Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead, Italy – (by wireless)
About 13 months ago I struggled one forenoon into a cactus patch about halfway between Sbeitla and Faid Pass, in Tunisia.
Hidden in that patch was all that was left of an armored combat team which had been overrun the day before, when the Germans made the famous surprise breakthrough which led finally to our retreat through Kasserine Pass.
A few of you more tenacious readers may remember my writing about this bunch at the time. I found them almost in a daze – and a very justifiable one, too, for they had been fleeing and groping their way across the desert for a day and a night, cut to pieces, and with the swarming Germans relentlessly upon them.
The few who escaped had never expected to survive at all, and on that weary morning they were hardly able to comprehend that they were still alive.
I had good friends in that gang, and I’ve just seen them again after 13 months. Talk about your family reunions! It was like Old Home Week for a while.
I stayed with them two days, and we fought the Tunisian wars over and over again. I can just visualize us on some far day when we cross each other’s paths back in America, boring our families and friends to distraction with our longwinded recounting and arguments about some afternoon in Tunisia.
Satch and the helmet
Maj. Rollin Elkins, sometimes known in fact as R. Lafayette Elkins, used to be a professor at Texas A&M College Station, Texas. He is one of this old gang. His nickname is “Satch,” and he goes around in the green two-piece coverall of the infantry. Everybody loves him.
That memorable night in Tunisia I excitedly went away and left my helmet and shovel lying under a halftrack in which Maj. Elkins was sleeping, and never saw them again. In our reminiscing I told the major how last fall, when I was home, several people told me that this steel helmet was now in somebody’s house out on Long Island. How it got there I haven’t the remotest idea.
But I’ve got another helmet now, and Satch Elkins has another halftrack, “Bird Dog the Second,” to replace the old one that was shot out from under him that awful Tunisian afternoon.
I saw Sgt. Pat Donadeo of Allison Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh, who is one of the best mess sergeants overseas. He has lived in the field for nearly two years, cooking in a truck on his portable kitchen, turning out excellent meals, and always having a snack for a correspondent, no matter what hour you show up.
District man forager
Sgt. Donadeo looks a little thinner, but he’s still all right. He speaks good Italian, and since hitting Italy, he has come into his own. He makes little foraging trips and comes back with such delicacies as fresh eggs, chicken, olive oil and cows.
In an earlier column, Ernie predicted that Sgt. Donadeo would be a valuable man when he got to Italy. The Pittsburgher was mentioned in two columns written in Tunisia in February and April of 1943.
And there’s Lt. Col. Daniel Talbot, who owns a big cattle ranch outside of Fort Worth, Texas. His nickname is “Pinky,” and he doesn’t look like a warrior at all, but he is.
Col. Talbot used to have a driver named Manuel Gomez from Laredo, Texas. One afternoon beyond Sidi Bouzid, a year ago, the three of us drove up to the foothills so we could look down over the valley where the Germans were. Shells were falling in the valley, and every time we’d hear one, we’d ditch the jeep and start for the gulleys, although they’d actually be landing a mile away from us.
Pvt. Gomez is still driving for the colonel, and the three of us laughed today at our inexperience and nervousness so long ago. None of us has got brave in the meantime, but all of us have enriched our knowledge of shell sounds. Today we think it’s far away when a shell missed by 200 yards.
Our tanks haven’t had much chance to do their stuff in the Italian war, because of the mountainous terrain and the incessant rains. But the tankers are ready, and they’re hoping. They know that sooner or later their big battle here on the beachhead will come. When I walked in, they laughed and said:
This must be it. Every time you’d show up in Tunisia, we’d have a battle. This must be the sign.
So you see I have my life work cut out for me. I just go around the country starting battles, like a nasty little boy, and then immediately run back and hide.
