Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  Cronkite’s UP story somehow got delayed in being transmitted to the States, so Glad Hill’s AP piece got bigger pickup back home. But Cronkite’s story hit huge in the British papers, which loved his repeated allusions to Hades and his evocative—if purplish—prose.

  Walter, however, knew none of this when he got back to the Park Lane at five a.m. and collapsed. Four and a half hours later Salisbury was on the phone, asking Cronkite to come in to the office to write a tribute to Post, who’d been officially declared missing.

  Once Cronkite finished his encomium, Salisbury insisted on treating Cronkite to a celebratory—and very liquid—lunch at the Savoy with UP deskman Bill Dickinson and Dickinson’s fiancée, a society reporter with the London Daily Mirror named Hilde Marchant. Marchant was instantly recognized by the Savoy’s maître d’, who proceeded to treat the party like royalty. They were given a table with a stunning view of Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament.

  Afterward, Cronkite begged off and “re-collapsed,” he told Betsy, at the Park Lane. At six thirty p.m. his phone rang; it was Salisbury again, ordering Cronkite to join the threesome for dinner at Jack’s Club, a favorite hangout of British and American correspondents. Then they were off to watch jitterbugging at the Opera House in Covent Garden, a lavish theater where Marchant had done stories about the U.S. dance craze sweeping Britain. Again, they were greeted with open arms and whisked to a box with an unobstructed view of the dance floor.

  “Boy, has jitterbugging hit this land! Wow!” Cronkite enthused to Betsy.

  They capped off the marathon party with a stop at the Cocoanut Grove, a nightclub where they repeatedly toasted Cronkite’s safe return. “As usual,” Cronkite laughed to Betsy, “everybody got drunk but Cronkite.”50 For his entire life, he prided himself on his capacity to nurse alcohol and worried about people—like his father, Jim McGlincy, and Hal Boyle—who couldn’t.51

  The sober but bushed Cronkite was again rousted out of bed Sunday morning by UP’s London bureau, this time to respond to a story idea from UP–New York. He then hustled over to the Officers’ Club just before it closed for lunch.

  As he entered the club, he sensed heads turning in his direction. Soon a palpable buzz filled the room. Walter Cronkite was no longer an obscure wire service scribbler. He had, literally overnight, become Walter Cronkite, famous war correspondent. Every Sunday paper in England, it seemed, had played his Wilhelmshaven story on page one, under “great, glaring headlines,” he told Betsy.

  Suddenly everyone was deferring to him; even the Park Lane’s “snooty elevator boys who hadn’t bothered saying hello before began ingratiating manners, the teller at the bank where I cash my check bowed and scraped, the telephone at the hotel rang all day with congratulations from some persons I knew and more often not…. Honestly, it was the damndest performance I’ve ever undergone.”52

  FOR THE SURVIVING MEMBERS OF the Writing 69th, the Wilhelmshaven raid and its aftermath had been one big damndest performance. All through training the hard-bitten reporters had kidded one another about the obligatory clichés they would use if a member of the Legion of the Doomed didn’t come back. Now that the scenario was real, it didn’t seem amusing anymore.

  “This is the story of Bob Post of the New York Times—the story he cannot write today,” Cronkite wrote on minimal sleep. “It’s the story of a big lumbering bespectacled Harvard graduate who looked about as much like an intrepid airman as Oliver Hardy, but whose heart beat the same do-or-die cadence as the pilots and crew of the American bomber which he accompanied to doom somewhere over Wilhelmshaven.”53

  “A mission to Germany is a nasty experience,” Bigart wrote in a reflective Herald Tribune piece a few days later. “Apart from the very real danger to life and limb, there is the acute discomfort of enduring subzero temperatures for hours at a stretch and taking air through an oxygen mask.”54

  Despite the danger and discomfort, Bigart told readers he’d like to go on another bombing mission. But Bob Post’s death had horrified everyone from President Roosevelt (who sent a tender note of condolence to Mrs. Post) and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger (who sent a what-the-hell-are-we-doing? cable to his London bureau chief Raymond Daniell) to Tooey Spaatz and Hal Leyshon. Despite the early bravado about keeping the Writing 69th together, permitting correspondents to go on combat missions would not become commonplace in the ETO until later in the war, when the Luftwaffe had been essentially neutered.

  Bigart worried for the rest of his life that his erratic machine gun fire over Wilhelmshaven had somehow contributed to the downing of Bob Post’s plane. He knew his fears weren’t rational—but that didn’t stop Homer from losing sleep. Bigart took his neurosis to the grave.

  CHAPTER 6

  FALLING LIKE DYING MOTHS

  All the [American airmen] had to do, I thought, was look around at each other and they would understand that democracy was worth defending.

  —A. J. LIEBLING, 1942 THE ROAD BACK TO PARIS

  Twenty days after the Wilhelmshaven raid, the Mighty Eighth unleashed an even bigger assault against the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat pens. This time, the target was Admiral Dönitz’ submarine yard at Vegesack, at the mouth of the River Lesum, a few miles upriver from Bremen. And this time, it was Molesworth’s 303rd Bomb Group, the men Walter Cronkite and Homer Bigart covered day to day, which was in the formation’s lead spot.

  The one-hundred-plane phalanx was spearheaded by a B-17 from the 359th Squadron known as The Duchess. Its bombardier was Lieutenant Jack Mathis, from San Angelo, Texas; its navigator was Lieutenant Jesse Elliott, from Tallahassee, Florida. They were flying their fifteenth combat mission together and were considered one of the better bombardier-navigator tandems in the squadron, which is in part why they’d been entrusted with the formation’s up-front position. They’d had a big evening the night before: Mathis’ older brother Mark, also an Eighth Air Force bombardier, had come to Molesworth for a visit.

  “We had a pretty routine trip to the [Vegesack] target,” Elliott told UP’s Cronkite a day later. “Jack [Mathis] called out the altitude over the inter-communications system and we were humming along prettily until we ran into the fighters.”1

  The Duchess was still twenty-five minutes from the German coast when it got jumped. Suddenly there were so many enemy planes flitting around that they almost looked like Allied escorts, Elliott remembered thinking. The Germans had thrown everything at the attackers, Bigart explained. In addition to what Bigart called the “usual reception committee” of Fw 190s and Me 109s and Me 110s, there was a horde of twin-engine Ju 88s that kept their distance and flew parallel to the attackers, looking to pounce on crippled bombers.2

  “They actually weren’t so tough,” Elliott told Cronkite. “It was just that there were so many of them. They weren’t even coming in as close as usual, except for a few daring ones.”

  Mathis was doing what bombardiers had to do, performing simultaneous double duty, calculating the bombing run while jumping up to operate a machine gun in the nose. “He got plenty of shots in at the enemy fighters coming in head-on,” Elliott said. “He really was beating out there, pouring on coal. He ran out of ammunition at least twice, and I remember him passing the ammunition three times.”

  The Duchess had warded off dozens of fighters and was just turning into its bombing run when flak erupted. It was exploding so close to the plane, Elliott explained to Cronkite, that first one wing, then the other, was being jerked up in the air.

  “[Flak] was raining off the nose like hail off a tin roof and knocking the plane all around,” Elliott said. “Jack was easy-going and the flak didn’t bother him. He wasn’t saying a word—just sticking there over his bombsight doing his job.”

  A minute later, Elliott heard Mathis tell the pilot that he’d opened the bomb bay doors. “Then [Mathis] gave instructions to climb a little more to reach bombing altitude. By that time we had settled down on the bombing run and Jack called up a couple of more technical directions to th
e pilot.”

  The Duchess was just seconds away from releasing its package when it was rocked by a barrage of flak. “One of the shells burst out to the right and a little below the nose,” Elliott said. “It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away when it burst. If we had been much closer, it would have knocked the whole plane over.”

  Shrapnel ripped through the nose, shattering the Plexiglas, deafening the crew, and knocking Mathis and Elliott backward. “I saw Jack falling toward me and threw up my arm to ward off the fall, but by that time both of us were way back in the rear of the nose—blown back there, I guess, by the flak,” Elliott said.

  “I was sort of half-standing, half-lying against the wall and Jack was leaning against me. I didn’t have any idea that he was injured. Without assistance from me, he pulled himself back to his bombsight. His seat had been knocked out from under him by the flak and so he sort of knelt over the bombsight, probably leaning on it, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

  Part of navigator Elliott’s job was to keep a flight log, so he glanced at his watch to record the exact time The Duchess released its load. “I heard Jack call over the inter-communications system, ‘Bombs—’. But he never finished the phrase with the usual ‘away,’” Elliott said. “The word just sort of trickled off and I thought his throat microphone had slipped out of place so I finished the phrase for him.”3

  There was a reason that Elliott stepped in to shout “away!” It was a hard-and-fast rule that pilots could not begin taking evasive action until the crew confirmed that their bombs had indeed been released. A moment later, Elliott glimpsed Mathis grabbing the handle to close the bomb bay doors. Just as Mathis pushed the lever, he fell backward.

  “At first, I thought he was just getting back to his feet from that crouching position so he could carry on with other jobs,” Elliott said. “But he didn’t get up. He fell on his back and I caught him.” Until that instant, Elliott admitted to Cronkite, the navigator hadn’t realized that Mathis was seriously wounded. Mathis’ right arm was a mangled mess, shattered above the elbow. Blood was gushing from his side and abdomen.

  “‘I guess they got you that time, old boy,’ I remember saying, but then his head slumped over,” Elliott said.

  Jack Mathis was dead. But he hadn’t died in vain.

  “Following planes said the bombardier’s salvos landed squarely in the target area,” Bigart wrote on the afternoon of the raid. Bigart’s initial account, in fact, could not identify Mathis by name because his next of kin in San Angelo had not yet been notified of his death.

  Mathis’ name was divulged two days later in a Cronkite article that ran on page one in the New York World-Telegram and papers across the U.S. and Britain. In DYING BOMBARDIER CARRIES ON, HITS THE MARK, Cronkite told the remarkable story of the twenty-one-year-old officer who had performed his duty until, literally, his last breath. Cronkite’s lede was, “The American bombardier who, though mortally wounded by antiaircraft shrapnel, crawled back to his bombsight and sent his bombs crashing squarely on the German U-boat yards at Vegesack was revealed today to be First Lt. Jack Mathis, of San Angelo, Tex.” Because the formation had been led directly over the top of the target, the Eighth Air Force considered Vegesack more successful than previous U.S. raids on U-boat bases.

  Mathis had been enrolled at San Angelo Business College before the war and was only three years out of high school. “If [Mathis] had seen [the] incident in the motion pictures he might have laughed and called it ‘Hollywood corn,’” Bigart wrote in his page-one tribute.

  The coverage by Bigart and Cronkite made Mathis’ martyrdom one of the European war’s most poignant moments. Readers on two continents blinked back tears when they learned that Mathis’ brother Mark was still at Molesworth when Jack’s body was carried off The Duchess. Four months later, “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty,” Jack Mathis was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.4

  Mark Mathis was determined to avenge his brother’s death. He asked for and received a transfer to the 359th Squadron; on a couple of occasions, he even got to serve as bombardier on the patched-up Duchess. Mark’s fourth combat mission was on a B-17 called FDR. After being repeatedly attacked by German fighters, FDR went down in the North Sea. Seven parachutes were spotted coming out of the plane, but no survivors were ever found. Only a few degrees above freezing, the North Sea swallowed up almost every airman who plunged into it without a rubber raft, Mark Mathis included. Major Bill Calhoun, the 359th’s commanding officer, said five decades later that writing the second letter of condolence to the Mathis family was much tougher than the first.5

  San Angelo’s airport is now known as Mathis Field. Well after the war, a group of surviving Hell’s Angels led by Calhoun gathered at the field to dedicate a plaque to the Mathis brothers. Calhoun’s eyes glistened as he told the San Angelo Standard-Times, “They were great boys.”6

  THERE WERE A LOT OF great boys in the skies over the Third Reich—so many heroes, in fact, that it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. They’re all a blur. Therein lies the challenge of appraising the Allies’ bombing war against Nazi Germany. Because no territorial ground was gained, it’s hard for even serious students of the war to appreciate its import and nuances.

  As reflected in the headlines of Cronkite, Bigart, and Rooney articles, the raids take on an almost numbing repetition. YANKS GO DEEP INTO GERMANY. HEAVIES RAVAGE COLOGNE. FORTS BATTER LORIENT, BREST. Behind the bold print was staggering human loss that Allied officials were loath to admit.

  Every raid was carefully calculated, of course, part of a larger strategy aimed at gutting Hitler’s capacity to make war. The targets were chosen by experts who agonized over intelligence reports, industrial data, and reconnaissance film and photographs, plus studied the sometimes sketchy information supplied by the Underground. Certain missions in certain weeks zeroed in on U-boat bases; others went after oil refineries or aircraft or other manufacturing facilities. The revenge-minded brass nicknamed such concentrated attacks “blitzes.”

  But little of this larger strategy could be shared with the press or public. General Eaker or General Spaatz would sometimes invite Cronkite, Rooney, Bigart, Hill, and other reporters into their offices, consult a map, and pinpoint objectives. The substance of the talks was almost always off-the-record, especially after first Cronkite, then Rooney, got into trouble in the spring of ’43 for printing stories that hinted the Eighth Air Force was contemplating nighttime missions and perhaps altering its approach to strategic bombing. How the stories managed to clear censors was anyone’s guess, but in both instances Colonel Jock Whitney and his PRO enforcers threatened reprisals against United Press and the Stars and Stripes. The incidents, however, quickly blew over. Indeed, the vast majority of the Cronkite-Rooney coverage of the Mighty Eighth dealt solely with the blow-by-blow of raids, not larger strategic concerns. Even the great Bigart had trouble wrapping his arms around the bigger bombing picture.

  The efficacy of the Allies’ bombing war remains a contentious issue all these decades later, as does its morality.7

  Both sets of critics miss the mark. Allied planners at the outset may have had inflated expectations for the combined bombing offensive, but they did a creditable job with incomplete information. They knew that ball bearings, for example, were integral to the German war effort. But so did Hitler and Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which is why the industrial center Schweinfurt was so heavily ringed with Luftwaffe airdromes and antiaircraft weaponry. Could Allied bombers have inflicted heavier damage on Schweinfurt’s ball bearing plants? Absolutely, but only at a catastrophic loss of men and planes.

  In My War, Andy Rooney dismissed the moral criticism of Allied bombing tactics by explaining the origin of Britain’s “area” bombing technique. It evolved, Rooney wrote, after German planes had viciously attacked Winchester and Coventry, two historic sites that had little military value.

  “For the British,
Coventry wasn’t just another industrial city,” Rooney wrote. “It was rich with Shakespearean history, with the lore of Henry VIII and such legends as Lady Godiva’s bareback ride through its streets. Coventry was dear to the British people and they never forgave the Germans for attacking it.”

  Allied air commanders were “too practical to have wasted bombs on churches and museums if they didn’t think it would hasten the end of the war,” Rooney wrote. “[They] wanted to show them what wanton destruction was; they wanted to make them think about what Hitler had brought down on their heads.”8

  BY THE TIME THE MATHIS brothers died, the Allied high command had arrived at a tortured conclusion: The most effective way to undermine Nazi Germany’s war-making capacity was to decimate the Luftwaffe. Wave after wave of bombers was sent over the Third Reich, luring enemy fighters out of their lairs. It was grisly stuff—not unlike General Ulysses S. Grant hurling thousands of men toward certain death at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. But just as Grant’s gory assaults had broken the back of the Confederacy, so, too, did the air offensive hasten an end to the war in Europe.

  Especially after late ’43, when P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts were equipped with long-range gasoline tanks and could escort bombers deep into German territory, Allied airmen became sacrificial lambs. Day after day they clashed with the Luftwaffe, their superiors secure in the knowledge that the Nazis were certain to lose a war of attrition: Hitler and his henchmen could never replace lost pilots and planes. It was nasty business, but everyone from a ground crew mechanic to General Eisenhower recognized that it had to be done.

  “OUR COVERAGE OF THE AIR war consisted mostly of interviewing the bomber crews as they returned from their missions,” Cronkite wrote years later. “We watched them coming home from battle, most with at least some damage—a cannon hole here or there or the almost delicate lacework of holes left by a trail of machine-gun bullets.”9