Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
You’ve heard of trench mouth and athlete’s foot, but now another occupational disease of warfare has sprung up on both sides here in the Italian war. It isa called “trench foot.” The Germans as well as the Americans have it. It was well known in the last war.
Trench foot comes from a man’s feet being wet and cold for long periods and from his not taking off his shoes often enough. In the mountains, the soldiers sometimes go for two weeks and longer without ever having their shows off and without ever being dry.
With trench foot, the tissues gradually seem to go dead, and sores break out. It is almost the same as the circulation being stopped and the flesh dying. In extreme cases gangrene occurs. We have had cases where amputation was necessary. And in other cases, the soldier won’t be able to walk again for six months.
In a way it’s much like frostbite, and as in frostbite, it is the wrong thing to put your feet in hot water when you get an opportunity.
Sometimes they’ve let their trench foot go so long without complaining that they have finally been unable to walk and have had to be taken down the mountain in litters.
Others get down under their own power, agonizingly. Recently one boy was a day and half getting down the mountain on what would normally be a two-hour descent. He arrived at the bottom barefooted, carrying his shoes in his hand, and with his feet bleeding. He was in a sort of daze from the pain.
One battalion has been experimenting by having its soldiers wrap part of a cellophane gas cap around their feet between their shocks and their shoes, in order to keep their feet dry. The battalion surgeon doesn’t yet know whether the experiment will work, because right in the middle of it we had a week of dry weather.
Cavemen in the Stone Age
The fighting on the mountaintop sometimes almost reaches the caveman stage. The Americans and Germans are frequently so close that they actually throe rocks at each other.
They use up many times as many hand grenades as we have had in any other phase of the Mediterranean war. And you have to be pretty close when you throw hand grenades.
Rocks play a big part in the mountain wat. You hide behind rocks, you throw rocks, you sleep in rock crevices, and you even get killed by flying rocks.
When an artillery shell bursts on the loose rock surface, rock fragments are thrown for many yards. In one battalion, 15% of the casualties are from flying rocks.
Also, now and then an artillery burst from a steep hillside will loosen big boulders which go leaping and bounding down the mountainside for thousands of yards. The boys say such a rock sounds like a windstorm coming down the mountainside.
Comin’ round the mountain
When soldiers come down the mountain out of battle, they are dirty, grimy, unshaven and weary. They look 10 years older than they are. They don’t smile much.
But the human body and mind recover rapidly. A couple of days down below and they begin to pick up. It’s funny to see a bunch of combat soldiers after they’ve shaved and washed up. As one said:
We all look sick after we’ve cleaned up, we’re so white.
It’s funny to hear them talk. One night in our cowshed, I heard one of them say how he was going to keep his son out of the next war.
He said:
As soon as I get home, I’m going to put 10-pound weights in his hands and make him jump off the garage roof, to break down his arches. I’m going to feed him a little ground glass to give him a bad stomach, and I’m going to make him read by candlelight all the time to ruin his eyes. When I get through with him, he’ll be double-4 double-F.
Another favorite expression of soldiers just out of combat runs like this:
Well, let’s go down to Naples and start a second draft.
Meaning let’s conscript all the clerks, drivers, waiters, MPs, office workers and so on that flood any big city near a fighting area, and send them up in the mountains to fight.
The funny thing is they wouldn’t have to draft many soldiers down there. A simple call for volunteers would be enough, I really believe. One of the paradoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out.
