Market Garden was largely unsuccessful in creating a back door into Germany for the Allied forces. That, of course, didn’t mean that Cronkite didn’t sell Market Garden as a victory to his American readership. “Thousands of Allied parachutists and glider troops landed behind the German lines in the Netherlands today, liberated village after village from enemy troops who fled in panic before them, and, as I write, are pushing to their first big objective, which they expected to reach by nightfall,” Cronkite reported. “I landed with the glider troops in this greatest airborne operation in all history—an invasion in which most of the intrepid men engaged are Americans seasoned in the Normandy invasion.”
With Hitler’s prized Panzer units offering the Allies stiff resistance, Cronkite’s glider had turned upside down and was cracked in two like an eggshell. Ironically, Cronkite didn’t want to write about his near-death experience. His assignment was to write about the heroism of others. Cronkite’s upbeat Market Garden stories ran in an unusually high number of newspapers, including The New York Times, which normally gave Associated Press reporting precedence over United Press. In rah-rah fashion, Cronkite reported that Montgomery’s monumental push aimed at having the Allied troops and tanks go through Nazi-occupied Holland and then across the Rhine into Germany proper was a game changer. Outside of Zon, Cronkite had difficulties in transmitting his UP stories to Allied headquarters. Nothing went well for Cronkite—the Zon bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal had been blown up, leaving him stranded for thirty-six hours before repairs could be made. And Cronkite—who later called his stories from Holland “lame”—wasn’t the star reporter of Market Garden. The ubiquitous Murrow rode a C-47 carrying paratroopers to the drop zone and recorded a spectacular commentary for CBS Radio:
Bob Masell of the Blue Network is sitting here working on the recording gear just as calm and cool as any of the paratroopers, but perhaps both of us should be because they’re going to jump and we aren’t. . . . There’s a burst of flak. . . . It’s coming from the port side, just across the nose, but a little bit low. . . . Nine ships ahead of us have just dropped and you can see the men swinging down.
Murrow continued to build drama for CBS listeners:
I can see their chutes going down now, every man clear. They’re dropping just beside a little windmill near a church, hanging there . . . They seem to be completely relaxed, like nothing so much as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade. . . . The whole sky is filled.
Murrow ended his report from the airborne C-47 with a line that stuck with Cronkite: “That’s the way it was.” As Edward Bliss Jr. pointed out in Now the News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism, Murrow’s “That’s the way it was” antedated, by nineteen long years, Cronkite’s signature TV signoff, “And that’s the way it is.” Cronkite never gave Murrow proper credit for this.
What Cronkite didn’t tell readers—couldn’t for propaganda reasons—was that Market Garden was plagued with logistical failures. Instead, he focused on the liberation of Eindhoven. And he rightly reported that except for a single engagement at Neunen, the American troops hurled the Germans back at every point. The armored column Cronkite was embedded with passed through the center of the operation controlled by the 82nd. Eventually, Cronkite made his way to Brussels and, using it as his base city for a few days, covered Montgomery’s Second Army regrouping and Belgian politics. Sometimes he camped outside or lived in a cramped, bug-infested hotel. He also reported on the battles to liberate the Low Countries. Many of his dispatches from Eindhoven were propagandist, claiming that the U.S. paratroopers had routed the Germans when they hadn’t. Arnhem stayed in German hands no matter how Cronkite spun it. Sometime in November, he saw a German V-2 rocket being launched toward England. “It looked like a gigantic skyrocket that disappeared into the stratosphere but never went off,” he wrote. “There was only a speck of glow, but there was what must have been a huge column of creamy white smoke clearly visible to the naked eye more than 100 miles away.”
A number of Cronkite’s great war stories came from Market Garden. His sidekick in the flat Dutch countryside was frequently Bill Downs of CBS, a former Unipresser and Cronkite’s closest friend among the Murrow Boys. With Downs as his constant companion, Cronkite maneuvered around the shifting battlefields of rural Belgium and the Netherlands that month. Downs, who had been attached to the British Second Army, and Cronkite were in rural Belgium when a merciless Luftwaffe strafing occurred. They sprinted together to the nearby forest for cover. Soon they were separated. Cronkite called out to Downs, but to no avail. He feared for his friend’s life. For hours Cronkite shouted for Downs until he was hoarse. Once back in Brussels, he told friends that poor Downs was missing in action. Then one evening, Cronkite headed over to the Hotel Metropole for a cocktail. To his astonishment, there was Downs, sitting at the bar with friends, having a gay old time. A wave of anger swept over Cronkite as he headed to Downs’s table.
“I thought you’d been killed,” he said. “I went through the woods calling your name.”
An embarrassed Downs had an alibi. “I couldn’t go around calling your name,” he said. “They’d think I was shouting German.”
By December 1944 Cronkite had spent two years in Europe. He was much skinnier and had less hair than when Betsy had last seen him in New York. Covering the war without a break aged a man. Few correspondents had shown the kind of stamina that Cronkite had displayed during the war. Even Murrow visited the United States quite frequently while he was posted in London. Cronkite, who had, ironically, been turned down for military service on a medical deferment, was indestructible, always wanting to be in the middle of the soldier story. Not the battle itself. Ensconced behind his Smith-Corona typewriter in Brussels, feeling hot and irritable, he complained loudly about wanting a break, needing to go home. But a few minutes later he was hatching plans about how to cover the demise of the Third Reich for UP.
In early December 1944, Cronkite was pleased to be filing stories on political developments in recently liberated Belgium; it constituted the type of daily-life reporting that he hoped to do after the war. On December 16, just as the Allied line in Western Europe seemed to solidify, the Germans swept against its weakest section, precipitating the Battle of the Bulge. “I was back in Brussels the night that Field Marshal Von Rundstedt started pounding through the Ardennes,” Cronkite recalled. “I got a call from U.P. in Paris that something had happened.” There were reports of action in the Ardennes, the forested plateau about seventy miles to the south.
Cronkite had barely put the phone receiver down when he heard a rap on his door. It was a breathless John Fleischer, a fellow Unipresser with the First Army. “This goddamn thing is real,” Fleischer said of the Bulge. “We have a headlong retreat.” For the next half hour, Cronkite interrogated Fleischer on everything he knew about the Bulge. He got the story out of his colleague and then drove as fast as he could—against the onslaught of retreating troops—to be near the battle line. Fleischer returned to the Bulge battlefield; soon thereafter he was killed by a bomb. When Cronkite got the news of Fleischer’s death he broke down crying. But he also had the presence of mind to get Fleischer’s last story out over the UP wire.
The fact that Cronkite managed to book a room at the Cravat Hotel in Luxembourg City, the HQ of General Omar Bradley, located only miles from the front, made his efforts no less valiant. It only demonstrated that he was a newspaper reporter willing to seize hotel comfort when available. The southern shoulder of the German breakthrough was north of Luxembourg. Cronkite followed General Bradley, who had lost communication with his units to the north as the invasion swept by. Eisenhower was alarmed that Bradley had no way to communicate with the Third Army and Ninth Army of 300,000 men. From the Cravat Hotel, he could only contact the First Army on the south side. There was a sense of general peace and safety in Luxembourg. The German thrust was eighty miles wide and forty miles deep, from Monshau to the north, to Eckternacht in the so
uth. Ike suggested that Bradley move his HQ to the apex of the Bulge so he could communicate down both shoulders, but Bradley balked, telling Cronkite that it would look bad for the men to see a general retreating. Ike didn’t care for appearances and wanted communications established. Since Bradley could not and would not retreat, Eisenhower turned over two-thirds of Bradley’s command to Montgomery, who had no problem doing so, on the north shoulder. Cronkite, marooned with Bradley, didn’t have much of a story. “During the early days of the Bulge,” Cronkite later said, “there was little to do but watch. A complete news blackout on all ground activity was added to normal censorship.”
Reporters were lucky to send back snippets from the front, to be compiled into articles by desk editors. Censorship wasn’t eased until after Christmas, which was a turning point for the Allies in the Bulge. (The battle lasted until January 25.) Starting in late December, Cronkite could file stories pertaining to British and American troops, yet he wrote little about them compared to his previous postings from Eindhoven. That didn’t make him recall these incidents any less vividly years later. “The heroic events of that Christmas,” he said about the Bulge in an essay for National Public Radio in 2004, “still mingle in my memory with the frigid air, the crunching snow, makeshift trees and carols echoing from tinny loudspeakers. . . . Memory often plays games when facts and emotion collide. But if the sound of Christmas music seems to lend a false sentimentality to the savagery of a horrible battle, it’s not because either the sentimentality or the savagery is dishonest or untrue. It was all wrapped up in a genuinely heroic story that Christmas of 1944.”
Although Christmas 1944 was a turning point for the Allies, there was still great suffering and death during the first two weeks of January. After the Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, Cronkite returned to London and spent much of the next few months there. As a war correspondent, Cronkite’s unintentional problem in 1944 and 1945 was that he was always just on the outskirts of the action area. But he was the UP authority on the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. That counted for a lot. The filings from London, as Allied forces pushed into Germany, kept him busy at the United Press bureau, but he was occasionally sent back to the Low Countries to report from the field. Like most U.S. reporters, he didn’t care much for Montgomery, perhaps as a result of attending too many of his briefings. “He really didn’t deserve the credit he got,” Cronkite insisted. “In Europe he sat on the Rhine intolerably long.” While stuck in Luxembourg, Cronkite befriended General Bradley. The only problem was that the gripping news was coming out of Bastogne, not the Cravat Hotel.
What Cronkite did gain from the Second World War was the ability to say he’d been a war correspondent. Murrow, Collingwood, Sevareid, Liebling, and, yes, Cronkite had become famous names. Unlike Murrow and his CBS Boys, Cronkite hadn’t pioneered the use of recordings from a C-47 flying over Holland or captured the gunfire ratchet of house-to-house combat in Aachen, Germany. However, he had gone on a combat bombing mission over Germany and been through D-day, Operation Market Garden, and the Battle of the Bulge (largely from the remove of Luxembourg). That was a damn impressive résumé.
During the Second World War (and the early cold war years that followed) the Charles Street Club in London was a favorite hangout for international newsmen. Everybody raved about how well the martinis were shaken and served. Don Hewitt, destined to become one of the most successful producers in television history, was hanging out there one afternoon, minding his own olives, when the United Press bureau chief walked up to the crowded bar. Suddenly everybody was whispering in awe. “Before you knew it, you could hear people saying, ‘You know who that is? That’s Walter Cronkite,’ ” Hewitt recalled in his memoir, Tell Me a Story. “Today, fifty years later, people still say, ‘You know who that is? That’s Walter Cronkite.’ ”
To his credit, Cronkite didn’t try to milk his World War II experiences for personal glorification. In fact, he liked to tell the story of the day in September 1944 when he and Bill Downs, after participating in the Market Garden glider landings in the Netherlands, were riding in a Jeep down Highway 69 (dubbed “Hell’s Highway”) and sharing a wild kind of momentary euphoria when they ran into serious crossfire. Ack-ack gunfire echoed all around them. A mortar exploded within yards of their Jeep, sending the two correspondents scrambling for cover in a nearby drainage ditch. Cronkite and Downs kept their heads down, helmets firmly fastened, just as General Patton insisted, but the outcome was uncertain, to say the least. The flak seemed endless. They were terrified that death was upon them. “Downs, lying behind me, began tugging at my pants leg,” Cronkite recalled. “I figured he had some scheme for getting us out of there, and I twisted my neck around to look back at him. He was yelling to me: ‘Hey, just remember, Cronkite. These are the good old days.’ ”
On May 5, 1945, at the hamlet of Wageningen, near Arnhem and Nijmegen, German generals signed the protocols of capitulation surrendering Denmark and the Netherlands. V-E (“Victory in Europe”) Day had almost arrived, and rumors of an armistice were announced on the UP wire. Cronkite borrowed a U.S. Army command car to ride from Brussels to Amsterdam to witness the liberation celebration at Dam Square. The landscape he traversed was geographically low lying, with vast swaths of land below sea level. Since Nazi Germany had invaded the Netherlands five years earlier, in May 1940, the Dutch people had lived in terror daily. Their response to their liberators was ecstatic. “They pelted us with tulips until our car was fender deep in them,” Cronkite recalled. “Tulips are heavy flowers. In bundles they are dangerous. The only blood I spilled in the war was that day—hit by a bunch of tulips tied together with a piece of wire.”
Wearing his government-issue correspondent’s uniform, cuffs hemmed so high you could see his socks, Cronkite joined in the Amsterdam revelry on May 7, V-E Day in Holland (determined to stay sober, he limited his libations there). “I got a lot of garlands and heard a lot of welcoming speeches,” he later explained to Time magazine. “The Canadians were not amused.” (It was the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force that had liberated the country.) This was the greatest day in Cronkite’s life, except for the day he married Betsy. An irrepressible joyousness, a downright rapture, swept over him at the realization that the Yanks had won, that Hitler was dead, that the people of the Netherlands had been liberated. Walter Cronkite, he gloated to himself, had been part of the historic liberation of Dutch soil. He was proud to be among the brave Dutch people, to whom he felt a bloodline connection. Wild yelps of jubilation echoed up and down the canals along Dam Square. Honking car horns created an almost single rumbling symphonic effect. Traffic was at a standstill. “The sound of Allied aircraft was the one sound of war the Dutch welcomed,” Cronkite recalled. “The Royal Air-Force came at night and the Americans during the day.”
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to the rest of Europe. History was happening fast. Urgent UP stories needed to be filed from The Hague, Utrecht, Maastricht, Bruges, Antwerp, Luxembourg City, and Brussels. While Amsterdam was rip-roaringly festive, Cronkite headed south to The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands, to reclaim what had been the UP bureau before the Nazi occupation. To his utter amazement, he discovered that three former Dutch UP staffers had already reestablished the office and were waiting for a correspondent to appear. Cronkite had been able to save about a quarter of his income and now used his money to help his UP staff get proper food and clothing. “Through their tears of joy they couldn’t wait to tell me that they had a teleprinter available, that we could put the U.P. back in business,” he recalled. “With incredible courage, they had disassembled one of our teletypes before the Germans entered Amsterdam. Each of them had taken a third of the parts to hide in their homes. If they had been caught, they would have faced certain execution.”
Cronkite realized that the Dutch celebrations belied the simple, ineradicable truth of Europe in May 1945. Death and loss were looming everywhere. Reports came over the UP wi
re that were shocking. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in Poland, ghastly new confirmation of the Holocaust was produced. A race for eyewitness accounts and photographs was on. The UP wanted copy about the dire fever of the immediate postwar situation: concentration camps, stolen art, dangerous dikes, flooded lands, widespread disease, and the devastation caused by the Soviet army. The list was long. “There were a number of great stories from the Netherlands,” Cronkite recalled, “but I didn’t get to print any of them because of the German surrender.”
While Cronkite was celebrating V-E week in The Hague, Murrow broadcast in a somber mood for CBS Radio from among the throngs massed in Trafalgar Square in London, unwilling to sound a trumpet. He had seen too much carnage to be unreservedly happy. He had been to the newly liberated Buchenwald camp in Germany that April. When Murrow took to the CBS Radio airwaves, he prayed for the Jewish people who had been victims of the most horrendous atrocities known to humanity. Compared with Murrow in London, covering top-level meetings going on in Whitehall and Westminster, Cronkite’s UP articles about the rebuilding of Dutch canal towns seemed bush league.
The United Press was still having Cronkite write uplifting boilerplate pieces about the victorious U.S. Army in Europe, morale-boosting copy aimed at producing Allied propaganda heroes because of the continued fighting in the Pacific. In fact, an argument could be made that Cronkite was flacking for the army under the guise of UP reporting. If his V-E journalism for UP was edited into an omnibus it could be labeled as nonfiction propaganda. “You can’t write horror stories every day,” Cronkite said in defense of hired-gun writers, “because nobody would read it, for one thing. It’s repetitious.”
As Cronkite intuited, once the euphoria of V-E Day passed, life in Europe was only a little less disturbing than it had been during the war, and the future no less uncertain. Throughout the Netherlands, war refugees roamed highways on foot, pushing wooden carts loaded with all they had. Displaced Dutch families were looking for relatives, retribution, or just a safe place to start life over. The Nazis had starved and beaten the Dutch, but had never defeated them. Vast tracts of blighted cities across the continent lay in rubble. More than 80 percent of Nuremberg, the Nazis’ showcase city in Germany, had been bombed out. There were shortages of nearly every commodity. For a reporter, the situation on the ground was overwhelming because the devilment of war could be churned up on every block. Throughout defeated Germany, everything looked wrecked as though by earthquake or eruption. Although not quite a pacifist with a capital P, Cronkite thought the Second World War taught that the age-old ways of militarism couldn’t continue in the second half of the twentieth century. No matter the circumstance in 1945, he declined to carry a pistol as he traveled dicey European neighborhoods where crime and chaos still reigned. He was strictly an observer of the destruction, not a participant.
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