The Pittsburgh Press (April 28, 1943)
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.