Andy Rooney: The Writing 69th

Andy Rooney was -- I  believe -- the last surviving member of a small group of Army-allied reporters called (cleverly, I must admit) the Writing 69th. Members included longtime Rooney pal, Walter Cronkite. The Writing 69th was an unusual collection of extremely gutsy reporters -- as great reporters are -- who embraced the assumption that you couldn't very well relay the stories of soldiers to the homefront unless you were with the soldiers on the battlefront. Homer Bigart was, of course, the grand master of battlefield GI reporting, but Rooney was a pretty solid legman himself in this regard. He flew at least five missions with a wing from the 100th Bombardment Group [Heavy], based at Station 139, Thorpe Abbotts, in East Anglia. (And thanks to my reader, Gerald Twomey, for the specific details.) 

In 2003, Rooney participated in a PBS oral history entitled, "Reporting America at War." Here's what Andy said. It's well worth a read.  

As an aside, one of the reasons I loved and admired Rooney so much was his dedication -- genuine dedication -- to the men and women of the U.S. armed services, and particularly those members of the generation that is now on the cusp of disappearing altogether. Tom Brokaw relayed a story to me some time ago about a "Nightly News" visit to France to one of those vast grave sites in Normandy, and standing near one stone was Rooney -- head bowed, in contemplation, or more likely simply overwhelmed with emotion. Brokaw says Rooney then and there directly inspired his desire to write a book about a generation that emerged from a crippling depression to fight a war whose magnitude and devastation we can only now barely comprehend. That book of course was called "The Greatest Generation."