Cronkite’s experiences at the Ministry’s offices at the University of London were typical. Early in the war, censors encouraged reporters to draft stories the way they normally would. “Then your story went in to the censors, and the censors killed it, cut it, or did whatever they needed to do to it,” Cronkite remembered. “And then they sent it back out to you, whether you wanted to file it that way or not. Sometimes, if you didn’t care how they censored it but just wanted it to move as quickly as possible, you could mark it, ‘Read and File.’ This meant for them to censor it and then send it to your office in the censored form. It might not make much sense, but you would feel that your office would get enough of the story out of it.”35
Back home, away from the war zone, U.S. press outlets operated on the honor system. In other words, for stories written in the States, censorship was voluntary. Not so in Britain or the ETO. “We argued like fury with the censors,” Cronkite recalled. “There were violent scenes going on all over the room.”36
Reporters had to pick and choose their battles with censors. Cronkite always asked himself before submitting an article: Is this information something that without doubt the Germans know? Because if that was indisputably true, then perhaps it was worth feuding over with the censor. But if there was any doubt about the enemy’s knowledge, then Cronkite and other reporters would censor themselves.
Censorship was bumpy, erratic, and often an embarrassment to the Four Freedoms the Americans were supposed to be defending. But, Cronkite recalled, “it worked with considerable smoothness, despite that.”37
THE VAGARIES OF ALLIED CENSORSHIP were the last things on Private Andy Rooney’s mind as he was ushered off the troopship Orcades. Lugging their gear, Rooney and his buddies in the Seventeenth Artillery trudged onto a packed train at the Liverpool depot.
They had orders to report to the U.S. Army base at Perham Down, a mushrooming camp near the village of Hampshire, not far from the Channel. “It was fun being in a strange country,” Rooney recalled. “We were vaguely aware that there would be an invasion of France if the war lasted, but it seemed far off and we knew that the artillery would be a safer place to be than the infantry because the artillery never wades ashore with the first wave.”38
Rooney’s relations with the brass stayed rocky at Perham Down. One hard-ass upbraided Rooney for having the temerity to apply for Officer Candidate School—which, given Rooney’s disdain for Army life, was indeed a bit of a head-scratcher. Still, the rejection stung Rooney so much he huffed out of his superior’s office without saluting.
But Rooney was lucky: His contributions to the brigade newsletter were appreciated by a kindly lieutenant who recognized that Rooney’s talents lay beyond firing a howitzer. The officer put Rooney in charge of the regimental band. Eventually the band job morphed into a more substantial task as regimental historian.
As scribe, part of Rooney’s job was to examine the directives that came in from London and Washington. One day a memo arrived from Special Services urging qualified GIs to apply for possible reassignment to a newly revived Army publication, the Stars and Stripes. Rooney, with the lieutenant’s encouragement, threw together a résumé that embellished his lowly internship at the Knickerbocker Press and a brief stint editing a Colgate University magazine. To Rooney’s astonishment, their gambit worked: A few days later he returned from yet another confrontation with an officer to discover that orders awaited him. He was to report immediately to London to assume new duties at the Stars and Stripes.
Rooney knew he’d caught a break—but had no idea just how life altering those orders were. The twenty-two-year-old Rooney had stumbled into one of World War II’s accidentally magnificent institutions.39
The Stars and Stripes traced its roots to the Union Army during the Civil War. It was exhumed in France during World War I, where it was edited in Paris by none other than Harold Ross. The future founder of the New Yorker was an absent-without-leave doughboy; the editing job may have saved him from doing time in the stockade.40
It was revived again in early ’42 as U.S. troops began arriving in Northern Ireland; the brass recognized that GIs needed a morale boost. It started as a weekly with a modest staff of five. But as tens of thousands of American soldiers poured into the British Isles, the operation was moved to Soho in London’s West End. Soon the Stars and Stripes became a three-times-a-week affair, then a daily with an eventual staff of more than 150 and a huge newsroom and printing press leased from the Times of London.
Rooney was just one of many great journalists who cut their teeth in Soho’s editorial offices. Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News, Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes, and future Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin all learned their craft at the Stars and Stripes, as did dozens of other notables. At the Army’s insistence, reporters and editors stayed active-duty military; many, including Rooney, were granted the rank of staff sergeant.
The paper’s biggest fan was the Supreme Allied Commander; yet Eisenhower winced when, early on, it ran a series of overly rah-rah editorials. Instead of obsequious propaganda, Ike and his staff wanted something that had the feel of a hometown paper, complete with reasonably honest coverage of war developments (the two censors in the Stars and Stripes newsroom rarely killed stories41), local news, sports, and gossipy features about Hollywood and Broadway. Plus, of course, cheesecake photos of starlets. For every picture of Ike, there were dozens of scantily attired pinup girls like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.
Under the no-nonsense direction of Staff Sergeant Robert Moora, one of Homer Bigart’s old bosses at the New York Herald Tribune, and Moora’s deputy, Corporal (soon to be Sergeant) Bud Hutton, the former editor of the Buffalo Evening News, the Stars and Stripes became a must-read for GIs. It spawned field operations and separate editions all over the ETO and special issues for the Pacific Theater, as well.
The Stars and Stripes was full of characters who taught Rooney the ropes. The crusty Hutton, who looked and sounded like a character in The Front Page, became the first of Rooney’s many wartime mentors.
Stars and Stripes’ newsroom was like something out of central casting. It reeked of cigarette and cigar smoke; its floor was grease stained, littered with butts, soda bottles, half-eaten sandwiches, carbon paper, and rejected ledes torn with disgust out of Underwoods. Rooney loved every smelly inch.
The normally cocky Rooney was so green that when given an early assignment to cover the most mundane of stories—a service bowling tournament—he panicked, not knowing how to distill his notes into a simple who-won-and-by-how-much article. He got lucky, though. When he called to check in that night, the phone was answered by one of his pals on the night desk, not Moora or Hutton. His buddy jotted down the tourney information and volunteered to draft something for the next edition, sparing Rooney the humiliation of fumbling for a lede.
Despite the bumpy start, it didn’t take long for Rooney to begin finding his rhythm. The cub reporter earned his first Stars and Stripes byline on December 8.
His breakthrough came in what became an archetypal Rooney profile: saluting the unsung grunts behind the scenes. His tribute to the men of the motor pool ran on page two, alongside a photo of a mechanic laboring under the hood of a jeep.
Datelined AN ORDNANCE MAINTENANCE UNIT IN ENGLAND, on December 7, precisely one year after Pearl Harbor, Rooney’s article led with: “The Purple Heart may never be awarded to the grease monkey in olive-drab overalls who works seven days and nights a week to keep Army wheels rolling. But he is made of the same basic stuff that puts the men in the Flying Fortresses in the headlines day after day. The grease monkey is the unglamorous, backstage—and very necessary—human element of this war.”42
Rooney had found his niche. Six days later he did a feature on B-17 technicians, men “who often work all day in a space that would make a telephone booth look like the waiting room of [the] Grand Central Terminal.”43
The prep school kid from the elite college quickly became the Stars and Stripe
s’ champion of “ordinary” guys. Rooney and Bud Hutton would become so infatuated with young air gunners that, together, they wrote a book about them.
IT TOOK HOMER BIGART MONTHS to convince his bosses at the Herald Tribune that he was the right guy to buttress the paper’s two-person London operation. Thanks to the U.S. Navy’s improved submarine surveillance, at least part of the U-boat hysteria had subsided when Bigart made his crossing in January 1943. Although Bigart never confirmed his exact convoy, given the timing it was almost assuredly SC 116, which departed New York on January 4, 1943, with a retinue of some sixty ships. Its flagship, ironically enough, was the USS Arkansas, the same battleship Cronkite had ridden to Scotland five months earlier.
Troopship convoys were now “no more eventful than a trans-Atlantic voyage at the height of the prewar June tourist rush,” Bigart observed, more than a bit disingenuously, in his first article ever with a London dateline. With his ineffable touch at slipping the silly into the serious, Bigart told readers he was almost as fearful of mushy British food as U-boats. At the outset of the voyage, he planned to sleep either fully clothed, clutching his life preserver, or in a life raft, “winning the friendship of a plump seagull.” Before the boat had even left the dock, Bigart claimed he was so unnerved that he drank all the brandy he’d hoarded to combat seasickness.
When he awoke on day two and discovered that, against all odds, he was still alive, he felt a patriotic surge, but then realized the lump in his throat “was a bit of undigested sourdough roll.” After a few days at sea his shipmates “started grousing about the food, and then you knew that everything was normal.”44
Enlisted men on a troopship were inclined to believe rumors that ran the gamut from enemy submarines lurking just off the bow and their ship taking on water to nefarious officers who unjustly threw men into the stockade and got to slurp beer while regular guys were stuck with soda pop.45
A hillbilly band of Texas GIs entertained Bigart’s ship at night. Shooting craps and playing Ping-Pong were popular recreations. No one wanted to get too sweaty, though: the ship didn’t carry saltwater soap, so the men took few showers.
Only a few select officers knew the boat’s ultimate destination. Rumors were rampant that the convoy was headed toward North Africa. It wasn’t until the eve of their arrival that unit commanders were told how to transport their men to American stations throughout the British Isles. That last night at sea, there was an eleventh-hour outbreak of paranoia. “Someone had it straight from the engineer that a big pack of submarines was trailing the ship. Another said the whole German Navy was loose in the North Atlantic—Major So-and-so heard it on the wireless,” Bigart wrote.
Bigart’s convoy steamed untouched into an unnamed harbor (almost certainly Liverpool), occasioning him to sheepishly tell readers, “You had crossed the submarine-infested Atlantic without sighting even a porpoise. A hell of a thing to have to confess to your grandchildren.” As for his shipmates, they were just happy to be back on land.
“‘When I get on shore,’ said an infantry captain from Utah, ‘I’m going to get a handful of dirt and eat it.’”
The story’s clinching sentence was pure Bigart. Instead of waxing poetic about England’s verdant landscape, he snapped, “The green fields looked like propaganda.”46
It was fine for Bigart to poke fun at himself, but his fears were hardly exaggerated. In truth, there were still substantial “gaps” between Nova Scotia and Iceland in air support coverage of seaborne convoys. Two months later, two separate convoys (SC 122 and HX 229) that originated from New York by way of Halifax—the same route Bigart’s group had taken—were attacked by three “rakes” of wolf packs. Twenty-two Allied ships and more than three hundred servicemen were lost.47
After that debacle, Allied planners demanded that the gaps be closed by carrier groups and long-range reconnaissance aircraft. As the war progressed, U-boats became less of a threat. Yet there had been plenty for Bigart to worry about beyond kippers and brussels sprouts.
CHAPTER 3
NORTH AFRICA’S LIPLESS KISS
In war, as in love, it is your first campaign that stays bone deep in your memory. And Tunisia was our introduction to the sweetheart with the lipless kiss.
—HAL BOYLE, 1950
HELP, HELP! ANOTHER DAY!
It was still pitch-dark when AP’s Hal Boyle gingerly swung a leg over the side of the troopship and began inching down its boarding net. Boyle was heavily weighted: a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, without which he never went anywhere, strained an already-stuffed musette bag. The beloved portable typewriter he’d entrusted with an Army public relations officer would soon, to Boyle’s horror, sink to the bottom of Fedala Harbor.
Heaving fifty feet below was a landing craft. Boyle, then thirty-one, was operating at a distinct disadvantage. Unlike the young men clambering over the edge, the beefy AP reporter had not been through anything resembling boot camp. He was brand-new to the war beat and not exactly in tip-top physical condition—unless repeated cigar stub removal and twelve-ounce curls could be counted as exercise.
Moreover, besides a bulky backpack, Boyle carried on his shoulders the burden of posterity: He knew from briefings that he would be covering the largest amphibious action in history and the first joint U.S. Navy–U.S. Army operation since the Spanish-American War. Having spent the last couple of weeks crossing the Atlantic with the guys now knifing down the net, Boyle didn’t want to embarrass himself. It must have amused Boyle, who never shied away from a good time, that his company’s objective was Pont Blondin, a prewar playground that boasted a seaside casino and racetrack. But croupiers and jockeys weren’t waiting for them—heavily armed soldiers were.
It was eerily quiet. The only noise came from nervous officers hissing at them to keep mum. A few minutes before, the first wave of attackers going in just north of Casablanca had surprised defenders and gotten to the beach virtually undetected. Boyle had heard only a few scattered shots. At that point, none of the ships in the U.S. flotilla had opened fire, nor had any of the “enemy” batteries along the four-mile-long beach. American forces, in fact, were under strict orders to fire only when fired upon. Allied planners had hoped that the U.S. could get troops ashore in French Morocco with a minimum of bloodshed, perhaps even a laying down of arms by halfhearted mercenaries.
But as Boyle’s landing craft joined others in motoring toward shore, “a bright searchlight stabbed the skies at Pont Blondin and then swept seaward, catching our assault wave. In a bright glare that dazzled the coxswain, we ducked to the bottom of the boat,” Boyle wrote in an article that took a week to reach the New York Times and other U.S. papers. Within seconds, machine gun fire from the beach raked Fedala Harbor. A Navy support ship on Boyle’s port side retaliated, snuffing the searchlight.
“Then came a grinding crash as our landing boat smashed at full speed into a coral reef that has helped to win this shore the name of Iron Coast,” Boyle wrote. “The craft climbed futilely, then fell back into the water.”
Boyle and his shipmates were plunged into armpit-deep water. They tried to struggle onto the reef, but waves kept pummeling them. Their sixty-pound knapsacks made it doubly difficult. Gasping for breath, Boyle grabbed at an outcropping. Another soldier beat him to it; the GI lay there, exhausted, half submerged in water, as Boyle flailed for help. “Twice the surf pulled me loose and twice it returned me,” Boyle wrote. “My strength was ebbing fast when another soldier pulled up the man before me and lent me a wet hand to safety.”
It took Boyle a few minutes before he felt strong enough to stand. He looked around and “saw about me scores of dripping soldiers, their legs weary and wide-braced.” His hands were so torn up by the spike-sharp coral that he couldn’t type for days.
Boyle and a sergeant decided to rid themselves of their bulky life vests. Together they crept across a patch of coral the length of a football field, then waded through waist-high water to the beach. Boyle and his buddy suddenly realized they w
eren’t alone.
“The way those soaked men, a few moments before so weary that they could barely stand, forgot their fatigue in seeing their objective is a never-to-be-forgotten example of soldierly fortitude,” Boyle told readers. “Forlorn on a hostile coast, with much of their heavy equipment under water, they quickly organized and turned toward their assigned tasks when we had crossed the beach and flung ourselves beneath a covering grove of pepper trees.”1
It didn’t take long for enemy artillery to find the pepper trees. “There isn’t much to tell about being under shellfire,” Boyle wrote his mother two weeks later, “except that 10 minutes under it, with the shells hitting close enough to shower you with dirt, teaches you more about war than you could learn in a lifetime any other way.”2
Boyle spent hours that morning crawling through muddy ditches. Seven artillery shells “hit close enough to have cut me down with splinters had I been standing.” By that afternoon Boyle’s landing party had dug foxholes. “We could lay there in comparative comfort and listen to the shells whistle by overhead,” he wrote. In the evening an enemy fighter plane strafed the beachhead as Boyle was interviewing infantrymen; he and the others dove for cover. After an uneasy night’s sleep, they were strafed twice more before breakfast.3
There was relatively little fighting around Pont Blondin on day two; Boyle was able to borrow a typewriter and dictate a couple of stories to a public relations officer since Boyle’s hands were still scabbed. That night, Boyle and other correspondents hitched a ride to Casablanca and checked into a hotel. The next day they were surprised to learn that an armistice had been signed in their lobby.4 French Morocco’s feckless little war was over—at least in theory. The fighting farther east in French North Africa, however, would continue for seven more months.
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