Assignment to Hell (23 page)

In addition to Rooney’s Army pay, he was given a per diem to offset living expenses, so he could afford a more than occasional meal out. He and another
Stars and Stripes
staffer, photographer Dick Koenig, shared a basement hovel on Clarges Street in Piccadilly. An enterprising lady of the evening occupied the apartment directly overhead. Her creaky bedsprings caused Rooney and Koenig so many sleepless nights that they were forced to find a new place in Hyde Park. Their flat may have had an elegant address—11 Palace Court—but it was just a two-roomer. Its bathroom fixtures worked, however, which in wartime London was living in the lap of luxury.

A
NDY
R
OONEY COULDN’T REMEMBER WHEN
and where he met Walter Cronkite for the first time, but it was probably at the St. Pancras or Paddington
railway stations, the central London depots where correspondents gathered to grab trains north to Bedford and the East Anglia airdromes. Cronkite was all business the first few times Rooney was around him, spare with small talk, a “tough, competitive scrambler” hell-bent on beating INS and AP.
¹⁸
It took a while for Cronkite’s icy demeanor to warm, Rooney recalled. It helped that Rooney, as a
Stars and Stripes
guy, wasn’t a competitor of UP’s, per se. Rooney’s broadsheet, in fact, turned out to be a steady UP and Cronkite customer.

Having taken three trips across the Atlantic in less than five months, Cronkite got settled in London during Christmastime ’42. On the eve of his departure from New York, he sat down—twice—to write Betsy a farewell letter.

My very dearest darling:

This isn’t a fancy card at all but more than any card could ever say it must tell you “Merry Christmas.” Wherever I am today, sweetheart, you know where my thoughts will be. They will be with you every second of the day just as if we were getting up together to go to our tree.…

A few days later, on December 12, he tried again.

My very dearest darling:

Thirteen is the number of days until Christmas. If I could just stay here that much longer to be with you.…

Years later, in a handwritten note scrawled on yellowed stationery, Betsy explained to her children that both fragments were meant to be goodbye letters that “Daddy” never finished. Her parenthetical note ends: “He didn’t get home again for two years.”
¹⁹
It was actually closer to three.

There was little time for Cronkite to explore London when he first arrived; he was immediately thrust into war coverage, handling the two p.m. to ten p.m. (often later) shift five days a week, plus nine a.m. to five p.m. on Saturdays. He was essentially on call twenty-four/seven; his phone constantly
rang in the middle of the night. Only on Wednesdays was he “off,” but even then he often found himself going into United Press’ cramped quarters in the News of the World building.

After UP’s special stipend to new arrivals ran out after a couple of weeks, Cronkite found a “cell” at the Park Lane Hotel in Piccadilly. It was so tiny, Cronkite complained to Betsy, that “my knees and shins bruised severely with a fresh injury occurring every time I attempt to turn round.”
²⁰
For this he was paying the princely sum of eighteen shillings a day, about three bucks.

The Park Lane’s chief attraction was the American Bar on its first floor; if late owls tipped the bartender, it sometimes stayed open past the mandatory eleven p.m. closing time. So some nights Cronkite could sip a watered-down beer or bourbon before collapsing into bed.

Fellow UP reporters Jim McGlincy, Bob Musel, John Parris, and Doug Werner were all bunking at the Park Lane and hanging out at the American Bar, too. In McGlincy’s case, he was spending too much time at the pub, often drawing the owner’s ire by insisting it stay open past midnight.

The blackout in a London winter night was near total: U.S. correspondents soon learned to carry a “torch” (flashlight) with them at all times.

On January 9, 1943, Cronkite wrote Betsy that he’d forgotten his torch the previous night. “Not having it was serious. In the first place, it was a pitch black nite and I stood [in] serious danger of tripping over a curb or running into a wall, or worse, completely losing my way—which isn’t a darned bit hard to do even for the oldest Londoners.”

Waving a torch, Cronkite explained, was the only way to hail a bus or taxicab. Cronkite was fortunate. After wandering around Fleet Street trying to grab the correct bus, he was able to whistle down a taxi. “Somehow we found each other in the pitch blackness. Thus ends the adventure of our rover boys and the blackout,” he kidded.
²¹

E
ARLY ON, THE ROVER BOY
visited the white cliffs of Dover to profile the plucky antiaircraft gunners who tried to knock the Ju 88s and He 111s out of the skies as they began their bombing runs over the southeast of
England. Cronkite was perched in a sandbag bunker outside Dover as the battery began firing on a fleet of bombers that could barely be seen by the naked eye.

Amid the
ack!-ack!
a bespectacled man next to Cronkite shouted something that Cronkite couldn’t quite make out.

“What’s that?” Cronkite hollered back.

“I’m the best piano player in town!” the man bellowed.

That night, a bemused Cronkite shared the story with some locals at the village pub. “Oh, that’s such-and-such,” they told Cronkite. “He
is
the best piano player in town!”

In late January 1943, Betsy’s nephew Bob, an Army lieutenant, got a two-day pass and came to London to see his uncle. Cronkite used Bob’s stopover as an excuse to take a real day off and peruse the city.

The day began with Cronkite throwing open his windows at the Park Lane to show off London’s infamous fog. Before sitting down to lunch, he and Bob stopped by an Army PX to pick up Cronkite’s weekly rations: one can of orange juice; one can of tomato juice; one box each of vanilla wafers, chocolate cookies (“very much unlike,” Cronkite was quick to tell Betsy, “the wonderful ones my wife makes”), and cheese niblits; one can of pipe tobacco (or five packs of cigarettes or three cigars, depending on tastes); one bar of soap; one pack of pipe cleaners; and sundry other items, all purchased for about a buck and a half.

Cronkite took Bob to the Army Officers’ Club near Hyde Park, where for forty pence uniformed correspondents could get a decent meal in a pleasant setting. The wood-paneled bar downstairs had a fireplace and a piano.

Then uncle and nephew set off on a four-hour stroll through the scarred city. They ended their pilgrimage back at the Park Lane bar, where they bumped into some Navy pilots.

“I made the mistake,” Cronkite laughed to Betsy, “of telling these guys that I thought I had perfect balance & if it weren’t for the old color blindness would make a terrific flyer. To prove which I had to pull that little stunt of holding one leg straight out in front & kneeling on the other—you know, I did the stunt with great aplomb. But I’m still limping.”
²²

C
RONKITE LIMPED HIS WAY ONTO
a lot of trains from London to East Anglia. In late ’42 and the first few days of ’43, there were just a couple of reporters covering the Eighth Air Force—but the trains got crowded in a hurry.

At the beginning, the press contingent consisted of the
Stars and Stripes
’ Rooney, sometimes accompanied by colleagues Bud Hutton or Charles Kiley; Sergeant Denton Scott of
Yank
magazine, the periodical counterpart to the
Stars and Stripes
; UP’s Cronkite; AP’s Gladwin Hill (Cronkite’s chief competitor and a wily journalist); the
New York Times
’ Robert Perkins Post; and International News Service’s William Wade. By the end of January they were joined by Homer Bigart of the
New York Herald Tribune
and Paul Manning of CBS Radio and later the Mutual Broadcasting System.

To alert reporters that a newsworthy raid was imminent, public relations officer Hal Leyshon came up with a novel system. Leyshon or aide Jimmy Dugan would give reporters a call using coded language. Lest enemy spies be eavesdropping, the PRO would say, “We’ve got a poker game in the works at my place,” or “There will be a mail delivery tomorrow.” Rooney remembered that it gave him the feeling “that I was part of a great conspiracy to save the world.”
²³

The correspondents would meet at St. Pancras or Paddington or sometimes King’s Cross and take the train north to a centrally located spot like Bedford or Cambridge. There, Army trucks would be waiting to transport them to one of several airdromes. Cronkite and Bigart, who knew each other a little from New York, soon became attached to the 303rd Bomb Group at Molesworth, and Rooney to the 306th Bomb Group at Thurleigh. Often the reporters spent a night or two or three in the barracks before heading back to London.

In February of ’43, Cronkite and Bigart began bunking more than occassionally in the crude Nissen hut barracks at Molesworth. If they had a little downtime between deadlines, they’d borrow bicycles and pedal around the picturesque countryside. A Cronkite letter to Betsy described
how parched he and Bigart had been after one midafternoon excursion, only to discover to their chagrin that the Cross Keys tavern didn’t reopen for the evening until four o’clock.

But for every relaxed moment spent around an air base, there were a dozen brutal ones waiting for the bomber boys to return from a bloody mission. Correspondents settled into a ghoulish routine, interviewing pilots and crew members for potential profiles before they went wheels up. Then the reporters would hang around for the six or eight hours it would take for the planes to return, praying their interviewees were still in one piece and, after their debriefing with the base command, could join them for a beer and a raid recap.

Without divulging much, Leyshon and his deputies would provide generic information about each mission, identifying the target, its military value, the number of times that it had been bombed, and sometimes the mission’s total bomb tonnage.

Much of it was educated guesswork; some of it bordered on outright fabrication, Cronkite later admitted. As the months went on and Allied bombing raids increased in size and frequency—some characterized as “light,” some “medium,” some “heavy,” some “very heavy”—Cronkite and his counterpart at AP, Gladwin Hill, would engage in a machismo duel in guesstimating the total number of aircraft committed to that day’s mission. U.S. papers wanted to print the wire service story that contained the most impressive number. So the stakes were high between AP and UP.

Cronkite would examine the scant information provided by the USAAF, consider whether the raid was being called “medium” or “heavy” or whatever, and, given recent history, estimate the number of bombers involved and stick it into a bulletin that would move over the UP wire. Then he’d go down to a Fleet Street tavern called the Bell Pub, order a gin and lime, and await the inevitable pas de deux with Hill.

Hill would walk into the Bell and shout at Cronkite: “How many?” Cronkite would throw out a number. Hill would stare disbelievingly, not sure if Cronkite was telling the truth or bluffing. Sometimes Hill would bolt back to the AP office to up the ante. Editors back home had no way of
knowing, but when UP estimated that 575 heavy bombers had attacked industrial targets in Düsseldorf whereas AP cited 580, neither number may have been even in the ballpark.

But all that came later. On any given day in early ’43, chances were roughly one in six or seven that U.S. airmen would not be returning from a mission. Too many surviving bombers, moreover, were forced to fire red flares out the pilot’s window as, belching smoke and leaking oil, their planes careened to a stop. The red signal meant they had wounded aboard. Ambulances with doctors and nurses cramped inside or clinging to the running boards would screech down the runway, performing instant triage.

After weeks of filing heartrending stories, the reporters began clamoring to go along on a raid. “We were tired of going up to those air bases and interviewing young guys our age that had lost friends in battle and returning to the comforts of London that night,” Rooney remembered. The correspondents were excited when the Eighth’s top brass okayed their request, but a little flummoxed when told it would require intensive training. None of them had thought through that part.

N
O ONE COULD QUITE REMEMBER
which public relations maven at the Eighth’s Grosvenor Square press headquarters dubbed the air beat reporters the Writing 69th. It might have been Cronkite’s pal Leyshon, then a captain, or one of Leyshon’s deputies, Joe Maher or Jimmy Dugan, or their boss, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, who doubled as a mogul at Twentieth Century-Fox and was the Air Force’s self-appointed emissary to London’s elite, or John “Tex” McCrary, a peacetime newsreel commentator and columnist for the
New York Mirror
who was engaged to the silky Jinx Falkenburg, a model and actress. Falkenburg, a leggy Chilean, possessed such beguiling beauty that she supposedly turned more heads in wartime London than Eisenhower’s redheaded driver, Kay Summersby, or the Prime Minister’s statuesque daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby Churchill. Cronkite’s letters to Betsy often gossiped about Whitney (whom he liked), McCrary (whom he didn’t—and Cronkite wasn’t alone; Andy Rooney called
McCrary a “con artist.”), Falkenburg (whom he ogled), and London’s American expatriate social scene, to which the deadline-plagued Cronkite only peripherally belonged.