Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in North Africa – (March 9)
Once more I’m with the House of Jackson – the bomber crew I wrote about in England and again elsewhere in Africa. We follow each other around so much that our reunions are getting to be commonplace.
They were out on a mission when I arrived at their remote airdrome. So, I went out to their plane’s parking place, and was waiting when they came back. The first man to drop out of the plane was Lt. Malcolm Andresen, of Hixton, Wisconsin, the navigator. We are good friends, and I hadn’t seen him for weeks, but he just grinned and said, “Hi, Ernie,” and didn’t even shake hands, as though I’d been there all the time.
The House of Jackson is still perking, but the inevitable perils and shiftings of war are starting to whittle her down. Her skipper was Capt. Jack Taylor, of Wollaston, Massachusetts. Now he has been promoted to ground work in an operations job, and takes the faithful old plane on its mission only once in a while.
He hates office work; just isn’t the type. But when I asked him if he didn’t chafe at being on the ground so much, he said:
Hell no. If I never go on another mission, it’ll suit me all right.
But later I noticed he was begging the squadron leader to let him go on one.
The bombardier is temporarily out of the crew too. He got a piece of flak in his left hand, and now goes around proudly with his arm in a sling. He is Lt. Joe Wolff, of Omaha. He’ll be flying again in a few days, but the boys kid him about maybe he’ll get a ticket home, now that he’s wounded. Joe laughes too, but he wishes they weren’t just kidding.
One man of crew killed
There is no laughter about the ball-turret gunner. For he is dead. He is the one who loved his ball turret so much he even wanted to be in it while the plane took off; loved it so much he wouldn’t let anybody else get inside it.
His death was a brave one. When the Germans came over the airdrome one night, this gunner jumped from the trench, where he was safe, and dashed to the nearest Fortress and began shooting at the enemy planes from the upper turret. A bomb landed nearby, and a small fragment tore through the side of the plane and went through his heart.
I was on the field that night, and the rest of the crew were asking their officers if they could take up a collection and send his body home. It is impossible, but they will mark his grave well, and maybe after the war his body can be arranged.
That night, Lt. Andresen asked me if I could say something in the column about how wonderful the ball-turret gunner had been, and how he had died, so his folks could read it. But I had to tell him it was impossible, because I can’t give his name.
There is a censorship rule which forbids us mentioning the name of a casualty until after his family has been notified by the War Department. The rule is good, I think, but there’s no way for us over here ever to know when the War Department has sent its telegram. Consequently, the rule really forbids us even mentioning casualties at all.
So, all I can do is tell the little incident, and someday the other members of the crew will write to this brave gunner’s family and tell them how he died.
The gunner was Sgt. John D. Wadkins, of Coolidge, Arizona. Ernie Pyle gave his name is a confidential postscript to this dispatch, for use of the War Department confirmed that the next of kin has been notified. This the department has done.
Fliers have ‘special’ language
The Air Forces have a language all their own. One old Air Force expression has increased in popularity over here until now it substitutes for about 50% of ordinary verbs. The expression is ‘'sweating out.” You “sweat out” a mission, or you “sweat out” the weather, or you “sweat out” a promotion. It means you wait, or you fight, or you do anything hard that takes some time.
Another much used expression is “rugged.” When you’ve been living in mud, that was “rugged.” When the flak over Bizerte has been especially bad, that was a “rugged” trip. Anything extraordinarily tough is “rugged.”
In the village near our airdrome, there is a terribly crippled Arab kid, about 10 or 12 years old, I’d judge. He can’t walk, and crawls on his stomach all over town through the dirt and filth.
And what have our soldiers done? Why, they’ve taken the wheels off a battery carrier at the airdrome, and made a little wheeled platform for the kid to lie on, so he can roll along the streets instead of crawl.
