Walter Cronkite made a name for himself covering World War II
Walter Cronkite’s path to becoming “the most trusted man in America” began during World War II.
Far from the venerable elder statesman who became a television fixture decades later, the young Missourian -- born Nov. 4, 1916 -- was a United Press correspondent eager to get near the action. He would end up seeing plenty.
Beginning with coverage of transatlantic convoys in 1942, Cronkite proved a reliable workhorse for UP throughout the war. He covered Operation Torch, the Allied landing in North Africa, that fall, but later carved out a niche with his reporting on the air war.
In early 1943, Cronkite and seven other correspondents in England (including his future CBS colleague Andy Rooney) got approval from the Eighth Air Force to accompany bombing missions -- an opportunity they had sought for some time. As a prerequisite, the men went through an intensive but abbreviated boot camp in which they learned how to use parachutes and fire .50-caliber machine guns, though the Geneva Convention did not permit non-combatants to use weapons.
An Army Air Forces PR officer dubbed the group “The Writing 69th,” and they embarked on their first mission Feb. 26, 1943. Cronkite’s searing eyewitness account of a raid on Wilhelmshaven from a B-17 ran on front pages across the U.S. in the days to come.
It was a hell 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting flak, of crippled Flying Fortresses and flaming German fighter planes.
I rode a Flying Fortress into the midst of it with the Eighth U.S. Air Force on their raid on the Wilhelmshaven naval base in northwest Germany Friday. For two hours I sat through a vicious gun duel with twisting and turning Focke Wulf 190 fighters and held tight while we dodged savage antiaircraft fire. My reward was to see American bombs falling toward German soil.
Not every bomber made it back that night. One of Cronkite’s colleagues, Robert Post of the New York Times, was among the casualties after his B-24 went down under fire, killing all aboard. That loss brought an abrupt end to the Writing 69th’s plans, though Cronkite and others would continue to cover the air war going forward.
Cronkite would tell the tale of the RAF’s famous dambusters raid in May 1943, and would fly over the Normandy coast on D-Day a year later -- though cloud cover kept him from seeing anything of note. He was back in the thick of the action in September 1944, crashing into the Netherlands in a glider filled with 101st Airborne troops as Operation Market Garden began.
With that assignment complete, Cronkite was assigned that fall to cover Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s advance across the continent. He was in Brussels when the Germans launched the counteroffensive that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge and quickly moved over to join the press camp covering Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army.
As the war in Europe wound down, Cronkite helped reopen the old UP bureau in Amsterdam and was eventually assigned to cover the Nuremberg trials before moving on to Moscow for a couple of years.
He joined CBS in 1950, a move that changed the course of his life. He spent nearly 20 years anchoring the CBS Evening News, reporting on every major story in those tumultuous times, from the space race to the Kennedy assassination to the war in Vietnam.
He retired from full-time duty in 1981 but remained a regular television presence through his death on July 17, 2009 at age 92.