Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Around the airdrome they joke about how one pilot won his victory over an enemy plane.
It seems he caught a tiny observation plane, similar to our Cubs, while he was out on a low-level mission. As soon as the frightened little enemy saw our ships, he got as low to the ground as he could. One of our planes pulled up and came down at him in a dive. The little plane was so slow that our pilot misjudged its speed and completely missed him. But as he shot on past, his propeller blast caught the little ship, threw it upside down, and it dived into the ground – quite fatally.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say.
You laugh at some very sad things in wartime. For instance, the pilots tell with merriment about the fate of a German motorcyclist.
Our planes were strafing a mountain road one day. They saw this German motorcyclist, who in his terror kept looking back over his shoulder at the approaching planes, and consequently rode right off the highway and over the edge of a 400-foot cliff.
In describing what it feels like to fly one of our high-powered fighting planes, one of our pilots said:
You’re just sitting there with a thousand horses in your lap and a feather in your tail.
Mushily patriotic scenes booed
One night I went into a little Italian town with some pilots to see the movie This Is the Army. The Air Forces had taken over a local theater, and as long as you were in uniform all you had to do was to walk in and sit down. About a third of the audience were pilots and the rest mechanics. I couldn’t help but be interested in their reaction to the picture. On the whole they applauded, but every time the action got a little gooey or mushily patriotic, you could hear a combination boo and groan go through the audience. Soldiers at the front can’t stomach flag-waving from back home.
I’ve just had a letter from a couple of lieutenants in the Army Postal Service enclosing their plan for saving soldiers a lot of letter writing.
Novel idea, but it won’t work
Their plan is based on the theory that the soldier could write just one V-letter and have it mailed to eight or 10 different people back home. That would be accomplished by writing extra addresses on a special pad; then in the laboratory the letter could be photographed over and over, slipping on a new address each time.
It’s a novel idea, but I’ve inquired around among soldiers about it and I’ve yet to find one who wants to write the same thing to a lot of people.
Imagination still occasionally gets the best of some of our letter writers. I heard the other day of a soldier who wrote to his girl that he had been wounded, and then wrote his mother and tipped her off that he had just made it up.
Non-flier gets Zeros in Italy
And another one who doesn’t fly at all wrote home that he had just shot down three Zeros. That’s really good going, especially in Italy, and tops my own record. The most I’ve been able to destroy in one day was an Italian vegetable cart.
Geographical notes: Mt. Vesuvius has a couple of streaks of red lava running down the side from the cone. They show up wonderfully at night and are fascinating. The volcano smokes continually.
The other night in Naples, we had a couple of small earthquake shocks which shook our cots and scared us half to death.
