Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The six hours of nighttime go swiftly for our ack-ack battery, which is a blessing. Time races when you are firing. And in the long lulls between the waves of enemy planes you doze and catnap and the time gets away.
Once, during a lull long after midnight, half a dozen of the boys in our gun pit start singing softly. Their voices are excellent. Very low and sweetly they sing in perfect harmony such songs as “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” and “Tipperary.”
There isn’t anything forced, or dramatic, about it. It’s just half a dozen young fellows singing because they like to sing – and the fact that they are in a gun pit in France shooting at people, trying to kill them, is just a circumstance.
The night grows bitterly chill. Between firings every man drapes an Army blanket around his shoulders, and sometimes up over his head, cape-like. In the darkness they are just silhouettes, looking strange and foreign like Arabs.
After 2 o’clock, there is a long lull. Gradually the boys wrap up in their blankets and lie down on the floor of the pit and fall asleep. Pretty soon you hear them snoring. I talk with the gun commander for a few minutes, in low tones. Then my eyes get heavy too.
Night silent as the grave
I wrap a blanket around me and sit down on the floor of the pit, leaning against the wall. The night is now as silent as a grave. Not a shot, not a movement anywhere.
My head slacks over to one side. But I can’t relax enough to sleep in that position. And it is so cold. I am so sleepy I hurt, and I berate myself because I can’t go to sleep like the others.
But I’m asleep all the time. For suddenly a voice shouts “Stand by!” – and it is as shocking as a bucket of cold water in your face. You look quickly at your watch and realize that an hour has passed. All the silent forms come frantically to life. Blankets fly. Men bump into each other.
“Commence firing!” rings out above the confusion, and immediately the great gun is blasting away, and smoke again fills the gun pit.
Sleep and rouse up. Catnap and fire. The night wears on. Sometimes a passing truck sounds exactly like a faraway plane. Frightened French dogs bark in distant barnyards.
Things are always confusing and mysterious in war. Just before dawn, an airplane draws nearer and nearer, lower and lower, yet we get no order to shoot and we wonder why. But machine guns and Bofors guns for miles around go after it.
The plane comes booming on in, in a long dive. He seems to be heading right at us. We feel like ducking low in the pit. He actually crosses the end of our field less than a hundred yards from us, and only two or three hundred feet up. Our hearts are pounding.
We don’t know who he is or what he is doing. Our own planes are not supposed to be in the air. Yet if this is a German, why doesn’t he bomb or strafe us? We never find out.
Ghostly shape in the sky
The first hint of dawn comes. Most of us are asleep again. Suddenly one of the boys calls out, “Look! What’s that?”
We stare into the faint light, and there just above us goes a great, silent, grotesque shape, floating slowly through the air. It is a ghostly sight.
Then we recognize it, and all of us feel a sense of relief. It is one of our barrage balloons which has broken loose and is drifting to earth. Something snags it in the next field, and it hangs there poised above the apple trees until somebody comes and gets it long after daylight.
As fuller light comes, we start lighting cigarettes in the open. The battery commander asks over the phone how many shells were fired, and tells us our tentative score for the night is seven planes shot down. The crew is proud and pleased.
Dawn brings an imagined warmth and we throw off our blankets. Our eyes feel gravelly and our heads groggy. The blast of the gun has kicked up so much dirt that our faces are as grimy as though we had driven all night in a dust storm. The green Norman countryside is wet and glistening with dew.
Then we hear our own planes drumming in the distance. Suddenly they pop out of a cloud bank and are over us. Security for another day has come, and we surrender willingly the burden of protecting the beaches. The last “Rest!” is given and we put the gun away until another darkness comes.