Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 19, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
The men who interrogate captured prisoners have interesting jobs. In addition to being linguists, they have to be good psychologists to wheedle information out of reluctant German soldiers.

They never have any trouble getting the Italians to talk, but unfortunately, the Italians don’t know anything. According to interrogators, they are a pretty sorry lot. Some didn’t even know they were fighting against Americans till they were captured.

One batch I know of thought we would execute them, and were pathetically happy when they discovered they would live. The first thing they usually ask is to be allowed to write their families that they’re all right, and, of course, permission is granted.

Most of them keep diaries. All of them, Italians and Germans like, seem to have plenty of money in their pockets. The Italians all carry Catholic medals and crosses, and are grateful on learning they can keep these. Nearly everybody has a picture of a wife or sweetheart or children, and these, too, they are allowed to keep.

A few of the captured Germans and Italians up north had on thin clothing, and no underwear at all. But most of them are warmly dressed and well-equipped. The first thing our soldiers take away from a German is his mess kit. It is superior in quality and design to ours; is made of steel, easy to keep clean, more compact, and even has a can opener with it.

The Italians have a shovel that is quite a gadget. It is small, sort of like a fireplace coal shovel. The shovel part is swiveled onto the handle, so you can turn it down, lock it, and the shovel then becomes a pick.

Captured Nazis can’t be trusted

Italian enlisted men wear as lapel insignia a tin star, exactly like the stars an American general wears. I know at least two generals now wearing these Italian stars on their shoulders. And I heard of a private who pinned one on his cap unthinkingly, and went around for an hour wondering why everybody in the Army was suddenly saluting him.

The Italians are almost unanimously happy to be captured, but you can never tell what a German’s attitude will be. Some are friendly and glad to be out of it. Others are arrogant. They tell of one wounded German who came to in the operating room of one of our hospitals, and instantly came off the table swinging with both fists. Nurses say the wounded Germans are usually sullen and autocratic.

There is one conscripted German regiment made up of people rejected earlier in the war – men with one eye or one finger missing, older people, men from occupied countries. But mostly, the Germans and Italians are in excellent physical condition.

The Germans get paid every 10 days, and nearly half their money is automatically sent home. They are usually short on cigarettes. Often, you’ll see Americans going past a batch of newly-captured prisoners and stopping to give them cigarettes.

Stories differ as to how the Axis treats our prisoners. Some who have escaped say the Italians are worse than the Germans. I know Americans who say they were treated courteously and considerately, and others who say they’ll commit suicide before they’ll be captured again. I guess it depends on the individual who gets his hands on you.

Villainous Pyle makes bum guess

During the February fighting in Tunisia, I unwittingly played the most villainous role it has ever been my misfortune to perform.

Will Lang of Time-LIFE and I had been traveling together. I left him way up in Ousseltia Valley, and drove back to the southern front. On the way, I ducked into a certain headquarters where mail is occasionally sent out to us from the city.

There I found about 15 letters and three cablegrams for Will and Eliot Elisofon, the LIFE photographer. So, I stuck them in my pocket, then headed for Sbeitla.

On the way, I stopped in Fériana to pick up some stuff we had left at the little hotel there. Lang and Elisofon kept a room at this hotel, to which they returned occasionally.

At first, I thought I’d better keep their mail with me. And then I thought no, there’ll be hard fighting around Sbeitla, and if anything should happen to me, their mail will be gone forever. So, I finally dumped it all on their beds in Fériana.

And I’ll be damned if the Germans didn’t push through that very night and take Fériana, and along with it the Lang and Elisofon mail. I could have cried for remorse. And, to top it off, I hadn’t even read their cablegrams, so couldn’t tell them what they said.

But two guys have never made it easier for a culprit then they did for me. They just laughed it off as if they were accustomed to getting 100 letters a day, and what difference did another 15 make?

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How hasn’t he seen his youngest child? Did he just abandon the child?

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Maybe with the war he hadn’t been home in three years?

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 20, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Tunisia –
American tent hospitals in the battle area seem to be favorite hangouts for correspondents. The presence of American nurses is alleged to have nothing whatever to do with it.

At one hospital, three correspondents just moved in and made it their headquarters for a couple of weeks. They’d roam the country in their jeeps during the day, then return to the hospital at night just as though it were a hotel.

There are two favorite hospitals where I drop in now and then for a meal or a night. One is an evacuation hospital – the same one where the other boys stay – which is always kept some 80 miles or more back of the fighting. That is the one staffed largely from Roosevelt Hospital in New York. The other is a mobile surgical hospital, which is usually only about an hour’s drive back of the fighting. This is the hospital that landed at Arzew on the day of the North African occupation, and whose nurses were the first ashore in North Africa.

Just like soldiers at front

This gang is kept pretty much on the move. They don’t dare be too close to the lines, and yet they can’t be very far away. So as the war swings back and forth, they swing with it. The nurses of this outfit are the most veteran of any in Africa.

There are nearly 60 of them, and they’re living just like the soldiers at the front. They have run out of nearly everything feminine. They wear heavy issue shoes, and even men’s GI underwear. Most of the time, they wear Army coveralls instead of dresses.

I asked them what to put in the column that they’d like sent from home, and here is what they want – cleansing creams and tissues, fountain pens, shampoos and underwear. That’s all they ask. They don’t want slips, for they don’t wear them.

These girls can really take it. They eat out of mess kits when they’re on the move. They do their own washing. They stand regular duty hours all the time, and in emergencies they work without thought of the hours.

During battles, they are swamped. Then between battles they have little to do, for a frontline hospital must always be kept pretty free of patients to make room for a sudden influx. A surgical hospital seldom keeps a patient more than three days.

Life is a social blank

During these lax periods, the nurses fill in their time by rolling bandages, sewing sheets and generally getting everything ready for the next storm.

They had a miserably blank social life. There is absolutely no town life in central Tunisia, even if they could get to a town. Occasionally an officer will take them for a jeep ride, but usually they’re not even permitted to walk up and down the road. They just work, and sleep, and sit, and write letters. War is no fun for them.

They make $186 a month, and pay $21 of it for mess. There’s nothing to buy over here, so nearly all of them send money home.

Like the soldiers, they have learned what a valuable implement the steel helmet is. They use it as a foot bath, as a wastebasket, as a dirty-clothes hamper, to carry water in, as a cooking utensil, as a chair, as a candle-holder, as a rain-hat, and for all sorts of other emergencies.

Being nurses and accustomed to physical misery, they have not been shocked or upset by the badly wounded men they care for. The thing that has impressed them most is the way the wounded men act. They say they’ve worked with wounded men lying knee-deep outside the operating rooms, and never does one whimper or complain. They say it’s remarkable.

The girls sleep on cots, under Army blankets. Very few have sleeping bags. They use outdoor toilets. At one place, they’ve rigged up canvas walls for taking sunbaths.

They wouldn’t go home if they could

Mary Ann Sullivan, of Boston, whom I wrote about last winter, is in this outfit. Some of the other girls I know are Mildred Keelin, of 929 Ellison Ave., Louisville, Kentucky; Amy Nichols, of Blythe, Georgia; Mary Francis of Waynesville, North Carolina; Eva Sacks, of 1821 North 33rd St., Philadelphia; Kate Rodgers, of 2932 Wroxton Ave., Houston, Texas.

Like the soldiers, they think and talk constantly of home, and would like to be home. Yet it’s just as Amy Nichols says – she wouldn’t go home if they told her she could. All the others feel the same way, practically 100%.

They’re terrifically proud of having been the first nurses to land in Africa, and of being continually the closest ones to the fighting lines, and they intend to stay. They are actually in little danger, except from deliberate or accidental bombing. They haven’t had any yet.

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Sure, buddy.

All hail the mighty M1. :smile:

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 21, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia –
Now we have left central Tunisia behind us. We are in the north now, Americans as well as British, and the end of the long Tunisian trail is in sight. Surely the kill cannot now be long delayed.

Except in the air, the American troops are playing a rather minor part in this final act. In the air, we are all-out, and great formations of American planes are overhead constantly. But on the ground, it is the British 8th and 1st Armies who are giving Rommel the main squeeze.

The troops have been so distributed for this last phase that the Americans and the French are holding only a small slice of the quarter-circle that is penning the Germans into the Tunis corner. True, we will do some hard fighting, but the bulk of the knockout blow on the ground will be British.

You at home will be wrong if you try to make anything sinister out of that, for it’s the way it should be, as I tried to tell you once before.

British more experienced

The British have more troops, and more experienced troops, in Tunisia than we have. We had sort of divided the load earlier, but with the arrival of the 8th Army the affair has become predominantly British,

Since Montgomery has chased Rommel all the way from Egypt in one of the great military achievements of history, it is only right that the British should make the kill.

The 8th Army is a magnificent organization. We correspondents have been thrilled by its perfection. So have our troops. It must surely be one of the outstanding armies of all time. We trailed it several days up the Tunisian coast, and we came to look upon it almost with awe.

Its organization for continuous movement is so perfect that it seems more like a big business firm than a destructive army. The men of the 8th are brown-skinned and white-eyebrowed from the desert sun.

Their spirit is like a tonic

Most of them are in shorts, and they are a healthy-looking lot. Their spirit is like a tonic. The spirit of our own troops is good, but these boys from the burning sands are throbbing with the vitality of conquerors.

They are friendly, cocky, confident. They’ve been three years in the desert, and now they wear the expression of victory on their faces. We envy them, and are proud of them.

This north country is entirely different from the semi-desert where we Americans spent the winter. Up here, the land is fertile and everything is violently green.

Northern Tunisia is all hills and valleys. There are no trees at all, but now in spring the earth is solidly covered with deep green – pastures and freshly growing fields of grain. Small wildflowers spatter the countryside. I have never seen lovelier or more gentle country. It gives you a sense of peacefulness. It seems to speak its richness to you. It is a full, ripe country, and here in the springtime living seems sweet and worthwhile.

Green turns red with blood

There are winding gravel roads everywhere, with many roads of fine macadam. Villages are perched on the hillsides, and some of them look like picture postcards. This is all so different from the Tunisia we’ve known that all of us, driving up suddenly one sunny afternoon into this clean cool greenness, felt like holding out our arms and saying:

This is the country we love.

Yet this peaceful green is gradually turning red with blood. The roads are packed with brown-painted convoys, and the trailers sprout long rifle barrels. The incredibly blue sky with its big white clouds is streaked with warplanes in great throbbing formations. And soon the whole northeastern corner of Tunisia will roar and rage with a violence utterly out of character with a landscape so rich in nature’s kindness.

The only thing we can say in behalf of ourselves is that the human race even in the process of defiling beauty still has the capacity to appreciate it.

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The perfection that is the 8th army. I think the Germans felt that way about the 6th army too.

It was the cream of the crop and the Allies had every right to be proud. Does this qualify Montgomery as one of the great commanders of all time?

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 22, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
I was away from the frontlines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front, I wondered if I would sense any change in them.

I did, and definitely.

The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they now talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. To them now, there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact, it is an admirable thing.

I think I am so impressed by this new attitude because it hasn’t been necessary for me to make this change along with them. As a non-combatant, my own life is in danger only by occasional chance or circumstance. Consequently, I need not think of killing in personal terms, and killing to me is still murder.

Even after a winter of living with wholesale death and vile destruction, it is only spasmodically that I seem capable of realizing how real and how awful this war is. My emotions seem dead and crusty when presented with the tangibles of war. I find I can look on rows of fresh graves without a lump in my throat. Somehow, I can look on mutilated bodies without flinching or feeling deeply.

It is only when I sit alone away from it all, or lie at night in my bedroll recreating with closed eyes what I have seen, thinking and thinking and thinking, that at last the enormity of all these newly dead strikes like a living nightmare. And there are times when I feel that I can’t stand it and will have to leave.

Fighting soldier’s blood is up

But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.

He wants to kill individually or in vast numbers. He wants to see the Germans overrun, mangled, butchered in the Tunisian trap. He speaks excitedly of seeing great heaps of dead, of our bombers sinking whole shiploads of fleeing men, of Germans by the thousands dying miserably in a final Tunisian holocaust of his own creation.

In this one respect the frontline soldier differs from all the rest of us. All the rest of us – you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa – we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over. The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

Britisher honors American heroes

Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.

In the semifinals of this campaign – the cleaning out of central Tunisia – we had large units in battle for the first time. Frankly, they didn’t all excel. Their own commanders admit it, and admirably they don’t try to alibi. The British had to help us out a few times, but neither American nor British commanders are worried about that, for there was no lack of bravery. There was only lack of experience. They all know we will do better next time.

The 1st Infantry Division is an example of what our American units can be after they have gone through the mill of experience. Those boys did themselves proud in the semifinals. Everybody speaks about it. Our casualties included few taken prisoners. All the other casualties were wounded or died fighting.

A general says:

They never gave an inch. They died right in their foxholes.

I heard of a high British officer who went over this battlefield just after the action was over. American boys were still lying dead in their foxholes, their rifles still grasped in firing position in their dead hands. And the veteran English soldier remarked time and again, in a sort of hushed eulogy spoken only to himself:

Brave men. Brave men.

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You should wait till Market Garden for that, I think.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 23, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
Thousands are the soldiers who want someday to bring their wives and children back to Tunisia, in times of peace, and take them over the battlefields we have come to know so well. But, except for the cities, they will not find much to remind them of the ferocity that existed here.

I have traveled recently over the Tunisian battle area – both the part we knew so intimately because it was on our side and the part we didn’t know at all because the Germans lived there at the time.

You don’t see the sort of desolated countryside we remember from pictures of France in the last war. That is because the fighting has been mobile, because neither side used permanent huge guns, and because the country is mostly treeless and empty. But there are some marks left, and I’ll try to give you examples in this and tomorrow’s column.

Tank skeletons, wooden crosses

East of El Guettar, down a broad valley through which runs a nice macadam road, you see dark objects sitting far off on the plain. These are burned-out tanks of both sides. A certain two sit close together like twins, about a mile off the road. The immense caterpillar track is off one and lies trailed out behind for 50 feet. The insides are a shambles. Seared and jumbled personal and mechanical debris is scattered around outside. Our soldiers have already retrieved almost everything worthwhile from the German debris, but you can still find big wrenches, oil-soaked gloves, and twisted shell cases.

And in the shade of one tank, not five feet from the great metal skeleton, is the fresh grave of a German tanker, marked by a rough wooden cross without a name.

There are many of these tanks scattered miles apart through the valley.

On the hillsides, you can still see white splotches – powder marks from our exploding artillery shells. Gnarled lengths of Signal Corps telephone wire, too mauled to retrieve, string for yards along the roadsides.

There are frequent filled-in holes in the macadam where artillery or dive bombers took their toll. Now and then a little graveyard with wooden crosses stands lonesomely at the roadside. Some of the telephone poles have been chopped down. There are clumps of empty ammunition boxes. But for all these things you must look closely. There was once a holocaust here, but it left only a slight permanent mark. It is sort of hard to disfigure acres of marigolds and billions of blades of fresh desert grass.

Sidi Bouzid in the middle

Sidi Bouzid is the little white village I saw destroyed by shellfire back in February. It was weeks later before I could get close enough to see the details, for the village remained German territory for some time. This was one of the little towns I know so well, and now it is pitiful to look at. The village almost doesn’t exist anymore. Its dozens of low stone adobe buildings, stuccoed a snowy white, are nothing but rockpiles. The village has died. The reason for the destruction of Sidi Bouzid was that German and American tank columns, advancing toward each other, met there. Artillery from both sides poured its long-distance fury into the town for hours. There will have to be a new Sidi Bouzid.

Faid Pass is the last pass in the Grand Dorsal before the drive eastward onto the long flat plain that leads to the Mediterranean at Sfax. For months, we looked with longing eyes at Faid. A number of times we tried to take it and failed. But when the Germans’ big retreat came, they left Faid Pass voluntarily. And they left it so thoroughly and maliciously mined that, even today, you don’t dare drive off onto the shoulder of the road, or you may get blown to kingdom come.

You lean away from danger signs

Our engineers go through these minefields with electrical instruments, locate the mines, and surround them with warning notices until they can be dug up or exploded later. These notices are of two types – either a white ribbon strung around the mine area on knee-high sticks or else stakes with oppositely pointing arrows on top. The white arrow pointing to the left meaning that side is safe, the red arrow pointing to the right meaning that side is mined.

And believe me, after seeing a few mine-wrecked trucks and jeeps, you fear mines so dreadfully that you find yourself actually leaning away from the side of the road where the signs are, as you drive past.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 24, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
I hate to think of poor little Sfax. I believe it must have been the prettiest of all the Tunisian cities we have seen so far. Somehow it had something of Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard in it, and a little of San Diego too. But it is gone now – I mean the downtown business part, for it lay right on the waterfront and our Allied bombers played havoc with it. The whole business section, of course, was evacuated before the bombing started, so probably there was only a slight loss of life.

Parts of Sfax look like London during the Blitz. A locomotive sprawls on its side across a sidewalk. Royal palms, uprooted, lie pitifully in the street. Little parks are no-man’s-lands of craters. The macadam streets have great cracks across them. There is no square inch left unwrecked in downtown Sfax.

The French feel that we shouldn’t have bombed Sfax because it was French. But it was one of Germany’s big supply ports, and not to have bombed it would have been cutting our own throats as well as the throats of all Frenchmen.

‘Holy city’ welcomes Allies

Kairouan – this holy city is one of the minor Meccas. They say seven journeys to Kairouan equal one to Mecca.

It wasn’t holy to the Germans. They used it all winter as a big rail and highway supply point.

We got to Kairouan shortly after the Germans had fled before the 8th Army. This was the first time I had been close on the heels, of a reoccupation. Three of us correspondents rode into the town in jeeps, and to our astonishment found the streets lined with crowds waving and cheering and applauding each passing vehicle.

Not knowing the difference, they gave us correspondents as big a hand as the rest. And we beamed and waved back just as though we’d run the Germans out ourselves. I might add on our behalf that we did feel like heels while doing it.

Kairouan had been under Axis domination for nearly three years but it was not damaged much by bombing. Therein lies a slight mix-up somewhere, for last winter that one of our fliers “destroyed” the Splendide Hotel, which housed a German headquarters. Yet the Splendide, I can assure you, is still standing, quite unharmed.

In Kairouan we saw the first white women most of us had seen in a long time. I remember three French girls who stood on a street corner for hours waving and smiling at the Allied tanks and trucks as they passed through the town. One of the girls had on a blue skirt and a white waist, I remember, which made her stand out from the others.

That girl in white waist!

The reason I’m telling you this is that in the days that followed, all over Tunisia, I’d fall into conversation with soldiers and they’d begin telling about the wonderful girl they saw in Kairouan. Eventually they’d describe how she was dressed, and it always turned out to be Miss Blue-Skirt-and-White-Waist.

That one girl, merely by standing in the street and waving, had given to scores of women-hungry men an illusion of Broadway and Main St. that they’d not known in months.

Gafsa is the southern town we took back after it had been in German hands for a couple of months. Gafsa was not much damaged by shot and shell, but it was gutted by the cruel hands of mean men. Whether those were the hands of Germans or Arabs or our own army, I’ve not yet found out.

One French officer estimated that the Arabs of Gafsa were 85% for the Germans, 5% for the French, and 10% indifferent. That is a testimonial to the power of German propaganda, for the Arabs are lovers of might.

Destruction is wanton

At any rate, when we returned to Gafsa the streets were littered, and the homes of all the Jews and better-off French and Arabs were wrecked. Windows had been broken, rugs and all other valuables stolen, furniture smashed and thrown out into the streets for desert Arabs to steal. Marauders went into a nice little hotel, apparently with hammers, and smashed every lavatory, every mirror and every window. They smashed the mechanism of every refrigerator in town.

Their crippling of the city power plant was legitimate. Their uprooting of private gardens was barbarism, solely for barbarity’s sake.

That’s about all on my tour of the battlefields. The Germans, by stripping the country of provisions, probably caused more grief than either side did by actual battle.

The tank-tracked fields will soon grow over. The blowing sands will fill the hundreds of thousands of expedient slit trenches. Ammunition boxes and gas cans and abandoned tanks will rust themselves into oblivion. Desiccated little towns will be rebuilt. And the Arab, as he has done for centuries, will go on about his slow business in the old way that suits him best.

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what did commodes do to them?

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I don’t know, must’ve pissed 'em off for being too still. :joy:

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 26, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia –
At least there’s one thing we can’t complain about as the Tunisian campaign draws toward its close, and that’s the weather.

In these past few weeks, the heavens have seemed bent on bounteous amends for all the misery they scourged us with during the winter. This is one time when nobody wants to do anything about the weather. It’s perfect as it is. The rains are over. The cold is gone. Everything is green, and flowers sparkle over the countryside. The sun is up early and bright, and it is a blessing after all those dreary months of wet and wind. It’s now like June in Virginia.

I don’t know how it affects the fighting troops, but in my own case I’ve got spring fever so badly my conscience hurts. All I want to do was lie in the sun.

For a while we were camped in an apricot grove, on ankle-high bluegrass. The sun beamed down between the trees, and occasional bees buzzed around with that Midwestern summer drone that to me is synonymous with lazy days.

Shirks work and loves it

That apricot grove was one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever known, and I’d find myself lying for hours outside my tent, flat on my back in the grass, reveling in the evil knowledge that I was shirking my work, the war, and everything else.

Then we moved to a gumtree grove and set up our tents again. One Sunday morning, most of the other correspondents left to visit an airfield, leaving our little camp deserted and a perfect place to accomplish a lot of writing.

But instead of doing my job as I should have, I fell into one of my carpentering spells and worked from breakfast to mid-afternoon building a washstand onto a tree, cutting up a five-gallon gasoline can for a washbasin, cleaning my mess kit, and wiring up a broken chair I had found on a dump heap, so we could boast that we actually had a home with a chair in it. I didn’t write a line all day, bur I sure had a wonderful time.

Chris Cunningham of the United Press and I are sharing a tent and he says if I don’t quit being so housewifey he’s going insane. I guess Chis is doomed, for the spring puttering days are upon me and I can’t help it.

We’ve not yet been issued summer khaki, but there’s a rumor it’ll be done soon. Actually, it isn’t too hot yet for our heavies. They say the cruelly hot weather doesn’t come till June.

Mosquitoes begin to show up

Mosquitoes are beginning to show up. We watched for the first mosquito as we used to watch at home for the first robin, but not with the same spirit of welcome. I’m the mosquito barometer for our group, since a mosquito will travel days and says to find me. I got my first bad bites down in central Tunisia and am now anxiously sweating out the malaria incubation period.

The Army hasn’t yet issued mosquito head or bed nets, but there’s a rumor along that line. They’ve started giving us semiweekly atabrine tablets. I’m being very bad and not taking anything, since atabrine throws me and quinine makes my head feel constantly as though I were shouting in a barrel. So, I suppose the next torture on your list will be having to read about me having malaria.

We correspondents are winding up the Tunisian campaign in comparative luxury. The old rough-and-tumble days of last winter are gone. The Army’s Public Relations Branch is now all set up like a traveling circus, and we are well looked after.

We are so close to the frontlines we can base permanently in our own camp and still get to the firing line in half an hour. German raiders come over daily, but our air superiority is so great now that oftentimes we don’t even look up.

All night the artillery rumbles, and the ground quivers. When I first came to this spot, I couldn’t sleep because of it, but I’ve got used to it.

Arabs dig out slit trenches

We are living in two-man tents, and there are several bigger tents for the kitchen, mess and stockroom. We have stolen tables from a bombed-out saloon in a nearby village. We have electric lights in our tents. And instead of digging our own slit trenches, here the Arabs do it – they pay being a pack of cigarettes for a day’s work.

We take off our clothes at night now. We sleep in folding cots, have our own mess, and even wash our faces of a morning. It is all so different from our miserable winter.

I’m telling you all this so you’ll understand why these columns have been so bad lately. Warm weather and a taste of half-civilized living have undermined my character. I’ve just been too comfortable to think.

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Won’t the mosquitoes suck him dry if he does so, since he is the mosquito barometer? Or did he have something to ward those pesky mosquitoes away?

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Sleep under a mosquito net?

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Ah… yes. Why did this not strike me as the obvious answer even though I live in a tropical country? :man_facepalming:

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 27, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
We moved one afternoon to a new position just a few miles behind the invisible line of armor that separates us from the Germans in northern Tunisia. Nothing happened that first night that was spectacular, yet somehow the whole night became obsessed with a spookiness that leaves it standing like a landmark in my memory.

We had been at the new camp about an hour and were still setting up our tents when German planes appeared overhead. We stopped work to watch them. It was the usual display of darting planes, with the conglomerate sounds of ack-ack on the ground and in the sky. Suddenly we realized that one plane was diving straight at us, and we made a mad scramble for foxholes. Two officer friends of mine had dug a three-foot hole and set their tent over it. They made for their tent, and I was tramping on their heels. The tent flap wouldn’t come open, and we wound up in a silly heap. Finally, it did open, and we all dived through the narrow opening at once.

We lay there in the hole, face down, as the plane came smack overhead with a terrible roar. We were all drawn up inside, waiting for the blow. Explosions around us were shatteringly loud, and yet when it was all over, we couldn’t find any bomb holes or anybody hurt. But you could find a lot of nervous people.

Guns thunder for 24 hours

Dusk came on, and with dusk began the steady boom of big guns in the mountains ahead of us. They weren’t near enough for the sound to be crashing. Rather it was like the lonely roll of an approaching thunderstorm – a sound which since childhood has always made me sad with a kind of portent of inevitable doom.

We went to bed in our tents. A nearby farmyard was full of dogs and they began a howling that lasted all night. The roll of artillery was constant. It never stopped once in 24 hours. Once in a while, there were nearer shots which might have been German patrols or might not.

We lay uneasily on our cots. Sleep wouldn’t come. We turned and turned. I snapped on a flashlight.

Chris Cunningham asked from the next cot:

What time is it?

I answered:

Quarter to one. Haven’t you been asleep?

He hadn’t.

A plane droned faintly in the distance and came nearer and nearer until it was overhead.

Chris asked out of the darkness:

Is that a Jerry or a Beaufighter?

I said:

It hasn’t got that throb-throb to it, so it must be a Beaufighter. But hell, I never can tell really. Don’t know what it is.

The plane passed on, out of hearing. The artillery rolled and rolled. A nearer shot went off uncannily somewhere in th darkness. Some guinea hens set up a terrific cackling.

Scorpions, snakes conjured up

I remembered that just before dusk a soldier had shot at a snake in our new camp, and they thought it was a cobra. We’d just heard our first stories of scorpions, too. I began to feel creepy and wondered if our tent flaps were tight.

Another plane throbbed in the sky, and we lay listening with an awful anticipation. One of the dogs suddenly broke into a frenzied barking and went tearing through our little camp as thought chasing a demon.

My mind seemed to lose all sense of proportion, and I was jumpy and mad at myself.

Concussion ghosts, traveling in waves, touched our tent walls and made them quiver. Ghosts were shaking the ground ever so lightly. Ghosts were stirring the dogs to hysteria. Ghosts were wandering in the sky peering for us in our cringing hideout. Ghosts were everywhere, and their hordes were multiplying as every hour added its production of new battlefield dead.

You lie and think of the graveyards and the dirty men and the shocking blast of the big guns, and you can’t sleep.

Everybody is nervous

Out of darkness from the next cot comes:

What time is it?

I snap on the flashlight.

Half past 4, and go to sleep!

Finally, just before dawn, you do sleep, in spite of everything.

Next morning, we spoke around among ourselves and found one by one that all of us had tossed away all night. It was an unexplainable thing. For all of us had been through dangers greater than this. On another might, the roll of the guns would have lulled us to sleep.

It’s just that on some nights the air becomes sick and there is an unspoken contagion of spiritual dread, and you are little boys again, lost in the dark.

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Yes, it was one of those nights we all know too well.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 28, 1943)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
Africa is a strange country, and this war is very little like the last war in France. Yet here too, many an American sleep beneath fields of poppies – poppies so red and vivid that their beauty is strangely saddening.

The desert battlefields and the northern battleground too are alive with flowers. They grow wild, in patches as thick as grass, blanketing solid acres. They grow together in vast stretches of red, yellow and orange, all of it framed by the lush green of new grass. Even the dullest spirits among us can’t help being touched by their ironical loveliness.

I have stopped now and then to see some of the battle graveyards. The Germans bury their dead in small cemeteries along the roadsides, but we concentrate in fewer and bigger graveyards, usually on the edge of some town. Arabs are hired to dig the graves.

At Gafsa, there is an American cemetery with more than 600 graves. It is in desert-like country, and the graves are aligned in precise rows in the naked gray earth. Each is marked with a waist-high wooden cross. In a nearby tent is a great pile of ready-made crosses, and a stack of newly carpentered wooden markers in the form of the Star of David, for the Jewish dead.

As all the American dead in the Gafsa area have been located and reburied in the permanent graveyard, this cemetery section will move on to other fronts.

Americans in German cemetery

The little German cemeteries are always bordered with rows of white rocks, and in some there will be a phrase neatly spelled out in white rocks with a border around it. One that I remember said, in rough translation:

These dead gave their spirits for the glory of Greater Germany.

In one German cemetery of about a hundred graves, we found 11 Americans. They lay among the Germans, not segregated in any way. Their graves are identical with those of the Germans except that beneath the names on the wooden crosses is printed “Amerikaner,” and below that the Army serial number. We presume their “dog tags” were buried with them.

On one of the graves, beneath the soldier’s serial number, is also printed: “T-40.” The Germans apparently thought that was part of his number. Actually, it only showed that the man had his first anti-tetanus shot in 1940.

My friend Sgt. Pat Donadeo, of 327 S. Atlantic Ave., Pittsburgh, was with me when we looked at this graveyard, and as we left, he said:

They respect our dead the same as we do theirs. It’s comforting to know that.

Booby trap grave markers

We also came upon a number of Italian graveyards set out in fields. Those graves too were well-marked, and each had a bouquet of wilted marigolds. At the side of one little Italian cemetery, which was beautifully bordered and decorated, were half a dozen additional graves, apparently dug at the last minute before the retreat. They were just rough mounds, unmarked except for an empty quart wine bottle stuck upside down at the head of each grave. Inside the bottles we could see scraps of paper, apparently with the dead Italians’ names and numbers on them. Naturally we wouldn’t violate the graves by pulling out the bottles, but even if our inclination had been rowdy, we would have been afraid to. There are rumors, which I have not been able to verify, that such grave-marking bottles are sometimes booby traps.

The Germans leave very clean country behind them. Their salvage organization must be one of the best in the world – probably because of desperate necessity. We’ve gone all over the Tunisian country from which they have fled, and evidences that they have been there are slight. You see burned-out tanks in the fields and some wrecked scout cars and Italian trucks lying in roadside ditches, and that is about all. Nothing is left behind that is repairable. Wrecked cars are stripped of their tires, instruments and lights. They leave no tin cans, boxes or other junk as we do.

We’ve seen little evidence of German earth-scorching, probably because the retreat northward was too fast. Some bridges were blown up. Mountain passes and the paths around wrecked bridges were heavily mined. But the most noticeable thing is the destruction of all telephone lines. They cut down about every other pole along the highways, and snipped most of the wires. The poles weren’t chopped down. They were sawed off about two feet above the ground, and very neatly sawed off too, the fastidious marauders.

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