Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
In addition to its regular job of furnishing food and clothing to the troops, the Quartermaster Corps of the 5th Army beachhead runs the bakery, a laundry for the hospitals, a big salvage depot of old equipment, and the military cemetery.
Hospital pillows and sheets are the only laundry done on the beachhead by the Army. Everything else the individual soldiers either wash themselves or hire Italian farm women to do. People like me just go dirty and enjoy it.
The Army laundry is on several big mobile trucks hidden under the sharp slope of a low hill. They are so well camouflaged that a photographer who went out to take some pictures came away without any – he said the pictures wouldn’t show anything.
This laundry can turn out 3,000 pieces in 10 hours of work. About 80 men are in the laundry platoon. They are dug in and live fairly nicely.
Laundrymen have been killed in other campaigns, but so far, they’ve escaped up here. Their worst disaster was that the little shower-bath building they built for themselves has been destroyed three times by “ducks” which got out of control when their brakes failed and came plunging over the bluff.
‘Ducks’ have names
Continuing with “ducks” for a moment, in one company all these amphibian trucks have been given names. The men have stenciled the names on the sides in big white letters, and every name starts with “A.”
There are such names as Avalon and Ark Royal. Some bitter soul named his duck Atabrine, and an even bitterer one called his Assinine - misspelling the word, with two s’s, just to rub it in.
Our salvage dump is a touching place. Every day five or six truckloads of assorted personal stuff are dumped on the ground in an open space near town. It is mostly the clothing of soldiers who have been killed or wounded. It is mud-caked and often bloody.
Negro soldiers sort it out and classify it for cleaning. They poke through the great heap, picking out shoes of the same size to put together, picking out knives and forks and leggings and underwear and cans of C ration and goggles and canteens and sorting them into different piles.
Everything that can be used again is returned to the issue bins as it is or sent to Naples for repair.
They find many odd things in the pockets of the discarded clothing. And they have to watch out, for pockets sometimes carry hand grenades.
You feel sad and tightlipped when you look closely through the great pile. Inanimate things can sometimes speak so forcefully – a helmet with a bullet hole in the front, one overshoe all ripped with shrapnel, a portable typewriter pitifully and irreparably smashed, a pair of muddy pants, bloody and with one leg gone.
Cemetery is neat – and big
The cemetery is neat and its rows of wooden crosses are very white – and it is very big. All the American dead of the beachhead are buried in one cemetery.
Trucks bring the bodies in daily. Italian civilians and American soldiers dig the graves. They try to keep ahead by 50 graves or so. Only once or twice have they been swamped. Each man is buried in a white mattress cover.
The graves are five feet deep and close together. A little separate section is for the Germans, and there are more than 300 in it. We have only a few American dead who are unidentified. Meticulous records are kept on everything.
They had to hunt quite a while to find a knoll high enough on this Anzio beachhead so that they wouldn’t hit water five feet down. The men who keep the graves live beneath ground themselves, in nearby dugouts.
Even the dead are not safe on the beachhead, nor the living who care for the dead. Many times, German shells have landed in the cemetery. Men have been wounded as they dug graves. Once a body was uprooted and had to be reburied.
The inevitable pet dog barks and scampers around the area, not realizing where he is. The soldiers say at times he has kept them from going nuts.
