Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  Wyler and his sound- and cameramen proved to be erratic pupils, not always showing up for class and feigning scheduling conflicts to skip—or, in one notable instance, Cronkite recalled, cheat on—the “exams” that punctuated each set of instructions. But Wyler and his team ended up producing The Memphis Belle, a film about a B-17 crew finishing its allotment of twenty-five missions that remains one of the finest documentaries made during World War II.

  The auteur’s movie embellished the facts but was so powerful that when it was screened for FDR in the White House, the president turned to the director, a German émigré, and said, “Everyone has got to see this.” They did. Within weeks the film was being shown in thousands of theaters in the U.S and Britain.

  Members of the Writing 69th developed their own fraternity grip, “which is not dirty,” Cronkite assured Betsy, “but involves a military secret. Remind me to show you when I get home.”31 They all felt “pretty war-like” as they traipsed through Paddington Station wearing service pants, galoshes, and mackinaws, with helmets and gas masks slung over their shoulders. When they got to Bedford they were met by an Army truck—for the first of many bumpy rides that week as they ricocheted from base to base.

  The reporters’ regimen began at seven thirty in the morning and lasted until ten thirty at night. They crammed three months’ worth of training into less than a week. On the first morning, at a combat crew replacement school, there was a scheduling mix-up; the pupil/reporters ended up killing time at the Ping-Pong table. When they finally sat down in a classroom, the orientation lecture was delivered by the school’s commandant, an Air Force colonel, who urged them to pay attention: Not only their asses were on the line, but also those of ten crew members, not to mention the fate of a million-dollar aircraft.32

  At Bovingdon, a Hertfordshire RAF instructional base not far from General Eaker’s headquarters, the entourage was instructed in oxygen maintenance, first aid, aircraft identification, and “ditching out,” which meant abandoning a plane by parachute or dinghy, Bigart explained to readers of the Herald Tribune on February 8.

  “It was during Lieutenant Alex Hogan’s ‘ditching out’ lecture that some of us felt like hopping the next train back to London’s Paddington Station,” Bigart joked. “The lieutenant is a pleasant lad from Starkville, Miss., but his discourse was a bit grim.”

  What would happen, a reporter asked, if they ditched into the North Sea and an enemy plane swooped down to investigate? “‘In that event,’ Hogan tartly replied, ‘merely tell them you’re waiting for the R.A.F. and wave ’em on.’”

  Lieutenant Hogan wasn’t alone: other trainers gave the Writing 69th men equally unsettling counsel. One medical officer, Bigart wrote, painted an “unforgettable picture of what might happen to our fingers if we took off our gloves at 30,000 feet.” Another urged them to constantly yawn and swallow after takeoff to relieve pressure on the eardrums. Since flatulence at a rarefied altitude could be painful and hazardous, he also prescribed avoiding gaseous foods such as beans, chips, and red cabbage, and to treat beer, Bigart wrote, “like the plague.”33 We’re in England, for God’s sakes, the reporters protested, what else are we supposed to eat and drink?

  After a couple of days they were ushered onto a B-17 named Johnny Reb, which zoomed around the Midlands at twenty-five thousand feet. No-nonsense sergeants were bemused by the specter of these typewriter jockeys fumbling with oxygen masks and parachute packs while squirming their beer bellies through Johnny Reb’s innards.

  Cronkite made sure he got a prized seat in the Fort’s plastic nose. “It was a real thrill,” Cronkite told Betsy, “taking off in that spot—watching the ground roar past you as those great motors throbbed, and then the ground pulling away.”34

  “All survived” the shakedown flight, noted Bigart, “and there is nothing to report, aside from a faint buzzing in the head.”

  Their tutor in aircraft recognition was a Yorkshire native named Bernard “Benny” Hall. The RAF sergeant was an expert teacher, having flown some four dozen combat missions, a fourth of them over Germany. “But his Yorkshire accent was baffling at first,” Bigart wrote. “He kept talking about ‘edam position’ until some of us began drawing outlines of a spherical Dutch cheese with wings. Later, it developed that he was referring to aircraft approaching from ’ead on.’”35

  Cronkite remembered Hall’s stirring, if barely intelligible, tribute to Britain’s Hawker Hurricane fighter. “This ’ere,” the RAF man said while displaying a silhouette on a domed ceiling, “is the ’Awker ’Urricane. A mighty nice aircraft. It helped our troops when Rommel had them on the run in the desert. It protected the boys getting out of Greece. And it was a big help in getting out of Norway. The ’Awker ’Urricane, as a matter of fact, was essential in all our defeats.”36

  Bigart and Cronkite’s lighthearted commentary aside, their training was deadly serious. The reporters gulped when told that in the event their bombers were shot or forced down, enemy soldiers in the heat of battle would never be able to distinguish “correspondent” from “combatant.” Learning how to return fire, therefore, was essential.

  Yet the only one who could fire a rifle or pistol with any degree of accuracy was the Times’ Post, who’d spent many a summer afternoon on Long Island shooting skeet. Even the cocksure Rooney, who’d gone through basic training, was a lousy shot.

  Cronkite told Betsy that the group was given four “very tough examinations.” He proudly reported that he’d gotten a ninety-eight on aircraft recognition, made the second-highest grade in the class on another test, “barely eked by” on a third, and flunked the final one, which was probably fifty-caliber machine gun assemblage. Cronkite had done better than most—and a lot better than William Wyler. Still, all of them, Wyler included, “graduated.”

  Given survival percentages, Bob Post reckoned late in their training, “one of us will not be here after the first mission.” Post then needled, “It will probably be you, Homer [Bigart]. You’re the Frank McHugh type, the silent, amiable guy who always gets it in the end.”37 McHugh, a ’30s character actor, had built his Hollywood career around playing the best buddy who gets rubbed out near the final scene. Ironically, McHugh had a role in The Fighting 69th as one of Cagney’s doughboy sidekicks. Sure enough, McHugh’s character was gunned down in the trenches a few minutes before the credits rolled.

  THE MACHISMO IMAGE OF THE Flying Fortresses had grabbed the public’s imagination; naturally, all the reporters wanted to fly with the B-17s. “Come on,” Air Force Major Bill Laidlaw, the PRO for the First Bomb Wing, admonished them on one of their last nights of preparation, “one of you has to go with the Liberators (B-24s). Those guys deserve some recognition, too.”

  Laidlaw was getting heat from his bosses to score publicity for the Libs, since a batch of new B-24s had just arrived from the States. But the reporters wouldn’t budge. A Laidlaw deputy, Second Lieutenant Van Norman, suggested they hold a lottery to determine who would fly what bomber. Cronkite and Hill staunchly refused, with the stuffy Hill braying, “I regret to inform you that my office has sent me here to cover the story of the B-17.”38

  After several minutes of stalemate, Bob Post raised his hand, cracked a weak joke about his newspaper not caring about headlines, and volunteered to ride in a B-24. Leyshon and Laidlaw were stunned that Post, never reticent in reminding people he represented the omnipotent New York Times, was the one that broke the impasse.

  Post had already confided to his wife and friends that he’d had premonitions of death. He was assigned to Maisie, a B-24 flown by Captain Howard Adams of the 44th Bomb Group in Shipdham. The plane had been named after a series of B movies starring screen siren Ann Sheridan, one of which, ironically, had been based on an A. J. Liebling story in the New Yorker.

  The Writing 69th’s orientation wrapped up February 9. For several days and nights they hung out in East Anglia, anxiously awaiting a thumbs-up that didn’t come. One night they were all cramped together in the same barracks dead aslee
p when a member of the fraternity tripped over a chair on the way to the restroom. Within seconds the entire gang was up, convinced the mission was on, Cronkite related to Betsy. One of them even began shaving before they discovered there was no reason to be stirring hours before reveille.39

  Eventually they returned to London, where they cooled their heels for another week and a half. The fateful call finally came on February 25, so they donned their galoshes and mackinaws again and scrambled back onto the train.

  CBS’ Paul Manning had contracted pneumonia and Yank’s Denton Scott had received a conflicting order, but the other six were scattered at different air bases. At their respective preflight briefings in the early hours of February 26, the correspondents learned that their bombing target would be a Bremen factory that manufactured Focke-Wulf fighter planes. If that area of Lower Saxony proved cloud-covered, their fallback target would be the Kriegsmarine U-boat base at Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea. Both outposts were heavily fortified with antiaircraft batteries and uncomfortably proximate Luftwaffe bases.

  The Eighth Air Force had been attacking enemy-occupied territory for seven months, yet the Writing 69th’s sortie would mark just the third time that U.S. planes had bombed Germany proper. On January 27, four weeks before, the first U.S. bombing attack on German soil had been carried out against Wilhelmshaven. Although the Eighth Air Force had insisted that the American press trumpet the raid, in truth visibility had been poor: most of the U.S. bombers missed their targets by wide margins. More bombs fell on the village and in the sea than on Hitler’s U-boat pens. The second U.S. attack against Germany had come against the coastal fortifications near the cities of Emden and Hamm; it, too, drew big headlines but had been largely ineffectual.40

  OF NECESSITY, THE BOMBER FLEETS on the morning of February 26 took off in increments, beginning at 0830, then circled the south of England, waiting for others to join. Andy Rooney likened it in his Stars and Stripes piece “to a pickup football team on a Saturday morning. We grew in strength as we flew, until all England seemed to be covered with bombers.” At the outset there were ninety-three bombers, but some twenty returned to England with mechanical or personnel issues, including the B-17 to which INS’ William Wade had been assigned. That left five members of the Writing 69th still airborne: Cronkite, Bigart, Rooney, Hill, and Post.

  The B-17s of the 305th led the way, followed by Bigart and Cronkite in the 303rd, then the 91st, then Rooney in the 305th, followed by the B-24 groups. Post, Captain Adams, and the 44th were in the most vulnerable spot in the formation, the back end, where the planes were known as “Rear-end Charlies.” Enemy fighters liked to attack formations from behind. Eventually the entire U.S. flotilla climbed to twenty-nine thousand feet and stayed there for most of the flight over the North Sea.

  Cronkite was with Captain Glenn Hagenbuch’s crew in S for Sugar; Bigart with larger-than-life Arkansan Lewis “Hoss” Lyle in Ooold Soljer, the same officer destined to lead the 303rd’s D-Day attack on the bridge at Caen.

  At precisely ten twenty-two a.m., a German radar station on the Dutch island of Texel spotted the formation and sounded the alarm. Within eight minutes, they were under attack by Focke-Wulfs stationed at Deelen, Holland, and along the Frisian Islands. The deadly harrasment continued, almost unabated, for the next two-plus hours. At one point Hoss Lyle counted thirty-five fighters “darting in from all directions,” Bigart wrote. Bigart put his machine gun training to use, manning one of the fifty-caliber waist guns on Ooold Soljer, but was racked with worry about accidentally hitting friendly planes. A few hundred aerial yards away in S for Sugar, Cronkite was in its Plexiglas nose, blasting away, conscience free, on the starboard fore-gun.

  “I fired at every German fighter that came into the neighborhood,” recalled Cronkite. “I don’t think I hit any, but I’d like to think I scared a couple of those German pilots.”41

  The German skies were so cloudy that, as the formation arrived over Lower Saxony at 1100, the objective was switched from slightly inland Bremen to coastal Wilhelmshaven. The entire formation was forced to execute a sharp turn to bring the U-boat base into its bombsights.

  “I could not quite make out our specific target for obliteration, the submarine pens, because at our altitude the installations along the Jade Busen (Jade Bay) seemed no bigger than a pinhead,” Bigart wrote later that day. The street pattern of the old Prussian village, on the other hand, could easily be discerned from five miles aloft, he noted.

  As they approached Wilhelmshaven Bigart watched in horror as an American bomber went “down in a dizzy spin.” Only two parachutes opened.

  Inside Ooold Soljer Bigart watched intently as the bombardier, Second Lieutenant Reinaldo J. Saiz of Segundo, California, and the navigator, First Lieutenant Otis A. Hoyt, of Dawn, Missouri, zeroed in on the target. The reporter glanced back and for the first time in an hour couldn’t see any Focke-Wulfs on their tail. “We had a good run and we were squarely over the town. I watched Saiz crouch lower over his sight. I heard him call ‘Bombs Away!’

  “Our salvo of 500-pounders plunged through the open bomb bay. From where I stood I could not see them land, but our ball turret gunner, Sergeant Howard L. Nardine, of Los Angeles, took a quick look back and saw fires and smoke.”

  Bigart was less concerned about fire on the ground than the flak exploding all around Ooold Soljer. “Nasty black puffs” were erupting as they barreled northwest over the sea. Soon enemy fighters were swarming again; this time, the 190s and 109s gave way to the twin-engine Me 110s, which seemed to Bigart to be preying on the crippled bombers desperately weaving in and out of cloud cover.42

  Banshee, Ooold Soljer, and S for Sugar all made it back to England without incident, although as we’ve seen, Rooney’s ship, Banshee, was pretty shot up.

  Cronkite always claimed that thirteen American bombers were lost that day, but the actual count, according to research conducted by The Writing 69th author Jim Hamilton, was seven. One of them, sadly, was Bob Post’s Liberator. After Maisie absorbed a mortal hit from an Me 109 over the outskirts of Wilhelmshaven, the crew of a companion B-24 spotted two streaming parachutes as the plane plummeted. Post never exited the stricken bomber. Later that day, his remains were found by German soldiers amid the wreckage.43

  Back on the ground, Cronkite and Bigart rendezvoused by plan at Molesworth with UP’s Harrison Salisbury, Hal Leyshon, fellow Air Force PRO Jack Redding, and an army censor, identified only in Salisbury’s account as Colonel Gates. The news that Post’s plane was missing hit everyone hard; the atmosphere in the windowless shed turned gloomy. Bigart couldn’t be sure, but he wondered if the wounded bomber he’d seen spinning toward the ground outside Wilhelmshaven had, in fact, been Post’s.

  Ten of them jammed into Leyshon’s sedan for the tense ride back to London. It was then that Bigart asked Cronkite if he’d drafted a lede and was incredulous to learn about his friend’s “assignment to hell” construct. As the years wore on, Salisbury claimed to have fed Cronkite the “hell” line—an assertion missing in Cronkite’s memoirs and three other detailed recollections of the mission and its aftermath.

  But there’s no doubt that once they got back to the Ministry of Information, Salisbury sat at Cronkite’s elbow as the story took shape. Salisbury kept murmuring, “That’s right down the old groove, Cronkite. Now you’re cooking,” Cronkite related to Betsy.44

  “Actually the first impression of a daylight bombing mission is a hodge-podge of disconnected scenes like a poorly edited home movie,” the grooved Cronkite wrote that night, “bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one engine thousands of feet above, a tiny speck in the sky that grows closer and finally becomes a Focke-Wulf peeling off above you somewhere and plummeting down, shooting its way through the formation.”45 Salisbury kept pounding Cronkite on the back as one paragraph after another poured out.46

  Not only was Salisbury hovering, but also an anxious John Charles Daly of CBS Radio, who ha
d arranged for the correspondent fresh off the Wilhelmshaven raid to appear on a live broadcast feed. The instant Cronkite pulled his copy out of the typewriter he raced off to the BBC studio that CBS was leasing.

  Daly and his guest cobbled together a quick script for the radio program, but didn’t get it in front of the censor until ten minutes before airtime, causing Daly palpitations.

  “Even as Daly was setting up the circuit to NY and they were doing the old ‘Hello, New York, Hello, New York. London calling, New York, London calling,’ censorship called and said the script was okay,” Cronkite told Betsy. They were on the air for only three minutes before the circuit failed, leaving Daly infuriated. Ten minutes later NBC used the same circuit and got its transmission through, which didn’t make Daly any happier.47

  Rooney also appeared on radio in the aftermath of the Wilhelmshaven raid, his first-ever broadcast interview. Expatriate American actor (and future Hollywood studio executive) Ben Lyon invited Rooney onto Lyon’s BBC show, London Calling. Every “Well, Ben,” and pause was carefully scripted.

  “Well, Andy, suppose you give us some low-down on one of those raids?” Lyon asked Rooney as the reporter delivered pedestrian patter about the previous day’s mission. The experience was so awkward that Rooney vowed he’d never again go on the air unless he’d personally written the copy—and never did. At least Rooney was well compensated for his troubles: the BBC gave him twelve quid, more than a week’s pay at the Stars and Stripes.48

  By the time Cronkite left the radio studio it was well past midnight. “I was horribly tired that night,” he wrote Betsy. “We had been routed out at [it had been scratched out by censors but was clearly “Molesworth”], for our briefing and a spot of breakfast before taking off for Germany, and then [again censored] hours in a bomber at high altitude living on pure oxygen, standing up most of the time with 50 lbs. of heavy fur flying equipment and parachute on your back, and the general exertion of shooting guns and moving about keeping out of other people’s way, is very tiring.”49