Bologna captured – Germans fleeing
U.S. tanks fan out onto Po Plain
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Plump Nazis forced to bury hundreds of dead prisoners
Yanks prod civilians as they balk at digging graves for captives at Gardelegen
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer
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Foot of class for Jap spellers
OKINAWA (UP, April 21) – Four Jap soldiers learned the hard way here that Tokyo schools teach English that is pretty good, but not good enough.
Marine patrols stopped four men who produced the following note: “There men are Okinawans – not soldiers. Treat them good.”
It was signed, “Commanding Officer – Marign Regiment.”
The Martine patrol investigated. Beneath the flowering Okinawan kimonos were concealed Jap Army boots, puttees and khaki breeches.
The four bad spellers were put at the foot of the class.
Love: They killed our pal Ernie, but we can help ‘his boys’
By Gilbert Love
Sunday, April 22, 1945
They killed Ernie Pyle – little inoffensive Ernie, who never harmed anyone in all his life.
He was our friend. We may never have seen him, but through his columns we knew him well. We suffered with him, were afraid with him, laughed and cried with him.
He took us to war with him, and because of this we knew how all our fine young men were living and dying. That was Ernie’s mission. It was his stern duty – the thing that forced him to go back to war, when he already had done more than his share, to meet his death on tiny Ie Island in the far Pacific.
What can we do?
What are we going to do about Ernie? We can’t go over there and take personal revenge on the Jap who took his life, although some of us felt a wild urge to do that when we heard the news of his death last Wednesday morning. We can’t do anything for Ernie himself.
But we can carry on his work.
The kind of people Ernie loved knew what to do when they heard of his death. Soldiers and workers began going to the Red Cross Blood Bank in the Wabash Building to give blood “for Ernie.” He couldn’t use it, of course, but his G.I.’s could.
Taking their cue from these special friends of Ernie’s, the Red Cross people designated this coming week at Ernie Pyle Week at the Blood Bank.
Anyone who wants to pay a small tribute to Ernie can walk into the Blood Bank any time between 9:45 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For evening or Saturdays an appointment should be made by calling GRant 1680.
The Week is a perfect memorial to Ernie, the kind he would have liked. No sad music and orations for him. If folks wanted to do something nice for him, he’d like to have them do it for “his boys.”
And the boys need it. Despite mounting casualties, and increased need for blood plasma to save lives, smaller and smaller numbers of donors have been visiting the Blood Bank. The news is good, and it’s assumed that the war is over.
400 pints daily quota
It isn’t over for the soldiers who are being mowed down by the cornered Nazis, or for the soldiers and sailors and marines who are facing their greatest battles against Japan.
The Blood Bank in the Wabash Building has a quota of 400 pints of blood a day. Not since March 1, when the Allies were still battling on the approaches to Germany, has the quota been met. Since that time the average has been 300 a day, and last week not even that figure was reached.
Wherever Ernie Pyle is now, he would be very happy to know a Pittsburgh district residents thought enough of him to bring their donations of life-giving blood up to par, if only for one week.
Frequent appeals
While he was on the Italian front, Ernie sent an appeal to the home folks to give blood for plasma. And here are a few significant paragraphs that he wrote on November 21, 1944:
This fall I came home from France on a ship that carried 1,000 of our wounded American soldiers. About a fourth of them were terribly wounded stretcher cases. The rest were up and about. These others could walk, though among the walking were many legs and arms missing, many eyes that could not see.
Well, there was one hospitalized soldier who was near death on this trip. He was wounded internally, and the Army doctors were trying desperately, to keep him alive until we got to America. They operated several times, and they kept pouring plasma and whole blood into him constantly, until they ran out of whole blood.
Didn’t want stampede
I happened to be in the head doctor’s cabin at noon one day when he was talking about this boy. He said he had his other doctors at that moment going around the ship typing blood specimens from several of the ship’s officers, and from unwounded Army and Navy officers aboard. They were doing it almost surreptitiously, for they didn’t want it to get out that they needed blood.
And why didn’t they want it to get out? Because if it had, there would have been a stampede to the hospital ward by the other wounded men, offering their blood to this dying comrade. Think of that – a stampede of men themselves badly wounded, wanting to give their blood.
Great stories he wrote provide best memorial to Ernie Pyle
Sunday, April 22, 1945
The best memorial to Ernie Pyle is what he wrote.
At a time when the nation, and especially the servicemen, are mourning the death of the man who yesterday was buried with five enlisted men on Ie Shima, we publish these excerpts from hi columns as examples of Ernie’s work.
In the front lines in Tunisia
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end, they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.
I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.
A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.
All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.
The men are walking. They are 50 feet apart for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.
On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.
They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaved. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.
In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of ant-like men.
There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.
From Italy
War correspondents try not to think of how high their ratio of casualties has been in this war. At least they try not to think of it in terms of themselves, but Ray Clapper’s death sort of set us back on our heels. Somehow it always seemed impossible that anything could ever happen to him. It made us wonder who is next.
I think the most frequent comment in this area was one that would have made Ray proud. People said:
“The old story again. It’s always the best ones that get it.”
From London during the Nazi blitz
The thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London – London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines.
These things all went together to make the most hateful most beautiful single scene I have ever known.
From San Francisco before his last trip
There’s nothing nice about the prospect of going back to war again. Anybody who has been in war and wants to go back is a plain fool in my book.
I’m certainly not going because I’ve got itchy feet again, or because I can’t stand America, or because there’s any mystic fascination about war that is drawing me back.
I’m going simply because there’s a war on and I’m part of it and I’ve known all the time I was going back. I’m going because I’ve got to, and I hate it…
Also from San Francisco
Friends warn me about all kinds of horrible diseases in the Pacific. About dysentery, and malaria, and fungus that gets in your ears and your intestines, and that horrible swelling disease known as elephantiasis.
Well, all I can say is that I’m God’s gift to germs. Those fungi will shout and leap for joy when I show up. Maybe I can play the Pied Piper role – maybe the germs will all follow me when I get there, and leave the rest of the boys free to fight.
So, what with disease, Japs, seasickness, and shot and shell – you see I’m not too overwhelmed with relief at starting out again.
But there’s one thing in my favor where I’m going; one thing that will make life bearable when all else is darkness and gloom. And that one thing is that, out in the Pacific, I’ll be good and stinking hot. Oh boy!
In Marianas, writing of cousin Jack Bales
Jack has had two jars of Indiana fried chicken from my Aunt Mary. She cans it and seals it in mason jars, and it’s wonderful. She sent me some in France, but I’d gone before it got there.
Jack took some of his fried chicken in his lunch over Tokyo one day. We Hoosiers sure do get around, even the chickens.
In Marianas, watching Superfortresses take off
Finally, they were all in the air, formed into flight, and vanished into the swallowing sky from which some would never return.
I had the same feeling watching the takeoff that I used to have before the start at Indianapolis. Here were a certain number of cars and men. Some of them you knew. They had built and trained for weeks for this day. At last, the time had come.
And in a few hours of desperate living, everything would be changed. You knew that within a few hours some would be glorious in victory, some would be defected in failures, some would be colorless “also rans,” and some – very probably – would be dead.
And that’s the way you feel when the B-29s start out. It is just up to fate. In 15 hours, they will be back – those who are coming back. But you cannot know ahead of time who it will be.
Off Okinawa the night before D-Day
This is the last column before the invasion. It is written aboard a troop transport the evening before we storm onto Okinawa.
We are nervous. Anybody with any sense is nervous on the right before D-Day. You feel weak and you try to think of things, but your mind stubbornly drifts back to the awful image of tomorrow. It drags on your soul and you have nightmares.
But those fears do not mean any lack of confidence. We will take Okinawa. Nobody has any doubt about that. But we know we will have to pay for it. some on this ship will not be alive 24 hours from now…
Our ship is an APA, or assault transport…
We are carrying Marines. Some of them are going into combat for the first time. Others are veterans from as far back as Guadalcanal. They are a rough, unshaven, competent bunch of Americans. I am landing with them. I feel I am in good hands.
With the Marines on Okinawa beachhead
My schedule for landing was an early one. I was ashore a short time after the first wave. Correspondents were forbidden to go before the fifth wave. I was on the seventh.
I had dreaded the sight of the beach littered with mangled bodies. My first look up and down the beach was a reluctant one. And then like a man in the movies who looks and looks away and then suddenly looks back unbelieving. I realized there were no bodies anywhere – and no wounded. What a wonderful feeling!
In fact, our entire regiment came ashore with only two casualties. One was a Marine who hurt his foot getting out of an amphibious truck. And the other was, of all things, a case of heat prostration!
On Okinawa
An assault on an enemy shore is a highly organized thing. It is so intricately organized, so abundant in fine detail that it would be impossible to clarify it all in your mind. No single man in our armed forces knows everything about an invasion.
But just to simplify one point–
Suppose we were invading an enemy beach on a four-mile front. It is not as you would think, one overall invasion. Instead, it is a dozen or more little invasions, simultaneously and side by side. Each team runs its own invasion. A combat team is a regiment. Our regimental commander and his staff were on the little control ship. Thus, our control ship directed only the troops of our regiment.
As I’ve written before, war to an individual is hardly ever bigger than a hundred yards on each side of him. And that’s the way it was with us at Okinawa.
From Italy writing of war
It’s the perpetual dust choking you, the hard ground wracking your muscles, the snatched food sitting ill on your stomach, the heat and the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving and the never settling down and the go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again. Eventually it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull, dead pattern – yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I’m so tired.
In Africa, watching the crippled bomber
Then we saw the plane – just a tiny black speck. It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.
I am a layman, and no longer of the fraternity that flies, but I can feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.
All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With our nervous systems, we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came – so slowly that it was cruel to watch.
It reached the far end of the airdrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out – it seemed to us – for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?
They cleared the last plane, and they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down die runway, the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.
The last of the sunset died, and the sky turned into blackness, which would help the Germans if they came on schedule with their bombs. But nobody cared. Our 10 dead men were miraculously back from the grave.
On the death of his mother
That night in London, back in my room alone, it seemed to me that living is futile, and death the final indignity.
I turned off the lights and pulled the blackout curtains and went to bed. Little pictures of my mother raced across the darkness before my eyes.
Pictures of nearly a lifetime. Pictures of her at neighborhood square dances long, long ago, when she was young and I was a child. Pictures of her playing the violin. Pictures of her doctoring sick horses; of her carrying newborn lambs into the house on raw spring days.
I could see her as she stood on the front porch, crying bravely, on that morning in 1918 when I, being youthful, said a tearless goodbye and climbed into the neighbor’s waiting buggy that was to take me out of her life.
The pictures grew older. Gradually she became stooped and toil-worn, and finally white and wracked with age… but always spirited, always sharp.
On that first night, I had felt in a sort of detached bitterness that, because my mother’s life was hard, it was also empty. But how wrong I was.
For you need only have seen the great truckloads of flowers they say came from all over the continent, or the scores of Indiana youngsters who journeyed to her both in life and in death because they loved her, to know that she had given a full life, and received one, in return.
Pyle’s closest pal writes of ‘my friend’
Hears news via radio with Army on Luzon
By Lee Miller, Scripps-Howard staff writer
This story about Ernie Pyle was written by Lee Miller, heretofore managing editor of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, and Ernie’s closest friend. When Ernie became famous and was roving over the world, Lee handled so much of Ernie’s business that he was jokingly referred to as “vice president in charge of Pyle.”
MANILA, Philippines (April 19, delayed) – I am tired and grieved and I don’t feel like writing anything.
They asked me to send in an article about my friend Ernie Pyle but Ernie wrote his own story. He wrote it in his blood – there with the foot soldiers whose dangers it was his self-imposed lot to share.
I was shaving out of a helmet this morning in a tent at the 49th Fighter Group, many miles from Manila. A radio came on in an adjacent tent. I couldn’t hear distinctly, but suddenly I thought I heard Ernie’s name. Jerry Thorp, with whom I shared a tent along with Paul Cranston, jumped from his chair and shouted: “What did he say?”
We stood there transfixed as the announcer went on. President Truman, he was saying, had paid tribute for the nation to the great reporter.
Details unimportant
The announcer went on with the meager details. But details seemed of no moment now. Ernie was gone – my closest friend for more than 20 years, years in which we shared some tragedies as well as pleasant things.
He was dead, dead the way he had increasingly feared he might die – in the violence of combat.
Ernie hated the thought of dying. He told me that in his first months of war he felt more excitement than fear, but that in the years that followed, as one friend after another was killed, and as he himself survived many brushes with death, he came to dread what might happen to him.
Didn’t want to go back
He didn’t want to go back to the war. He said so on return from Europe last year. He said it in New York, in Washington, in Albuquerque, in Hollywood, in San Francisco and Honolulu, where I saw him off in January. He forced himself to go, as a duty.
And it was indeed a duty. For never, surely, in the history of journalism had so many people come to trust implicitly the word of one particular reporter, nor so many people to feel personal devotion to a reporter.
I had been planning to go up to Baguio this morning. But I thought my office – Ernie’s office – in Washington would be trying to reach me, and I decided I’d better get to Manila. There was a five-hour wait at the airstrip before I got a ride in a B-24 going halfway. Meantime I talked to the air force noncoms leaving for home on rotation after more than three years in this theater.
“First President Roosevelt and now Ernie,” said Sgt. Harry A. McMahon of Memphis. “It won’t be the same back home now.”
Later when I changed from bomber to jeep, Capt. Al Stoughton of Washington said a Red Cross girl down at the airdrome had burst into tears at the news. All the way down the line, and here in Manila tonight, people have been saying: “Is it true about Ernie Pyle?”
At a ceremony for presentation of decorations to some engineer troops, a detailed account of Ernie’s death was read aloud to the hushed gathering.
Legend to men
I picked up my mail. My mother had written from Indiana, “I hope Ernie gets back all right. We’ve watched his progress on Okinawa closely and were so glad he had a safe landing.”
A delayed wireless from Washington said Ernie was planning to remain in the Ryukyus several weeks. A letter from my office enclosed clippings of several of Ernie’s columns, and a picture.
Ernie had never visited the Southwest Pacific Theater. He had planned to. Weeks ago, he wrote me that he hoped to see me on Luzon. But he was a legend to these men out here who never knew him.
It is still impossible to compass the fact that Ernie, that human, earthy, gentle, wise man, is gone from this troubled world whose collective madness he abhorred but whose shortcomings were overshadowed for him by the nobility of the individual human being.
Buchenwald torture camp staggering to Clare Luce
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A charred mass of bodies – a new lesson in barbarity
By William H. Stoneman
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Nazi files to show fate of airmen
Documents, effects of ‘missing’ found
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer
Saturday, April 21, 1945
NUREMBERG, Germany – The fate of thousands of American and British airmen listed as “missing” will be known soon. Documents recording all Allied fliers downed in German territory during the war were captured today.
A master file, containing the histories of more than 45,000 British and American airmen, was found in the nearby town of Buchenbuehl. Officers consider it one of the most important finds in Germany to date.
The last entry, dated April 7, was of an American pilot who, it said, was found dead. The records revealed that more than one million dollars in various kinds of currency had been taken from captive airmen. Of this amount, only $4,000 was recovered.
Find rings, watches
Bushels of rings, watches, jewelry, flying orders, love letters, photographs and other items taken from fallen airmen – whether alive or dead – were on file. Some 400 displaced persons, including Russians, Dutchmen, Yugoslavs, Poles, Frenchmen and Italians, worked in the center. When Germans authorities fled, they took many valuables. Slave clerks – 350 men and 50 women – lived in the same camp.
When Lt. Col. D. T. Fuller of North Tarrytown, New York, heard that women slave workers were wearing American fraternity pins, he assigned Capt. Carl Luetke of San Antonio, Texas, to investigate.
Cases recorded
Capt. Luetke discovered the file and the stored valuables. Individual cards listed the place where the airman had been brought down, whether he had been alive or dead when found. Those who died after capture were recorded with cause of death and the burial site.
Capt. Charles Richard Sattgast, President of the Minnesota State Teachers’ College, was put in charge of the file. He ordered the workers to return all rifled possessions. They claimed German authorities had invited them to help themselves when American artillery began shelling the town.
Rail targets hit for sixth day
Munich center of U.S. plane attacks
By Leo S. Disher, United Press staff writer
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Germany conquered now but peace is long way off
Rumblings already started against occupation – armies greeted with relief – not welcome
By Henry J. Taylor
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Berlin capture by Reds called Big Three plan
Americans scheduled to smash redoubt
Saturday, April 21, 1945
WASHINGTON (UP) – The final military plan agreed upon by the Big Three to knock out Germany calls for the Russians to capture Berlin while the Americans take on the tough job of reducing Hitler’s Bavarian redoubt, authoritative military observers believed tonight.
The British forces, in turn, are scheduled to continue north through Hamburg, and probably on to the Luebeck area on the Baltic to cut off Denmark.
This plan would give each county the assignment of cleaning the last fanatical Nazi resistance out of the area of Germany they reportedly will control after the war – Russia, the eastern part of the Reich; United States the south, and Great Britain the industrial northwest.
Americans hold back
It hourly appears more probable the observers said, that the Americans intend to hold back their full strength along the Elbe River line to permit the Reds to capture Berlin.
Such a decision would be based on good tactical principles. If both sides attacked simultaneously under separate leadership, the result might well be tremendous military waste, the observers said.
The function of the U.S. Ninth Army forces along the Elbe, it was believed, will be to prevent Gertman forces there from being turned to the defense of Berlin. But observers here were not looking for any large U.S. gains in this sector in the near future unless German resistance collapses more swiftly than is expected.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops to the south will be regrouped to carry through the Third Army’s thrust toward the Bavarian Alps.
Which task hardest?
Observers were in disagreement as to which would be the more difficult operation – taking Berlin or digging a strong force of, say, 25 divisions out of the Alps.
Berlin, they believe, will prove to be “hundreds of square miles of booby traps.” Even the fact that Berlin has been bombed to a rubble aids the defenders because smashed buildings make good defense positions.
The Bavarian redoubt is in the most rugged section of the Bavarian Alps, extending 200 miles from Lake Constance to Salzburg. The area is nearly 100 miles wide. Its unsurpassed natural defense positions may make it necessary to take the whole area a yard at a time.
Yanks speed ahead in Mindanao drive
Take road hub in amphibious advance
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B-29s again rip Kyushu airfields
Raid is second on homeland in 2 days
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