Mrs. Cronkite ended up becoming an editor and featured contributor to the Hallmark Military News, a weekly newsletter put out by the greeting card company that kept the home fires burning.
AS LATE MAY OF 1944 approached, the fifty-eight media professionals who’d been given invasion-day or immediate-aftermath assignments were told to “wander up” to an unmarked townhome at 38 Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge near Brompton Oratory.32 But they were warned to knock on the door solo, not show up in groups of three or four; bunches of uniformed correspondents might have stirred attention from German spies.
There was no placard outside to indicate that 38 Egerton Gardens had been commandeered by U.S. Army public relations, but inside the crowded flat a bevy of PROs under the command of Majors Jack Redding and Barney Oldfield was coordinating first-wave press relations, trying to square away the thousand-and-one details required to pull off such a massive undertaking.
Redding and Oldfield insisted that the media professionals swear an oath of confidentiality, fill out personal information forms including data on next of kin, keep Army PR apprised of their whereabouts at all times, pack a musette bag of bare essentials, and, as the pièce de résistance, directed that each reporter, photographer, radioman, and newsreel cameraman write his (or her) own obituary.33
William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News balked when Oldfield parked him in front of a typewriter. When told that his archrival, H. R. Knickerbocker of the Chicago Sun, had filed a four-and-a-half-page obit listing every battle and skirmish he’d ever witnessed, Stoneman told the PROs to “just say I was all the places Knick was—and usually filed first, too.” Acme photographer Bert Brandt gave Oldfield’s staff formal “laying out” instructions. “Part my lips in a smile,” Brandt said. “That’s the way everyone would remember me. If they ever find me.”
Ernie Pyle, who liked to make wan jokes about his own demise, wrote a bare-bones account of his remarkable career, then volunteered: “And when it becomes necessary to release this information, please inform my syndicate so it can break the news to my wife.”34
ALAS, JIM MCGLINCY’S SELF-COMPOSED OBIT has not survived. But McGlincy was Joe Liebling’s kind of guy: a tempestuous Irishman who wrote like a dream (Cronkite always said that his roommate had “the news in his head”) but drank and fought way too much for his own good. Cronkite’s letters back home were full of stories about McGlincy picking pub fights, ticking off the landlord, sleeping off hangovers, missing deadlines, and generally making himself persona non grata at the London UP bureau.
But Cronkite glimpsed a side of McGlincy that few others saw—and loved his wicked wit. Cronkite took care of his friend, rescuing him in bars, sobering him up, and making sure his copy got to the bosses.
McGlincy had a flair for funny features that put him almost in the same league as Hal Boyle. In the late fall of ’43, Pinkley told McGlincy to check out what had become known as “Ladies, Excuse Me” dances—social gatherings where English lasses would entertain American servicemen on leave. They were labeled “Excuse Me” because they required constant cutting in by the girls.
“Wow, whatta assignment!” McGlincy exclaimed at the top of a piece played up by the Stars and Stripes. “Soft lights, sweet music, and waltzing women.…
“‘Find out something about these “Ladies, Excuse Me” dances,’ said the boss, who apparently had been hitting the phonograph needle again. ‘How’d they start? What’re they like?’”
So off McGlincy went to the Opera House in Covent Garden, the same place Cronkite had visited nine months earlier with Harrison Salisbury to celebrate Cronkite’s scoop on the Wilhelmshaven raid. After being comped his thirty pence cover charge, McGlincy learned from an Opera House manager that the special dance had a long tradition in England. Since there were often more women than men at community dances, they decided that during certain songs, women could cut in on couples, say “Excuse me,” and waltz away with the man.
Amid McGlincy’s “vision of buck-toothed buffaloes with horn-rimmed glasses saying, ‘Excuse me,’” the manager approached the orchestra leader to request the dance.
“I shuddered, gulped, and blanched,” McGlincy wrote, “but before I could say, ‘Look, chum, let’s not carry this thing too far,’” they were announcing the dance over a microphone. McGlincy soon found himself on the floor with “a couple of thousand other people—not tripping lightly, just tripping.”
His first partner was a blonde named Edna. “The conversation turned out to be a brilliant tirade of scintillating talk, consisting entirely of the questions (from her) ‘Do you like it over here?’ and (from me) ‘How do you like Americans?’ and the answers (from both of us) ‘Yes.’”
Soon enough “a neat little number with black hair and big bright eyes” cut in. McGlincy suspected that the manager had sent her his way—but he wasn’t objecting. “‘Do you like it over here?’ asked my new partner. Playing it safe, I said ‘Yes’ and followed right up with ‘Do you like Americans?’”
She turned out to be named Vicki, a waitress at a Leicester Square eatery. McGlincy felt his heart melting and was just about to ask what Vicki was doing the next night when he “was seized by what felt like a vise but turned out to be a pair of arms hanging on a buxom, brown-haired girl with a lot of teeth.”
As soon as McGlincy could free himself, he went looking for Vicki but found “the little vixen” cozily chatting with an American GI. It wasn’t their first encounter, McGlincy realized: They were clearly an item.35
C’est la guerre.
AS THE WINTER OF ’44 turned to spring, Omar Bradley (“Brad”) and Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”) were contending with far weightier U.S.-Anglo relations. The cross-Channel invasion plan they’d inherited from an Allied team led by British general Frederick Morgan was well thought out in terms of location and timing, but woefully inadequate in what Ike called “wallop.”36 Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, and Bradley, the commander of U.S. ground forces, effectively doubled the size of the initial seaborne assault force (from three divisions to five), demanded much heavier and broader naval gunfire and strategic bombing support, and insisted on the aggressive use of airborne troops.
After leaving the U.S.’s Italy operation in the unsteady hands of Lieutenant General Mark Clark, Ike and Brad met nearly every day in the Norfolk House on the east side of St. James’s Square.37 Ike and Brad had witnessed in Sicily the hazards of paratroop operations. The more they studied maps of Normandy and assessed intelligence reports of the Wehrmacht’s deployment in northern France, however, the more convinced they became that it was imperative to land airborne divisions behind the beachheads. Without troopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st and the British Sixth harassing enemy troops and seizing key arteries, it would be nearly impossible for the seaborne infantry to push inland, Bradley and Eisenhower believed. Allied paratroopers had to be in position to disrupt enemy counterattacks; without them, Panzer units and the other outfits the German field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was holding in reserve would have an unbroken line to vulnerable beachheads.
THROUGHOUT THAT WINTER AND SPRING, St. James’ Square would attract onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous American generals. One of the hangers-on was Joe Liebling, who would often take a workout jog through the square and nearby Hyde Park.
In November ’43, Liebling had again crossed the Atlantic without benefit of military escort, arriving in Liverpool aboard a cramped Norwegian fruit ship. “My notion,” he wrote a few years later, “was to get to England early in order to be sure of a good spot in the invasion. I did not want to get caught up in some ancillary theater and then not be able to transfer out in time for the main event, and as the lone correspondent of the New Yorker I had to fight my own campaign against red tape and the stuffy lay bureaucrats.”38 Liebling endeared himself to the New Yorker’s London correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downes, by bringing her dozens of nylons—a luxury impossible to find at Selfridges or Harrods.
When not beseechin
g SHAEF public relations officers for an invasion berth, Liebling enjoyed London’s hedonistic charms. Again he found lodging at Flemings in Piccadilly. He got chummy enough with the blokes who ran Shepherd Market that he managed to sometimes score gulls’ eggs and black-market seafood delicacies. He even re-created his Runyonesque life in the Big Apple by frequenting a back-alley bar called Toby’s. It was a smoky joint that featured a raffish clientele who, despite a little distraction like a world war, still managed to find their way to the track.
Acting as if nothing had happened, he resumed his relationships with the two women he’d known in ’42: a lady from Yorkshire and a Wren, a British servicewoman, from Nottingham. The fact that the Wren had been impregnated by somebody else didn’t appear to daunt Liebling. The Yorkshire woman, whom Liebling snidely called “the canary” in letters to Joe Mitchell, convinced Liebling to write a story about the bomb damage in Hull, her hometown.
By early ’44, Liebling had gone through two sets of gas masks and helmets and had ordered a new pair from Army PROs. He was so bored waiting month after month for the invasion that he thought about volunteering for Army Intelligence, but abandoned the idea when First Division commander General Clarence Huebner offered him the chance—if approved by the public relations staff—to go ashore on D-Day with the Big Red One. It didn’t help Liebling’s prospects of landing an invasion assignment that an old gout condition resurfaced, forcing him to gimp around London. His gout, his ample girth, and his thick glasses all made him look pathetic to the PROs handing out invasion slots.
Even Liebling’s boxer-inspired workouts failed to put much of a dent in his belly. His overeating was becoming more compulsive. He constantly dined at an upper-crust restaurant off St. James’s called Wiltons, whose wartime prices were obscene.
His New Yorker articles from London were an eclectic mix: a piece on a munitions factory that gave English laborers credit in helping to turn the tide; an irreverent profile of “Paddy,” a Royal Air Force ace; and “V for Victory,” a valentine to the British Broadcasting Corporation for its efforts in building morale and making the V symbol an inspiration to the Resistance movement throughout Europe. During the winter of ’44 Liebling also went on his own “Eisenhower shuttle,” the B-26 raid over the Nazis’ Montdidier airdrome.
To his eternal credit, Liebling was determined to pay homage to the French Resistance. Awed by the forbidden French newspapers that were smuggled into England, he tried to piece together a definitive picture of the Maquis’ (literally “underbrush”) defiance, but given skimpy information, it was impossible. It amazed Liebling that some of France’s underground papers had circulations of fifty thousand or more. Merely to be seen reading an outlawed circular was to risk torture or a firing squad. The courage it took to actually print one under the nose of the Gestapo staggered him.
Liebling would quiz any French expatriate he encountered, picking their brains about their countrymen’s efforts to defy Hitler. The topic would become a recurring theme, Liebling’s most passionate wartime cause. Eventually he compiled his essays on the Resistance into a collection he called The Republic of Silence.
AFTER EIGHT ENERVATING MONTHS IN Sicily and Italy, Hal Boyle finally got a break. Boyle owed his respite to Ernie Pyle, whose battlefield adventures were being turned into a United Artists movie, Ernie Pyle’s The Story of G.I. Joe, starring Burgess Meredith as the intrepid columnist. Among the Pyle intimates slated to play themselves were Boyle and Don Whitehead of Associated Press; Chris Cunningham of United Press; Sergeant Jack Foisie of the Stars and Stripes, Bigart’s buddy from Sicily; and Tom Treanor of the Los Angeles Times, the correspondent who had climbed Monte Cipolla with Bigart and Whitehead.
AP shrewdly gave Boyle and Whitehead a few extra weeks off to make speeches, do radio interviews, and generally beat the drum for the wire service’s coverage of the war. To get home, Boyle ended up hitching a ride in Naples on a B-24 known as The Blue Streak, a bomber that was being retired in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations after a record 110 missions.
“She dropped half a million pounds of bombs on enemy objectives, sank a destroyer, a tanker, and a merchant vessel,” Boyle wrote in a piece that ran on page one of the Atlanta Constitution. “During her 1,058 hours of combat her gunners brought down 23 enemy fighters. In her long career—she has used up 10 engines and twice been rescued from the junk heap—the big-bellied Liberator never lost one of her crewmen to German guns or German ack ack although her paint-peeling frame is pitted with 150 flak holes.”39
Boyle and The Blue Streak arrived in Miami on February 20, 1944. It took the Liberator forty-five hours and eighteen minutes to make the 8,100-mile flight—not that Boyle was counting. They’d flown from Naples to Dakar, where they refueled and attempted to fix a balky electrical problem that had put the navigation system on the fritz.40
On the tarmac at Miami’s 179th Street Airport, Boyle posed for pictures with the Streak’s passengers and crew. The photos moved on AP, thus serving both the wire service’s and USAAF’s interests.
By late winter ’44, Boyle had become much more than “the poor man’s Ernie Pyle”: He was regularly outperforming the master, although he never achieved Pyle’s iconic status. In any given week, Boyle put out at least twice and sometimes three times the amount of copy that came out of Pyle’s typewriter. Boyle would feed AP spot coverage updates each day, then sit down almost daily to write Leaves from a War Correspondent’s Notebook. His column typically ran in about half the four-hundred-odd newspapers that used Pyle’s column in early ’44; still, by any measure, Boyle’s stuff got sensational pickup.
BOYLE FLEW FROM MIAMI TO New York, where he and Frances had a joyful reunion. They hadn’t seen one another in fifteen months, since Boyle had left for the Operation Torch convoy.
As part of his publicity tour, on the evening of March 7, 1944, Boyle appeared as a guest on CBS World News’ Report to the Nation, a program hosted by “noted foreign correspondent” Quentin Reynolds. The script has survived in Boyle’s papers and demonstrates why print journalists, Cronkite and Boyle among them, were so wary of the broadcast medium. Cronkite’s adjective, “schlocky,” doesn’t begin to describe the Reynolds–Boyle exchange. “Vapid” would be closer to the mark. Boyle’s two most celebrated moments in North Africa—his Darlan scoop and his vote-for-Boyle silliness—were distorted and reduced to specious caricatures, complete with anti-Arab slurs.
Despite the contrived patter, Reynolds did ask Boyle meaningful questions about censorship, GI spirit, and Allied antipathy toward the Nazis. Boyle allowed that he didn’t care much for censors but said they weren’t vicious, “just capricious.” When Reynolds asked about morale in Italy, Boyle said, “There’s nothing wrong with morale when they’re fighting but the boys are really aching to get home. Some of them have been away from home for two years.”
When quizzed on how he felt about the Germans, Boyle mused, “Well, as you know most of the American soldiers in Africa were a lot sorer at Japan than they were at Germany, in the beginning. However, the Nazis have managed to gain equal footing with the Japs. Our kids see the death and desolation Germans leave behind when they evacuate a town. The sick and dying women and children, the stripped hospitals, the unnecessary misery. And of course, American soldiers have seen a lot of good friends fall under German bullets.”
Boyle closed by urging folks at home to write to the men and women on the front lines. “Tell them all the news of what’s going on at home and tell ’em you know what they are going through…. You have no idea what that sort of recognition means to a kid.”41
The Reynolds program poked fun at the very thing Hal Boyle did so superbly: doggedly gathering information and telling stories about the human drama of war. Moreover, the real news—the Nazi atrocities that Boyle had witnessed in Italy—barely merited a mention. If that’s how the great CBS conveyed wartime news under the portentous banner Report to the Nation, imagine what less reputable outlets were doing.
AFTE
R PAINTING THE BIG APPLE redder, Frances and Hal worked their way west on the train, stopping in Cincinnati so Boyle could do a radio interview and address a civic group. They spent more than a week in Kansas City, seeing Hal’s mother, Margaret, and older brother Ed, who, as a thirty-two-year-old store proprietor, was the only Boyle boy not in uniform. Neil was an airman in North Africa; John an Army machine gunner who was wounded in the Pacific.
Margaret was at Kansas City’s Union Station to give her son a “good Irish welcome,” as the Kansas City Star put it. “Yes, it’s sure good to be back,” Boyle told the Star in a story that ran underneath a photo of Boyle mère et fils grinning from ear to ear. “We were out to a New York nightspot the other night and when we got ready to leave, the other fellow reached out and picked up the $44 check. Then I knew I was home—that’s home when the other fellow reaches for the check.”42 Boyle’s vacation included a lot of nights out at a lot of nightspots.
The Sunday, February 27, Star had run a front-page tribute to the war reporters and photographers that had ties to the Paris of the Plains. Boyle, of course, was featured, fêted by his boss Wes Gallagher: “[Boyle] has an unshaken faith in the American infantry and his idea of an ideal army is one with millions and millions of infantry, a couple of big guns, and an airplane. The airplane would be used only to carry his copy from the front.”43
While in Kansas City, Boyle got to admire the scrapbook that his sister-in-law, Ed’s wife, had lovingly kept since Hal climbed aboard his first troopship. Encased in a handsome beige cover with a soaring eagle on the front, the album was already crammed with four or five inches’ worth of clips and mementos. By war’s end, it would be close to two times that thick. The Star printed everything that moved on the AP wire with Boyle’s byline, often playing it on page one, so Monica had plenty of material.
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