Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
To me the funniest incident of the Tunisian campaign was the following:
Back in January and February, the headquarters of the II Corps were in a deep ravine some six miles the other side of Tébessa. Wooded mountains rose of each side quite steeply, and the bottom of the gulch was well coated with trees.
The corps was down there in numerous tents, but it was decided to tunnel big shelters into the mountainsides for offices just in case of dive-bombings. So, soldiers were set to tunneling.
It was a major mining job, for they had to bore through solid rock, using air drills and dynamite. They worked in shifts, 24 hours a day. The blasted-out rock was hauled away in trucks.
They bored four great tunnels into the mountainous, each one as wide as an auto and some 50 yards long. At the back end they connected all four tunnels into ne huge room, forming unquestionably the biggest and finest air-raid shelter in the continent of Africa.
It took three solid weeks to build it. And the very day it was finished the Germans broke through Faid Pass and pushed us back through Kasserine, and the corps had to move in a hurry. The government tunnels, all finished, were never occupied even for an hour.
Flea bite cure found
Shaving cream is among the items regularly issued to frontline troops over here. It is one thing everybody has found extremely useful. It turned out to be the best sunburn lotion we know of. The soldiers also out it on flea bites with good effect. They shave with it too, incidentally. It’s just one of those little discoveries of the war.
They tell an anecdote about a soldier on guard duty in the frontlines one night, for the first time. He heard a strange noise, fired at it, and then called out, “Who went there?”
The engineers who built those marvelous temporary steel bridges, strong enough to hold up tanks, over the Tunisian rivers after the Germans had destroyed the original bridges are certainly due a lot of credit.
Perhaps the biggest satisfaction they got out of their work was naming the bridges after they had finished them. They nearly always painted a name on signboards and staked one at each end of the bridge. You could tell one outfit was from New York, for you cross4ed a whole string of bridges named “Manhattan,” “Brooklyn,” “Queensborough” and so on. But the one that tickled me most was a big one at Mateur which bore a sign with large black letters: “Huey P. Long Bridge.”
Sugar sent home
Last December, when I left Oran, I bundled up a canvas bag full of odds and ends that I didn’t want to carry to the front, and left it at one of the Army offices for picking up at some future date. Months went by, and I never got back to Oran, I inquired about the bag a couple of times from travelers who had come from that office, and they reported it was still there. And then just the other day came a letter from Washington saying that a mysterious bag, sent by me and addressed to me, had arrived in America. They described the nah, and it was without doubt my Oran storage bundle. Apparently, somebody just got tired of seeing it around and decided to get it far out of sight.
I can’t remember what was in the bag, except for two items: (1) the only dress uniform I’ve got, and (2) a pound box of cube sugar I brought with me from America a year ago. I don’t need the sugar, as the Army has plenty, and I’ve never had the dress uniform on since the night I left London last fall.
But now that it’s 4,000 miles away I suppose some general will be inviting me out to dinner and I’ll have to go in coveralls. While we’re supposing, suppose we suppose it’s Gen. Eisenhower himself, just to make it good.