In the late ’30s, with the specter of war looming, Betsy and Walter had signed up for the federal government’s Civilian Pilot Training Program. Much to his chagrin, Walter had been washed out because of color blindness, but Betsy had earned her wings—and bragging rights for the rest of their lives together.15
The color-blind correspondent’s penchant for going airborne elicited a rebuke from his UP superiors, who had already lost prized reporter Brydon Taves in a plane mishap and didn’t want to lose another. In February 1944, after Cronkite returned from a B-26 Marauder operation against nascent enemy V-1 rocket sites along the Pas de Calais coast on the English Channel, he was told in no uncertain terms to forswear combat flights.16
Decades later, after “Uncle Walter” had succeeded Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower as paterfamilias—twentieth-century America’s last (and best) surrogate dad—his CBS News underlings, astounded and a little put off by his doggedness and unflappability, dubbed him “Old Iron Pants.” It was one of those exquisite nicknames meant to convey heartfelt respect and a hint of disdain all at the same time.
But the Cronkite who wedged himself between bombardier F. E. Umphress, Jr., (front right) and navigator Kenneth Olsen (back left) in the transparent nose beneath Shoo Shoo Baby’s cockpit wasn’t wearing iron pants. Cronkite was plenty nervous, he later admitted. The UP reporter had been on the bombing beat for his entire tenure in England. He’d written tons of profiles about airmen like Umphress and Olsen, kid lieutenants who risked life and limb and braved subzero temperatures to take the fight directly to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Millions of American newspaper readers, anxious to learn more about their boys in battle, hung on every word.
Cronkite was never as pious as his public persona. With a good smoke and cocktail in hand, he loved to spin yarns about his dalliances in bookie joints and topless bars and the rest of Kansas City’s steamy underbelly. Still, he’d once toyed with becoming an Episcopal minister. But he had a soft spot—and not inconsiderable envy—for hell-raisers. He was forever pulling his rakish London roommate, fellow UP reporter Jim McGlincy, out of barroom brawls and scrapes with the landlord.17
So Cronkite was bemused to learn that Shoo Shoo Baby’s Bob Sheets was one of the four B-17 pilots who’d gotten in Dutch the previous fall for buzzing Yankee Stadium during the first game of the 1943 World Series.18 Members of the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals weren’t the only ones ducking for cover that afternoon as Sheets and his wing mates, completely unannounced, came thundering in low over the Bronx. Many in the sellout crowd of sixty-eight thousand–plus thought the city was under attack. Enraged, mayor Fiorello La Guardia wanted the miscreants court-martialed, but there was too great a demand for competent bomber pilots. Sheets, his buddy Jack Watson, and their two accomplices got away with mild reprimands and seventy-five-dollar fines.19 Overnight, the Yankee Stadium quartet became legends in the hell-for-leather air corps.
Correspondents, especially wannabe pilot Cronkite, were in awe of flyboys: the bomber skippers who hustled the “swellingest gals”;20 the fighter hotshots who bragged about their duels with Luftwaffe aces over the North Sea; the bombardiers, radar technicians, radio operators, flight engineers, and navigators who, when not in their cups, would calmly dissect their planes’ performance at five miles above the earth; and, most of all, the tail-, topside-, and ball-turret gunners, the eighteen-year-old kids who stared into their beer a little too long, hands trembling as they took another gulp.
Cronkite the correspondent may have been awed, but Cronkite the human being knew enough not to get too close. Indeed, among the first things he told Harrison Salisbury when the UP senior editor (and future New York Times sage) arrived in London in early ’43 was to keep an emotional distance from the bomber boys. Too many wouldn’t be coming back—or if they did, they’d be shot up, maybe crippled for life, Cronkite warned.21
No reporter understood the macabre metrics of air combat survivability better than Cronkite. S for Sugar, the Molesworth-based B-17 in which Cronkite had flown his first mission over the Reich, was one of eleven bombers shot down in January ’44 while attacking an aircraft assembly plant in Oschersleben, Germany. The S for Sugar men were luckier than many Allied fliers that day: they bailed out and spent the rest of the war in a Luftwaffe-run stalag.22
Fully three-fourths of the American airmen who flew against Nazi Germany in 1943 and the first half of 1944 ended up as casualties of one kind or another,23 apparitions that haunted the journalists who covered East Anglia airdromes, sharing beer and small talk with doomed young men. Stars and Stripes reporter Andy Rooney, Cronkite’s friend and fellow air war writer, likened bombing missions to playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter.24
CRONKITE HAD BEEN AROUND MOLESWORTH for a lot of missions. But he’d never seen it as frenzied as it was on that early June morning. At the last minute the brass had added a horde of new targets and demanded extra sorties, exacerbating Molesworth’s bedlam. Each of the thirty-four B-17s in Shoo Shoo Baby’s 427th Bomb Squadron was being loaded with a full complement of ten five-hundred-pound demolition bombs, believed to be the optimal weapons for the unprecedented low-altitude attack the squadron was being asked to undertake.
A few hours earlier, Cronkite had been alone in his London flat. Like virtually everyone in the south of England that evening, he’d heard the unstinting drone of Allied warplanes and figured something big was up. “The whole world knew that the [cross–English Channel] invasion was imminent,” Cronkite remembered a half-century later. “The secret being guarded to the very death was exactly when and where.”25
Over Cronkite’s protestations, his bosses at UP that spring had dictated that once the assault began, he would stay in London, write the lead story, and coordinate transatlantic coverage. Their edict left him “broken-hearted,” he wrote to Betsy on May 14. “I am safe and snug and hating it,” he snarled.26 Fewer than three dozen of the five hundred Allied war correspondents in England had been “assimilated” with invasion-day troops; Cronkite, despite his stature, wasn’t one of them. Ironically, his party-boy roomie, McGlincy, was among the elite few.27
At his place on Buckingham Gate a couple of blocks from the royal palace, Cronkite was trying to nod off after midnight when he was startled by someone banging on his door. Standing there, red-faced and in full uniform, was Major Hal Leyshon, an Eighth Air Force public relations officer whom Cronkite had gotten to know from poker games and the occasional spree in Piccadilly. A postmidnight visit from Leyshon, then, was not all that unusual—but not with Hal wearing a uniform and a scowl.
A onetime New York newspaperman, Leyshon brusquely inquired about the whereabouts of McGlincy. Still half asleep, Cronkite explained that Jim was somewhere in the south of England, sequestered with an Army outfit “on maneuvers.”28 Still not satisfied, Leyshon stormed around the apartment, jerking open every closet door. “What in the devil are you doing, Hal?!” Cronkite demanded.29
Finally Leyshon growled, “Cronkite, you’ve drawn the straw to represent the Allied press on a very important mission. It will be dangerous. No guarantee you’ll get back. But if you do, you’ll have a great story. You can turn it down now, or you can come with me. And security is on—you can’t tell your office!”30
Cronkite did not hesitate. “I’m in. I’m with you,” he assured Leyshon.31 Already rehearsing an alibi, he hurriedly climbed into his ill-fitting uniform. “I figured if I made it,” he wryly recalled, “the UP would forgive me.”32
Leyshon had a sedan and driver waiting. As they tore north on blacked-out country roads, the wily public relations officer stoked his friend’s competitive fire. Leyshon promised Cronkite he’d have the hottest story in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) that day. Best of all, Cronkite would be back at UP’s offices off Fleet Street before any Allied reporter—including his nemeses at AP and INS—had even filed a story!33 Leyshon knew his man: Cronkite was as vainly cutthroat as any correspondent in England.
THE
Y PULLED INTO MOLESWORTH IN time for the premission briefing at 0330. Having been awakened ninety minutes earlier, the B-17 crew members were perched on chairs and benches, eager to learn their objectives.
G-2 intelligence officers wielding wooden pointers stood on a platform; behind them was a huge map concealed by a drape. Every briefer in Britain at that hour was smiling “like a skunk eating chocolate,” one flier recalled.34 After calling the men to attention, the officers paused for dramatic effect—then dropped the curtain.
Everyone hooted. Instead of a flight path taking them deep into the Third Reich, the tacked-up ribbons foretold a brisk run across the Channel into northern France. Colonel Kermit D. Stevens, commander of a 303rd combat wing, marched to the front of the stage and bellowed, “This is the day we have all been waiting for! Make ’em know it!”35
Along with scores of other Allied air units, the 303rd’s mission was to bomb enemy entrenchments and transportation arteries immediately behind the Calvados coast of Normandy—all aimed, they were told, at helping seaborne infantry gain a toehold on Normandy’s beaches. Shoo Shoo Baby’s squadron was given a daunting target: a bridge over the Orne River and its parallel canal that, left intact, would enable the Germans to rush reinforcements to the beaches. The bridge was some 10 miles inland, outside a village known as Caen.36
For weeks, Cronkite had groused about being sidelined. Now, thanks to a lucky draw and a friendship forged over watered-down bourbon, he would be an eyewitness to the twentieth century’s most epochal moment. On that day of days, Cronkite’s Fort was one of 9,500 Allied warplanes that saw action over the Channel. The Missouri daredevil was the only American correspondent that morning to fly on a bomber. During takeoff, Cronkite parked himself in the B-17’s plastic nose, the better to absorb the full adrenaline rush.37
By the time Shoo Shoo Baby rumbled down Molesworth’s mucky runway, jostling its men with each bump, the sun had been up for a while. Twenty-four thousand Allied paratroopers had already hurtled into the dank gloom all over Normandy. Before long Cronkite could glimpse through the clouds the “unbelievable” spectacle of vessels steaming across the Channel—so many, he wrote, that there “didn’t seem to be room for another.”38 By now it was nearing 0700, Tuesday, June 6, 1944.
It was D-Day.
ONE OF THE BOATS THAT Shoo Shoo Baby barreled past at sixteen thousand feet was LCI(L)-88, a Landing Craft Infantry, Large, operated by the U.S. Coast Guard and carrying an elite band of demolitionists from the Sixth Amphibious Naval Beach Battalion. At that precise moment, LCI(L)-88 was hovering a mile or so off a beach Allied planners had christened Omaha.
Bracing themselves against choppy seas, LCI(L)-88’s officers were standing on the bridge, peering through field glasses, trying to divine how the first wave of seaborne troops—infantrymen from the U.S. Army’s Blue and Gray Division, the Twenty-ninth—was faring. From that distance it was tough to tell, but it didn’t look good. Huge plumes of smoke billowed from German artillery and 88s, the deadly accurate antiaircraft and antitank guns. Every few seconds there was a concussive whoosh! as enemy gunners zeroed in on the boats in front of them. The splashes were getting closer and louder.
At exactly 0735—sixty-five minutes after H-Hour—LCI(L)-88’s job was to clear a path for the next wave of invaders scheduled to hit the heart of Omaha. Its mission was to deposit the Navy demolition team, expert engineers who’d been trained to dismantle the insidious obstacles that German commander Erwin Rommel had planted to repel an attack. Allied planners called that section of the beach, apparently without irony, Easy Red.
Perched next to the officers was a rotund thirty-nine-year-old writer with thick wire-rim glasses named Abbott Joseph Liebling. Liebling, scion of a wealthy New York family, owned a set of binoculars so powerful that he loaned them to the LCI(L)’s captain that morning.
The essayist was A.J. to readers of the New Yorker magazine but Joe to his friends—and in five days on board the LCI(L), four of them spent docked at Weymouth, England, Liebling had made a lot of new friends. The Coast Guard and Navy men were tickled that an intellectual with an Ivy League pedigree could talk sports—especially prizefighting—with such relish. Liebling not only knew more about boxing than most cornermen, but loved to imitate his heroes, inducing howls as his chubby carcass pranced and jabbed, bobbed and weaved. He was also a dead-on mimic, the kind of guy who could eavesdrop on a snatch of conversation and instantly spoof both ends.
One of the crew members who got a kick out of Liebling was a chunky youngster from the District of Columbia. The other Coasties needled the D.C. kid about his habit of beginning every letter to a girl back home with “Well, Hazel, here I am again.”39 The Coast Guardsman who served as the LCI(L)’s coxswain—the swabbie who lowered the ramp and plunged into the water to secure the anchor—had aspirations to be a journalist.
Among the seamen in the Navy’s amphibious force (or, as the Coasties kiddingly called it, the “ambiguous farce”40) was a twenty-two-year-old radioman from Kansas City, Kansas, named John Murphy. Young Jack was the kid brother of Associated Press columnist Hal Boyle’s sister-in-law. During the North African campaign earlier in the war, Boyle and Liebling had become jeep mates and drinking buddies. Thanks to Jack and his cohorts, Normandy would soon reunite them.
Liebling was the least pretentious-looking correspondent in the ETO. Combat reporters weren’t necessarily matinee idols, but most tried to dress the part, sporting an aviator’s scarf or a tanker’s jacket or some other item that projected a martial image. Fashion affectation, though, was lost on Liebling, whose military-issue slacks fit so loosely they flapped in the breeze. Three decades later, fellow correspondent Don Whitehead remembered that Liebling “managed to look like a large, uncomfortable sack of potatoes.”41
The potato-shaped boxing aficionado had begged the Army for an invasion assignment with foot soldiers. Liebling wanted to coldcock Hitler’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe) with his First Division pals from Tunisia—and had a personal invitation from the First’s commanding general, Clarence Huebner, to hit the beachhead at Omaha.42 Many of the men in the Big Red One, as the First Division was known, were native New Yorkers, ethnic guys with “Toidy-Toid Street” accents and attitudes to match—the streetwise cockiness that Liebling loved to celebrate in print.
After the Army press brass refused to honor Huebner’s proffer, Liebling accused them of perpetrating reverse snobbery. Nobody wanted to hand a plum invasion spot to some fat egghead from a snooty rag, he crabbed. But Liebling was lucky: Two old friends, John Mason Brown, a once and future Broadway critic, and Barry Bingham, a prewar reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, were handling the Navy’s invasion-day press relations. Lieutenants Brown and Bingham arranged for a berth for Liebling on LCI(L)-88, one of the first large landing crafts scheduled to hit Omaha.43
When Francophile Liebling, who was almost as enamored of northern France as he was of New York City, learned four days before the invasion that Normandy was the objective, he remembered feeling “as if, on the eve of an expedition to free the North from a Confederate army of occupation, I had been told that we would land on the southern shore of Long Island and drive inland toward Belmont Park.”44
Liebling had no idea until he arrived at Weymouth that the boat was skippered by an acquaintance. Before the war, Coast Guard captain Henry Kilburn “Bunny” Rigg had been a prizewinning sailor; on occasion, Rigg would write up his seafaring adventures for none other than the New Yorker. Liebling didn’t know Rigg well, but it’s likely he viewed Bunny’s presence as a heartening omen.45
Rigg’s gangplank greeting was so nonchalant it was “as if we were going for a cruise to Block Island,” Liebling wrote. But Rigg wasn’t leading a pleasure outing: the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) had made it clear to journalists that once aboard a boat bound for the Channel, there was no getting off. The LCI(L) was a marvel of design: Its flat bottom and collapsible ramp permitted it to run right onto a beach
.
Liebling’s prewar critiques of New York’s dining scene had betrayed a weakness for the good life. He was both gourmet and gourmand, and the thin gruel of service chow took some getting used to. On his first night on LCI(L)-88, before sitting down to a repast of frankfurters and beans, Liebling made mental notes as Rigg and the commanding officer of the beach battalion rolled out a remarkably detailed map of Omaha, buttressed by reconnaissance photographs of Easy Red that showed where the Germans had dug in pillboxes and artillery guns. Rigg pointed out a blockhouse on the bluff overlooking the beach, saying they could expect menacing fire from that area.
Eleven months earlier, the captain and his crew had weathered their share of action during the dicey landing at Licata in Sicily. Liebling was also comforted by the knowledge that the Coast Guard and Navy men had, together, been rehearsing their movements for weeks.
LCI(L)-88’s goal, Rigg chuckled, was to give the Navy boys a “dry-ass landing.” Knowing that Liebling was worried about enemy guns as the craft maneuvered near the beach, the Navy commander, a Washington, D.C., attorney and Annapolis grad named Eugene Carusi, assured the writer that LCI(L)s tended “to make a fairly small target bow on.”46 Carusi was Liebling’s kind of guy: He detested military chickenshit. His men loved him for it; they proudly called themselves Carusi’s Thieves.47
RIGG KNEW THAT CARUSI’S THEORY would be tested as, staring through Liebling’s binoculars at 0720, he sought the correct alleyway to Easy Red. If the team that had stealthily surveyed Omaha’s attack routes before dawn had done its job, LCI(L)-88 would come across colored buoys marking its path through the underwater mines, iron barriers, and concrete blocks. Not much went according to plan that morning at Omaha. But remarkably, the painted buoys were bobbing almost exactly where Rigg had anticipated.
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