Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With the U.S. Navy in the Mediterranean – (by wireless, delayed)
Our first day at sea on the way to invade Sicily was truly like a peacetime Mediterranean cruise. The weather was something you read about in travel folders, gently warm and sunny, and the sea as smooth as velvet.
We were kept at a sharp alert, for at any moment we could be attacked by a submarine, surface ship or airplane and yet, any kind of attack – even the fact that anybody would want to attack anybody else – was so utterly out of keeping with the benignity of the sea that it was hard to take the possibility of danger seriously.
I had thought I might be afraid at sea, sailing in this great fleet that by its very presence was justification for attack, and yet I found it impossible to be afraid. As we sailed along, I couldn’t help but think of a paragraph of one of Joseph Conrad’s sea stories which I had read just a few days before. It so perfectly expressed our feeling about the changeless sea that I’m going to quote it here.
Conrad sets the scene for Pyle
It was in a story called “The Tale,” written about the last war. In it, Conrad said:
What at first used to amaze the Commanding Officer was the unchanged face of the waters, with its familiar expression, neither more friendly nor more hostile. On fine days the sun strikes sparks upon the blue; here and there a peaceful smudge of smoke hangs in the distance, and it is impossible to believe that the familiar clear horizon traces the limit of one great circular ambush. One envies the soldiers at the end of the day, wiping the sweat and blood from their faces, counting the dead fallen to their hands, looking at the devastated fields, the torn earth that seems to suffer and bleed with them. One does, really. The final brutality of it – the taste of primitive passion – the ferocious frankness of the blow struck with one’s hand – the direct call and the straight response. Well, the sea gave you nothing of that, and seemed to pretend that there was nothing the matter with the world.
And that’s how it was with us; it had never occurred to me before that this might be the way in enemy waters during wartime. Why it remained that way we shall never know, but throughout our long voyage and right up to the final dropping anchor, we never had one single attack from above, from below, nor from over the horizon.
Excitement in the dark
Dusk brought a change. Not feeling of fear at all but somehow an acute sense of the drama we were playing at that moment on the face of the sea that has known such a major share of the world’s great warfare. In the faint light of the dusk, forms became indistinguishable. Ships nearby were only heavier spots against the heavy background of the night. Now you thought you saw something and now there was nothing. The gigantic armada was on all sides of us, there only in knowledge.
Then out of nowhere, a rolling little subchaser took on a dim shape alongside us and with its motors held itself steady about 30 yards away. You could not see the speaker but a megaphoned voice came loudly across the water telling us of a motor breakdown of one of the troop-carrying barges farther back.
We megaphoned advice back to him. His response came back. Out in the darkness the voice was young. You could picture a boyish skipper over there in his blown hair and his lifejacket and binoculars, rolling to the sea in the Mediterranean dusk. Some young man who had so recently been so normally unaware of any sea at all – the bookkeeper in your bank, perhaps – and now here he was, a strange new man in command of a ship, suddenly transformed into a person with awful responsibilities, carrying out with great intentness his special, small part of the enormous aggregate that is our war on all the lands and seas of the globe.
All for one – one for all
In his unnatural presence there in the rolling darkness of the Mediterranean, you realized vividly how everybody in America has changed, how every life suddenly stopped and suddenly began again on a different course. Everything in this world has stopped except war and we are all men of new professions out in some strange night caring for each other.
That’s the way you felt as you heard this kid, this pleasant kid, bawling across the dark waters strange nautical words with a disciplined deliberation that carried in them the very strength of the sea itself, the strong, mature words of the captain on his own ship, saying:
Aye, aye, sir. If there is any change, I will use my own judgment and report to you again at dawn. Good night, sir.
Then the whole darkness enveloped the American armada. Not a pinpoint of light showed from those hundreds of ships as they surged on through the night toward their destiny, carrying across this ageless and indifferent sea tens of thousands of young men of new professions, fighting for… for… well, at least for each other.
