Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Before he was killed on Ie Shima, Ernie Pyle, as was his habit, had written a number of columns ahead. He did this so there would be no interruptions in the column while he was getting material for more. Several more are expected.
OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – It’s marvelous to see a bunch of American troops go about making themselves at home wherever they get a chance to settle down for a few days.
My company of First Division Marines dug in at the edge of a bomb-shattered village. The village was quaint and not without charm. I was astonished at the similarity with the villages of Sicily and Italy.
The town didn’t really seem oriental. The houses were wooden one-story buildings, surrounded by little vegetable gardens. Instead of fences, each lot was divided by rows of shrubs or trees. The cobblestoned streets were just wide enough for a jeep. They were winding and walled on both sides by head-high stone walls.
A good part of the town lay shattered. Scores of the houses had burned and only ashes and red roofing tile were left. Wandering around, I counted the bodies of four Okinawans still in the streets. Otherwise the town was deserted.
The people had fled to their caves in the hillsides, taking most of their personal belongings with them. There is almost no furniture in Japanese houses, so they didn’t have to worry about that.
After a few days the grapevine carried the word to them that our commander picked out a nice little house on a rise at the edge of town for his command post.
Marines on an afternoon off
The house was very light, fairly clean, and the floors were covered with woven straw mats. A couple of officers and a dozen men moved into the house and slept on the floor and we cooked our rations over an open stone cookstove in the rear.
Then the word went around for the men of the company to dig in for several days. Two platoons were assigned to dig in along the outer sides of the nearby hills for perimeter defense.
The boys were told they could keep the horses they had commandeered, that they could carry wooden panels out of the houses to make little doghouses for themselves, but not to take anything else, and that they could have fires, except during air alerts.
They weren’t to start their daily mop-up patrols in the brush until the next day, so they had the afternoon off to clean themselves up and fix up their little houses.
Different men did different things. Some built elaborate houses about the size of chicken houses, with floor mats and chairs and even kerosene lanterns hanging from the roof.
One Mexican boy dug a hole, covered it with boards, and then camouflaged it so perfectly with brush you really couldn’t see it.
Some spent the afternoon taking baths and washing clothes in the river. Some rode bicycles around town. Some rode their horses up and down. Some foraged around town through the deserted houses. Some went looking for chickens to cook. Some sat in groups and talked. Some just slept.
Wear Jap kimonos
An order went out against wearing Jap clothing or eating any of the local vegetables, pork, goat, beef or fowl. But this was before the order came out.
The Marines had dug up lots of Japanese kimonos out of the smashed houses and put them on while washing their one set of clothes. If you ever want to see a funny sight, just take a look at a few dozen dirty and unshaven Marines walking around in pink and blue women’s kimonos.
A typical example was Pvt. Raymond Adams of Pleasant, Tennessee. He had fixed himself a dugout right on the edge of a bluff above the river. He had a grand view and a nice little grassy front yard. Out there he had driven stakes and built a fire. He hung his helmet over the fire like a kettle and was stewing chicken. He had taken off his clothes and put on a beautiful pink and white kimono.
Later a friend came along with a Jap bicycle with one pedal off, and Adams tried without much success to ride it up and down a nearby lane.
If there ever is a war play about Marines, I hope they include one tough-looking private in a pink-and-white kimono, stewing chicken and trying to ride a one-pedaled bicycle through a shattered Japanese village.
Pvt. Adams is married and has a boy eight months old he has never seen. If the baby could have seen his father that day he would probably have got the colic from laughing so much.