Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
It was after dark when we finally backed away from the dock. We nosed out to sea for a mile or so, then dropped anchor for a couple of hours waiting on other ships to finish loading and join us.
There is an ever-present danger of submarines, and once off the beachhead the ships are frequent targets for aerial bombing and shelling from the land. Quite a few have been hit by all three methods, yet the supplies keep going through, and are often piled on the beachhead a day ahead of what was planned.
One night recently the Germans hit one of our gasoline dumps and burned up some 5,000 gallons of gasoline. One officer said:
At home, where gas is rationed, that would seem like an awful lot, but up here it’s just a drop in the bucket and makes no difference at all.
Our fleet of supply ships is manned by Americans, British and Greeks. As we lay at the dock before sailing, a British LST was on one side of us and a Greek on the other.
When we finally got underway for good, I went up to the open-air deck just above the bridge to see how a convoy forms up at night.
On these LSTs, the bridge is completely enclosed with heavy armor plating, which has little slits of thick bulletproof glass to look through. Since visibility is thus limited, the officer in charge stays on the open-air deck above and calls his instructions down to the bridge through a tube.
Moon gives faint light
The moon was swathed in clouds, but it gave a faint light. You could see landmarks, silhouetted against the horizon, but not much more.
The captain asked:
Have you ever looked through night binoculars? Try these.
The view was astonishing. Those binoculars seemed to take 25% of the darkness out of the night. With them you could see several ships in line, where you could see none before.
Far ahead of us, directly out to sea, we could see occasional flashes of gunfire. I asked what that could be, but no one knew. It seemed unlikely that a naval battle could be going on out there, and yet there were the flashes.
Capt. Joseph Kahrs said:
That’s one of the things I’ve found out about the sea. You’re always seeing and hearing things which are completely mysterious and unexplainable. You go on your way, and never do find out the answer.
The wind began to come up and the night to grow chill. It was straight sailing for the rest of the night, so I went to bed.
Ship rolls violently
The night passed with nothing more exciting than the ship doing some violent rolling. I could hear some sliding and breaking in the kitchen, and out on deck several halftracks broke their moorings and charged back and forth across the deck with a frightening sound of steel scraping on steel. We landlubbers aboard slept rather fitfully.
The officer of the deck sent a sailor to awaken me just at dawn. I got up sleepily and went back to the deck above the bridge. Anzio and Nettuno were in sight off to our right. We could see an occasional golden flash of artillery fire on shore.
The day was gray. Heavy clouds covered the sky, and rain occasionally drenched the landscape. That meant another day our troops on the beachhead would have to go without air support, but it also meant the Germans would be grounded too and our ships could land without being bombed. And for that we were selfishly glad.
Our convoy eased along until we were just off Anzio harbor. Everything was as peaceful as could be. I was walking along the deck just looking at the shore, when suddenly a shell smacked the water about a hundred yards away. It was so close we heard the whine after the blast.
At that the captain moved us farther out. The shells continued to come at about 10-minute intervals, none quite so close as the first. We all wore our steel helmets now.
Shells sing through air
Finally the signal came to enter to harbor. Capt. Kahrs stood on a little platform on the open deck, steering the ship to its moorings. I stood just behind him to watch.
The morning was raw and chilly. Yet Capt. Kahrs wore only summer khaki trousers, a light Army field jacket and, of all things, tennis shoes. He was shivering.
Shells continued to sing through the air, some hitting ahead of us, some behind. One hit the end of the stone mole just before we got to it. Another one screamed right over our heads and hit behind the mole.
At each sound we’d all duck instinctively. And the captain laughed and said:
We sure get a lot of knee-bending exercise on these trips.
We were all pretty silent and tense during those last few minutes of entering the harbor. The captain had to maneuver the ship into a tiny space just barely the width of the ship. Yet he put it in there as though he were using a pointer, and he put it in fast, too, and no monkeying around.
As you remember, the captain is a Newark lawyer in peacetime. I couldn’t help but admire this new skill of a man whose profession was so alien to the sea.
Here he stood in tennis shoes, far from home, worming his ship into a half-wrecked harbor with shells passing a few feet over his head. And he did it with complete absorption and confidence. Men can do strange and great things when they have to do them.
