Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Africa – (by wireless)
One of the sagas of this war – and one that can’t be written fully until after the war – is the career of the Combat Engineers.
They have yet to hear the crack of an enemy gun, but their overseas record is already talked about throughout the length and breadth of Africa. They have been away from home now since the spring of 1942. They are one of the proudest organizations I’ve ever come across. They brag about what they’ve taken and swear they are yenning for more.
The Army Engineers build things, as you know. These particular engineers build airfields and depots and barracks for other soldiers. But it isn’t so much what they have built as where they built it, and how.
On their first and biggest job, they lived for five months in an isolation that few other American troops have known. They worked day and night. The only way they knew when Sunday came was that the colonel would put on a necktie. They wore out their gloves and worked with bandaged hands. Supplies failed to reach them on schedule, so they went on half rations, and then on quarter rations. Each man got only one quart of water a day.
They had no entertainment of any kind, and no mail for three and a half months. Well, some mail did come at the end of two months, but it was all fourth-class, including a sackful of training manuals for troops in Arctic climates.
Never use what they build
These were the first American troops to hit the Congo. They built an immense base camp in record time, when the natives had said it couldn’t be built at all. Then, in squads and platoons and companies, they pushed deep into all parts of Central Africa. They built emergency airfields all over the veldt and through the deep jungle. They built hospitals, roads and bridges, and set up barracks for the troops that were to follow. But not for themselves.
One sergeant said:
Hell no! We ain’t slept in a building since we left the States. We build ‘em, we don’t use ‘em.
The outfit has its fun as well as its work. They have killed two elephants. They hunt antelope, deer, buffalo and crocodiles. Snakes don’t even count. Monkeys and leopards were accumulated as pets.
One company in a locality where horses abound is called the “Mounted Engineers” because almost every man owns a horse. Another unit is known as the “Mayors of Harlem,” since they are in direct control of more natives than Father Divine has followers.
Their work is tough, dirty and unglamorous, and it is done under the most trying conditions. Working in “the white man’s graveyard,” they have lost only one man – due to a streptococcic infection. They have learned to take everything the tropics have to offer and still keep going,
One said:
We have lived with more different kinds of bugs than Carter has Little Liver Pills.
And another one said:
At first, when a bug wandered into the warm soapsuds we call beer down here, we’d throw the beer away. The second week, we would take the bug out. The third week, we took the bug out, squeezed him dry, then drank the beer. The next week, we drank the bug. Now we catch them and put them in our beer for flavor.
Immaculate commander called ‘Ramrod’
There were more than a thousand of these tough Army Engineers at the last counting. They are scattered in seven different parts of Africa, toiling away. Their commander, whom I am not permitted to name, is a tall, gangling soldier of the old school, whose greatest misfortune is that he has a face which looks something like mine. Otherwise, we’re nothing alike. In conversation, he is pleasant, and during working hours he is tough. He is always immaculate in his dress, and he remains immaculate even when the tropical sun hits 150.
He stands so straight they call him “Ramrod.” At work, he always carries a silver-tipped swagger stick under his arm. One admiring engineer described him as “a swagger stick carrying a swagger stick.”
Two men I can name are the two who gave me most of my information about this unusual organization. In fact, one wrote some of these words himself. He is Lt. William Newman of Cullman, Alabama, a town which has a monastery with a famous miniature city in its garden, about which I wrote a column several years ago. The other is Capt. Jules Carville of Norco, Louisiana. His ancestors founded the town of Carville. The captain is now an ancestor himself – of a descendant who has arrived since he left home, and whom he’d like mighty well to see.