Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Tank commander Martin Kennelly of Chicago wanted to show me just where his tank had been hit. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t seen it for himself yet, for he came running up the street the moment he jumped out of the tank.
So, when the firing died down a little, we sneaked up the street until we were almost even with the disabled tank. But we were careful not to get out heads around the corner of the side street, for that was where the Germans had fired from.
The first shell had hit the heavy steel brace that the tread runs on, and the plunged on through the side of the tank, very low.
Kennelly said in amazement:
Say, it went right through our lower ammunition storage box! I don’t know what kept the ammunition from going off. We’d have been a mess if it had. Boy, it sure would have got hot in there in a hurry!
The street was still empty. Beyond the tank about two blocks was a German truck, sitting all alone in the middle of the street. It had been blown up, and its tires had burned off. This truck was the only thing you could see. There wasn’t a human being in sight anywhere.
Then an American soldier came running up the street shouting for somebody to send a medic. He said a man was badly wounded just ahead. He was extremely excited, yelling, and getting madder because there was no medic in sight.
Word was passed down the line, and pretty soon a medic came out of a doorway and started up the street. The excited soldier yelled at him and began cussing, and the medic broke into a run. They ran past the tanks together, and up the street a way they ducked into a doorway.
Lot of dangerous-sounding noise
On the corner just across the street from where we were standing was a smashed pillbox. It was in a cutaway corner like the entrances to some of our corner drugstores at home, except that instead of their being a door there was a pillbox of reinforced concrete, with gun slits.
The tank boys had shot it to extinction and then moved their tank up even with it to get the range of the next pillbox. That one was about a block ahead, set in a niche in the wall of a building. That’s what the boys had been shooting at when their tank was hit. They knocked it out, however, before being knocked out themselves.
For an hour, there was a lull in the fighting. Nobody did anything about a third pillbox, around the corner. Our second tank pulled back a little and just waited. Infantrymen worked their way up to second-story windows and fired their rifles up the side street without actually seeing anything to shoot at.
Now and then blasts from a 20mm gun would splatter the buildings around us. Then our second tank would blast back in that general direction, over the low roofs, with its machine gun. There was a lot of dangerous-sounding noise, but I don’t think anybody on either side got hit.
Then we saw coming up the street, past the wrecked German truck I spoke of, a group of German soldiers. An officer walked in front, carrying a Red Cross flag on a stick. Bob Capa, the photographer, braved the dangerous funnel at the end of the side street where the damaged tank stood, leapfrogging past it and on down the street to meet the Germans.
First, he snapped some pictures of them. Then, since he speaks German, he led them on back to our side of the invisible fence of battle. Eight of them were carrying two litters bearing two wounded German soldiers. The others walked behind with their hands up. They went on past us to the hospital. We assumed that they were from the second knocked-out pillbox.
Don’t always have tanks to help
I didn’t stay to see how the remaining pillbox was knocked out. But I suppose our second tank eventually pulled up to the corner, turned, and let the pillbox have it. After that the area would be clear of everything but snipers.
The infantry, who up till then had been forced to keep in doorways, would now continue up the street and poke into the side streets and into the houses until everything was clear.
That’s how a strongpoint in a city is taken. At least that’s how ours was taken. You don’t always have tanks to help, and you don’t always do it with so little shedding of blood.
But the city was already crumbling when we started in on this strongpoint, which was one of the last, and they didn’t hold on too bitterly. But we didn’t know that when we started.
I hope this has given you a faint idea of what street fighting is like. If you got out of it much more than a headful of confusion than you’ve got out of it exactly the same thing as the soldiers who do it.
