Assignment to Hell (27 page)

The efficacy of the Allies’ bombing war remains a contentious issue all these decades later, as does its morality.
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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.”
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B
Y THE TIME THE
M
ATHIS
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.

“O
UR 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 N
INE
C
RYING
B
OYS
and a
F
ort. Cronkite always said it should have been called N
INE
C
RYING
B
OYS
and O
NE
C
RYING
C
orrespondent.

Once Stockton was laid to rest at the Brookwood Cemetery outside Cambridge,
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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.”
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A
NDY
R
OONEY, 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.
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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.
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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.

M
OVIES 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
.
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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.
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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.”
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