Cronkite's War
Page 26
I’ll try to get this off by the quickest possible means. Tell all the family and little Judy hello for me. Oh, by the way, I got your Sept. 20 v-mailer today and am terribly disappointed that the airborne stuff didn’t get a better play out there. I love you, Walter
THE FAILURE OF Operation Market Garden to enable the promised Allied breakthrough into Germany brought an end to the summer’s “home by Christmas” euphoria, as evidenced by both Cronkite’s October 17, 1944, letter to Betsy and his United Press dispatch of the same day. For the first time in the nearly two years he had been overseas, he began to have second thoughts about the idea of bringing her to London.
The letter also had some interesting details about Cronkite’s postwar plans, as he conceived them in the waning days of 1944. He planned to be a foreign correspondent for at least “a score of years,” expecting the first decade of that “foreign service” to be spent in conditions of dire privation. He also felt himself, still some days short of his 28th birthday, to be displaying the symptoms of “advancing old age.”
Only toward the end of the letter, in his description of his encounter with the king, did some of the familiar Cronkite humor show itself. King George VI visited the British Second Army on October 15, 1944, and knighted its commander, Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey. The press corps attached to the Second Army was driven to Eindhoven airport to meet the king when his plane landed. Tongue in cheek, Cronkite told Betsy that, on the basis of a two-word conversation with the king, “he seems like a great guy. I’ll have to get to knowing him better.”
Cronkite added more details of his royal audience in A Reporter’s Life. Field Marshal Montgomery’s press aide disapproved of his battle garb, which included pants bloused in combat boots, paratrooper style. The aide ordered Cronkite to don a pair of white gaiters, regulation gear for British soldiers on dress occasions. Citing the Boston Tea Party, Cronkite refused. In the end, he remembered proudly, “I met the King in my good American combat boots.”
Somewhere in Holland Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1944
Hello, darling:
… Your August 25 letter was all about what to do in preparation for coming over here and it made me sick to read it and realize that you still are there and I’m still here and that days still slide by without our being together. You ask whether I have changed or not. I imagine I have, honey. An awfully lot has happened in these two years and it would be pretty amazing, I guess, if I hadn’t undergone a few alterations. Physically I know I have. For one thing—most obvious, of course—I’m back to the gangling youth you met at KCMO, except that the lines are a little deeper and the circles under the eyes are a little blacker. Then my teeth have gone to hell and I just haven’t had time to do anything about them—which is disgraceful. I have stomach aches and back aches and night risings and other little symptoms of advancing old age. And I’m afraid I’ve lost a lot of my sense of humor. Somehow or other, despite the synthetic attempts at gaiety, things don’t seem very funny over here. And that applies even more now that we are in Europe. It is really depressing when you know there is nowhere to go for a good meal, that there is nowhere to go for a hot bath, that there isn’t a room in town that is really warm, that you can’t go downtown and buy a pair of shoes or a shirt, that there isn’t any laundry because there isn’t any gas. God knows how long things are going to be that bad here, but I’m afraid prospects aren’t very bright.
I’m frankly extremely pessimistic about the whole thing. I have committed myself now to the foreign service and, at any rate, would not back out because I think financially it is by far the better deal. That means at least a score of years over here and, assuming that we don’t have another European war in the near future, that still means at least the first ten aren’t going to be particularly pleasant. There is still hope, of course, that Amsterdam will not suffer the fate the Germans seem to have planned for it and things might not be so bad as I have pictured—but I am pessimistic, as I say. Paris, for instance, is lovely and once food, clothing and utilities are available there in decent quantities it will not be bad. But I don’t think I’m likely to get very near Paris. I’m praying that I don’t get saddled with any part of the Berlin bureau. That will be sheer hell.
Darling, this is sort of a ticklish subject but in all fairness I think I ought to bring it up. Whereas three months ago, even after D-day, I still thought it smart for you to come over as soon as possible and was feeling around for ways of getting that job done, at the moment it looks damned inadvisable to me, and, even if we could work it, I don’t see how you could be with me on the Continent for months and months to come. Well, I’ve been away two years now and the day when I shall be able to come home, even for a visit, or you shall be able to join me permanently, seems as remote as ever. It has worried me a lot that, while my interests have broadened almost faster than I can keep up with them and while I’m constantly circulating among other people and (within some pretty definite restrictions) kicking around the world, you have been living the same, monotonous, sheltered existence there. I love you more than you know for the thought behind it and the constancy it implies, but, honey, these should be pretty good years in anybody’s life instead of a sort of enforced spinsterhood and old age.
What I’m getting around to, sweetheart, is that I want you to have a good time. I want you to buy fancy clothes and wear them, I want you to have cocktails with people and go out dancing with them, I want you to travel if you feel like it and go to New York and visit Janey. That money that is piled up there is yours, Betsy. A little nest egg for the eventual European trip is a good idea but don’t let it stop your living now. If you travel I want you to go Pullman or fly. Be a little selfish about it if it would help ease the conscience any: remember that while I don’t call most of this life over here fun, at least it is different and I’m seeing a lot of country and meeting a lot of people. Don’t overdo the thing, my darling, but please have a good time. Really, I worry terribly about it.
Incidentally, while I am at the front I am on a full living account and it ought to be possible for me to repay those few hundred dollars I had to draw while dodging buzz-bombs. So, in the same mail, I am writing the accounting department in London to start sending to you the full weekly check of $90 (less occasional insurance deductions). If I suddenly get transferred back to a population center where I’m on only a limited living allowance and have to dip into my salary, then I’ll occasionally draft enough to get by. So within two or three weeks you should start getting $90 a week from New York.
I have gotten one or two congratulatory messages since I got up here on the British front but the front has been so comparatively inactive that there really hasn’t been very much doing. The competition is stiff here and it is like a movie version of war reporting to race with Charlie Lynch, the Reuters man, and Roger Greene, the AP man, for the breaks and then the transmission facilities to get the stories out. I’m living with Lynch in a screamingly funny, horribly uncomfortable, semi-blitzed village hotel whose plumbing belches all night and whose roof leaks drop by drop into a big pail at the foot of the bed and which has a swinging iron sign that rattles in the wind like all the artillery in the world opening up against you …
Now it can be revealed that I covered part of the King’s tour of the Dutch front last week. At one point we exchanged a couple of words. I was standing with other newsmen at the end of a row of troops he was reviewing. He walked right on beyond the last troops and suddenly stopped in front of our ragamuffin group in a wonderful double-take. “What’s this?” he said, looking at me. “The press,” I answered, quick as a flash and without the slightest suspicion of awe. He nodded, looked again, turned and said something to [Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery, and walked away. Quite an interview, that was. He seems like a great guy. I’ll have to get to knowing him better.
I’ve heard rumors that there is a traveling American army post office down the road a few miles and I’m going out this afternoon to try to find it so I might get this letter off
to you in fairly rapid fashion. As I’ve said before, I think the fastest way to write me is still by V-mail to APO 413 as per the old address. The office will see that it is forwarded.
Give my love to little Judy and to all the family. Well, that part of my love you think you can spare. Forever, Walter
P.S. Which one of my stories were in the [Kansas City] Star?
FROM PAGE 4 of the Abilene (Texas) Reporter-News, October 19, 1944:
TROOPS LIKELY TO SPEND CHRISTMAS IN FOXHOLES
By Walter Cronkite
WITH BRITISH SECOND ARMY IN HOLLAND, Oct. 17—(Delayed)—(UP)—We might as well face it; barring a political collapse inside Germany, we won’t be out of the foxholes by Christmas.
For a month since the bold air-borne descent on Holland, we have sat on this salient. We have broadened its flanks just enough to protect the lifeline corridor up the middle of it …
We have shattered their tanks and artillery all along the way, but what they have left is banked tread to tread and hub to hub along the Siegfried line. We are operating over territory they have held for four years and their guns are ranged in and operated at the very points on which they know we must concentrate.
Then there’s the weather. Even if the normal rain and snow come, this country is going to be hell. Already the flat Dutch fields are bogs in which tanks cannot operate. The fighting must be done on the hard roads. And it is against them that the Germans can concentrate their mines, mortars, artillery and men.
Cronkite’s letter of November 19, 1944, was one of his longest and most interesting. He began by confessing his fear that Betsy might misinterpret either his silences when he didn’t write or his words when he did. And then, in a lengthy section that seems almost as if it were written for the convenience and edification of future biographers, he offered a year-end review of his experiences and emotions in the eventful months of 1944. During the first five months of the year, he wrote, “the air [war] was the big thing, and I was its papa.” Since the invasion, however, he felt he had let down his readers and his employer, even during the dramatic days he spent behind enemy lines in Operation Market Garden: “I didn’t do any really outstanding stories from what should have been the best assignment I ever had.”
Maj. Louis M. “Mel” Schulstad, singled out in Cronkite’s letter as a friend with a “screwball” sense of humor, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939, flew 44 combat missions in a B-17 over France and Germany, and was twice awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for valor. He retired as a colonel after 27 years in the military.
Alfred Wagg was a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
Bill Walton was a Time correspondent; he dropped into Normandy with the paratroopers on D-Day.
“Nightside” was journalist slang for the night shift in a newspaper office—a less desirable employment option than the day shift.
Sunday, November 19, 1944
My darling wife:
It has gotten to be nine-thirty in the evening of the day which for a week I have set aside to spend writing to you. And I am just getting started on this letter. The maid permitted me to oversleep this morning and I barely had time to finish a letter to [Virgil] Pinkley before I had to run to meet Ronald Clark, BUP [British United Press] reporter, for lunch. At lunch it developed that Clark had a sore throat and wanted to beg off covering the afternoon military briefing. So this afternoon was lost to me while I handled that. Then I had a date for dinner with Boyd Lewis, UP man down from the Canadian front. So I have just gotten home.
But, despite the delay, I consider this a very important letter. I want to turn over a new leaf, honey. I want to write you daily, if possible, and if anything prevents that, then to fill you in as quickly as possible on the missing days. I have been so depressed lately because I can’t be with you and because I have been without you so long, and I feel that the only way I possibly can snap out of it is to be closer to you again. The only way I know to do that is to write. Part of my melancholy, I know, is a feeling of guilt, a feeling that perhaps I have hurt you by not writing oftener. If anything, it is more horrible to hurt you when we are apart for then it seems an almost impossible task to make amends. Just like we can never catch up on the years we have lost, so I can never make amends for the loneliness I’ve sharpened by not writing. All I can do is beg, darling, and tell you again that I love you so.
I don’t know exactly which—if indeed any particular one—of many factors have contributed most to my sudden realization of the meany I’ve been. Perhaps it is that for the first time since we have been apart I have been without mail for weeks on end and know, for the first time, how really cruel and horrible that can be. Perhaps, quite candidly, it is a sudden fear that gripped me as soon as I had mailed that letter written at the depth of my gloom; the one in which I urged you to play and have a good-time because we were wasting so many precious years apart. I thought over that letter a long time before I wrote it, and fiddled with it a long time in the writing, and finally thought it was what I wanted it to say. Then, when I had mailed it, I sank even lower in to despond fearing that you might put the wrong interpretation on it. I’m afraid even now of the answer I’m going to get from it. Perhaps another factor is that for the first time in many, many months I’ve reached some resemblance to permanency and feel that I can keep any pledge to write and can really settle down to a somewhat normal existence.
I thought maybe, if you would like, honey, I’d make this sort of a year-end report to catch up. I’d kind of review the year, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, who I’ve known (as nearly as this horrible memory of mine will know), what I’ve thought. Would that be all right? But before I get into that, a couple of current matters.
First of all, there is some chance again that Pinkley may act to get you over here. He only hinted at it when I saw him in Paris last week and said he would go into it more fully with me later, but I had to pull out rather suddenly and we didn’t get to finish the discussion. He is due up here next week and I plan, of course, to go into the matter in minute detail then …
Secondly, Pinkley turned me down again in Paris on my proposal to go home for a short leave, but we left the door open to further negotiations. I hate to shirk a job, particularly at this stage of the game when I have been named to a pretty important post, but dammit, darling, two years without you is too much. (Two days is too much, but it seems that we are destined to deal with years …) So I thought that when I see Pinkley here next week I’d put a set of conditions up to him … I have been overseas now, in a continuous stretch, longer than any other married man in the company … Pinkley’s soft-soap answer to me always is the same—that I’m indispensable. I’m getting just a little tired of the line (despite the fact that I pat myself on the back, grin at myself in the mirror, and almost believe it). I think that if my conditions were met and I still were denied the home leave, I’d feel strong enough about it to threaten to quit. I’m awfully homesick for you and Judy and if months more of loneliness stretched before us I think I’d go mad.
Thirdly, by sheerest chance and strangest accident, two Christmas packages for me arrived in Paris while I was there. Of course, they weren’t supposed to have gone to Paris but anyway they showed up there at the correspondents’ mail room and one of the UP boys spotted them on their way back to the proper APO. So I claimed them the morning that I was about to go out to the Post Exchange and buy a pair of shoes. They looked like shoe boxes so I thought the better part of valor was to open them—and anyway it was just a few days past my birthday and I hadn’t had a birthday gift except your sweet telegram. I opened them and found in one the wonderful slippers that I needed so badly, and in the other the Bostonian shoes. I can’t tell you yet, for sure, whether the shoes fit. For two months I’ve been in oversize parachute boots and my feet have spread out a little … I feel guilty every time I get a package. All you folks are far too good to me.
Well, about this year: Looking back on it, I guess it was a pretty successful one fo
r me, but I didn’t have much fun living it. During the first five months, of course, I had the main story almost every day completely to myself. The air was the big thing, and I was its papa. At its height, just before D-day, I had five and sometimes more men working for me. I sort of city edited the job, writing all the leads and directing my staff out in the field. Virgil has said since that my organization, sense of responsibility, and blah-blah on that one helped him make up his mind to give me the Low Countries for post-war development. My stand-bys were Collie Small (who is a swell, slightly irresponsible youngster who the Moorheads dearly love and who used to be a sports writer in the States), Bob Richards, Bill Disher. At one time or another Bill Higginbotham and Sam Hales and McGlincy helped me. It seemed a little odd ordering Sam around, but he took it in good spirit and we got along nobly. My only source of real trouble was Phil Ault, a Minnesota boy with plenty on the ball who has battered his way right up to the top in the UP foreign service and for whom I have a lot of respect. He was sitting in the day slot in London and used to have a habit of signing the short overnight cables he would send about RAF night activity. He had some cohorts in New York who put his name on all the day stories on the air war, the great bulk of which I was writing. It took me two months of that shadow boxing before I finally laid down the law to Pinkley and got him to send a definite order to New York that I would be signed around the clock on all air news except the individual, side-bar features that Collie and the others dug up. That job, with the amazing growing of the air forces, kept me pretty well tied to the desk but I managed some out-of-town trips up into lovely sections of England which, unfortunately, because of air forces still based there, I still can’t identify. Also I had been over that territory so much in the preceding year that I knew it by heart and it got to be just a tedious grind standing up for hours in crowded train corridors and sticky-handed children pawing at my already dirty pants, and then long, cold, bumpy rides in open jeeps, and finally miserable Nissen huts wallowing in the mud and smoky officers’ bars where pilots insisted on a drink-for-drink basis. I made a lot of friends, of course, the best of whom usually were non-flying officers like Major Bill Laidlaw, public relations officer for First Bombardment Division, who was a left-banker in Paris for years before the war, writing weighty stuff for Atlantic Monthly and being a Bohemian. He is strictly a delightful screwball with a terrific sense of humor, an insatiable thirst, and an over-active mind that is hard to keep up with. I told him once I thought his brain was on a Pogo stick—and he loves me for the remark, which, I think myself, is pretty good. Then there was Major Clayton Smith, old-time Houston oil man who suddenly found himself a public relations officer for a medium bomber outfit and was swell because he became a father to the youngsters there. He loaned them money, solved their personal problems, arranged their parties, did their Christmas shopping for them, got them out of trouble. There are hosts of others who will come up as we talk it over in the years to come, and I hope you get a chance to meet some of them.