Assignment to Hell (40 page)

Some fifty miles northwest, Allied forces remained bottled up at Anzio well into spring. In early March, Bigart was in a jeep behind a truckload of replacement doughboys as they headed toward Anzio. Six full weeks after the landings, the Allied position was still so vulnerable that any vehicle approaching the beachhead was exposed to deadly artillery fire.

“The green men must have had a premonition,” wrote Bigart. “They had seen dead cows and sheep beside the road and they were crouching down to the floor of the truck when the first shells came in, rattling like a runaway coal truck.”

The Germans undershot slightly, their misfires showering the truck with mud. Bigart’s jeep came under attack, too, but his driver stomped on the accelerator; they wheeled around the truck and out of danger. Both vehicles made it safely to the beachhead.

“The terror faded from the faces of the new men. There always has to be a first time, but the men had not expected it so soon,” Bigart wrote.

After they arrived at the beachhead, Bigart watched a no-nonsense
platoon sergeant give the green GIs a demonstration on the proper method of digging a foxhole. The sergeant walked them over to a spot near some shell craters and ordered them to dig in for the night.

Thirteen months into covering the war Bigart had witnessed untold tragedies, yet had not grown inured to them. There was something exceedingly sad about watching these kids being thrown into battle in such a dismal setting. But rather than dwell on the young soldiers’ anxieties, Bigart chose to describe the stark milieu.

“It was one of those grim March days that hold no hope of spring,” he wrote. “The brown plain reached toward mountains still covered with snow. A raw wind marshaled steely bands of clouds across the sky and rippled the flooded fields.

“On such a day you expect death more than on bright days. You think that if only you can survive this day, then tomorrow will be sunny and you’ll be one day nearer to the end of the war.”
⁵²

Some sixty thousand Allied soldiers in Italy never saw another sunny day.

W
alter Cronkite was grabbing a late Friday supper at the Grosvenor House near Hyde Park when the
ack!-ack!
barrage got uncomfortably loud. By February of ’44 Londoners had become blasé about air raids. Piercing sirens still went off, triggering crisscrossed searchlights, sporadic antiaircraft fire from the sandbag bunkers all over town, and a smattering of bombs that, for the most part, failed to inflict much damage. It was nothing like the Blitz of ’40, when tons of deadly ordnance struck almost every day and night, igniting fires throughout the city and forcing Londoners to flee underground inside tube stations.

A week earlier, in fact, Cronkite was watching actor Claude Rains in the film
Phantom of the Opera
when sirens began blaring and a defiant message was flashed on the screen: “An air raid warning has sounded. The performance will continue.” Nobody left the theater to seek cover, despite the fact, Cronkite volunteered to Betsy, that the movie “stank—it just didn’t jell.”
¹

Several nights later, though, the noise enveloping the West End sounded
more ominous. Cutting dinner short, Cronkite rushed out and goosed his neck to see a dozen or more glows from Nazi incendiaries.

Cronkite pulled out his torch and hailed a cab. The taxi took him to a neighborhood where two full blocks of apartment buildings were aflame. He got the attention of a female fireguard and asked if anyone had been hurt. Most of the flats had been vacant, he was told, but three older women had been evacuated and were being treated in an apartment across the street.

“I went over to have a look in on them,” Cronkite told Betsy. “Here were these three old gals, all of whom looked to be in their nineties, with the few pitiable possessions they had saved stacked around them. There was no light in the parlor. It was lit only by the reflection of the three old ladies’ burning flat across the street. But the three old ladies were huddled around a quart of Irish whiskey. And when I looked in one was just wiping her lips, laughing uproariously, and cackling: ‘Gol blimey, if it ain’t just like the good old days!’

“I guess that is the blitz spirit we read about. And the firemen here. I didn’t hear them shout a single order. They went about the work with more calm, and about as fast, as a bunch of WPA workers digging a sewer. And this with magnesium incendiaries still burning in the streets beside them.”
²

Twenty-four hours later the Luftwaffe was at it again. Cronkite was on deadline that night, pounding out a story at UP headquarters about the Allied raids on Leipzig, Hamburg, and Braunschweig that had kicked off Operation Argument, a savage bombing offensive against German aircraft factories that had been nicknamed Big Week.
³
Perhaps Hermann Göring was determined to retaliate. Suddenly London was filled with the same wail that Cronkite had heard the night before.

He ran up to the roof of the News of the World building. Whole sections of London were already ablaze, “illuminating the skyline like a full moon,” he told Betsy.

Cronkite hustled back downstairs and hollered for colleague (and roommate) Jim McGlincy to follow him. The two UP reporters ducked into a taxi and raced toward an industrial stretch of town where a conflagration was raging.

“It was no fun with the sparks whipped by a high wind, flying down the street like Fourth of July sparklers,” Cronkite told Betsy. The embers were so fierce that McGlincy and Cronkite were forced to beat them off their coats and pant legs with gloved hands and hats. Between the bitter cold and the malevolent sparks it was impossible for the correspondents to take notes or conduct interviews.

The next day they learned that one of their UP colleagues had been bombed out of his flat. Other UP reporters, including Cronkite and McGlincy, had experienced “narrow squeezes”: Several incendiaries had fallen within a block or two of their apartment building on Buckingham Gate.

“Some fun!” Cronkite facetiously wrote Betsy. “We all had a little taste Friday night and again last night of what London went through in the blitz and an even smaller taste of what Berlin must be going through now. And believe you me, a taste is enough.”
⁴

S
OME FUN INDEED
. C
RONKITE’S “LITTLE
taste” of terror bombing ironically became known in London lore as the Little Blitz. Journalist-historian Chester Wilmot was in southern England during that stretch, billeted with paratroopers from the Sixth British Airborne Division. On nine separate nights in February and March of ’44, Wilmot recalled, Göring’s bombers hit London harder than the British capital had been hit in years.
⁵
But the Luftwaffe couldn’t sustain the offensive. Göring had cobbled together a makeshift fleet of bombers from Nazi airfields in France. Once those planes were destroyed or damaged, few replacements were available. By mid-March, the Luftwaffe had again been reduced to ineffectual spot raids.

Thanks to forty thousand tons’ worth of Allied bomb attacks over launch and construction sites, moreover, Hitler’s scheme of a sky full of
Vergeltungswaffen
(“revenge”) rockets raining down on England was running well behind, five full months away from realization.

On Thursday, February 10, 1944, Cronkite went along on a B-26 Marauder raid against what he explained to Betsy were “special military targets” along the Pas de Calais on the Belgian-French border. In truth, USAAF sources told Cronkite, the targets were secret Nazi rocket-gun
emplacements. The 114 medium bombers were escorted for the entire mission by British Spitfires, which effectively discouraged the Germans from dispatching their own fighters. “The trip was about as exciting as a windy day in a Piper Cub,” Cronkite complained to his wife. Only a couple of bursts of flak exploded anywhere close to Cronkite’s formation.
⁶

When he got back to London, censors forbade Cronkite from identifying the raid’s objective, forcing him to stick, more or less, to the vagaries he offered Betsy. Still, Cronkite’s piece was well received in England, landing on the front page of the
Daily Herald
, the
Daily Sketch
, and the
News Chronicle
.
⁷

The article’s pickup may have tempered his bosses’ pique. UP’s higher-ups were angry at Cronkite for violating an office “rule” precluding reporters from going on airborne missions. Cronkite quickly produced a two-month-old memorandum that gave him dispensation to participate in the B-26 raid—a blessing that UP boss Virgil Pinkley had apparently forgotten.

“I think that secretly they [his bosses] probably admired the initiative. At any rate, I hope so,” Cronkite confided to Betsy.
⁸

L
ONDON WAS FULL OF ADMIRABLE
initiative in the winter and spring of 1944; still, it was a bizarre and, as Hal Boyle put it, “jittery” place.
⁹
The city was again under siege, but this time only peripherally from German bombs. Invading England in droves, however, were American servicemen and servicewomen.

When Cronkite, Rooney, and Bigart had first started covering bomber boys in early ’43, there were just four USAAF air bases in Britain and fewer than fifty thousand servicemen. By the end of ’43, both figures had more than quintupled—and that was just the beginning.

Newly arrived airmen looked around at all the airfields, Cronkite remembered, and declared England the “world’s largest aircraft carrier.” By the spring of ’44, nearly six dozen airdromes had taken root and a million and a half American men and women were being housed in the U.K. And that didn’t count hundreds of thousands of troops from the British
Commonwealth nations, plus France, Poland, Holland, Norway, and Czechoslovakia.
¹⁰

Indeed, London was the makeshift capital of every country that had been dismembered by the Third Reich. The place was full of so much intrigue and innuendo, Joe Liebling wrote, that “lunch at Claridge’s or the Ritz Grill resembled an Alfred Hitchcock film.”
¹¹
Things were so topsy-turvy that the heir to the Persian throne lived in the modest hotel room next to Liebling’s.
¹²

Shakespeare’s scepter’d isle was bursting at the seams. London was a much different town than it had been in the nadir of the Blitz. Londoners still showed remarkable resilience. But they were numb from five years of war; by early ’44, many had grown weary and claustrophobic. Twelve months earlier it had been rare to see American servicemen on leave in London. Now Yanks were on every street corner and in every pub—and not always exhibiting refined manners.

“The attitude of the British changed during the war. They got pretty damn tired of their island being weighted down by tens of thousands of these rather brash Americans,” Cronkite recalled.
¹³
When Cronkite first arrived, British families would host U.S. servicemen in their homes for Sunday dinner, posting thoughtful invitations on bulletins boards at base PXs and places such as the Ministry of Information.

In early ’43, Cronkite visited the home of a family who appeared to be trying to marry off a “not uncharming” daughter and were doubtless disappointed to see Cronkite’s wedding ring. As a special treat for its American guest, the family had saved up ration points to buy a joint, the traditional Sunday entrée for better-off Britons.

A
FEW MONTHS LATER
, E
DWARD
R. Murrow, the CBS Radio commentator who had done so much in 1940 and ’41 to build American support for Britain’s cause, invited Walter Cronkite to lunch. Murrow had admired the UP reporter’s coverage of the air war and was impressed by Cronkite’s natural ease in front of a microphone. Cronkite had been a popular interview
choice for Murrow’s London boys; the aftermath of the Wilhelmshaven raid in February of ’43 was one of several Cronkite appearances on CBS Radio.

Murrow asked Cronkite to meet him at the Savile Club, the tony Mayfair restaurant. But London’s elite haunts were unknown to the workaholic Cronkite, who thought Murrow had said “Saddle Club” and didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking the broadcaster for directions.

Cronkite jumped into a cab on Fleet Street and instructed the driver to take him to the Saddle Club. “Don’t believe I know it, governor,” the cabbie replied. Cronkite had the cab pull over next to a phone booth; he called the UP office, where a colleague steered him toward the proper location on Brook Street.
¹⁴