Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Here on the Anzio beachhead, nobody is immune.
It’s not only a standing joke, but a standing fact, that a lot of frontline people would not voluntarily come back into the hot Anzio-Nettuno area for a small fortune.
People whose jobs through all the wars of history have been safe ones up here are as vulnerable as the fighting man. Bakers and typewriter repairmen and clerks are not absolved from shells and bombs. Table waiters are in the same boat.
When I’m back in the harbor area writing, I eat at a mess for staff officers. Twice within 10 days, big shells have demolished buildings on either side of this mess.
The four boys who serve us here asked if I would mention them in the paper. I said I certainly would, not only because they’re doing a dangerous job but also because they are four of the most courteous and best-dispositioned men I’ve ever met. They are:
Cpl. Harold Gibson of Booth Bay Harbor, Maine; Pvt. Lloyd Farlee of Pierce, Nebraska; Pvt. Herb Wullschleger of Wichita, Kansas, and Pvt. Charles Roderick of Salem, Massachusetts.
The girl he left behind
Here is a sad story. It concerns a tank driver named Cpl. Donald Vore, a farm boy from Auxvasse, Missouri.
The corporal had a girl back home he was crazy about. After he came to Italy, she sent a beautiful, new, big photograph of herself. Like more tankmen, he carried it with him in his tank.
The other day, a shell hit the tank. It caught fire, and the whole crew piled out and ran as far as they could. Cpl. Vore had gone a little way when he suddenly stopped, turned, and went dashing back to the tank.
Flames were shooting out of it, and its heavy ammunition was beginning to go off. But he went right into the flaming tank, disappeared a moment, and came climbing out – with his girl’s picture safely in his hand.
A few hours later, the crew came trudging back to home base. Mail had arrived during their absence. There was a letter for Cpl. Vore from his girl. He tore it open. The letter was merely to tell him she had married somebody else.
They said that if it hadn’t been such a long walk back, and he hadn’t been so tired. Cpl. Vore would have returned to his tank and deposited the picture in the flames.
About a year ago, I wrote an item about the numerous uses we had found for the brushless shaving cream issued to frontline troops.
Its virtues are legion. It is perfect for sun and windburn, nurses shampoo their hair in it, it soothes fleabites and softens chapped hands and cracked fingers. And now the soldiers have discovered that if they’ll massage their feet with it once a day, it goes a long way toward preventing the dreaded trench foot.
It’s a shame somebody doesn’t shave with it once in a while.
The relaxation of death
Some soldiers were telling me the other day about running onto another soldier stretched out in the back seat of a jeep, way up front, almost in No-Man’s-Land.
His helmet was down over his eyes, and he had a half-smoked cigar in his mouth. They were in dangerous territory, and they went to take a closer look at a soldier so nonchalant.
He was dead. A sniper had shot him through the back of the helmet. He was just lying there, looking perfectly relaxed, the cigar still in his mouth. He had been dead two days.
The other day, I ran onto Maj. Henry Frankel of Brooklyn.
I’ve been crossing his trail ever since July of 1942 in Ireland, and every time I see him, he has gone up a notch in rank. When I first knew him, he was a lieutenant.
Maj. Frankel speaks about eight languages, but as far as I can see, a man with his luck doesn’t need to speak anything. Listen to this –
The other day, he was digging a dugout in the backyard of a place he had picked out for billeting, and he dug up a case and a half of fine cognac, numerous bottles of Benedictine, anisette and old wines, a box of silverware, and a gallon of olive oil.
Being an honest man, Maj. Frankel hunted up the Italian owner who had buried it, and gave him back everything except the 18 bottles of cognac. These he kept as a reminder of his own meticulous honesty, and shared them with other patched and deserving Americans.