But Cronkite did not cover the renewed Allied advance. Suddenly, he was given the opportunity by his employers at the United Press to take his long-delayed home leave, and he arrived in New York sometime in the first week in March. No letters to Betsy chronicle this event. Instead, the only surviving written record of the visit comes from two stray clippings preserved in the Cronkite family papers, both from Kansas City newspapers in 1945: One women’s page society news account rather breathlessly recounts Betsy’s reunion in New York City with her husband. The second article covers a public speech that Cronkite gave in Kansas City, probably on March 15, on the prospects for postwar peace.
Walter, Betsy, and cocker spaniel Judy photographed during their long-awaited reunion, March 1945
Walter Cronkite with his father, Walter Leland, Sr., and Betsy, April 1945
According to the society page story, Betsy made a “sudden departure,” following an all-night packing session with her mother-in-law. In tones of gushing enthusiasm that no doubt reflected her genuine excitement, but also reflected the conventions of society page reporting, Betsy told a reporter that she and her husband “tried to cram in enough fun in three weeks in New York to make up for the 28 months since [they’d] been together, Betsy continued:
We saw “Oklahoma,” “Harvey,” “The Hasty Heart” and “The Seven Lively Arts” with Bea Lillie, Bert Lahr, et cetera. We danced to Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Leo Reisman and at the Waldorf Wedgewood Room, the Café Rouge, the Astor Roof and several little places in Greenwich Village. And so many chocolate sodas were consumed that when Walter weighed in for his return plane trip, he had gained back almost 15 of the 40 pounds lost in the European Theatre! We celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary with gardenias and a lot of festivity.
The Cronkite wedding anniversary was on March 30, so the “three weeks” in New York were apparently broken into several segments, for by mid-March the happy couple was back home in Missouri. The March 16 clipping describing Cronkite’s talk on the postwar world noted, “Airplane travel took Cronkite from a frigid German town less than two weeks ago.”
While in Missouri they visited Cronkite’s mother, and also his father and stepmother—and photographs taken on the latter occasion help document the happy Cronkite reunion. And, of course, Cronkite also got to see his other “favorite redhead,” Judy the cocker spaniel. Finally, “on a bright April morning,” in Washington, D.C., according to the society page account quoting Betsy, “Walter left. And I got a cablegram two days later when I flew home that he had already arrived safely somewhere in Europe.” The story also noted, “Mrs. Walter Cronkite, Jr., the former Betsy Maxwell, plans to join her War Correspondent husband sometime this summer in Holland.”
Cronkite’s next letter to Betsy was written on April 10, 1945, from London, where he was temporarily delayed en route to Brussels. He had evidently taken orders prior to his trip home for goods then hard to come by in Europe—hence the girdles, tennis balls, lipsticks, and so forth that he delivered to friends in London.
Bert Brandt was a photographer for Planet/Acme, the United Press picture wire service, who had covered the D-Day landings. Ned Roberts and Bill Higginbotham were UP correspondents. Joan Twelftrees was a British UP correspondent.
Tuesday, April 10, 1945
Well, it is Tuesday and I’m still here in London … I’m afraid that by now you are back in Kansas City but I do hope that you stayed to take a look around Washington, or perhaps returned by way of New York and saw [Jim] McGlincy. Everyone here thinks he must have arrived in the States just about the time I left. I’m terribly sorry we missed him.
I’ve delivered the tennis balls, lipstick and girdles and found everyone but Ned Roberts, who, needless to say, got the balls, about as unappreciative as you’d expect these people to be. After I wrote you Sunday, I called Helvi Rintals, the Flemish girl, and told her I had brought the girdle and would leave it at the office for her to pick up. (I still thought I was leaving for Brussels Monday, at that point). She invited me instead to a regular Sunday open house given by one Countess Norborough, a Hungarian refugee intellectual who apparently uses the same cocktail recipe as Earl. It was the darnedest Grand Hotel you ever saw. We counted nine nationalities represented. Lady Iris O’Malley (honest!), Lord Louis Mountbatten’s sister who has been going around with a negro rhumba band-leader much to the embarrassment of the Royal Family, was there, as was some British naval commander who spoke nine languages including two Chinese dialects and Japanese, a smooth Hungarian who did native dances with Countess Norborough, some gal in the French Ministry of Information at whose wedding DeGaulle was best man, an American lieutenant-colonel in the railway transport service who went around slapping on the back and guffawing in the faces of the continentals in the best Babbit style. The old gal served some Spam and Hungarian cookies around nine and we all got away about ten which suited me perfectly because I was still pretty tired from the trip.
Yesterday I took girdle II to the office for Joan Twelftrees and the lipstick to Joan Mayers at the public relations office. They both nodded a polite thanks and that was that. I saw Twelftrees again last night, getting sucked into taking her to the Cocoanut Grove, a Regent Street nightclub. I went to Sandy’s for dinner with Bill Higginbotham and there ran into Frank Harris, European head of RCA, his date, and Ray Porter of NBC. They had the nightclub bug and I was so lonely and depressed that they didn’t have to twist my arm very hard to lure me along. Well, to make a long story short, Frank’s date’s roommate is Twelftrees and since Joan was working until eleven the suggestion naturally followed like day the night that we gather her up. Then Porter decided he’d pick up one Miss Peart of NBC who also was working late.
So we went to the C.G. where Harris, the belligerent Irish type, kept getting into arguments with doormen, waiters, busboys, singers, guests. We killed a bottle of twelve-dollar Scotch and half a bottle of elevendollar gin and naturally everyone got tight but—guess who? I don’t think I had over three drinks all evening. Porter got absolutely stiff. Remember how [Frank] Barhydt actually got ‘cockeyed’ at the MU-KU game? Well, Porter was so stiff he looked like Frankenstein in movement. He insisted on riding home in the baggage compartment of the taxi, out in the fresh air alongside the driver. I finally turned in about four A.M. …
I find that I forgot a rather important item I was asked to get for Paul Eve, a heluva nice Australian who works for BUP. He wanted 3 or 4 white, button-down if possible, shirts, 15 1/2, 33. Do you suppose you could get them and send them, civilian mail, direct to him at British United Press? Let me know when you do and I’ll tell Paul that they are on the way, then I can collect whatever they cost from him … Walter
ON MAY 5, 1945, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the surrender of the German army forces in western Holland, as well as those in northwestern Germany and Denmark. The complete surrender of the remaining German forces came two days later, May 7, and V-E Day was officially observed on May 8. In Holland, the disarming of the German army took several days to complete, during which armed clashes erupted between the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and Dutch resistance units. Not until May 8 did elements of the First Canadian Infantry Division enter Amsterdam, occupied since 1940, to the wild acclaim of Dutch citizens.
Reporters were supposed to enter Amsterdam behind the column of Canadian soldiers assigned to secure the city, but Cronkite and a Canadian reporter set out in an open command car by back roads and got there first. As a result, they bore the brunt of Dutch rejoicing and were pelted with tulips.
Cronkite made his way to the United Press office in the city, which had been shut down five years earlier. Three Dutch UP employees proudly presented him with the teletype machine they had disassembled and hidden in their basements during the entire war. Before the summer was over, the UP would be back in business in Amsterdam.
Cronkite’s letter of May 20, 1945, was his first surviving letter written from peacetime Europe. He had been shuttling between Amsterdam and Brussels sin
ce V-E Day. The privations of war were still all too evident in newly liberated Amsterdam. The previous winter would go down in Dutch memory as the “hunger winter,” for the Germans had cut off food shipments to the western cities in retaliation for Dutch support of the Allied armies in eastern Holland. Thousands of city dwellers had starved as a result.
May 20, 1945
This has been a hectic week in which, again, I haven’t had a chance to write you although I have been thinking of you … The real reason I haven’t had the time is that my day ends abruptly now at 9:30. There still is no electricity in the Netherlands and once the sun goes down all activity ceases. I haven’t yet been able to get a carbide or kerosene lamp for my room.
I returned to Holland Monday with Collie Small … We got into Amsterdam late Monday and checked into the Park Hotel where they were holding a room for me. Wednesday and again Friday I had to make short trips to The Hague attempting to arrange communications, and Thursday I had to make a run to Utrecht, site of the Canadian Press Camp, to replenish our dwindling rations and gasoline. A great deal of my time during the week has been taken with frantic efforts to get an automobile without which I’m hamstrung here. I still have not succeeded and yesterday morning the Brussels vehicle had to return with Collie and Mickey. Now I’m stranded.
Tonight I’m at Utrecht. I had to come down here this afternoon in order to get transportation to cover a big victory parade at the Hague tomorrow. I hope to get a ride back to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon, and then I’m stuck again.
To make matters worse, Saturday afternoon I was unceremoniously kicked out of the Park. The Canadian Army requisitioned it as a billet for service women. I have now moved into the much nicer Krasnopoldky which is on what is called “the dam” (it isn’t), a sort of large plaza flanked on one side by the old Royal Palace. It is only three blocks from the office, however. I am really almost sick from eating the terrible tinned bully beef and other rations which I have to draw from the press camp and have cooked by the hotel staff. There is absolutely no food in this part of Holland. It is impossible to tell you how bad things are. I have seen several persons faint in the streets from hunger. A prominent newspaper publisher whom I invited to meet me downtown said he could come but he couldn’t bring his wife. “Her feet are swollen too badly,” he said, “no food, you know.” The people are walking skeletons. Their eyes bulge from shrinking sockets and their skins are bleached of natural color. I find it sickening to sit across a desk and talk business with many of them … Walter
WITH THE END of the war, Cronkite began to report on the rebuilding of a war-ravaged continent.
From page 11 of the Tucson (Arizona) Daily Citizen, June 12, 1945:
DUTCH SCORING FAST COMEBACK BUT LIFE HARD
Raggedness and Hunger are Everywhere After Years of Nazi Rule
By Walter Cronkite
AMSTERDAM, June 25. (UP)—The Dutch people are coming back to something near normal perhaps faster than any other on the continent. But the mark of five years’ German occupation still is deep and the job of rehabilitation has barely begun.
Everywhere is hunger and raggedness and the thousand and one harassments of survival in a country where electricity, coal, gas, soap and every conceivable “necessity” are strictly rationed or non-existent.
Food is coming into the country regularly and the calory count of the average diet has risen from last April’s low of 400 to about 2,000 calories daily.
But most of the food is canned goods shipped in by Allied military authorities. Fresh meat, milk, and cheese are almost unknown …
In his letter of June 12, 1945, Cronkite reported on progress in the Low Countries. The Brussels UP operation was up and running, using teletype communications; Amsterdam had yet to be linked to the wire service network.
Food remained scarce, but Cronkite was happy to report a new addition to his wardrobe—a dashing, short-waisted “Eisenhower suit,” better known as the Ike jacket, which was modeled on the British battle jacket.
June 12, 1945
This letter is going regular mail because I have run out of v-mail blanks and can get no more until I return to The Hague where there are a few Americans. Incidentally, I hear from London that a lot of the air mail from there is reaching New York in three days now. If that is true, things certainly are looking up.
But I hope we won’t have to depend on mail much longer. I cabled Virgil [Pinkley] to inform you what progress was being made in getting you over. I trust by now he has been in touch with you and things are being worked out. Meanwhile I assume you are taking the very necessary shots.
I’m afraid there isn’t much to report from here. Things have been going along in a deadly dull rut for me. Doeppner and I have signed one paper and are on the verge with a couple of others. Last Friday we went down to Rotterdam to lay our proposition before an old client there, and tomorrow we return for his answer. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Meanwhile, I’m working full speed on the annoying office routine and communications. Incidentally, Sam Hales has done a terrific job in Brussels and has almost got us set up there with a leased teleprinter line to Paris, which is one of the great feats of the age, considering the terrible disruption in which all European communications are. I have got teleprinters in our office here—another major feat—but as yet there are no lines to connect us with anybody so they are useless …
There is absolutely no social life here because the usually hospitable Dutch have nothing to offer at the moment. Barrows and I take all our meals in the hotel, with our Army canned rations. It is unbelievable how sick we have gotten of Spam and terrible British sausage with an occasional tin of sardines and the inevitable beans. We get virtually no greens and no fruit or milk of any description. We have had two or three bowls of lettuce in the last month—at $1.20 per serving.
Did I tell you that, when I made the last run to Brussels, I bought in the U.S. Officer’s Store there an “Eisenhower suit.” It is the latest thing for the well-dressed man in the XTO. You probably have seen the general in his. He designed it, and a Paris manufacturer makes it so if anyone happens to ask you, tell them I get my clothes in Paris. It is made of a fine green material that holds a press and resists spots like nobody’s business, and is cut in the natty style of a sort of lounge jacket. Great stuff, unseen in any other theater of war. Or peace.
By the way, it seems more like a pre-war than a post-war era here. Everyone talks about, and worries about, what the Russians are going to do. I hope it is a bogey, and suspect strongly that it is simply the hangover of a lot of well-planted German propaganda.
A recent party resulted in a connection through which I have obtained from the seized German property pool a 1939 Hudson convertible. Now, if I can keep the damned thing running—because there are no parts available—and can get some sort of military permission to retain it, I have a car. The military permit is going to be difficult. Other correspondents have seized their own cars only to have them taken away later by the military. But because of my definite commitments for post-war duties here, I may be able to cling to it. It is almost essential for the job at hand, because there will be no possibility of getting a civilian car here for perhaps two or three years.
I am now looking for a flat for us here, but hope that it will be possible to delay a decision on that pending your arrival. If we have a certain means of communications, perhaps we can get a house somewhere on one of the quiet canals on the outskirts. There are some really lovely ones out there, and before the war they weren’t too expensive. Of course there are terrible black market prices in all commodities now, and I imagine the same thing applies to furnished flats or houses.
Love to the family and Judy too. Walter
CRONKITE’S LAST SURVIVING letter to Betsy from Europe, written on June 26, 1945, is concerned, not at all surprisingly, with plans for her to join him there. Following this letter, he began to communicate with her via the much faster and newly available medium of wire service cable.
June 26, 1945
Don’t use civilian addresses yet. That mail is being long delayed. I cabled you today to resume mailing to: c/o PRO HQ UK Base, APO#413, U.S. Army, c/o Postmaster, New York; instead of to Major Cutting. That is because the SHAEF Mission Netherlands is likely to fold up any day now. I also cabled that you should apply for visas to both Netherlands and Belgium, but, failing to get those, should ask for one for London. The latter is likely to be much simpler, and once we get you that far we can get you on over here in comparatively short order by one hook or another crook. At least we’ll be in the same hemisphere.
I’m all right for clothing at the moment and package delivery is so uncertain that perhaps you had better hold onto my sweat shirt, extra shoes, etc., for the moment. But please keep on sending food, canned fruit, tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, vitamin pills, and the like.
Regarding wives joining their occupation troop husbands: Every Army source here has been denying that story for months, and there was a recent story in Stars & Stripes that the House of Representatives had even frowned on the idea. As I get it, only State Department wives are going to be permitted now, and even then it depends on the conditions in the country to which they are going, and the attitude of the government there. For instance, because of difficult living conditions here, most of the American Embassy personnel at The Hague are bringing their wives only as far as London for the moment. This would not apply, however, to Belgium, and probably not in our case anyway because we would be living in Amsterdam instead of the Hague … Suggest you bring plenty of warm clothes: damn few summer ones on account of that’s how it is here—top coats most of the year around for gals, winter suits for men … Keep plugging that old French … Walter
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