Apparently the damn fools didn’t. Liebling went to Washington in the fall of ’40 to profile General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff. Liebling penned a New Yorker piece that lauded Marshall’s foresight in preparing America for war. But after his article appeared, Liebling got the impression it hadn’t made a ripple: His progressive friends didn’t think much of professional soldiers.
When McCall’s magazine commissioned him a few months later to write an essay on propaganda, Liebling used the platform to skewer the isolationist America First movement and its apologists among Wall Street chieftains and newspaper editors, chief among them right-winger Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Daily Tribune. But in truth the America First movement was buttressed by left-wingers, too—a reality that depressed the liberal Liebling.60
France “represented for me the historical continuity of intelligence and reasonable living,” Liebling reminisced after the war. “Nothing anywhere” would have meaning for Liebling until that continuity was restored.61 A French friend who had escaped the Nazis vowed to Liebling in early ’41: “We will awake from this nightmare.”62
Despite his best efforts, Liebling couldn’t wake up America. Whether liberal, conservative, or agnostic, Americans deceived themselves into thinking that the spread of Fascism was somebody else’s problem.
CHAPTER 2
“ALL SORTS OF HORRORS”—CROSSING TORPEDO JUNCTION
This correspondent came over recently in a fast ship. He had carefully schooled himself for a nervous breakdown by imagining all sorts of horrors: packs of submarines under foot; the sky darkened by the Luftwaffe after the second day out; breakfast of kippers, boiled potatoes at noon, brussels sprouts at night.
—HOMER BIGART, JANUARY 19, 1943
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
In September 1941, just three months before the U.S. was catapulted into war, the future Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight David Eisenhower, was a colonel running training exercises at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Prospective four-star general Omar Bradley had seen more action than Ike, his West Point classmate, but most of it had come while chasing the bandit Pancho Villa in the Army’s quixotic 1916 incursion into Mexico.
Walter Cronkite in the autumn of 1941 was on the foreign desk of United Press’ New York operation, editing stories filed by correspondents abroad while groveling to get overseas himself. The worldly future anchorman had never been east of Long Island.
Andy Rooney was still a buck private being trained as an artilleryman at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Outside of Rooney’s English classes at Colgate, the future commentator had never penned a commentary, let alone a who-what-where-why-when-how news article.
Hal Boyle was a rewrite guy on the Associated Press’ night desk in New York. The columnist who in the postwar years would travel the globe so extensively that the Overseas Press Club of America named an award in his honor, had never been outside North America.
Homer Bigart was a spot features writer for the city desk of the New York Herald Tribune. Bigart, too, had lived a parochial existence. Harrison Salisbury’s portrait of the early-war Bigart as a “journeyman with no foreign language, no foreign experience, no more knowledge of war or foreign affairs than he could glean from the headlines”1 accurately described the other three, as well. Just as World War II brought out the best in Eisenhower and Bradley, it stirred something within Cronkite, Rooney, Boyle, and Bigart that they may not have known they had.
Only Joe Liebling among the five had any background in European affairs or combat reporting. But Liebling hadn’t witnessed much actual fighting in his first go-round as a war correspondent. The French and British armies had disintegrated so quickly in Hitler’s onslaught that most of Liebling’s spring 1940 bylines limned Parisians’ weirdness as the Nazis grew closer.
The five men brought different perspectives and journalistic acumen to war coverage. Cronkite was a better writer than he gave himself credit for, but at heart he was a meatball journalist, a guy who learned his craft in no-nonsense newsrooms and wrote in a rat-a-tat style that he never completely abandoned, but later managed to adapt for broadcast. His métier during the war was telling the story of a clash through the eyes of one or two heroic combatants.
Boyle was raised in the same bare-bones wire service world but developed a creative technique that transcended it. Indeed, during the war Boyle’s narrative helped redefine AP’s services. Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook, Boyle’s column, was second only to Ernie Pyle’s dispatches in grassroots popularity; by midwar, Boyle’s features had become a breakfast table fixture in millions of American homes. Boyle’s copy rarely addressed the larger ramifications of an Allied offensive. Instead, Boyle plowed ground that Pyle was to make famous: profiling grunts in the trenches, always looking for the human side of the war. “The fellow who pulls the trigger on a gun is more interesting than what happens to the bullet,” Boyle remarked in midwar.2
Rooney was a cub reporter tossed—untrained—into the biggest maelstrom in history. Through trial and error, he helped forge the Stars and Stripes, the wondrous “paper for Joe,” the broadsheet that chronicled the bravery and struggles of American servicemen and servicewomen caught thousands of miles from home. By war’s end, Rooney had saluted nurses, medics, motor pool mechanics, Red Cross hostesses, amateur thespians, truck drivers, cooks, tankmen, howitzer operators, air gunners, and incalculable numbers of GI Joes—not to mention Generals Eisenhower and Bradley and hundreds of field officers. But not General George Patton, for whom Rooney developed an instant—and lifelong—contempt.
Bigart, who had less classroom education than any of them, ironically became renowned for his facile grasp of geography and military tactics. No reporter in the ETO could recount a particular day’s actions, then plug them into a larger strategic framework as powerfully as Bigart. Journalism is often called the first draft of history. In Bigart’s case, and perhaps his alone among the ETO’s workaday correspondents, it was literal. Any historian studying the nuances of the Allied air war, or the campaigns in Sicily, Italy, the Riviera, and later the eleventh-hour push toward the Japanese home islands, would do well to read Bigart’s daily reportage.
Often Bigart’s stuff was featured in the right-hand column on page one of the Herald Tribune. Despite his remarkable success during the war, Bigart the Depression kid never felt secure at the Trib. Every day, he believed he had to prove himself to demanding editors. Cronkite and Boyle had also been upended by the Depression; even after they achieved fame, their letters back home were full of worries about job security.
Liebling the rich kid and Times Square raconteur had been insulated from Depression anxiety. Joe became something very different from his colleagues during the war. Unconstrained by daily deadlines and usually unconcerned about a censor lurking over his shoulder, he could still indulge his passion for oddballs and eccentrics. But his narrative was leavened by a reverence for the Allied cause and a profound gratitude for the kids sacrificing their lives and limbs to liberate his beloved France. He pretended that combat bored him, but few could describe the bloody back-and-forth of a battle with Liebling’s panache.
A YEAR BEFORE THE U.S. entered the war, the New Yorker had sent Liebling to London. Joe got the news about Pearl Harbor while returning for a holiday visit to the U.S. He was in the mid-Atlantic aboard a Norwegian trawler that escaped the sonar screens of U-boats. Joe toasted America’s entry into the war with his new Scandinavian friends.
Liebling ultimately called the book he published in midwar The Road Back to Paris. In it, the boxing devotee divided his pieces into three chronological categories: The World Knocked Down, The World on One Knee, and The World Gets Up.
The others may not have known Liebling early in the war, but they certainly shared his zeal to grab a ringside seat for the most momentous fight in history. By early ’42, Cronkite, Boyle, and Bigart had been hectoring their bosses to send them to a war zone. The three were also impelled by something besides a red-bl
ooded yearning to catalogue the conflict: All three were young enough to be drafted. But the U.S. War Department had deemed that combat correspondents would be exempt from Selective Service.3
THE WORLD KNOCKED DOWN DOESN’T begin to describe the dire straits faced by the Allies in 1942. Adolf Hitler’s empire, in the words of New Zealander historian Chester Wilmot, “stretched from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, from the English Channel to the Black Sea and almost to the Caspian. Between the Pyrenees and the Ukrainian steppes there was no other sovereign state but Switzerland.” By mid-’42, Panzer armies had reached the Volga in their push against the Soviet Union and gotten precariously close to the Nile in their thrust against British forces in North Africa. “In three years of war,” Wilmot wrote, “Hitler had been denied victory only in the sky above London and in the snow outside Moscow.”4
Moreover, Hitler’s Axis partner, General Hideki Tojo, emboldened by the success of his sneak attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, continued Japan’s imperial conquest of Asia Pacific and sought to do the same in the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Allied leaders fretted that, unless thwarted soon, Hitler and Tojo would inevitably join forces somewhere east of the Suez and west of the Ganges.
The war’s geographic parameters may have eluded many Americans, but most were driven by two primal emotions: a desire for quick revenge against Japan and a deep-seated dread of German U-boats. One of Hal Boyle’s first wartime articles, written aboard a troopship, described the disappointment a group of GIs felt upon learning that the convoy was heading toward the Mediterranean, not the Pacific. “We wanted to get the Japs first,” a California private told Boyle while fingering the six-inch knife sheathed on his hip.5 President Roosevelt gained some measure of vengeance against Tojo by correctly insisting—over the objections of his military advisors—on Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid against Tokyo in April 1942. Doolittle’s raiders inflicted only superficial damage on Japanese factories but did wonders for U.S. morale.
But in early ’42 nothing struck fear into the hearts of Americans like the dastardly Unterseebooten. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a vestige of the Great War, the biggest reason that American public sentiment had turned against Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. People who couldn’t find Château-Thierry on a map still remembered the Germans’ torpedoing the ocean liner Lusitania. Americans now feared, two and half decades later, that troopships carrying their children and grandchildren would suffer the Lusitania’s fate. Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s U-boat commander, was unconscionable: After deadly attacks, Dönitz defied international conventions by instructing his captains to machine-gun survivors.
Americans’ paranoia was well-founded. Since East Coast merchants stubbornly refused to impose blackouts, bright shore lights silhouetted freighters and tankers, turning them into sitting ducks. Horrified beachcombers from the Gulf Coast to New England watched as massive amounts of oil, cargo, and human debris washed up onshore. Losses quickly mounted: in May of ’42, U-boats decimated three times the amount of Allied shipping that had been sunk in January.6
Churchill admitted that his lowest moments came while contemplating the appalling toll inflicted by German submarines. “The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war,” he wrote. “Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”7
“A SOLDIER ABOARD A TROOPSHIP has at least one advantage over a canned sardine—he comes out alive,” Hal Boyle joked while crossing the Atlantic for the first time in the fall of ’42. Although Private First Class Andy Rooney’s sardinelike trip was involuntary, Rooney beat Boyle across the ocean by four months. Rooney’s 17th Field Artillery Regiment, then stationed at Florida’s Camp Blanding, got word in July 1942 that it was being transferred to Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. The men didn’t stay near the Susquehanna River for long: After being immunized with a series of shots, they were en route to New Jersey to catch a troopship.8
Just before they got on the train to north Jersey, the men were called in to have mug shots taken. Rooney’s photo, he later conceded, accurately captured his attitude toward Army life. With snarling eyes and pursed lips, adorned with a sign strung around his neck that read, “A. A. Rooney, Pvt.,” it made him look like he was a fugitive from justice.
None of the enlisted men in Rooney’s outfit had a clue as to where they were headed. It could just as easily have been the Pacific, on a ship routed through the Panama Canal. Along with four thousand other men, Rooney was loaded on board a converted British cargo carrier, the Orcades. The men’s sleeping quarters were crammed into the storage space down below; thousands of uncomfortable canvas hammocks hung from pipes.
Boyle later likened the crush of soldiers on a troopship to being along the rail at the Kentucky Derby.9 Enlisted men killed time by reading pulp magazine fiction and murder mysteries while officers played checkers and chess and listened to “Lord Haw-Haw,” the German radio mouthpiece, on the shortwave.10 Worried about U-boats and nauseated by the smell, Rooney couldn’t sleep, so he roamed around in the shank of the night, chatting up British galley mates and bakers. Poker and craps games were a popular pastime for other sleepless GIs, although lights were forbidden on deck. To escape claustrophobia, some guys dragged their bedrolls into the open air. But as the ship entered more dangerous waters, officers told them to go back below.11
Soon Rooney figured out the modus operandi that got him through the ten-day ordeal: he’d get shuteye during the daylight hours when most of the men—and their noxious odors—were up on deck, and explore the ship at night when it was easier to move around. The Orcades was part of a huge convoy that included battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers; the flotilla followed a typical course for early ’42 crossings, heading northeast to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then refueling and skirting Newfoundland and Iceland before arriving in the British Isles. Fortunately for Rooney and mates, the midsummer seas weren’t especially rough; still, many of the men had trouble keeping down distasteful British food. It seemed to take forever, but eventually the Orcades and its escorts steamed into Liverpool; Rooney got his first glimpse of England, his home base for the next three years.
Rooney had no way of knowing it as he grabbed his gear and joined the mêlée headed toward Liverpool’s train station, but the Orcades was damned. Less than three months later, while traveling unescorted on a secret mission to the Indian Ocean, it was torpedoed by a U-boat in the South Atlantic. The Orcades was one of the largest Allied troop carriers—one of the biggest Allied ships, period—sunk during the war.12
Reminded seven decades later that his troopship went down eighty days after he walked its plank, the ninety-two-year-old shrugged and said that a lot of ships were sunk during the war.
THE ILL-STARRED ORCADES WASN’T GIVEN much time to refuel or restock. Within days of getting back to New York from the Rooney mission, the transport was thrown into another convoy to the United Kingdom, this one even bigger. It would be witnessed by a wire service correspondent and future sailing enthusiast making his first-ever sea voyage.13
Transporting men and equipment and buttressing the Royal Navy’s convoy protection were virtually the only combat roles America played in the first few months of the European war. As a result, a news-starved public wanted to learn as much as it could about the people and ships navigating what Allied sailors had come to call Torpedo Junction.
Walter Cronkite had been begging UP president Hugh Baillie and senior editors Harrison Salisbury and Virgil Pinkley to cover the Battle of the Atlantic from the deck of a warship. In early August ’42, Cronkite was designated a Navy correspondent and authorized to cover a convoy.
Before Cronkite could jump aboard the World War I–vintage battleship USS Arkansas, then docked off Staten Island, he needed proper credentials and attire. The paperwork took several hours at the Navy’s headquarters at 90 Church Street in New York. Cronkite was told to p
ack light: he’d be limited to a musette bag, a portable typewriter, and some carbon paper.14
“The United States military was as unprepared for handling the requirements of the press as it was for meeting the enemy,” Cronkite remembered.15 “They were ad-libbing as they went along.”16
Ordered by Navy officials to get himself a proper uniform, Cronkite excitedly showed up at Brooks Brothers in Manhattan, only to discover that its tailors were as clueless as he was about what a correspondent’s garb was supposed to look like. So Cronkite phoned the public relations office at Navy headquarters, asking for guidance. There was a long pause. Make it look a little like an officer’s uniform, Cronkite was told.17 So he did. Cronkite may have been the first ETO reporter to actually procure a dress uniform.
Eventually, the ad-libbers in the War Department determined that civilian correspondents would be given officers’ privileges and field-grade uniforms without insignia of rank or branch of service.18 At a quick glance, the drab olive outfits made them look like ersatz Army captains. Cronkite and other uniformed correspondents were startled when enlisted men began saluting them. It took repeated episodes before reporters learned to return the courtesy with an awkward gesture of their own. Wearing a uniform made the chubby Joe Liebling so uncomfortable that he felt he was “play acting.”19 UP insisted that Cronkite sit for a portrait shot; their twenty-five-year-old prodigy gazed beyond the camera with hardened eyes.
At first, the military dictated that correspondents’ uniforms be augmented by a green brassard with a large white C on the left arm. But among the uninitiated, the undefined “C” created confusion. On one of his first days aboard the Arkansas, an officer in the wardroom surprised Cronkite by inquiring about his religious affiliation. When Cronkite, mystified, allowed that he was “sort of a jackass Episcopalian,” it caused the officers seated around the table to exchange glances. After a few strained moments, a lieutenant queried, “Well, how did you happen to become a chaplain?”
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