Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 24, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
We came down one noontime upon a heat-baked desert airdrome in the center of Africa. It was just about as far away from anywhere as I can conceive.

At first, all their gasoline had to be brought a hundred miles by camel train. Even now it is brought across a long desert only by truck, and so sandy and wasted are the trails that it takes nearly as long as by camel.

There are only three dozen American soldiers there to run the airdrome. Were it not for the planes that stop daily for gas, their isolation would be unbearable.

We were on the ground just an hour, and during that hour I discovered that in this fantastically remote spot, two copies of this column arrive every day. One set is passed around among the enlisted men to read, and one among the officers. I suppose it’s the only place in the world where I can say the column is read by 100% of the population. We will table the motion just heard that when you’re that far away from home, you’ll read anything.

And of course, I found a Hoosier there also. Not one but two of them. One was right from the banks of the Wabash. This was Pfc. George Richardson, who gets his mail either through Covington or Gessie, Indiana, just up the road a few miles from my town of Dana. George was a pipefitter’s helper before the war. Now he’s a mechanic.

The other one wore a natty sun helmet and high leather boots, and had a pointed mustache. I thought at first he was an Englishman, but no, he was just Capt. Harold Lawler, of Indianapolis. He had been in this devastating spot six months already, and he didn’t think it was so bad.

We flew nearly all day down the Nile. In my mental pictures of the great river, it had always been dotted with those little Egyptian sailboats with their white sails puffed out, and sure enough, on our very first glimpse – where the White and Blue Nile run together near Khartoum – there were the little sailboats.

It is wretched, tortured and forbidding country on either side of the Nile, but the river creates for itself a sheathing of green loveliness, and for a thousand miles it makes a vivid tracing through its background of gray waste.

I had heard so much about the vast and fertile Nile Valley that I had supposed it was a hundred miles across. Actually, all the way south from Cairo, it is hardly more than 10 miles wide – just a narrow strip of green on each side of the river and then you are suddenly out in the desert again.

At last, I have been to Cairo. To see Cairo and to sit on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel at the crossroads of the world and see somebody I knew walk by had been among my minor ambitions for years. Now they have both been realized. The familiar face that passed on Shepheard’s terrace was that of Cliff Henderson, of National Air Races fame.

But there was something about Cairo that made me unhappy. Perhaps it was Cairo’s horn of plenty. I have lived so long now with austerity that austerity has come to seem more honorable than luxury.

Cairo was once frightened, but now all the war danger has receded and the city thrums and throbs as though it had never been afraid at all. The spirit of Cairo is trade, and trade is flourishing. Soldiers are better spenders than the tourists ever were. And you can still buy anything in the world in Cairo, I believe, provided you have enough money. You can get silk stockings ($4 a pair), Bourbon whisky, razor blades (90¢ for a tiny pack), or precious star rubies and emeralds. And you can get fine food.

I went to see the Pyramids in a jeep and found they were too steep for me to climb. The Sphinx did not speak to me, and I decided he was silent because he probably had nothing to say. At Shepheard’s, I shooed away the gully-gully boys, and in Khalili, I was set upon by droves of aspiring merchants who persisted like desert fliers. The spirit that flowed through Cairo irritated and frightened me. Maybe I was all wrong, but I was glad to get out of there.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 25, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
From Cairo, we retraced the whole long trail over which Gen. Montgomery chased Rommel last fall and winter, all the way from Egypt to Tunisia. Lord, what a vast blank distance it is!

The desert in western Egypt and eastern Libya is absolutely flat, absolutely barren. It is like looking down on an endless skating rink.

From the air we could see where the war had been. We could see wrecked and blackened tanks by the score. We could see dumps of abandoned gasoline cans and used boxes, wrecked ships on the beach, crashed planes, and even gun pits that had once poured out steel and death. Everything stood out as though it had been painted, for there was nothing else at all on the desert except these remnants of war.

But the one thing that fascinated me most was the tracks of the tanks and the trucks. Yes, they were still there. The winter’s winds had not covered them up. There were absolutely billions of tracks in the sand, tracks swerving and turning and intertwining as far as you could see. Never was such a plain picture drawn of modern war’s mobility as that grandstand view of the infinite tracks in the sands of Rommel’s defeat.

We stopped over for a day at Tripoli, and I was disappointed in Il Duce’s paradise city. Oh, it was all right, but now take some comparable place like Santa Barbara and you’ve… oh well, let’s skip it.

I rode a truck into town with a bunch of pilots in the afternoon. Some of the boys were looking for bright lights, and they disappeared. Others went to get their haircut. Two more and myself went down to the harbor and stood there for a while looking over a wire fence at all the wreckage.

There were few Italians in the streets, but most of the street population seemed to be British and American soldiers. This was shortly after Tripoli fell, remember.

It didn’t seem to me that what few Italians we saw were having any trouble restraining their joy. We were surprised to see Italian officers in the streets.

The fronts of the downtown buildings were pretty well smacked up by flying bomb fragments, but on the whole, the city wasn’t devastated like Sfax, Gabes and Bizerte. It was mainly the harbor that got it.

Most of the shops were closed but a few were open. There were signs at the airport warning us against drinking any of the local liquor, as it is known to produce ailments ranging from blindness to insanity. But we didn’t see any evidence of any liquor to drink anyhow…

In boredom, we finally wound up in a little teashop, drinking lukewarm coffee and eating soggy little French pastries. The place was packed with 8th Army men. It seemed incongruous that an Italian shopkeeper in a town that had just been conquered should be running around his crowded shop taking in money hand over fist from his conquerors.

Our truck wasn’t due to start back to camp till 4 o’clock, and by 3:30, we had seen all of Tripoli we wanted, so we bought a nickel’s worth of peanuts apiece (for which we paid the equivalent of 20¢) and sat on the floor truck eating them till time to go.

The next morning, we left Tripoli on the last day of our long flight home.

Looking back over Africa, there are a few little brag-mag items I didn’t get around to and haven’t got room to do more than mention here – just a scattering of notes like passing thoughts… I was in one city where second-hand Packards sell today for $20,000 in American money, and where people pay a thousand dollars for tires… Pilots on our ferry routes over here are flying as high as 150 hours a month, the maximum on the airlines back home being 90… In one city, where gasoline is almost extinct, you see dozens of autos with horses hitched to them, being used as taxis… All through Central Africa, the first thing a man does when you are introduced is to whip out his Short-Snorter bill and have you sign it.

Many people are making collections of paper money from different countries, pasting the ends of the bills together with Scotch tape. I saw many rolls so big you couldn’t get them in your pocket, and I saw one more than 35 feet long. In these travels I saw the largest Negro city in the world outside of Harlem (I’m sure you never heard of it), and I saw anthills higher than a two-story house… In one country, the earth is a sort of pinkish red, and when the wind blows, this pink dust settles in a thin coat over everything. Pilots have been startled to look down and see herds of honest-to-goodness pink elephants… That’s enough for today.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 26, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Africa –
Before ending this tropical series, I want to tell you a little about all the flying we did. The total distance was somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 miles – every bit of it in Douglas cargo planes, with the seats replaced by hard tin benches along the sides.

We hauled everything from generals to immense air compressors. Sometimes we would have so much freight that only a few passengers could crawl in on top of it. At other times, we’d have 25 passengers and no freight. We always flew with bigger loads than would be allowed back home.

The work of the Transport Command in running these delivery routes all over the world is one of the war’s most captivating stories, but for security reasons we are permitted to tell about it only in vague generalities. That’s the reason these columns have seemed so jumpy at times – so unspecific about various places down below.

This flying over wildest Africa isn’t haphazard at all, but so meticulously systematic that it is much like flying with Pan American in peacetime.

You stay overnight at Army camps, and around 3 a.m. you are awakened by a professional awakener who tells you where to eat breakfast and what time the bus leaves for the airport. Usually, you are in the air by dawn or a little before. Once in a while you eat a nice lunch on the ground at some airport, but usually your lunch is a big pasteboard box full of jelly sandwiches prepared the night before in some Army kitchen.

Sometimes you fly for several days with the same crew, and you all get well acquainted and become a sort of family, as on Pan Air. It’s much more intimate than flying the domestic airliner at home. The crews are almost invariably friendly and good-humored.

Life is very informal on these long trips. Colonel and privates sleep side by side, and anybody who wants to can walk up front and look over the pilot’s shoulder.

On one trip when we had been out over the ocean for several hours, and everything was going along smoothly and most of the passengers were asleep, I decided to go up front and chin with the pilots for a while. The sight that greeted me when I opened the cabin door would have brought heart failure to an airline traveler back home. For one pilot was rolled up in a blanket on the floor, sound asleep, and the other pilot was snoring away in his seat, and the sergeant flight mechanic was flying the plane.

But that’s nothing. Once in a great while, they’ll put the plane on the automatic pilot and the whole crew will come back and chat with the passengers, just to see how nervous they act.

These ferry crews are doing a superlative job. Those tin seats get might hard on a long trip. Also, despite the tropical heat below, it is often cold at high altitudes.

You can always tell a veteran ferry-line traveler by what he carries and how he acts on the plane. Being an old hand at it now myself, I always carry a loose blanket and take a musette bag into the cabin. As soon as we are in the air, I push a few people’s feet aside, spread the blanket on the floor and lie down, using the musette bag as a pillow. Some of the more fastidious travelers even bring air mattresses. The best bed of all is a stack of mailsacks, but sometimes there aren’t any mailsacks.

It’s going to cramp my style, when I get home and fly the regular airline again, not to be able to stretch out on the floor as soon as we get in the air.

When nature turns on the spring heat in the desert countries, it seems to boil its fury clear up into the skies, and the result is almost constantly rough air. It took us about six days to cover 8,000 miles from the Congo back to North Africa, and every one of those six days it was rough, I’ve never seen such continuous rough air in my life.

One of our pilots on the long haul was Capt. Wayne Akers, of Memphis. At one of the lunch stops, he got out of the plane and said:

God, that even made me sick.

For some strange reason, I never got sick once during the whole trip, but plenty of the others did, and how, I think one of the funniest sights of the war occurred during one of those violent all-day rides – a British general and an American private kneeling side by side on the floor, their heads close together over the same bucket, their ranks and their nationalities utterly forgotten in their common bond of wishing they were dead.

[adamsano]

I very much enjoy reading Ernie’s columns in real time 1943. Please keep them coming. Thanks, Dave

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 28, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa – (by wireless)
Our last day was as interesting as any one of the whole trip. We took off early from Tripoli, and most of us were glad to get on our way. Fighting was then still going on in central Tunisia, and the Luftwaffe was active, so we made a wide circle around to the south.

We flew for many hours. The air was bitterly rough, and it seemed to us we would never get anywhere. We were over the Sahara, and I have never seen desert so utterly void of anything as the desert that was then beneath us. It was the billowing, spaceless kind of desert you see in the romantic movies – yellow and luscious enough to eat. It was truly beautiful in a ghastly, naked sort of way. Down among those rippled dunes no life could long exist.

Once I walked up into the cockpit, Lt. Richard Litsey Jr., of Sherman, Texas, was flying the plane, and he said:

How are you going to describe what this looks like?

I told him I didn’t think I could describe it, and he said he too felt completely incapable of picturing it, to anybody else. Then he said:

Let’s go down and take a good look.

And down we started. The other passengers were either sick or asleep, and I’m sure it didn’t help their repose when we unexpectedly started going down, down, down, over that remote, lifeless no-man’s-land of infinite sand. We went down until we were only a few feet above the ridges of the dunes, and down there we discovered to our amazement that these dunes were sometimes two and three hundred feet high. Their rippled sides were so beautiful they made you feel sad.

Four hours we flew over this lovely, tortured segment of the world. Finally, we came out into the suburbs of the desert – foothills and occasional oases. I began to recognize it as country I had traveled over by truck when we went to search for some crashed planes last winter.

And then at last, we flew over the very airdrome where I had spent so many weeks at the beginning of the year. It looked lonely and forsaken down there now – for we had abandoned it long ago, driven out by the continuously flying sand.

At last, we came over northern Algeria, and to the last hour of our homeward flight. By now it was late in the day, and everybody was in a tense, expectant, homecoming spirit. Even the sick ones couldn’t help feeling an animation. The pilots seemed to feel it more than anybody else. They kept the plane only a few feet off the ground, and it seemed we must be going 500 miles an hour. Flocks of sheep ran wildly before us. Arabs stopped their oxen in the fields and ducked as we flew over them. The plane banged and bounced and tore on into the mountain passes ahead of us as though it had its teeth bared.

As I have said before, northern Algeria is incredibly beautiful. Its great ridges and green forests and gentle valleys and white clouds are a divine progeny such as nature seldom conceives. We roared into and through this spectacular beauty – sometimes almost scraping the red roofs of Arab villages perched on nearly inaccessible peaks, sometimes twisting through narrow passes that we passengers swore were not wide enough for our wings, sometimes soaring out over ledges that dropped down thousands of feet and left us suddenly motionless, it seemed, above the patchwork valleys far below.

And finally, we came home, or to what we who are now so long out of America have come to call home.

The long peril and agony of travel was over. It was a gigantic relief to feel the ultimate ground underneath us again. We piled out with an inner feeling of accomplishment that practically made us individual heroes to ourselves. We emerged as though expecting some welcoming throng at the airdrome to break into uncontrolled cheers in our honor.

Fortunately, no such thing happened. For as I climbed down the ladder, I caught a heel on the narrow steps, lost my balance, and fell sprawling into the ground. I tore my pants, and skinned my knee nastily.

It was my only accident in nearly 15,000 miles of travel. But so high were our spirits at being home again that even the burning in my knee felt good.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 29, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa – (by wireless)
Now the time has come to talk about the mail. My mail, I mean.

Back in those first months in Africa, I didn’t get any mail at all. My friends and family were writing all the time, of course, but the letters just never came through. It was terrible to go month after month with no word from home at all.

But now, the tide has turned. I am known as the man who gets all the mail. If fewer than six letters a day come in, I start pouting and they have to give me extra rations of jam at suppertime.

I’m surprised that the Army postal system doesn’t use its influence to get me kicked out of Africa on the grounds that I’m an impediment to the war effort, and also a nuisance.

You folks who read the column have been thoughtful and generous in writing to me. You have written letters by the hundreds, and they have all been grand to read. You have written me in red ink, green ink, by typewriter and by pencil. You have cabled me and you have sent notes by friends coming over. There have been letters from generals’ wives, from aircraft workers, from old schoolmates, shipyard presidents, schoolkids, Pacific heroes, and hundreds of letters from mothers and fathers of soldiers in North Africa.

Most of you have written only once, but there have been series of as many as 15 and 20 letters from the same person. One reader, a complete stranger to me, has written me oftener than my own family. I’m on several “buddy” lists of people who write weekly to 50 or 60 overseas soldiers.

Some of you tell me your life histories or experiences in the last war, or what you are having for supper. You’ve given me remedies for sore hands and advice on how to break a pet dog of being battle-shy. You’ve sent me drawings of improvised stoves for pup tents, and you’ve asked me to call and have dinner with long-unseen French aunts in Oran and Algeria. You’ve sent Christmas cards and sickroom cards and homemade poems and hand-drawn cartoons. You’ve sent photographs of yourselves, and newspaper clippings by the hundred.

Many of you have written of sending me boxes or cigarettes, soap, shaving lotions, books, cookies, nail scissors and sweaters. None of these have ever come, but the mere fact that you sent them is sufficient.

You mustn’t send anything more, because in the first place the stuff is likely not to get here, and in the second place there isn’t a thing in the world we need that we don’t have. That goes for most of the troops, too. We are well provided for, so don’t worry about us.

I could write a whole column about the unusual addresses you put on your letters. You send my letters to your husband’s APO number, or in care of some soldier I have written about, or to the Stars and Stripes, or in care of Gen. Eisenhower, who wouldn’t know me if he saw me.

Sometimes you merely clip my picture out of the column and paste it on an envelope. But most of you address your letters just “Somewhere in Africa,” or “On the Tunisian front.” Hundreds of these probably never reach me at all, but other hundreds do. The ironic thing is that many of these vaguely-addressed letters come through faster than correctly-addressed ones from personal friends. In tracking me down, these letters go through many hands. I’ve had penciled notes on the outside of envelopes from soldiers I hadn’t heard of in years. And some mystery person keeps printing on letters that come from different parts of the country and at different times, but always in the same hand. My only conclusion is that it must be done by a censor. Of all people!

Many of your letters make the rounds of a dozen units and get to me as much as six months after being sent. Just the other day, I got one that was mailed in New York in December. The envelope was so covered with penciled notations that you could hardly find the name. But what tickled me most was that some wishfully-thinking postal clerk had sent it to three different prison camps, trying to locate me. It was all penciled out there on the envelope. One of the notations said:

Not at diplimary barracks.

If the Army is going to make a criminal out of me, I do wish they’d learn how to spell “disciplinary” first.

[NormanStewart]

@NormanStewart

diplimary

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 30, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa – (by wireless)
The letters you readers write to me here in Africa begin with everything from “Dear sir” to Hi, Ernie.” Any columnist can expect a nasty letter once in a while, but you have yet to write me a nasty one. Maybe you’re just saving up to slaughter me all at once.

Many of you write long letters about how things and people are in your hometown, just as though that were my hometown too. I like that. Your letters have kept me pretty well informed on the progress of rationing, shortages, and public spirit at home.

Most of you write from your own goodness just to tell me you enjoy the column. A few of you make unusual requests such as asking for an Algerian postcard to add to your collection, or a camel bell, or a dissertation on the ancestry of Tunisia’s black and white sheep. Unfortunately, there had not been time for me to comply with these requests.

A number of you have asked me to send you the names of soldiers who get no mail so you can correspond with them. I shall have to fail you there too, for I have never known a soldier who didn’t get any mail, and I can’t go around asking each man if he’d like somebody to write him.

About a third of you ask me to look up your sons and husbands and brothers and say hello. Once in a while, I just happen to be near the outfit you mention when your letter comes, but those are just coincidences. Ordinarily it would be like writing to me in New York and asking me to look up somebody in Chicago, for our Army has grown to be that big over here.

Many of you have asked me to look up sons you haven’t heard from for a couple of months and see if they are all right. I can’t do that either, but I can tell you this – no news from your boy (dissatisfying though that may be) is almost always good news. For if anything serious has happened to him, you’ll hear about it from the War Department long before you would have begun worrying because of the lack of letters.

The absence of letters is usually due either to a jam in the mail service or to the fact that he just isn’t writing as often as he should.

A small percentage of my letters are from families who have already received the dreaded telegram from the War Department. Those telegrams are stark, blank things – they deal you the blow and leave you hanging in thin air. Your letters ask me to try to find out all the little details of how it happened and let you know. How I wish that it were possible. Those are the letters I would give anything to comply with. Those of you who have lost close ones seem to write so beautifully, so resignedly, and so patiently, that it is doubly hard on me to be forced to do nothing about your letters.

At first, I did try, and I was able (largely by the freak circumstance of having been there at the time) to send details home to a few parents. But now those letters have grown to the point where I dare not even try anymore to get the details of the death or capture of any one person. It requires days of tracing down through headquarters records, and then either a personal trip hundreds of miles or a long letter to his commanding officer or his buddies.

All this would be a full-time job, not for just one man but for a whole staff. It would require a full-fledged information bureau.

I know how you feel – you think to yourself:

But surely, he could find time to answer just this one request.

That’s true. I could find time to do one. But it isn’t just one. There are scores of them. If I were to obey my impulse and carry out these touching requests, I would have to stop writing the column altogether.

No matter how it may seem to you who read our stuff, a war correspondent works mighty hard. We all do. Spare time is something that has ceased to exist for us. The War Department accredits us here to write for you publicly, and the minute we stopped doing that, we would be sent home.

That’s the way it is. And so, this column is addressed to all you readers who have written me, and even to a large percentage of my friends back home, to tell you why I can’t answer your letters individually, and yet to thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 1, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

North Africa – (by wireless)
As I have said before in these columns, the Army is almost without exception good to correspondents at the front. I have never yet been treated uncivilly, and usually officers and men will go out of their way to help you.

I remember one instance when another correspondent and I were making a trip of several hundred miles in a jeep with half the windshield missing. Riding behind a glassless windshield gets pretty rugged, even in good weather. All along the way we would drop into motor pools and ordnance depots, trying to get some glass. But there simply wasn’t any.

Then one day, we happened to stop at a small camp merely to inquire the way to a nearby airdrome. And the officer in charge asked out of a clear sky if we would like to have our windshield fixed. We said we sure would, but there wasn’t any glass. He said:

Maybe we can find some. Since you’re staying all night at the airdrome, just forget about it. I’ll find your jeep where you leave it, and we’ll fix it.

And sure enough, a couple of hours later here came the officer and two men with a nice piece of glass. They had cut it from the windshield of a wrecked Flying Fortress, and it made a much better windshield than the original.

There was no reason for them to do it at all, except that they were just nice people. Our benefactors in this case were Lt. James O’Connor of Worchester, Massachusetts, and Sgts. Ernest Kelly of Spokane, Washington, and Lawrence Hunter of Pensacola, Florida.

I am having medals struck off for them on my private medal-machine.

The other day at one of the airdromes, I got to talking with a young fellow who is one of four brothers in service. Such an odd thing happened to them last year that I think you’d be interested in hearing about it.

This young man is Sgt. Ray Swim, who used to work in Denver but whose real home is Grand Junction, Colorado, where his father is a farmer. Ray’s three brothers are also sergeants, to wit: Sgt. Ralph, at Lowry Field, Denver; Sgt. William at Fort Logan, Denver; Sgt. Orville, somewhere in Australia.

Now we go back to the spring of 1942. Ray was then in the bombardier school at Midland, Texas. He got a few days’ leave and decided to go home. He just got on a train and started. He didn’t even let the folks at home know he was coming.

When he got off the train at Grand Junction, he bumped into one of the other brothers, who had also just arrived from camp unannounced. What a coincidence, they thought.

They shook hands and walked around the corner, and there was a third brother, under the same circumstances. And before they got out of town, damned if they didn’t pick up the fourth brother, who had also arrived home unexpectedly. So, there they were – neither of the four had known the other were coming, their parents hadn’t known any of them were coming, and it was the first time the whole family had been together in five years. And to top it all off, it happened on Mother’s Day.

The boy’s mother was almost overcome. They thought for a while they would have to call a doctor for her. But I don’t think the doctors know how to prescribe for sheer joy.

It there is one single scene that could be described as typifying North Africa to the American soldier, it’s the sight of a ragged Arab standing along the roadside holding up an egg between his thumb and forefinger, trying to sell it. Through this individual bartering, I suppose the Arabs have sold billions of eggs to American soldiers. Apropos of this, Bill Stoneham of The Chicago Daily News and Drew Middleton of The New York Times were riding along one day and Bill remarked that he supposed the most difficult feat in Africa would be to reverse the process and sell an egg to an Arab. Drew said, “Oh, I don’t know,” and the bet was on.

Drew bet 200 francs he’d sell an egg to an Arab before Sept. 1. No tricks will be allowed. It has to be a legitimate sale, although Drew is permitted to sell as cheaply as he wishes. So now you see him, every time he goes out into the country, jumping out of his car at frequent intervals, rushing over to a bunch of Arabs, holding out his egg and starting his pleading sales talk of “Ouef, deux francs.” The Arabs just turn and walk away.

Drew admits privately that he has slight hope of winning his bet. It’s harder than selling coals in Newcastle. And the worst part of it is that Drew, being honest, won’t palm off stale merchandise, so he has to go out and pay five francs for a fresh egg every time he starts in one of his futile selling trips.