Assignment to Hell (13 page)

He was surprised that an article describing the demolition of one of America’s biggest troopships was approved by censors. “I had lucked in to early recognition as a war correspondent,” he wrote.
³³

Having survived a benign baptism under fire, UP’s new war reporter returned to New York to await his next assignment.

T
WO MONTHS BEFORE
C
RONKITE’S CONVOY
left Staten Island, Franklin Roosevelt by executive order had created the Office of War Information (OWI). Its mission was to enhance understanding of Allied war aims and policies. FDR appointed America’s most esteemed radio journalist, Elmer Davis of CBS, to head OWI. Davis was a native of Indiana who, as a
New
York Times
reporter two decades before, had gained notoriety for his exposé of slippery evangelist Billy Sunday.

After Davis joined CBS in the late ’30s, his soothing Hoosier baritone drew millions of ears to the network’s evening news roundup. Without doubt Davis ran what could be described as a “propaganda” machine, producing radio shows, posters, documentaries, editorial commentaries, motion pictures, and museum exhibitions—many of which rankled congressional Republicans by celebrating FDR’s “Four Freedoms.”
³⁴
One of OWI’s centerpieces early in the war was director Frank Capra’s series of films called
Why We Fight
. Capra was one of several great Hollywood directors who lent his talents to OWI and the Signal Corps. Later in the war, John Huston and William Wyler would film documentaries in close proximity to our five correspondents.

Despite today’s popular misconception, OWI was never charged with “censoring” newspaper and radio coverage. Wartime censorship evolved more or less willy-nilly from service to service; early on, U.S. officials took their cues from the ultrastrict British Ministry of Information. While in a war zone, U.S. reporters in ’42 and ’43 were put through a wringer, forced to compose their stories in the presence of a censor who immediately bluelined their copy, then usually submitted it to a second review from a superior public relations officer before allowing it to be relayed. It often took days—sometimes weeks—before the copy was fully approved and disseminated.

Cronkite’s experiences at the Ministry’s offices at the University of London were typical. Early in the war, censors encouraged reporters to draft stories the way they normally would. “Then your story went in to the censors, and the censors killed it, cut it, or did whatever they needed to do to it,” Cronkite remembered. “And then they sent it back out to you, whether you wanted to file it that way or not. Sometimes, if you didn’t care how they censored it but just wanted it to move as quickly as possible, you could mark it, ‘Read and File.’ This meant for them to censor it and then send it to your office in the censored form. It might not make much sense, but you would feel that your office would get enough of the story out of it.”
³⁵

Back home, away from the war zone, U.S. press outlets operated on the
honor system. In other words, for stories written in the States, censorship was voluntary. Not so in Britain or the ETO. “We argued like fury with the censors,” Cronkite recalled. “There were violent scenes going on all over the room.”
³⁶

Reporters had to pick and choose their battles with censors. Cronkite always asked himself before submitting an article: Is this information something that
without doubt
the Germans know? Because if that was indisputably true, then perhaps it was worth feuding over with the censor. But if there was any doubt about the enemy’s knowledge, then Cronkite and other reporters would censor themselves.

Censorship was bumpy, erratic, and often an embarrassment to the Four Freedoms the Americans were supposed to be defending. But, Cronkite recalled, “it worked with considerable smoothness, despite that.”
³⁷

T
HE VAGARIES OF
A
LLIED CENSORSHIP
were the last things on Private Andy Rooney’s mind as he was ushered off the troopship
Orcades.
Lugging their gear, Rooney and his buddies in the Seventeenth Artillery trudged onto a packed train at the Liverpool depot.

They had orders to report to the U.S. Army base at Perham Down, a mushrooming camp near the village of Hampshire, not far from the Channel. “It was fun being in a strange country,” Rooney recalled. “We were vaguely aware that there would be an invasion of France if the war lasted, but it seemed far off and we knew that the artillery would be a safer place to be than the infantry because the artillery never wades ashore with the first wave.”
³⁸

Rooney’s relations with the brass stayed rocky at Perham Down. One hard-ass upbraided Rooney for having the temerity to apply for Officer Candidate School—which, given Rooney’s disdain for Army life, was indeed a bit of a head-scratcher. Still, the rejection stung Rooney so much he huffed out of his superior’s office without saluting.

But Rooney was lucky: His contributions to the brigade newsletter were appreciated by a kindly lieutenant who recognized that Rooney’s talents lay
beyond firing a howitzer. The officer put Rooney in charge of the regimental band. Eventually the band job morphed into a more substantial task as regimental historian.

As scribe, part of Rooney’s job was to examine the directives that came in from London and Washington. One day a memo arrived from Special Services urging qualified GIs to apply for possible reassignment to a newly revived Army publication, the
Stars and Stripes
. Rooney, with the lieutenant’s encouragement, threw together a résumé that embellished his lowly internship at the
Knickerbocker Press
and a brief stint editing a Colgate University magazine. To Rooney’s astonishment, their gambit worked: A few days later he returned from yet another confrontation with an officer to discover that orders awaited him. He was to report immediately to London to assume new duties at the
Stars and Stripes
.

Rooney knew he’d caught a break—but had no idea just how life altering those orders were. The twenty-two-year-old Rooney had stumbled into one of World War II’s accidentally magnificent institutions.
³⁹

The
Stars and Stripes
traced its roots to the Union Army during the Civil War. It was exhumed in France during World War I, where it was edited in Paris by none other than Harold Ross. The future founder of the
New Yorker
was an absent-without-leave doughboy; the editing job may have saved him from doing time in the stockade.
⁴⁰

It was revived again in early ’42 as U.S. troops began arriving in Northern Ireland; the brass recognized that GIs needed a morale boost. It started as a weekly with a modest staff of five. But as tens of thousands of American soldiers poured into the British Isles, the operation was moved to Soho in London’s West End. Soon the
Stars and Stripes
became a three-times-a-week affair, then a daily with an eventual staff of more than 150 and a huge newsroom and printing press leased from the
Times
of London.

Rooney was just one of many great journalists who cut their teeth in Soho’s editorial offices. Peter Lisagor of the
Chicago Daily News
, Don Hewitt of
60 Minutes
, and future Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin all learned their craft at the
Stars and Stripes
, as did dozens of other notables. At the Army’s insistence, reporters and editors stayed
active-duty military; many, including Rooney, were granted the rank of staff sergeant.

The paper’s biggest fan was the Supreme Allied Commander; yet Eisenhower winced when, early on, it ran a series of overly rah-rah editorials. Instead of obsequious propaganda, Ike and his staff wanted something that had the feel of a hometown paper, complete with reasonably honest coverage of war developments (the two censors in the
Stars and Stripes
newsroom rarely killed stories
⁴¹
), local news, sports, and gossipy features about Hollywood and Broadway. Plus, of course, cheesecake photos of starlets. For every picture of Ike, there were dozens of scantily attired pinup girls like Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.

Under the no-nonsense direction of Staff Sergeant Robert Moora, one of Homer Bigart’s old bosses at the
New York Herald Tribune
, and Moora’s deputy, Corporal (soon to be Sergeant) Bud Hutton, the former editor of the
Buffalo Evening News
, the
Stars and Stripes
became a must-read for GIs. It spawned field operations and separate editions all over the ETO and special issues for the Pacific Theater, as well.

The
Stars and Stripes
was full of characters who taught Rooney the ropes. The crusty Hutton, who looked and sounded like a character in
The Front Page
, became the first of Rooney’s many wartime mentors.

Stars and Stripes
’ newsroom was like something out of central casting. It reeked of cigarette and cigar smoke; its floor was grease stained, littered with butts, soda bottles, half-eaten sandwiches, carbon paper, and rejected ledes torn with disgust out of Underwoods. Rooney loved every smelly inch.

The normally cocky Rooney was so green that when given an early assignment to cover the most mundane of stories—a service bowling tournament—he panicked, not knowing how to distill his notes into a simple who-won-and-by-how-much article. He got lucky, though. When he called to check in that night, the phone was answered by one of his pals on the night desk, not Moora or Hutton. His buddy jotted down the tourney information and volunteered to draft something for the next edition, sparing Rooney the humiliation of fumbling for a lede.

Despite the bumpy start, it didn’t take long for Rooney to begin finding
his rhythm. The cub reporter earned his first
Stars and Stripes
byline on December 8.

His breakthrough came in what became an archetypal Rooney profile: saluting the unsung grunts behind the scenes. His tribute to the men of the motor pool ran on page two, alongside a photo of a mechanic laboring under the hood of a jeep.

Datelined A
N
O
RDNANCE
M
AINTENANCE
U
NIT IN
E
NGLAND
, on December 7, precisely one year after Pearl Harbor, Rooney’s article led with: “The Purple Heart may never be awarded to the grease monkey in olive-drab overalls who works seven days and nights a week to keep Army wheels rolling. But he is made of the same basic stuff that puts the men in the Flying Fortresses in the headlines day after day. The grease monkey is the unglamorous, backstage—and very necessary—human element of this war.”
⁴²

Rooney had found his niche. Six days later he did a feature on B-17 technicians, men “who often work all day in a space that would make a telephone booth look like the waiting room of [the] Grand Central Terminal.”
⁴³

The prep school kid from the elite college quickly became the
Stars and Stripes
’ champion of “ordinary” guys. Rooney and Bud Hutton would become so infatuated with young air gunners that, together, they wrote a book about them.

I
T TOOK
H
OMER
B
IGART MONTHS
to convince his bosses at the
Herald Tribune
that he was the right guy to buttress the paper’s two-person London operation. Thanks to the U.S. Navy’s improved submarine surveillance, at least part of the U-boat hysteria had subsided when Bigart made his crossing in January 1943. Although Bigart never confirmed his exact convoy, given the timing it was almost assuredly SC 116, which departed New York on January 4, 1943, with a retinue of some sixty ships. Its flagship, ironically enough, was the USS
Arkansas
, the same battleship Cronkite had ridden to Scotland five months earlier.

Troopship convoys were now “no more eventful than a trans-Atlantic voyage at the height of the prewar June tourist rush,” Bigart observed,
more than a bit disingenuously, in his first article ever with a London dateline. With his ineffable touch at slipping the silly into the serious, Bigart told readers he was almost as fearful of mushy British food as U-boats. At the outset of the voyage, he planned to sleep either fully clothed, clutching his life preserver, or in a life raft, “winning the friendship of a plump seagull.” Before the boat had even left the dock, Bigart claimed he was so unnerved that he drank all the brandy he’d hoarded to combat seasickness.

When he awoke on day two and discovered that, against all odds, he was still alive, he felt a patriotic surge, but then realized the lump in his throat “was a bit of undigested sourdough roll.” After a few days at sea his shipmates “started grousing about the food, and then you knew that everything was normal.”
⁴⁴

Enlisted men on a troopship were inclined to believe rumors that ran the gamut from enemy submarines lurking just off the bow and their ship taking on water to nefarious officers who unjustly threw men into the stockade and got to slurp beer while regular guys were stuck with soda pop.
⁴⁵

A hillbilly band of Texas GIs entertained Bigart’s ship at night. Shooting craps and playing Ping-Pong were popular recreations. No one wanted to get too sweaty, though: the ship didn’t carry saltwater soap, so the men took few showers.

Only a few select officers knew the boat’s ultimate destination. Rumors were rampant that the convoy was headed toward North Africa. It wasn’t until the eve of their arrival that unit commanders were told how to transport their men to American stations throughout the British Isles. That last night at sea, there was an eleventh-hour outbreak of paranoia. “Someone had it straight from the engineer that a big pack of submarines was trailing the ship. Another said the whole German Navy was loose in the North Atlantic—Major So-and-so heard it on the wireless,” Bigart wrote.

Bigart’s convoy steamed untouched into an unnamed harbor (almost certainly Liverpool), occasioning him to sheepishly tell readers, “You had crossed the submarine-infested Atlantic without sighting even a porpoise. A hell of a thing to have to confess to your grandchildren.” As for his shipmates, they were just happy to be back on land.