Assignment to Hell (24 page)

Its name parodied
The Fighting 69th
, a popular 1940 Jimmy Cagney–Pat O’Brien movie about the World War I exploits of the 69th Infantry Regiment. Rooney, Cronkite, and company liked to refer to themselves as the Flying Typewriters or, in more jaded moments, the Legion of the Doomed.

Only the eight men who’d been consistently covering the air war beat were invited to join the Writing 69th. When word reached UP’s Salisbury that his charge Cronkite was among the invitees, Salisbury winced. “I was not happy about it,” he recalled, “but a dozen elephants could not have kept Walter out of the B-17.”
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The same could have been said of Bigart and Rooney.

G
LADWIN
H
ILL
, C
RONKITE’S ARCHRIVAL, WAS
a fine reporter but too often enamored of his own voice. A devotee of Great War press coverage, the Harvard graduate liked to share wearying stories about how certain correspondents had handled the earlier conflict. During one rambling Hill monologue, Cronkite recalled, “Homer [Bigart] leaned over, tapped him on the knee, and said, ‘G-g-g-g-glad, if you’re not d-d-damned c-c-c-careful, you’re going to b-b-b-b-be the Gladwin Hill of W-w-w-w-world War Two.’”
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Robert Perkins Post of the
New York Times
had an even more patrician background than Hill. Just thirty-two, Post belonged to a Boston Brahmin clan that summered on Long Island and had social connections to the Roosevelt family. At St. Paul’s School and Harvard, he earned high marks in creative writing. A poem he wrote while still at St. Paul’s presaged his life and death.

As the clear sunset, brilliant, color-wild,
Died in the West, so dies our near-run youth;
As the clear after-glow lights up the Western sky,
So may our age light up a darkening world.
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Post got to glimpse the darkening world in a way he never imagined. Having joined the
Times
soon after graduating from Harvard, Post at a tender age became a White House correspondent. He earned the wrath of his family friend by having the temerity to ask President Roosevelt at a press conference in 1937 about FDR’s intention to seek a third term—three years
before
the next presidential election. With his usual aplomb Roosevelt tried to brush it aside; when Post persisted, FDR sputtered, “Oh, Bob, go put on the dunce cap and stand in the corner!”
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Cartoonists and FDR detractors had a field day. In the summer of 1940, when FDR accepted the Democratic nomination for a third term, Post sent the president a telegram. “Who’s the dunce now?” he twitted FDR.

Post was dashing in his Cambridge years, but by the late ’30s had turned more than a bit beefy. He wore his hair slicked back, à la Jay Gatsby. And like any Fitzgerald protagonist, he was fixated on his own social standing and preoccupied by thoughts of his own demise.

The
Times
delighted Post by sending him to their London bureau. His byline graced many of the
Times
’ best articles about the Blitz and the war’s grisly beginnings.

“The sun rose red over London yesterday after one of the worst air raids that London has experienced,” Post wrote in November 1940 after the horrific nocturnal bombing of Westminster Abbey and the Commons Chamber of the Houses of Parliament. “Weary and drawn after a night of horror and fire—a night that even women living alone spent in putting out incendiaries—London began to make a preliminary reckoning of what had happened…. It is perhaps not important to the historian that little shops have been blasted or that a street of little homes has been destroyed: but it is vital to men who own and work in those shops and live in those houses.”
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One night a group of British Home Guardsmen barged into the
New York Times
’ London offices wielding rifles and axe handles. A suspicious Londoner had complained that the
Times
’ lights were violating strict blackout
rules. “Lights?” Post responded when the guardsmen challenged him. “Oh, that’s just our regular nightly signal to the Germans.”
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Post may have had a quick wit, but he also possessed a dark side: He could be snooty and sullen. He smirked when telling colleagues that American GIs, upon finding out that he was a reporter, would naïvely ask if he could get an article about them into their hometown papers. How could they confuse the
New York Times
with some two-bit rag? Post would snigger. He had a rocky relationship with Raymond Daniell, the
Times
’ London bureau chief. Post had been the interim head of the office before Daniell arrived; they quarreled over which reporters would get what assignments and jockeyed over who would get credit for scoops.

His wife, Margot, also came from an impeccable northeastern pedigree. After years of trying to join her husband in London, she was finally due to arrive in midwinter ’43.

“W
E DIDN’T REALIZE UNTIL THE
top boys in the Eighth cleared the idea,” Andy Rooney recalled of the Writing 69th, “that we’d have to attend gunnery school for a week. If we were going to go on a bomber in battle, we were told, we’d better know how to shoot a gun in case we got in trouble.”
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Hal Leyshon, who at one time or another had bought them all drinks (although in Rooney’s case it was probably a root beer), was placed in charge of their preparation.

The Writing 69th’s training began in earnest during the first week of February. Beyond the eight original correspondents, the “students” now included several photographers and famed Hollywood director William Wyler. Wyler’s 1942 film
Mrs. Miniver
, about a London family enduring the Blitz, had just won the Academy Award for best picture. The director had joined the Army Air Force to film a documentary about the air campaign.

Wyler and his sound- and cameramen proved to be erratic pupils, not always showing up for class and feigning scheduling conflicts to skip—or, in one notable instance, Cronkite recalled, cheat on—the “exams” that punctuated each set of instructions. But Wyler and his team ended up
producing
The Memphis Belle
, a film about a B-17 crew finishing its allotment of twenty-five missions that remains one of the finest documentaries made during World War II.

The auteur’s movie embellished the facts but was so powerful that when it was screened for FDR in the White House, the president turned to the director, a German émigré, and said, “Everyone has got to see this.” They did. Within weeks the film was being shown in thousands of theaters in the U.S and Britain.

Members of the Writing 69th developed their own fraternity grip, “which is not dirty,” Cronkite assured Betsy, “but involves a military secret. Remind me to show you when I get home.”
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They all felt “pretty war-like” as they traipsed through Paddington Station wearing service pants, galoshes, and mackinaws, with helmets and gas masks slung over their shoulders. When they got to Bedford they were met by an Army truck—for the first of many bumpy rides that week as they ricocheted from base to base.

The reporters’ regimen began at seven thirty in the morning and lasted until ten thirty at night. They crammed three months’ worth of training into less than a week. On the first morning, at a combat crew replacement school, there was a scheduling mix-up; the pupil/reporters ended up killing time at the Ping-Pong table. When they finally sat down in a classroom, the orientation lecture was delivered by the school’s commandant, an Air Force colonel, who urged them to pay attention: Not only their asses were on the line, but also those of ten crew members, not to mention the fate of a million-dollar aircraft.
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At Bovingdon, a Hertfordshire RAF instructional base not far from General Eaker’s headquarters, the entourage was instructed in oxygen maintenance, first aid, aircraft identification, and “ditching out,” which meant abandoning a plane by parachute or dinghy, Bigart explained to readers of the
Herald Tribune
on February 8.

“It was during Lieutenant Alex Hogan’s ‘ditching out’ lecture that some of us felt like hopping the next train back to London’s Paddington Station,” Bigart joked. “The lieutenant is a pleasant lad from Starkville, Miss., but his discourse was a bit grim.”

What would happen, a reporter asked, if they ditched into the North Sea and an enemy plane swooped down to investigate? “‘In that event,’ Hogan tartly replied, ‘merely tell them you’re waiting for the R.A.F. and wave ’em on.’”

Lieutenant Hogan wasn’t alone: other trainers gave the Writing 69th men equally unsettling counsel. One medical officer, Bigart wrote, painted an “unforgettable picture of what might happen to our fingers if we took off our gloves at 30,000 feet.” Another urged them to constantly yawn and swallow after takeoff to relieve pressure on the eardrums. Since flatulence at a rarefied altitude could be painful and hazardous, he also prescribed avoiding gaseous foods such as beans, chips, and red cabbage, and to treat beer, Bigart wrote, “like the plague.”
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We’re in England, for God’s sakes, the reporters protested, what else are we supposed to eat and drink?

After a couple of days they were ushered onto a B-17 named
Johnny Reb
, which zoomed around the Midlands at twenty-five thousand feet. No-nonsense sergeants were bemused by the specter of these typewriter jockeys fumbling with oxygen masks and parachute packs while squirming their beer bellies through
Johnny Reb
’s innards.

Cronkite made sure he got a prized seat in the Fort’s plastic nose. “It was a real thrill,” Cronkite told Betsy, “taking off in that spot—watching the ground roar past you as those great motors throbbed, and then the ground pulling away.”
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“All survived” the shakedown flight, noted Bigart, “and there is nothing to report, aside from a faint buzzing in the head.”

Their tutor in aircraft recognition was a Yorkshire native named Bernard “Benny” Hall. The RAF sergeant was an expert teacher, having flown some four dozen combat missions, a fourth of them over Germany. “But his Yorkshire accent was baffling at first,” Bigart wrote. “He kept talking about ‘edam position’ until some of us began drawing outlines of a spherical Dutch cheese with wings. Later, it developed that he was referring to aircraft approaching from ’ead on.’”
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Cronkite remembered Hall’s stirring, if barely intelligible, tribute to Britain’s Hawker Hurricane fighter. “This ’ere,” the RAF man said while displaying a silhouette on a domed ceiling, “is the ’Awker ’Urricane. A
mighty nice aircraft. It helped our troops when Rommel had them on the run in the desert. It protected the boys getting out of Greece. And it was a big help in getting out of Norway. The ’Awker ’Urricane, as a matter of fact, was essential in all our defeats.”
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Bigart and Cronkite’s lighthearted commentary aside, their training was deadly serious. The reporters gulped when told that in the event their bombers were shot or forced down, enemy soldiers in the heat of battle would never be able to distinguish “correspondent” from “combatant.” Learning how to return fire, therefore, was essential.

Yet the only one who could fire a rifle or pistol with any degree of accuracy was the
Times
’ Post, who’d spent many a summer afternoon on Long Island shooting skeet. Even the cocksure Rooney, who’d gone through basic training, was a lousy shot.

Cronkite told Betsy that the group was given four “very tough examinations.” He proudly reported that he’d gotten a ninety-eight on aircraft recognition, made the second-highest grade in the class on another test, “barely eked by” on a third, and flunked the final one, which was probably fifty-caliber machine gun assemblage. Cronkite had done better than most—and a lot better than William Wyler. Still, all of them, Wyler included, “graduated.”

Given survival percentages, Bob Post reckoned late in their training, “one of us will not be here after the first mission.” Post then needled, “It will probably be you, Homer [Bigart]. You’re the Frank McHugh type, the silent, amiable guy who always gets it in the end.”
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McHugh, a ’30s character actor, had built his Hollywood career around playing the best buddy who gets rubbed out near the final scene. Ironically, McHugh had a role in
The Fighting 69th
as one of Cagney’s doughboy sidekicks. Sure enough, McHugh’s character was gunned down in the trenches a few minutes before the credits rolled.

T
HE MACHISMO IMAGE OF THE
Flying Fortresses had grabbed the public’s imagination; naturally, all the reporters wanted to fly with the B-17s. “Come on,” Air Force Major Bill Laidlaw, the PRO for the First Bomb
Wing, admonished them on one of their last nights of preparation, “one of you has to go with the Liberators (B-24s). Those guys deserve some recognition, too.”

Laidlaw was getting heat from his bosses to score publicity for the Libs, since a batch of new B-24s had just arrived from the States. But the reporters wouldn’t budge. A Laidlaw deputy, Second Lieutenant Van Norman, suggested they hold a lottery to determine who would fly what bomber. Cronkite and Hill staunchly refused, with the stuffy Hill braying, “I regret to inform you that my office has sent me here to cover the story of the B-17.”
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