He was called the most trusted man in America and was credited with defining the role of the television news anchorman. Walter  Cronkite, right, who ended his “CBS Evening News” broadcast with, “And that’s the way it is,” died at his home July 17 at the age of 92. He reported on President Kennedy’s assassination, man’s first step on the moon and the war in Vietnam.
Cronkite also reported on D-Day when he was a 27-year-old correspondent for United Press. Decades later, as a director of WCC Newspapers Inc., which then owned a controlling interest in this newspaper, Cronkite wrote about that experience as the 40th anniversary of the Normandy invasion approached. To commemorate his passing, we are rerunning his story that appeared in the Laurel Leader on May 31, 1984.

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By Walter Cronkite

The weather outside was miserable that June 6, 1944. Outside Gen. Eisenhower’s invasion headquarters at Portsmouth the wind howled and the rain came down and the waves churned the English Channel.

For four years now the European continent had been in Hitler’s deathly embrace. It would not seem that delaying liberation another day could be that serious. But assuming that German spies already had informed Berlin that the invasion fleet had sailed from England, and given the state of soldiers already casualties of seasickness, another day could well spell the failure of a mission — and perhaps more years of Hitler’s rule. And the weather forecast was for even worse conditions on the morrow. Eisenhower gave the order to proceed.

These were historic moments. This correspondent slept through them.
 
I had been denied a place among those correspondent heroes selected to make the landing with the troops on D-day. “Denied” may be too strong a word. It was the most dangerous assignment of the war and every correspondent knew it, and when the chance of glory was weighted against innate cowardice, glory sometimes lost its priority.

But this choice wasn’t mine to make (this perhaps saving me from besmirching the family escutcheon). I was assigned to stay back at United Press headquarters in London’s Fleet Street to help write the lead stories, pulling together what we all knew would be a confusion of reports from the beaches and the military commands.

While our luckier (?) colleagues already were fighting mal de mer in the landing craft off the beaches, we in London had no idea that the invasion was on, such was the security all along England’s embarkation coast. I finished a night tour of duty, found my way home through the blackout and snuggled under the comfort to the accompaniment of rain beating on the old apartment’s leaded windowpanes.

The awakening was abrupt. Someone pounding at the door. I checked my watch. One-thirty a.m. At the door was an old friend, Maj. Hal Leyshon of the Eighth Air Force public relations staff, a peacetime New York advertising man.

Hal wasn’t exactly a laughing boy. His humor was of the old-city-editor-hard-bitten school. But we had shared some grand evenings together and I knew his moods. This wasn’t a playful one. He was deadly serious when he checked the apartment to be sure no one else was there.

“Walter,” he finally said, tension doing a funny thing to his voice. “We’ve got an assignment for you. Only one man can go, and your name was drawn out of the hat. You’ll have to pool what you get with the other newspapers and services. It will be dangerous, you’ll be out of touch with the office for some hours and you can’t let them know where you are going.

“That’s all I can tell you. If you want to turn it down, that’s up to you, and I wouldn’t blame you. No one will have to know. We just ask that you don’t say anything about it until we tell you you can.”

Well, while we didn’t know the exact date of the invasion, everyone in England, and I suppose in Germany too, knew that it was imminent. After all, our correspondents assigned to various invasion units had been disappearing from the office and their London haunts over a period of days and we knew they must have been called to their invasion posts.

My mind was spinning, but like a fixed roulette wheel it always stopped on the one thought: This was D-Day and somehow I was going to be a part of it.
 
When we got down to the car and underway, Hal briefed me. Although there had been no such plans before, Eisenhower’s headquarters had suddenly decided that it needed more firepower on the beaches than either the Navy or the fighter bombers could deliver. It asked the Eighth Air Force if its heavy bombers, B-17 Flying Fortresses or B-24 Liberators, could do something they had never done and were untrained for — go in low so they could positively identify their targets and hit the Germans right behind the Normandy beaches.

The Eighth had accepted the assignment and had chosen the 303rd Bomb Group for the job. Headquarters and the group commanders agreed that one correspondent should go along to record the historic effort, and the Eighth public relations officers decided on the draw from six correspondents.
 
I was in the pool for United Press, while the other five represented the two other news services, Associated Press and International News Service, the New York Times and New York Herald-Tribune and the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes (Andy Rooney was its man).

We had taken air crew training to qualify to fly with the big bombers and the February before had been the first correspondents to ride them over Germany — bombing the submarine pens at Wilhelshaven against fierce opposition from German fighters and flak.

I had won a lottery in which I hadn’t even entered. I was to be the pool correspondent in a daring, unrehearsed and hastily planned aerial adventure over the D-Day beaches.

It was three in the morning when we reached the 303rd’s field at the crossroads hamlet of Molesworth. The ground crews already had the Forts warming up, their bombs, machine guns and fuel loaded. The air crews already had been briefed and I was taken directly to the B-17 to which I had been assigned. I swung myself up through the mid-ship belly hatch, the door was latched and I was on my way to France.

We rumbled down the runway in an extraordinary long run before we finally lifted off. Clearly we were heavy with bombs. There was nothing to be seen out of the Plexiglass bubble of the nose. The bombardier and the navigator and I strained against rain and fog to confirm that we were clearing the big oaks at the end of the field.

Never had I been aboard a bomber in such frightful weather. The B-17s flew in tight formation, with little distance between wing tips or nose and tail. That’s how they defended themselves. The machine-gun fire from one plane could help protect its neighbors. That’s why they were a success against the Luftwaffe over Germany.

But now that tight formation became a menace. We were flying where Forts didn’t fly — a few hundred instead of 17,000 feet over the ground. There was no room to maneuver out of each other’s way, and we were flying in and out of fog trusting against reason that none would swing wing tip against wing tip, sending at least two ships down and perhaps, in chain reaction, taking most of the flight with them.

And then the order came to arm the bombs — remove the safety pins so they would explode on contact. What had been dangerous before now became insane. If we collided, there was every chance the bombs would go, and the 303rd could go up in one terrible series of blasts.

Halfway across the channel, as dawn broke, through the fog and scudding clouds, there they were! A sight such as man may never see again: the greatest invasion fleet ever assembled. Spread out below us were battleships, cruisers, destroyers, large transports and the myriad of smaller vessels, the tank and infantry landing craft.

If they had begun unloading, we missed it. For just as we reached the coast, the fog became almost total. Down through the haze I thought I saw big guns firing and shells landing, but it was like the impressions of a nightmare. I was there, but was it real?

Besides, something else was happening now. Navigator and bombardier were becoming frantic — calmly frantic, and there can be such  a thing I learned that morning. We didn’t know how important our mission was to the total effort, but we were beginning to get the idea that we weren’t going to play our part.

We had to see the target to bomb it, and the weather was not cooperating. Whether our troops already were ashore, perhaps had advanced a few hundred yards or were a mile or more inland, we had no way of knowing. There was no place to dump our bombs!

Back up through the clouds we climbed — those loaded bombs waiting that one touch of wing tips that we couldn’t even see from the cockpit.

Thank heavens the Luftwaffe had been driven back from the beaches to defend the German homeland, and their Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs weren’t there to dispute our passage over France. We made a long, swinging circle hoping the weather would improve and give us just a little break to see the enemy and add our bit to the big day. But as we crossed the beach again, there had been no improvement — and we made the torturous climb again.

Fuel low, we returned to England, as near as birds can come to having their tails between their legs. England, too, was closed in now and getting home and landing with those full bomb bays was not exactly a Sunday ride to grandma’s, but all of the 303rd, and one correspondent, made it.

Postscript: Security forbade me from telephoning from the air base. Hal drove me back to London and directly to the office. The report of the invasion had come now an hour or two before. I walked into an office hectic with activity. The boss said: “We’ve been trying to call you. Where in the hell did you spend last night?”

I slipped behind my typewriter to write my first person story of the Allied invasion of France — somewhere down below the fog.

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