Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
Maj. Burt Cochrane is executive officer of the squadron with which I’ve been living. He is not a flying man, but he takes most of the onerous duties off the shoulders of the squadron commander, who is always a flying man.
Maj. Cochrane is the perfect example of a man going all-out for his country. He doesn’t want to be over here at all. He is 55, and a grandfather. But he fought through the last war, kept his commission in the reserve, and just couldn’t picture himself not being in this one. He has been away from home three years.
In civil life, Maj. Cochrane is what you might call a gentleman cattle-raiser. He owns about 300 acres in the beautiful rolling country north of San Francisco, not far from Jack London’s famous Valley of the Moon. The nearest town is Kenwood.
He turns out about 75 head of beef cattle a year, has a lovely home, beautiful riding horses, and lives an almost Utopian life. He left the city eight years ago, and says he never knew what happiness was until he got out into the hills.
Maj. Cochrane is quiet and courteous. Enlisted men and officers both like and respect him. He is so soldierly that he continually says “sir” even to me, although I’m a civilian and much younger than he.
Kiss boy goodbye
One of the newer and much-trusted pilots in my squadron is a good-natured, tow-headed youngster named Lt. Leroy Kaegi (pronounced Keggy). He is from Ashland, Oregon.
Lt. Kaegi had quite a day recently. Two missions, morning and afternoon. Returning from his morning mission, he couldn’t get one of his wheels down. He had to fly around for an hour and finally stall the plane in order to shake the wheel loose.
Then just as he was ready to take off on his afternoon mission, some major came rushing up to the plane in a jeep, jumped out and yelled:
Hey, wait a minute. This girl wants to kiss you goodbye.
Lt. Kaegi had never seen the girl before, but she was American and she was beautiful. So out he popped and gave her a great big smackeroo, and then dashed back in again. When he got back, all he could take about was this strange and wonderful thing that had happened to him. He said he was so excited he took off with his upper cowl flap open.
The girl, I found later, was Louise Allbritton of Hollywood. She’s over with June Clyde, entertaining troops for the USO. They are both swell gals.
Since Lt. Kaegi’s adventure, I’ve been hanging around the planes at takeoff time for a week, just hoping, but nothing seems to come of it except that I get a lot of dirt blown in my face.
Shot-up champion
One day I was standing around an A-20 bomber when the crew chief came up and pulled a clipping out of his pocket. It was a piece about his plane written more than a year ago by my friend Hal Boyle of the Associated Press.
At that time, the plane was the most shot-up ship in the squadron, with more than 100 holes in it. The crew chief, Sgt. Earl Wayne Sutter of Oklahoma City, has had this same ship since just before they left England nearly a year and a half ago. He’s very proud of its record. And it still holds the record, too. By now, it has more than 300 holes in it. But Sgt. Sutter and his gang just patch them up, and it keeps on flying. With all that riddling only one crew member has ever been hurt, and he only slightly.
Crew members for the past several weeks have been wearing “flak vests.” These look something like a lifejacket and are made of steep strips covered with canvas. They weight about 25 pounds.
There have been several instances already where these bests have saved men from being wounded by flak. The oddest instance was of one gunner who took his vest off because it felt too heavy, and threw it on the floor. By chance it happened to fall across his foot. A moment later, a piece of flak came through the wall and smashed into the flak vest. If it hadn’t been lying where it was, he would have had a bad foot wound.
