Cronkite's War

by Walter Cronkite, IV

  The biggest trouble was the flyers who came to London on “48’s”—forty-eight hour passes—and expected me to show them the town and keep up with their drunken “tomorrow we die” sort of entertainment. I still don’t like that sort of party and never got mixed up in them, arriving at an early stage at a formula of meeting them for a quick drink before dinner, then perhaps taking them to Sandy’s, and then excusing myself to return to work—which was no lie. The only one I ever really went out with was Mel Schulstad, who now is a Major. He is in his early twenties, and came from the group with which I flew over Wilhelmshaven. He is a screwball like the rest but with the kind of sensa humor we both love, and he reminded me of you and home, and that’s why I liked him. He had a wonderful little rhyme, recited to gestures when the right moment came. It went: “If you’re a droop, you end up in group, and if from there you’re canned, it’s Bomber Command. Out of the sack, into the flak; out of the flak, into the sack. How now, brown cow.” Perhaps it is meaningless to anyone but the air boys, but to them it was a knockout.

  I found out only tonight that the only other funny thing I’ve said all year has gained immortality. I was having dinner tonight with Boyd Lewis, Bill Johnson of Time, and Barney McQuaid of the Chicago Daily News. When I brought up this crack, as I often do, McQuaid leaned over the table and grabbed my hand and said he always wanted to shake hands with the author of that marvelous line. It seems that there is a lecherous little writer who no one likes named Al Wagg. Bill Walton of Time and I were walking down a London street when two horribly ugly Wacs passed up—as ugly as only WACS can be—and immediately after them Wagg, with his tongue fairly hanging out. He barely had time to pipe a hello in his squeaky voice. I said to Walton: “Just a case of Wagg dogging his tail.” (Laughter.)

  Incidentally, funny thing about Walton. He is one of my favorite people. I met him the first night he hit London just about a year ago and tried to show him a few of the ropes and we got to be pretty close friends although we didn’t see a great deal of each other. He jumped with the parachutists D-day and I have seen him here once and in Paris once since then. Scene switches and we meet Al Newman, a very nice guy from Newsweek and used to be one of their top sports men and now is a war correspondent. I’ve never known Al very well, our paths simply crossing in the usual course of events. But a couple of days ago I ran into Al on one of the streets here. He was just passing through on his way back from London to one of the fronts. He then threw in the bomb shell that in his hut near Aachen a few weeks ago he and Bill Walton were having a little chat when Walton’s eye suddenly fell on a copy of Chakett, a Chi Phi magazine. And then it all came out—Walton, Newman and I are fraternity brothers. It seems so strange since I never seem to run into Chi Phi’s anywhere and had just given up asking people. Now I’m all fraternity-conscious all over again.

  During those months before D-day Jim and I were living at 78 Buckingham Gate, the old building by Wellington Barracks where young Guardsmen used to have their bachelor quarters. It wasn’t much of a flat but it was convenient and comfortable—that is until Robin Duff, the BBC commentator, got bombed out of his flat and came to stay with us for a few days until he found another. He was there for three months—until the invasion moved both him and Jim out. I was so busy with the air story—working toward the last up to twenty hours a day—that Jim and I didn’t get a chance to do much helling around and the little socializing we did do was over the bar at El Vino’s, Frank Bauer’s little emporium on Fleet street around the corner from the office. We would have an occasional drink in there and talk over things before I went back to the office for another stint. I really love Jim like a brother but the guy is strictly black Irish. Like all those people he has a special fairy sitting on his shoulder whispering wonderful lines in to his ear which he transposes onto paper with all the ease of a man licking a stamp. But sometimes the fairy whispers dark things to him and he goes out and gets fiery, Irish drunk and ends up in a typical saloon brawl. Sometimes he doesn’t show up for work, and the office loses faith only to regain it with his next smashable piece. Where he’ll end up remains to be seen but there will be no middle ground. He’ll either be on top or in the gutter. He went over to Ireland to do the DeValera crisis in March and met there an Irish girl with whom he is much enamored and she may have some effect in straightening him up—but I don’t believe much in that sort of reform. Besides, I suspect Bunty [his girl] of harboring the same traits Jim does, and that ain’t good.

  That, in sort of a slap-dash fashion, brings us up to D-day. That was when my, as well as Hitler’s, little world seemed to crumple around my shoulders. There, first of all, was that abortive D-day bomber flight over the invasion coast which I couldn’t see because of the clouds and about which I told you. Then, from there on out, the air story took a back seat and it was such a come-down from handling the top story everyday that I didn’t seem to ever get back into the swing. Except for the appearance of the flying bombs and the smash play I got on the early stories regarding them, I didn’t do a really valuable piece of work for the first three months of invasion. I just sat in London champing at the bit to get to the front but being held back to do the work-horse job that still had to be done on the air story. I was pretty envious of McGlincy and the others in Normandy and pretty unhappy. I was also terribly lonesome living alone and a little upset about being bombed out. I made those two trips to Normandy to do special stories but neither of them made the front-pages. Then in the middle of August Pinkley asked if I’d be interested in the airborne assignment. I, of course, jumped at it. Then for the next month I spent my time shuttling back and forth from London to airborne headquarters as they set up one after another airborne show only to have Patton’s or Dempsey’s men move so fast that the parachute and glider landing was not needed. The biggest disappointment of them all was the first one which had us scheduled to land on the outskirts and take Paris. That would have been a great show. I was beginning to look a little foolish around the office. Four times I dashed in, picked up expense money, left last instructions with various people, and dashed out to the wars in my battle clothes only to return a few days later with the whole thing called off.

  The rest of it you know. I didn’t do any really outstanding stories from what should have been the best assignment I ever had. It was just a good workmanlike job with no flashes of brilliance. I think everyone, including Cronkite, was a little disappointed but communications, plus the fact that I was scared to death most of the time, had something to do with it. Even so I got some nice cables and Baillie and Pinkley sent along congratulations. Then a couple of weeks ago I got a little certificate from the commanding general of the airborne division saying that I had made a glider landing in the presence of the enemy and was hereby a glider pin which looks a little like a pilot’s wings and which I proudly wear.

  I stayed with the airborne troops until the first of October, went to Paris for a couple of days’ leave, returned to Brussels to fill in for Clark for a week, then back to Brussels to begin the job of organizing our Low Countries bureaus and services for both the incoming and outgoing services. I took off that few days last week to go to Paris and am now back here settling down for the long grind until it is time to shove on toward Rotterdam, The Hague, and Amsterdam. Or until I get to come home.

  I’m living now with Dave Anderson, 39-year-old New York Times correspondent who is sort of a pretty-boy social butterfly and strictly an old maid around the house. We have been living together a week and I don’t know that I’m going to make a go of it. He is at the opposite end of the scale in every respect from McGlincy.

  The flat, however, is wonderful. It is owned by American Jews who fled when the Germans came, and for four years was occupied by the Nazis. It is strictly modern (although without heat or hot water, of course), on the fourth floor of a fancy apartment building on a fashionable drive at the top of a hill overlooking a wide stretch of the city. It has a big living room, dining room, little alcove with desk and bookc
ase, and, off of a long corridor, three bedrooms. The maid, who was here eight months before the war and stayed throughout the German occupation, has the back bedroom. It is only about twenty minutes from the center of town by tram, and only ten minutes from the main government quarter and the spot where we have to file our copy. My principal problem now is to find office space for the UP, get some furniture somewhere, locate an English-speaking staff, etcetera. I’m really beginning to feel the executive burdens, complicated all the more by my lack of language. For a newspaperman that is a terrifying handicap. I can’t even read the papers to find out what is going on, I can’t make appointments by telephone, I can’t dicker for office space. It is the one thing that might defeat me in this job and then, as Norma Chaney seems so confident of, I might have to come traipsing back out to Kansas City to run the nightside. No, I don’t really think that will happen. If language does defeat me here, there are plenty of other good spots with the UP where such a handicap won’t matter.

  I like it here, though, being the big fish in the little pond. As UP manager for the Low Countries I find I garner a lot of respect. The American ambassador likes me and I have open sesame to his precincts. Tomorrow night his first secretary (MALE!) is coming here for dinner, and things go swimming along that league. Once this war is over, you and I ought to have a lot of fun in this supposedly gay international set. That is the day I’m living for. That is what will make all this worthwhile.

  That is pretty much of once-over-lightly treatment. It won’t ever be possible to just sit down and recite the events of these years, honey. They will just have to come out in driblets as one thing leads to another and reminds me of something else. But I’ll try to be a better boy in the weeks to come before we are together again and keep you up to date, day to day.

  The important thing, always, is for you to remember that I love you. You must know that. That is one flame that has never gone out. And tell little Judy I love her too. Just because I don’t mention her in each of my letters isn’t any sign that she isn’t as constantly in my thoughts as you yourself. How I’d like to run my fingers through the hair of those two red-haids again! Tell the folks, mine and yours, that I love them too, and thank them for me for their swell packages and their letters. It is nice to know you aren’t forgotten.

  Forever and ever, my sweetheart.

  I love you, Walter

  As BUREAU CHIEF for the United Press in Brussels, Cronkite found his days filled with bureaucratic chores and social obligations.

  Morris Swanoepoel held a position with the Belgian national radio network.

  Monday, Nov. 20, 1944

  My dearest Betsy:

  It is now 6:35 p.m. It is raining cats and dogs outside, as it has been all day, but today it is not so cold and we have scrounged a little coal to keep at least this one front room livably warm. In twenty-five minutes Ernest Mayer, the legation first secretary, is due along for dinner and I have to get my face washed and my hair combed and fingernails cleaned. There isn’t any question of dressing since all I have here still is this filthy British battle dress. Mayer is a wonderful guy with the look of the career diplomat but a strange aversion to red-tape.

  I have had a bitch of a day and am tres tired, as we say here. Dave [Anderson] ran across some English-speaking lad who is a friend of one of his social contacts here and who wants to work for the Americans, so we had him in this morning for an interview as a possible office-boy, translator, and messenger. He seemed like a good boy so we decided to hire him … Then I was on my way up to SHAEF to try to arrange some way of speeding up my mail to you and vice-versa when I ran into Major George Hargreaves who spent two months at Fort Leavenworth and won’t stop talking about the Hotel Phillips officers’ club—a subject close to my heart, all right (namely, you) but which gets a little boring from dear old George. We went up to the Belgium information office and there George introduced me to one Oscar Hellstrom, a fabulous character out of whose clutches I wasn’t able to wiggle (and I’ll admit I didn’t struggle very hard) until three o’clock when I had an appointment at the radio station. Oscar is now a member of the SHAEF mission to the Netherlands and is going to turn out to be a hell of a valuable contact. Already today, in my first three hours with him, I had lunch with M. and Mme. Fernand de Nefvre, veddy, veddy social artists and interior decorators, and an hour with the head of the Belgian Red Cross. Then it turns out that Oscar himself is a multi-millionaire and superbigwig politician from Seattle. He is a close friend of FDR’s and has one of those rare sets of cuff links that the prexy passed out to his closest advisers some ten years ago or so and which the Republicans have never ceased talking about. Then out to the radio station for a two-hour conference with Morris Swanoepoel trying to get them to monitor our newscasts from London and New York so I can get some sort of service rolling here. Well, that the day. Boring, isn’t it? But through it all, I love you.

  IN HIS NOVEMBER 22, 1944, letter, Cronkite reported on roommate trouble and colleague trouble.

  Frank Barhydt was an old Cronkite friend—what he meant by “Barhydting my soup in their faces” can only be imagined.

  Wednesday, Nov. 22, 1944

  My darling

  I didn’t get to write last night, frankly because for the first time I had a chance to go out and have a drink with Dave [Anderson] and it looked to me like a small talk over a bar was pretty essential at that point to a continued amicable sharing of this apartment. We had dinner about seven-thirty and finished, in best continental fashion, about nine-thirty, whereafter he suggested a trip across the street to investigate the Chez Elysee club. I took him up on it and it wasn’t until twelve o’clock (despite an eleven o’clock curfew existing here) that we got home. The drinks helped clear the air a little bit but today he returned to his old role of grandma and he began complaining that someone had rearranged his file of newspapers, and I hit the ceiling again. All in all, it isn’t too happy an association and, if the flat weren’t so damned comfortable, I’m sure it wouldn’t last very long.

  I’m also having troubles in the office, so to speak. Richard McMillan, as you undoubtedly know, is one of the BUP [British United Press], and consequently the UP, top-notchers, but he also is the biggest prima donna of the bunch. Unfortunately he is on one of the fronts nominally under my control. But Mac, of course, is under no one’s control—not even Pinkley’s or Fisher’s—because that is Mac’s nature. Yesterday he all of a sudden appeared here with the announcement that he was going to take it easy for a couple of weeks and that he intended “sending young Clark up to the front for a spell.” Well, there is a cardinal rule that no one leaves a front, or any other assignment for that matter, without first informing the office. This is one of the cases where the rule was pretty important, because it happens that Clark is seriously ill with flu. Luckily Boyd Lewis was in from the comparatively quiet Canadian front and I was able to send him up in Mac’s place …

  Yesterday we had a little sunshine which sort of brightened things up but today it has turned beastly again. (Speaking of things turning beastly—Noel Coward is in town in an ENSA—British USO—show but it looks as if I’m going to be too damned busy to see it.) There really hasn’t been a thing of interest in the last 48 hours, just dull business negotiations. Oh, yes, two of Dave’s British pals came for dinner tonight and we had no sooner seated ourselves than one mentioned some mutual friend with the comment that “he was in school at Harrow with me.” …

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, old chap, he was with me at Eton,” said the second secretary of the British Embassy. “By jove, egad, but really he was with me at Harrow, you know,” replied the RAF type. Honestly word for word, that went on for a good ten-minutes during which I was doing my best to keep from Barhydting my soup into their faces.

  Which, for some reason or other, reminds me that I bought a wonderful English-language volume in Paris “banned in United States and Great Britain.” It is privately printed and called “Some Limericks.” It has, unexpurgated, all
the dirty limericks all the little boys in the world have ever heard, each followed with a perfectly dead-pan explanation of them. I started to say “for example” there and quote one in best “censored quotations” style, but I find even that is impossible. Just one of those post-war projects, I guess.

  Last night on Dave and my roamings we stumbled into a wonderful little bar up at the corner whose Dutch owner used to play the trap drums in some European jive outfit. Come to think of it, I guess that falls simply under “incidental intelligence.” …

  Give my love to little Judy and to all the family. I love you, honey. Forever, Walter