Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 25, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the North African desert –
While the rest of the men were working on the planes, I spent the day wandering around the desert talking to nomadic Arab shepherds. I’d walk up to one, say “Bonjour,” and shake hands. The French and the Arabs are great handshakers. The first one I hit was a young fellow, handsome in a way but badly pockmarked.

I was looking for a long-bladed Arabian knife for one of the officers back at our airdrome. So, after shaking hands and giving my new friend a cigarette, I started asking him if he had a knife with a long blade, sharp on both edges, and with a wire-wrapped handle. I may as well have saved the description, for he never even got it through his head I was asking for a knife.

He didn’t speak French, which left us no common ground, particularly since I don’t speak it either. But I got out my own pocketknife, and then went through all the motions which, in almost any other country, would have conveyed to him that I was engaged in some sort of general discussion about a cutting implement. But not this baby.

‘No comprez’ Ernie’s signs

Arabs aren’t dumb, but somehow, they just don’t seem to understand our brand of sign language. That Arab boy and I would talk our heads off, and not understand a word, and then he’s giggle and shake his head as if to say:

This is silly but it’s fun, isn’t it?

The Arabs are all very friendly and they smile easily. It makes you feel nice and kindly toward them, even if you can’t talk with them.

This fellow was herding about 50 camels, grazing, just like cattle, on little clumps of sagebrush. I made signs that I wanted to see his camels close up, so we walked over. On the way over, I did find that the Arab word for camel is something like “zu-mel.”

He had his eye on a certain one he wanted to show me. It was old and shaggy, and was hobbled by having its right legs tied together with rags. I asked why, and the best I could make out was that it was a bad camel. As we came near, the camel rolled its tongue out one side of its mouth and gave forth a series of the most repulsive belching noises I’ve ever heard. At this, the Arab looked at me and laughed and then started imitating the camel.

Arab boy and his dog

This went on and on. Every time the camel would belch, the Arab would mimic him and laugh derisively at the silly old camel. Finally, he had to go round up some of the herd that was getting too far away, so we shook hands and off he went across the desert.

Late that afternoon, I was sitting near one of the planes when an Arab boy and his little sister, on a donkey, came past. Their white dog was running ahead of them, and we called to the dog. One of the soldiers had the dog coaxed up almost to him when the Arab boy got there and started throwing rocks at the dog to drive it away. We all frowned and said, '‘No, no, no,’’ and indicated to the boy that we wanted him to call the dog back so we could pet it. He nodded his understanding, then picked up another rock and threw it at the dog. I tell you, they just don’t understand sign language.

The boy himself was perfectly friendly. He sat down beside me and I gave him a cigarette. From the way he choked I guess he wasn’t a smoker, and was smoking just to be polite. He sat around about 15 minutes watching us and smiling. After a while, I tried the dog business again, pointing at the dog and making motions for him to call it over. He smiled and nodded, then got up and threw another rock at the dog.

The Arabs, incidentally, have beautiful dogs, as well as horses. Some of them look like small collies, but most of them, strangely, seem to have a strain of the Arctic husky in them. Usually, they are white with just a touch of cream.

Lots of Missouri mules

The goat and sheep flocks are large. Once we saw a flock of sheep that were all black. Of course, we made wisecracks about there being enough black sheep to furnish one for every family back home. It isn’t unusual to see a sheep spotted black and white like a dog.

The desert is literally alive with shepherds. You can see their tents in the distance – dark brown with wide dark stripes. The average Arab had camels, goats, sheep, horses, burros and dogs. And it seems a little incongruous somehow, but we saw lots of plain old Missouri mules on the desert.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 26, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa –
We finished the salvage work on the wrecked planes and cooked our supper on the ground. As we ate, the soldier-mechanics got to talking about the trip, and our presence so close to enemy territory. One of the truck drivers said:

Back in the States, the commanding officer made us a speech one day. He told us we were lucky to be driving trucks. Almost made us feel like slackers. Said we’d go through the whole war and never be within 500 miles of the enemy. I’d like to get hold of that guy now. He’s still back there.

One boy said:

And here we are within 30 miles of the Germans.

The officer said:

Thirty miles? It’s only 20 miles.

I chimed in:

I’m going to make it 10 miles in the column. We’ve got to be heroes, haven’t we?

That set the boys off. They told me how to write the story about our trip.

They joke, in all seriousness

They said:

Write about digging the ditch. Tell them how we dug our heads off and got finished just as a German plane came over. You don’t have to say it was 30,000 feet high and couldn’t have seen us with bifocals.

That’s the way they joke about it, but they’re only half-joking all the time. The boys were really afraid of strafing. They held a consultation about going home. One soldier and myself wanted to spend the night there, and then make the long journey home next day. But the mechanics and truck drivers didn’t relish driving in daytime so near the enemy lines. They voted to leave that night. And leave we did. We finished our supper, gave what rations were left to the French, rounded up our Arab guide, and pulled out just at dusk.

We drove all night, without lights. It was easy to follow the tracks. Yet we had to cross rocky river beds with steep banks, and dodge countless holes, and thread our way over drifted sand dunes, and pick the right trail where tracks branched out in all directions.

It was a touchingly beautiful night. The sky was cloudless and the moon so bright that it dimmed out all but a few of the most lustrous stars. And it was warm when we started. We all felt relieved, somehow, and in high spirits. But we had forgotten the chill that comes with night on the desert. By 8 o’clock, we were getting cold. By 9, we were scrunched on the floor and wrapped in blankets. From 10 on, we were in an agony of cold. Nothing could keep it out. Finally, it became an intense pain, and we suffered a sleepy horror from it all night.

Arab grapevine is uncanny

The slow dusty miles dribbled away behind us in the moonlight. Far off, little red fires dotted the desert where the shepherds camped. Dark forms of grazing camels passed in the weird light. Once we stopped and turned off the motors, and could hear a German plane very high in the night sky. And once our Arab friend “Wah,” apparently unaccustomed to motoring, got carsick and we had to stop and let him out for a while.

We went through little towns, and awakened the dogs. At 2 a.m., we came back past our first French garrison, where guards stood watch on the high walls, day and night. Their grapevine signal system is uncanny. For, when we pulled up, the commandant was out of bed, with an overcoat over his pajamas, waiting for us.

I’ve heard tales of the Arab grapevine. They tell of one case where it carried the news of a crashed German plane 150 miles, and faster than the French Army’s wireless system.

We said goodbye to “Wah” and shook hands with the commandant and barged on into the night. The miles and hours grew longer as we neared home. The last 20 miles seemed to take weeks. Once the driver stopped for our routine stretch, and the rigidly cold soldiers growled at him to keep going.

Something to tell grandchildren

Finally, we came home, an hour before daylight, and just as the moon played out on us. We hadn’t seen any war, but we had seen the Sahara by day and by night. One of the soldiers said:

I’ll be telling my grandchildren someday about the time I crossed the Sahara Desert.

Another one said:

You didn’t cross it.

Oh, well, what the hell, I crossed part of it. Let’s get to bed and stay there all day.

And that’s what we did.

[adamsano]

Ernie is able to effectively capture the trials and tribulations of regular men and women on the front lines of war. He literally puts himself in their shoes.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 27, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Algeria –
Before leaving this special vicinity, I want to tell you about a couple of friends of mine. They are Military Police. I like them as much as anybody I know in the whole Army.

They’ve been coming to see me so long now that I’ve actually forgotten how we first got acquainted. I know an officer who was in my room one day when they were there, and after they left, he said to me:

You’re the damnedest guy I ever saw. I’ve been in the Army three years and you’re the first guy I ever heard of who knew an MP personally. Nobody knows any MPs.

Maybe not, but if so they’re ignorant of one of the finest groups in the Army. The Military Police don’t have the taint to them that they had in the last war. This time they are a specially picked, highly trained, permanent organization. An MP serves throughout the war as an MP, he is proud of his organization, and he is respected by his fellow soldiers.

One day an officer and I were talking about a barroom brawl the night before in which a drunk had tried to stab an MP, and the officer said:

Anybody who starts anything with an MP is insane. They’ve picked men, and their training starts where Commandos leave off. They know every method of fighting in the world.

MPs get tough training

And from the MPs that I’ve seen, from their demeanor and their conduct, I believe that next to Rangers and Paratroopers they are really the pick of the Army.

But to get around to my two friends. They are: Cpl. Freeland L. Riles Jr., of 601 Broad St., Darlington, South Carolina, and Pvt. Thomas Stewart, of Scurry, Texas. Riles goes by the nickname “Snip,” and Stewart goes by “Tom.” They both wear white leggings, and brass whistle-and-chain over their shoulders, and Sam Browne belts, and carry a big .45, and believe me they both know how to shoot it too.

They never knew each other before the Army, of course, but they’re the same age to the day. Both born on July 7, 1919. “Snip” went only through the eighth grade, Tom through the ninth. Then they both started to work. Both of them talk low and slow and drag out their words as if they had all day to say a sentence. Snip’s is the soft easy drawl of the Deep South, while Tom’s was the wide, frank drawl of the open spaces. They were as different as day and night.

Tom says:

Give me open country. I like big country where if you want to holler you can get out and holler.

Tom’s face is windy-red, and he is land and jointy. In the respectful fashion of his part of the country, he still refers to his mother as “Mama.” Neither he not Snip is making any headway at all trying to learn French.

Tom was a carpenter

Tom used to be a carpenter. He likes best to do the interior cabinetwork when a house is about finished. He says his specialty is making tables. He made a beauty for the general when he was at Camp Bowie in Texas.

Snip was a traveling route-agent for a bakery. He used to drive his bread truck 180 miles a day and make as high as $60 a week during tobacco season when people had money. He is a handsome youngster, black-haired and spic-and-span, but very quiet and serious. He was a star athlete in school. He says he was never homesick at all in England, but down here he thinks about home a lot.

He knows jujitsu and all the other methods of fighting, but he says he’ll never use his jujitsu, for it’s too easy to cripple somebody permanently. Both boys say they have very little trouble. Most soldiers who get to whooping it up in the backroom quiet down like mice and walk along peacefully the moment an MP shows up.

Post-war trips arranged

My friendship with these two fighters has struck me as odd, for I’m nearly old enough to be their father, and there’s little in companionship I can contribute to them. Yet they come daily and sit and chat; they say if I ever need an escort anywhere just to holler and they’ll take me; they insist on running errands for me; they bought a special bottle of champagne and brought it to my room on Christmas Eve for us three.

We’ve arranged to take trips together after the war. Snip insists on taking me on a South Carolina deer hunt, a famous institution where the man who misses his first deer gets his shirttail cut off.

And Tom has a two-week catfishing and cougar-hunting trip down the Nueces River all planned. I’ve agreed to go on these trips although I don’t know why, for I’ve never shot anything bigger than a rabbit in my life, and never intend to.

Tom wants to get into the border immigration service after the war. Snip thinks maybe his MP experience would qualify him for some kind of police work, although he’s really undecided what he wants to do.

I’ve noticed that both boys almost always preface their after-war plans by saying “If I live through it…” Nobody talks a great deal about that, but it’s in the back of everybody’s mind. It’s even in mine sometimes, despite the nice safety of my non-combatancy. Even a deer hunt looks beautiful way off there in the future.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 29, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Oran, Algeria –
It’s strange, but for some reason or other things seem to get damaged in wartime. So, less than two weeks after we landed in Africa, an Army Claim Commission had set itself up in each of the big occupied cities and was doling out money to aggrieved citizens whose persons or property had been damaged by our forces. There are 12 officers and 13 enlisted men in the Oran claims section. They handled 165 cases in the first two weeks. They paid off the first complainant three days after arriving.

Most of the claims are minor ones. A good many are for damage to crops where soldiers marched across fields or camped for the night. The commission brought along an American farmer in order to be able to handle such cases intelligently. He is Maj. William Johnson, who lives on a 200-acre farm six miles outside of Duluth, Minnesota. Ironically, he has been so busy in the office handling claims that he hasn’t had time to get outside of Oran and see any farms.

There have been a number of traffic accidents. In the first three weeks five people were killed by trucks, and eight or 10 mules have been killed. The commission pays $200 for a good work mule. That’s more than they’d pay at home, but good mules are harder to get over here. The price for a horse is about the same.

Commission pays ‘right’

One tough problem the commission faces is how much to pay for destroyed articles that are irreplaceable. One woman, for instance, filed a claim for 375 francs for a radio the Army had commandeered. She said she paid 250 francs for it, but was asking 375 because she simply couldn’t get another one. The commission agreed with her reasoning and paid her 375 francs.

The head of the commission is Lt. Col. George T. Madison, a tall, gangling, slow-talking lawyer from Bastrop, Louisiana. I can never forget Col. Madison because he led our little detachment off the boat months ago, and I marched into Oran for the first time behind him. Another friend of mine on the commission is Capt. John M. Smith of West Memphis, Arkansas. He knows a lot of my friends in Memphis, and relays news of them that comes in his letters.

Don Coe, United Press correspondent, arrived in North Africa a while back from the gold Coast, way down below. He had been sitting for six months in Liberia, not permitted to write a line. He says he didn’t mind it a bit.

He and three other correspondents went to Liberia last June. They lived throughout the tropical rainy season in tents, and here in Oran, Don slept in a real bed and under blankets for the first time in six months.

Bed traded for smokes

Don doesn’t smoke himself, but he left his bedroll and gas mask behind in order to bring scads of cigarettes to give away up here, which is the most thoughtful thing I’ve heard of in years. He says they were well fixed down there – but then we are up here too.

Don says he and other correspondents, to kill time during the long half year of doing nothing, thought of writing a book entitled I Found No War. But it’s hot down there, and all they did was think about it.

An Army friend of mine, Cpl. Jimmy Edwards from Tyler, Texas, used to be a cavalryman before the war, so consequently he goes nuts about the Arabian horses he sees here. Being an old horse-hater from way back I refuse to look at the beasts, so Jimmy has described them to me in his own words. He says:

I can’t help but notice how beautiful they are. They’ve got little feet, slim bodies, well-shaped heads and small ears. You see them hitched to these two-wheeled hacks in the city streets. One owner said you could buy one for about $200. That isn’t cheap but I’d sure like to have some to put in my pasture back home.

Burro delights

There is one animal here that delights both Jimmy and me, and that’s the local burro, or donkey. They’re only about two-thirds as big as our Southwestern burro, and their hair is slicker, giving them a much neater appearance, but they’re still just as droll-looking. Jimmy went up and measure one the other day. It was only 35 inches high, and its funny head was half as long as the burro was high. I asked the burro if he knew the Americans were here, and he shook his head and said he didn’t care who was in charge as long as he got fed. He ain’t the only one, either.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 30, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With U.S. forces in Algeria –
Every Army headquarters anywhere in the world has what is called a “Message Center.” It is run by the Signal Corps, and through it goes all the vast flow of communications necessary to keep an Army running.

Where I am, the Message Center handles my columns after they leave the censor. Some columns go home by wireless, some go part way by air and the rest by wireless, some go all the way home by air. I have to trust blindly to the boys in the Message Center to get my columns headed in the right direction and by the right means, and especially trust them to get them started somewhere immediately, and not let them lie around for days under a stack of papers. I understand there were several lapses in this column at home a while back, due to its getting bottlenecked somewhere along the route. But I’m sure the delay hasn’t been at the fountainhead of literature. For the boys at the Message Center and I have a system.

Now Ernie’s paying off

I’ll put their names in the paper if they treat me nice and handle my copy well; they’ll treat me nice and handle my copy well if I’ll put their names in the paper. It sounds like collusion, and undoubtedly is. At any rate, the boys have done their part, so now I’ll pay off. If any of their parents should read this, they may know their boys are living under cover, eating well, are in no personal danger, and that they are gay and have fun at their work. Here they are:

Lt. Gordon Carlisle, of 14 Cass St., Exeter, New Hampshire, was still in college when he joined the Army. They call him the boy from “Cow College,” the nickname for the University of New Hampshire. Coming from up north, he’s a fresh-air fiend, and keeps the boys frozen stiff by having the windows open all the time.

Erie private misses bowling

Pvt. Frank T. Borczon, of 631 Payne Ave., Erie, Pennsylvania, says the worst part of being in Africa is that he can’t find a bowling alley. He was a champion back home.

Pvt. Julius Novak, of 1613 Ave. V, Brooklyn, New York, is so quiet the boys can’t tell me a thing about him to put in the paper.

Pfc. George Doomchin, of 1944 Unionport Rd., the Bronx, said the great mystery of the war is how the Saturday Evening Post gets along without him. He used to sell it at home.

Pvt. Gerald Kelly, of 22 Central St., Elkins, West Virginia, is a cheerful, good-looking young fellow who used to be an athletic director for the YMCA.

Cpl. A. C. Moore, of Mobile, Alabama. His mother always called him “A.C.,” which has been slurred into “Ace” in the Army. In the slack hours late at night, the boys pass the time by drawing up court-martial charges against “Ace.” He is a printer by trade. His wife is waiting for him out in Lufkin, Texas.

Fill-‘er-up Phil Harrington

Pvt. William J. Harrington of 908 Greenfield Ave., Pittsburgh, is jovially known in these parts as “Fill-'er-up Phil.” Seems as though his glass is always getting empty.

Pvt. Jacob L. Seiler, of Covington, Louisiana, or “Jake the Fake,” as the boys call him, says to put down that he was a “mixologist” before the war. In other words, a bartender. I assume he carries on in the Army by getting the messages all mixed up.

Pvt. George Murphy, of 172 Grand St., Lowell, Massachusetts, spent years as a textile mill’s traveling salesman, and can’t seem to stop traveling.

Sgt. John D. Taylor, of Temple, Texas, is a big husky who was a football and baseball letter-man at the University of Alabama.

Cpl. Jack Price, of Bellefontaine, Ohio, says he grew up in a poolroom. His father owned one. Jack speaks only about twice a day, and then it’s always something that rolls the other boys in the aisles. That old dry wit, you know.

Beer salesman from Steubenville

Pvt. Ed Sailor, of 2542 North 31st St., Philadelphia, said to put down that he is a former postal clerk and well-known Strawberry Mansion pinball player. I asked him what Strawberry Mansion was. He said anybody in Philadelphia would know.

Pfc. Thomas C. Buckley, of New Hebron, Mississippi. They call him the “Mississippi Mud Hen.” He used to jerk sodas way down South. He celebrated Christmas and his first wedding anniversary the same day.

Cpl. Russell W. Harrell, of 902 East Burlington St., Fairfield, Iowa, has been everything – farmer, building constructor, hardware salesman – so nothing surprised him anymore.

Pvt. Primo de Carlo, lived at 255 North 7th St., Steubenville, Ohio. The boys give him more Italian nicknames than Musso himself, the main one being Signor Vaselino. The Signor just grins. Primo was once an opera singer. He went to school for three years in Milan. And then wound up selling beer in Steubenville. He wonders if he won’t eventually get back to Milan, after all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 31, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With U.S. forces in Algeria –
Everybody who comes in North Africa with the Army is issued a special desert-kit. The main item in our kit is a dust mask. It is a frightful-looking contraption. It consists of a big black rubber schnozzle that covers your nose and half your face. To this are attached two circular devices, about saucer size, which look like wheels and which hang over each jaw. Apparently, the theory is to scare the dust away.

We are also given a pair of old-fashioned racetrack goggles, the kind that strap around your head and have fuzz around the edges of the eyepieces. They’re tinted slightly brown to act as sunglasses. Further than that, each of us is given a dozen isinglass eyeshields, to be used largely for gas attack, but which can also be used for dust.

On the day when we have to put on our gas masks, dust masks, gas eyeshields, dust goggles, and steel helmet all at once, they’ve promised to give a medal to the last man to choke to death.

Dust gives ‘em ‘sundown throat’

Actually, nobody uses or needs his dust equipment at this season. It is raining a good part of the time, and some kind of duckfoot attachment for your shoes would be much more appropriate than a dust mask.

This country along the coast is not truly desert. It is without trees or much natura; vegetation, but it is all farming country, covered with vineyards and olive groves and grain fields. The soil is a sort of red clay.

But soon it will blow, and from what the people say, it will blow until we almost go insane. Even now, after a few rainless days, you can notice a thin film of dust on your table. You really can’t sense dust in the air, but some is there.

The doctors say this invisible dust, plus the rapid drop in temperature at sundown, is responsible for what we call, or at least I call, ‘‘sundown throat." Almost everybody I know gets a sore throat just about sundown. It’s a strange, seemingly unaccountable thing. It comes on just after the sun gets behind the hills and the evening chill starts coming down. Your throat gets so sore you can hardly swallow. It is gone next morning. If your general health is good, nothing comes of this “sundown throat.” But if you are run down, one of those African flu bugs may come along, and then your sore throat turns into the African flu, as happened to me.

Pill No. 2 kills Pill No. 1

Also in the desert kit are two little bottles of pills for purifying drinking water when you’re in the country. You put one pill in your canteen, let it sit half an hour, put in the other pill and wait a few minutes, then drink the water. Pill No. 1 kills all the germs in the water, and Pill No. 2 kills the nasty taste left by Pill No, 1. In addition, we have a can of mosquito paste, and pills to take for malaria. In this area, and at this season, there isn’t much need for those. I’ve yet to see a mosquito, although once in a while a malaria case turns up at one of the Army hospitals.

The local people consider December, January, and February their winter. They say they stop taking quinine Dec. 1, and start again in March. Right now, this seems the last place on earth where you’d get malaria – it simply doesn’t look like malaria country. For although this is Africa, it’s still as far north as Norfolk, and it’s not the steaming jungle you’re thinking of, a thousand miles south.

Our malaria pills are not quinine, but a substitute known as atabrin. We are warned not to take them without doctor’s instructions. Personally, I’m never going to take mine. I talked to one doctor from the South, a malaria specialist, who took his and thought he was going to die. He says he’d rather have malaria and get it over with.

‘Puny Pyle’s Perpetual Pains’

Africa is not clean, and we can expect a good bit of disease before we finally get out of here. Our sore throats and flu are known to the doctors as “winter respiratory diseases.” The malaria, dysentery, and stuff we’ll have this spring will be known as “summer intestinal disturbances.”

The large and small diseases that infect the ragged carcass of this sad correspondent at all seasons and in all climes are known medically as “Puny Pyle’s Perpetual Pains.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 1, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa –
One day Mrs. Sara Harvey of 227 Natchez Place, Nashville, Tennessee, wrote a letter to me, and it finally found its way over here. Mrs. Harvey asked me to look up her husband in England, and tell him to hurry up and get the war won and get back home to her.

Lots of people write me letters like that. Unfortunately, the world is a big place and our troops are scattered. Only once in a blue moon do I happen to be in the vicinity of the husband or sweetheart asked for. But the Harvey case turned out just right. When Mrs. Harvey wrote, both her husband and I were in England. When the letter arrived, we were both in Africa, and Mrs. Harvey’s ever-loving was right under my nose. All I had to do was walk through a bunch of palm trees and across a little sand, and there he was.

He is Sgt. Benson Harvey, radioman with a fighter squadron. He was playing catch with a baseball right after supper when I found him. Harvey and another fellow lived in a pup tent just big enough to hold their blankets. Their private slit trench is just a jump away. A small tinted picture in a glass frame hangs on the tiny pole at the back of the tent. The picture is of Mrs. Harvey.

Four brothers in service

Sgt. Harvey is a young fellow. Back in Nashville he used to be janitor, phone operator and all-round worker at an apartment house. He is quiet, friendly, sincere, slow-speaking – you’d almost know he was from Tennessee. His captain thinks a lot of him. He is one of four brothers scattered all over the world. Maj. Robert Harvey is a doctor now on his way overseas, probably to Africa. James is a chief petty officer in the Navy. He was through Pearl Harbor and the Solomons battles, and is somewhere at sea. His wife was once notified that he was dead – but he wasn’t. The fourth brother is Frank, an aviation machinist’s mate, who was on the Wasp when she was sunk.

Sgt. Harvey says it’ll be tough when they get home, for they’ll all want to tell their lies at the same time. Harvey has been in the Army two and a half years already. He has things pretty nice, as things go over here. I’m glad Mrs. Harvey wrote me about him.

While we were roaming around. Sgt. Harvey took me into the squadron’s little dispensary and hospital. It’s a big hole in the ground, about four feet deep – all tented over. It’s about the nicest improvised operating room around here. We got to talking with Sgt. Burt Thompson of 3660 East 151st St., Cleveland, Ohio. He used to be a production clerk in a hydraulic-equipment factory in Cleveland, but now he’s in the medical section and has hung around doctors so long, he’s started inventing things.

The Air Forces make up a medical kit for pilots to take with them on their missions. It’s in a canvas case with a zipper, and is placed behind the pilot’s seat. It’s all right if you can get to it, but a wounded fighter pilot can’t always reach it.

Smaller kits will be issued

So, Sgt. Thompson has assembled a smaller kit, which a pilot can carry right in the map pocket on his trousers leg. It is packed in the little tin box our dust goggles came in – about the size of a Nabisco wafer box. It has everything in it from bandages to a half gram of morphine which you can inject yourself. It even has a tourniquet, wrapped around the outside. Sgt. Thompson gave me one of them.

I asked:

Are you going to issue these to pilots?

He said:

We’d like to, but some new regulation has to come from headquarters first.

I said:

That’ll take months. Why don’t you just issue them?

Sgt. Thompson with a little grin said:

That’s what we intend to do.

There is now starting to grow up among the soldiers over here, I’ve noticed, a little feeling of resentment at, and superiority over, the soldiers back in the States. I’m sorry to see this, for I think it’s unfair. Few soldiers have the slightest control over whether they’re to be in Africa or in Florida. Soldiers don’t choose; they’re sent. The ones back home aren’t cowards, and are no doubt itching to get over here.

There is one tiling concerning home life that soldiers are absolutely rabid on: that is strikes. You just mention a strike at home to either soldier or officer, living on monotonous rations in the mud under frequent bombing, and you’ve got a raving maniac on your hands.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 2, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa –
The Americans’ love for pets never ceases to delight me. We are a people who are fundamentally kind to animals. You’d be surprised at how many nationalities aren’t. Our soldiers over here are shocked – I’ve heard them remark on it a hundred times – at the way the Arabs mistreat their dogs and burros.

You’d laugh if you could see the collection of pets at one camp I visited recently. There were countless dogs, several cats, one gazelle, one monkey, two or three rabbits, a burro, and, believe it or not, half a dozen chickens.

A gazelle, as somebody said, is a cross between a jackrabbit and a moose. Actually, it’s a tiny, doll-like deer, delicate and dainty, and stands no higher than a big dog. You’ve heard of the gazelle’s speed. They say they’ve been clocked at 60 miles an hour. They run wild in the mountains near here, and the French hunt them with shotguns. Many of our officers have gone on gazelle-hunting trips. Personally, I could no more shoot one of them than I could a friendly dog.

Bob says ‘no’ to glamor girl

About the cutest dog on the post is a fuzzy little mongrel called “Ziggie,” which belongs to Cpl. Robert Pond, of 2147 Marion St., Denver. He paid 500 francs for it. When the American actresses were in Africa, Carole Landis took Bob’s dog in her arms and asked if she could take it home with her. Seems she has two Great Danes and wanted a little dog to go with them. Bob, coolly superior to glamor, said “No.”

I happened to fall in with four young lieutenants of a bomber crew who had recently arrived from America. They had been on three missions in their first ten days, and had got shot up every time. Not shot down – just shot up.

The third time one engine was knocked out, and one rudder fell clear off just as they landed at the home airdrome. They really started getting their thrills in a hurry. I asked them whether this sudden taste of violent adventure pepped them up, or whether they were beginning to wonder. They laughed and said their only feeling was one of regret and annoyance that their plane would be out of commission for a few days.

Soldiers grow crop of beards

The four were Pilot Ralph Keele, a Salt Lake City Mormon, Co-pilot William Allbright, of Western Springs, Illinois, Navigator Robert Radcliff of Richland Center, Wisconsin, and Bombardier Eugene Platek, of Antigo, Wisconsin.

The soldiers have grown such a crop of beards that you think you’ve driven into one of our Western towns just the week before the annual Pioneer Days celebration. Over here Hollywood could find every type of beard that ever existed. Some are big and fierce, some blond and curly, some wispy and foppish, some of the sourdough kind, others as prim and sharp as a boulevardier’s. You’ll even find the old Irish type of jaw-whiskers. I let mine grow for two weeks but nobody noticed it, so I gave up.

In all this area near the front there is no such thing as a Post Exchange. The Army instead issues free such necessities as cigarettes, soap, razor blades, and so on.

‘Not in combat zone! Nuts!’

But at a forward post one day I tried to get some tooth powder, and was told disgustedly by the sergeant that there wasn’t any, because we weren’t in the combat zone.

I said with astonishment:

Not in the combat zone? Who says we’re not?

He said:

Some guy at some desk far, far away. I don’t know where he expects us to get in, in the first place, and in the second place, I wish he was here a few nights when the bombs start whistling. I’ll bet you couldn’t get him out of a slit trench all night. Not in the combat zone! Nuts!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 3, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria –
Here is the home of the renowned French Foreign Legion, probably, over the years, the most famous fighting unit in the world.

The Legion comprises the only true mercenaries left in existence. They’ll fight whomever their leaders tell them to; on either side, with the same emotions.

A Legionnaire lives with but one high goal – death on the battlefield. On the walls of one of the barracks is inscribed this message from a former commander:

You, Legionnaires, are soldiers made to die. I send you where you die.

The message is looked upon with reverence, almost as holy.

Like a good many things in this world, the Legion isn’t as romantic when you get close to as it is from a distance. It does have a fine fighting history, no question of that. And life in the Legion is much more modern than most of us have thought. And yet it is an empty life, by most standards. It is a bleak life. Men with fine minds, who for obscure reasons go into the ranks of the Legion, find that after a few years their minds have dwindled to a common denominator of mere existence.

They say that most Americans who have joined the Legion can’t stick out their five-year enlistments. Before the war Americans and British could get out of the Legion with a little diplomatic pressure. When a German enlisted, he was stuck for five years, no matter how he hated it. But Germans don’t hate it the way Americans and Englishmen do.

Glad to be beaten

The Legion consists of about 10,000 men. In this war, it fought the Germans in France and in Norway. Its record, as usual, was superb. After the fall of France, it withdrew to Algeria, its lifelong home. Last year, it fought against the British in Syria – it doesn’t make any difference to the Legion whom it fights.

Today, the Legion is scattered. Some of its units are bottled up by the Japanese in French Indochina. A few are fighting the Germans in Tunisia. The rest are spotted over North Africa, preparing for future battles. Fewer than 2,000 men are here at headquarters.

The morning the Americans landed in North Africa, the Legion started north on the 50-mile run to Oran to join the fighting. But they never arrived. Allied airplanes bombed and machine-gunned them along the highways, and they had to turn back. Their burned-out trucks still lie along the roadside. Fortunately, there were almost no casualties. The Legionnaires felt badly that they didn’t get to Oran in time. Not because they dislike Americans, but simply because they missed a fight.

Now the Legion is hand-in-glove with the Americans, and readying itself to join in the great fight on our side. The soldiers are impatient and itching to get going.

Discipline is absolute

Sidi Bel Abbès has become practically a shrine for Americans over here. More than 400 American officers go through the Legion’s home quarters every week. The Legion puts on parades for visiting American generals. American doughboys and Foreign Legion privates walk the streets together and sit in cafés, trying their best to talk to each other.

Discipline in the Legion is probably the strictest in the world. It isn’t just a brutal discipline; it is what professional soldiers point to admiringly as the absolute ideal in military precision of conduct. There is no sloppiness of dress, no relaxing of respect. Soldiers salute an officer clear across the street. They salute officers sitting at tables 50 yards away. Neglect to salute costs a Legionnaire eight days in jail. They salute me too. They would even if they knew I was only a correspondent, for I’m in uniform and it’s the uniform they salute.

‘French is spoken here’

There are still rough, murderous men in the Legion, but today many of them are high-type persons who left their home countries for political reasons. Fifty-five nationalities are represented. There are only three Americans and they are not here.

A large percentage of the Legion is now Spanish and German. Once we took over here, the question arose what to do with the German Legionnaires. That has been solved by sending them far to the south, with a detachment that will never come into contact with Axis troops and will fight no World War battles.

The Germans have made excellent Legionnaires, but they became so numerous there has been some resentment against them among the French. In one kitchen I noticed a sign in French saying “French is spoken here.” I asked the cook the significance of it. He said it got so that German was the predominant language around the kitchen, so he put up the sign to show there were some Frenchmen left.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 5, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria –
The home of the Legion was a great and pleasant surprise to me. I expected it to be a slovenly tent-camp out in an almost unbelievable desert, with dirty cutthroat troops and brutal-looking officers.

Everything is just the opposite. The headquarters is in a city of 60,000 people, with fine sidewalk cafés and paved streets and modern apartment houses. It is not in the desert at all, but in rich farming country.

The Legion buildings form a sort of academy, right in the heart of the city. There are four-storied permanent barracks, and fine parks inside the walls, with many flowers and extraordinarily clean grounds and buildings. There are museums, and beautiful statues and monuments about the grounds. There are nice homes for officers and noncoms and their families.

Officers are uniformed as though by Bond St., and most of them might be American businessmen or professors as far as their looks are concerned. At Saint-Cyr, the West Point of France, the top man in each class has the privilege of choosing where he shall serve. And it is a tradition that he always chooses the Foreign Legion. So, the Legion is led by career men.

Wooden hand is prize memento

Legionnaires tell me that many of the officers, though strict, are almost fatherly in their attitude toward the soldiers. And certainly, the ones I met are, without exception, gentlemen in anybody’s country.

The French Foreign Legion was created in 1831. So, it has more than a century of tradition behind it. The Legion is extremely proud of the two museums here in headquarters which depict its history. On the museum’s tiled floors there are beautiful brown-and-white Algerian rugs, somewhat similar to our own Navajo Indian rugs. Around the walls are case after case of Legion mementos – old swords, flags, pieces of uniform, guns, bullets, decorations.

The walls are hung with hundreds of pictures of Legion members who have died gloriously. Life-sized wax figures standing around the walls of one room show the dozen or so types of uniform worn by the Legion over the years.

The Legion’s most prized memento is, of all things, a wooden hand. In 1854, the Legion fought in the Russian Crimea, and in that campaign a Capt. Danjou had one hand shot off. So, he had a wooden hand made to replace it. The hand is of fine workmanship, the fingers are all jointed, and the thing looks almost lifelike.

Legion abandoning its cavalry

Well, the Legion went to Mexico during Maximilian’s reign, and there was fought the most memorable battle in its history. A tiny party of 115 Legionnaires barricaded themselves in a hacienda at the town of Camerone, and battled 4,000 Mexicans. All but three of the Legionnaires were killed. It was much like our own Alamo. Capt. Danjou with the wooden hand was killed in this battle. Later his hand was found, and sent back to Sidi Bel Abbès.

The battle was fought April 30, 1863. The Legion observes April 30 each year with great parades and reviews. Capt. Danjou’s hand is brought out in its glass case and stands there as a symbol of what the Legion means.

It all seems a little gruesome, but the Legion feels deeply about it.

The Legion, though hard, is just as sentimental as any other organization. You can see it especially right now among their cavalrymen. As we came unexpectedly into the stables, we caught a glimpse of one young soldier kissing his horse’s forehead as he finished currying it. He was a tough-looking boy who didn’t seem capable of tenderness or sentiment. Something will be lost when the Legion’s cavalrymen start riding iron horses.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 6, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria –
The French Foreign Legion has changed greatly from the dregs-of-humanity catchall that it once was. But it is still wholly a fighting outfit, and anything that exists solely to fight is bound to be tough. As a result, the Legionnaire lives in a mental environment that is deadly. There is little reason or inclination for high thinking.

Legionnaires are lonely. There is little outside their military life for them. They can sit in the cafés and drink, and that’s about all. Many of them carry on regular correspondence with women all over the world whom they’ve never seen, even with Americans. They say it isn’t unusual to see among the want ads in the Paris papers a plea from a Foreign Legionnaire for a pen-pal.

The loneliness and longing for other days is proved, it seems to me, by one little vital statistic. Every year around Christmas, five or six Legionnaires commit suicide.

Russian gets drunk on payday

The Legion is full of “characters.” There is one Russian, a carpenter, who has been indulging in a peculiar routine as long as Legionnaires can remember.

On every payday, which is twice a month, he buys himself a large bucket of wine. He puts it on the floor beside his cot, gets plenty of cigarettes, then lies down and starts drinking and smoking. He’ll drink himself into a stupor, sleep a few hours, then wake up and start drinking again. He never gets out of bed, makes any noise, or causes any trouble. His jag lasts two days. It’s been going on so long that the officers just accept it.

But just let a Legionnaire get out of control on the street or on duty, and the penalties are severe. For extreme drunkenness, a Legionnaire can get nine months in the Disciplinary Regiment – which means nine months far away on the desert, working from dawn till dusk, with poor food, no cigarettes, no wine, no mail.

Penalties are severe

Even for slight infractions he gets eight days in jail, with his head shaved. They say any man who goes through a five-year enlistment without getting his head shaved is either an angel or extremely lucky.

At the end of a five-year enlistment the Legion gives a “Good Conduct Certificate.” The Legionnaires are so tough that only half of them get the certificate. Those who don’t get it have only two choices: re-enlistment for another five years or lifetime expulsion from the entire French Empire (so the bad ones sign up again).

The Legion does do many things for its men. Here at Sidi Bel Abbès, the Legion has built a huge modern theater, where movies are shown and band concerts given. The men even put on their own theatricals, and the Legion has a 350-piece band.

Nearby is a new concrete swimming pool, the largest in North Africa. I’ve never seen anything in Hollywood to beat it. It is surrounded by tiled terraces, with tables and chairs and cabanas, and with green trees and a riot of flowers.

Sergeant paid only $10 monthly

Officers and noncoms are provided with houses, and may have their families with them. A sergeant gets only $10 a month, but this is increased if he has a family. A sergeant in the Legion rates salutes the same as a commissioned officer.

The Legion had shops where its men could study trades during spare hours after supper. After the Americans arrived they put in a voluntary English course.

The Legionnaires here at home base sleep in concrete-floored barracks much like our own. They have iron cots and their stuff is packed to move at a moment’s notice.

Every barracks and recreation hall has cartoons drawn all over the walls – well-done cartoons making jokes about Legion life. This is another Legion tradition. Whenever a new company moves in, it has the right to erase all cartoons and draw its own.

Tradition is admirable, but–

It has been a marvelous experience to visit, after all these years and in this remote part of the world, the men about whom Beau Geste was written. You can’t help admiring the Legion’s pride in itself, its fastidious discipline, its cleanliness, its whole tradition.

But beyond that, life in the Foreign Legion seems to be horrible. Living to fight merely for the fight’s sake is something I cannot understand.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 7, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria –
Our visit to the French Foreign Legion was made particularly pleasant by a Legionnaire who is an Englishman – Sgt. John Whiteway. Whiteway is not an adventurer at all; he is a normal kind of businessman.

Just after the last war, he went to Paris to live. For 20 years he was the Paris representative for American refrigerator and radio companies. He married a French girl, and they have three handsome children, the youngest of whom he has never seen although the child is now nearly three.

When war seemed imminent in 1939, Whiteway felt he should fight for the country that had supported him for 20 years. He couldn’t join the regular French Army, so he joined the Foreign Legion. They fought through the fall of France, and then were shipped back to Algeria. And here Whiteway has been ever since.

It was tough going, the first few months for a man of his maturity and intellect. But his business ability and office experience made him invaluable to the Legion, and he was soon put into administrative work at headquarters. Thus, he has escaped most of the rigors and the deadly barracks life of the Legion.

When the Americans came, Whiteway was one of the few English-speaking men in the Legion. So, he was immediately attached to American headquarters as a liaison man. He wears civilian clothes now, and it was he who brought us to Sidi Bel Abbès.

Royal homecoming for sergeant

Although Whiteway had been away only a month, his return was like a royal homecoming. Everywhere we went, both soldiers and officers of the Legion saluted and stopped and shook hands and jabbered as if he’d been gone for years. Little French girls, whom he had been teaching English, came running down the street to kiss him. He seems to be one Englishman who has made the French like him.

We were a happy party who visited the Legion. In addition to Sgt. Whiteway and myself, there were five American Army officers – Lt. Col. Egbert W. Cowan, who has served all over the world in the Regular Army and whose daughter Shirley is about to become a ferry pilot at home; Capt. Art Nillen, a boisterous dentist from Dallas, whose motto is “See your dentist every day and brush your teeth twice a year;” Lt. Albert Deschenes, a young Boston doctor who speaks French, and well he might with a name like that; Lt. Max Kuehnert of Chicago, who was America’s best brick salesman before the war, and who still carried around his sales booklets of model brick homes; and Lt. Leonard Bessman, a likable Milwaukee lawyer who doesn’t speak French, but who has the virtue of continually trying to speak it.

Foreign language gabfest

Lenny and Max are enthusiasts. Everything they see is wonderful. Lenny has been a Foreign Legion fan ever since he was a child, and we almost had to hold him to keep him from signing up right on the spot.

It was Lenny’s efforts at French which endeared him to a Romanian cavalry sergeant named Paul Baron Ecsedy de Csapo, who hung around with us all day and wound up by almost tearfully pinning his most prized medal on Lenny’s blouse, as a token of his esteem.

Max hit his stride when we dropped into a little bar patronized almost exclusively by the Legion. It is run by a man named Lucett Paume, a Swiss who spent 20 years in the Legion and is now retired. His wife and two children help him run the bar.

Max speaks German, and this is how it wound up – Max and the Swiss in one huddle talking German; Lt. Deschenes and the proprietor’s daughters in another huddle speaking real French; Col. Cowan with a little group around him telling about hunting elephants in Indochina; Art Nillen standing in the doorway shouting “Zid, yalla, you little…” at all the passing Arab kids; Lenny and the sergeant in another huddle speaking pidgin and making motions, and me sitting all alone in a corner ordering my breakfast in Spanish over and over to myself.

Breakfast words happen to be the only Spanish I know, and damned if I wasn’t going to talk some kind of foreign language amid all that international sewing circle, even if I had to keep ordering hypothetical breakfasts all afternoon. Thus, the day passed. Vive la Légion Étrangère!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
The war correspondents over here seldom write about themselves, as it may be interesting if I try to tell you how we live.

There are more than 75 American and British correspondents and photographers in North Africa. Since Allied Headquarters is in a big city to the rear, that’s where most of the correspondents stay. The number actually in Tunisia at any one time fluctuates between half a dozen and two dozen. Each of the three big press associations has a five-man staff – usually three men back at headquarters and two at the front. They rotate every few weeks.

The correspondents in the city live a life that is pretty close to normal. They live in hotels or apartments, eat at restaurants or officers’ messes, work regular hours, get laundry done, dress in regulation uniforms, keep themselves clean, and get their news from communiqués and by talking to staff officers at headquarters.

Heebie-jeebies in the city

Since their lives are closely akin to the lives of newspapermen at home, we’ll deal here only with the correspondents as they live at the front.

Some of us have spent as much as two months in Tunisia without ever returning to the city. When we do, it is a great thrill to come back to civilization – for the first day.

But then a reaction sets in. Almost invariably we get the heebie-jeebies and find ourselves nervous and impatient with all the confusion and regimentation of city life, and wish ourselves at the front again.

The outstanding thing about life at the front is its magnificent simplicity. It is a life consisting only of the essentials – food, sleep, transportation, and what little warmth and safety you can manage to wangle out of it by personal ingenuity. Ordinarily, when life is stripped to the bare necessities, it is an empty and boring life. But not at the front. Time for me has never passed so rapidly. You’re never aware of the day of the week, and a whole month is gone before you know it.

Up here, the usual responsibilities and obligations are gone. You don’t have appointments to keep. Nobody cares how you look. Red tape is at a minimum. You have no desk, no designated hours. You don’t wash hands before you eat, nor afterwards either. It would be a heaven for small boys with dirty faces.

And it was a healthy life. During the winter months I was constantly miserable from the cold, yet paradoxically I never felt better in my life. The cold wind burned my face to a deep tan, and my whole system became toughened. I ate twice as much as usual. I hadn’t been hungry for nigh onto forty years, but in Tunisia I ate like a horse and was so constantly hungry it got to be a joke.

You do everything for yourself

It was a life that gave a new sense of accomplishment. In normal life, all the little things were done for us. I made my money by writing, and then used that money to hire people to wash my clothes, shine my shoes, make my bed, clean the bathtub, fill my gas tank, serve my meals, carry my bags, build my fires.

But not in Africa. We did everything ourselves. We were suddenly conscious again that we could do things. The fact that another guy could write a better story than I could was counterbalanced by the fact that I could roll a better bedroll than he could.

Last, and probably most important of all, was the feeling of vitality, of being in the heart of everything, of being a part of it – no mere onlooker, but a member of the team. I got into the race, and I resented dropping out even long enough to do what I was there to do – which was write. I would rather have just kept going all day, every day.

I’ve written that war is not romantic when a person is in the midst of it. Nothing happened to change my feeling about that. But I will have to admit there was an exhilaration in it; an inner excitement that built up into a buoyant tenseness seldom achieved in peacetime.

Just part of Army family

Up here, the Army accepts us correspondents as a part of the family. We knew and were friends with hundreds of individual soldiers. And we knew, and. were known by, every American general in Tunisia. There was no hedging at the front. I’ve never known an instance where correspondents were not told, with complete frankness, what was going on.

In the beginning, no restrictions were put on us; we could go anywhere we pleased at any time. But things gradually changed, as the established machinery of war caught up with us. Then there was a rule that correspondents couldn’t go into the frontlines unless accompanied by an officer. Maybe that was a good rule. I don’t know. But there were about two dozen of us who felt ourselves in an odd position, as if we were being conducted through our own house.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
When correspondents first came to the Tunisian front last fall, there were no special facilities for them and every man was on his own. Some got around by hitchhiking on Army vehicles. Some bought French sedans. They wrote wherever we could; sitting in their cars or in some bleak country hotel. They got their copy back to the city by many methods, including the one of walking up to anybody about to get on a plane and saying:

Hey, Joe, would you mind taking this in for me?

Things are different now. The Army Public Relations Office has set up an advanced post well back of the lines. They look after a regular aerial courier service back to headquarters and send out our mail to us. They have a few jeeps to dole out to correspondents, and for a while they had a house where meals were served and correspondents could throw their bedrolls on cots when they came back from the lines. The PRO hopes eventually to acquire tents and tables and cots and a regular kitchen crew, so that it can move right along with the advancing troops, just like a circus. We’ll be covering the war in style.

Jeep from Ford City man

When I was first in Tunisia, I traveled by hanging around some headquarters until I hit somebody who was going my way by truck or jeep, then threw my stuff on and set out. A little later, I was lucky enough to get a jeep. The man responsible for that was Capt. Ed Atkins, of Ford City, Pennsylvania, who controlled a certain motor pool. He and Lt. Max Kuehnert did so much for me in the way of little things all through the campaign that it will take me 10 years to repay them.

Only two or three of us had jeeps at first, so we always tried to double up. I shared mine for some time with Don Coe of the United Press. Will Lang of Time-LIFE and I made a couple of trips together. And some of the time I wandered around alone, although that isn’t wise anymore, for you need one man to watch the rear for strafing planes.

On the jeep, we carried everything we had – bedroll, typewriter, musette bag, tent. We also carried extra cans of gasoline, a camouflage net, and a box of canned rations, in case we got stuck somewhere away from an Army kitchen.

We knew where all the gasoline dumps were throughout the 100 miles or so of American front. We’d simply drive up to one, tell the soldier in charge we needed some gas, get out our pliers, tap a couple of five-gallon cans, and pour it in. He’d say, “Who’s this to be charged to?" And we’d tell him any outfit number that popped into our heads, or even some mythical unit such as “the Sahara Task Force.” He’d seldom put it down anyway, for obviously it was Army gas going into an Army vehicle.

Stalled British trucker stands popeyed

I remember once a stalled British truck flagged us down, and the kid driver said he was out of gas. Much to his astonishment, we said we’d give him five gallons. And when he asked if we had a form for him to sign and we said, “Hell no, just pour it in,” his amazement was complete. These crazy Americans, they make things so simple.

Correspondents on the prowl sleep wherever they stop. Usually, you can find a bare tile floor in some old farmhouse being used as a headquarters. We’ve discovered that after a few nights on the floor or on the ground it doesn’t seem hard. I believe I’m about the only correspondent who frequently pitches his pup tent. Some correspondents carry folding camp cots, but I don’t because I haven’t got one, and secondly, it’s much warmer sleeping right on the ground.

Our main difficulty has been in keeping warm. I have my bedroll cover and two blankets under me, then three blankets over me, plus mackinaw and sometimes the canvas top to the jeep. You always sleep with your clothes on, taking off only your mackinaw and shoes.

The greatest mistake I made in this campaign was in not bringing a sleeping bag and rubber mattress from home. They’re just as light to carry as a bedroll, twice as comfortable, and three times as warm. I think about half our line officers did bring sleeping bags. But now that spring is here, it isn’t so important.

Just one bath in 5 weeks

Oddly enough, you don’t get up terribly early at the front. Breakfast at a field headquarters usually runs till 8:30 a.m., so you can sleep till around 8. If it’s a semi-permanent headquarters, you eat at tables in a tent. If it’s a field kitchen, you’ve served on trays from the back end of a truck, and you eat standing up.

Most officers manage to wash once a day, but I personally go more on the enlisted man’s psychology and just skip it. Between Dec. 28 and March 1, I had just one bath. When I finally went into the city and had my first bath in five weeks, it was too much for me. I came down with a seven-day cold.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
The American war correspondents in Tunisia work hard and conscientiously; they get frightened and exhilarated; and frequently they are depressed by the tragedies around them. They’re doing a job which most of them find extremely interesting, but they all wish it were over.

The most picturesque of the correspondents is Jack Thompson of The Chicago Tribune. He is a husky fellow, and has grown a terrific black beard. He looks ferocious, but he is gentle-mannered and considerate, and always willing to help a newcomer get onto the ropes. He has been in Tunisia from the beginning, and has spent more time here than any other correspondent.

The only other bewhiskered member of the corps is Eliot Elisofon, photographer for LIFE. He has grown a Continental goatee which makes him look like a magician. Elisofon is afraid, like the rest of us, yet he makes himself go right up into the teeth of danger. I’ve never known a more intense and enthusiastic worker than Elisofon.

I like practically all the correspondents, but one of my favorites is Graham Hovey of International News Service. I like him because he is quiet and undemanding, and because he is sensitive to the beauties as well as the horrors of war.

Hovey had an unusual baptism. He had been in the headquarters office for some time, pestering his boss to get to the front. Finally, he went, and on the first day almost got killed.

The very first bomb he ever saw fall, the very first one he ever heard explode, was a 500-pounder that hit within 50 feet of him and killed three men. He and Boots Norgaard of the Associated Press, a veteran at these things, escaped only by the freakish luck of finding a ready-made slit trench just where they stopped. Hovey was shaken by the experience, yet now, after a few weeks he feels that same fascination for the front that I do.

Most of the correspondents keep themselves pretty presentable at the front. I think it is not going too far to say that I am the worst-looking one of the lot.

Correspondents have officer status, you know, and wear regular officers’ uniform without insignia. But in order to keep warm, I dress like a cross between Coxey’s Army and the Ski Patrol. I wear Army coveralls, enlisted men’s mackinaw, knit cap, goggles and overshoes. The only way you can tell me from a private is that I’m too old.

The two oldest correspondents here are Gault MacGowan, of The New York Sun and myself. Gault is in his late 40s, and was wounded in the last war. He always has his pad and pencil out, and is a fiend for writing down names and addresses of New York soldiers. The other day we saw him right up among the men who were firing, writing down names. It was almost like a cartoon. He told one soldier:

I do on the battlefield what Winchell does at home.

Bill White of The New York Herald-Tribune was in Tunisia for two months before returning to the city. When he came back, he was tanned completely black, was so pure and healthy from rough living that he wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette, and insisted on sleeping on the hotel-room floor in his bedroll the first night.

Bill Stoneman of The Chicago Daily News was the first correspondent to be wounded in Tunisia. He was furious about it. In the first place, he got shot in his behind; secondly, when the surgeons dug out the bullet, it turned out to be only .22 caliber. Bill felt that the whole thing was ignominious.

Stoneman is one of the few professional foreign correspondents here. He has been in Europe for 15 years, knows all the capitals intimately, has a colossal diplomatic acquaintance throughout Europe, and speaks many languages, including some Russian. While convalescing from his wound, he decided to learn Arabic. So, he called up an agency and told them to send him an instructor, preferably a luscious Arab girl. But just as Bill expected, the teacher turns out to be a bedraggled male pedagogue who works him to death. The last I heard he was rapidly packing his bags for the front again.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 12, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
Down in central Tunisia, in the village of Fériana, there is a little country hotel where four or five of us correspondents used to drop in now and then for a day or two to sleep under a roof and eat some of Papa’s meals.

The hotel is run by a French family. Papa is big and mustached, and always wears a cap and a dirty apron and always has a burned-up cigarette in his mouth. He takes an instant like or dislike to newcomers, and the ones he doesn’t like get short shrift.

Mama is plain and gray and sweet, and although she can’t speak a word of English, paradoxically she can understand it. She never does a bit of the cooking; that is Papa’s job and privilege. She sits at the kitchen table and sews and knits.

There are three boys in the vicinity of 15, all handsome and superior boys. Roget is our favorite, because he studied English in his school and we can converse with him. The three boys serve the meals. They also act as chambermaids.

Once when I was trying to write in the hotel, Roget came in to clean up. Immediately he called his two brothers, and for half an hour they all stood in a circle looking over my shoulder admiringly – not at the magic of my wonderful words, but at how fast my fingers worked the keyboard.

The hotel had one very dirty toilet, and in the rooms were merely washbowls and kerosene lamps. French soldiers slept on straw in the little lobby. There were always at least 10 people in the kitchen, including a few neighbors, some stray French privates helping wash the dishes, and a French officer or two trying to learn English from Roget.

Jack could do no wrong

Jack Thompson of The Chicago Tribune found this place way back in November. As far as I know, it was the only operating hotel in all of central Tunisia. Jack kept two rooms there all winter, and they were like a headquarters. Jack himself might not be there one night a week, but if any other correspondents blew in, we’d just walk in and settle down as though the rooms belonged to us.

Jack could do no wrong in Papa’s eyes. Papa was so prejudiced in Jack’s favor that he would never serve breakfast to anybody else until Jack came down for his.

Frank Kluckhohn of The New York Times used to get up early, hoping to get breakfast and get started out; and after a while he’d come back upstairs alternately cussing and laughing at the incongruity of being refused breakfast until Monsieur Thompson also got ready to eat.

Papa just sort of tolerated me. He didn’t detest me as he did some of the others; it was just that I hardly existed in his eyes. But I was one of Mama’s favorites. She always got out her private homemade confiture (in this case, marvelous peach jam) for me when I ate alone with the family in the kitchen.

I remember one morning when four of us correspondents were eating breakfast in the kitchen, and Mama got out the jam and made it quite plain it was for me alone. But Frank Kluckhohn didn’t follow her reasoning, and helped himself to some of my jam. Fortunately, he didn’t see the daggers Mama was looking at him. Poor Frank, he had a tough time eating in that place.

Then the Germans came

The little hotel was a peaceful place for many weeks. Not much of the American Army knew about it. We correspondents and a few fliers from a near-by airdrome, who came in once a week for dinner, were the only Americans around.

And then all of a sudden, everything changed. The battle lines drew near. Within an hour one day the village was deluged with American troops. Trucks with Negro drivers filled the olive grove across the street. The grove on the other side was pitted deep with sudden slit trenches and great holes where tanks and half-tracks were nearly hidden in the ground.

Soldiers flowed in and out of the hotel like water. The Germans were coming nearer. A couple of us correspondents sped in from another front, packed a few things into our jeep, and Papa and Mama and the boys stood waving at us as we dashed off again.

The next thing we knew, Fériana was gone. The end came suddenly, and Papa and Mama and the boys had to get out in the middle of the night. Some of us saw them next day – nearly 30 miles away – trudging uphill behind a mule cart with a few of their things on it.

The German tide that washed over Fériana was brief, but the town was shelled by both sides. Maybe Papa and Mama and the boys will have things fixed up again by the time we get back there. No doubt the Germans cleaned out Papa’s meager wine cellar. I don’t care about that, but I hope they didn’t find Mama’s peach jam.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 13, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
Maj. Gen. Terry Allen is one of my favorite people. Partly because he doesn’t give a damn for hell nor high water; partly because he’s more colorful than most; and partly because he’s the only general outside the Air Forces I can call by his first name.

If there’s one thing in the world Allen lives and breathes for, it’s to fight. He was all shot up in the last war, and he seems not the least averse to getting shot up again. This is no intellectual war with him. He hates Germans and Italians like vermin, and his pattern for victory is simple – just wade in and murder the hell out of the lowdown, good-for-nothing so-and-so’s. Allen’s speech is picturesque. No writer can fully capture him on paper, because his talk is so wonderfully profane it can’t be put down in black and white.

Allen was shot through the jaws in the last war. This wound causes him to make an odd hissing noise when he is intense. He breathes by sucking the air in between his teeth, and it sounds like a leak in a tire. This reverse hissing will doubtless confuse the Japs when he gets around to that part of the world.

It was Gen. Allen’s outfit that took Oran, in the original landings. Then it was necessary to hold his troops there, and for a couple of months Allen not-so-quietly went nuts sitting back in an Oran olive grove watching the war from a distance.

‘Can anybody get in this war?’

Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, so he went to the High Command and said:

Is this a private war, or can anybody get in?

At least that’s the way the legend goes, and it sounds like him. At any rate, Allen got in, and now he’s as happy as a lark.

After they came to the front, I drove over to visit him. When I finally found Allen, he said:

Don’t bother to pitch your tent. You sleep in my tent tonight.

An invitation from a general was an order, so I carried my bedroll up to the general’s tent and looked in. There was one bedroll on the ground. That took up half the tent. The other half was occupied by a five-gallon tin of water sitting on some rocks over a gasoline flame on the ground, and by a rough, unpainted folding table.

I couldn’t figure out where he expected me to sleep. But it was all solved that evening by the general’s orderly, who simply carried out the water can, smothered the fire with sand, moved the table, and unrolled my bedroll on the ground beside the general’s.

As far as I know, Terry Allen is the only general in Tunisia who sleeps on the ground. All the others carry folding cots. Gen. Allen won’t allow any of his staff to sleep on a cot. He said if everybody in his headquarters had a cot it would take several extra trucks to carry them, and he can use the trucks to better purpose. He likes to fight rough anyway.

General wears cavalry boots

Allen is an old cavalryman. He still wears his high-laced cavalry boots when he dresses up. He married an El Paso girl, and calls El Paso home. He carries pictures of his wife and 15-year-old son in a leather pocket case, and is tremendously proud of them.

He has been known as one of the best polo players in the Army. He hasn’t any horse to ride now, but he keeps in shape by doing a three-mile after-breakfast jog on foot through the hills several times a week. He smokes incessantly.

I went out on a shooting expedition that night with some of Allen’s men, and it was midnight when I got back. He had left the light on for me, and the wind was making the tent heave and groan, but Allen was sleeping like a child.

Dirt blew in and filtered over us. My bedroll was right over where the fire had been, and I slept warmly for the first time in weeks. Toughly trained sentries with itchy fingers stood at the front and rear of our tent. Boy, did I feel well protected!

At 7 next morning one of the sentries came in and awakened Gen. Allen. He grunted and went back to sleep. Five minutes later, another sentry came in and knelt over him and kept saying, “General, sir, general, sir,” till Allen responded and started getting up.

I had slept in all my clothes; the general in his long underwear. We were both covered with sifted dirt from the windstorm. It took us about 30 seconds to dress, and then we just walked out of the tent and went to breakfast, without washing or anything.

That’s how life is for one general at the front.

[dan.harnden]

Marvelous writing. Leaves you wanting more.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 14, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
The central part of Tunisia is a sandy-colored, desert-like country. It is made up of mountain ridges with wide, flat, fertile valleys between them. The ridges have fir trees high up, but the valleys are without vegetation except for the crops and a knee-high growth of bush. Consequently, the valleys are poor places for hiding big motorized troop concentrations. About the only thing that affords any natural cover is an olive grove or a cactus patch.

Some of these cactus patches grow wild, and others are planted in rows just like any other crop. The plants are shoulder-high, and have big thick leaves of the prickly-pear type. They have thorns an inch long, vicious and cruel. The cactus is grown for camel feed, and camels actually come up and eat them off the bush. How they do it I don’t know, for the stickers are as hard as steel needles, and they don’t bend. But the camels don’t seem to mind.

Danger in cactus patch

Every soldier over here has learned to tread cautiously through a cactus patch, for these stickers can cause you grave trouble. They frequently start bad infections. I saw a soldier one day being taken to the rear with his arm swollen so badly he had to carry it on a sort of rack. And I myself had a small experience with them. I’d noticed for several days that my right knee was so sore I could hardly put any weight on it when I got down to roll up my bedroll. But I supposed I’d just bruised it on a rock, and didn’t pay much attention.

It wasn’t until I returned to the city and took off my clothes for the first time in weeks that I saw an angry-looking lump on my knee. So, like a country boy, I squeezed it and out popped a cactus thorn half an inch long.

In a day or two the soreness was gone. Anybody else would probably have lost his leg, but you see I lead such a pure life that my blood was clear and strong and noble and all that stuff, period.

Goes to battle with shovel

The soldiers all laughed when I started out to battle armed only with a shovel. That does seem a ridiculous instrument to carry to the wars, but I’m a pretty smart guy, you know, and I’d figured the thing all out ahead of time. My calculations were verified when I got up front where the boys actually know what the zing of a bullet sounds like. None of them laughed. Because, brother, when you’re up there where the dive bombers play, digging becomes instinctive.

I’ve heard of dive-bombings so severe that soldiers lying in shallow trenches would try to dig deeper with their fingernails. And I know of many a man who is alive today because he happened to be near an empty foxhole some previous warrior had dug. Long live the shovel!

There seems to be a sort of unwritten law that full colonels and generals always act nonchalant when in danger. Most colonels and generals don’t wear their steel helmets in battle. I thought for a while it was an unbreakable tradition, but I have seen a few colonels and generals wearing them.

I lost my steel helmet

I don’t wear mine, incidentally. But that’s not because I’m nonchalant. It’s because I got rattled and forgot and left it lying under as truck one night when we were retreating.

When you drive over a Tunisian road the morning after a big night convoy has passed, you see occasional trucks and tanks that have run off the road in the blackout.

I remember one morning counting two trucks and three tanks hanging over the edge in a distance of 45 miles. Nothing seemed to be damaged, and wreckers would soon have them out. One tank had run off a concrete bridge and dropped about 10 feet into the dry steam-bed below.

It was just after daylight, and we stopped to see if anybody were hurt. Everything was still and quiet around the tank. And then we saw, about 50 feet away, the whole crew stretched out on the sand, covered with their blankets, sound asleep while the morning sun beamed down on them. As peaceful a picture as you ever saw.