Assignment to Hell (16 page)

On November 8, Port Lyautey invasion commander General Lucian Truscott, acting on Eisenhower’s orders, sent two emissaries to negotiate a truce with the French commander. The mission failed when a Vichy sentry machine-gunned the jeep carrying the two Americans and their white flag. Both officers were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, one posthumously.

Since Port Lyautey’s garrison was guarded by fewer than three thousand defenders, Torch planners thought that pacifying it would be fairly easy. Ironically, the fighting in and around the sixteenth-century fortress that GIs facetiously nicknamed the Kasbah was as fierce as any in the three-day Moroccan war.

Truscott, a forty-seven-year-old former horse soldier fated to spend too much of the war under the thumbs of George Patton and Mark Clark, made his share of mistakes in attacking Port Lyautey. Instead of having the Navy level the garrison with concentrated fire, Truscott ordered a series of infantry assaults from troops who’d never seen combat. The attacks proved tepid and uncoordinated. Two hundred U.S. casualties later, they still hadn’t captured the fort. Truscott and his staff were appalled by the number of infantrymen who refused to fight or abandoned their weapons at the first sign of trouble.

When French artillery located at both ends of Port Lyautey began firing at the invaders at first light on November 9, the
Texas
responded all out,
unloosing its fourteen-inch guns in a spectacular barrage. Cronkite, gripping the bridge rail with both hands, was actually singed by flames leaping out of the massive barrels. As the salvo continued, the
Texas
staggered; some of its aging ceramic pipes burst. “It was as if, instead of disgorging the shells, she had been hit by them,” Cronkite remembered.

Just then fighters appeared overhead. Convinced they were Vichy planes from Port Lyautey’s airdrome, every antiaircraft battery on the
Texas
opened up. “Fortunately, none was hit,” Cronkite recalled, “and a moment later a furious Captain Roy Pfaff was on the ship’s public-address system.

“‘Men, there is nothing worse in war than firing at your own men. We’ve been drilling on aircraft identification ever since we left Norfolk. There is no excuse for this. I’m going to find the man who gave the order to fire and I’m going to have him before the mast.

“‘But, men, my God, if you’re going to shoot at them, hit them!’”
¹⁸

In the midst of this chaos, Radio Maroc was trying to try transmit President Roosevelt’s message. The intensity of the concussions knocked it off the air. To the amusement of the Navy guys, it took a long while before the Army’s station was operational. But as Hal Boyle pointed out in a piece published later that month, Radio Maroc did succeed in helping explain the Allies’ cause to skeptical Moroccans.

On November 10, Cronkite filed his first eyewitness account of close-in combat—and in doing so, created his first war hero. Datelined S
EBU
R
IVER
,
¹⁹
P
ORT
L
YAUTEY
, F
RENCH
M
OROCCO
, the article recounted the courage of a Navy lieutenant commander in getting his ship up the heavily guarded river and capturing the airdrome.

The officer’s name was Steve Brodie, which also happened to be the moniker of an infamous daredevil in the 1880s who supposedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge for a wad of cash—and lived to squander it. Six decades later, “Steve Brodie” was still synonymous in America with machismo derring-do. Cronkite saw his opening.

“This Steve Brodie took a chance, too,” went his minimalist lede.

The second paragraph drilled home Cronkite’s theme: “But instead of
jumping off a bridge, this Steve Brodie stood on the bridge of a stripped-down old American warship and pushed her through the mud of the shallow Sebu River to capture the Port Lyautey airdrome.”

Censorship rules precluded Cronkite from identifying Brodie’s ship, but it was the twenty-three-year-old destroyer USS
Dallas
, whose superstructure had been reduced by engineers specifically for the Sebu mission. Army ground troops had been bottled up for nearly two days in trying to assault the airfield. Now it was the Navy’s turn to force its way inland. Using wire cutters, volunteer seamen attempted to sever the net that Vichy forces had planted in the river, but succeeded only in puncturing a hole.

Brodie and his crew of 122, including seventy-five commandoes, failed twice to penetrate the damaged netting, but tried a third time. The
Texas
was anchored at the mouth of the Sebu; Cronkite was standing near Admiral Kelly, who was getting constant updates from his lieutenant commander. “We’re going to ram the net,” Brodie reported, then a few minutes later announced, “We’re through the net!” The
Dallas
navigated the rest of the Sebu, piled its commandoes onto rubber rafts, and within twenty minutes captured the airdrome.
²⁰

When it finally surfaced weeks later, Cronkite’s article cracked front pages all over the country, including the
Kansas City Kansan
, the paper of record in Wyandotte County, across the Missouri River from Cronkite’s adopted hometown. It annoyed Cronkite that the
Star
gave local guy Hal Boyle consistent exposure while ignoring his own wire copy. His letters back home constantly inquired if the
Star
was giving him bylines.

K
ANSAS
C
ITY’S OTHER FAVORITE SON
also used historical allusions to forge a hero in the fighting in and around Port Lyautey. A few days after the cease-fire, Boyle got a tip from Truscott’s public relations officer that a direct descendant of Confederate naval legend Raphael Semmes, the captain of the raider
Alabama
, had helped blunt a French counterattack on the first day of the invasion. “A former Washington, D.C., attorney and tank commander saved an entire American landing force here from being thrown back in to the sea by leading six U.S. tanks against an overwhelmingly
superior French force and knocking out every one of 18 opposing machines,” Boyle wrote.

Colonel Harry Semmes had come to the rescue on the evening of November 8 when Navy surveillance pilots spotted a French tank unit, accompanied by a regiment of infantry, heading toward Lyautey from Rabat, twenty-five miles away. Semmes quickly off-loaded two more tanks, then maneuvered to defend the beach. The French had ten-ton Renault tanks that were creaky but packed a wallop. U.S. forces had new, light tanks suitable for amphibious action. Semmes’ own tank, Boyle reported, was hit eight times while putting four French tanks out of commission.

“If they had gotten through, we probably would have been driven back in the seas,” Semmes told Boyle. After the battle Truscott sought Semmes out and congratulated him. “‘Well, general,’ [Semmes] came back, ‘we just kept pecking away at them.’”

Semmes wasn’t the only American fighting man pecking away during those seventy-two confused hours in Morocco. It was the shortest war in American history—and the weirdest.

“I don’t understand it,” a private told Boyle. “All the French people come out to clap and cheer us when we take a town. Nothing’s too good for us. But when we start to move on we have to fight like hell all over again at the next town.”
²¹

O
NCE
V
ICHY FORCES AGREED TO
the cease-fire on November 11, Cronkite spent a couple of days ashore surveying artillery damage and talking to Truscott’s GIs about their first taste of combat. Seventy-nine had sacrificed their lives; another 250 had been wounded.
²²
Ironically, the P-40s slated for the Port Lyautey’s airfield never became the fighting force that Patton and Truscott envisioned. More than a few planes were wrecked or damaged upon landing; none saw action in the weeks that followed.

Cronkite wrote a number of follow-up stories about ground action and, once approved by censors, relayed them, as agreed before the invasion, to the British Royal Navy’s transmitter on Gibraltar. By then German U-boats had begun slipping past the destroyer cordon around the Moroccan
task forces, unleashing torpedoes with alarming regularity—none of which Cronkite could report, of course. Between the ships scuttled by the French navy and the damage being inflicted by Nazi submarines, Port Lyautey Harbor wasn’t easy to navigate.

An officer on the
Texas
told Cronkite, who’d been spending his nights on the ship, that it would be heading down the coast to reinforce Hewitt’s main task force at Casablanca. So Cronkite, eager to report on Torch’s primary thrust, stayed on board, since getting to Casablanca via jeep was extremely dangerous; rogue vigilantes were roaming around.

The
Texas
was heading west, all right, but it didn’t stop at Casablanca. Instead, it steamed into open water and, along with a slimmed-down armada, charted a course back to Norfolk. Cronkite, dejected, was convinced his career as a war correspondent would ignominiously end once UP–New York got wind of how he’d miscalculated.

But a couple of days into the trip home it occurred to him that he might be the first U.S. correspondent to return from the North African war zone—a coup that might help UP forgive his gaffe. He shared his first-reporter-back epiphany with
Texas
chums, who were pleased at the prospect that Cronkite’s stature might generate extra attention for their ship. By then, Cronkite had proudly filed thirteen stories on the task force voyage and invasion, most of them centered on the
Texas
’ role. He started feeling better.

In midocean, Cronkite was called into Admiral Kelly’s quarters and given bad news: The newer and faster USS
Massachusetts
, with INS’ John Henry aboard, was a couple of days ahead of the
Texas
armada and headed back to its home port in Boston. Henry, Cronkite knew, had a big yarn: a firsthand account of the
Massachusetts
’ dismantling of the French battleship
Jean Bart
. It was the worst of all worlds for Cronkite: Now he wouldn’t be the first correspondent back, his screwup would be doubly glaring, and his competitor had a better story.

One of Cronkite’s
Texas
buddies, a Navy pilot named Bob Dally, came up with an inventive solution. “If you can get the Old Man’s approval,” Dally told Cronkite, “I could fly you into Norfolk and probably save a couple of days. Maybe you could still beat the
Massachusetts
.”

Admiral Kelly, enamored of more publicity for the
Texas
, liked Dally’s idea. The minute the battleship ventured into air range, Dally and Cronkite climbed into an observation pontoon biplane, the smallest aircraft in the Navy. The plane was fired from a large catapult on a railway that ran the width of the ship. It was “as close to being shot out of a cannon as one could arrange without joining the circus,” Cronkite kidded.
²³

Just as the seaplane neared Norfolk, Dally volunteered that they were dangerously low on gas. Dally plunked into Norfolk Harbor and deposited Cronkite at the dock with the tank virtually empty.

Security guards wouldn’t let Cronkite near any phones, which was just as well because he learned that a Navy plane was about to depart for Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Minutes after the plane touched down, he managed to hitch a ride with a truck driver headed to Manhattan. With no advance warning, Cronkite strolled into the UP office in the
Daily News
building at 23 Park Place. It was like a scene in a hokey movie: every noise except the
tat-tat-tat
of the Teletype machines abruptly went dead. His officemates stared, disbelieving, as if seeing a ghost. Cronkite hadn’t been heard from since Task Force 34 left Norfolk six weeks before. None of his dispatches from the
Texas
had gotten through. United Press—not to mention his wife and parents—had feared the worst.

Crusty editor Mert Akers, not prone to emotional displays, leapt from behind his desk and gave Cronkite a bear hug. “My God, Cronkite, you’re safe!” Akers gushed. Then regaining his usual abrasiveness, Akers yelled, “And where in hell have you been?”

The Allied radio relay system set up before the invasion—from American warships and ground stations to the Royal Navy’s transmittal center on Gibraltar, then, via Teletype, to the respective press outlets in the U.S.—had been a bust. Many of the transmissions didn’t go through because of mechanical breakdowns. Even worse, the Gibraltar technicians had exercised favoritism, sending the reports of British correspondents back to the U.K. while brushing aside U.S. requests.
²⁴

Cronkite immediately asked about INS’ Henry: had Henry’s reports come across the wire yet? The answer was “no”: Henry, apparently believing he was well ahead of any potential competitor, had taken a couple of
days of rest and relaxation in Boston. Thanking the Almighty for his good fortune, Cronkite made a tearful call to Betsy, then jumped behind a typewriter. He had been smart enough to save carbons of all thirteen stories. With secretarial help, he reconstructed his accounts, consolidating them into four or five articles. Within hours, the stories hit the wire with an editor’s proud note bragging that they were the first uncensored eyewitness accounts of the fighting in North Africa. Cronkite, competitive to the end, always took great delight in explaining how Henry had just sat down to compose the first of his North Africa stories when Cronkite’s bylines came clattering across the wire.

UP wasted no time exploiting Cronkite’s newfound fame. He was interviewed by CBS Radio and filmed a segment for Paramount News. Millions of American moviegoers in the late fall of ’42—including Betsy—saw the black-and-white newsreel short that was introduced with the dramatic teaser: H
E
S
AW
I
T
H
APPEN!

The camera picks up the fully uniformed Cronkite pretending to bat out a story on his typewriter. Then he glances up, stops typing, and says in his gravelly baritone at that unmistakable cadence, “I’ve just come back from reporting the greatest assignment any American correspondent has had so far in this war.…”