Rambling Reporter, Ernie Pyle (1941-42)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 15, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

CLOVIS, N.M. – The middle of last month, when I was in California and writing about moving the Japanese farmers inland, one column said:

“The transplanting of these Japanese will produce a vegetable shortage unless some program is worked out for taking over their farms. And I can find no such program. The whole thing is pretty chaotic.”

In the mall today comes word that there is now such a program. It was set up between the time I wrote that paragraph and the time it was published.

The details come in a letter from Dolph Winebrenner, who is with the Farm Security Administration in San Francisco.

The letter is one of the nicest I’ve ever received, and was a pleasure to read, until I got to the end and winced when Mr. Winebrenner signed himself, “Associate Information Specialist.” But I suppose one of his bosses in Washington thought that up, and Mr. Winebrenner is probably ashamed of it himself, so we’ll get on with what he has to say:

“To maintain the volume of vegetables and other crops produced by Japanese and Japanese-Americans, a program has been put into action by the Farm Security Administration at the direct orders of the U.S. Army.

FSA agents control shifting

“This means that a vast double migration is being conducted, of Japs and others away from farms in the defense areas, and a corresponding movement of acceptable farmers to take their places.

“Several hundred FSA field agents, located throughout the evacuation zone, are responsible for seeing that the people who must leave are given a square deal in disposing of their property. They make certain the new owners or tenants are capable.

“To say that an agent must combine the qualifications of interpreter, counsel, custodian, examiner and general overseer barely outlines his work.

“When a farm has been vacated by a Japanese family, the field agent supplies the new operator with any technical assistance he should have, along with help in getting credit. The agent can make special loans, if necessary.

“The scope of this migration is greater than anything of its kind in history. About 150,000 people are involved. Most of the Japanese are second-generation citizens. In California alone, they farm 225,000 acres, worth 70 million dollars. They raise from 35 to 50 per cent of the state’s vegetable produce.

“In the first ten days of our work, more than 500 Japanese offered their farms for sale or lease through our agents, and about 400 applicants registered to take over the land. Numerous deals have been closed and loans already made.

Some crop losses inevitable

“It is interesting to note that we have had to operate so fast that few letters have been written to us from our field agents; the entire job so far has been done by telegraph and telephone.

“What crop losses will occur it is hard to say. Some are inevitable. Floriculture losses may be heavy, since few others than Japanese have the necessary technique. Strawberries may possibly be out for the duration.”

The thing that puzzled me when I was in California was where the new farmers of the Japanese lands were to come from, and who they were to be.

Mr. Winebrenner doesn’t say. I suppose, actually, they are all sorts of people, California is full of retired Midwest farmers who might want to get back to work. And the closing of small businesses is throwing thousands of people out of jobs.

This vast migration, and the transfer of lands, and the inward migration to the farms, had not started when I left California. I wish I were back there again, to follow it through. I hope some newspaper or magazine assigns somebody to do it beautifully. It is, in its way, another “Grapes of Wrath.”

Most of these Japanese are as blameless and as innocent as you or I, and it is a tragedy in their lives. But I don’t feel sorry for them.

I can’t feel sorry for them when, back in Indiana, in our own farm community, straight Americans who have had their land for generations have been kicked out on much less notice than the Japanese, to make way for an ammunition factory. And no place has been prepared for them to go, either.

The war is beginning to touch everybody now.

And how did I get off on this, when we were talking about a vegetable shortage? I’m glad the government has taken over, for something had to be done. Even so, I expected those magnificently green, lush and ridiculously cheap vegetables of Southern California are out for the duration. Now I can cut down on my spinach with a clear conscience.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 16, 1942)

Rambling Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

CLOVIS, N.M. – Some time ago (up in Oregon, I think it was) I mentioned how hotels seem to have a national conspiracy to start painting the halls as soon as I move in. Paint gives me a headache, and I wish they’d paint while I’m somewhere else.

One result of that item was a dirty letter from a painter saying that my complaints were subversive, and no doubt would throw 15,000 painters in New York out of work.

But that fellow overestimated my strength. Instead of discharging their painters since then, hotels seem to have doubled their painting programs. It’s got so now I can hardly get through a hotel lobby for the falling paint.

Literally, half a dozen times since that Oregon column, painters have started splashing outside my door as soon as I moved in. The latest one was here in Clovis.

Start painting in few minutes

I registered one evening. The room had a connecting door to the adjoining room. I couldn’t get the lock on my side to work, so just put a chair against it.

Early next morning I was propped up in bed smoking a cigarette, when that door opened and the chair was pushed back and a woman stuck her head in, then quickly withdrew it.

To make sure that she got me straight as a Sir Galahad, I called out, “I tried to lock that door last night, but it won’t lock.”

And she replied, “Oh, that’s all right. I’m the housekeeper. We’re just clearing out this other room. We’re going to start painting in here in a few minutes.”

I threw my cigarette away, took one last deep breath of fresh air, and jumped out the seventh-floor window. I’m writing this column on the way down.

Humor in the high schools

My little girl friend Shirley Mount in Albuquerque (remember, she helped me build the picket fence last year?) writes that the high schools are seething again with humor.

She sends along. some samples, a few of which follow:

Q. What is Hollywood’s newest war-dog hero?
A. Rin-Plastic-Plastic, to replace Rin-Tin-Tin.

And the next one:

Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider, and stood beside her, and said
“I’m rigormortis, may I set in?”

Next and last, for this is killing me: Use the word “regiment” in a sentence,

“Regiment well, but he got his face slapped anyway.”

Thank God, I’m 41, and too old to laugh any more.

Soldier pays, and Pegler loses

It is with pleasure that I am able to report today that Mr. Westbrook Pegler lost.

You remember the bet we had – whether or not the soldier hitch-hiker I lent the 10 bucks to would send it back. Peg bet I’d never see it again! I bet I would.

The $10 has just arrived, from the young soldier’s father. It was accompanied by one of the nicest letters anybody ever received. After getting the letter, I wouldn’t even have minded if he had forgotten the $10.

Now that it is paid, I can tell the soldier’s name. It is Pvt. Robert Henderson, and his father is R. F. Henderson, 524 East 13th St., Dallas, Tex. He said in his letter that his son arrived home 48 hours after leaving his camp in California, was married the next evening, and immediately started back for California.

Better luck next time, Peg. It wasn’t a fair bet anyhow. The law of averages was against you.

When I wrote recently about Maj. Bateson, the gardening man in Long Beach, there was a paragraph quoting him as believing we may run short of insecticides before the war is over.

Several letters have come in saying the major is all wrong about us facing either a vegetable-seed shortage or an insecticide shortage. There’s no way right now for me to check officially on the situation, but maybe later I can.

In the meantime, a lady reader from Pueblo, Colo., sends in her solution for the insecticide shortage, if one comes. She says her recipe has stood by her for years, and she’s had no bug trouble yet on either her flowers or vegetables.

She says she simply boils one 5-cent sack of Bull Durham tobacco in a gallon of water, lets it stand for one day, and then sprays it on her plants. Result – no bugs.

And here I’ve been smoking Bull Durham for 20 years, and I’m still alive.

Ernie Pyle to rest

For some weeks, Ernie Pyle has been in ill health. He finally has been compelled to take a rest, so this will be his last column for a while.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 12, 1942)

Ernie Pyle in Ireland

The Roving Reporter sailed across the Atlantic in a U.S. convoy. He will tour Army camps in Ireland – give his impressions of the war-world in this new phase.

His columns from Ireland will start in The Pittsburgh Press soon.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 15, 1942)

Pyle Column Resumes Soon

The Rambling Reporter is now in Ireland. He will report what he sees in U.S. Army camps there; how the people are taking the war since he was abroad last.

Ernie Pyle’s column from Ireland will start in The Press soon.

Watch For It!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 20, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ernie Pyle, the roving reporter, has hit the road again after a leave of absence. This time the road leads him overseas once more. His first dispatch follows:

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND (By Wireless) – For the second time, this wandering farmer has crossed the Atlantic Ocean by airplane.

Offhand that would seem like the beginning of an enviable record, yet there was a passenger on our plane who had made 27 round-trip flights.

If it were peacetime I could write for a week about the ocean crossing, but as things stand today I must say very little, and that very late. One column will dispose of all the publishable material about our flight.

I can’t tell you where I started, where I stopped, nor how long the journey took. I can say that once under way the whole thing seemed wonderfully simple.

We stayed overnight in a Canadian town, slept under blankets in a hotel, then flew all day and all the next night; then we were in Ireland.

The weather is a forbidden topic these days, but since the Germans don’t know when we crossed I can say that our weather was perfect. It seems almost impossible that the air could have been so smooth over such a vast distance. Throughout the long flight there wasn’t one single bump.

Couldn’t resist peeking

We were comfortable on the plane. The cabin was heated, and although we flew high it wasn’t high enough to bother anybody.

They curtained the windows for an hour after leaving and before arriving. Most of the military people I have talked with think this window blackout business is silly, but somebody thought it up so now we are stuck with it.

None of us could resist peeking, however, and it seemed that the most important and responsible passengers did most of the peeking. The blinds were taken off the windows as soon as we were out of sight of land. They were up again during the night, but that didn’t make any difference because we couldn’t have seen anything anyhow.

The nights are short now. Also, we were rushing toward the sun. Our total darkness in crossing the ocean was only four hours.

For the first 200 miles the ocean was wide and clear beneath us. The only things we saw were a dozen blue-white icebergs. They looked small from the plane, but actually they were bigger than battleships. We saw no ships at all.

After the first 200 miles we never saw the ocean again. A solid floor of clouds beneath us extended without a single break for the next 1800 miles. It ended, uncannily, not more than five miles from our landing place on this side.

The captain said he had never seen a solid undercast for such a terrific distance.

Play bridge above clouds

Once we were out to sea, the passengers got off their coats and got comfortable. I took off my tie and put on a sweater and a pair of house slippers. Several others did likewise.

A couple of bridge games went on all afternoon. The rest of us sat in groups and talked.

Smoking was permitted in two compartments, and late in the afternoon the steward served highballs at 65 cents apiece. We had an excellent dinner.

During the evening a poker game was going on in one compartment, and two bridge games in another. The captain won all the money at poker, and the passengers accused him of making a business of it. The captain, incidentally, was cordial and very popular with the passengers.

Around midnight we all went to bed. Except that that’s hardly the phrase for it. We just closed our eyes, you might say, for there were no berths, and slept where we could. Some slept in chairs. Some sprawled on life preservers. Some rolled in blankets and lay on the floor. That’s the way I slept.

Our crossing had been so quick and miraculous that somehow we felt like men from Mars. Yet nobody paid the slightest attention to us. We might just as well have landed in New York from Philadelphia, for all the stir we caused. That’s the way ocean flying is today.

We laymen have little idea of all the ocean flying that is going on now, or what is on the boards for the future. Two years after the war we’ll be flying from New York to London between dinner and breakfast. You wait and see.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 21, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND – I got my first sight of an American soldier on Irish soil while riding on a train. Two soldiers got on at a little station and sat in the two seats next to mine.

Being slightly homesick already, I couldn’t resist starting a conversation.

“Where are you from?” I asked them.

“That town where the train just stopped,” one said.

“No, I mean where from in the States,” I said.

So one of them said he was from Maine, and the other from Missouri.

“Have you been in the States?” the Maine boy asked.

I told them I had spent many years there.

“It seems as if nearly everybody you meet over here has been in the States,” he said.

I’ve been taken for a lot of different things, but that’s the first time anybody ever took me for an Irishman.

‘Don’t you swallow that’

The Maine boy had some chewing gum, so he passed it around the compartment. Across from us was a short, heavy woman with a strikingly beautiful little girl, about 5. Each took a piece of gum. The little girl apparently had never seen any before. She started sucking it like a lollipop.

We watched, entranced. Finally the mother told her to put it all in her mouth and chew it. It was all so new to her that we couldn’t take our eyes off.

Suddenly the Maine boy yelled, “Don’t you swallow that!” She had been on the verge.

Everybody laughed except the little girl.

As we were pulling into a station the woman got up, put an arm around the Maine boy’s shoulder, half hugged him, and whispered in his ear that he was welcome to North Ireland. I could see that it embarrassed him, but it was a friendly act.

I am too new here to know whether that is typical of the way the people feel about the American troops, but from all I can gather things are all right on the whole. I think the boys would rather be back home than over here, but that would be true of all troops everywhere. That’s human nature.

There is almost no such thing among the troops, I believe, as a specific dislike of Ireland. The two main complaints are about the climate and the fact that they find Northern Ireland “dead.”

There is hardly such a thing as summer over here. Right now, in July, it rains about half the time, and the air is chill and piercing. Many Americans are wearing heavy underwear throughout the summer. The troops have not been issued summer uniforms, and won’t be.

In my hotel room I have been almost as cold as I was that horrible November in Lisbon. As for gay life, the men are forbidden to cross the line into Eire, but they all long for a trip over there. They have heard there’s more fun over there, more things to do.

Northern Ireland is predominantly Protestant, and more conventional than Eire, yet I can’t see that it’s any deader than a good many places back home. They don’t have Sunday movies, which is hard on soldiers on leave, but they seem to have about everything else.

People standoffish at first

The people were a little standoffish at first, but now they’ve warmed up. They say the Americans got a bad name here before the troops arrived. That was caused by the “technicians,” as the Irish call them – a large contingent of civilian construction men who came long ago to build camps and storehouses ahead of the troops. They made big money, and they had almost no restrictions. They brawled and fought and caused trouble.

The troops arrived with that to live down. As far as I can find out, they’ve lived it down.

We sometimes get the idea at home that all the troops do over here is drink and pick up girls and go to dances. That impression is partly the result of necessary censorship, which forbids telling about what the men actually do in training all day.

They work a great deal more than they play, on the average. Their daily life is very much like what it was in the camps back home. They are up early and they work hard. They are getting plenty of toughening-up training, among other things.

In those recent maneuvers a large number of them marched 32 miles in one day. That was followed with 25-mile marches the next two days.

After hearing that, I’ve decided that being a newspaperman is not so bad.

No, American troops are not unwelcome in Northern Ireland. And they’re behaving all right. Mainly they miss their home companionships. On my first day here I watched a lone soldier stand and read entirely through a show window full of scores of greeting cards. It was Sunday, and the store was locked. He had nothing better to do with his time off. It was sort of pathetic.

There’s more of that sort of thing here than there is of hell-raising.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 22, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND (By Wireless) – The Army’s censorship rule against datelining any newspaper dispatch from this country with the name of a specific town is a good one, from a military standpoint, but it has resulted in a feeling of vagueness among the folks back home about their boys over here.

Northern Ireland is not awfully big, yet the constant dateline “Somewhere in Northern Ireland” is to the folks at home practically like datelining a piece “Western Hemisphere.” You can’t picture in your mind where the boys are, or just how they live.

So these pieces will try to tell you, and I think it can be done without going outside the censorship rules.

First, I’ll try to describe the country to you. Northern Ireland, which is a part of the United Kingdom, forms the northeast corner of the island. The eastern and northern sides are all coastline. The western and southern boundaries are inland.

Northern Ireland is almost circular. Right in the middle is a big lake called Lough Neagh. (The word lough, which means either bay or lake, is pronounced “lock”). Northern Ireland is roughly 90 miles across, in any direction. You can drive across it in two hours and a half.

It is honeycombed with roads. They are macadamized, and in good shape, but very narrow. They are also quite crooked, like some of our secondary roads which have not yet been straightened into main highways.

Troops are everywhere

Practically everywhere the roads are lined on both sides with vine-covered stone fences. The fields are tiny. Farmhouses and towns occur with about the same frequency as in, say, eastern Pennsylvania. The country is very rolling, with some low mountains. Everything is a vivid green.

There are nearly 200 cities and towns in Northern Ireland, running all the way from Belfast, with nearly half a million, down to picturesque little villages with just a few people.

Now to give you an idea about where our troops are.

They are everywhere. They are at dozens of towns and villages. They are in the fields, and hidden along the edges of woods. There is no such thing as a big permanent camp, with rows of wooden barracks, such as we have at home. That would make the men too vulnerable to bomber attack.

The whole point of the Army’s training here is dispersal and mobility.

Units keep on move

Everything is scattered to begin with, and units don’t stay permanently in one place. Every unit in Northern Ireland is prepared to abandon station completely and move on to somewhere else on a few hours’ notice – and often does. That’s to train them to do it when they finally get into battle.

If you happened to know the exact town where your boy was, and sent him a letter there, he probably would have moved on bag and baggage before the letter got here.

Even the main headquarters moves occasionally.

All telephones in the Army’s offices here are field telephones in canvas boxes that can be moved instantly. All records are kept in trunklike boxes. All they have to do is slam the lid shut, pick the thing up and take the records with them.

So, if you’re trying to picture where your boy is, he’s all over Northern Ireland. He’s worse than a tourist.

There is only one place in Northern Ireland that I can name specifically, and that’s the new naval base at Londonderry. There sailors and Marines are in permanent quarters. They are working at a daily routine in machine shops, instead of training for battle. So first of all I’m going to Londonderry for a week or two.

After that, for a few weeks, I will be in that delightful vale known as “Somewhere in Northern Ireland,” and you may know that like the troops I will be on the move much of the time.

No dive bomber is going to catch me asleep between showers.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 23, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – This is the town where Amelia Earhart landed on her first flight across the Atlantic. And this is the town where the American Navy has established its first base on this side of the water. American sailors and Marines are finding it an interesting place.

I always thought Londonderry was a village, probably a place with only a few stores and no hotel. Actually it is a sizable city, the second biggest in Northern Ireland. The population today is around 60,000.

It has two railroad stations, several movies, a large business district, a great, lovely cathedral, a Woolworth 10-cent store, and a city square known as The Diamond with a World War statue in the middle.

Londonderry is a place of hills. You can stand at certain high points and look down upon the city. The most striking thing to an American eye is row after row of little chimneys sticking up from long lines of brick houses. The houses make almost a wall, and the chimney pots oozing smoke into the damp air are an Irish sight for you.

Londonderry is terrifically old. It was even old when the Great Siege came in 1689. The siege was Londonderry’s most historic moment. It is spoken of often, just as the Great Fire is spoken of in San Francisco.

The old wall around the city still stands intact. Of course, the city was much smaller then, so the wall now encloses only the center part of town. It is as high as a second-story window, and so wide you could drive a car on top of it.

Arches have been cut so that when you are driving to the center of town you drive right through the wall.

Famous for shirts, collars

My first evening here, I walked with friends clear around the top of the wall. I could look down on the sidewalks and see sailors talking to girls. But when they looked up and saw us watching, they were almost embarrassed and stopped talking.

Londonderry is almost shortened to plain “Derry” in conversation.

The city is not on the ocean, nor even on a bay. It is several miles up the River Foyle. The river is no wider here than the Ohio at Cincinnati. Nothing bigger than a destroyer can get up this far.

Derry exists because of its shirt and collar factories. The town is full of them. They employ around 12,000 workers, mostly women. There is almost no other industry at all.

The result is that in the past few years Derry has been a place where the women did all the work. The menfolks couldn’t find jobs so they didn’t work much, which makes Derry a Utopia, except for the climate.

The summer here is one of daily rain. In fact, it rains a couple of dozen times every day. There may be black rain coming down in torrents, and then 30 seconds later the sun will be beaming – and vice versa.

The result is that everything is violently green. The rolling countryside is a joy to see. You go around half wet all the time, but despite the dampness and chill Derry seems to me several degrees warmer than Belfast, on the east coast.

Why the lift in censorship

Derry has had only one bombing. That was a year ago last Easter, the same night that Belfast was so badly blitzed. They say only one bomb was dropped here, but it made a prize hit and killed more than 20 people.

There has been only one alarm since the Americans came. That was a couple of months ago, in daytime. No bombs were dropped. It was a reconnaissance plane.

But Derry lives an uneasy life. She expects something before it’s over, and she is ready. Brick surface shelters are seen everywhere in the city squares, and huge, shoulder-high concrete tanks of water. Barrage balloons float above the city and the suburbs. Hospitals have their decks cleared for a sudden avalanche of victims.

The people of Derry keep wondering why America decided to release the news of the existence of a new naval base. Of course, they know Germany didn’t have to read the papers to find out about it, but they do feel that it was sort of like an invitation, a sort of challenge to Germany to do something about it.

Personally, I feel that the Germans have many better things to do than try to blitz Derry. In the first place, they would have to fly a long way. Secondly, they would meet with a nice reception when they got here. Thirdly, Derry isn’t quite so vital as we might think at home, and Hitler knows it.

American sailors and Marines based here like Derry. Like everybody else over here, they’d rather be home, but, even so, they know they’re living a pretty good life for wartime and could be a lot worse off.

Tomorrow, I’ll start telling you about them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 24, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – When America started in last fall to build a naval base here, the planners had one thing uppermost in mind. That was dispersal.

The idea was to separate things as much as possible in order to avoid concentrating everything in one spot to the advantage of Hitler’s bombers.

So today, although the whole thing is known as naval operating base, it actually is a number of separate centers several miles apart. There is a hospital one place, machine shops somewhere else, living quarters at another point, and headquarters elsewhere.

Nobody lives at the base proper, where the actual work on ships is done. The sailors are taken back and forth by bus.

Everything is brand new. There was no converting, or adding to something old. The British did have, and still have, a repair base here, but ours was created on ground that had been mostly bare or occupied by a few old buildings, now torn down.

There is a wire fence between the two bases, but British ships tie up at our docks for repairs. Our ships are never in Derry very long. They come here, you might say, only for emergency repairs.

It is unusual for a ship to be here more than two or three days. They are like race cars coming to the pits at Indianapolis – in a hurried moment, to get whatever is necessary, then gone again out into the dangerous tracks of the Atlantic.

The repair base itself is almost exactly like any small Navy yard at home. Work goes on in just the same routine, matter-of-fact way.

The buildings are big rectangular ones of corrugated steel, laid out in streets. There are such things as foundries, woodworking shops, electrical and radio shops, and storage sheds. There is even a typewriter repair shop, and a room where a watchmaker keeps the base’s clocks in repair.

Throughout the base American sailors carry on various crafts just as they have done throughout their Navy careers. There is nothing warlike at all in the atmosphere.

The sailors and Marines live in a camp some distance away, on a slope. Incidentally, over here a bog doesn’t have to be down at the bottom of a valley. You can find a bog right on a hilltop in this place.

Where this camp now stands used to be a bog. Today it is laid out just the same as a military town back home. The main difference being that instead of living in two-story wooden barracks the men live in those rounded nissen huts, made of steel. You’ve doubtless seen pictures of the huts. They’re the kind the troops use in Iceland. Each one looks like a half-section of a huge drainage pipe.

The huts arrive here in the form of slightly curved sheets of steel. These are fitted together over a steel framework and bolted. Then two inches of insulation is applied inside the hut, and a wooden floor is laid.

They say 10 unskilled soldiers and sailors, after a week of practice, can put up a hut in a day.

The huts are used because they are easy to transport knocked down, and because they are more sturdy than wooden buildings and quicker to put up.

Each hut has a door and two windows at each end. There are no windows along the side except in special office huts. This is to reduce the danger from flying glass in case of a bombing. The result is that the huts tend to be darkish, but in most of them the men have rigged up their own bed-table lights.

Each hut holds six to ten men. There are lockers and chairs. The huts don’t have washing or toilet facilities, but in each company street one entire hut is devoted to that.

Everything at the camp is inside nissen huts – kitchens, clubs, library, dental office. The one exception is the recreation hall, an immense, tall, rectangular building of steel sheeting where they show movies and have dances.

Each hut has an oil stove in the middle. Despite the rainy climate and the surrounding mud, the huts are completely dry inside.

There are some rats around the camp. Occasionally one works up through a hole in the wooden floor and gets a shoe heaved at him.

The company streets are made of crushed rock. In dry weather this gets dusty and blows like a sandstorm, but it has been wet for so long that everybody has almost forgotten about the dust.

In the center of the camp Old Glory flies at the top of a high mast.

The view from the camp is lovely – green Irish fields stretch to the horizon, and low clouds smother the green hilltops. You can walk a few hundred yards and be out in the fields. Way down below is the river.

It would be a perfect place for a country estate – if it could only be in Southern California, instead.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 25, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – War is a tough business, and all that, but the policy of our government is to make our troops abroad just as comfortable as possible, and I think the policy is a good one.

Sailors and Marines at the new United States naval base here, for instance, are living almost as they would if they were in a camp at home. The only real difference is that when they go to town in the evening they are amidst foreign surroundings.

Food is always item No. 1 in a wartime outfit. Our men here are eating well, in fact better than well. The contrast between their food and what the British soldiers and sailors get is almost embarrassing. The Navy gets eggs locally, but practically everything else is shipped from the States. Even beer.

I have eaten here and been all through the galleys, and the grub standard is just as high as at home. There is only one lack – the men miss their fresh vegetables.

Although the officers’ messes take a chance and serve fresh milk, the Army and Navy have turned thumbs down on Irish milk for the troops.

The reason – the dairies don’t come up to our standards of sanitation, and there is much tuberculosis among the cattle. So condensed and powdered milk from home is used.

The men frequently receive packages of food and knickknacks from their families, but actually it’s the touch of home rather than what’s in the packages that counts, for there’s almost nothing they need or want that isn’t supplied them.

They can buy American cigarettes and chocolate bars at the post exchange. Cigarettes are 6 cents a pack. They are rationed at a carton and a half a week, but that is plenty.

It’s the civilian Americans over here, such as myself, who take it on the nose as far as shortages are concerned. It is a real treat to us to be put up at an Army or Navy camp for a few days.

We get plenty of sugar, real American coffee, an egg for breakfast, and we get our pockets loaded with American cigarettes.

The sailors over here work regular hours, with very little drill, because they are nearly all technicians. They are up around 6, have breakfast, clean their huts and stand formation. Then they are taken in busses to the big repair base.

They work at the various shops from 8 to 12, then go back to camp in busses for lunch. They return to work at 1 and knock off at 4:30. Supper is at 5. Shortly after that they are off for the evening.

There are always some who go to town of an evening to dance or sit around in the pubs or walk the streets.

One of my friends here is Chief Shipfitter Hiram Nicholson, from North Carolina. He lives in a hut with five other petty officers. Their hut, he says, is about typical of the whole camp. Three of six men go to town almost every night. The other three hardly ever go.

They spend their evenings in camp, writing letters, listening to the radio, going to the movies, or chatting around at the petty officers’ club. There is a movie in the recreation building every night except Saturday, when there is a dance instead.

The camp also has a brand-new library occupying a whole hut. Books have just arrived, thousands of them, and all new. It made my mouth water to look over the shelves. The library opened only a few days before I came, yet already hundreds of books had been taken out.

There also are two clubs in Nissen huts – one for the men, one for chief petty officers. The clubs have tables, chairs, and a radio. They serve American canned beer – each man being limited to two cans a day. They also serve grilled sandwiches, ice cream and Coca-Cola. In fact it’s easier to get Coca-Cola here in this camp that it is back home.

They make ice cream from a powdered mix sent over in cans from the states.

There is a dentist’s office, and a large sick-bay camp at the main naval hospital several miles away. You would never recognize it as a hospital, for it, too is all Nissen huts and it looks exactly like the main living camp. You are right on it before you know it, for it is well hidden under trees.

Right now most of the hospital’s patients are British sailors. There is plenty of equipment for a sudden expansion in case of a blitz.

Those sailors who go to town in the evening have to be back at 11:30. At this time of year it’s still daylight when they return. As soon as darkness begins to come ahead of the regular lights-out time, all huts will be equipped for blackouts.

All in all, as long as we have to be in a war, the boys over here at the Derry base haven’t much to grumble about.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 27, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) --What has struck me most about this American camp so far away from home is the way the men have fixed up their Nissen huts with homey touches.

One Marine Corps hut has stars painted all over the ceiling to resemble a nigh sky. Many boys have tacked up pictures of their girls, their parents, and so on. Others have put up brightly colored magazine pictures. Some have bought dainty lampshades downtown.

Others have swapped personal trinkets for extra paint and decorated the inside of their huts. In some the boys have used beer cans to make pretty little table lamps. Others have rigged up beer cans as bed lamps.

Capt. Williams J. Larson, commandant of the base, encourages all this. he says they can put up anything they want as long as it isn’t lewd. He has even offered a prize to be given next month for the most homelike hut. I think I know the one that will get it.

In this certain hut the sailors have worked magic in transforming what was really just a bare dormitory into a home.

By Navy trade they are all craftsmen, and they can do things you and I can’t.

They’ve taken the legs off their green lockers, set them down on the floor about four feet apart, then bought some heavy green material and stretched it on wire across the open space. They even did the sewing themselves. This not only forms extra closet space but gives a neat touch that the best interior decorator couldn’t pass.

Since the walls of a Nissen hut are curved, anything like a locker won’t fit against them. So the boys took some plywood, cut boards to fit the curved space behind the lockers, sealed the space up and painted the boards green. Now the lockers look as though they were built right into the hut.

The wooden floors are bare in most huts but for this one they’ve got a brown hemp runner three feet wide stretched the full length of the hut in the center, making a rug.

I asked one chief petty officer where they got the runner, which looked like naval stores to me. He grinned and said a wise Navy man never tells where he got anything.

Capt. Larson also offered a prize for a golf tournament that is going on now. The boys have plenty of games here, both indoors and out. The recreation officer spent more than $3,000 for athletic game equipment.

Other officers laughed when he spent a lot on badminton sets for the Marines, but he can laugh now, for they have taken to it in a big way. They even set up a court under the trees so they could play while it was raining.

They actually have to play around tree trunks, which makes the game more interesting. And the final touch of enthusiasm came when they started playing three men to a side.

The Marines at this base are used solely for guard duty. They patrol every gate at every one of the camps. Even at the officers’ house where I’m a guest I can hear a Marine walk past my window every five minutes in the dead of night.

Speaking of making a place seem like home, the camp has acquired about a dozen dogs and cats. Some of them just wandered in and set up housekeeping.

Sailors bought others from Irish kids who come to the gate and beg them to buy a dog for a shilling.

The dogs have been given such military names as Reveille and Taps.

One thing I forgot to mention is the bomb shelters. At every one of the camps, shelters are dotted all over the place like flyspecks. No matter where you are you would have to run only a few feet to reach one.

The shelters are the same shape as the Nissen huts, only lower. They are made of heavy steel sheeting, then heavily sandbagged, then the whole thing is covered with sod. In front of the door is a heavy bulwark to keep a blast from blowing the door in.

Inside a long bench stretches the entire length of the shelter on each side. There are air vents on top, and at the back is a long curved escape shaft!

Practically no shelter will stand up under a direct hit. These probably wouldn’t either. But they would stand a close one, I’m sure, and the thing that pleases me is that there are so many of them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 28, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – When our sailors and Marines arrived here to take over our new naval base, things were only half finished. Everybody had to live as best he could.

For lack of better facilities, the officers lived in Nissen huts. Life in the main camp wasn’t so bad at that. Most of them could still take it without much grumbling. But the government began to make other arrangements.

Today the officers are scattered around in old country estates, farmhouses, grand town mansions, and some even downtown apartments.

Most of them are living in a half-world that would tickle you – a combination of bleak, castle-like splendor and whatever improvised home touches they can rassle up at this distance from America.

You can get the picture from the house where I am a guest. The house is old and dingy-looking outside, but a palace in its way.

It sits on a hillside, with a view somewhat like that from Mount Vernon. The grounds are huge. Down below are giant beech trees, wandering walks through shrubbery, and flower gardens. The whole thing is on a magnificent scale, but of many years ago.

The owner is now away, a fighting officer in the Allied armies. The house has been leased by our government. All except the essential basic furniture has been taken out.

The house has a great wide center hallway. At the far end is a grand staircase. There is a living room on each side of the hall. The officers seldom use more than one.

The dining room is an immense one, at the rear. The officers all eat together at a long table.

Nine officers, some Navy and some Marine, live in this mansion. Each man has a room of his own upstairs. And the rooms are immense. Each has a gas-log fireplace. There is no other heat, but the gas takes the chill off.

Some of the rooms have regular beds and wardrobes. Others are bare except for Army cots and tables.

Some of the officers feel that it isn’t worthwhile to add anything to take the bareness away. Others have scattered family photos on the mantle.

There were some bathrooms but not enough. So the upstairs end of the huge hall has been blocked off with beaverboard, and lavatories and hot showers put in.

Alongside the house is a newly built bomb shelter exactly the same as those in the camps. That is true of every house in which officers live.

Breakfast runs from 7 to 8:30. It is a good old American breakfast, too, with eggs and everything.

A little mimeographed newspaper gives the latest news received by wireless.

Typed at the top of it is, “For Navy personnel only; to be destroyed after reading.” But I have got to be such a thorough piece of Navy personnel myself that I read it without batting an eye, and nobody says anything. To tell the truth, there’s nothing in it that you wouldn’t find in American newspapers anyhow.

Immediately after breakfast, the officers leave for their respective camps. Some have been assigned cars of their own – Chevrolet sedans. Others go by groups in station wagons. Everybody is back for lunch at 12:15. They sit around for a half hour after lunch talking about their work and recalling funny yarns and famous naval characters.

Dinner is at 6:30. The officers usually get home in time to clean up first. Frequently there is a guest. It may be an American nurse, a British WREN, a local member of the Home Guard, or the dean of the cathedral – just anyone they want to invite.

The living room where they sit and talk for a while after dinner is bare except for a davenport, a few chairs and a big round table with some old newspapers on it. There is not a picture or an ashtray or a knickknack. But little enough time is spent there, so it makes no difference.

In the evenings one officer always has night duty at camp. Others go out. Some stay in their rooms and read or write letters home. Most have radios.

There is very little noise. The house is so big and thick-walled that you couldn’t hear a noise in another room if there was any.

The blackout curtains are drawn about 10 o’clock, though it is not dark till midnight. Marine sentries guard the house all night. Usually you can hear rain pattering on the trees when darkness finally comes.

It isn’t the best way in the world to live but it is pretty good for war. And as one officer said, “It’s a hell of a lot better than living on a destroyer in the North Atlantic.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 29, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – At the new American naval base here the chief petty officers’ huts are all together at one end of the camp, and just behind them is their clubhouse, in a Nissen hut. It has just been opened.

The manager is Chief Yeoman David Hurley, who is a sort of master of ceremonies for the whole station, and a character in anybody’s country.

Hurley is an old-timer in the Navy. His sleeve has service stripes clear to the elbow. He is a good-natured guy, and he talks your head off. He has a hand in everything – arranges Sunday picnics, puts on all the movies, plans and supervises the weekly dances. He’s an arranger at heart, and he’s in his glory over here.

Last week he had three days’ leave, but he never even left the camp. One of the officers found him in a recreation hall stringing up colored pennants on wires.

“What are you doing here, Hurley?” he said. “You’re supposed to be on leave.”

Hurley said, “Yes, but all these British sailors and Irish girls are coming to a dance tomorrow night. This place has got to look nice, and if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.”

He acted very mad and persecuted about it, but he couldn’t have been pried out of there with a court-martial.

Hurley hasn’t any upper teeth. He goes around with his cap pulled down, making his ears stick out, and with his lower lip folded up over his toothless upper one. He’s a sight to behold.

He says he plays 11 musical instruments. And he is a constant actor. He’ll break into a skit on a moment’s notice. Two of his chief acts are a crying jag and an imitation of Stepin Fetchit.

Wherever he goes Hurley produces his own good time. I don’t think he even knows he’s in Ireland.

The chief petty officers had just opened their club a couple of nights before I got here, so I sat around with them one evening and thereby added a laurel to my belt of odd distinctions.

I became the first honorary member of the CPO club of the American Naval Base at Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

It was Hurley’s idea. Of course he is going to make me some kind of membership card so I can show it off around the world. It will go well with my membership in the Squaw Men’s Union of Seward, Alaska, and my vice presidency of the Rio Grande Steamboat & Navigation Co.

Twice already the Navy and Marine camp has thrown a big British-American dance. They invite all the British sailors in town. Everybody digs up a girl.

The dance takes place in the camp’s big recreation hall. The Navy has an orchestra.

There isn’t much trouble between the British and American enlisted men. What trouble there is springs largely from the fact that the Americans get more pay than the British, and that of course gets all the girls. The colleens are like girls everywhere. They like to have money spent on them.

It has got so they walk up and down outside the camp gate about the time the boys are coming out for the evening on pay day, and for a few days after. The congestion gets pretty heavy.

The boys say they like the Irish girls all right. The main trouble with them is they all want to get married. The reason for that is that they want to get to America eventually.

A lot of girls won’t waste their time on a man if they find out he’s married, so intent are they on sewing up that old ticket to America.

The other day a Marine officer was standing near a private at camp when a train went by. A note flew out the window and landed nearby.

“I wonder who that’s for,” the officer said.

“For me, sir,” the Marine said. “She’s been passing every day on the train, and I’ve been waving to her.”

So he picked up the note, and here’s what it said:

“If you’re single, call me tonight at such-and-such a number. If you’re married, forget about it.”

The Marines tell me the Irish girls are a clannish lot. There is indeed honor among girls wanting to get married. They say the minute one of them gets crazy about an American all the others lay off, and he couldn’t get a date with anybody else if he got up on a soapbox and pleaded.

The sailors, when they first arrived, threw out a lot of self-protective misinformation around town. For instance, they told the girls that any man wearing gold braid (an officer) had a contagious disease and should be avoided.

And that red stripes on a man’s sleeve (a petty officer) meant he was a criminal out on parole. But the girls soon found out the truth for themselves.

About the only way an enlisted man can get a girl at first is at a public dance or by the plain old pickup method. But this doesn’t mean they’re all of the street variety. Many swell girls have been picked up in this neck of the woods.

The officers, of course, fare better, for they have opportunities to meet girls through regular introductions.

The American officers run around mostly with the uniformed girls known as WRENS and WAAFS, and with American nurses and Irish girls whose families they have met.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 30, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – A fellow traveling around the way I do never knows an hour ahead of time how things are going to work out.

For example, this trip to Londonderry was decided on all of a sudden, so I quickly packed my bags and took the train. At Derry I found an unofficious, quick-thinking friendly people.

Maj. Dugan of the Marine Corps happened to be standing at the door of the officers’ house when my taxi drove up. He grabbed my typewriter and took me back to a small extra room with a cot, and said that was my room.

Then he asked me up to his room for a chat before dinner. Pretty soon Cmdr. Edward R. Sperry and Lt. Col. Lucian Burnham drifted in and sat on the bed.

Commander Sperry is executive officer of the naval base. Col. Burnham is in command of the Marines.

I got out my war correspondent’s credentials and showed them, just to keep the record straight. After a while dinner was ready, and we all went downstairs to the dining room. We chatted a few minutes before dinner.

Several other Navy and Marine officers were there, and I was introduced all around. Finally I came to one pleasant-looking officer with glasses and a mustache, who was introduced as Lt. Cmdr. Phillips.

Then Maj. Dugan said, “We’ve been waiting to see what would happen when you two got together.”

Yes, of course, we were schoolmates at Indiana University 20 years ago. I might have known it.

John Reed Phillips is from Michigan City, Ind. He was a doctor in France in the last war, and has been in the naval reserve several years. He was called up for active duty a few months before we got into the war.

You’ve never seen a guy in your life like this Dr. Phillips. My little room was perfectly all right, but he insisted that I take over his own room instead. When I said no, he just picked up my bags and carried them upstairs.

Since then he has been sleeping in a bare room while I have the luxury of his very homey, gas-heated room upstairs. I wear his sweaters, smoke his cigarettes and even read his mail.

He has toted me around in his car, introduced me to everybody, taken me to parties and on sightseeing tours, and finally loaded me down with luxuries ranging from cartons of American cigarettes to a jar of sandwich spread and a souvenir shillelagh. Praise be for Dr. Phillips!

There are nine officers in this house, and they’re all grand people.

Maj. Dugan drops in frequently for a before-dinner chat or midnight coffee. His name is James but we call him Red. He’s tall and slim and carrot-topped, and looks more like the Marines’ famous bulldog than it does itself. He is from Quincy, Mass. He owns a button factory, and has a wife and children.

Red Dugan used to play professional baseball, and he does leather tooling as a hobby. He has his tools with him now, and makes belts, wristbands and other beautiful things. He’s always laughing, yet he loves to fight. He’ll fight anybody, at the drop of a hat.

Another officer with whom I have found a lot in common is Cmdr. Jesse Suisser, from Denver. He has been with radio station KOA for years, as a technical expert.

That’s how things turn out when they’re perfect. If I didn’t have work to do, I think I’d just stay here for the duration and let Dr. Phillips and the Navy support me in the manner to which I am becoming accustomed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 31, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – Every now and then an all-day picnic or sightseeing tour is arranged for the men of the new American naval base here. I happened to get in on one of them.

We started out at 9:30 of a Sunday morning in two big busses, each driven by a Navy enlisted man. There were about 60 men altogether.

The sailors drifted up to the busses one by one, but the Marines with their traditional order came marching up.

I happened to be in the bus that was mostly occupied by Marines. Capt. Frank Martincheck of Washington, Pa., who used to be a schoolteacher, was the only officer in the party.

We drove for about an hour and a half. We went across lovely rolling country, past peat bogs where turf was being cut for fuel, through herds of cows on the road, through little villages. We even went through the famous whisky town of Bushmill, but didn’t stop.

Finally we came along the seashore – a rugged, high seashore. We stopped for a little while to scramble among the ruins of old Dunluce castle. Then we drove on a few miles farther and came to the end of the road. A tiny inn was spotted there on a cliff.

Huge boxes of sandwiches were brought out of the busses. We all stood on the cliff and ate standing up against the wind that was blowing coldly across from Scotland. The sailors and Marines lined up while a petty officer opened cans of beer and gave one to each man. Then we started walking toward the high point of the trip – the Giants’ causeway.

I had heard of the Giants’ causeway all my life, yet I didn’t even know what country it was in. I’m now able to reveal, despite the strict wartime censorship, that it’s in Northern Ireland.

It consists of thousands upon thousands of flat-sided rock pilings, about as big as a man’s body, standing together straight up on end. It looks like a crystallization, and they say that’s exactly what it is, on a gigantic scale. Legend has it that old Irish giants used to walk across the causeway clear to Scotland.

We milled around on the causeway for a couple of hours following steep trials along the cliffs for about four miles, and finally returned to the busses.

We sat at the little inn for a breather before starting the trip home. Some of the boys, in fact, had been taking breathers all the time we’d been away, and hadn’t been nearer the causeway than the front door of the inn.

It was the day before payday and there was hardly a shilling in the crowd, but one wise sergeant had borrowed a pound from the captain before we started the walk, and his pound was all inside him when we got back. He felt wonderful.

When we finally started home the sergeant was the last one in the bus. As soon as he sat down he started singing an old Marine song about wishing the captain was in Hades and the major in the brig, or something like that. I looked out of the corner of my eye at Capt. Martincheck, and he was grinning all over. You could feel a sort of tingle of holiday spirit go through the bus, and it didn’t take long to coagulate.

My friend Chief Hurley, the old arranger, had coyly secreted an extra case of beer in the back seat. The first thing I knew the cans were being passed from hand to hand all along the bus. The bars were down, and the spirits up.

The sergeant’s song was taken up by others, and when it came to an end somebody started another. That was the beginning of a songfest that lasted two solid hours.

Marine belts and ties came off. The sergeant got funnier and funnier. Chief Hurley put on his crying-jag act, and then sang “Old Black Joe.” By this time rain was coming down in torrents, Walkers along the road stopped to stare and grin at the bus, from which came the strains of “Tipperary.”

They sang every song I’d ever heard of and between songs you could hear Indian yells. Even I sang.

When we finally rolled back through Londonderry the captain turned around and said:

“Come on, what’s the matter? You want them to think we didn’t have a good time? Make some noise!”

And thus we drove into the middle of the American naval base in Londonderry singing and yelling like a bunch of wild men.

The door of the bus opened, and it was all over. It was probably the best day I had had personally in years – a day of abandon, well done.

To appreciate the point you have to remember that Marine fighting men are rigidly disciplined. I know how tough and unbending Marine rule is, but I had forgotten that true discipline flourishes on or off duty in a democracy. The captain’s presence didn’t hamper the men a bit. In fact he was singing and yelling and taking his beers along with them, and laughing when they stumbled over his feet or the sergeant would lose his balance and fall on him.

But the thing that thrilled me about it was that there wasn’t one minute of that whole trip, riotous as it was, when Capt. Martincheck couldn’t have stood up and ordered the men instantly to form ranks in the middle of the road and marched them away across a muddy field in perfect formation, straight and stiff and proud as a king’s guard. The captain knew it. The men knew it. All accepted it, and were superior for it.

I’ve long since passed the gushing stage, but riding across Ireland with that bunch of yelling Marines on a holiday made me terribly proud of America.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 1, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – Here are three little sketches to suggest what life can be in Northern Ireland for those Americans who are over here for a long, long time.

There is a place called Rising Sun a few miles outside of Derry. Mother O’Conner wouldn’t change the name of the place even if it occurred to her. She probably figures that Rising Sun was her idea long before the Japs thought of it.

Rising Sun is a public house – a country public house, not a city one. It is a long, low, white building with a thick thatched roof, the kind you so often see in pictures of Ireland. It sits off the road a little, more like a farmhouse than a public house. There is a small bar when you go in, but if you like you can go right on back to the kitchen.

There Mother O’Conner sits beside the kitchen stove. She is an immense woman, in a black dress. You have the feeling that she hasn’t risen from her chair in many years. Her face is motherly, and full of quiet good nature.

A couple of naval officers are already there when I arrive. The snappiness of the naval uniforms seems queer, out on this Irish farm where you can almost feel the “little people.” The officers are deeply fond of Mother O’Conner. They liked to kid her.

Susan O’Conner is the barmaid. She brings the drinks to the kitchen, and guests use the dining table and sewing machine to set them on. You sit on an old-fashioned sofa tilted at one end. The rain is coming down outside.

The naval officers are telling Mother O’Conner about their recent trip to London. She laughs at some of their expressions that are strange to her. The officers play a matching game to see who pays. The two have a well-framed trick so they never have to pay. Mother O’Conner laughs at her recently found boys from so far away. She drinks lemonade with us. It is only half-light in the old kitchen.

“Now sing, Susan,” she says. Susan is a pretty Irish girl.

Looking down on us from the kitchen wall is an old picture of Christ, Susan sits on the kitchen table and, timidly at first, like a child, sings that grand song, “Bless ‘Em All.” Then she goes off into Irish songs we have never known. Her voice is good. It is thrilling to sit there and listen.

The rain is coming down, and a deep dusk has come prematurely. It is only 10:30, but the night is heavy all around. It is time to go. We can barely see in the old kitchen. Mother O’Conner sits immobile in her great chair, looking gently at her new boys. Under that old thatched roof in the country we have found something of the goodness of life.

The Rev. Richard G. S. King is dean of the great Londonderry Cathedral. He wears knee breeches, and black cloth leggings buttoned to the knees. He has invited you to tea. He is fond of Americans. Perhaps Dean King is fond of all peoples, but I don’t know how he could be.

He served through the last war. He has a son in Madagascar in Ceylon with the RAF.

“Have you ever been to America?” I ask.

He laughs, says, “Oh, no, no, no, I’ve always been too poor to get that far away.”

We sit in a small dining room and a maid serves our tea. It is cruelly hot and bitterly strong. With it we eat pancakes sprinkled with sugar. That’s something new to the naval officer and myself who are the dean’s guests.

The dean leads us to a huge study upstairs. It is a study mellow with age. There are deep chairs, polished brass, and old books. Dean King is the historian of Londonderry. He is a historian merely because he loves books. The entire room is walled with books on Ireland.

The dean lights the cigar the naval officer brought him. “You’re too good to me,” he says. “You’ll spoil me. I mustn’t get used to such luxuries.”

And then he says, “You don’t have to be anywhere, do you? I like to talk when there’s plenty of time. I can’t talk to somebody who has to be somewhere else in a half hour.”

I did have to be somewhere else in a half hour, but I didn’t mention it. And it was two hours later when I got there. It isn’t every day you can sit in the great study of the dean of Londonderry Cathedral and listen to his endlessly captivating talk.

A gay party is in progress in a Londonderry apartment. The young people are having a good time. It’s just like parties at home, except that it’s full of British and Irish accents. There are officers and civilians and WRENs and American Army nurses. They’re grand people.

All international dislikes have broken down because everybody is having fun. The military girls are in civilian dresses. They changed in a bedroom. They’re glad to get out of their strict uniforms for a brief evening.

A phonograph starts up, and people take off their shoes and dance in their stocking feet – all except me, of course, who couldn’t dance if Arthur Murray was propping me up. But I take off my shoes anyhow. Me in my white socks!

Then there are songs and shouts of gaiety. The place is thick with cigarette smoke. There is a bedlam of British and American and Irish, an international chaos of sound.

As a climax, a door bursts open and a man whom I could name but shan’t comes riding into the living room on a bicycle, fully dressed in a WREN’s uniform – skirt, coat and three-cornered hat.

There you have, not what our American officers over here do during the day when work is done, but what they can do, and do do, when work is over and a strange country holds out its arms.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 3, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – Now we start with the United States Army of Northern Ireland. There is a lot of it, and it is scattered all over the place.

Since military security forbids me to write specifically about any place, troop unit or station, or to identify them in any way, I have mapped out a new technique, you might call it, of working.

The Army has graciously provided me with a peep and a driver and I am free to go anywhere I please. So I’m spending four days each week with the troops, all over Northern Ireland, one night in one camp and the next night in another.

Most of the time I live and eat with the enlisted men rather than the officers. At the end of four days I come back to Belfast with my head full of stuff and sit for three days holed up in a hotel room writing the pieces I’ve gathered.

Then when I’ve got everything down on paper and sent it off to America, I blow a bugle, summon the trusty peep, and go snorting out over the countryside again. Remember, you can drive clear across Northern Ireland in three hours.

All the columns in the next few weeks will have to be rather generalized. Only now and then can I write about an individual specifically, and never about a certain group specifically.

But through it all, and despite the generalizations, I think I can eventually draw you an honest picture of what life is like for these boys over here who form the vanguard of a great expeditionary force that is building up in this part of the world.

Newspapermen like myself drift in and out of Northern Ireland, but there are three correspondents and four photographers assigned here permanently. They represent the press associations and picture services.

They all came over on the first convoy in January. They live with the officers in Nissen huts in one of the camps, but some of them keep a hotel room in Belfast also. They all wear uniforms, and so do the visiting American and British correspondents who run over from England occasionally.

The question most frequently asked me is why I’m not wearing a correspondent’s uniform. The answer is that the War Department gives two types of accrediting to newspapermen.

One permits the correspondent to rove around, and this one does not require a uniform. I chose this type deliberately so I could be free to circulate. Also, it’s nice not to have to spend $300 on a uniform when I’m not really a soldier. However, if I should ever decide to be attached directly to troops and go to the front with them, I would have to wear a uniform.

The correspondents’ uniform is exactly the same as the officers wear except that there are no shoulder insignia.

Theoretically, correspondents have the rank of acting captain. They rate salutes, and are subject to military discipline. Actually they aren’t disciplined or restricted at all, and the average soldier doesn’t know whether to salute them or not.

Despite my civilian clothes, I’ve been getting saluted all over Ireland. That’s because I ride around in an Army peep and wear an officer’s-type trenchcoat that I got in London last year. Sentries, and soldiers along the road, apparently think my dilapidated civilian hat is just the whim of some eccentric general, so they take no chances and salute themselves to death.

Naturally, I don’t know what procedure to follow in return, so I usually just wave and yell, “Howzit, kid?”

Actually I believe I get along better not being in uniform, bunking around with enlisted men as I do. An officer’s uniform would scare them and put them on guard, and I couldn’t lie around half the night shooting the bull with them. As it is, they seem to feel that I’m just another old broken-down guy from home and sort of a sight for sore eyes.

The other night I fell in with a group of sergeants at one camp just as they were starting uptown to see a movie. I said, “I’ll go along if it won’t be interfering with your plans.”

And one of them said, “Good Lord no! We’re so glad to see an American in civilian clothes we wish you’d just stay with us all the time.”

I don’t know yet how flexible the Army censorship is, but I have read the rules and if the censors stick to their own rules there is very little that I would normally want to write that I can’t.

These columns go from here to London in a sealed Army pouch, and are transmitted from there to New York by wireless, as we old continentals call it. And I might add it is costing the office a pretty penny, so you’d better read every column twice.

The columns are censored three times – once by the Army, in London; once by the British cable censors; once by the American cable censors on your side of the pond. So you may be sure that by the time they get to you they are lily-white and safe as an old maid.

Now that I’ve used up the day letting you in on all my family secrets I will get to bed and try to get on with my business tomorrow.

As an afterthought, Irish beds are wonderful. They are tall, deep and even in the summertime they have enough covers to crush a mastodon. I can at least keep warm in bed over here.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 4, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (By Wireless) – Before I start in on the Army camps, let me give you some idea of what Belfast is like.

There are no Army camps here, but the soldiers come here on leave. Nearly every American soldier in Northern Ireland has been in Belfast at some time or other.

This is a city of half a million. There has always been a rivalry between Belfast and Dublin as to which is the bigger.

Belfast is a busy industrial place, surrounded by hills. By driving three or four miles out you can look right down on the city.

There is still lots of traffic in the streets. They have awkward-looking double-decker trolleys here that stack up in long lines of congested traffic just as the trolleys do in Washington.

These trolleys are so tall and topheavy that if you sit in the extreme front or back on the top deck you swing up and down as if you were on a teeter-totter. You almost get seasick.

Belfast looks like a city at war. Barrage balloons fly overhead. British and American Army cars form a sizable portion of the traffic. Uniforms are everywhere.

The newspapers are thin – four pages. Store windows are either beaverboarded up, with a tiny show window in the center, or criss-crossed with tape in fancy designs. The clothing on display has signs telling how many coupons are necessary to buy it.

A few autos have those fantastic gas bags on the roof to supply fuel. Brick shelters line the streets, and more are still going up.

Downtown there are huge concrete water tanks for firefighting in some future blitz. The tanks are shoulder high and sometimes as big as a quarter of a block square. They have signs around saying, “Static water.”

Big steel water pipes run along the curbs. These were hastily laid to provide extra firefighting facilities.

Belfast had its blitzing a year ago Easter. It was really surprised. And what a pasting this place had! Right downtown entire blocks are so completely blank they are used now as parking lots or for water tanks or are just standing vacant.

The clean-up job has been so perfect – shattered walls pulled down, holes patched up, rubble carried away – that I really believe the average American soldier seeing his first bomb damage doesn’t get the full significance of it.

Belfast sidewalks are so crowded you can hardly walk sometimes. A new American correspondent said it was as bad as Times Square.

Everybody is working. Prices are high. There aren’t many good places to eat, and even at these you have to get there early, for the best dishes are soon gone. It’s a restricted diet that you get over here, but there is certainly enough, though the Army eats much better than the civilians.

Pedestrians pay absolutely no attention to the lights or the traffic. People jaywalk in the middle of a block without a single sidewalk glance. It’s the worst city for driving that I’ve ever been in.

There are no shoeshine boys or stands in Belfast. An entrepreneur could clean up a small fortune starting a string of shoeshine stands for Americans.

I can’t verify it, but I heard the other day that a Belfast man recently started a pressing shop and within three weeks was so overwhelmed with trade that he just gave up and went out of business.

The Americans have been eager to learn the history and legends of the country around them. It is almost impossible to buy an Irish history – the Americans have bought them all.

Another thing I’ve noticed, especially among soldiers on leave, is that they go for the children. They’ve already got half the kids of Northern Ireland hopelessly spoiled by giving them pennies. In the parks on a Sunday you see a soldier swinging a kid on his foot, or playing catch. Irish people have mentioned to me many times how impressed they were with the way the Yanks take to the children.

A civilian visitor like myself has to spend at least a day getting his ration card. Then there is a long trolley ride to a police station where he registers as an alien. My ration card hasn’t been touched yet and probably won’t be. The hotels and restaurants seldom bother to ask for coupons.

When I registered, the police sent to London for my little police book that I left on file there more than a year ago. It has just arrived in Belfast. A police sergeant brought it to my room, with smiles and handshakes. I had never supposed I would see that little book again.

Although the red tape involved in so much registering is tiresome, the Ulster officials have been without exception friendly and pleasant, so I haven’t minded.

My official papers consist of an American passport, an Army correspondent’s card, a certificate of inoculations, a British registration card, a food ration book, a Ministry of Information pass, a police booklet and a card exempting me from the alien curfew laws.

All this requires a huge black wallet almost as big as I am. And also, since I’m damned rich, I always carry my money in gold doubloons. The whole thing makes my right shoulder sag down about three inches as though it were crippled.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 5, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND (By Wireless) – In this column I will try to give you a general idea of the mental attitude of the American soldiers who are the vanguard of the new AEF.

Some of them have been here going on six months now, others only a short while, but their feelings are all about the same. I have now traveled enough and lived enough with the troops that I think I have a pretty good idea of their general outlook. Basically it is this:

1. They are impatient to get into action – not because of any thirst for war but because they want to get it over with and get home. Getting home is the real point. But they know they may not see home again till the fighting is done, and they are tired of waiting.

   I saw the other day that a poll showed 48 per cent of the American people in favor of opening a second front this summer. I am sure a similar poll among the American troops in northern Ireland would go 99 per cent for an immediate descent on the continent.

2. The soldiers say they have reached the peak of their Army schooling. In America they learned about all there was to learn short of actual combat. And now that they are just busily marking time, it seems anti-climactic to them.

3. They don’t dislike Ireland, but they miss America’s weather. No matter how well they may fall in with the local community, they miss above all things their home companionships.

   They miss American things. They feel that things at home are not only different from things over here, but that they are better. Time after time I have heard a soldier say that he now appreciates his home town – which he had never thought much of before.

4. In general there is no kick at all against the Army. Without exception the men praise the Army food. And it seems to me that they like their officers better than our soldiers did in the last war.

   As for money, they are getting more now than they know what to do with.

5. Oddly enough, they don’t mind the rather primitive way most of them are living. They have adjusted themselves to it quickly. It isn’t the physical inconvenience they dislike, it’s the waiting for action.

   Time doesn’t hang heavy, for they are kept pretty busy. It’s just that they want to get the fight finished and get home.

6. They miss the small news from home. Over here they get the headline news, but none of what we might call the second-stratum American news – such things as an explosion in Iowa, a train wreck in Pennsylvania, a heat wave in Kansas, Ralph Ingersoll joining the Army, or the latest effects of gas rationing.

   They devour the Stars and Stripes, so when I get to London I’m going to suggest that it carry one page a week of just this type of news from home. And I’ll bet a shilling to tuppence that nothing comes of it.

7. The soldiers’ time is too occupied for much philosophizing or introspection.

8. When the boys left their home towns to go into the Army some of them may have done so in a spirit of adventure. But life right now is neither adventurous nor romantic to them. It is just everyday soldiering.

9. Despite their wish to be home, practically all the boys are proud and glad to be over here instead of stymied in some camp back in America.

10. Taken all in all, the American troops as individuals and units are pretty well satisfied, pretty cocky, and they think they’re the best fighters in the world.

I guess that’s what it takes to win a war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 6, 1942)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN IRELAND (By Wireless) – The American troops in Northern Ireland work hard, but they have plenty of time off, too.

The average soldier, unless he is standing guard or on kitchen duty, has every evening to himself. If his camp is close to a town, he can go to town for the evening. If not, he sits around camp, but he has no duties to perform.

In addition to that, every soldier has a 24-hour leave about once a week. Formerly the bulk of these leaves came on week-ends, with the result that the camps were weakened on Saturdays and Sundays, and the cities and towns were crowded with soldiers.

But now a new system is in effect, and an equal number of men go on leave every day of the week. There are no more soldiers in Belfast on a Sunday than on a Tuesday.

The men themselves like it better, too, for there is little to do in the cities on Sunday. Also, if they all go to town at once the competition is too heavy and most of them have to go without girls, and just wander the streets.

In one camp I know of there is no such thing as Sunday. Well, there is Sunday, but it may come this week on Thursday, next week on Saturday. German bombers will never find a true week-end lull in the American operations over here, either in the sense of work stoppage at the camps or of cities congested by soldiers on leave.

Some camps now run their 24-hour leaves from noon one day to noon the next. That means the boys can catch a train or bus from the home camp and be in Belfast by mid-afternoon, have a high time until midnight or after, get a cheap, clean room from the Red Cross for the night, have breakfast, catch a train in mid-morning and be back in camp by noon ready to go to work.

Their entertainment in Belfast consists of dancing, going to movies, drinking in the pubs, walking aimlessly up and down the streets or sitting on the grass in the City Hall park.

Of course the soldiers don’t all go to Belfast by any means. I have found that lots of boys in isolated camps actually prefer one or another of the smaller cities, where they have grown to know the people and have become regular attendants at the local dances, pubs and teashops. One or two trips to Belfast, just to see the place, usually satisfies most of them.

As I have said before, there is no such thing over here as an immense camp of thousands and thousands of men like the camps back home. Anything more than a few hundred in one camp is unusual here.

The troops are dispersed all around Northern Ireland, usually in quarters formerly occupied by the British. Although most of the troops are living in small camps, in Nissen huts, not all of them are. Others live in every conceivable way.

They live in old mills, in castles, in barns, in private homes, and what not. There is no common denominator of living conditions for our troops over here except in the line of food. The food is good everywhere. Outside of that, things vary greatly.

Very little new construction has been done in creating the camps. Our soldiers have largely taken over camps that had been used by the British. British standards of Army comfort are not as high as ours, and very few Americans over here have the same bang-up living facilities they had in the camps at home.

In some camps the enlisted men are living more comfortably and conveniently than the officers in other camps. The only Americans in Northern Ireland who can be said to be living a standardized, normal type of life are the sailors and Marines at the Londonderry naval base.

The Army isn’t bothering to install more than the barest necessities, because of the underlying principle of mobility. No outfit knows today whether it will be in the same place next week. They are almost as fluid as though they were in the field with the enemy close at hand. Everything is improvised and ready for moving on a moment’s notice.

You’ll see very little conventional office equipment in an Army office over here. The walls are bare, the floors unpainted. The letter baskets are gasoline tins cut in half. The desks are merely rough boards nailed together, with legs on hinges for quick folding. Telephones can be detached and carried away in a few seconds. The sergeant-typist has to fire a coal stove as well as type his reports.

Things sure ain’t like things used to be back in Wall Street.