Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
When soldiers sit around during lull periods at the front, they talk about everything under the sun. Out of my recent times with frontline outfits, I’ve tried to remember some of the things they talked about.
Two things eventually come up in every extended conversation – the latest rumor about the outfit, and discussions of what home is like and when we’ll get home.
The latest rumor was that my outfit was to get no more replacements for men lost in battle, which led inevitably to a believe that they were to be withdrawn and sent him. nobody really believed it, but everybody wanted to believe it. there were also rumors that the outfit was going to England and to India.
Memories of what America was like are actually getting pretty dim to men who have been overseas two years. As one Iowa boy said:
Why, even England is dim in my memory now, and we were there long after we were in the States.
One boy said that no matter where we went was bad for him, because we’d have to go by ship and he had an absolute horror of ships. He didn’t exactly say so, but I believe he’s rather stay here the rest of his life than make that ocean crossing again.
Shell tagged ‘screaming meanie’
One night, in a group of some soldiers and officers, the question came up whether you should yell or not when making a close-in attack.
An officer thought it was good psychology because the Germans are afraid of night attacks, and a good barrage of Indian yells would further demoralize them.
But the soldiers mainly disagreed. They said Jerry didn’t scare so easily as all that, and when you yell you just give your position away.
Speaking of noise, you’ve probably heard the term “screaming meemies,” for a certain noisy type of German shells. The boys at the front call them “screaming meanies” instead, and brother, they are bad indeed to listen to.
The Germans call the gun the nebelwerfer. It is a six-barreled gun which fires one barrel right after another, electrically. The gun doesn’t go off with a roar, but the shells swish forward with a sound of unparalleled viciousness and power, as though gigantic gears were grinding. Actually, it sounds as though some mammoth man were grinding them out of a machine with a huge crank.
Whenever a shelling starts, we always stop and listen, and somebody makes a remark like, “Grind ‘em out, boy; keep on turning!” or, “Boy, Jerry’s getting’ mad again!”
The “screaming meanies” are frightful in sound when they’re coming at you, and even when they’re going off at an angle far from you, they make a long-drawn-out moaning sound that is bloodcurdling.
Prefer Italy to Africa
The soldiers talk about the Italian people, and on the whole the average soldier doesn’t dislike the Italians too much. Nine out of 10 much prefer Italy to Africa. And the sight of the poor children always gets them.
At an Army chow line near a village or close to farms, you see a few solemn and patient children with tin buckets waiting to get what is left over.
One soldier said to me:
I just can’t bear to eat when they stand and look at me like they do. Lots of times I’ve filled my mess kit and just walked over and dumped it in their buckets and gone back to my foxhole. I wasn’t hungry.
Don’t want to go to Pacific
Bad as this war is, the average soldier hopes he’ll never be sent to the Pacific. He hates the Japs more than the Germans, but he has heard about the horrible jungle fighting and the Jap beastliness, and he prefers to fight somebody of his own kind.
One night, a colonel was talking offhandedly about the war, and how people felt and everything, and he said:
The whole trouble with everything is vitamins. We got along all right before everybody had to have so many vitamins a day.
Very often the rotation system of sending one-half of one percent of the men back to the States each month comes up in the conversation. The boys in my company were all upset because a sergeant in another company had just been taken who had much less time overseas than they.
And a soldier said:
You, know, I’ve never yet seen a battlefield after we passed over it. We always just keep going ahead. Sometime I’d like to walk over the country we fought over. I said walk, not run.