One of Cronkite’s favorite B-17 pilots in the 303rd was a twenty-two-year-old from Redondo Beach, California, named Don Stockton. Cronkite met Stockton in February of ’43, after he’d steered a shot-up and nearly tailless Fort back to Molesworth from a raid over France.
“[Stockton] was sitting on a table in the briefing room, a doughnut in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. His flying cap was pushed back on his forehead. His face bore red marks where the oxygen mask had been. It was dirty and sweaty, but it was broken in the middle by one of the biggest grins I ever saw.”10
Cronkite thought to himself: “This bird isn’t real; he is out of one of those slick magazine ads. Don turned out to be the realest man I ever met.” Stockton sported a stubborn cowlick and a “twenty-mission cap”—regular-issue USAAF headgear with the stiffening wire removed to affect a rakish (and slightly crumpled) look. The guy who left Stanford University for the then Army Air Corps after his sophomore year had been made a captain at twenty-one, but he never put on officers’ airs nor pulled rank, Cronkite remembered. He loved buying rounds of beer for the whole gang and often arranged for the Cross Keys to send a keg over to the enlisted men’s club.
Stockton had joined the corps with two buddies from California. All three had begun flying combat missions over occupied France in November ’42, the early stage of the USAAF bombing operations. Within weeks, Stockton’s two friends had been killed; Stockton figured his number would soon be up. So he sat for a handsome photo portrait and shipped it off to his parents.11 Remarkably, by the spring of ’43, he had completed twenty-three combat missions, which put him in rarefied company: Two more and he’d reach the threshold of twenty-five. He’d be home free.
For his twenty-fourth sortie, on May 14, 1943, Stockton was ironically assigned to S for Sugar, the B-17 in which Cronkite had made his maiden combat raid ten weeks earlier. The target that day was the U-boat base at Kiel. Just after Stockton and his crew delivered their payload, they were jumped by German fighters. A twenty-millimeter cannon shell pierced the cockpit and struck Stockton on the right side of his chest. It was a complete fluke: Stockton was the only member of the crew hit. But the shot killed Stockton almost instantly. He slumped over the wheel; the Fort went into a near-fatal dive before copilot John C. Barker and Engineer Roy Q. Smith were able to wrest control and fly the barely damaged bomber back to Molesworth.12
Cronkite was waiting on the Molesworth tarmac to congratulate his friend on number twenty-four and get the skinny on what had happened over Kiel. It appeared from Cronkite’s vantage point to be a routine landing; to his eye, S for Sugar looked unscathed. He was surprised, then, to see a red flare burst from the cockpit and an ambulance rush out to the end of the runway. A crew member was placed on a litter, then the red-crossed vehicle headed toward the field hospital.
“The open truck that ferried the air crews around the base came rolling back toward the debriefing shack and, to my anxious but apparently hasty eye, all the crew seemed to be aboard. They drew closer and the scene changed drastically. There were only nine of them.… And to a man—or make that to a boy—they were crying uncontrollably.”
When the crew told him what had happened, Cronkite began weeping, too. But later he pulled himself together to write an article called NINE CRYING BOYS and a Fort. Cronkite always said it should have been called NINE CRYING BOYS and ONE CRYING Correspondent.
Once Stockton was laid to rest at the Brookwood Cemetery outside Cambridge,13 Cronkite vowed to visit the grave on Memorial Day, 1944—a year removed. But D-Day preparations chained Cronkite to London, of course, and he couldn’t get up to East Anglia. Instead, he wrote his most moving article of the war, a tribute to his friend Don that took the form of a letter to his parents.
“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stockton: This is to apologize for not keeping my promise,” Cronkite’s article began. “You did not know of my promise. I made it only to myself—and silently to Don in a way. I promised to go out to Brookwood Cemetery and visit his grave this Memorial Day. But the war—the one that cut that grand full life of his short at 22 years—interfered in carrying out that simple little gesture of tribute.”
Young Stockton was one of the “pioneers,” Cronkite wrote, who bombed the Reich without fighter escorts. Cronkite closed by telling his parents that “in the year that has gone by, Don still stands out as typical of all the things that are finest in our American fliers.”14
ANDY ROONEY, TOO, WAS PAYING homage to all the finest qualites of American airmen. Rooney tried not to let on, but on those train rides he was absorbing as much as he could from the likes of Cronkite, Bigart, and Hill. It occurred to him that his mentors were successful because they were relentlessly inquisitive, never afraid to ask questions or follow different story threads.
After the first Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid on ball bearing plants in August of 1943, Rooney had plenty of questions. Everything about Schweinfurt-Regensburg, where five dozen bombers perished, was tragic, including the raiders’ return to East Anglia. Rooney was on the ground at Thurleigh “sweating them in,” as the ground crew guys called it. Increasingly frantic radio traffic made it clear, Rooney wrote, “the ordeal wasn’t over. There were dead and dying men on board half a dozen of the group’s bombers.”
One B-17 reported that its ball-turret gunner was trapped inside his plastic bubble underneath the plane. The gears that opened his bubble and allowed him to climb back into the plane’s belly had been hit in combat and were completely jammed. Even worse, the Fort’s hydraulic system was also inoperable. The only way the plane could get on the ground was via belly landing.
There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.15
Readers of the Stars and Stripes never saw Rooney’s account of the gunner’s gruesome end. Rooney was so shaken that he returned to London that night, unable to write about what he’d witnessed. “Some reporter,” Rooney reprovingly wrote of himself a half century later.16
The death of the B-17 ball-turret gunner has become part of the air war’s lore; it’s been twisted, turned, and fictionalized over the years. President Ronald Reagan was fond of telling a version of the story whose roots appeared to come not from the circumstances surrounding the real tragedy, but from the movie A Wing and a Prayer starring Reagan’s friend Dana Andrews.
MOVIES WERE AN IMPORTANT PART of the folkways of wartime England. Almost everyone with a few bob in his pocket went to cinema houses a couple of times a week. Cronkite, a movie buff from his days as a fill-in reviewer for the Houston Press, didn’t get to see as many films as he wanted because he worked so many nights. An evening at a British wartime movie theater would begin with a group sing-along, followed by cartoons, the latest newsreels, a short or two, and the inevitable double feature.
The press back then was almost as celebrity conscious as today’s media. When Hollywood megastars Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart arrived in England in ’43 to serve in the Eighth Air Force, it was huge news. There was an insatiable public appetite for information about how the two icons, both then signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, were getting along in Britain. Under pressure from their bosses back home, correspondents, including the supposedly above-it-all Cronkite and Rooney, fell over one another to see who could score the biggest scoop.
Gable, the King of Hollywood, was four years removed from his turn as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. He was still grieving over the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard, the gifted actress who died in early ’42 in a plane crash while raising money for war bonds. That summer, Gable rankled the suits at MGM by enlisting as a private. He was soon persuaded to accept a captain’s commission by War Department officials, no doubt prodded by a still-irate Louis B. Mayer, who didn’t want his meal ticket seen as a lowly enlisted man.
Gable went through an abbreviated training course as an air gunner and was asked by USAAF boss Hap Arnold to produce and narrate a recruiting film heralding gunners called Combat America.17 In early ’43, Gable arrived in Britain in the same Hollywood entourage as Memphis Belle director William Wyler and was assigned to the First Wing headquarters at Cheltenham, then eventually transferred to active duty with the 351st Bomb Group at Polebrook.
“I have a clear impression of how good [Gable] looked in his pinks [dress uniform] and it didn’t occur to me at the time but I suppose they were tailor-made for him in London,” Rooney remembered.18
Cronkite happened to bump into Gable on one of the star’s first days at Cheltenham, getting a story that AP and INS didn’t have. The two struck up a relationship.
“I’m having a helluva time these days with Clark Gable,” Cronkite wrote to Betsy on May 18, 1943. “I think I told you that I had a clear beat with an exclusive on his arrival in this area and that finally even the public relations office was calling me to find out where he was.
“Well, since then pandemonium has broken loose. The poor guy when he talked to me that first day said he was rather sorry I’d stumbled into him because he wanted to be just another officer and do his part in the war effort and he knew that a lot of reporters around all the time were going to hinder him in that ambition. When the pub relations men heard that they clamped down the screws and now nobody gets near the guy—except by accident. So I spend half my time now trying to create an accident for myself and prevent one for the AP or INS.”19
Gable was serious about avoiding the limelight. When Bob Hope came to Polebrook for a USO show, Hope asked for “Rhett Butler” to stand up and take a bow. Gable never budged and the guys around him refused to give him up.20
“It was considered good politics as well as good public relations to get Gable an Air Medal,” Cronkite recalled. “So they picked five milk runs to the nearby coast of France, and he was decorated with all the hoopla that Air Force public relations could muster.”21 It’s true that the Eighth Air Force didn’t send Gable deep into the Reich, but his first mission was hardly a pushover. The plane got shot up and a shell narrowly missed wounding Gable.22
“Gable was a good guy,” Cronkite wrote. “I thought he was just a little self-conscious about that Air Medal. He had good reason to be, but he was living the role assigned to him and doing it as graciously as possible.”23
He may have been gracious to Cronkite, but Gable, traumatized by what he saw happening to fellow airmen, had some rough moments. “It’s murder up there,” he confided to a member of his film crew. “They’re falling like moths. Like dying moths.”24 While visiting a hospital full of wounded fliers, an overcome Gable threatened to pummel a doctor he felt wasn’t being sufficiently empathetic.25
The star’s presence wasn’t lost on the Hollywood-worshipping enemy in Berlin. Reichsmarschall Göring offered a $5,000 reward to any Luftwaffe flier that shot down Gable’s plane. Gable worried that, were he ever captured, Hitler and Göring would turn him into a circus freak, parading him all over the Reich. “How could I hide this face?” Gable confided to a friend. “If the plane goes, I’ll just go with the son of a bitch.”26
Combat America, Gable’s film, was supposed to help the Army Air Force recruit air gunners. But the AAF already had more than enough gunners by the time the film was ready for distribution in late ’43. The documentary contains some gritty combat footage and revealing interviews with gunners, but doesn’t come close to packing the wallop of Wyler’s The Memphis Belle.
JIMMY STEWART, TOO, ENLISTED AS a private, just days after winning an Academy Award for his memorable role with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story. Stewart, by then in his midthirties, had gotten a pilot’s license after graduating from Princeton and owned a little two-seater. Coaxed into B-17 school, he was lauded as a superior pilot and became an instructor. But Stewart began itching for combat duty; in the fall of ’43, the Army Air Force finally relented, again incurring Mayer’s wrath.
Ironically assigned to a B-24 Liberator unit, the 445th Bomb Group out of Tibenham, Stewart was dead set against publicity. For months he refused to pose for pictures and fought off an avalanche of interview requests. Only when the Eighth Air Force’s public relations officers pointed out that a little press attention would help the morale of squadron members did Stewart finally budge, allowing photographers and correspondents to cover a medal ceremony.
“I was reluctant to send a cameraman out in front of the line of men receiving awards and singling out Jimmy Stewart to photograph but I suspect that, in this case, he must have been a little proud and only tentatively reluctant to have his picture in the Stars and Stripes,” recalled Rooney. As Rooney studied Stewart’s face during the awards ceremony, he couldn’t help but think, “Those don’t look like lips that have kissed Lana Turner’s.” Later in life Rooney wondered if thoughts of kissing Turner had ever come to Stewart, unbidden, while attacking the Reich.27
Lieutenant Colonel Stewart ended up flying twenty-one missions over enemy territory without ever losing a plane or a crew member and was promoted to operations officer for the 453rd Bomb Group, then made chief of staff for the Second Bomb Wing out of Hethel.
Stewart was so valued by crew members that on September 27, 1944, he was called back to Tibenham after his old unit absorbed the worst beating in the annals of American aerial warfare.
Twenty-five of thirty-five Liberators did not make it home from a mission over Kassel and Göttingen. After releasing their loads they were jumped by three of Göring’s Sturmstaffeln (“storm squadrons”), special units of heavily armored Fw 190s. Some survivors were in such deep shock that they couldn’t utter a word. Stewart intervened, quietly divided the men into small groups, and got them to share their grief—and discuss how such a debacle might be averted by future attackers.28
Stewart was “the kind of American that Americans like to think of as typical even though he was better than that,” Rooney wrote.29
“IT WAS LIKE A DEATH in the family every time a crew returned and found that friends in another B-17 or B-24 hadn’t made it,” Rooney remembered. “Back in their Nissen hut, they found empty bunks and silence where friends had been that morning. The wife, the girlfriend, the mother stared out from the picture next to the bunk. The guys were gone. In all probability dead or, at very best, prisoners. No one mentioned the empty spaces at the breakfast table next morning.”30
The tour of duty for bomber boys in ’43 was twenty-five missions; after that, at least in theory, they’d be rotated off duty or sent home. Many crew members kept track of their progress on barracks’ walls by marking each mission with a vertical line.
One day, Rooney was interviewing a young airman sitting on a bunk and spotted the markings behind him. Rooney congratulated him on having completed seventeen missions. “You’re practically done,” Rooney smiled. “No,” the kid responded. “Those aren’t mine. Today was my third.”
“I didn’t have to ask about the man who had carved the seventeen marks,” Rooney wrote. “He never got back to carve the eighteenth.”31
At the Thurleigh airdrome, Rooney’s home base, American airmen “adopted” a three-year-old war orphan, nicknamed her Sweet Pea, and decorated the nose of a bomber with her painted palm print, hoping her mark would keep the plane safe.32
The bomber boys knew every guy who disappeared the way classmates in a small school know one another. “If you hear of someone who flew thirty-five or forty missions in a bomber, it was not from a base in the British Isles before D-Day,” Rooney wrote. “No one made it that far.”33 In one of his first columns, Hal Boyle told the story of a pilot in the Mediterranean Theater who had a recurring nightmare about landing on top of the Rock of Gibraltar—with brakes that had gone out.34
MAINTAINING MORALE IN BOMBER CREWS became so thorny that the Eighth Air Force took up the British Air Ministry on its offer to make the RAF’s rest-and-relaxation
homes—known among the ranks as flak farms—available to American airmen. Homer Bigart filed a piece in late April ’43 on the R & R spot for officers and followed up seven weeks later with a description of the respite home for air gunners.
Censorship rules, of course, prevented Bigart from mentioning either location. But the Air Ministry had established flak farms at resorts and estates all over England: at Ebrington Manor in Gloucestershire; at Eynsham Hall near Whitney; at Phyllis Court near Henley on Thames; and at Moulsford Manor and Bucklands Hotel at Wallingford, Oxfordshire.35 Bigart’s eclectic knowledge and his gift for tart tongue-in-cheek observation were on full display in both articles.
“A rest home, with breakfast eggs, mullioned windows, tiled baths, central heating, golfing privileges, a butler named Bunting, and fishing rights in a stream mentioned favorably by the late Izaak Walton, has been requisitioned by the Air Ministry and thrown open to tired pilots, copilots, navigators and bombardiers of the Eighth Air Force,” was his lede in the April 29 piece that got wide pickup beyond the Herald Tribune. The estate, wrote the reporter, who had just spent weeks hanging around director William Wyler, “resembles a Hollywood version of the country diggings of a strictly upper-class Mrs. Miniver.” Some of the estate’s relics dated from the time of King Ethelwulf, the monarch whom, Bigart informed readers, had “sired” Alfred the Great.
Its main house was “a Tudor residence of mellowed red brick, surmounted by five squat gables, ornamented by heavily-carved woodwork. The broad terrace along the southern front slopes gently to a chain of ponds, bordered by high clumps of rhododendron. Along the west slope are hothouses enclosing peach trees, fig trees and grape arbors and the usual rock garden.” Then, just to give his august portrayal a hint of American insouciance, Bigart slipped in: “For security reasons, there is no babbling brook.”
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