Yum, yum, yum –
Relief in meat shortage predicted for civilians
Lots of livestock, little feed, may bring sharp upturn in marketing soon, WFA officials say
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Yum, yum, yum –
War message on ads favored
Home front told it must do better job
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Newspapers must reduce print supply
WPB tells publishers to cut orders to wartime quotas
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17 million women workers may keep jobs after conflict
They are in a better position to enforce their demands than after World War I; Labor Department Bureau helps them
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Army nurses like Iceland despite rain
Lieutenant on leave says it rains all year but it’s nice work
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Kiska isolated, Nimitz asserts
Admiral calls outlook in Pacific brighter
By Charles Arnot, United Press staff writer
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Italian tanks easy targets for Americans near Gela
Yanks take care of some new Nazi Mark IVs too as warships join in battle
By Richard D. McMillan, United Press staff writer
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U.S. extends plane inquiry to war fronts
Check being made of all Curtiss engines delivered to Armed Forces
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Resistance point reduced to rubble by Allied raids
Few of Sicilian villages show scars of war, but Palazzolo feels full fury of attack
By Ned Russell, representing the combined American press
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Millett: Fellows ‘too old to fight’ find new dangers in life
They’re restless because being out of uniform deprives them of measure of respect
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the invasion fleet – (by wireless, delayed)
Our ship has been in African waters many months but this invasion is the first violent action its crew has ever been through. Only three or four men, who’d been torpedoed in the Pacific, had ever before had any close association with the probability of sudden death.
I’ve come to know a great many of the sailors aboard and I know they went into this thing just as soldiers go into the first battle – seemingly calm but inside frightened and sick with worry. It’s the lull in the last couple of days before starting that hits you so hard. In the preparation period, your fate seems far away and once in action you are too busy to be afraid. It’s just those last couple of days when you have time to think so much.
The night before we sailed, I sat in the darkness on the forward deck helping half a dozen sailors eat a can of stolen pineapple. Some of the men of our little group were hardened and mature. Others were almost children. They all talked seriously and their gravity was touching. The older ones tried to rationalize how the law of averages made it unlikely that our ship out of all the hundreds in action would be hit.
‘If I get through alive–’
They spoke of the inferiority of the Italian fleet and argued pro and con over whether Germany has some hidden Luftwaffe up her sleeve she might whisk out to destroy us. Younger ones spoke but little. They talked to me of their plans and hopes for going to college or getting married after the war, always epilogued by the phrase:
If I get through this fracas alive.
As we sat there on the hard deck, squatting in a circle around our pineapple can like Indians, we all seemed terribly pathetic to me. Even the dizziest of us knew that within less than 48 hours, many of us stood an excellent chance of being in this world no more. I don’t believe one of us was afraid of the physical part of dying. That isn’t the way it is.
Your emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up your future. I suppose that seems like splitting hairs and that it really all comes under the heading of fear, yet somehow to us, there is a difference.
These gravely yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things – things such as seeing “the old lady” again, of going to college, of staying in the Navy for a career, of holding on your knee just once your own kid whom you’ve never seen, of becoming again champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and, yes, even of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico.
Ernie eavesdrops
When you huddle around together on the dark decks on your last wholly secure night, it’s these little hopes and ambitions that make up the sum total of your worry at leaving rather than any visualization of physical agony tomorrow.
Our deck and the shelf-like deck above us were dotted with little groups huddled around talking. You couldn’t see them but you could hear them. I deliberately listened around for a while. Every group was talking in some way about their chances of survival. A dozen times, I overheard this same remark:
Well, I don’t worry about it because I look at it this way. If your number’s up, then it’s up and if it ain’t, you’ll come through no matter what.
Every single person who expressed himself that way was a liar and knew it but, hell, a guy has to say something on the last night. I heard oldsters offering to make bets at even money we wouldn’t get hit at all and 2 to 1 we wouldn’t get hit seriously. Those were the offers but I don’t think any bets were actually made.
Somehow it seemed sort of sacrilegious to bet on your own life.
Simple, undramatic patriotism
Once I heard somebody in the darkness start cussing and give this answer to some sailor critic who was proclaiming how he’d run things:
Well, I figure that Captain up there in the cabin has got a little more in his noggin than you have or he wouldn’t be Captain, so I’ll put my money on him.
And another sailor voice chimed in with:
Hell, yes, that Captain has slept through more watches than you and I have spent time in the Navy.
And so it went on that last night of safety. I never heard anybody say anything patriotic like the storybooks have people saying. There was philosophizing but it was simply and undramatic. I’m sure no man would have stayed ashore if given the chance. There was something bigger than the awful dread that would have kept them there. With me, it was probably an irresistible egotism in seeing myself part of the historic naval movement. With others, it was, I think, just the application of plain, ordinary, unspoken, even unrecognized, patriotism.
So… Just like Britain… Why didn’t they put Brits here? They would love this place
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