Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Most of my time with the 47th Group of A-20 Boston light bombers has been spent with the gunners. All the gunners are sergeants. Each plane carries two. They ride in the rear compartment of the plane.
The top gunner sits in a glass-enclosed bubble rising above the fuselage. The bottom gunner sits on the floor during takeoff, and after they’re in the air he opens a trap door, and swivels his machine gun down into the open hole.
Due to the nature of their missions and to the inferiority of German fighter strength in Italy, the A-20 gunners seldom have a battle in the air. Their main worry is flak, and that’s plenty to worry about.
The gunners live in pyramidal tents, four and five to a tent. Some of their tents are fixed up inside even nicer than the officers’. Others are bare.
The gunners have to stand in chow line the same as other soldiers, and eat out of mess kits. Now and then they ever have to go on cleanup detail and help pick up trash throughout their area. They must keep their own tents clean, and stand frequent inspection.
They count missions
I found them a high-class, sincere bunch of boys. Those who really love to fly in combat are the exceptions. Most of them take it in workaday fashion, but they keep a fanatical count on the number of missions flown, each one of which takes them a little nearer to the final goal – the end of their tour of duty.
Ordinarily a gunner goes on only one mission a day, but with the increased air activity of late they sometimes go both morning and afternoon, day after day. There are boys here who arrived only in December and are already almost finished with their missions whereas it used to take six months and more to run up the allotted total.
Life in the combat air forces is fairly informal. In several days on this field, I’ve seen only one salute. But that’s all right, for the Air Forces don’t need the same type of discipline that less specialized branches require.
The enlisted gunners and the commissioned pilots work so closely together that they feel themselves in the same boat.
Don’t like braggarts
Gunners don’t like braggarts, either among commissioned officers or their own fellows. After I got to know them, they told me of some of their own number who talked too big, and of some with the bad judgment to tell “whoppers” even to their gunners.
One night I sat in their tent with five gunners for about three hours. After I had been with them some time, their natural reserve in front of a stranger had worn off, and we talked and talked about everything under the sun, and about what men think and feel who are caught in the endless meshing of the war machine,
One by one they told me of the experiences they had been through. Every man in the tent was living on borrowed time. Every one had stayed alive at least once only by a seeming miracle. Several had been badly wounded, but were back in action again.
When I started to leave, they said apologetically:
We’re kind of ashamed. Here we’ve been doing all the talking, when actually we wanted to hear your experiences.
And I tried to say:
People like you saying things like that! Just one of your ordinary missions is more than everything I’ve seen put together.
And they said:
Well, anyhow, you don’t know how much we appreciate your coning and talking with us. We don’t get to talk to anyone outside very often. It has meant a lot.
And as I followed the twisting path by flashlight back to my own tent among the grapevines, I couldn’t help but feel humble and inconsequential before these boys who are afraid and yet brave, who yearn for something or somebody to anchor to, who are so sincere they even want to listen to the talk of a mere spectator at war.
