Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 2, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
Men and machines have both now passed their shakedown period in this war – at least here in North Africa. Men who weren’t up to their jobs have largely been culled out and given different work. There are still some inept ones in office jobs, but among the line troops the mill of experience has pretty well ground out the weaklings, the freaks, and the misfits.

And it’s the same with machinery and weapons. Some things have proved themselves almost useless. Others have turned out so perfectly that the engineers would have to scratch their heads to think of any change in design.

In the mechanical end of our African war, three American vehicles stand out above all the others. They are the jeep, the GMC two-and-a-half-ton truck, and the Douglas DC-3 cargo plane.

The DC-3, known in the Army as the C-47, is the workingest airplane in existence, I suppose. It lifts incredible loads, and takes terrific beatings from rough fields, hard handling, and overuse. Almost any pilot will tell you it is the best airplane ever built.

The GMC truck does the same thing in its field. It hauls big loads, it is easy to drive and easy-riding, and the truck driver can do practically anything with it up to an outside loop. It seldom gets stuck, and if it does it can winch itself out. The punishment it will take is staggering.

Jeep goes everywhere

And the jeep – good Lord, I don’t think we could continue the war without the jeep. It does everything, goes everywhere. It’s as faithful as a dog, as strong as a mule, and as agile as a goat. It consistently carries twice what it was designed for, and still keeps on going. It doesn’t even ride so badly after you get used to it.

I have driven jeeps thousands of miles, and if I were called upon to suggest changes for a new model, I could think of only one or two little things.

One is the handbrake. It’s perfectly useless – won’t hold at all. They should either design one that works or else save metal by having none at all.

And in the field of acoustics, I wish they could somehow fix the jeep so that at certain speeds the singing of those heavy tires wouldn’t sound exactly like an approaching airplane. That little sound effect has caused me to jump out of my skin more than once. Except for those two trivial items the jeep is a divine instrument of wartime locomotion.

Only once in my long and distinguished jeep career have I ever had anything go wrong. That time the gears got all mixed up and the thing wouldn’t come out of low gear. It was while we were still fighting around Mateur.

There’s repair depot

Our road was under heavy German shellfire, so the only thing we could do was to take off cross-country and make a wide circle around the shell-infested area. We drove through shoulder-high barley fields, along foot-wide goat trails, up over hills, down steep banks, across creeks, and over huge rockbeds. Then just as we hit the main road and were out in the free again, this gear thing happened.

We still had 20 miles ahead of us, and there was nothing to do but keep on going in low gear. Luckily, we hadn’t gone more than a mile when we saw a little sign denoting an Armored Force repair depot. We drove in just on a chance, and sure enough they said they could fix the jeep. They not only fixed it but gave us supper while we waited, and were extremely pleasant about the whole thing. That’s better service than you get in the States.

The boss man of this outfit was Lt. George P. Carter, of Louisa, Kentucky. He had intended becoming a doctor, and had just finished his premedical course, but now he’s a doctor of heavy machinery. His gang retrieves tanks and repairs them, and keeps all the mighty rolling equipment of an armored division in order. To them, fixing a jeep is like a boilermaker fixing a watch, but they can do it.

The mechanic who fixed our gears was Sgt. Walter Harrold, of Wadena, Minnesota. Already that day his outfit had been forced to move twice. German artillery had got their range once, and they were dive-bombed another time.

Sgt. Harrold had been working and moving and dodging all day and would have to work some more that night, yet he worked on our jeep with as much interest as though it were his own. You can tell a mechanic at heart even on a battlefield. Or maybe I should say especially on a battlefield.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 3, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
The head man of the photographic section at one of our Flying Fortress airdromes is Sgt. Robert Thompson, of Lansing, Michigan. Thompson has four men in the section with him. They are well organized for future conquests, as one of them speaks Italian and one speaks German.

I am mentioning these boys because they have built themselves a photographic darkroom that is unique in Africa. It is an underground dugout 10 feet deep. Most of it was dug through solid rock, and without any blasting equipment whatever. It took the five boys 10 days to do it.

You go down some steps, turn right along a deep, narrow ditch, and then right again, which brings you completely underground with a three-foot roof of earth and rock over you for bomb protection. They’ve never had a raid at this field, but where they were previously stationed raids were frequent.

Everything in the darkroom is homemade. Running water comes through some curved piping taken from the hydraulic system of a B-17. On the end of the pipe is a spigot from a wine barrel. All their photographic chemicals are kept in old champagne bottles. Their developing trays are gasoline tins cut in half the long way. Their film-printing box was made from fragmentation bomb cases. Their red safety light is the reflector off a jeep. An electric switch from a bombardier’s control-box lid is cushioned with rubber from the pilot’s seat of a Fortress.

Besides Thompson, the men in this section are Cpl. Bennett Tucker, St. Louis, Pvt. Harold Harrington, Carteret, New Jersey (he’s Irish), Pfc. Otto Zinkgraff, Plymouth, Wisconsin (he’s the German), and Pfc. John Martini, New York (he’s the Italian).

They all live in the same tent, and for such an international hodgepodge you never saw five men prouder of their joint accomplishments.

Another Volkswagen owner

A man I’ve been intending to mention for a long time is Capt. A. D. Howell of Maryville, Tennessee, a suburb of Knoxville. Over here he is known as Dixie Howell, but he was never called that before he got in the Army.

We met way back in January, and every time I’ve run onto him since then something new has happened to him. One time he had been slightly wounded and got a Purple Heart. Another time he’d invented a new way to clean up minefields. Another time he had been decorated for bravery. Another he had been promoted to captain. Another had his thumb bandaged because of a cut from a dive-bombing fragment. And the last time he had just abandoned a captured German Volkswagen because it didn’t have power enough to pull over the mountains.

That last item makes us practically blood brothers since we are both former Volkswagen owners now.

Capt. Howell worked for the Aluminum Company of America before the war. His father-in-law is the regional manager at Alcoa. Young Howell didn’t have to live on grits and sowbelly by any means, but regardless of his nice status in life he volunteered in the Canadian Army long before Pearl Harbor, and went to England more than two years ago. He transferred to the American Army last fall.

He has been constantly at the front. He’s the mine and booby-trap expert with a regiment of fighting Engineers. He probably knows as much about the more fiendish types of German explosives as anyone in North Africa.

Shows Eisenhower sideshow

Howell has a truckful of defanged mines, booby traps, flares, rockets, grenades, scare whistles, and other devices which he uses to teach others how to deal with them. Once I saw him demonstrating his sideshow to Gen. Eisenhower, on one of the general’s visits to the front.

Capt. Howell has a 5-year-old daughter, Madlyn, and a beautiful wife. He hasn’t seen them in two and a half years. He says he’d give anything in the world to see them, yet he doesn’t want to go home till after the next show is over, whatever it is.

He’s had more than his share of narrow escapes. He won his Silver Star by working for an hour, under constant fire, setting his charge on a bridge and blowing up the bridge when the advancing Germans were only 400 yards away.

He’s just one of the thousands over here who have done things you people at home can hardly conceive of, and who are now very tired but still willing to go on and on.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 4, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
Many things have happened since I left my gang of Flying Fortress friends last January. Often in the months that intervened I have watched them plow through the Tunisian skies, miles above, and wondered what they were up to and what they were thinking and how things were with them. Now I have visited them again briefly.

A few of them are gone forever, but not so many. Practically everybody has gone up one notch in the promotion scale. Some of them have been sent home to help train new groups. And a lot of them have completed their allotted number of missions and are through with combat flying for a while, and assigned to ground duties.

Many new faces show up

Nearly all of them wear medals. Distinguished Flying Crosses and Purple Hearts are galore. Some of them seem pretty tired, and those of the old original crews who haven’t got in their full number of missions are anxious to get it done and rest.

Some of my enlisted friends have commissions now. Most of the January beards have been shaved off, and shirtless suntans have replaced the heavy mackinaws the mechanics used to wear. Pet puppies have grown into big dogs.

There are many new faces. Replacements arrive to fill the gaps left by those who don’t return and those who finish their required missions and go on ground duty. Everybody knows more about his job than he used to. It’s routine now, both on the ground and in the air, and you sense a confidence that comes from doing a thing a long time.

Fliers earn respite

Shortly after the Tunisian campaign ended, the flying men were given a three-day holiday, the first of its kind since they arrived in North Africa. Some of them went to the nearest cities by jeep or truck for a little fling. Others took planes and went to big cities farther back. Many went to beaches to swim and laze. And a great many went to Tunisia – to see with their own eyes the havoc they had so carefully and perilously wrought all winter.

They found it an odd thing to be there on the ground looking at a place they’d never seen except from miles above and with the sky around them riddled with flak and swarming with fighters. They visited Bizerte, which they had wrecked, and Ferryville and Tunis, whose docks they had demolished in their numberless raids. They were pleased at what they saw. They found that in their precise work of destruction they had done a good job.

Old plane finally checks-in

The House of Jackson ­– the Fortress crew I have followed since before it left England – doesn’t exist anymore as a “family.” The passage of time has scattered and consumed it. Two of the original members are dead. Some have been promoted. Others have completed their goal in missions and are on ground duty. The remaining few have been assigned to other crews.

They are all veterans of veterans by now, and their old Fortress itself is no more. The old “Devils from Hell” that they brought all the way from America nearly a year ago went down over Palermo one bitter day, but only one of the original House of Jackson was still on her then.

The faithful old ship was on her 42nd mission when she died. She had been on so many raids they had almost run out of room to paint the little white bombs on her nose, each of which denote a mission. Her list of enemy victims ran high too.

I supposed the boys would feel sentimental about her going, but they didn’t seem to.

Fliers are legion now

There was a day when I knew every group of fliers on combat duty in North Africa. But not anymore. They have multiplied and grown fantastically. Today there are more than you could possibly know, even if you devoted all your time to it.

When I go about the airfields now, I feel old in Africa. Those few who carried the torch at first, and still remain, are a sort of grandfather generation among all the hordes that speckle the skies today. And that is well, for that is what we have been waiting for.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 5, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
To me the funniest incident of the Tunisian campaign was the following:

Back in January and February, the headquarters of the II Corps were in a deep ravine some six miles the other side of Tébessa. Wooded mountains rose of each side quite steeply, and the bottom of the gulch was well coated with trees.

The corps was down there in numerous tents, but it was decided to tunnel big shelters into the mountainsides for offices just in case of dive-bombings. So, soldiers were set to tunneling.

It was a major mining job, for they had to bore through solid rock, using air drills and dynamite. They worked in shifts, 24 hours a day. The blasted-out rock was hauled away in trucks.

They bored four great tunnels into the mountainous, each one as wide as an auto and some 50 yards long. At the back end they connected all four tunnels into ne huge room, forming unquestionably the biggest and finest air-raid shelter in the continent of Africa.

It took three solid weeks to build it. And the very day it was finished the Germans broke through Faid Pass and pushed us back through Kasserine, and the corps had to move in a hurry. The government tunnels, all finished, were never occupied even for an hour.

Flea bite cure found

Shaving cream is among the items regularly issued to frontline troops over here. It is one thing everybody has found extremely useful. It turned out to be the best sunburn lotion we know of. The soldiers also out it on flea bites with good effect. They shave with it too, incidentally. It’s just one of those little discoveries of the war.

They tell an anecdote about a soldier on guard duty in the frontlines one night, for the first time. He heard a strange noise, fired at it, and then called out, “Who went there?”

The engineers who built those marvelous temporary steel bridges, strong enough to hold up tanks, over the Tunisian rivers after the Germans had destroyed the original bridges are certainly due a lot of credit.

Perhaps the biggest satisfaction they got out of their work was naming the bridges after they had finished them. They nearly always painted a name on signboards and staked one at each end of the bridge. You could tell one outfit was from New York, for you cross4ed a whole string of bridges named “Manhattan,” “Brooklyn,” “Queensborough” and so on. But the one that tickled me most was a big one at Mateur which bore a sign with large black letters: “Huey P. Long Bridge.”

Sugar sent home

Last December, when I left Oran, I bundled up a canvas bag full of odds and ends that I didn’t want to carry to the front, and left it at one of the Army offices for picking up at some future date. Months went by, and I never got back to Oran, I inquired about the bag a couple of times from travelers who had come from that office, and they reported it was still there. And then just the other day came a letter from Washington saying that a mysterious bag, sent by me and addressed to me, had arrived in America. They described the nah, and it was without doubt my Oran storage bundle. Apparently, somebody just got tired of seeing it around and decided to get it far out of sight.

I can’t remember what was in the bag, except for two items: (1) the only dress uniform I’ve got, and (2) a pound box of cube sugar I brought with me from America a year ago. I don’t need the sugar, as the Army has plenty, and I’ve never had the dress uniform on since the night I left London last fall.

But now that it’s 4,000 miles away I suppose some general will be inviting me out to dinner and I’ll have to go in coveralls. While we’re supposing, suppose we suppose it’s Gen. Eisenhower himself, just to make it good.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 7, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, North Africa – (by wireless)
Another friend, whom I’ve mentioned before in these columns, is among the missing. He, we know almost definitely, is a prisoner.

He is Capt. Tony Lumpkin, of Mexico, Missouri. Tony was headquarters commandant of a certain outfit – a headquarters commandant being a sort of militarized hotel manager.

Just before he disappeared, Tony got to going by the nickname of “Noah” Lumpkin, because he always seemed to pick out such a miserably wet place for a command post. On their last move before he was captured, the commanding general – a swell guy with a sense of humor – called Capt. Lumpkin over, stood with him outside a tent looking out over the watery landscape, and congratulated him on locating them in the center of such a beautiful lake.

Tony wanted to do some shooting

Tony Lumpkin needn’t have been captured at all if he had been content to stick to his comparatively safe “hotel managing.” But he wanted to get a crack at the Jerries himself. He is an expert gunner, and he finally talked the commander into letting him take five men and a small gun on wheels and go out to see what he could pick off.

The first day they got one German truck plus something that turned out later to be a camel, although it looked like a truck at the distance they were firing from. The second day they moved farther into the mountains to get into a better shooting position, but bagged nothing. On the third day they went even farther into the hills, hunting a perfect spot for firing.

Capt. Lumpkin used to share a tent with Maj. Chuck Miller of Detroit, and with their assistant, Cpl. William Nikolin of Indianapolis, both of whom I’ve written about before. They formed an intimate little family.

That third night Maj. Miller came in late. He was astonished, and a little bit concerned, to see Tony’s cot empty. When he woke up next morning there was still no Tony.

He knew something had happened. He went to the general and got permission to start out with a squad of his own military police and hunt for his lost companion.

Tony really gets lost

They covered all the ground Tony had covered, and finally, by studying the terrain and talking with others who had been nearby, and interviewing German prisoners, they pieced together what had happened. The hill that Capt. Lumpkin had been trying to get to had been simply lousy with German machine-gunners. The Germans saw him all the time. They sent out a party that worked behind and surrounded him. A German who was captured later said that a captain with a Tommy gun killed one German and wounded another before being taken. That is all we will know until Tony comes back to us.

There isn’t grief in the little Lumpkin-Miller-Nikolin family, but there is a terrible vacancy.

Maj. Miller says:

We were a perfect team. Tony was slow and easygoing, and I’m big and lose my temper too quickly. We balanced each other. I’d keep him pepped up and he’d calm me down. We sure miss him, don’t we, Nicky?

The two who remain, the officer and the corporal, seem drawn even close together than before. When there are guests, Nicky is called in to be part of the company. Nicky waits on the 6’4” major as though he were a baby, and the major treats Nicky with an endearing roughness.

They’d give a lot to have him back

Maj. Miller went on:

Nicky always woke us up every morning by bringing in hot tea. Then the damn intellectual would ruin the day for me by sitting down while we drank the tea and starting an argument along the line of who was the greater writer, Tolstoy or Anatole France. That kind of stuff throws me.

Tony would argue with him, and relieve me of the horror of such a subject at such an hour. But now that Tony’s gone, I have to bear the load all by myself. It’s awful.

And Nicky stands and grins while the major talks.

Our conversation drifted off onto other things, and a long time afterwards, out of a clear sky, Maj. Miller said:

Damn it, I’d give a month’s pay – no, I’d give six months’ pay – no, I’d give a year’s pay if only old Tony were back.

And Nicky would gladly do the same.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: The Press today begins a new series of columns by Ernie Pyle, the report of a 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa. The trip was made before the heavy fighting in Tunisia and until now Ernie hasn’t had time to tell about it.

Somewhere in Africa –
During a lull in the Tunisian fighting, I let the old wanderlust get the better of me as usual, and took myself a trip.

It was just a little trip – only 13,000 miles. If I’d thought to go in a different direction, I could have traveled from Tunisia to California and back to Tunisia again in the same direction. Yet all I did was fly around Africa.

The reason for the trip was twofold – to get a breathing spell from the front, and to try to get warm. I hadn’t been warm in nearly nine months, and one way to get warm is to go south.

So, I went down to the tropics. I slept under mosquito netting, swam in the Gold Coast surf, bought ivory carvings in the Congo, watched native jungle dances, took after-lunch siestas, had my own houseboy, and really lived the life of Reilly on my small world tour.

It wasn’t entirely a vacation trip, for I wrote columns as I went along. So now I’ll be telling you about the trip, and also how some of our American soldiers live in the other half of this vast and strange continent.

Our trip took us over mountains, ocean, jungle and desert. It was a sort of pioneer version of peacetime traveling with Pan American Airways, except that it was all by Army plane. We’d fly all day, go to bed early, and get up anywhere from 3:30 on for another early start.

You almost always take off before daylight, for distances are vast in Africa and you cover a lot in one day. Rolling out of bed at inhuman hours gets to be almost normal for you after a while.

I remember one morning at a little jungle camp down in the Congo. We were sitting at a mess-hall bench eating breakfast. Our pilot, Capt. Johnnie Warren of Columbia, South Carolina, was sitting next to me. We were both half-asleep.

Daylight spoils the ‘fun’

A faint dawn began to show in the sky. I said:

Look, it’s getting daylight.

Whereupon Capt. Warren looked out the window, threw down his spoon, and said:

Aw shucks, that takes all the fun out of his takeoff. Now we can see where we’re going.

We flew across the Sahara. We landed at little pinpoints populated by a lonely dozen or two Americans in khaki shorts, holding these far outposts that must be held by somebody.

The desert was stifling when we came down upon it, and each time we pitied the fellows stationed there, and were glad to leave and climb back into the cooler skies.

The Sahara is hard to see from the air, because the wind keeps a constant haze of sand hanging above it. After you’ve risen a couple of thousand feet, you don’t see anything.

For a long time, I forced myself to stay awake and keep looking out the window, for fear I’d miss something interesting. But finally, I gave up hope of seeing anything, and plunked myself upon an inviting stack of gray sacks piled along one side of the cabin.

And thus, cuddled down into a nice form-fitting nest, I slept most of the way across the Sahara Desert upon the United States mail.

I should have abandoned my long underwear and heavy uniform the day after starting. But I figured on the coolness of flying at high altitudes the following days, and left them on.

Long live Liberia!

On the third day, we were deep in the tropics. We stopped at a jungle field for lunch. It was hotter than hell. Most of the black natives were semi-naked. The whites were sitting around in a sort of boiling stupor. The sweat poured off us newcomers, and that woolen underwear began to wriggle. I felt as though somebody had poured hot gravy down my back.

And then the pilot decided to stay there overnight. We were assigned to barracks, and carried our luggage about a quarter of a mile to them through the blasting sun.

I flopped on my cot a few moments and shut my eyes, just long enough to roll over in my mind the delightful anticipation of the bath I was going to have,

In the tropics, bathwater is never heated. It’s just right without heating. The water came pouring out of the showers over me, and water has never felt so good. Baths had been few and unsatisfactory for me during the past winter. But there in the tropics I washed and washed until I was weak from over-cleansing.

And then I put on summer underwear and thin khaki, abandoning long heavy underwear for the first time since last July. For a couple of hours, I felt the way one feels after fever – light and floating and strange. But I felt good.

That transition from heavies to lights, from months of cringing against the cold, to the sudden freedom of true warmth, is an experience that sticks in your mind for weeks above the ordinary happenings of the days.

Liberia is where I became a sanitary human being again. Long live Liberia!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: Before the heavy fighting in Tunisia which led to the Axis surrender, Ernie Pyle took a little side jaunt around Africa – a mere 13,000-mile trip. Only now has he had time to write the story of that trip. This is the second article.

Somewhere in Africa –
As you travel west and then south away from Tunisia, your feeling of leaving the war behind increases in direct proportion to the miles you travel.

In Algeria, you still feel the war, for you are surrounded by the flow of supplies and troops and equipment moving toward the front. You feel no danger, but you have that exhilarating surge that comes of great activity around you.

In Morocco, the atmosphere is different. There is still great activity there, but it is so far from the front that you feel a definite wall between you and what is going on up there in Tunisia. It’s sort of like the warmup before the big game.

But south of Morocco – well, you seem only to be forever practicing. Our camps throughout the rest of Africa are sort of normal affairs. You have a daily job to do and it’s the same every day. Your job is vital, and yet there’s nothing to fight. You feel a sense of frustration; you’ve finally reached the ball park, but you can’t see the diamond.

Ashamed of living so well

All through Africa, I ran onto this same feeling. Morale was perfectly good and people were doing their jobs and doing them well; but everybody had in the back of his head the burning yearning to get up north where the shootin’ was going on.

Down below, some of the permanent bases are almost like country clubs. There is little difference between life there and life at an American posy in peacetime. Dozens of times I’ve heard soldiers, all the way from privates to colonels, express a feeling of shame that they were living so well.

I know how they feel, and I sympathize. Yet they shouldn’t feel ashamed. For their jobs are vital. They’re doing a work that must be done or else their fellowmen at the front could not survive. Everybody can’t be on the firing line.

And as for living well, I certainly see no harm in it if you’re equipped to do so, and can do it without taking anything away from anybody else. It seems to me that living miserably just out of sympathy would be a ridiculous affectation.

‘Always gotta do something’

This impatience with a static camp life is just a manifestation of the normal American necessity to bust out and do things.

One day, I was talking with the commander of a camp far in the jungle, a camp we were closing because it was no longer needed. The camp was near a famous and bad rapids.

The commander said:

I guess it’s a good thing we’re leaving here. Take those rapids as an example. People have lived around for thousands of years, and nobody has ever tried to shot the rapids.

But if we stayed here another month, sure as hell some soldier would go over those rapids in a barrel. That’s just the way we are. Always gotta do something. That’s the best thing about us.

And I know of another case of farawayness-from-the-front getting under some soldiers’ skins. This also happened at one of our tropical camps.

Four soldiers couldn’t stand the peacefulness any linger, so they bought two dugout canoes, stocked up with provisions, hired two native boys to help, and started by river to Cairo – a little matter of 5,000 miles.

By tom-tom teletype

The soldiers were gone three days before they were caught. The order for their capture, incidentally, was carried upriver through the jungle by native tom-toms, beating out the message from village to village, on orders of the Army.

The boys’ commander told me that personally he would have liked to give them medals, but rules are rules, so he had to order them court-martialed for desertion. They were let off with a month apiece, and now are transferred to another camp. They still haven’t got to the fighting line, but their ex-commander bets they’ll get there eventually.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: This is one in a series of columns by Ernie Pyle reporting on his 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa, made before the heavy fighting began in Tunisia.

Somewhere in Africa –
In the tropical, legendary part of Central Africa which once was famous in the worldwide slave trade, there is now a fabulous American camp.

This camp is an airfield, and it is the biggest American aerial operation anywhere outside the United States. It has big shops and great warehouses, and it takes thousands of men to run the place and handle the planes that flow through here.

The camp is equipped to care for hundreds of flying transients every night, and traveling generals and ambassadors are so frequent you don’t bother to ask their names. The place is truly an aerial Times Square. Here men from England, America and India meet and shake hands as they step off their planes, none of them more than three days from home.

Lucky indeed is the soldier who fights the war in that place, for he is healthy, comfortable and comparatively safe.

Movies ahead of U.S. showings

He can surf-bathe on a beach which they say is better than Miami’s. his food is abundant and his bed soft. He is seldom too warm and never too cold. His mail comes from home quickly, and he sees American movies sometimes before they are released at home.

He wears light coveralls or khaki shorts at his work, and the typical sun helmet of the tropics. He takes quinine daily, but his camp is so clean that malaria is rare.

This American post is laid out like one of our modern government-built cities at home. Winding paved streets run all through it. There is some grass, and young trees have been planted. There are three churches, and the finest general store – the post exchange – I’ve seen in Africa. It has one-day laundry and you can get your shoes half-soled in less than two weeks – both of which are phenomenal in Africa.

There are tennis courts and a baseball diamond. There is an outdoor theater, with a movie every night. Sometimes visitors appear on the stage. Martha Raye played here, and took the boys by storm. When the performance was over, they presented her with a token of their appreciation – a baby crocodile. Martha screamed and his behind the piano.

Ernie’s stage fright silences him

H. V. Kaltenborn spoke to the soldiers there. So did Quentin Reynolds when he went through not long ago. I was there at the time, and the soldiers apparently had been affected by the heat that day, for they started yelling for me to get up on the stage, too.

It was one of the few times in my life when I really want to get up and say something. But that old phobia of mine – stage fright – took a firm grip and I couldn’t have moved if you’d offered me a million dollars.

At this camp, the soldiers live in pre-fabricated barracks. They sleep on cots under mosquito nets, and eat in mess halls.

The officers have rooms in permanent block barracks, made of concrete and stucco. A wide screened porch runs entirely around each barracks. Every room has a front and back window, and a front and back door, so there is plenty of air.

Just off the back porch is a bath for every two rooms. Some of the blocks ever have electric refrigerators, to provide ice for the late-afternoon cooling drinks.

A white mosquito net hangs over every bed. During the day, your houseboy hangs out all the bedding top be cleaned and dried by the sun and wind, and twice a week he puts the mattresses out to sun. it is so comfortably cool at night you use a blanket.

The weather is muggy there, although the annual rainfall is actually less than in Indiana. But things get musty and moldy very quickly. That painless spot on my typewriter, which has rusted so fervently in Panama and Ireland, has developed a new coat here that looks like a spot of brown fur.

At this camp, one officer is an old friend of mine from Albuquerque. He went away on a long trip the day I arrived, so I lived in his room while he was gone.

Light averts mold

The first night there, just before going to bed, I discovered the electric light on the back wall of his clothes closet was burning. It didn’t go off when you shut the door, as I thought it should. I spent 10 minutes trying to find the switch to turn it off, and finally gave up and let it burn all night.

The next day I mentioned it to an officer, and was amazed to learn that an electric light burns continuously in every closet in the block. It’s never turned off, day or night. It isn’t there for light. It’s there to absorb the dampness so your clothes won’t mold!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: Before the heavy fighting in Tunisia which led to the Axis surrender, Ernie Pyle took a little side jaunt around Africa – a mere 13,000-mile trip. Only now has he had time to write the story of that trip. This is the fourth article.

Somewhere in Africa –
In the huge aerial crossroads camp that I wrote about yesterday, hundreds of black natives work – as houseboys, as white-coated waiters, as drivers, and as plain laborers putting up more and more buildings. They are descendants of the ones who escaped being carried away to America as slaves.

There is a Negro houseboy for every two rooms in the officer’s blocks. He dresses in khaki shorts and goes barefoot. His job is easy, but he has less “manana” in him than some of our own Latins.

The boys are faithful, honest and pleasant. Most of them are devoted to their masters. It will be hard for many an American officer to get over being waited on hand and foot when he returns to the old hometown.

Handy houseboys got $12

The houseboy comes at 6:30 in the morning, and stays till 6:30 at night. He has an hour off for lunch, and two hours for resting in the afternoon.

He keeps your room clean, airs the bedding, hangs out your clothes, and shines your shoes every day, even if you haven’t worn them since the last shining. He does your washing if you don’t want to sent it to the laundry, and sews on your buttons.

He is always within yelling distance somewhere on the back porch, and he comes at call to get you some ice or find you some matches or anything you wish.

He gets $12-a-month salary, and each officer tips him 49¢ a week extra. The houseboy calls his officer “Master,” and sometimes it is slurred so that it sounds just like our old-time Southern Negro “Massuh.” When our boy Jim first called me “Master,” I thought he was talking to somebody else, and looked around to see who was in the room.

The colored boys all speak a native tongue, but they know enough English that you can talk easily with them. In that area, there is a whole vocabulary of pidgin English.

‘Who dat man?’ favorite expression

For instance, you never hear the word “tip.” The world is “dash.” You “dash” your houseboy two shillings a week. A beggar never says “gimme.” He askes you to “dash” him a penny. A meal is “chop-chop,” and when you’re telling a boy to do something immediately or to hurry, you say “one-time.”

Another favorite expression is “Who dat man?” It seems that the native soldiers call halt by yelling “Who dat man?” So, the thing has become a byword with our troops. If somebody knocks at your door, you call “Who dat man?” If a sinister villain appears in the movie to do the heroine dirt, the soldier audience yells “Who dat man?”

Everything wood is mahogany

Around this special camp, everything is made of mahogany. That doesn’t mean they’re squandering our taxes on foolish luxury; mahogany happens to be the cheapest and most prolific wood in those parts.

The clothes closets, the chairs, the weather stripping, all are of mahogany. This precious wood forms the rough benches of the outdoor movie. The projection shack is made of mahogany, and so are the concrete forms for the new buildings.

There is, in fact, so much mahogany everywhere that it almost ceases to be pretty, for after a while you just aren’t aware of it anymore.

A small proportion of officers and men – maybe one-tenth on the hottest days – wears khaki shorts in Central Africa, just as tropical Englishmen do in the movies.

At night, you are required to out on long trousers, long-sleeved shirts, and the officers must wear ties. It is as much for safety against mosquitoes as for discipline.

Everybody wears mosquito boots

Also at night, most people in camp wear mosquito boats – which are brown suede, sort of like cowboy boots, near knee-high. In fact, they won’t let you into the outdoor movie unless you’ve got on your mosquito boots.

The Army nurses have special boots which come clear above their knees. At least, that’s what my investigating department reports.

Oddly enough, you don’t see many deep tans among our troops in the tropical countries. The reason is that you perspire so much you just soak the tan off.

Cigarettes gets damp down there, and don’t taste the same. And you have to put your extra envelopes in the closet near the electric light. Otherwise, they seal themselves. That’s the reason I don’t write to anybody; all my envelopes are sealed. Any old excuse in a storm, I always say.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 12, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: This is one in a series of columns by Ernie Pyle reporting on his 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa, made before the heavy fighting began in Tunisia.

Somewhere in Africa –
At any number of our camps in Central Africa, I noticed with sharp surprise a playful little thing which you would never be aware of if you hadn’t been at the front.

In these camps, soldiers will walk along in groups, kidding and laughing, and you’ll hear them give each other mock others of “Squads Right,” or “Halt.”

The first time I heard that shouted word “Halt” down there, I stopped dead still, and my heart skipped a couple of beats. For believe me, when you’re up at the front, halt means halt and no monkey business. Nobody ever says it in play, and when you hear it, you freeze in your tracks. If you don’t, you’re likely to get a bullet through you.

It’s a sound that bears the same deadly warning as the whine of a shell or the hiss of a snake, and you obey it automatically and instinctively.

Too hot to walk the dog

For some reason, and I can’t explain it, the troops on Central Africa don’t go on for pets the way they do up north.

True, I’ve heard of soldiers who had baby giraffes for pets, and others who had monkeys and parrots, and even leopards. But they are rare. The small number of dogs is what amazed me. Up north, the soldiers have thousands and thousands of dogs for pets.

I guess it’s just too hot down here to walk the dog around.

Many of our officers and men, by the nature of their jobs, have covered Africa from stem to stern. They know the whole continent intimately, and they rattle off the merits of some unheard-of jungle river port as knowingly as they’d speak of Cape Town or Cairo.

And they are impressed. I’ve heard many an American say he’d sure got his eyes opened by coming over here. Before the war, he was hardly aware that Africa existed. But now he sees the immense richness of the jungle and the plains going partly to waste; he wonders who said there was no more land left in the world to pioneer.

Soldiers global-minded

Of course, the average soldier swears that after the war he’ll never set foot out of his hometown again. But everybody isn’t average. I’ll bet you that within five years after the war, you’ll find thousands and thousands of Americans scattered to the remotest points of the globe, carving out careers for themselves in spots they’d never heard of before 1942. This war is making us global-minded.

One evening, at a campo way down on the Slave Coast, an officer came up and introduced himself. He was Lt. Walter Wichterman, an insurance man of Indianapolis. The reason he spoke to me was this – we were college mates at Indiana University, and once went to Japan together when the Indiana baseball team made a tour over there. Our paths had not crossed for more than 20 years.

U.S. homes must be museums

If what I’ve seen is any indication, the average American home by now must look like the Natural History Museum. Soldiers are fiends for buying stuff and sending it home.

There isn’t so much to buy in North Africa. But in other parts, there is. The carved ivory, carved ebony, leather work, knives and stuff that have been sent home from Central Africa must reach an appalling total.

Add to that all that must be flowing home from India, China, Alaska and elsewhere, and we’re surely becoming a nation of ivory-hoarders.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 14, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
We are apt to think of Saturday night as a peculiarly American institution. But like a lot of other things that we just assume belong to us, Saturday night is universal.

It is the night to howl, the world over. That holds just as true in the jungle as on Broadway. Everywhere in the jungle, the natives dance and drink and sing on Saturday night.

So, one Saturday night in Liberia, we went across the river to see a village dance. A native boy rowed us across the black water in a long dugout canoe.

The dancers were about 10 Negro girls in long cotton-print dresses, half a dozen or so young men, and a scattering of grinning, half-naked kids. As far as I could ever see, the dance consisted of nothing more than hopping around in a big circle.

Soldiers want jungle touch

There were already some soldiers standing around when we arrived. Some of the Negro boys in the village worked as houseboys for the Americans, so one of them came over and got chairs for us.

To tell the truth, the dance was pretty tame. Gradually the American soldiers, as they do the world over, decided they wanted a little more life in it. It was their wish and desire that the dancing girls take off their blouses. It was not an especially outlandish request, since the girls go around all week without any blouses. The Americans wanted to get the real jungle touch, you know, such as you see in pictures.

Well, negotiations for the hoped-for striptease were started through the houseboy who worked for the lieutenant with us. The houseboy left to put the matter before the chief.

Pretty soon, a different Negro boy came back, stood directly in front of us, and made a speech. It was in pretty good English, fairly normal, and very flowery.

Six bucks ‘uncover’ charge

He was, he said, speaking as an official representative of the chief, welcoming us to the village. The chief was proud to have us, sent his royal respects, and hoped we were enjoying the dance. Anything the village had was ours.

We were touched. It might well have been Sumner Welles welcoming the new ambassador from Brazil. We were ashamed we’d thought of anything so crude as our striptease request. We abandoned the whole idea, and the lieutenant was just rising to deliver a courtly reply to the chief’s welcome, when the boy launched into the second half of his prepared address.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was to the effect that if we could spare up the nominal sum of six bucks among us, the chief would attend to the blouse business in a big way!

The lieutenant was pretty sore over this, especially when it came out thar the other soldiers had already forked over $4 for the same purpose. But it looked like all or nothing, so we dug up $6 and, by shaking ourselves, once more achieved the transition from ministers plenipotentiary back to ordinary guys in the front row.

Be patient, chief says

And then for an hour, the dance went on, just as usual. Every 10 minutes or so, the lieutenant would send word to the chief that we were still waiting and to hurry up.

The chief, who looked like any other Negro you ever saw, was sitting in dignity on his back porch about 20 feet away, but the business had to be conducted through an emissary. Each time, the chief would send back word to be patient, that such things took time.

Finally, after another half-hour, the lieutenant got mad, and went in person to the chief. They palavered a long time. When he came back, he said the chief was practically in tears.

The whole affair was off, and the chief had given our money back. The girls had refused to obey his command. They didn’t mind taking off their blouses, since they don’t wear any all week anyhow. That wasn’t the trouble. They were just using it for an issue.

Chief defied publicly

The chief confessed to the lieutenant that his power over the village had been slipping for some weeks. Tonight was the showdown. He had been defied tonight, and he couldn’t publicly lose face like that and keep his hold. He was finished. Poor chief.

We got in the canoe and rowed back across the river. The girls were dancing and laughing their defiance of the chief when we left, and we could still hear the tom-toms back at camp.

The whole thing was a confusing study in human psychology. As a dance, it wasn’t half as good as you’d find in any Saturday-night cotton patch in our own South. But as a study in drawing-room neurotics, Noël Coward himself couldn’t have produced a better one.

And as a final puzzle in our psychological drama, why are soldiers anxious to pay 10 bucks on Saturday night for the same thing they can stand around and look at all week for nothing? Don’t ask me, I’m just a stranger here myself.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 15, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
Here’s a good lesson in not believing everything you hear. Up in North Africa last winter, there was a report from people who should know that more than 50% of our troops in tropical Africa were down with malaria. We just accepted it as true.

But when I went to Central Africa, I found that malaria among our soldiers was less than 1%! And dysentery is even lower.

The false rumor was based on one single detachment of troops. They were the first to hit Africa last spring, they were in an infested jungle, they were without mosquito nets for the first four days, and practically the whole camp was down with malaria. The percentage was actually greater than the rumored 50, in that one case.

But that was soon over, and today that place is as healthy as any other. And nowhere else have we ever had a serious run of the fever.

Actually, the general health of our troops in the tropics is better than in the average camp at home, Army doctors say. It’s because we exercise such extraordinarily careful protection over our men’s health. You can’t travel around Central Africa without feeling a tremendous pride in the Army’s Medical and Sanitary Corps.

Let’s go to another part of Africa – a place so deep that it takes days of flying to get there. Right from our camp you can hear the throb of tom-toms all over the country at night. The soldiers only have to take a boat ride to shoot crocodiles. The place is practically the capital of malaria and dysentery.

Our campsite – picked by local officials – was in the worst swamp around. Yet the Americans thrive there. The answer lies in spraying and burning and oiling the swamps, using mosquito netting. Watching all dirt and filth, and taking 10 grains of quinine a day.

They had an astonishing example there of American sanitation. The troops were living out in this swamp-like camp. But the Army nurses were living temporarily in the nearby city. They were living in a hotel – a big, modern, lovely place. And every single one of the nurses came down with dysentery – one of them died – while only three of the soldiers out in the swamp got dysentery. Those three vases were traced to eating occasional meals in town, at the same place the nurses got theirs.

An Army doctor told me the other day that probably every one of our soldiers in that area does have malaria germs in him, but the daily quinine keeps them from becoming active. I asked him, then, how long it would take the germs to die after leaving malarial country.

He said:

If we were to be ordered home tomorrow, I’d have the boys continue their daily quinine for six weeks. By that time, all the germs would be out of them.

Throughout the tropics all Americans sleep under mosquito netting, and wear boots of an evening, and most of them take quinine. In some places, they take one tablet a day (five grains), and in more dangerous places two a day. Nobody uses face nets, so far as I know.

A few people can’t take quinine. It gives them a bad skin rash, and too much ringing in the ears. These people are put on atabrine. And then there are other people who are allergic to atabrine and get deathly sick after taking it. These people are kept on quinine.

A few of our men have cracked up under the tropical strain and had to be sent home. But they are very few. The average man gets along all right in the tropics if he is careful, keeps regular hours, and doesn’t drink too much.

It is true that the tropics sap your energy. You just don’t have the old git-up-and-git you had back home. You feel sleepy of a morning, you’re a little dopey most of the time, you welcome the siesta after lunch. You’re less efficient than back home.

In one of our camps where soldiers were doing hard manual labor such as mixing concrete, they tried both an hour and a half and two hours and a half for the lunch-and-rest period. Hospital figures showed the two-and-a-half-hour noon rest was necessary. So that’s what they’re on now.

But of course, they’re young. Now me, at my age, I have to rest all day.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 16, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa – (by wireless)
I have taken quite a shine to the natives of Africa’s Gold Coast, Slave Coast and Ivory Coast. They seem so happy. It makes you forget how grim people at war are, and it sort of makes you happy, too.

These are the people our own American Negroes came from. They are as black as our blackest Negroes. You seldom see a light-colored one. They are supposed to be full of tropical diseases, yet you can look at any fisherman along the coast and if you can find a more magnificently powerful physical specimen anywhere in the world, I’d like to see him.

They have many qualities that surprise me. They have, first of all, a lively sense of humor. They’re always laughing, and their wit isn’t just primer wit, either. It’s often very subtle.

They work slowly, as all people do in the tropics, but they are not shiftless. You see fewer sitting around doing nothing than you do in our own South.

And they are honest. In some countries, you hardly dare take off your clothes for fear they will disappear, but along these hot coasts, honesty seems to be inbred. Hundreds of these blacks work as houseboys and personal servants for the Americans and British, and the thought of anything being stolen never enters anybody’s head.

Furthermore, they are meticulously clean. The little sandy yards of their homes are swept constantly with big coarse brooms. There’s never a speck of trash in them. And the people are always taking baths. The men bathe every afternoon when they finish work. They bathe on the scene of their job, right out in the open in a bucket of water. I think that if you gave one of those Negroes 20 buckets of water a day, he’d take 20 baths.

They are in every respect a contrast to the Arabs of North Africa.

Natives deck out in colors

As soon as a coast Negro gets home from work, he changes from the ordinary shorts and undershirts in which he usually works into native dress. That consists of nothing but yards and yards of wildly bright cotton print, thrown over one shoulder and draped around the body.

The wildness of color and fantasy of design of these cotton prints is the most striking thing about the Central African natives to me. To see a village street full of Negroes late in the afternoon is to see something so beautifully colored you can’t believe it’s true.

From babies to old men, everybody is garbed in some vivid hue – they aren’t in stripes, or in checks, or even solid colors; they give the appearance of being a million colors thrown onto a piece of cloth willy-nilly, in which the overall effect turns out to be as beautiful and natural as a garden of flowers.

They buy the cloth at native markets. Some of it is manufactured locally, but most of it comes from England, America and India. You hardly ever see two pieces alike.

The riotous colors sort of get in your blood, so I decided to go native a little myself. My flannel pajamas were slightly heavy for this climate, so I went to a bazaar to buy some tropical pajamas. But everything on the counters looked as if it had been made for Kansas City. I was disappointed. So, the Indian trader who ran the bazaar said he’d made me some. By buying the cloth myself, I could go as wild as I wished.

Ernie goes wild, over pajamas

So I went to a native outdoor market, and into a little stall inhabited by two black women, a naked, crawling baby, and scores of bolts of weirdly bright cloth. I bought four different pieces of material, so that in making two pairs of pajamas, nothing would match.

One of the black women joined in my whimsy and helped me find wilder and wilder stuff. She got so pleased with the whole business she didn’t even ask me for some “dash” – a little extra – when I paid her.

When I took the cloth back to the tailor, he had no doubts whatever that I was crazy, too, for he laughed and laughed and went about his measuring with a vim. Three days later, my monstrosities were ready. They were really wonderful.

Back at camp, I put them on and gave a style show for a gang of American officers with whom I was staying. At first, they all yelled and hooted in derision, as I had expected they would, but within two days they were all downtown buying wild cloth and having pajamas made for themselves. Everybody from colonels on down now has some psychopathic pajamas in the making.

Personally, I haven’t slept too well since I got mine, they are louder than a London air-raid siren, and have everything in them except the Battle of Gettysburg. They are a screaming explosion of birds, flowers, castles, snakes, palm trees, the great earthquake of 1934, elephants, boats, pointing fingers and evil eyes. I hope they last till I get back home again. Then I can say I’m shell-shocked – and prove it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 17, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa – (by wireless)
A good friend of mine on this southern trip was Lt. Leslie Boyd of Ontario, California. His work causes him to travel a lot, and he knows remote parts of Central Africa and the Middle East as well as he knows California.

We went exploring and gadget-shopping together in several parts of the world. One day in a native market on the coast of Africa, Lt. Boyd and I were strolling around looking for things to buy, and a beautifully embroidered fez caught my eye. So, I asked two Negro shopkeepers sitting inside their stalls:

How much?

One of the women was very old, the other quite young. They named a price, and Les and I automatically threw up our hands and pooh-poohed the whole idea. Of course, that’s the normal procedure – they ask about double what they expect to get, and if you paid them what they asked, they’d be disgusted. The point is to keep on haggling, you coming up and they coming down, until finally you arrive at about the price you both knew it should be all the time.

But in this case, we just said the price was too much and walked on. There was no other fez market as nice as that one, and so a half-hour later we wound up again before this stall, ready to start bargaining. But by now, the two shop owners weren’t interested. They just don’t want to play. Apparently, I had made a breach of local business etiquette by walking away when I really was interested. And they never did sell it to me, either. They were perfectly friendly and nice, but they just wouldn’t talk price anymore. They knew I would now pay more than I had originally intended, yet they finally let me go to another stall and buy a fez from another fellow.

That’s the way I think business should be conducted – transactions by whim only. If you suddenly don’t feel like making some money, then just skip it. If I could only be like that, I could just write a column or two a month.

‘Tips’ on picture taking

These African Negroes have a sense of fun about them all the time. Another incident happened the same day. Lt. Boyd and I stopped to talk to the woman from whom I had bought the material for my pajamas, and we were welcomed like long-lost members of the family.

Boyd had his camera, and he wanted to get a shot of us in the market, so he buttonholed a Negro passerby and showed him how to work the camera. Then we got the Negro woman to stand between us, with her little naked baby hanging to her dress. Usually, if you ask a native to pose for you, he will if you “dash” him a shilling or so, but since I was by now an old and valued customer, the woman wouldn’t think of asking me for a tip.

When it was finished, we shook hands all around and walked on. As we passed a stall a few feet away, a big fat woman, apparently madder than a hornet, began screaming at us.

She yelled:

Don’t you dare take my picture without dashing me!

Lt. Boyd said:

We don’t want to take your picture.

‘You’re a bad man’

That seemed to make her all the madder. She hollered:

I won’t let you take my picture without dashing me.

Boyd said:

You’re being a bit previous. We didn’t ask to take your picture. We don’t want to take your picture. In fact, we wouldn’t take your picture if you asked us to.

The woman yelled back, “You’re a bad man,” and we walked on around the market.

About 10 minutes later, clear on the other side of the big market, I was jostled in the crowd and here was this same woman, apparently still mad.

She said to me:

He cussed me.

I said:

Why, he didn’t cuss you at all. What’s the matter with you?

Lt. Boyd stepped over and started to get mad himself, but I could see a sparkle in the woman’s eyes behind the ferocious look on her face, so I said quietly:

Naw, he didn’t cuss you. He likes you. He’d have used bad words to cuss you, and he didn’t use any bad words now, did he?

The woman looked down at the ground and still said:

He cussed me.

You can’t exactly convey in words how you can sense the devil in somebody, but somehow, I could tell that this big scowling black woman couldn’t hold on much longer. So, all of a sudden, I started laughing. Whereupon she began laughing fit to kill and slapping her leg, and as we walked off grinning, she called out, “Okay, goodbye,” in the friendliest tone you ever heard.

She had made the whole thing up and had walked clear around the market just to put on the final act of her little comedy. You can’t help liking people who get that much fun out of life.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 18, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa – (by wireless)
One of the sagas of this war – and one that can’t be written fully until after the war – is the career of the Combat Engineers.

They have yet to hear the crack of an enemy gun, but their overseas record is already talked about throughout the length and breadth of Africa. They have been away from home now since the spring of 1942. They are one of the proudest organizations I’ve ever come across. They brag about what they’ve taken and swear they are yenning for more.

The Army Engineers build things, as you know. These particular engineers build airfields and depots and barracks for other soldiers. But it isn’t so much what they have built as where they built it, and how.

On their first and biggest job, they lived for five months in an isolation that few other American troops have known. They worked day and night. The only way they knew when Sunday came was that the colonel would put on a necktie. They wore out their gloves and worked with bandaged hands. Supplies failed to reach them on schedule, so they went on half rations, and then on quarter rations. Each man got only one quart of water a day.

They had no entertainment of any kind, and no mail for three and a half months. Well, some mail did come at the end of two months, but it was all fourth-class, including a sackful of training manuals for troops in Arctic climates.

Never use what they build

These were the first American troops to hit the Congo. They built an immense base camp in record time, when the natives had said it couldn’t be built at all. Then, in squads and platoons and companies, they pushed deep into all parts of Central Africa. They built emergency airfields all over the veldt and through the deep jungle. They built hospitals, roads and bridges, and set up barracks for the troops that were to follow. But not for themselves.

One sergeant said:

Hell no! We ain’t slept in a building since we left the States. We build ‘em, we don’t use ‘em.

The outfit has its fun as well as its work. They have killed two elephants. They hunt antelope, deer, buffalo and crocodiles. Snakes don’t even count. Monkeys and leopards were accumulated as pets.

One company in a locality where horses abound is called the “Mounted Engineers” because almost every man owns a horse. Another unit is known as the “Mayors of Harlem,” since they are in direct control of more natives than Father Divine has followers.

Their work is tough, dirty and unglamorous, and it is done under the most trying conditions. Working in “the white man’s graveyard,” they have lost only one man – due to a streptococcic infection. They have learned to take everything the tropics have to offer and still keep going,

One said:

We have lived with more different kinds of bugs than Carter has Little Liver Pills.

And another one said:

At first, when a bug wandered into the warm soapsuds we call beer down here, we’d throw the beer away. The second week, we would take the bug out. The third week, we took the bug out, squeezed him dry, then drank the beer. The next week, we drank the bug. Now we catch them and put them in our beer for flavor.

Immaculate commander called ‘Ramrod’

There were more than a thousand of these tough Army Engineers at the last counting. They are scattered in seven different parts of Africa, toiling away. Their commander, whom I am not permitted to name, is a tall, gangling soldier of the old school, whose greatest misfortune is that he has a face which looks something like mine. Otherwise, we’re nothing alike. In conversation, he is pleasant, and during working hours he is tough. He is always immaculate in his dress, and he remains immaculate even when the tropical sun hits 150.

He stands so straight they call him “Ramrod.” At work, he always carries a silver-tipped swagger stick under his arm. One admiring engineer described him as “a swagger stick carrying a swagger stick.”

Two men I can name are the two who gave me most of my information about this unusual organization. In fact, one wrote some of these words himself. He is Lt. William Newman of Cullman, Alabama, a town which has a monastery with a famous miniature city in its garden, about which I wrote a column several years ago. The other is Capt. Jules Carville of Norco, Louisiana. His ancestors founded the town of Carville. The captain is now an ancestor himself – of a descendant who has arrived since he left home, and whom he’d like mighty well to see.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 19, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in North Africa – (by wireless)
There wasn’t any real reason for me to go to the Belgian Congo, since we have only a handful of troops in that area now, but when I got to a spot only 1,500 miles away, I said to myself:

Gee, I hate to be this close and not see the Congo.

So, I just got in a plane and flew an extra 3,000 miles and saw the Congo. Just as I had expected, the Congo looks like a river, that being what it is. It is wide and pretty muddy. It looks a good bit like the Mississippi, only it’s darker. It didn’t look either very dangerous or very romantic where I saw fit.

I stayed down there for a week. We planned to take a launch and go upriver about a hundred miles to see some flora and fauna, but at the last minute the launch broke down and we didn’t get to go. But I did ride across the Congo twice in the motorboat, and I saw the mast out of Stanley’s ship which they have planted on the shore at Leopoldville. We spent 10 minutes walking around and around the mast, looking at it from a sense of duty, but it was just another mast to me.

Leo is genuine surprise

Leopoldville was a big surprise. I expected to find just a large village with a few tin-roofed trading posts, such as you see in tropical movies. But actually “Leo” is a beautiful city of 50,000. It has shipyards, big river docks, and a modern textile factory with 4,000 workers. It has 3,000 white inhabitants and scores of homes as beautiful as you would find in Pasadena. Its streets are of macadam. It has fine big stores in buildings of brick and stone and concrete. Huge trees like maples line the streets. There are many parks, and lovely statues.

There are movies and a zoo and a big tropical museum. Bougainvilleas and other flowers of all kinds splash the city with color. People sit and drink in sidewalk cafés. Autos dash along the streets at astonishing speed. You are suddenly amazed to see so many white women again.

A big ell-shaped hotel sits in the center of town, with its lovely garden right on the river bank. You could sit in your room at the hotel and throw an inkbottle out of the window and it would go kerplunk right into the Congo.

Not as hot as Washington

The city is always referred to by the shortened term “Leo,” just as Elizabethville is almost always called “Eville.”

The very words Belgian Congo have always suggested the most insufferable kind of tropics, where white people sit and rot with the heat. Yet when I was there it was not as hot as Washington in summertime, and during half of my week it was almost chilly, with frequent cloud-bursting rains.

If you are careful, it need not be an especially unhealthy place, although the climate is energy-sapping and people work with probably half of their normal efficiency.

The war seems pretty far away at Leo. The Belgian Congo did send an army up to help the British retake Ethiopia, and Congo troops were with Gen. Jacques Leclerc’s army when it marched up from Lake Chad, and the Congo is producing to the limit of its natural resources – tin, rubber, cotton and other goods – for the war effort. But still the war seems pretty far away.

No rationing to worry about

They don’t ration gasoline or tires in Leo. I saw some new-looking autos there. There is plenty to eat. There is liquor to drink. The stores have nearly everything you want. And all the physical labor is still done by natives.

The Belgian people have been grand to our troops, inviting them into their homes, and turning over to them the one big club in town. But the Belgians are strict about their women, and a soldier can’t have a date unless the whole family sits around. And if it gets to the point where you are trusted alone with a girl, then you’re practically married.

At one time, there were quite a lot of American soldiers in Leo, but the need for them has ceased and they have now been moved out. When I was there about three dozen men were living in a camp built to hold thousands. It was like living with a couple of friends in the Empire State Building.

They had a few trucks left, but no jeeps, so for personal transportation they gave me a two-and-a-half-ton truck, in which I noisily whisked back and forth between the camp and the town and was the cynosure of all eyes, I assure you.

[gerhard-w-koester]

@NormanStewart

Belgian Congo

The book Congo: The Epic History of a People written by David van Reybrouck is worth reading.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 21, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
Our soldiers like Leopoldville fine, although they suffer from a monotony complex. For even a town of 50,000 has its limitations.

Of an evening they can go into town, have a couple of beers at a sidewalk café, and then go to a movie. The Army runs a truck back out to camp each night after the movie.

The only prostitute in Leo was an anemic French Mademoiselle who followed the worldwide custom in all lines of endeavor of upping the price about 300% the moment Americans heave into view. But the colonel in charge beat her to it by putting her place out of bounds the instant they arrived.

There ensued a long correspondence in which the Mademoiselle was first insulted, then standing on her rights, then humble, then pleading, and as it wound up, she got so utterly lonesome she finally wrote and begged the colonel just to let the boys come in to sit and talk about the weather. The colonel still said no. The boys said she only weighed 85 pounds and was too ugly to talk to anyhow.

Thus died the only vestige of a Sadie Thompson story that I’ve run onto in the tropics.

We had a big Army hospital at Leo. It was built to care for hundreds, but the most it ever had was a few score patients. The staff was still hanging around when I was there, but they’ve moved long before now.

An odd thing about it was that due to the censorship of mail, and the average American’s complete lack of knowledge about Africa’s size and climate, most of the nurses’ families back home thought they were about 5,000 miles from the war.

One Saturday night when I was there, the doctors and nurses gave a big farewell party for themselves and invited me. The early part of the evening was spent signing each other’s Short-Snorter bills. Then finally it came to the point where I either had to get up and dance voluntarily or else be dragged bodily out onto the floor by a few husky nurses, so I slipped out the back door and ran home.

Some of the nurses wrote their names down for me on scraps of paper. Much time has passed, and now I can’t remember what each individual looked like or anything, but here they are, and I know that by now they’re in a happier place and as busy as they want to be:

Chief Nurse Josephine Balestra, of Salinas, California (we had a common bond, for Salinas is where I registered for the draft); Rachel Badger of Ogden, Utah; Gracie Blair and Mayellen Ross, both of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania; Sarah Hale and Bertha Pollard, both of Richmond, Virginia; Jane Mogarry, of Butler, Pennsylvania; Kathleen Merran of Philadelphia, and Catherine Androulski of Washington, DC.

The surgical and medical staff was largely from the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Lt. Col. William Casey, of Portland, Maine, was in command, and he spent most of his time worrying about the prodigality of keeping surgeons who were $30,000-a-year-men in civil life just sitting there 5,000 miles from the nearest shooting, with nobody to operate on. But, as I say, they’ve moved since I was there.

On the staff were such men as Maj. Charles Flood, assistant dean at Columbia, and Capt. Robert Wylie, who they say is one of the finest chest experts in New York.

They were a grand band of Americans there at Leo, all sort of hanging closely together in desperation against boredom and nothing-to-do and lonesomeness.

Out at the camp the few boys who are left do a little work on the roads and keep the camp utilities going, and that’s about all. The first night I was there, they asked me to come and sit with them at the post exchange, and they all stayed at camp just to pump me with questions about what it was like in Tunisia and the rest of Africa.

Their attitude was that they would prefer to be up north in action, but since they weren’t and had nothing to say about it, they guessed they weren’t so badly off at that.

None of them felt that the tropics were getting them or anything like that.

The boys amuse themselves by going on Sunday picnics into the bush, playing cards at the post exchange of an evening, taking lots of photographs, sending home ivory carvings, going to town to see the movies, and writing letters.

Their mail service is good, their food is all right, their health is fine, and life in general for them is OK – with the one important exception that after a while, it just sort of gets like living in a vacuum.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 22, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
Brazzaville is the capital of French Equatorial Africa. It is also the original headquarters of the entire Free French movement throughout the world.

You’d have to search a long time for a more remote spot in which to center a world movement, but at the time France went under, there weren’t many French territories left to harbor a renewal of the war against the Germans.

Brazzaville has been mostly just an executive war capital, fighting only with the radio, with plans, with decisions. Gen. de Gaulle has been there a number of times, but no actual movement or concentration of war goods has ever occurred there. It’s just too far away from anywhere.

Brazzaville is on the opposite bank of the Congo River from Leopoldville. The river there is about a mile and a half wide. You cross in a motor launch, which runs every half hour. Natives sit in the front part, and whites in the rear.

Brazzaville is to Leo what West Memphis, Arkansas, is to Memphis, Tennessee. It is small in comparison and everybody goes to Leo for his better shopping and entertainment. Brazzaville has a few paved streets, a few nice homes, but mostly it is a native village.

There is one thing you do go to Brazzaville for, however, and that’s to buy ivory. It is one of the best places in Africa for ivory carvings. I wanted to get some to ship home, so I collected a friend and we went across the river.

This friend was Capt. Phil Ross (now a major), formerly an independent oil operator in San Antonio, Texas. Buying ivory is one of his hobbies. He knows the values down to a centime, and he has a way of haggling with the natives – a boisterous pretense of being insulted and angry at the prices they ask – that tickles them to death.

When we got off the launch, about a hundred black boys came charging down as though we were a citadel and they were storming us. They were all rickshaw pullers.

Knowing how this thing works in other countries, I quickly picked out one boy on the theory that he would save me from the rest. But it doesn’t work that way in Brazzaville. The others continued to yell, grab, push and haul at my defenseless person until we were a hundred yards down the road. Real chamber-of-commerce go-getters, those Brazzaville boys.

A Brazzaville rickshaw is something new under the sun. It has only one wheel. This wheel is nicely rubber-tired, and about the size of a motorcycle wheel. It sits in the center right beneath your seat. A framework of shafts extends fore and aft, and it takes two boys to balance and pull the thing.

Brazzaville is full of rickshaws, but for some strange reason there are none at all in Leo, 10 minutes away.

We went into the heart of the native section and finally pulled up before a mud house. An ivory dealer lived there. He got out his supply from a wooden truck, spread it out on the bare ground of the hallway, then ran along the front of his house, and we began bargaining.

The grapevine carried the word rapidly over town, and pretty soon other dealers began to arrive with their ivory tied up in white rags. They would sit and watch the proceedings for a while and then slowly untie their stuff and very gradually, enter the bargaining.

They were all Negroes, dressed mostly in loosely flowing white gowns. About a dozen finally came. These were not ivory carvers, but merely traders.

They looked like plain jungle Negroes, yet they were acute businessmen. When the American troops first arrived, ivory prices skyrocketed, but when we were there, most of the troops had gone and prices had consequently nosedived again.

Some of the Negroes spoke a few words of English, and Capt. Ross knew a few words of French. Between them we bargained, laughed and haggled there on the ground for three solid hours. We bought bracelets, Negro busts, solid ivory elephants, beautiful Madonnas, knife-and-fork salad sets, dainty pairs of antelopes, turtles, necklaces.

It was more like an auction than a private transaction. I kept books on the thing – whenever Capt. Ross would finally strike a deal for something he would lay it aside and I would put down a description of the article and its cost, on the back of an envelope. When we were finally finished, we had more than 50 separate pieces and they ran into thousands of francs.

I added up the figures, Capt. Ross added them up, and two of the Negroes added them up. I didn’t think they could add, but they said the total was correct. Anyhow we paid a lump sum to one man and left it up to them to thresh out the division among themselves.

How they ever got it straightened out, I didn’t know, for it was a complicated mess, but everybody seemed happy, including us.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 23, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
You know me when I get started traveling – I just can’t ever seem to stop. So, I came back to North Africa from the tropics by the longest possible route I could find – via Egypt.

It’s a long haul. It takes you clear across Africa, down the Nile, and back along the whole Mediterranean shore. It takes you into parts of deepest Africa that few Americans had ever seen before this war. It makes you realize more than ever how completely global, poking into the farthest and tiniest recesses, this war really is.

Nearly everywhere you go you find some American troops, from mere handful up into thousands. They are not fighting troops, they are the builders and maintainers of airdromes, who sort of catch our multitudes of airplanes and toss them on to the next station on their long haul from America to Russia, India, China.

The men who staff these remote landing fields up and down Africa live a strange and almost inconceivable kind of existence. They are completely divorced from life as they know it back home, and from the war, and from all normal associations with people of their own kind. And yet, because of the airplane and the radio, they keep in close mental touch with the world.

At the most weirdly isolated places they get mail from home quicker than we do in North Africa. They set themselves up in permanent quarters more homelike than ours in the north. They are in no danger, but they must bear the great crosses of heat, isolation and monotony. On the whole, they don’t seem to mind it much.

At one certain field, our men have built a big permanent camp. Overnight transients are assigned to wooden cots in open barracks. Each block has toilets and showers, and it’s wonderful to get under that water after a hard day of flying. At the back of each block is a big electric refrigerator, and it is filled with scores of Coca-Cola bottles, containing not Coca-Cola but cold water. You drink continuously in these hot places.

There is only one white woman – a British nurse – within 200 miles. All gasoline has to be trucked 375 miles from the end of the nearest railroad. And yet things aren’t so bad. Listen–

Beautiful Arabian horse abound there. Before the Americans came, you could buy one for $20. Now the price has gone up to $50, but even so you’ve got a horse that would cost you $500-$1000 back home. There are 175 Americans in this camp, and 50 of them own their own horses.

Down there when you buy a horse you don’t just buy a horse. You also buy (all included in the $50) the bridle, the blanket, the saddle, the horseboy, and the horseboy’s whole family!

Our men have built a big three-sided barn. On one side are the horses’ stalls. At the end the feed and saddles are kept. Along the other side, the horseboys and their families live.

A horseboy does nothing whatsoever except feed and care for your horse. It’s his craft. You wouldn’t think of asking him to do anything else. He sticks with that horse as long as the horse lives, and if he doesn’t like the new owner, professional ethics make him stick with you regardless.

And are you wondering about the upkeep of an Arabian horse and horseboy and horseboy’s family? Well, I raised that question and discovered that the total cost of feed for the horse, pay for the boy and food for his whole family is – 10¢ a day. Horsemen, here’s your paradise.

The commanding officer at this place is Lt. George Hester, of Tubac, Arizona. He spent five years with American Airlines in the States and with Pan American Airways in Central America before coming over here. He likes his work and finds the life interesting and full.

For instance, he was telling me about a recent huge conclave of chiefs, a sort of annual review climaxed by a parade of 500 horsemen. As commandant, Lt. Hester was asked to sit with the big chief and review the parade.

He says it was one of the most moving sights he had ever seen.

The horses were flamboyantly decked out, some of them in red velvet pants, and a thousand of the 5,000 horsemen wore coats of mail that had been handed down right from the day of the Crusaders.

These Negroes are mostly Mohammedans. They seem to have a tinge of Arabian in them, and they speak a language that is incomprehensible to the coastal Negroes.

These people dead in the heart of Africa know little about what goes on in the world. The average native knows vaguely that there is a war on, but he can’t conceive of its proportions because he actually doesn’t know how big the world is. His conception of the Allies is merely that England is big and American generous. He knows little about the oceans. He knows roughly that America is somewhere west and Cairo somewhere east, near Mecca. He has never heard of Japan.

I think maybe he’s got something there.