Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Then I moved over to an ordnance evacuation company.
These men handle the gigantic trucks, the long low trailers and the heavy wreckers that go out to haul back crippled tanks and wrecked anti-tank guns from the battlefield.
The ordnance branch’s policy on these wrecking companies is that if they don’t have a casualty now and then, or collect a few shrapnel marks on their vehicles, then they’re not doing their job efficiently.
The job of an ordnance evacuation company is often frightening, although this company’s casualties have been amazingly low. In fact, they’ve had only four and it’s still a mystery what happened to them.
The four left one day in a jeep, just on a normal trip. They didn’t come back. No trace could be found. Three weeks later, two of them came in – just discharged from a hospital. On the same day a letter came from the third – from a hospital in England. Nothing yet has been heard from the fourth.
Can’t remember what happened
And the strange part is that neither the two who returned nor the one who write from England can remember a thing about it. They were just riding along in their jeep and the next thing they woke up in a hospital. All three were wounded, but how they didn’t know. Friends suppose it was a shell hit.
At any rate, a sergeant in charge of one section of the mammoth movers, known as M19s, took me around to see some of his crewmen. They all go by the name of “the Diesel Boys.”
Their vehicle is simply a gigantic truck with a long, skeletonized trailer behind.
Like all our Army over here they were strung out around the hedgerows of the field under camouflage nets, with the middle grassy fields completely empty.
My friend was Sgt. Milton Radcliff of Newark, Ohio. He used to be a furnace operator for the Owen Corning Fiberglass Company there. He and all the other former employees still get a letter every two weeks from the company, assuring them their jobs will still be there when they return. And Radcliff, for one, is going to take his when he gets back.
Sgt. Vann Jones of Birmingham, Alabama, crawled out of his tent and sat Indian fashion on the ground with us. On the other side of our pasture lay the silver remains of a transport plane that had come to a mangled despair on the morning of D-Day.
A funny country, France
It was a peaceful and sunny evening, quite in contrast to most of our days, and we sat on the grass and watched the sun go down in the east, which we all agreed was a hell of a place for the sun to be going down. Either we were turned around or France is a funny country.
The other boys told me later that Sgt. Jones used to be the company cook, but he wanted to see more action so he transferred to the big wreckers and is now in command of one.
There are long lulls when the retriever boys don’t have anything to do besides work on their vehicles. They hate these periods and get restless. Some of them spend their time fixing up their tents homelike, even though they may have to move the next day.
One driver even had a feather bed he had picked up from a French family. The average soldier can’t carry a feather bed around with him, but the driver of an M19 could carry 10,000 feather beds and never know the difference.
Proud of their company
The boys are all pretty proud of their company. They said they did such good work in the early days of the invasion that they were about to be put up for a presidential citation. But one day they got in a bomb crater and started shooting captured German guns at the opposite bank just for fun, which is against the rules, so the proposal was torn up. They just laugh about it – which is about all a fellow can do.
Cpl. Grover Anderson of Anniston, Alabama, is one of the drivers. He swears by his colossal machine but cusses it, too. You see the French roads are narrow for heavy two-way military traffic and an M19 is big and awkward and slow.
Anderson says:
You get so damn mad at it because convoys piled up behind you and can’t get around and you know everybody’s hating you and that makes you madder. They’re aggravating, but if you let me leave the trailer off, I can pull anything out of anywhere with it.
Cpl. Anderson has grown a red goatee which he is not going to shave off till the war is won. He used to be a taxi driver; that’s another reason he finds an M19 so “aggravating.”
“Because it hasn’t got a meter on it?” I asked.
“Or maybe because you don’t have any female passengers,” another driver said.
To which Brother Anderson had a wholly satisfactory G.I. reply. He said, … [REMAINDER OF COLUMN VOLUNTARILY CENSORED]
