walter Cronkite reported from Lieut. Gen. Sir Miles C. Dempsey’s Second Army front that the British struck out up the Nijmegen-Arnhem road in the Rhine triangle Wednesday and the initial impact of the attack carried forward a mile …

  Tom Wolf was a reporter with the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA).

  The U.S. Embassy in Brussels was reestablished on September 14, 1944, with Ernest de W. Mayer as chargé d’affaires ad interim.

  With Second Army in Holland Monday, Oct. 9, 1944

  My darlingest:

  I’m writing just a note tonight hoping that somehow or other I will find a way to get it mailed in the near future …

  (This typewriter didn’t survive the airborne operation as well as I did. It has gone a little ockeyed.)

  Well, as I was saying, Paris was terrific. Sunday we borrowed a captured German Wasserwaggon (amphibious jeep) that Tom Wolf has been using for transportation, wangled some gasoline and went for a three-hour tour of the city. We hit the Arc de Triomphe again, all the way out to the end of the Champs d’Elysee, over to Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, down the left bank into the Left Bank, back over to the Place Bastille, and up through Montmarte to the exquisitely lovely Sacre Cour from which all Paris is laid at your feet. The only disappointment was the Left Bank which wasn’t as Greenwich Village as Greenwich Village.

  Monday, after buying you and mother a present (That God knows how I’m going to get back to you), I flew back to Brussels. I spent a horribly lonely and discouraging week there kicking myself out to the army press conferences twice a day because I had never learned French and felt like a damned baby. When you are a newspaperman and can’t even read the daily papers you are in a pretty sorry state. Things did pick up Saturday when I visited the Embassy. I was amazed to find that the charges’ [chargé d’affaires’s] secretary was Pat Sussmann who used to room with a girl with whom Harrison Salisbury went around a little. So she gave me the grand introduction to Ernest Mayer, the charges, and the remaining two days of my Brussels stay were swell. I had dinner at the Embassy Saturday night with the Canadian charges and Winthrop Greene, the U.S. charges in Luxembourg who was over for a visit …

  We went for a ride after lunch in the Embassy Packard (whose diplomatic immunity had been zealously guarded by the Germans for four years) and stopped at the Brussels Country Club for a short walk around the lovely golf course there. (They have women caddies for women golfers, incidentally, just in case, I suppose, a little boy caddy couldn’t stand the language—and the chattering.) …

  We are here at the Second British Army press camp and tomorrow plan to shove on up to the front for a day or so to pick up whatever is available.

  I had a delightful surprise Friday when a packet of letters arrived from London, forwarded by this office. There were several from yo
u, one from mother … and most delightfully, one from Eva enclosing some pictures of you, Judy and Petty (but, darnit, none of Molo—tell her to crowd you folks out of one of those snaps anyway). I love the one of you in bathing suit and Judy sitting up even if both of your backs are to the camera. I’m putting that one in my already crowded billfold. Your hair looks as lovely as ever, darling. I’d like to run my fingers through it again …

  Now that I finally have gotten your letters about seeing Roberts I’m sorry I’m not in a position to do anything from this end. Frankly, honey, I’m wondering how all this is going to work out now anyway. I don’t mean to be discouraging, but after seeing the awful mess in which Europe is, and now with the added prospect that Holland, where I am to be for some time, is going to be flooded and the worst off of any—after seeing all that I’m wondering how advisable it is to subject you to it. England already is improving and is not going to be so bad. Paris might be all right if the ports are opened fairly soon and the railroads are at least partially relieved of military traffic … But the Low Countries, Germany and the Balkans—ugh! I really dread to think of the prospects of this winter here and even, perhaps, next winter before things improve enough to make living comfortable. However, we will see in the next month or so how things are going to work out. The only thing I can suggest is that, if you can work a deal to get to London, that is a heluva lot closer to Europe than America. But London might be an awfully lonely place unless we were together there.