Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
As tiny and shell-raked as our Anzio beachhead is, life in some respects is astonishingly normal. For example, the 5th Army runs a daily movie here. It started less than a month after our troops first landed.
They put on two shows a day, and we’ve had such recent pictures as Abbott and Costello in Hit the Ice, Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier, and Rosalind Russell in What a Woman.
I go occasionally, just to kill time at night, since the place where I write has no electricity, and I haven’t got enough Abe Lincoln in me to do any work by candlelight.
A funny thing happened at the movie the other night. I was standing outside the building with a big bunch of soldiers waiting for the first show to end. As we stopped there, a shell suddenly whipped in, scared us out of our wits, and exploded behind the building.
When the boys came out after the first show ended, they were laughing about the odd timing in the picture’s dialog. The exploding shell made a big boom inside the theater, and just as it went off there was a pause in the film’s dialog, and the heroine slowly turned her head to the audience and said: “What was that?”
‘Rest camp’ under fire
Also, our beachhead has a rest camp (ha, ha) for infantry troops. The camp is under artillery fire, as is everything else on the beachhead.
But still it serves its purpose by getting the men out of the foxholes, and as somebody said:
There’s a hell of a lot of difference getting shells spasmodically at long range, and in being right up under Jerry’s nose where he’s aiming at you personally.
Further, our beachhead has a big modern bakery, which has been working under fire for weeks, turning out luscious, crisp loaves of white bread from its portable ovens at a pace of around 27,000 pounds a day.
More than 80 soldiers work in this bakery. It is the first draftee baking outfit in our Army, and the company will be three years old in June. They’ve been overseas a year and a half, and have baked through half a dozen bitter campaigns.
They’ve had casualties right here on the beachhead, both physical and mental, from too much shelling.
Their orders are to keep right on baking though an artillery barrage, but when air-raiders come over, they turn out the fires and go to the air-raid shelter.
Life seemed very normal in the bakery when I visited them. The shift leader at the time was Sgt. Frank Zigon of 5643 Carnegie St., Pittsburgh, who showed me around. The boys were glad to have a visitor, and they gave me a pie to take home.
They said they’d had shells on this side of them and that side of them, and in front and behind. It was believable, but everything was running so smoothly that their stories of shells seemed quite academic, like some mathematical truth without reality.
Ernie hangs onto his pie
But when I left the bakery we hadn’t gone a hundred yards till an 88 smacked into the soft ground just the width of the road from our feet. If the ground hadn’t been muddy thus absorbing the fragments, we would have got some hot steel in our jeep and probably some in our persons, as the lawyers say.
The baker boys’ story of shelling ceased to be academic right then, but I still held onto my pie.
At the movie the other night, I ran onto one of the two soldiers who had so nicely volunteered to help lug my gear off the boat the day we hit the beachhead.
They were Cpl. Bert L. Hunter of Tonkawa, Oklahoma, and Pvt. Paul Norman of Des Moines, Iowa. Hunter is in the engineers and Norman is in a signal company, and works in the message center. The boys say they don’t mind it on the beachhead.
On the boat, they and some other soldiers had a frisky little brown puppy they’d bought in Naples for two packs of cigarettes and some gumdrops.
They couldn’t think what to name the dog, so I suggested they call him “Anzio.” So Anzio it is, and he’s still here with them, having the time of his young life.
