The Pittsburgh Press (August 22, 1942)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND (By Wireless) – I have written a lot about what the American troops in Northern Ireland do during their time off but very little about what they do all day long when they’re hard at work. So I’ll try to give you an idea of the daily routine of one infantry outfit I’ve been visiting.
They’re up at 5:45, and they stand reveille at 6 o’clock. Their mess hall was built for 200 men but is feeding 800, so they have to eat in two crowded sittings. This throws the second group so late that they have to eat fast in order to get through in time to join in the day’s work. They don’t even have time to brush their teeth after eating.
Two days each week this outfit starts at 7 in the morning on a 20-mile march. Usually it sticks to the roads, instead of cutting across fields as they don’t want to ruin any Irish crops.
The roads over here are fairly narrow, and the men have to march in column of twos, keeping watch out for traffic.
It takes about seven hours for the 20-mile march, resting 10 minutes every hour. At noon a truck loaded with sandwiches and coffee finds the men and feeds them.
On days when they are not marching they have 30 to 90 minutes of close-order drill, a military lecture, a run through an obstacle course and some field maneuvers, these fast frequently at night.
The day I was there they had a lecture on military discipline and courtesy. I asked some of the boys whether they hadn’t learned all that stuff long ago, and they said they had heard that lecture so often they knew what every word would be 15 seconds before the speaker said it.
The night maneuvers are small tactical exercises, with the men crawling around in the darkness and simulating conditions of real warfare. They pay no attention to rain, since it rains most of the time.
Anyhow, the boys are not grumbling at the hard training they have to go through. If they were allowed to draw up their own training schedule, I believe they’d make it about twice as hard for themselves.
For those boys know that, sooner or later, they’re going into battle. They know that the most rigidly trained troops will have the best chance of coming through alive.
They want to live to see America once more, and consequently they want tougher training. They want something that will make them physically fit as iron and keep them that way. These 20-miles-a-day marches, they say, are duck soup.
One outfit has abandoned the traditional American Army way of making up its cots for daytime, and has turned to the British method, which is to fold everything up in the middle, leaving the bare springs exposed at each end of the bed.
There is no question that our soldiers are in tremendously better physical trim than they were before they entered the Army. Most of them have gained weight, but they have now worked it down to a firm hardness.