One evening, the Latrios decided to perform around Piccadilly, starting with their version of “King Porter Stomp.” Midsong, a large chamber pot full of water was dumped on their heads from above, followed by a loud . . . Shut up! The three correspondents raced into the building and up a stairwell to confront their attacker. A dozen or so GIs appeared to be sleeping with the lights out. Caen, in “Blood n’ Guts” Patton-mode, barked, “Who threw the chamber pot?” A silence filled the room. “I’m counting to three,” an angry Caen shouted, but no one confessed. The Latrios headed back down the stairs, deciding to let the matter rest. All they heard as they beat their retreat was a huge collective laugh from all of the GIs, at their expense. The Latrios disbanded not long after getting drenched.
On January 27, 1943, newspapers in the United States carried the first of many United Press dispatches written by Cronkite from Great Britain about the B-17 crews. It was bylined as both “A Flying Fortress Station, Somewhere in England” and “Beautiful Bombing, U.S. Flyers Boast.” Cronkite was proud that it ran in the New York World-Telegram. It was a rah-rah dispatch on U.S. bombers ready to beat Germany to smithereens. “A Flying Fortress called ‘Banshee,’ ” Cronkite wrote, “with a lad named Hennessy at the controls today drew the honor of being the first American plane to bomb Germany in this war.” Cronkite recounted what it meant to fly at 25,000 feet—an altitude where temperatures often reached 50 degrees below zero. The United Press had just launched a massive ad campaign to promote UP correspondents such as Cronkite and other “shock troops of the press.” It had even hired an illustrator to portray UP reporters as superheroes, using typewriters as weapons, as they stormed a fascist beach with the ferocity of Genghis Khan on a fiery steed. It was Cronkite’s duty as UP’s air war correspondent to explain all the mechanisms necessary to support a massive air force.
A warm relationship developed between Cronkite and many of the Eighth Air Force crews. He was constantly mobile, making regular rounds to the Eighth’s logistic base, including supply and repair depots, air fields, living quarters, and mess halls. More than a mascot, Cronkite was their Boswell, the town crier of their heroism, the scribe who could make them famous back home in Texas and Ohio. When crews returned to Molesworth from a bombing raid on Germany, Cronkite would rush to interview them. A half-dozen crewmen Cronkite befriended were shot down by the Luftwaffe; a couple of them died. On each raid, Cronkite learned, the Eighth Air Force lost on average over 5 percent of its airmen. Cronkite would oftentimes commiserate with Andy Rooney, his best friend for life, over how ignoble it was to be boozehounds in London while crews were risking their lives over Germany. “After a while, we saw so many people we had gotten to know who were shot down, taken prisoner, or killed that we all began to feel guilty about covering this war the way we were,” Rooney recalled. “It just seemed wrong to us.”
Like the combat crews themselves, Cronkite learned his tasks “on the job.” He would usually write up his dispatches directly from Cambridgeshire, under the surveillance of U.S. military censors. Once cleared, they would be forwarded to London for wire transmission to New York. Cronkite wrote great stories about how Mighty Eighth pilots were trained in the art of flying in tight formations and how radio operators learned Morse code. A fierce competition ensued between Cronkite of UP and Gladwin Hill of AP over who would log the best dispatch. “I would worry,” Cronkite recalled. “ ‘Gosh, I wonder what Gladwin is going to write.’ ”
Two words in MacDonald’s New York Times article of January 18, 1943—in which the fine reporter described flying in an RAF Lancaster bomber on a Berlin raid—haunted every war correspondent in metropolitan London, even as the bombing of German targets became front-page news stories. The two words were, “I saw.” If only Cronkite would be allowed to go on a bombing mission with the Mighty Eighth over Germany, writing “I saw,” he would become a hero at UP. Until green-lighted, Cronkite relied on post-raid interviews with flight crews. That was the best he could do. The challenge lay in the fact that the Mighty Eighth, in rapid deployment mode, had bases all over East Anglia, and the number was growing. Rushing to meet a huge story head-on, Cronkite took his cue from the Eighth’s public relations officers at first. Playing the propagandist, he found the primary-source material for his stories by speaking to the Eighth Air Force pilots whom the army recommended.
In early February, that changed temporarily. “I don’t know who decided to do it,” Rooney recalled, “but we decided we’d better go on a bombing raid ourselves.” Cronkite, Rooney, and a cadre of other reporters were invited to sidestep the crew interviews and actually embed themselves on a raid, one whose target, they learned later, was the ports and military facilities surrounding the German city of Bremen. Cronkite wanted to put The New York Times to shame with his matter-of-fact United Press prose from a B-17 or B-24 mission.
When General Eaker, who was now commander of the Eighth Air Force, made the decision to enhance the publicity surrounding the air war by allowing correspondents to accompany a bomber mission over Germany, the United Press received one seat. Cronkite campaigned hard to be UP’s man in air combat. Harrison Salisbury, the esteemed reporter who was the able manager of the United Press London bureau, later reflected that “wild elephants couldn’t have kept Cronkite from taking part in the mission.” For a reporter to fly with the Eighth was extremely dangerous. But the potential for making front-page news back in the States was high. As Salisbury pointed out in his memoir, A Journey for Our Times, what Cronkite coveted was “to hold a ticket to a funeral . . . [his] own.” Aware of the grave risk, Salisbury reluctantly agreed to allow Cronkite on the bombing run. “It was with great trepidation that I said OK,” Salisbury recalled. “Walter came back all right. One reporter did not.”
Before journalists would be allowed to fly bombing raids over Germany they had to take a short course in air survival. They would be flying under conditions that required an oxygen mask and electrically heated suits to ward off raging wind blasts and prevent oxygen deprivation. When Cronkite finished the training on February 6, he wrote Betsy a long, enthusiastic letter: “For the past week six other correspondents and I have been under full army regime going to school from seven thirty in the morning until ten thirty at night learning how to take our places as the tenth member of a Flying Fortress crew,” he explained. “We’ve been assigned by our papers to the Eighth Air Force. We’re going to live on the airdromes with them and, occasionally, when the story warrants, we’re going along on their raids with them. The story involves a certain amount of risk but it’s a terrific opportunity. . . . We’re now called by the Air Corps boys, for no particular reason, the Writing Sixty-Ninth and we’re just like a bunch of kids about the assignment.”
There are a couple of versions of how the reporters got their name, the Writing Sixty-Ninth. One has sexual connotations, but according to the G-rated version, Hal Leyshon of the Eighth’s public relations office created it, riffing off The Fighting 69th, a 1940 James Cagney movie about a World War I battalion. The name may have been manufactured for publicity purposes, but the intent was serious. The Writing Sixty-Ninth would help promote the Eighth Air Force in hopes of building stateside support for more air crews and equipment. “I don’t know how that Writing Sixty-Ninth stuff got so big,” Rooney recalled. “It was really a lot of hooey. We never really, in any serious way, actually referred to ourselves as that. But it stuck in history.”
Besides Cronkite and Rooney, other Sixty-Niners were Paul Manning of CBS Radio, Denton Scott of the Army weekly Yank, Bob Post of The New York Times, Gladwin Hill of Associated Press, William Wade of the International News Service, and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald-Tribune. Cronkite fit in easily with the top-drawer assemblage and was nicknamed “The Major.” Other airmen took to calling him “the Flying Typewriter.” Everybody liked him; he was seen as both serious about his trade and entertaining at night. “Walter was really the class clown,” Rooney recalled. “He made us all la
ugh. He was serious in believing we couldn’t take ourselves too seriously.”
A couple of bona fide celebrities were connected to the Writing Sixty-Ninth, including Hollywood director William Wyler, then a major in the army, whose 1942 film Mrs. Miniver told the noble story of an English family struggling to survive the Nazi Blitz. Wyler passed out 35mm cameras to flyboys so they could authentically capture the essence of a combat mission. Wyler, who would win six Academy Awards in his career, was in England making a War Department documentary about strategic bombing. He enrolled in the same gunnery school as Cronkite. One day Wyler saw the B-17 Memphis Belle and said, “That’s it”—the plane his 1944 documentary would be based on. Besides writing about Wyler’s escapades to Betsy, Cronkite also casually mentioned rubbing shoulders with actor Clark Gable, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and future American ambassador to the United Kingdom Jock Whitney.
On direct orders from General Jimmy Doolittle, the Eighth Air Force taught the Writing Sixty-Ninth how to perform the primary duties of the enlisted men on a B-17 or B-24. The newsmen were exposed to a curriculum that covered “first aid, the use of oxygen, and high-altitude flights.” Cronkite also took part in target practice, high-altitude adjustment drills, emergency parachuting exercises, and enemy identification. It was a lot of quick, life-or-death learning. There wasn’t much room for a reporter on a B-17 or B-24, so Cronkite would have to earn his keep by knowing what to do in case of emergency or enemy attack. Due to his gunnery training class, he could dismantle a weapon blindfolded and distinguish a Focke-Wulf from a British Hurricane. When Writing Sixty-Niners passed their training, Denton Scott, speaking for them all, shouted, “God help Hitler!”
If there was such a thing as a ringleader of the Writing Sixty-Ninth, it was Bob Post of The New York Times, the hardest-working journalist of the cabal. How many bombs were dropped and from what kind of plane were the kinds of facts that the hyper-diligent Post never failed to procure. “There are ten of us here now,” Post said of the Writing Sixty-Ninth. “It kind of makes you think when you realize that according to the highest proportion of losses supposedly standable by the aircorps, which is ten percent, that one of us will not be here after the first mission.” On bomb run day they numbered eight, not ten. One Writing Sixty-Ninth was ill (or so he said). “Listen, it happens,” Rooney wrote of the no-show. “The thought crossed my mind that I didn’t feel too well myself.”
At dawn on February 26, 1943, the eight Writing Sixty-Ninth correspondents took off in B-17s and B-24s for the wild blue yonder. The plan was to drop bombs on the German port city of Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea and the industrial area around Bremen. Cronkite, embedded with the 303rd, left from Molesworth in a B-17 that had a mad-as-hell Bugs Bunny insignia near its Plexiglas nose; it was commanded by Major Glenn E. Hagenbuch. This was just the second Mighty Eighth bombing mission over Germany, but the first to carry correspondents. One of the planes carrying two reporters turned back because of mechanical problems. That left six reporters—Cronkite, Rooney, Wade, Bigart, Post, and Hill—in the air. At first, Cronkite’s flight was tedious. Then holy hell broke out. “It was terrible,” Cronkite recalled in 1981. “Exciting, but terrible. We had no fighter escort. Just four groups of planes, B-17s and B-24s. We had the German Luftwaffe attacking us for 2½ hours, all the way to the target—Wilhelmshaven—and back till we got to the North Sea. And flak so thick you could walk on it.”
One of the B-24s was hit by a Nazi fighter plane over Oldenberg, Germany, catching fire in midair. The crew and embedded reporter Bob Post parachuted out of the Liberator, but they drifted directly into enemy fire. Post and the entire flight crew were killed.
From seventeen thousand feet above Earth, Cronkite saw German FW-190 and ME-109 fighter planes approaching to attack his B-17. Under the circumstances, the crew gave Cronkite a job to do: manning the Flying Fortress’s starboard gun. No one on the B-17 felt quite as vulnerable as Cronkite, but then, no one had as good a panoramic view. Cronkite’s color-blindness didn’t seem to matter an iota. “I fired at an awful lot of Focke Wulfs and Messerschmitts that day,” Cronkite recalled, adding with battlefield humor, “I don’t think I hit any, I may have hit a Liberator or two.”
With adrenaline still coursing through their veins, Cronkite and the other Writing Sixty-Ninth correspondents returned to Molesworth from the Wilhelmshaven bomb run, stunned by the aerial violence. For nearly three hours they had bounced around the sky like cannonballs, and now, understandably, they wanted to decompress. But not for long. They were all on deadline to produce copy about the bravery of the Eighth airmen. The game plan had been for all of the Writing Sixty-Niners to congregate in a windowless room at the base, compare experiences, divvy up assignment angles for the sake of diversity, and then bang out their stories. When they finished writing, they would collectively get censor clearance and then transmit their stories to London, where they would be sent on to New York. But the only thing the five safe-and-sound reporters could talk about after they landed was that Post had not returned.
The winner of the most bloodcurdling Wilhelmshaven survivor story was undoubtedly Rooney. He had been cramped in the nose of a B-17 eighteen thousand feet over Germany when a piece of shrapnel from a Messerschmitt hit the plane, breaking off a hunk of the Plexiglas nose. The bombardier on board quickly tried to stuff a parachute into the hole as cold air rushed into the cabin. When the bombardier took his gloves off, his hands froze on the spot. A startled Rooney, trying to stay composed, noted that his navigator was slumped over his desk. “His oxygen tube,” he recalled, “had been pierced.”
Rooney, his life hanging in the balance, got on the intercom and asked the pilot what to do. “We have emergency air in oxygen bottles up behind me,” the pilot replied. “Take some deep breaths and come back up behind me and get the oxygen bottle; bring it back down and hook him up to that.” Although not sure he understood the instructions, Rooney did as he was told to save the navigator’s life. “I took some deep breaths,” he said. “I took my oxygen mask off, and went through this alleyway up behind the pilot. There I got an oxygen bottle and hooked up the navigator, who was a much more experienced flyer than the bombardier.” The man regained consciousness and then attended to the bombardier, who was in severe pain due to his frozen hands. “So,” Rooney wrote, “I had by far the best story to tell of all the [Sixty-Ninth] correspondents who went out that day.”
Cronkite’s lede for UP about the Wilhelmshaven raid was unlike that of any of the others. What made him proudest was that he trumped Bigart, the legendary New York Herald Tribune writer. Both Cronkite and Bigart felt lucky that February 27, for they were alive. The 303rd, their bomb group, suffered no losses. Exhausted from a long day’s raid over Germany, Cronkite, at the Molesworth base, read out loud to Bigart from his notebook. “Homer,” Cronkite said, “I think I’ve got my lede.” He then read to Bigart the following:
American Flying Fortresses have just come back from an assignment to hell—a hell of 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire, of crippled Fortresses and burning German fighter planes, of parachuting men and others not so lucky. I have just returned with a Flying Fortress crew from Wilhelmshaven.
Bigart had a pronounced stutter. When he heard Cronkite’s histrionic text, he reportedly put his hand on Cronkite’s arm and moaned, “Y-y-y-y-you wouldn’t.” Decades later Cronkite, usually modest, boasted about his recounting of the Wilhelmshaven mission. “I swept the boards with my story on that,” he declared. “Particularly in the British press. Every British paper bannered my story.”
UP president Hugh Baillie encouraged his reporters to write the kind of copy that would attract lots of attention to the UP brand, as Cronkite’s Wilhelmshaven story did. In a cable sent to his European news manager, Baillie gave specific instructions for the type of writing he wanted to see from Cronkite and his peers: “Tell those guys out there to get the smell of warm b
lood into their copy. Tell them to quit writing like retired generals and military analysts, and to write about people killing each other.”
Salisbury, the UP London editor, wasn’t offended by the emotionalism of Cronkite’s account. Salisbury, in fact, later claimed to have suggested the “hell” metaphor, when Cronkite was at a loss for words after the raid. “Bigart, Cronkite and Hill were badly shaken by their experience,” Salisbury recalled. News that Bob Post was missing—and presumed dead—stunned them. Their nerves were raw with grief. Stricken with writer’s block, still shaken from the mission, Cronkite couldn’t get his story started properly. After typing a few lines, he’d rip the paper from his Smith-Corona, wad it into a ball, toss it away like a baseball, and start over. Salisbury recalled what happened next: “Finally, as his editor at U.P., I fed him a typical wire-service overline: ‘I flew through hell today.’ Walter eyed the words with some doubt, but finally modified the phrase and used it to lead his story.”
Cronkite’s dramatic Wilhelmshaven account may have been riddled with cliché images, but somehow it worked. Hundreds of newspapers used “Assignment from Hell” the first week and, remarkably, others were still running the Cronkite piece a month or more after the event. Nearly two decades later, the editor of the book Masterpieces of War Reporting, Louis Snyder, selected it over the other contenders as the best journalistic account of a World War II air mission.
The dispatch made Cronkite popular in America; it also brought him a new level of media accolades in Great Britain. The piece was neither beautifully written nor an incisive overview of a bombing mission, but for the first time, Cronkite allowed his readers to see inside him. “The impressions of a first bombing mission,” he admitted midway through the article, “are a hodgepodge of disconnected scenes like a poorly edited home movie—bombs falling past you from the formation above, a crippled bomber with smoke pouring from one motor limping along thousands of feet below, a tiny speck in the sky that grows closer and finally becomes an enemy fighter, a Focke-Wulf peeling off above you somewhere and plummeting down, shooting its way through the formation; your bombardier pushing a button as calmly as if he were turning on a hall light, to send our bombs on the way.”
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