Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
During the Cherbourg Peninsula campaign, I spent nine days with the 9th Infantry Division – the division that cut the peninsula, and one of the three that overwhelmed the great port of Cherbourg.
The Cherbourg campaign is old stuff by now, and you are not longer particularly interested in it. But the 9th Division has been in this war for a long time and will be in it for a long time to come. So, I would like to tell you some things about it.
The Ninth is one of our best divisions. It landed in Africa and it fought through Tunisia and Sicily. Then it went to England last fall, and trained all winter for the invasion of France. It was one of the American divisions in the invasion that had previous battle experience.
Now an odd thing had happened to the Ninth while we were in the Mediterranean. For some reason which we have never fathomed, the Ninth wasn’t released through censorship as early as it should have been, while other divisions were.
As a result, the Ninth got a complex that it was being slighted. They fought hard, took heavy casualties, and di a fine job generally, but nobody back home knew anything about it.
Set up public relations section
This lack of recognition definitely affected morale. Every commanding general is aware that publicity for his unit is a factor in morale. Not publicity in the manufactured sense, but a public report to the folks back home on what an outfit endures and what it accomplishes.
Your average doughfoot will go through his normal hell a lot more willingly if he knows that he is getting some credit for it and that the home folks know about it.
As a result of this neglect in the Mediterranean, the Ninth laid careful plans so that it wouldn’t happen again. In the first place, a new censorship policy was arrived at, under which the identities of the divisions taking part in this campaign would be publicly released just as soon as it was definitely established that the Germans knew they were in combat.
With that big hurdle accomplished, the Ninth made sure that the correspondents themselves would feel at home with then. They set up a small public relations section, with an officer in charge, and a squad of enlisted men to move the correspondents’ gear, and a truck to haul it, and three tents with cots, electric lights and tables.
Correspondents who came with the Ninth could get a meal, a place to write, a jeep for the front, or a courtier to the rear – and at the time they asked for it.
Of course, in spite of all such facilities, a division has to be good in the first place if it is going to get good publicity. The Ninth is good. It performed like a beautiful machine in the Cherbourg campaign. Its previous battle experience paid off. Not only in individual fighting but in the perfect way the whole organization clicked. As I have tried to tell before, war depends a great deal more on organization than most people would ever dream.
Keeps right on enemy’s neck
The Ninth did something in this campaign that we haven’t always done in the past. It kept tenaciously on the enemy’s neck. When the Germans would withdraw a little, the Ninth was right on top of them. it never gave them a chance to reassemble or get their balance.
The Ninth moved so fast it got to be funny. I was based at the division command post, and we struck our tents and moved forward six times in seven days.
That works the daylight out of the boys who take down and put up the tents. I overheard one of the boys saying, “I’d rather be with Ringling Brothers.”
Usually, a division headquarters is a fairly safe place. But with the Ninth, it was different. Something was always happening.
One night they have a bad shelling and lost some personnel. Every now and then snipers would pick off somebody. In all the time I was with them, we never had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Our own big guns were all around us and they would fire all night. Usually German planes were over too, droning around in the darkness and making us tense and nervous.
One night I was sitting in a tent with Capt. Lindsey Nelson of Knoxville, when there was a loud explosion, then a shrill whine through the treetops over our heads. But we didn’t jump, or hit the dirt. Instead, I said:
I know what that is. That’s the rotating band off one of our shells. As an old artilleryman I’ve heard lots of rotating bands. Sometimes they sound like a dog howling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
“Sure,” said Capt. Nelson, “that’s what it was, a rotating band.”
But our harmless rotating band, we found a few minutes later, was a jagged, red-hot, foot-square fragment of steel from a 240mm German shell which landed a hundred yards from us. It’s wonderful to be a wise guy.
