Cronkite

by Douglas Brinkley

  By late March 1944, Cronkite, while not privy to classified information, knew that the Allied invasion of France was approaching. Betting on the exact day, place, and time of the invasion had become a parlor game for Molesworth beat journalists. The waiting game kept Cronkite on high alert. But as Cronkite’s fourth wedding anniversary approached—March 30, 1944—he also grew lovesick for Betsy. “I just sent you a cable . . . saying the only thing I seem to be able to think,” Cronkite wrote his wife. “That the first two years seemed to go so quickly, and the last two have dragged so horribly. Two whole years out of our lives. It makes this war with Hitler a pretty personal matter.”

  A glitch occurred that almost prevented Cronkite from covering D-day. For some reason, Cronkite wasn’t selected to be the UP reporter covering the Normandy invasion. The decision made that May was that Jim McGlincy would be one of the five hundred correspondents chosen for the invasion across the Channel. The snub stung. He was mystified as to why he was being benched. In a letter to Betsy he conveyed how “broken hearted” he was at not being chosen. But he did, in the end, play a minor role in the D-day landings.

  At 1:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, he was shaken awake in his London hotel room by a friend, Major Hal Leyshon, the PR man from the Eighth Air Force, madly pounding on his door. A breathless Leyshon told Cronkite, “We’ve gotten a new mission with the Eighth Air Force. And it’s going to be a highly dangerous operation, very dangerous, something we’ve never done before.” Leyshon told Cronkite he would have the first and best story of the cross-Channel assault. “There’s a pretty big story breaking,” Leyshon concluded. “I think you better come with us.” Cronkite quickly changed clothes and grabbed his bag. Once they were in Leyshon’s sedan, driving through the dark, Cronkite received a full explanation. “The invasion is about to start,” Leyshon said. “We’re sending a B-17 bomber group over the coast at low altitude as a spearhead.”

  “It struck me,” Cronkite wrote decades later, “that this was D-Day and I was going to be there.” As the car rumbled down a back road headed to the airstrip, Cronkite understood that D-day was the make-or-break moment for the Allies. How strange that living in such a grand moment felt so routine. Leyshon claimed that historians would someday think of June 6 as another Gettysburg or Waterloo. Cronkite knew he was probably right. “You have the greatest story of the war because you’re going to get back before any other stories will be released,” Leyshon told Cronkite when they reached the airfield at 3:00 a.m. “You will be back in your office ready when the story of D-day starts hitting the wires. You’ll be able to write, ‘I’ve just returned from flying over the beaches.’ ”

  Cronkite remembered thinking, “Jesus Christ, that’s the greatest.”

  After a full year of round-the-clock reporting, Cronkite was excited to think that he would be a part of D-day, flying in a tight formation of B-17s, witnessing the beginning of the liberation of Europe. Leyshon warned Cronkite that the flight would be at a very low altitude because of the lousy weather. Once at the Molesworth base, Cronkite sat through a series of fast and furious intelligence briefings. A huge map of Normandy was unveiled that showed arrows and estimates. For the first time, Cronkite grasped the enormity of the Normandy invasion. Every aspect of D-day amazed him. He didn’t know the Allies had over four thousand vessels in their armada.

  Off Cronkite went into the sky on a B-17 in a V-formation of nine planes. Instead of flying at seventeen thousand feet (as he had during the Wilhelmshaven raid), Cronkite was now cruising only a few hundred feet above the ground in a thick fog. “And then the order came to arm the bombs—remove the safety pins so they would explode on contact,” he wrote. “If we collided, the bomber would probably go, and the 303rd could go up in one terrible series of blasts.”

  Cronkite’s flight over the North Sea didn’t accomplish its mission of dropping bombs on German defensive positions. The fog made that impossible. Nor did Cronkite, craning his neck in vain, have a genuine view of the beachhead. The greatest invasion fleet in world history was below him—battleships, cruisers, destroyers, large transports, and a phalanx of lesser vessels—but he couldn’t see them because of cloud cover. He did get a few glimpses of the Allied armada crossing the Channel, which he deemed an “unbelievable sight.” There were so many vessels, he wrote, that there “didn’t seem to be room for any more” in the Channel.

  His own reporting that morning was understated. With perhaps too much humility, he didn’t even mention that he’d been on board a B-17 bomber during the early going with the Mighty Eighth. Unlike Murrow for CBS Radio or Hemingway for Collier’s (on Omaha Beach), Cronkite didn’t really have much of a story. The first part of Cronkite’s UP report was a succinct account of the all-night bombing strikes on German positions along the French coast. Then Cronkite gave some idea of the sights and sounds of D-day’s first air battle. “Many of the German gun nests were blanketed by thick cloud formations, but the British bombers sent their blockbusters crashing down dead on the targets through flare rings dropped by their pathfinder planes,” he wrote. “Throughout the night the skies over the channel reverberated to the ceaseless beat of Allied planes and the roar of exploding bombs rolled back to the British coast.”

  The most riveting journalism report of June 6, 1944, came from George Hicks for ABC. He stood near the bridge of the American command ship U.S.S. Ancon (a sophisticated communications ship) as it lay off Omaha Beach on D-day just after 6:00 a.m., in the midst of the Normandy invasion, which included more than five thousand Allied ships and thirteen thousand Allied aircraft. A stunned Hicks described the magnificent flotilla as it deposited soldiers on the beach. There was no air battle on D-day; the decimated Luftwaffe didn’t show up in force, as feared. Hicks stayed where he was and continued recording for more than ten minutes. The present tense was radio’s strength, and rarely had it been quite so effective as with a man and a microphone at the core of battle, in this case, Hicks for ABC:

  The planes come over closer (sound of plane) . . . Smoke . . . brilliant fire down low toward the French coast a couple of miles. I don’t know whether it’s on the shore or is a ship. Here’s very heavy ack-ack now. (Heavy ack-ack.) The plane seems to be coming directly overhead. . . . (Sound of plane and machine-gun fire and ack-ack.)

  Well, that’s the first time we’ve shot our guns . . .

  Hicks stole the show. “After that,” said CBS News director Paul White, referring to Hicks’s report, “everything was anti-climax.” White was in New York, choosing reports from the pool for broadcast over the network. A workhorse with CBS since 1930, he believed radio had covered the invasion brilliantly, though others pointed to technical problems that reduced the number of reports available. The newspaper coverage was more complete, as papers all over America put out “extra” editions to cover the unfolding story. Virgil Pinkley, UP European manager and one of Cronkite’s immediate bosses, assumed the job of amalgamating the many reports into UP’s lead story on the day’s events, which ran under banner type on the front page of hundreds of newspapers. Cronkite’s account of the early-morning bombing was buried in the back pages of the few U.S. papers that ran it.

  What Cronkite took from D-day was that radio broadcasting was still the medium of World War II. When Murrow had first come to Europe in 1937, he tried to join the American Foreign Correspondents Association; he was turned down because he was a broadcaster, not a print reporter. After the Normandy invasion, Murrow was anointed president of the London-based organization. That honorific said it all in an overwhelmingly easy-to-comprehend way. Radio was the new print. Murrow by 1945 had grown accustomed to wearing garlands as neckties.

  Once all the D-day activity had settled down, Cronkite wrote a long and tangled letter home on June 12. “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 thing
s up,” he wrote to Betsy. “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 inland over Caen and Carentan, I did not see a single thing. I never was 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.”

  When asked decades later whether he had flown over Utah or Omaha Beach, Cronkite nonchalantly shrugged. “I think it was Omaha,” he said. “We didn’t know about those names then, of course; all I knew was it was the beach. I didn’t even know how extensive the landings were.” What Cronkite did know was that Eisenhower was the true man of the hour, the architect of Operation Overlord. In 1964, Cronkite got the opportunity to interview Eisenhower on Omaha Beach for a CBS News Special Report called “D-Day Plus Twenty Years.” Staring out at the English Channel, Eisenhower turned philosophical. “You see these people out here swimming and sailing their little pleasure boats and taking advantage of the nice weather and the lovely beach, Walter, and it is almost unreal to look at it today and remember what it was,” Eisenhower told Cronkite. “But it’s a wonderful thing to remember what those fellows twenty years ago were fighting for and sacrificing for, what they did to preserve our way of life. Not to conquer any territory, not for any ambitions of our own. But to make sure that Hitler could not destroy freedom in the world.”

  Cronkite nodded along in agreement, remembering his own D-day experience in the fog, a non-eyewitness to the turning point in the liberation of Europe. “To think of the lives that were given for that principle,” Eisenhower said to Cronkite, “paying a terrible price on this beach alone, on that one day, 2,000 casualties. But they did it so that the world could be free. It just shows what free men will do rather than be slaves.”

  In the aftermath of D-day, Cronkite knew the tide had indeed turned for the Allies. “I suppose I actually have been just as busy since D-day as I was before, but the work is more tedious,” he wrote his mother on August 15. “I no longer am handling the top story of the day: the air war has been relegated to second, third, or even fourth place, by the French fighting, the Russian Front and inner German politics. So, although scarcely two years ago I would have been thrilled to handle any big story, now I find myself getting just a little bored if it is not [a] number one story every day.”

  A month later, in the 263rd week of World War II, Cronkite would no longer find himself bored. But Cronkite’s Eighth Air Force reportorial beat wasn’t the story. The liberations of Paris and Brussels dominated headlines. Cronkite told his mother he’d ask Virgil Pinkley, the general manager of United Press, about finagling a quick two-week leave-trip home. He missed Betsy terribly. Even during war, keeping a foreign correspondent away from his wife for too long was cruel. No superior at the UP provided Cronkite much encouragement on the “break” front. “Hugh Baillie is coming over for a few weeks and Virgil thinks that, since I probably will be one of our post-war European bureau managers, I ought to be on hand when the president is here,” Cronkite wrote. “I agree with him to that extent, and also want a chance to see a little of the action before the show is over. But I also would like a couple of weeks with you all again.”

  While Cronkite manned the UP desk in London and worried that his rising career might be on the post-D-day downswing, a group of men and women in New York were doing work of far greater import to his future. The four American radio networks—CBS, NBC, ABC, and Mutual—knew television would be the new trend in broadcasting once the war was over. The medium had been around since the 1920s, but now its long infancy was coming to a close. Almost no one had a television set yet, and the networks had voluntarily suspended TV broadcasting for the two last years because of the war. But around D-day, CBS renewed its TV broadcasting efforts. Paul White, director of news, took a strong interest in transferring the expertise of the Murrow Boys into the new television medium.

  By the mid-1940s, while radio news was sleekly produced and as respected in terms of integrity as its print counterpart, television was just plain clumsy. White wrote with sturdy self-assertion, “There’s no question that television has tremendous possibilities, especially in the fields of news and special events. The news broadcaster, assisted by maps, charts, films, animation devices and photographs, should be able to give the news a dimension not possible when it is heard only by the ear and not seen by the eye.”

  White’s CBS division, overflowing with futuristic optimism, started producing an experimental TV broadcast twice a week. Hosted by an “anchor,” this fifteen-minute news show was innovative in the use of illustrations, and it impressed even Marty Schrader, the stern critic at Billboard magazine. He roundly disdained the rest of CBS’s TV programming but thought that the news show was equal in quality to anything on the radio. Since the other radio networks had yet to return to television, CBS and its news department now had a head start on the new medium. As White observed, the public was much more curious about television than about any of the innovations on the horizon for radio. But with the Second World War still in full swing, television would have to wait its turn until victory over both Germany and Japan could be declared.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gliding to V-E Day

  THE WAR GRINDS ON—PINING FOR NORMALCY—TV HOLDS ITS OWN (BARELY)—WHAT AN AIRBORNE OPERATION!—OUTHUSTLED BY MURROW REDUX—FEAR AND LONELINESS IN BRUSSELS—ARDENNES FOREST TALES—HELL’S HIGHWAY WITH BILL DOWNS—THESE ARE THE GOOD OLD DAYS—TULIP JUBILEE—V-E DAY AT LAST—REPORTING ON THE RUBBLE—OPENING UP BENELUX BUREAUS—REFUSING TO THROW IN THE TOWEL—WELCOME TO THE ATOMIC AGE

  The Waco CG-4 was the most widely used U.S. troop and cargo glider in World War II. Cronkite suddenly found himself strapped inside one like a sardine in a can. It was September 17, 1944, and he was participating in Operation Market Garden (the combined armored/airborne attack through Holland north from the Belgian/Dutch border that aimed to cross the lower Rhine River and outflank the Siegfried Line to break into Germany’s back door). It seemed odd to Cronkite, as the lead C-47’s tow rope was cut and his glider headed toward the Dutch farmlands below, that this flying coffin had been made by the Wicks Aircraft Company’s factory in Kansas City.

  Of all the books written about World War II, Cronkite’s favorite was Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far. Not only did he cooperate with Ryan about his own role as the UP reporter attached to the 101st Airborne’s assault on the Germans along the border of Belgium and the Netherlands, but he also recommended Ryan’s book to everybody because it portrayed the bravery of both the Allied soldiers and the Dutch resistance fighters determined to defeat the Nazis following the liberation of Brussels. “Market” was the code name for the airborne assault Cronkite found himself a part of that day, while “Garden” denoted the name given to the armored forces. “I was unceremoniously crash-landed in a troop-carrying glider,” Cronkite told Ryan. “The German Army welcomed us with machine-gun fire.”

  Cronkite was dropped into the largest airborne operation of World War II, in which over twenty thousand men rode in 478 white-striped gliders and 1,544 transport planes to help rid Holland of the Germans. His partner on his jarring descent in the glider was Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe; with them was a group of 101st Airborne staff officers. A flurry of antiaircraft fire rocked the sky as the Cronkite-McAuliffe team tried to engineer a smooth landing. The martial noise was deafening. As Cronkite’s glider thumped hard on the ground, almost knocking him unconscious, he thought of how idiotic he had been for believing a glider was like a kite—no “roaring engine,” simply a “silent glide into eternity.” For a few seconds, Cronkite thought he had died. In a conversation with historian Don Carleton, Cronkite joked, “if you have to go to war, don’t go by glider!”

  The 101st Airborne glider Cronkite was riding in landed near the Dutch village of Zon and the Wilhelmina Canal. The objective of Market Garden was to captu
re eight bridges that spanned the network of canals and rivers on the Dutch-German border—a feat that would require British and American troops to fly behind enemy lines. Cronkite was surprised immediately by the heavy volume of artillery fire left in the Third Reich’s arsenal. “I thought the wheels of the glider were for landing,” Cronkite told Ryan. “Imagine my surprise when we skidded along the ground and the wheels came up through the floor. I got another shock. Our helmets, which we all swore were hooked, came flying off on impact and seemed more dangerous than the incoming shells. After landing I grabbed the first helmet I saw, my trusty musette bag with the Smith-Corona typewriter inside and began crawling toward the [Wilhelmina] canal, which was the rendezvous point. When I looked back I found a half dozen guys crawling after me. It seems that I had grabbed the wrong helmet. The one I wore had two neat stripes down the back indicating that I was lieutenant.”

  The eight-day objective of Market Garden, authored by the usually cautious Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the British forces in Europe, was to hasten Allied victory by outflanking the Siegfried Line, a stretch of defensive forts along the western border of Germany. The astonishing Allied success of the D-day landings in France had become mired in the languid and costly advance through the Normandy glades and hedgerows, which the Germans defended with dexterity and resolve.