Cronkite reports on air battle over Germany

What would become one of the most famous names in journalism appeared on the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 75 years ago.

Walter Cronkite, then a United Press staff writer, assembled a “You Are There”-style report on a 1944 American bombing raid over Germany by at least 1,400 planes.

“It was weird waiting for death up there,” Cronkite wrote in a story that appeared Jan. 13 and was based on the accounts provided by airmen who took part in the mission. While the outside temperature was 33 degrees below zero, “you sweated so [much] that you took off your gloves and turned off the heat in your flying suit.”

“It was eerily quiet, with even your engines sounding strangely muffled, while you waited for death to make his entrance,” he wrote. “Then he came, roaring at you in the form of a row of Messerschmitts with madmen at the controls …” The German pilots first fired rockets, then followed up with machine guns. “That was the experience related today by American fliers who spent three appalling hours over Germany.”

Cronkite, based in London, was the re-write man that day for material gathered by UPI reporters at American air bases after the raid. He was 27 and had worked for the wire service since 1937.

Cronkite described the recent air battle in nearnovelistic terms. “It was a story of heroism … of Fortress gunners who held their fire until their turrets were almost brushed by enemy wings, of bomber crews who battled valiantly long after their ships had been mortally stricken.”

Cronkite had some personal experience involving aviation and air combat. Eleven months earlier he had been among six reporters, including future CBS correspondent Andy Rooney, who flew on a bombing mission over Germany. One of the journalists, New York Times reporter Robert Post, died when his B-24 was shot down and exploded.

Later in the war, Cronkite was aboard a glider landing with members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne as part of “Operation Market Garden” in the Netherlands. Months later he covered the Battle of the Bulge.

Cronkite joined the television division of CBS News in 1960. In 1962, the 25-year journalism veteran became anchor of the network’s evening news. In that position, he headed CBS coverage of stories that included the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. race to the moon, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

His closed his last broadcast as CBS anchor with his familiar signoff, followed by the date: “And that’s the way it is: Friday, March 6, 1981.”