Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
OKINAWA (via Navy radio) – During our first afternoon on Okinawa my group of Marines went about a mile and a half inland. Our vehicles were not ashore yet, so we had to pack on our backs everything we had.
Personally, I was overladen as usual. I had two canteens, a musette bag, a blanket rolled up in a Poncho, three rubber life preservers, a shovel, and assorted knives, first aid kits, etc. Furthermore, I had on two pairs of pants, was carrying two jackets, and it was hotter than hell.
The result of all this was that for the first time in my life I couldn’t keep up. I hated to do it, but I had to sit down now and then to rest and let the others go ahead. (Moral: A lifetime of sin and crime finally catches up with you.)
Anyhow, we finally got where we were going. We stopped on a hillside, threw down our gear, connected our phones to wires on the ground, and were ready for business. That is, the others were. Me, I lay down on the grass and rested for an hour.
After that we began getting ready for the night. We figured the Japs would bomb us all night, that their artillery soon would start up from the hills, and that when it got dark, some slinky infiltrators would start infiltration.
So, we dug foxholes. The slope was so steep I chose a nice depression at the foot of a small embankment that didn’t require much digging.
The why of the life preservers
Now we come to the life preservers. You may have wondered why I was carrying three lifebelts on dry land. Well, I knew what I was doing all right.
I just blew up my three life preservers, spread them in the foxhole and I had the nicest improvised Simmons you ever saw. We finally got onto that trick after a few invasions in Europe and I slept all last summer in France comfortably on three blown-up preservers.
And it was worth the struggle of carrying them just to see the reaction of the Marines. They would come up to look at this stranger device and stand there, staring, and then say: “Well, I’ll be damned. Why in the hell couldn’t I have thought of that?”
Then we got out our K rations and my friend, Maj. Reed Taylor, came and squatted Indian-fashion while I made hot coffee for us with some new heat tablets the Marines had issued. By the time we finished, it was almost dark.
Everybody who wasn’t on guard at the edge of our little camp, or who wasn’t standing duty at the field telephones went to bed, for in Jap country you don’t move around at night unless you have to.
Only one with a blanket, too
Going to bed was merely a figure of speech for everybody except me. I seemed to be the only one who had brought a blanket and I definitely was the only one who had nice soft life preservers to sleep on.
The others slept on the ground in their foxholes with their ponchos wrapped around them. A poncho is wind and waterproof, but it has no warmth. In fact, it seems to draw all the warmth out of your body and transmit it into the air.
The day had been hot, but the night got mighty cold. And a very heavy dew came gradually, soaking everything. All the others practically froze and got very little sleep. But for once in my life, I was warm as a bug.
But I didn’t sleep too much. There’s always a flaw somewhere. My flaw was the mosquitoes. I’ve never been so tortured by mosquitoes as that first night on Okinawa.
They were persistent. They were tenacious. And they were the noisiest mosquitoes I’ve ever associated with. They were so noisy that when I pulled the blanket over the side of my face and covered my ears tight, I could still hear them. That’s really true.
Puts blanket over head
I doused my face twice with the mosquito repellant which the Marines had issued, but it did no good whatever. It was 11 o’clock before I finally got asleep. At 2 a.m. I awakened and knew something was wrong. What was wrong was my face.
My upper lip was swollen so that I thought I had a pigeon egg under it. My nose was so swollen the skin was stretched tight over it. And my left eye was nearly shut.
After that I just went under the blanket and decided to suffocate. That way I did sleep, but the next morning I was groggy and dopey from sleeping so long without air.
Those mosquitoes really put a scare into me. For they say Okinawa is malarial and I certainly got enough mosquito venom that night to malarize half of California. So bright and early, I started taking atabrine for the first time in my life.