Assignment to Hell (11 page)

A
YEAR BEFORE THE
U.S. entered the war, the
New Yorker
had sent Liebling to London. Joe got the news about Pearl Harbor while returning for a holiday visit to the U.S. He was in the mid-Atlantic aboard a Norwegian trawler that escaped the sonar screens of U-boats. Joe toasted America’s entry into the war with his new Scandinavian friends.

Liebling ultimately called the book he published in midwar
The Road Back to Paris
. In it, the boxing devotee divided his pieces into three chronological categories: The World Knocked Down, The World on One Knee, and The World Gets Up.

The others may not have known Liebling early in the war, but they certainly shared his zeal to grab a ringside seat for the most momentous fight in history. By early ’42, Cronkite, Boyle, and Bigart had been hectoring their bosses to send them to a war zone. The three were also impelled by something besides a red-blooded yearning to catalogue the conflict: All three were young enough to be drafted. But the U.S. War Department had deemed that combat correspondents would be exempt from Selective Service.
³

T
HE
W
ORLD
K
NOCKED
D
OWN DOESN’T
begin to describe the dire straits faced by the Allies in 1942. Adolf Hitler’s empire, in the words of New Zealander historian Chester Wilmot, “stretched from the Mediterranean to the Arctic, from the English Channel to the Black Sea and almost to the Caspian. Between the Pyrenees and the Ukrainian steppes there was no other sovereign state but Switzerland.” By mid-’42,
Panzer
armies had reached the Volga in their push against the Soviet Union and gotten precariously close to the Nile in their thrust against British forces in North Africa. “In three years of war,” Wilmot wrote, “Hitler had been denied victory only in the sky above London and in the snow outside Moscow.”
⁴

Moreover, Hitler’s Axis partner, General Hideki Tojo, emboldened by
the success of his sneak attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, continued Japan’s imperial conquest of Asia Pacific and sought to do the same in the lands bordering the Indian Ocean. Allied leaders fretted that, unless thwarted soon, Hitler and Tojo would inevitably join forces somewhere east of the Suez and west of the Ganges.

The war’s geographic parameters may have eluded many Americans, but most were driven by two primal emotions: a desire for quick revenge against Japan and a deep-seated dread of German U-boats. One of Hal Boyle’s first wartime articles, written aboard a troopship, described the disappointment a group of GIs felt upon learning that the convoy was heading toward the Mediterranean, not the Pacific. “We wanted to get the Japs first,” a California private told Boyle while fingering the six-inch knife sheathed on his hip.
⁵
President Roosevelt gained some measure of vengeance against Tojo by correctly insisting—over the objections of his military advisors—on Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raid against Tokyo in April 1942. Doolittle’s raiders inflicted only superficial damage on Japanese factories but did wonders for U.S. morale.

But in early ’42 nothing struck fear into the hearts of Americans like the dastardly
Unterseebooten
. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a vestige of the Great War, the biggest reason that American public sentiment had turned against Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. People who couldn’t find Château-Thierry on a map still remembered the Germans’ torpedoing the ocean liner
Lusitania
. Americans now feared, two and half decades later, that troopships carrying their children and grandchildren would suffer the
Lusitania
’s fate. Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s U-boat commander, was unconscionable: After deadly attacks, Dönitz defied international conventions by instructing his captains to machine-gun survivors.

Americans’ paranoia was well-founded. Since East Coast merchants stubbornly refused to impose blackouts, bright shore lights silhouetted freighters and tankers, turning them into sitting ducks. Horrified beachcombers from the Gulf Coast to New England watched as massive amounts of oil, cargo, and human debris washed up onshore. Losses quickly mounted: in May of ’42, U-boats decimated three times the amount of Allied shipping that had been sunk in January.
⁶

Churchill admitted that his lowest moments came while contemplating the appalling toll inflicted by German submarines. “The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war,” he wrote. “Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”
⁷

“A
SOLDIER ABOARD A TROOPSHIP
has at least one advantage over a canned sardine—he comes out alive,” Hal Boyle joked while crossing the Atlantic for the first time in the fall of ’42. Although Private First Class Andy Rooney’s sardinelike trip was involuntary, Rooney beat Boyle across the ocean by four months. Rooney’s 17th Field Artillery Regiment, then stationed at Florida’s Camp Blanding, got word in July 1942 that it was being transferred to Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. The men didn’t stay near the Susquehanna River for long: After being immunized with a series of shots, they were en route to New Jersey to catch a troopship.
⁸

Just before they got on the train to north Jersey, the men were called in to have mug shots taken. Rooney’s photo, he later conceded, accurately captured his attitude toward Army life. With snarling eyes and pursed lips, adorned with a sign strung around his neck that read, “A. A. Rooney, Pvt.,” it made him look like he was a fugitive from justice.

None of the enlisted men in Rooney’s outfit had a clue as to where they were headed. It could just as easily have been the Pacific, on a ship routed through the Panama Canal. Along with four thousand other men, Rooney was loaded on board a converted British cargo carrier, the
Orcades
. The men’s sleeping quarters were crammed into the storage space down below; thousands of uncomfortable canvas hammocks hung from pipes.

Boyle later likened the crush of soldiers on a troopship to being along the rail at the Kentucky Derby.
⁹
Enlisted men killed time by reading pulp magazine fiction and murder mysteries while officers played checkers and chess and listened to “Lord Haw-Haw,” the German radio mouthpiece, on the shortwave.
¹⁰
Worried about U-boats and nauseated by the smell, Rooney couldn’t sleep, so he roamed around in the shank of the night, chatting up British galley mates and bakers. Poker and craps games were a
popular pastime for other sleepless GIs, although lights were forbidden on deck. To escape claustrophobia, some guys dragged their bedrolls into the open air. But as the ship entered more dangerous waters, officers told them to go back below.
¹¹

Soon Rooney figured out the modus operandi that got him through the ten-day ordeal: he’d get shuteye during the daylight hours when most of the men—and their noxious odors—were up on deck, and explore the ship at night when it was easier to move around. The
Orcades
was part of a huge convoy that included battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers; the flotilla followed a typical course for early ’42 crossings, heading northeast to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then refueling and skirting Newfoundland and Iceland before arriving in the British Isles. Fortunately for Rooney and mates, the midsummer seas weren’t especially rough; still, many of the men had trouble keeping down distasteful British food. It seemed to take forever, but eventually the
Orcades
and its escorts steamed into Liverpool; Rooney got his first glimpse of England, his home base for the next three years.

Rooney had no way of knowing it as he grabbed his gear and joined the mêlée headed toward Liverpool’s train station, but the
Orcades
was damned. Less than three months later, while traveling unescorted on a secret mission to the Indian Ocean, it was torpedoed by a U-boat in the South Atlantic. The
Orcades
was one of the largest Allied troop carriers—one of the biggest Allied ships, period—sunk during the war.
¹²

Reminded seven decades later that his troopship went down eighty days after he walked its plank, the ninety-two-year-old shrugged and said that a lot of ships were sunk during the war.

T
HE ILL-STARRED
O
RCADES
WASN’T GIVEN
much time to refuel or restock. Within days of getting back to New York from the Rooney mission, the transport was thrown into another convoy to the United Kingdom, this one even bigger. It would be witnessed by a wire service correspondent and future sailing enthusiast making his first-ever sea voyage.
¹³

Transporting men and equipment and buttressing the Royal Navy’s
convoy protection were virtually the only combat roles America played in the first few months of the European war. As a result, a news-starved public wanted to learn as much as it could about the people and ships navigating what Allied sailors had come to call Torpedo Junction.

Walter Cronkite had been begging UP president Hugh Baillie and senior editors Harrison Salisbury and Virgil Pinkley to cover the Battle of the Atlantic from the deck of a warship. In early August ’42, Cronkite was designated a Navy correspondent and authorized to cover a convoy.

Before Cronkite could jump aboard the World War I–vintage battleship USS
Arkansas
, then docked off Staten Island, he needed proper credentials and attire. The paperwork took several hours at the Navy’s headquarters at 90 Church Street in New York. Cronkite was told to pack light: he’d be limited to a musette bag, a portable typewriter, and some carbon paper.
¹⁴

“The United States military was as unprepared for handling the requirements of the press as it was for meeting the enemy,” Cronkite remembered.
¹⁵
“They were ad-libbing as they went along.”
¹⁶

Ordered by Navy officials to get himself a proper uniform, Cronkite excitedly showed up at Brooks Brothers in Manhattan, only to discover that its tailors were as clueless as he was about what a correspondent’s garb was supposed to look like. So Cronkite phoned the public relations office at Navy headquarters, asking for guidance. There was a long pause. Make it look a little like an officer’s uniform, Cronkite was told.
¹⁷
So he did. Cronkite may have been the first ETO reporter to actually procure a dress uniform.

Eventually, the ad-libbers in the War Department determined that civilian correspondents would be given officers’ privileges and field-grade uniforms without insignia of rank or branch of service.
¹⁸
At a quick glance, the drab olive outfits made them look like ersatz Army captains. Cronkite and other uniformed correspondents were startled when enlisted men began saluting them. It took repeated episodes before reporters learned to return the courtesy with an awkward gesture of their own. Wearing a uniform made the chubby Joe Liebling so uncomfortable that he felt he was “play acting.”
¹⁹
UP insisted that Cronkite sit for a portrait shot; their twenty-five-year-old prodigy gazed beyond the camera with hardened eyes.

At first, the military dictated that correspondents’ uniforms be augmented by a green brassard with a large white C on the left arm. But among the uninitiated, the undefined “C” created confusion. On one of his first days aboard the
Arkansas
, an officer in the wardroom surprised Cronkite by inquiring about his religious affiliation. When Cronkite, mystified, allowed that he was “sort of a jackass Episcopalian,” it caused the officers seated around the table to exchange glances. After a few strained moments, a lieutenant queried, “Well, how did you happen to become a chaplain?”

A couple of weeks later, after the convoy docked along the Firth of Clyde, a kilted Scottish officer took umbrage at Cronkite enjoying the officers’ club. “I say, old boy,” he censured Cronkite, “is it customary in your army for cashiered officers to drink with the gentlemen at the officers’ bar?”
²⁰
The U.S. military eventually changed the lonely “C” to “War Correspondent,” and directed that patches be sewn over the jacket’s left breast pocket and shoulder. The gold-embroidered shoulder patch handsomely featured “War Correpondent” encircling “U.S.”
²¹

Cronkite didn’t know it until midvoyage, but he was part of an immense task force charged with conveying thousands of Army Air Forces personnel, plus the USAAF’s vital construction equipment, to the United Kingdom. A dozen troop carriers were escorted by the flagship
Arkansas
, a 555-foot behemoth christened in 1911; a phalanx of cruisers; and some fifteen U.S. and British destroyers.

To avoid collisions in poor visibility, each of the bigger ships, Cronkite explained in a diary he began keeping while aboard the
Arkansas
, would maintain a distance of a thousand yards port to starboard and a gap of six hundred yards fore to aft. Cronkite’s journal was typewritten and edited by hand on a batch of Mackay Radio and Telegraph letterhead—the stationery on which many of his war dispatches to the UP wire would be composed. His wartime diaries and letters sat in a trunk in a closet of his Martha’s Vineyard home; although known to exist, they were uncovered only after Cronkite’s death.

Given just a few minutes’ warning by the Navy, Cronkite arrived at Staten Island on August 3, 1942, two and a half days before the convoy was scheduled to shove off. The landlubber hurriedly kissed his wife goodbye
on the dock and boarded a skiff to transport him out into the harbor, where the leviathan lay anchored. Cronkite “felt damn homesick that night,” especially since Betsy remained close by at their Jackson Heights apartment.
²²
“My god, [the
Arkansas
] looked a mess,” Cronkite later recalled, with crates and debris strewn all over.
²³

The
Arkansas
crew made Cronkite a makeshift stateroom out of spare space near Captain (and future Rear Admiral) Carleton F. Bryant’s cabin. Bryant was a soft-spoken, if occasionally flinty, Northeasterner whose patrician elocution over the ship’s loudspeaker caused his men to titter.