Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
I know of nothing in civilian life at home by which you can even remotely compare the contribution to his country made by the infantry soldier with his life of bestiality, suffering and death.
But I’ve just been with an outfit whose war work is similar enough to yours that I believe you can see the difference between life overseas and in America.
This is the heavy ordnance company which repairs shot-up tanks, wrecked artillery, and heavy trucks.
These men are not in much danger. They work at shop benches with tools. Compared with the infantry, their life is velvet and they know it and appreciate it. But compared with them your life is velvet. That’s what I’d like for you to appreciate.
These men are mostly skilled craftsmen. Many are about military age. Back home, they made big money. Their jobs here are fundamentally the same as those of you at home who work in war plants. It’s only the environment that is different.
These men don’t work seven, eight, or nine hours a day. They work from 7:00 in the morning until darkness comes at night. They work from 12 to 16 hours a day.
Haven’t sat in chair in weeks
You have beds and bathrooms. These men sleep on the ground, and dig a trench for their toilets.
You have meals at the table. These men eat from mess kits, sitting on the grass. You have pajamas, and places to go on Sunday. These men sleep in their underwear, and they don’t even know when Sunday comes. They have not sat in a chair for weeks. They live always outdoors, rain and shine.
In the World War, their life is not bad. By peacetime standards, it is outrageous. But they don’t complain – because they are close enough to the front to see and appreciate the desperate need of the men they are trying to help. They work with an eagerness and an intensity that is thrilling to see.
This company works under a half-acre grove of trees and along the hedgerows of a couple of adjoining pastures. Their shops are in the trucks, or out in the open under camouflage nets.
Most of their work seems unspectacular to describe. It just consists of welding steel plates in the sides of tanks, of changing the front end of a truck blown up by a mine, or repairing the barrel of a big gun hit by a bazooka, of rewinding the coils of a radio, of welding new teeth in a gear.
It’s the sincere way they go at it, and their appreciation of its need that impressed me.
Cpl. Richard Kelso is in this company. His home is in Chicago.
He is an Irishman from the old sod. He apprenticed in Belfast as a machinist nearly 30 years ago. He went to America when he was 25, and now he is 45.
Improvisation wins wars
He still has folks in Ireland, but he didn’t have a chance to get over there when he was stationed in England. He is thin and a little stooped, and the others call him Pop. He is quiet and intent and very courteous. He never did get married.
Kelso operates the milling machine in a shop truck. His truck is covered deep with extra strips of steel, for these boys pick up and hoard steel as some people might hoard money.
When I stopped to chat, Kelso had his machine grinding away on the rough tooth of the gearwheel of a tank.
The part that did the cutting was one he had improvised himself. In this business of war, so much is unforeseen, so much is missing at the right moment that were it not for improvisation, wars would be lost.
Take these gearwheels, for instance. Suppose a tank strips three teeth off a fear. The entire tank is helpless and out of action. They have no replacement wheels in stock. They have to repair the broken one.
So, they take it to their outdoor foundry, make a form, heat up some steel till it is molten, pour it into the form and mold a rough gear tooth which is then welded onto the stub of the broken-off tooth.
Now this rough tooth has to be ground down to the fine dimensions of the other teeth and that is an exacting job. At first, they didn’t have the tools to do it with.
But that didn’t stop them. They hacked those teeth down with cold chisels and hand files. They put back into action 20 tanks by this primitive method. Then Kelso and Warrant Officer Henry Moser of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, created a part for their milling machine that would do the job faster and better.
That one little improvisation may have saved 50 Americans’ lives, may have cost the Germans a hundred men, may even have turned the tide of a battle.
10 miles away, they’re real
And it’s being done by a man 45 years old, wearing corporal stripes who doesn’t have to be over here at all, and who could be making big money back home.
He too sleeps on the ground and works 16 hours a day, and is happy to do it – for boys who are dying are not 3,000 miles away and abstract; they are 10 miles away and very, very real.
He sees them when they come back, pleading like children for another tank, another gun. He knows how terribly they need the things that are within his power to give.
