Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Most infantry companies in the American frontlines are now composed largely of replacements, as they are in all armies after more than a year of fighting.
Some of these replacements have been here only a few weeks. Others came so long ago they are now as seasoned as the original men of the company.
The new boys are afraid, of course, and very eager to hear and to learn. They hang onto the words of the old-timers. I suppose the anticipation during the last few days before your first battle is one of the worst ordeals of a lifetime. Now and then, one will crack up before he has ever gone into action.
One day I was wandering through an olive grove talking with some of these newer kids when I saw a soldier, sitting on the edge of his foxhole, wearing a black silk opera hat. That’s what I said – an opera hat.
The owner was Pvt. Gordon T. Winter. He’s a Canadian. His father owns an immense sheep ranch near Lindbergh, Alberta, 200 miles northeast of Edmonton.
Pvt. Winter said he found the top hat in a demolished house in a nearby village and just thought he’d bring it along. He said:
I’m going to wear it in the next attack. The Germans will think I’m crazy, and they’re afraid of crazy people.
Private played dead
In the same foxhole was a thin, friendly boy who seemed hardly old enough to be in high school. There was fuzz instead of whiskers on his face and he had that eager-to-be-nice attitude that marked him as not long away from home.
This was Pvt. Robert Lee Whichard of Baltimore. It turned out that he was only 18. He has been overseas only since early winter. He has seen action already. He was laughing when telling me about the first time he was in battle.
Apparently, it was a pretty wild melee, and ground was changing hands back and forth. Pvt. Whichard said he was lying on the ground shooting, “or maybe not shooting, I don’t know,” because he admits he was pretty scared.
He happened to look up and here were German soldiers walking past him. Bob said he was so scared he just rolled over and lay still. Pretty soon mortar shells began dropping and the Germans decided to retire. So, they came back past him, and he still lay there playing dead until finally they were gone.
Bob says the other night he dreamed his feet were so cold that he ran to the battalion aid station and there were his mother and sister fixing some hot food over a wood fire for him and poking up the fire so he could warm his feet. But before either the food or his feet were warm, he woke up – and his feet were still cold.
Another soldier came past and said he’d dreamed the night before that he was home and his mother was cooking pork chops by the tubful for him to eat. This one was Cpl. Pamal Meena, whose father is a Syrian minister in Cleveland.
The post office system has broken down as far as Cpl. Meena is concerned. He has been overseas five months and has never got a letter. The corporal has not been in combat but is ready for it. He says he hasn’t decided whether he is going to be a minister, like his father, but he has taken to reading his Bible since he came to war.
Has Ernie in stitches
One day I was walking through another olive orchard which held the 34th Division headquarters, and I noticed a soldier under a tree cleaning a sewing machine.
This was Pvt. Leonard Vitale of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He’s an old-timer in the division. As I looked around, I saw a couple of other sewing machines sitting on boxes. I asked:
Good Lord, what are you doing? Starting a sewing-machine factory?
Pvt. Vitale said no, he was just getting set to do altering and mending for division headquarters. The first two sewing machines he had bought from Italians, and an AMG officer had given him the newest machine. It was a Singer, in an elaborate mahogany cabinet.
Pvt. Vitale said he wasn’t an expert tailor but had picked up some of the rudiments during the three and a half years he’d spent in the CCC and thought he would do all right and make a little money on the side. As I walked away, he called out:
I’ll have this war sewed up in a couple of months.
I grabbed a rifle from a nearby MP and shot the punster through and through before he had me in stitches.