Yes, it was one of those nights we all know too well.
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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.
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The Pittsburgh Press (April 29, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
One night at Kairouan, three of us correspondents, finding the newly-taken town filled wirth newly-arrived British and American troops, just drove out of town into the country and camped for the night. We didn’t put up a tent. We just slept in the open.
The mosquitoes were fierce, and we draped netting over our hands. We were in a sort of big ditch right alongside an Arab graveyard. But neither the graves nor the mosquitoes bothered us that night, for we were tired and windburned, and before we knew it, morning had come and a hot sun was beaming down into our squinting eyes.
And what should those sleepy eyes behold but two Arab boys standing right over our bedrolls, holding out eggs. It was practically like a New Yorker cartoon. For all I know they may have been standing there all night.
At any rate, they had come to the right place, for we were definitely in the market for eggs. They wouldn’t sell for money, so we dug into our larger box and got four eggs in trade for three little cellophane packets of hard candy. Then we started all over again and got four more eggs for a pack of cigarettes.
Americans run everything
We thought it a good trade, but found later that the trading ratio which the Germans had set up ahead of us was one cigarette for one egg. We Americans have to ruin everything, of course, but as one tough-looking soldier said:
If I want to give $50 for an egg it’s my business and my $50. And from all I’ve seen of Arabs an extra franc or two ain’t gonna hurt them any.
All this happened before wee had got out of our bedrolls. But the youthful traders didn’t leave. As we were putting on our pants, each boy whisked a shoe-shining box from under his burnoose and went after our shoes. Then when we started a fire and were feeding it with sticks, one of the boys got down and blew on the flame to make it burn better. It was easy to see that we had acquired a couple of body servants.
The boys were herding about two dozen goats in some nearby center. Now and then, one of them would run over and chase the goats back nearer to our camp. We called one boy Mohammed and the other Abdullah, which seemed to tickle them. They were good-natured, happy boys of about 15.
One of them tried on my goggles. He seemed to imagine that he looked wonderful in them, and giggled and made poses. He didn’t know the goggles were upside down. Also, he didn’t know that I was hoping fervently his eyes weren’t as diseased as they looked.
Paid in worthless money
The boys told us in French that the Germans had made them work at an airport, opening gas cans and doing genera flunky work. They said the Germans paid them 20 francs a day, which is above the local scale, but it turned out they were German-printed francs, which of course are now absolutely worthless.
Our self-appointed helpers hunted sticks for us, poured water out of our big can and helped us wash our mess kits. They kept blowing in the fire, they cleaned up all the scraps around our bivouac, they lifted our heavy bedrolls into the jeep for us, and just as we were ready to leave, they gave our shoes a final brushing.
We paid them with three cigarettes and two sticks of gum each, and they were delighted.
Wants goat food
When we were ready to go, we shook hands all around, au-revoired, smiled and saluted. And then one of the boys asked apologetically if we could give them one more thing maybe. We asked what it was they wanted. You’d never guess. He wanted an empty tin can for his goats to chew on. We gave him one.
Hadji is the Arab word used in place of “Sir” before the name of anybody who has journeyed to Mecca and become holy. Seven journeys to Kairouan equal one to Mecca, so we correspondents now go around calling each other Hadji, since most of us have crossed the city line more than seven times.
Another word we’ve adopted is djebel. It’s Arabic for hill or mountain. On the maps every knob you see is Djebel This or Djebel That. So, we also call each other Djebel, and if you think that’s silly, well, we have to have something to laugh at.
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Well we at least solved the mosquito netting question.
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The Pittsburgh Press (April 30, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
Our Army in North Africa is still full of rumors. Most of them have to do with when we will go home.
Recently, there was a rumor that President Roosevelt had made a radio address saying that the mothers, wives and sweethearts of the men in North Africa were due for a big surprise as soon as the Tunisian campaign was over. I have never been able to verify whether he made such a speech or not, but anyway the rumored remark spread and was immediately interpreted by the men as meaning that everybody was going home the minute the last German was out of Africa. Some of our troops sincerely believe that’s what will happen.
The orange and tangerine seasons is over now. Those richly juicy North African tangerines were one of the pleasantest things of our war over here. For months we ate them by the daily dozens. Now that they are all gone, we are back to occasional canned fruit juice from America. And on British mess tables you’ll find a little can of pills called ascorbic tablets, which you take daily to make up for the lack of fruits in your diet.
Mama and Papa’s hotel intact
I stopped at Fériana one day to check up on what had happened to our little old hotel there and Papa and Mama and the boys, who ran it.
Well, the American Army had taken over the hotel, lock, stock and barrel. Papa and Mama were still living in Tébessa, to which they fled when the Germans came. Two of the boys were back at Fériana, living in two backrooms and just sort of waiting for the Army to leave.
The Germans had done very little damage to the place. Before long now all of us intruders will be gone and then Fériana can go back to its own peaceful ways,
A new type of American ration has just showed up over here in answer to the British “compo,” which small groups of traveling soldiers had found so superior to anything of ours. The new stuff is called “U ration.” It’s wonderful. It has everything that is needed by four or five men out on a trip who have to fix their own meals.
It comes in a pasteboard box inside a wooden box. Everything is done up in small cans or packets just big enough to be used up at one meal.
Meals are really somethin’
With it come two printed menus to help guide you. I’ve lost No. 1 but here is No. 2: Breakfast – tomato juice, whole-wheat cereal, sliced bacon, biscuits, coffee; dinner – bean soup, roast beef, quick-cooking rice, biscuits, lemonade, hard candy; supper – meat and vegetable stew, dried prunes, coffee, apricot spread.
The ration also includes root beer, gumdrops, canned butter, lemonade, tomato juice in powdered form, and two big envelopes of toilet paper. The tomato juice is fairly lousy, but the canned bacon is superb. God bless the U ration!
He understood all the time
Lots of odd little prisoner stories are popping up.
One American officer I know had to take charge of a German aviator who had been brought down. The German had a slight wound in the forehead, so the American officer took him in a jeep to a hospital and had the wound treated. Then he put him under guard for the night but saw to it that he was free to go to the toilet whenever he wished, and even sent him some extra blankets.
The German was surly throughout. Efforts at casual conversation with him got nowhere. Obviously, he was mean, and couldn’t understand what was said to him anyway.
The next morning, he was transferred to a prison camp. The American officer wasn’t present when his guest left, but just as the German stepped into a truck, he spoke to one of our orderlies, and in perfect English without an accent said:
Corporal, tell Maj. Smith I deeply appreciate everything he did for me.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 1, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by cable)
As is bound to happen in wartime, your close friends sometimes disappear. And as soon as they are gone, you sit of an evening and recounted stories about them, just as we used to do in the old aviation days after a mail pilot didn’t come back from his run.
The closest friend I’ve got so far is Lt. Leonard Bessman, a lawyer from Milwaukee. We have almost definite proof that Bessman was captured, and not killed, so we all hope to see him again before too long if things turn out right. I’ve mentioned Lennie Bessman before in these columns. Of all the soldiers I have ever known, he is the most sensitive to the little beauties of war and to the big tragedy of life. Maybe that is because he is Jewish, or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.
His bravery was a byword among us long before he was captured.
Laugh about Lennie’s words
We sit around on our cots at night and laugh about things we’d heard Lennie say, because they sounded so melodramatic, yet, knowing him as we do, we know they weren’t melodramatic at all and that Lennie meant what he said.
He was up forward of our advance troops, for that was his job, and suddenly he found himself cut off, with a German tank in front of him and a machine-gun nest on his side. Lennie jumped out of his jeep, pulled his .45 and yelled at the heavily-armed enemy:
Come on out and I won’t shoot.
How’s that for confidence? We sit around at night and laugh about it.
Most of us find our emotions becoming jaded as month after month of war piles up on us, but Lennie was never jaded. He had a facility for mirroring in his fertile mind every little human thing that crossed his path. I’ll tell you a couple of stories he told us.
We had a certain type of anti-aircraft gun, mounted on a half-track, which requires two men to fire. They sit in two metal bucket seats just back of the guns.
Eyes kept on Germans
Lennie was lying near this ack-ack outfit during a terrific dive-bombing and strafing. He kept his eyes on these two special gunners as the Stukas came down right upon them.
The two never wavered. They sat there firing until suddenly and in unison they toppled sideways out of their seats – dead. And all within the same instant two more Americans rose like twins from the bed of the half-track, took the seats just vacated by death, and went right on with the firing.
The incident that most tickled his admiration was a queer one. It seems we had a big concentration of artillery that was giving the Germans plenty of trouble. They couldn’t locate it, so at night they would send planes over hunting for it. Of course, it was then our cue to lay low and silent, so as not to give away our position by firing at them.
‘You silly fools’
They came night after night, and never did find us. But each night after they had circled and were finally leaving, one lone contemptuous gunner would fire one lone contemptuous shot at them, just as though to say:
Here we are, you silly fools!
Night after night that one gunner would fire his one slapstick shot just as they were leaving. His sauciness exalted Lennie’s soul. I’ve heard him say:
I’d rather shake hands with that man than anybody in the American Army. I’m going to try to find him, and even if he’s a private I’m going to salute him.
We have heard that the Germans took the few Americans captured at El Guettar and marched them up the main street of Tunis, then loaded them in trucks and paraded them back again, then unloaded them and marched them through town once more – to make it look as though there were lots of prisoners. One of Lennie’s friends back here says he can just see Lennie, on his third compulsory trip down the main street of Tunis, screwing up his nose in the special mask of comic disgust which is one of his little habits, and observing:
Seems as if I’ve seen this before somewhere.
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Lennie lived a long interesting life and passed away at the age of 85 in 1994. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
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He’s around the same age as my grandfather, I see.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 3, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In the frontlines before Mateur, Tunisia – (May 2, by wireless)
We’re now with an infantry outfit that has battled ceaselessly for four days and nights.
This northern warfare has been in the mountains. You don’t ride much anymore. It is walking and climbing and crawling country. The mountains aren’t big, but they are constant. They are largely treeless. They are easy to defend and bitter to take. But we are taking them.
The Germans lie on the back slope of every ridge, deeply dug into foxholes. In front of them the fields and pastures are hideous with thousands of hidden mines. The forward slopes are left open, untenanted, and if the Americans tried to scale these slopes, they would be murdered wholesale in an inferno of machine-gun crossfire, plus mortars and grenades.
Consequently, we didn’t do it that way. We have fallen back to the old warfare of first pulverizing the enemy with artillery, then sweeping around the ends of the hill with infantry and taking them from the sides and behind.
I’ve written before how the big guns crack and roar almost constantly throughout the day and night. They lay a screen ahead of our troops. By magnificent shooting they drop shells on the back slopes. By means of shells timed to burst in the air a few feet from the ground, they get the Germans even in their foxholes. Our troops have found that the Germans dig foxholes down and then under, trying to get cover from the shell bursts that shower death from above.
Enough… for once
Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.
All the guns in any one sector can be centered to shoot at one spot. And when we lay the whole business on a German hill the whole slope seems to erupt. It becomes an unbelievable cauldron of fire and smoke and dirt. Veteran German soldiers say they have never been through anything like it.
Now to the infantry – the goddamned infantry, as they like to call themselves.
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end, they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.
I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.
A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.
All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.
The men are walking. They are 50 feet apart for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.
The line never ends
On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.
They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaved. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.
In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of ant-like men.
There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.
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Writing like this is an art that is missed in today’s world. He puts the reader directly in his shoes to see what he sees, to smell what he smells, to hear what he hears, and to feel the emotions he feels. This is one reason the families back home were an integral part of the war effort.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 4, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontlines in Tunisia – (by wireless)
When our infantry goes into a certain big push in northern Tunisia, each man is issued three bars of D-ration chocolate, enough to last one day. He takes no other food. He carries two canteens of water instead of the usual one. He carries no blankets. He leaves behind all extra clothes except his raincoat. In his pockets he may have a few toilet articles. Some men carry their money, others give it to friends to keep.
In the days that follow they live in a way that is inconceivable to us at home. They walk and fight all night without sleep. Next day they lie flat in foxholes, or hide in fields of freshly green, knee-high wheat. If they’re in the fields they dared not even move enough to dig foxholes, for that would have bring the German artillery. They can’t rise even for nature’s calls. The German feels for them continually with his artillery.
Daylight waiting is torture
The slow drag of these motionless daylight hours is nearly unendurable. Lt. Mickey Miller of Morgantown, Indiana, says this lifeless waiting in a wheatfield is almost the worst part of the whole battle.
The second evening after the attack began, C-rations and five-gallon cans of water are brought up across country in jeeps, after dark. You eat in the dark, and you can’t see the can you are eating from. You just eat by feel. You make cold coffee from cold water.
One night, a German shell landed close and fragments punctured 15 cans of water.
Each night enough canned rations for three meals are brought up, but when the men move on after supper most of them either lose or leave behind the next day’s rations, because they’re too heavy to carry. But, as they say, when you’re in battle and excited you sort of go on your nerve. You don’t think much about being hungry.
The men fight at night and lie low by day, when the artillery takes over its blasting job. Weariness gradually creeps over them. What sleeping they do is in daytime. But, as they say, at night it’s too cold and in daytime it’s too hot. Also the fury of the artillery makes daytime sleeping next to impossible. So does the heat of the sun. Some men have passed out from heat prostration. Many of them get upset stomachs from the heat.
But as the third and fourth days roll on, weariness overcomes all obstacles to sleep. Men who sit down for a moment’s rest fall asleep in the grass. There are even men who say they can march while asleep.
Men can sleep anywhere
Lt. Col. Charlie Stone, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, actually went to sleep standing up talking on a field telephone – not while listening, but in the middle of a spoken sentence.
When sometimes they do lie down at night the men have only their raincoats to lie on. It is cold, and the dew makes the grass as wet as rain. They don’t dare start a fire to heat their food, even in daytime, for the smoke would attract enemy fire. At night they can’t even light cigarettes in the open, so after digging their foxholes they get down and make hoods over their heads with their raincoats, and light up under the coats.
They have plenty of cigarettes. Those who run out during battle are supplied by others. Every night new supplies of water and C-rations are brought up in jeeps.
You can’t conceive how hard it is to move and fight at night. The country is rugged, the ground rough. Everything is new and strange. The nights are pitch-black. You grope with your feet. You step into holes, and fall sprawling in little gullies and creeks. You trudge over plowed ground and push through waist-high shrubs. You go as a man blindfolded, feeling unsure and off balance, but you keep on going.
Fear of mines ever-present
Through it all there is the fear of mines. The Germans have mined the country behind them beyond anything ever known before. We simply can’t take time to go over each inch of ground with mine detectors, so we have to discover the minefields by stumbling into them or driving over them. Naturally there are casualties, but they are smaller than you might think – just a few men each day. The greatest damage is psychological – the intense watchfulness our troops must maintain.
The Germans have been utterly profligate with their mines. We dug out 400 from one field. We’ve found so many fields and so many isolated mines that we have run out of white tape to mark them with. But still we go on.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 5, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In the frontlines before Mateur – (by wireless)
After four days in battle, the famous infantry outfit that I’m with sat on its newly won hill and took two days’ rest, while companion units on each side of it leapfrogged ahead.
The men dig in on the back slope of the hill before any rest begins. Everybody digs in. This is an inviolate rule of the commanding officers and nobody wants to disobey it. Every time you pause, even if you think you’re dying of weariness, you dig yourself a hole before you sit down.
The startling thing to me about those rest periods is how quickly the human body can recuperate from critical exhaustion, how rapidly the human mind snaps back to the normal state of laughing, grousing, yarn-spinning, and yearning for home.
Here is what happens when a unit stops to rest.
My unit stops just after daybreak on Hill 394. Foxholes are dug, outposts placed, phone wires strung on the ground. Some patrol work goes on as usual. Then the men lie down and sleep till the blistering heat of the sun wakes them up.
Darkness brings hot food
After that you sit around in bunches recounting things. You don’t do much of anything. The day just easily kills itself. That first evening is when life begins to seem like Christmas Eve. The mail comes up in jeeps just before dark. Then come the men’s blanket rolls. At dark, hot food arrives – the first hot food in four days. This food is cooked in rolling kitchens several miles back and brought up by jeep, in big thermos containers, to the foot of the hill. Men carry the containers, slung on poles over their shoulders, up goat paths in the darkness to all parts of the mountain.
Hot food and hot coffee put life into a man, and then in a pathetic kind of contentment you lie down and you sleep. The all-night crash of the artillery behind you is completely unheard through your weariness. There are no mosquitoes so far in the mountains, and very few fleas, but there are lots of ants.
Hard to write letters
Hot food arrives again in the morning, before daylight. You eat breakfast at 4 a.m. Then begins a day of reassembling yourself. Word is passed that mail will be collected that evening, so the boys sit on the ground and write letters. But writing is hard, for they can’t tell in their letters what they’ve just been through.
The men put water in their steel helmets and wash and shave for the first time in days. A few men at a time are sent to a creek in the valley to take baths. The remainder sit in groups on the ground talking, or individually in foxholes cleaning their guns, reading, or just relaxing. A two-month-old batch of copies of the magazine Yank arrived, and a two-week-old bunch of Stars and Stripes. Others read detective magazines and comic books that have come up with their bedrolls. At noon everybody opens cans of cold C ration. Cold coffee in five-gallon water cans is put in the sun to warm.
Soldiers cut each other’s hair. It doesn’t matter how it looks, for they aren’t going anywhere fancy anyhow. Some of them strip nearly naked and lie on their blankets for a sunbath. By now their bodies are tanned as though they had been wintering at Miami Beach. They wear the inner part of their helmets, for the noonday sun is dangerous.
Purple with ointment
Their knees are skinned from crawling over rocks. They find little unimportant injuries that they didn’t know they had. Some take off their shoes and socks and look over their feet, which are purple with athlete’s-foot ointment.
I sit around with them, and they get to telling me stories, both funny and serious, about their battle. They are all disappointed when they learn I am not permitted to name the outfit they’re in, for they are all proud of it and would like the folks at home to know what they’ve done.
They say:
We always get it the toughest. This is our third big battle now since coming to Africa. The Jerry is really afraid of us now. He knows what outfit we are, and he doesn’t like us.
Thus they talk and boast and laugh and speak of fear. Evening draws down and the chill sets in once more. Hot chow arrives just after dusk. And then the word is passed around. Orders have come by telephone.
There’s no grouching
There is no excitement, no grouching, no eagerness either. They had expected it. Quietly they roll their packs, strap them on, lift their rifles and fall into line.
There is not a sound as they move like wraiths in single file down tortuous goat paths, walking slowly, feeling the ground with their toes, stumbling, and hushfully cussing. They will walk all night and attack before dawn.
They move like ghosts. You don’t hear or see them three feet away. Now and then a light flashes lividly from a blast by our big guns, and for just an instant you see a long slow line of dark-helmeted forms silhouetted in the flash. Then darkness and silence consume them again, and somehow you are terribly moved.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 6, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In the frontlines before Mateur, Tunisia – (by wireless)
Rest periods for our frontline troops in Tunisia are few and far between. And when they do come, they are only for a day or two, and subject to being ended at any moment.
The infantry battalion that I’ve attached myself to had its rest cut short just after dark on the second evening. Word came to move again into the lines, which were only a mile and a half away.
We had been dug in on a high, rocky ridge. German shells pounded continuously on the back side of the ridge, just a hundred yards off. The whole solid mountain seemed to tremble with each blast, but of course it didn’t actually. And we were perfectly safe.
Glad to leave reptiles, ants
Our view there was beautiful and majestic. Yet, I, personally, was not reluctant to leave. For our ridge was inhabited by a frightening menagerie of snakes, two-legged lizards, scorpions, centipedes, overgrown chiggers and man-eating ants.
Our battalion marched in two sections. The first left early, with orders to attack a certain forward hill at 3 a.m. The other half was to start after midnight, reach a certain protected wadi before dawn, dig itself in, and stand by for use whenever needed. I went with the second batch.
The men weren’t upset about going into the line again so soon. They just accepted it. They feel they have already done more than their share of this war’s fighting, but there is in their manner a touchingly simple compliance with whatever is asked of them.
At 1 a.m., we were ready to go. Blanket rolls and personal gear were left behind. I carried only my mackinaw and small hand shovel. In columns of twos, we plowed down a half-mile slope waist-high in wild grass. The slope was full of big bomb craters. We had to feel for them with our feet and walk around them. There were big rocks hidden in the grass, and soldiers stumbled and fell down awkwardly in their heavy gear, and get up cussing.
Finally, we hit a sort of path and fell into a single line of march. It was very slow at first, for we were crowding the last stragglers of the first section. For long periods we would stop for some unexplained reason and just sit on the ground.
The man ahead of me, Pvt. Lee Hawkins of Everett, Pennsylvania, had a 50-pound radio strapped on his back, plus two boxes of ammunition. How he kept on his feet in that rough sightless march, I don’t know.
Orders prohibit talking
After a couple of hours, the route ahead seemed to clear up. We walked briskly in single file. You had to keep our eyes on the ground and watch every step. The moon came up, but it was behind a great black cloud and gave only a little light. We talked some, but not much. We made a couple of brief unexplained stops, and then suddenly word came down the column:
No more talking. Pass it back.
From then on, we marched in silence except for the splitting crash of German artillery ahead, and of ours behind. The artillery of both sides was firing almost continuously. There would be the heavy blast of the guns, then an eerie rustle from each shell as it sped unseen across the sky far above our heads. It gave the night a strange sense of greatness.
As a first-timer, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of exaltation from this tense, stumbling march through foreign darkness up into the unknown.
Seems Howell never comes in
It did have its lighter touch, if you were inclined to hunt for a laugh. One soldier with a portable radio had been trying since early evening to get contact with our leading column. He was having static trouble, and kept walking around trying various locations all night long. Wherever you turned, wherever you stopped, you could always hear this same voice, gradually growing pitiful in its vain quest, calling softly:
Lippman to Howell. Come in, Howell.
As the night wore on and this voice kept up its persistent wandering and fruitless calling for its mate, it got to be like a scene out of a Saroyan play, and I had a private giggle over it.
Shells from both sides kept going far over our heads. They were landing miles away. Then, all of a sudden, they weren’t. With the quickness of an auto accident, a German shell screamed toward us. Instinct tells you, from the timber of the tone, how near a shell is coming to you. Our whole column fell flat automatically and in unison.
The shell landed with a frightening blast 200 yards to our right. We got up and started, and it happened again, this time to our left. I felt weak all over, and all the others had the creeps too.
Then, off to the left, we heard German machine-gun fire. You can always tell it from American machine-gun because it is so much faster. Word was passed down the line for us to squat down. We sat silently on our haunches for a minute, and then on another order we all crept over into some grass and lay hidden there for about five minutes. Then we started on.
All dig in, go to sleep
We got to where we were going half an hour before dawn. It was an outcropping of big white rocks, covering several acres, just back of the rise where the earlier half of our unit was already fighting.
The commanding officer told us to find good places among the rocks, get well scattered, and dig in immediately. He didn’t have to do any urging. Machine guns were crashing a few hundred yards off. Now and then a bullet would ricochet down among us.
The order went around to dig only with shovels, for the sound of picks hitting rocks might give us away to the Germans. We talked only in low voices. The white rocks were like ghosts and gave an illusion of moving when you looked at them. I picked out an L-shaped niche formed by two knee-high rocks, and began shoveling out a hole in front of them. At dawn, we were all dug in, and the artillery had increased to a frenzy that seemed to consume the sky.
We now had been without sleep for 24 hours, and we lay in our holes and slept wearily, oblivious of the bedlam around us and the heat of the bright early sun. Just as I fell off to sleep, I heard a low voice just behind my rock, pleading, it seemed to me now, a little hoarsely, but still determinedly:
Come in, Howell. Come in, Howell.
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Wow that was so good.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 7, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In the frontlines near Mateur, Tunisia – (by wireless)
The day I’m writing about in this column is one of those days when you sit down on a rock about once an hour, put your chin in your hand. And think to yourself:
What am I doing here, anyway?
On this unforgettable Tunisian day, between 3,000 and 4,000 shells have passed over our heads. True, most of them were in transit, en route to somewhere else, but enough of them were intended for us to make a fellow very somber before the day was over. And just as a sideline, a battle was going on a couple of hundred yards to our left, mines were blowing up jeeps on our right, and German machine-gun bullets were zinging past with annoying persistency.
My outfit was in what was laughingly called “reserve” for the day. But when you hear soldiers who have been through four big battles say with dead seriousness, “Brother, this is getting rugged!” you feel that you would rather be in complete retirement than in reserve.
Noise of guns brutal
All day we were a sort of crossroads for shells and bullets. All day guns roared in a complete circle around us. About three-eighths of this circle was German, and five-eighths of it American. Our guns were blasting the Huns’ hill positions ahead of us, and the Germans were blasting our gun positions behind us. Shells roared over us from every point of the compass. I don’t believe there was a whole minute in 14 hours of daylight when the air above us was silent.
The guns themselves were close enough to be brutal in their noise and, between shots, the air above us was filled with the intermixed rustle and whine of traveling shells. You can’t see a shell, unless you’re standing near the gun when it is fired, but its rush through the air makes such a loud sound that it seems impossible it can’t be seen. Some shells whine loudly throughout their flight. Others make only a toneless rustle. It’s an indescribable sound. The nearest I can come to it is the sound of jerking a stick through water.
Some apparently defective shells get out of shape and make queer noises. I remember one that sounded like a locomotive puffing hard at about 40 miles an hour. Another one made a rhythmic knocking sound as if turning end over end. We all had to laugh as it went over.
Close ones sound differently
They say you never hear the shell that hits you. Fortunately, I don’t know about that, but I do know that the closer they hit, the less time you hear them. Those landing within a hundred yards you hear only about a second before they hit. The sound produces a special kind of horror inside you that is something more than mere fright. It is a confused form of acute desperation.
Each time you are sure this is the one. You can’t help but duck. Whether you shut your eyes or not, I don’t know, but I do know you become instantly so weak that your joints feel all gone. It takes about 10 minutes to get back to normal.
Shells that come too close make veterans jump just the same as neophytes. Once we heard three shells in the air at the same time, all headed for us. It wasn’t possible for me to get three times as weak as usual, but after they had all crashed safely a hundred yards away, I know I would have had to grunt and strain mightily to lift a soda cracker.
Heinous bedlam after lull
Sometimes this enemy fire quiets down and you think the Germans are pulling back, until suddenly you are rudely awakened by a heinous bedlam of screaming shells, mortar bursts, and even machine-gun bullets.
Here is an example of these sudden changes. As things had died down late one afternoon, and the enemy was said to be several hills back. I was wandering around among some soldiers who were sitting and standing outside their foxholes during the lull. Somebody told me about a new man who had had a miraculous escape, so I walked around till I found him.
He was Pvt. Malcolm Harblin, of Peru, New York, a 24-year-old farmer who has been in the Army only since June. Pvt. Harblin is a small, pale fellow, quiet as a mouse. He wears silver-rimmed glasses. His steel helmet is too big for him. He looks incongruous on a battlefield. But he was all right in his very first battle, back at El Guettar – an 88mm shell hit right beside him, and a big fragment went between his left arm and his chest, tearing his jacket, shirt and undershirt all to pieces. But he wasn’t scratched.
Dud passes on first bounce
He still wears that ragged uniform, for it’s all he has. He was showing me the holes, and we were talking along nice and peaceful-like when all of a sudden here came that noise, and boy this one had all the tags on it.
Pvt. Harblin dived into his foxhole and I was right on top of him. But sometimes you don’t hear a shell soon enough, and in this case, we would have been too late, except that the shell was a dud. It hit the ground about 30 feet ahead of us, bounced past us so close we could almost have grabbed it, and finally wound up less than a hundred yards behind us.
Pvt. Harblin looked at me, and I looked at Pvt. Harblin. I just had strength enough to whisper bitterly at him:
You and your narrow escapes!
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 8, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
A few weeks ago, I said in one of these columns that the part the Americans would play in the final phase of the Tunisian war would be comparatively small. That was true, if you look at it from the big angle. But when you look at it from the worm’s-eye view that has been mine in the frontlines during a big portion of the fight, it is hard to see anything from the big angle, and I feel constrained to eat my words.
Our part has seemed mighty large to me at times. For our American troops had a brutal fight in the mountain phase of the campaign.
It was war of such intensity as Americans on this side of the ocean had not known before. It was a battle without letup. It was a war of drenching artillery and hidden mines and walls of machine-gun fire and even of the barbaric bayonet.
Germans fight desperately
It was an exhausting, cruel, last-ditch kind of war, and those who went through it would seriously doubt that war could be any worse than those two weeks of mountain fighting.
The Germans battled savagely and desperately from hill to hill until the big break came. There were times when we had to throw battalion after battalion onto an already-pulverized hill before we could finally take it. Our casualties will surely run high.
Nobody will care to underrate the American contribution to the end of Rommel in North Africa.
My time at the front was spent with a certain unit of the 1st Infantry Division. This division has now been through four big battles in North Africa and has made a good name for itself in every one of them. But it has paid dearly for its victories.
Apparently, there have been some intimations in print back home that the 1st Division did not fight well in its earlier battles. The men of the division all are as sore as hornets about it. If such a thing was printed, it was somebody’s unfortunate mistake. For the 1st Division has always fought well.
1st Division has enviable record
It is natural to be loyal to your friends, and I feel a loyalty to the 1st Division, for I have lived with it off and on for six months. But it is a sad thing to become loyal to the men of a division in wartime. It is sad because the men go, and new ones come and they go, and other new ones come until at last only the famous number is left. Finally, it is only a numbered mechanism through which men pass. The 1st Division will exist forever, but my friends of today may not.
For you at home who think this African campaign has been small stuff, let me tell you just this one thing – the 1st Division has already done more fighting here than it did throughout the last war.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 10, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (by wireless)
Just after daylight on the first morning of the battle that I recently sat in on as an awed semi-participant, wounded men and German prisoners began coming back down the hill to us.
They didn’t have far to come – the less seriously-wounded could walk back down in five minutes. We were that close.
About an hour after daylight, I noticed that a man on one of the stretchers coming toward us had on a British officer’s cap. I had a hunch, and ran over to look closely. Sure enough, it was my tentmate of the previous three nights – a British captain.
When I ran, the litter-bearers put down the stretcher, and I kneeled down beside it. As I did so, the captain opened his eyes. He smiled and said:
Oh, hello, hello. I was worrying about you. Are you alright?
How’s that for British breeding?
Bad wounds are ‘nothing at all’
I started to say something about being sorry, but before I could get a word out, he said:
Oh, it’s nothing at all, absolutely nothing. Just a little flesh wound. It isn’t as if I’d been hit in the spine or anything.
But the captain had a big hole in his back, arid his left arm was all shot up. They had given him morphine and he wasn’t in much pain. His shirt was off, but he still wore his pistol and his cap as he lay there. There was blood all over his undershirt. His tanned face had a pale look, but his expression was the same as usual.
Our first-aid station was too much under fire for ambulances or any vehicles to be brought up, so four litter-bearers still had to carry the captain a mile and a half back to the rear. When he heard this, he said:
That’s perfectly ridiculous, carrying me that far. They’ll do no such thing. I can walk back.
The doctor said no, it would start him bleeding again if he got up. But the captain got halfway off the litter and I had to give him a push and a few cusswords before he would consent to being carried.
First half-hour of first battle
The captain was a young fellow, sort of pugilistic-looking but with a gentle manner and an Oxford accent. He had been in the British 8th Army two years without getting hurt. He had just joined us as liaison officer, and was shot in the first half-hour of his first battle.
We’d had nice talks about England and the war and everything. It seemed impossible that someone I’d known and liked and who had been so whole and hearty such a few hours before could now be torn and helpless. But there he was.
A few minutes later, two German prisoners came down the hill, with a doughboy behind them making dangerous motions with his bayonet at their behinds.
Couple of Hitler’s supermen
The captor was a straight American of the drawling hillbilly type, who talked through his nose. I’m sorry I didn’t get his name. When he walked the Germans back to his sergeant he said, in his tobacco-patch twang:
Hey, Sarge, here’s two uv Hitler’s supermen for yuh.
The two prisoners were young and looked very well fed. Their uniforms were loose-fitting khaki, sort of like men’s beach suits at home. With their guns and all their other soldier gear taken away, they had the appearance of being only half-dressed. The expression on their faces was one of wondering what came next.
They were turned over to another soldier, who marched them across the fields to the rear. I couldn’t help grinning as I watched, for the new guardian stayed well behind them and walked as if he were treading on ice.
Our aid station was merely a formation of outcropping rocks on the hillside. The wounded all stopped there to await new litter-bearers to carry them on back.
The battalion surgeon, Capt. Robert Peterman of Hicksville, Long Island, had remarked earlier how our wounded never groaned or made a fuss when they came in, so I paid special attention. And it is true that they just lie on their stretchers, docile and patient, waiting for the medics to do whatever they can.
Seatless britches almost funny
Some of them had been given morphine and were dopey. Some smoked and talked as if nothing much had happened. A good many had been hit in their behinds by flying fragments from shells. The medics there on the battlefield would either cut the seat out of their trousers or else slide their pants down, to treat the wounds, and they’d be put on stretchers that way, lying face down. It was almost funny to see so many men coming down the hill with the white skin of their backsides gleaming against the dark background of brown uniforms and green grass.
Some of the boys who were not too badly wounded seemed to have an expression of relief on their faces. I know how they felt, and I don’t blame them. I remember from the last war the famous English phrase of “going back to Blighty” – meaning being evacuated to England because of wounds. In this war, we have a different expression for the same thing. It is “catching the white boat,” meaning the white hospital ship that takes wounded men back across the Atlantic.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 11, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Tunisian front – (by wireless)
The thing that Americans in Africa had fought and worked six months to get came today. When it did come, it was an avalanche almost impossible to describe. The flood of prisoners choked the roads. There were acres of captured material.
I’ll try to tell you what the spirit of the day was like.
It was a holiday, though everybody kept on working. Everybody felt suddenly free inside, as though personal worry had been lifted. It was like we used to feel as children on the farm, when parents surprised us by saying work was finished and we were going to the state fair for a day. And when you have looked all day goggle-eyed at more Germans than you ever expected to see in your life, you really feel like you have been to a fair.
Today you saw Germans walking alone along highways. You saw them riding, stacked up in our jeeps, with one lone American driver. You saw them by hundreds, crammed as in a subway in their own trucks, with their own drivers. And in the forward areas our fairgrounds of mile after mile contained more Germans than Americans. Germans were everywhere.
German officers weep
It made you a little lightheaded to stand in the center of a crowd, the only American among scores of German soldiers, and not have to feel afraid of them. Their 88s stood abandoned. In the fields, dead Germans still lay on the grass. By the roadside, scores of tanks and trucks still burned. Dumps flamed, and German command posts lay littered where they had tried to wreck as much as possible before surrendering.
But all those were sideshows – the big show was the mass of men in strange uniform, lining roads, swamping farmyards, blackening fields, waiting for us to tell them where to go. High German officers were obviously down in the mouth over the tragic end of their campaign. We saw some tears. Officers wept over the ghastly death toll taken of their men during the last few days. Officers were meticulously correct in their military behavior, but otherwise standoffish and silent.
Not so the common soldiers. I mingled with them all day and sensed no sadness among them. Theirs was not the delight of the Italians, but rather an acceptance of defeat in a war well-fought – why be surly about it?
Germans are friendly
They were friendly, very friendly. Being prisoners, it obviously paid them to be friendly; yet their friendliness seemed genuine. Just as when the French and Americans first met, the Germans started learning English words and teaching us German words.
But circumstances didn’t permit much communion between them and our troops. Those Americans who came in direct contact with them gave necessary orders and herded them into trucks. All other Americans just stared curiously as they passed. I saw very little fraternizing with prisoners. I saw no acts of belligerence and heard neither boos nor cheers. But I did hear a hundred times:
This is the way it should be. Now we can go on from here.
Americans and Germans trade cigarettes
German boys were as curious about us as we were about them. Every time I stopped a crowd would form quickly. In almost every group was one who spoke English. In all honesty I can’t say their bearing or personality was a bit different from that of a similar bunch of American prisoners. They gave us their cigarettes and accepted ours, both for curiosity’s sake. They examined the jeep, and asked questions about our uniforms. If you passed one walking alone, usually he would smile and speak.
One high American officer told me he found himself feeling sorry for them – until he remembered how they had killed so many of his men with their sneaking mines, how they had him pinned down a few days ago with bullets flying; then he hated them.
A ‘sucker for guy who loses’
I am always a sucker for the guy who loses, but somehow it never occurred to me to feel sorry for those prisoners. They didn’t give you a feeling they needed any sorrowing over. They were loyal to their country and sorry they lost but, now it was over for them, they personally seemed glad to be out of it.
Tonight, they still lounge by thousands in fields along the roads. Our trucks, and theirs too, are not sufficient to haul them away. They will just have to wait their turn to be taken off to prison camps. No guards are necessary to keep them from running off into the darkness tonight. They have already done their running and now they await our pleasure, rather humbly and with a curious eagerness to see what comes next for them.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 12, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Northern Tunisia – (May 8, by wireless)
Before the first day of the great surrender on the Bizerte-Tunis front was over, I believe half the Americans in the area had German souvenirs of some sort.
There was very little of what one would call looting of German supply dumps. The Germans gave away helmets, goggles and map cases, which they will not be needing anymore. The spoils of war which the average doughboy has on him are legitimate, and little enough recompense for his fighting.
Practically every American truck has a German or Italian helmet fastened to its radiator. Our motorcycles are decorated like a carnival, with French flags and the colorful little black-and-yellow death’s-head pennants the Germans use for marking their own minefields.
Ernie gets big souvenir
Many soldiers have new Lugers in their holsters. Lots of our men clowningly wear German field caps. German goggles are frequently seen on American heads. I got in on the souvenirs too. I got one memento that is a little gem. It’s an automobile – yep, a real automobile that runs.
I drove back to camp that first evening in my German “Volkswagen,” the bantam car the Nazis use as we use our jeep. It is a topless two-seater with a rear motor, camouflaged a dirty brown.
Mine was given me by our 1st Armored Division for – as they said – “sweating it out with us at Faid Pass all winter.” As I drove back from the lines, Americans in the rear would stare, startled-like and belligerent; then, seeing an American at the wheel they would laugh and wave. I have owned half a dozen autos in my life, but I’ve never been so proud of one as of my clattering little Volkswagen.
Germans well-fed, well-equipped
On that first day of surrender, the Germans sat in groups of hundreds in the fields, just waiting. They lay on their overcoats, resting. They took off their shirts to sun themselves. They took off their shoes to rest their feet.
They were a tired army but not a nondescript one. All were extremely well-equipped. Their uniforms were good. They had plenty in the way of little personal things, money, cigarettes, and food. Their equipment was of the best materials. One English-appearing soldier had a Gem nail-clipper. He said he paid 25¢ for it in New York in 1939.
Some were clean-shaven, some had three- or four-day beards, just like our soldiers. Lots of them had red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep.
As a whole, they seemed younger than our men, and I was surprised that on the average they didn’t seem as big. But they did appear well-fed and in excellent health.
Germans admire Americans
They think Americans are fine fighters. They express only good-natured contempt for their allies, the Italians. As one of them said:
It isn’t just that Italians don’t fight well. It’s simply that Germans don’t like Italians very much in the first place.
Wherever any American correspondents stopped, prisoners immediately gathered around. They all seemed in good spirits. Even those who couldn’t speak a word of English would try hard to tell you something.
The main impression I got, seeing German prisoners, was that they were human like anybody else, fundamentally friendly, a little vain. Certainly they are not supermen. Whenever a group of them would form, some American soldier would pop up with a camera to get a souvenir picture. And every time all the prisoners in the vicinity would crowd into the picture like kids.
Big boost to American morale
One German boy had found a broken armchair leaning against a barn, and was sitting in it. When I passed, he grinned, pointed to his feet and then to the chair arms, and put back his head in the international sign language for “Boy, does this chair feel good!”
This colossal German surrender has done more for American morale here than anything that could possibly have happened. Winning in battle is like winning at poker or catching lots of fish – it’s damned pleasant and it sets a man up. As a result, the hundreds of thousands of Americans in North Africa now are happy men, laughing and working with new spirits that bubble.
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The first American using and promoting VW. 
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