Editorial: Time to be tough
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By Brydon Taves, United Press staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
This is the second in a series about U.S. troops in North Africa, in which battle zone Mr. Pyle has recently arrived. Today, he shows how red tape vanishes as battle nears.
WITH U.S. FORCES IN ALGIERS (by wireless) – Many of the red-tapish formalities that are common to the military are cast aside when the Army is in the field, moving relentlessly forward.
At an American airdrome where two of us correspondents went to arrange transportation farther east, a major said:
Aw, to hell with your permits. I haven’t got time to look at them. Just camp here in your bedrolls and I’ll put you on the first plane going your way.
Many a good clerk in Washington would turn gray at such clerical simplicity.
I wish you could see this airdrome. It is far behind the fighting lines now, but still within reach of enemy bombers. Here you sense the pace of modern war.
It is an airdrome we captured from the French after hard fighting. It is in flat desert country, with bare hills in the distance. Clouds of dust hang over it constantly raised by the propellers of planes taking off and landing.
Down again, up again, off again
Fighters circle continuously overhead like protecting hawks. The sky is alive with work planes, rushing stuff to the front. They come singly and in vast formations. They land, load up, and take right off again.
Luxury liners that once carried you from coast to coast, now stripped down inside and painted olive drab, waddle off the ground with unbelievably big loads of soldiers, ammunition, supplies of all kinds.
The major said:
They’re getting off the ground thanks to those kid pilots and a slight surface wind. They’re terribly overloaded, but it’s necessary.
The airdrome itself is a Hollywoodish scurry of activity. Jeeps dash around by the score. Great trucks haul their loads to the doors of planes. Ground crews live in ditches right alongside the runways. Officers throw their bedrolls onto the floor of a barracks building and just step across the road into the darkness for toilet purposes.
The officers are dirty, unshaven and tieless. You can hardly tell them from the privates.
Flat tires are patched right on the field. Great mounds of gasoline cans are stacked about the field. Protective revetments for fighter planes, made of adobe bricks, were built by the French before we came.
In town, life is not quite so urgent. The necessary office work of the Army seems about the same wherever it is done, and the Army is adept at setting up new headquarters in strange places.
Today, Oran is just as smoothly running an Army headquarters as any town in England or Ireland before the trek to Africa began. Hundreds of officers have already settled into a daily routine of working 12 hours or more at the office and going home to bed.
Breakfast in bed
The Army has taken over several large hotels and office buildings. Officers are billeted in the hotels. Many of the troops are billeted in a big modern garage. Two officers’ messes have been set up, one at a hotel and one at a restaurant. They serve American food, brought in by convoy. For there is little food in this country. Our meals have been excellent, far better than civilians in England are used to.
Life here in town is on a rather ridiculous, half-normal-half-battle basis. I sleep in my bedroll on a hard stone floor, but I can have breakfast served grandly there in bed by a French waiter in a white coat!
I can have a luxurious hot bath, but I have to wash my own clothes. There is no soap except what we carry with us. Yet champagne is abundant and cheap.
There is little traffic in Oran except for hundreds of jeeps and Army trucks. Soldiers on short leaves sit at sidewalk cafés sipping wine, while a few blocks away others lie wounded in hospitals.
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642 telephone officials paid $10,000 and up
AT&T head gets $206,000 – subsidiary presidents average $36,000
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Huh? What does that mean? When they win the war… What will they do? Yeah do whatever you want bro to their enemy Nations without punishing them?
It just sounds too stupid to me
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There’s the answer in the article. 
Senator Nye criticized “unadulterated, blown-in-the-bottle American eagles… like Wendell L. Willkie and Henry Luce,” who, he said, have been:
…screaming that the British must quit fighting to preserve the British Empire, and join with us in some not-clearly-defined but “larger” cause if they expect us to stay with them in this fight.
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I am not sure what he by “to turn loose”.
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U.S. Navy Department (December 4, 1942)
Communiqué No. 212
South Pacific.
On December 3, ground activity on Guadalcanal Island was confined to routine patrol operations during which 14 Japanese were killed. Army fighters supported ground forces on 5 attack missions.
The Pittsburgh Press (December 4, 1942)
ALLIES CHECKED IN TUNISIA
Lack of support from air hinders Anglo-U.S. army
British fleet backs up land forces west of Bizerte, blasts Axis ships
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