The book Congo: The Epic History of a People written by David van Reybrouck is worth reading.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I very much enjoy reading Ernie’s columns in real time 1943. Please keep them coming. Thanks, Dave
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 2, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
North Africa – (by wireless)
There is one awfully important American in Africa who has been mentioned very little. That is William E. Stevenson, head of the American Red Cross over here.
Stevenson organized and ran the whole vast Red Cross setup in England. Then, starting from scratch, he built the now-immense Red Cross system in Africa. And wherever the American Army goes next, he will move with it and do the same thing all over again.
Stevenson’s job is unromantic, but it is more vital than many a general’s. A good portion of the morale of the Army in Africa depends on his decisions. His employees run into the thousands. He spends millions of dollars a year. His daily headaches, though less important, are as numerous as Gen. Eisenhower’s.
He has to be a pioneer, a businessman, a diplomat, a dean of women, a military expert and a wheedler of small favors, all in one. Yet until a year and a half ago, he had never dreamed of organizing anything bigger than a committee meeting and had never thought twice about the institution known as the Red Cross.
Stevenson has been successful because he is smart and because he is honest, in the deepest meaning of the word. He has no sideline ambitions and no axes to grind. He wants nothing for his future out of the Red Cross nor out of the Army nor out of Africa or England or Italy or anywhere else. He is simply serving for the duration and serving with his whole thing. When it’s all over, he will go back and take up where he left off – which was at the head of an outstanding young law firm in New York City.
Stevenson is tall, handsome and athletic. He looks 10 years out of college instead of 20. He is a minister’s son, but didn’t follow either of the two paths taken by so many ministers’ sons. He neither turned pious or went to the dogs. He wound up as a perfectly normal well-balanced fellow, humorous and capable.
He was born in Chicago, but due to his father’s changes of pastorates, he also lived in New York, Baltimore and Princeton. Bill’s father wound up as president of Princeton’s Theological Seminary, so it was Princeton where Bill went to school, after prepping at Andover. It amuses him that he recently – while faraway overseas and in no position to assume any duties – was elected a trustee of Andover, which he left 25 years ago.
Stevenson is now 42. He was just old enough to get into the Marine Corps at the tail end of the last war, and served a few months in the States. He graduated from Princeton in 1922, then went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and studied law for three years there. He likes and understands the English, but he didn’t go British nor adopt the Oxford accent.
He was American champion in the 440yd dash in 1921, and took the British championship for the same distance in 1923. Then in 1924, he went to the Olympics at Paris and ran on the 1600m relay team that set a new world record.
There is one strange feat he is proud of. In 1921, he won the quarter-mile for a Princeton-Cornell team competing against Oxford and Cambridge. Then he went abroad, and in 1925, he won the quarter-mile for the Oxford-Cambridge team against Princeton-Cornell. That’s what is known in some circles as working both sides of the ocean.
In 1926, Stevenson returned to New York and went to work. His first job was as assistant to District Attorney Buckner. Bill went into the Prohibition branch; because it paid $1,000 a year more, and he needed the thousand to get married on. Buckner practiced what he enforced about Prohibition, and insisted that his men do likewise. As a result, the Stevensons couldn’t even drink champagne at their own wedding. Mrs. Stevenson still thinks it was an outrage.
A little Prohibition work goes a long way, so before long Stevenson went into the law firm of John W. Davis. He stayed there till 1931, when he formed his own partnership with Eli Whitney Debevoise. They were successful from the beginning. They have had as high as 21 lawyers on their staff.
Our entrance into the war caught Bill Stevenson in that same shadowy, borderline stage of life that caught me. He was too old for combat duty and too young not to want to have a finger in the pie. He didn’t know what to do. He could have gone to Washington and donned a soldier suit with oak leaves on his shoulders and sat at a nice desk. But that somehow seemed ridiculous to him. He waited and looked around, and after a while he heard that the Red Cross needed a man to go to England.
He knew nothing about the Red Cross but thought his law experience and three years of school in England might come in handy. And it was a chance to get across the water and into the heart of things. He got the job and here he is.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 3, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
North Africa – (by wireless)
Bill Stevenson, the head of the American Red Cross in Africa, has been married 17 years and has two daughters, 15 and 14. Mrs. Stevenson is just as handsome as her husband, and the two stand out in a crowd because of their smart good looks.
Mrs. Stevenson’s name is Eleanor, but it is a name so long unused that she probably wouldn’t respond if you called her by it. Her name before her marriage was Eleanor Bumstead, and ever since she can remember, she has been known as Bumpy.
The two met while Bill was at Oxford in the mid-20s. Bumpy’s father had gone to England on business, and Bumpy went along. She and Bill knew of each other but had never met.
Bill says Bumpy followed him to England and asked him to marry her. Bumpy says, well, what the hell if she did?
There is a sort of unspoken rule in the Red Cross against husbands and wives being together, but in this case, it is unthinkable that Bumpy should not be along. The two operate as a mechanism. Bumpy wears a Red Cross uniform, and in addition to a terrific amount of headquarters work she is a sort of roving delegate, cheerer-upper, smoother-over and finder-outer for the whole Red Cross of Africa, and half the Army too. She travels a lot, and everywhere she goes, she lands her pretty ear to tales of woe, turns her pretty smile on generals and privates without distinction, and gives her strong shoulder to be wept upon by all and sundry.
Bill calls her “the G.I. girlfriend.”
Bill says with a laugh:
I have to be super-nice to everybody because I never know whom I’m talking to. Soldiers come barging into my office and sit and talk by the hour. I’ve got work to do but I don’t dare hurry them off, for it’s probably Bumpy’s latest boyfriend. It’s always either generals or privates with Bump. Nobody in between stands a chance.
Bumpy and Bill have a way with them of making everybody crazy about them. Bumpy especially is a sponge that attracts the spilling of private griefs. The soldiers think she is wonderful. She is always getting herself in a mess by going to bat for somebody she thinks is being mistreated. Like Bill, she is in work up to her ears and has no axes to grind.
To everybody who knows them, Stevenson is Bill and Mrs. Stevenson is Bumpy, but to each other, they exchange the latter for the slightly more intimate Bump and Billy.
The Stevensons have an Oldsmobile sedan for their own use over here. They live in a small but nice apartment on a hilly street. They have no servants, and seldom sat at home. It’s easier and cheaper to eat at the Red Cross mess downtown.
Both are blessed with indifference to social-climbing. They have entrée, as a matter of course, to high circles, but they are the kind who don’t need to be seen with the right people. They dine with Lt. Gen. Spaatz, for instance, not because he’s a general but because they like him and have business to talk over with him. They have no purely social life whatever. They can skip that for the duration.
The Stevensons have been overseas more than a year now. They were in England together, and Bumpy followed Bill down here. Bill had a few bad days when he heard Bumpy’s boat had been sunk, but it turned out she was on a different boat.
Bumpy has not been back to the States at all, but Bill took a flying trip home this spring to thresh out some details at Washington headquarters. He did his business, saw their two children, stayed a total of three weeks, and was glad to get back over here.
Bumpy’s presence in a theater of war with her husband is a strange repetition of history. The whole thing parallels the experience of her own parents. In the last war, her father was on the faculty at Yale and frequently went to England to give special lectures at Cambridge. He was there when we entered the war in 1917 and was immediately appointed scientific attaché of the American Embassy in London. So, Mrs. Bumstead left her children with their grandmother and went to England to be with him.
Today, Bumpy’s daughter are left in the hands of their grandmother while Mama works overseas. Bumpy says she remembers when her mother went away to war and how lonely and horrible she felt, yet what a thrill it was to show off before the other kids in a sort of stuck-up way about having your mother overseas. And when Bumpy left for England in the spring of 1942, one of her little girls said as she kissed her goodbye:
Mummy, we’ll be awfully lonesome, but we’re awfully proud too.
Meaning, mainly, as Bumpy says, that they can go around bragging about it.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 4, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
North Africa –
The Red Cross has a few critics but they are few indeed. The wonder is that it gets its job done at all, considering the conditions under which it has to work.
When the Red Cross opens up a new war theater, its growth has to be as fast as the growth of the Army. The way clubs spring up overnight in newly-occupied centers, the way restaurants and dances and movies and clubmobiles and hospital workers mushroom into life all over a new country, is something that still astounds me.
Bill Stevenson, the Red Cross delegate to Africa, wouldn’t admit this himself, but actually his job is to do things for the Army in spite of the Army. Not that anybody is against the Red Cross. It isn’t that. But the Red Cross has depended on the Army for a great many things – for jeeps, and boat priorities, and requisitioned buildings, and permissions of many kinds – and each of these is guarded by some individual whose job is to conserve things for strictly military use. The result is a fine art of wheedling on the part of Mr. Stevenson. But things do get done.
We who have written about the Red Cross in the past have usually centered upon the fine clubs it operates in all the big centers where troops are stationed. And yet actually – and I didn’t know this until a few days ago – the club part comes third in the list of things the Red Cross does in Africa.
First and foremost is the hospital program. The Red Cross has women workers with every hospital in this theater – five each at the big ones, three at the smaller ones.
Second is the field program. This is run by men, who live and work with combat outfits. They dole out books, towels, toilet sets, writing paper – all the little things the soldiers lose in battle. They are horns of plenty and father confessions and Johnny Fixer-Uppers.
They are the ones who wire home to see if Pvt. Joe Smith has become a papa yet. They bring the sad news that a soldier’s mother has died at home. They talk things over and get a neglectful boy to write home.
Through these field workers, the soldiers have direct contact with America in cases of family emergency. It’s surprising the number of cases they handle. Every day, 250 cables and 300 letters start across the oceans, solving soldier’s problems – it takes seven American girl stenographers typing constantly to keep these messages flowing.
The field men conduct 26,000 interviews a month with soldiers, advising them about allotments and other things.
The most spectacular Red Cross activity, although third on the program, is the club service. Today the Red Cross has more than 40 clubs in North Africa. These aren’t just little reading-room affairs – they’re hotels of four or five stories, serving meals, providing beds, and equipped with snack bars, lounge rooms, dances, and movies. Running all this is in a minor way the same as running an army. It’s a terrifically big business.
The Red Cross has 365 Americans over here now, and 100 more are due shortly. It has hundreds of local employees. 60% of the Americans are women.
No matter what deep services the Red Cross may perform, Stevenson says it’s the touch of femininity that does the soldiers the most good. Despite his metropolitan background, Bill has been naïve all his life about the influence that women wield in this world. He has found out in Africa.
Bumpy (Mrs. Stevenson) laughs and says that’s the outstanding thing Bill has learned in his war career – he has awakened to the powerful existence of womanhood.
He has found it out in two ways – one, the touching approval and desire of the soldiers for female companionship, even if it consists of nothing more than standing and looking at an American girl behind a counter; and, two, the rather laughable troubles he has with his staff in matters of the heart.
Bill has what he calls “colonel trouble.” It seems his gals are always getting engaged to colonels. You’d think a man old enough to be a full colonel would either be well married and settled or else determined to be an old bachelor. But no. Colonels moon around the Red Cross workers like country swains and the first thing you know they’re betrothed, begorra.
There’s no rule against Red Cross girls getting married while overseas, but there is a rule that they can’t be stationed in the same area as their husbands. One general, who has a colonel about to get married on him, says he will consent only on condition that they will be stationed a thousand miles apart.
Bill Stevenson wonders whether it’s going to be the general’s duty to keep the colonel-husband away from his wife, or his [Bill’s] duty to keep the Red Cross wife away from her husband. I suggest that Bill and the general make up a pot between them and hire a small Arab boy to stand watch.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 7, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
First of five articles on the WAACs.
North Africa – (July 6)
This is a short series about the WAACs in Africa. There aren’t so very many of them over here so far. The ones who are here are a sort of test tube, but they are working out so well that many others undoubtedly will be coming along to reinforce them.
There is a distressing shortage of WAACs. There are only 60,000 of them altogether, and I’m told the Air Forces alone would like to have 300,000. If you happen to have 240,000 potential WAACs around the house, would you please let us know?
There are fewer than 300 WAACs in North Africa. All of them live in a big headquarters city. They are not dodging bullets, not living in foxholes, not blood-and-gutsing around at any front, as some of the more romantic pieces written about them seem to intimate. They are, in fact, living not very differently from what they would in service at home.
The first WAACs over here were five chaplains, on very special confidential work, who arrived last December after being torpedoed on the way. These five, by the nature of their work, are separate from the regular WAAC unit and live together in a villa. Since then, four other WAAC officers have come for similar duty.
An example is Lt. Sarah Bagby, who is confidential secretary to Lt. Gen. “Tooey” Spaatz. Lt. Bagby, incidentally, is the 11th member of her family to go into uniform.
Now to the bulk of the WAACs. There is one full company here – 274 women, including five officers. They arrived January 26. They aren’t scattered around Africa; they are all concentrated in one city.
Half of them live in a requisitioned five-story office building. Streetcars, buses and Army vehicles flow past their door constantly. From their rooftop you look right down upon the city and its harbor – it’s one of the most striking views I ever saw.
The other half live in a convent just on the edge of the city. They have taken over about half of the convent, and the girls live in huge rooms little different from college dormitories. Their quarters surround a crushed-stone patio with an ancient well in the middle. It all looks like a picture out of the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most peaceful places I have ever seen.
There are five women officers to run the company – two captains and three lieutenants. One of the five is a doctor. The officers call the girls either by their rank or by their last name only. First names are never used. Despite these formalities, there seems to be a gentler exchange of personalities between WAAC officers and girls than between officers and men in the Army.
Some WAAC officers are grim and severe. One of these might dismiss an auxiliary from her presence with a stiff and chilling “That’s all, Holmes,” while another officer would perform the same mission by saying, “Get the hell out of here, Holmes, you rat,” in a manner that would send the girl off singing to herself for an hour.
One very fine officer I know indulges in morale-building horseplay that would probably shock the Articles of War right out of their covers – such as returning an extremely snappy salute with a snappier one that resembles a baseball pitcher’s windup.
The WAACs have conducted themselves beautifully over here. Naturally one has a sip too much of wine now and then, or stays out past hours in the moonlight, but on the whole, their conduct would more than meet the approval of any fair-minded person.
The WAACs, like everybody else, are subject to many rumors. This might be as good a place as any to dispel one of the vicious ones. It has been whispered about town that 25% of the WAACs have been sent home. This is a genuine libel. Only four WAACs have been sent back, and they were older women who simply couldn’t make the psychological adjustment to being so far from home.
Actually, the WAACs are neither prissies nor toughies, but just nice natural girls the same as they would be back home.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 8, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Second of a series.
North Africa –
The fond mothers of WAACs in Africa may have visions of their poor little girls all alone over here in this big bad world fighting off olive-skinned rouges with one hand and lions and snakes with the other.
They needn’t worry. The girls are perfectly safe. The city they are in is as modern, though in a European way, as cities back home. Thousands of French women and girls, dressed just as Americans dress, crowd the streets at all hours. There are American Army nurses, and British nurses, WAAFs, WRENs and ATS girls, and five different kinds of French service girls in uniform.
There is the thrill of being in the midst of vital things here, without the drawbacks of either physical danger or spiritual peril.
Our WAACs do about a dozen kinds of work here. It takes a couple of dozen to run their own two barracks, their three messes and their headquarters. They are proud of being a self-contained unit, requiring no help from anybody. They even repair their own stoves.
Five of the others are car drivers, and the rest work in offices. They serve as secretaries, typists, draughtsmen, phone operators, and mail sorters. They get up and “go to the office” just as though they were on civilian jobs back home.
There are six WAACs in Gen. Eisenhower’s office. There are 30 in the Adjutant General’s office, 11 in the Judge Advocate’s office, 14 in Civil Affairs. The Signal Corps has 50 running switchboards and teletypes and deciphering code messages. And since there are no WAVES over here yet, two WAACs are working for the Navy!
When a WAAC takes over a telephone switchboard from a soldier, efficiency goes up about a thousand percent. If there is one single thing the male species does with complete confusion and incompetence, it’s running a switchboard.
The mail section is another example of women doing a job better than soldiers can. There are 95 WAACs in the delayed-mail section – mail that, for some reason or other, is not immediately deliverable, and the addresses have to be tracked down. This is confining and tedious work. You have to sit all day, and you become practically an international business machine. Each of these girls is now doing the work of four G.I. soldiers whom they replaced, the big bumble-fingers.
There are a number of WAACs in the Planning Section, and these are cognizant of the most vitally secret information. They are good tongue-holders. Their officers tell me that soldiers who have dates with WAACs are always confessing to them where they are going next, but that the girls are as mum as though they were talking to German spies.
Of the five girls who are drivers, two drive trucks. In England, it’s a common sight to see a whole big military convoy driven by women, but we haven’t reached that stage yet. The two WAAC truckdrivers work mostly in the city, but they have made cross-country trips of several hundred miles hauling supplies.
Both of these drivers are former schoolteachers, and one holds a master’s degree. She is Idel Anderson of San Francisco. She taught history in Reno. She loves it over here. In fact, she has definitely decided to come back after the war and stay a while. She wants to learn French perfectly, for one thing, and to have more time to brush up on history at the scene.
The other schoolmarm who wheels a big truck is Dorothy Gould, of Dos Palos, California. Both of these girls wear Army coveralls, but both of them are feminine and there is nothing truck-driverish about them except their ability.
The five officers of the WAAC company live in barracks with the girls but have separate rooms. The company commander is Capt. Frances Marquis, of New York, who is 46 and married and did promotion publicity work back home.
Second in command is Capt. Burke Nicholson, of St. Louis. She is 29, married, and has her own law practice in St. Louis. In fact, she was president of the Women’s Bar Association there, being the youngest one extant.
Lt. Elizabeth Joosten commands that part of the company which lives in a convent. She is a charming woman with a sharp wit, she is married, and she gives the Stratford Hotel in Houston, Texas, as her home. She was born and educated in Holland.
Lt. Sylvia Marsili, who says her name rhymes with parsley, is 36, comes from Pittsburgh, has a BS degree in home economics, and taught junior high school at Pittsburgh.
The fifth officer is a doctor. She is Lt. Margaret M. Janeway, who had her own practice in New York. She’s about to be taken into the Army. Lt. Janeway is 47, and married. She says the WAACs’ health is good and that the average WAAC in Africa, although she has gained about 15 pounds, has actually got slimmer around the waist. Which shows what hard work and regular hours and trying to learn French can do for a woman.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 9, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Third of five articles on the WACs.
North Africa –
For some weird and unfathomable reason known only to the strange creatures themselves, women love to drill. But the WACs in North Africa don’t get to do much drilling. They’re too busy doing their regular jobs.
Those of the WACs who live at the edge of town in a convent are marched about a quarter of a mile every morning to board the trucks that take them downtown. That and a 15-minute drill period once a week is all the drilling they get.
The ones who live in an old office building downtown don’t even get that. In fact, they don’t even have reveille. Horn-tooting at sunrise would be impractical, for the girls work shifts clear around the clock, like factory workers, and at dawn many of them have barely got to sleep.
Their home life is very much like life at college. They sleep in double-decker beds, some of them French iron beds, some carpentered from boards. All the beds have springs. The girls sleep between Army blankets, with one rough sheet. They are issued seersucker pajamas, either light blue or peach-colored. Their rooms are crowded. There isn’t too much space to put things.
After careful yoo-hooing and peeking ahead by the officer in command, I was allowed to snoop around into the sacred precincts of the girls’ dormitories and rooms. Everything was neat, since the girls are soldiers now. They make their own beds, and do their own washing. Practically every one of them brought an electric iron from home. Probably the most typical sight in a WAC barracks is a girl bending over an ironing board.
In the downtown barracks, the girls hang their washing on half of the roof, keeping the other half for sunbathing. Clotheslines are constantly filled with brown stockings, slips, shirts and panties.
The officer who took me around said:
You’re the first man who has ever seen this many pairs of WAC panties at one time.
And I said:
Madam, due to the rigors of old age and encroachment for war work upon my spare time, I have never seen even one pair of WAC panties before.
Each girl is issued three khaki skirts and nine shirts. They are not allowed to roll up their sleeves, and they must wear the cotton stockings that are issued to them. French girls who are the equivalent of our WACs wear anklets, which look infinitely better.
The girls are not allowed to wear jewelry, except signet or wedding rings and wrist watches. The first week they were here, it was a poor WAC indeed who didn’t have at least three Algerian bracelets showered upon her by startled and adoring G.I.s, but since they weren’t allowed to wear them, most of them sent the bracelets home.
The girls have to wear dog tags around their necks, the same as soldiers, but every one of them has her tag on a silver or gold chain instead of the Army’s piece of string.
The girls don’t have much time for dates. Those on daytime shifts work from 8 to 5, and many of them go back at night to work some more. Those who don’t have to work at night use that time to do their washing, pressing and letter-writing.
Lights go out at 10 o’clock, and the roll is taken every night to catch anybody who is staying out. Each girl gets an 11 o’clock pass once a week, and half a day off once a week.
Every one of the girls has already learned passable French, and some of them are expert at it.
There are frequent dances and beach parties, given by various Army units. When one of these is planned, the Army sends notice that so many WACs are wanted. The notice is put on a bulletin board, and any WACs who want to go put down their names.
When mail arrives, a list of those who have letters is put on the bulletin board. The day I was there, the typewritten list was headed:
Come and get it, you sweet little things.
There is also a full-length mirror near the front door of the downtown barracks, and above the mirror a sign which says, “Check Your Appearance.”
I don’t believe the girls have as many pictures beside their beds as the average soldier living in permanent quarters. You see a few photographs of parents and nephews, but the boy pictures I noticed were 100% of men in uniform. Many of the WACs are engaged to boys back home who are now in the service.
A good many romances are blooming among those not already engaged, but so far, there have been no marriage requests. Some 18% of the WACs in Africa were already married when they enlisted.
Every box and windowsill at WAC quarters is filled with ointments, lotions, salves, pastes and creams. They brought a year’s supply with them when they came, and now the post exchange has plenty for sale. Consequently, your WACs are soared that unspeakable condition known as being non-cosmetic.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 10, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Fourth of five articles on the WACs.
North Africa –
There are some amazingly interesting individuals among the 283 WACs now serving in North Africa. For instance, one girl used to be a bartender. One was a reporter on an English paper in China. One is an heiress to Penney Store millions. One was a poetess. One was at Pearl Harbor. And two of them have sons in the service.
Five of the WACs have met their brothers here in North Africa. They are Lt. Sarah Bagby, of New Haven, Missouri; Lt. Susan Hammond, of Nahant, Massachusetts; Capt. Ruth Briggs, of Westerly, Rhode Island; Evelyn Pagles, of Tonawanda, New York, and Ethel Crow, of Houston, Texas.
Mrs. Mary McCurl, of Baltimore, has a son in the Merchant Marine, and Mrs. Florence Byrns, of Cincinnati, has a son in the Army. Miriam Stehlik, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was a model before joining the WACs. Virginia Stacy, of Seattle, was at Pearl Harbor and now works for the Navy here.
Alice Hesse, of Boulder Creek, California, had a book of poetry published. Sgt. Nana Rae, of New York, has become a poet since arriving here. She came out with one on the G.I.s’ most unfavorite pill. The title is Atabrine, and the poem follows:
If I should die before I wake,
At least I won’t have pills to take,
And after doses one to three
The Lord can have the rest of me.
One of my favorite WACs is Betty Jane O’Leary, of Pittsburgh. She is a beaming blond with impish eyes. She does secretarial work at WAC headquarters. The first time I appeared there without my having identified myself or anything, she began committing favorably upon my dogs, my picket fence at home, my good looks, and the general quality of genius apparent in these columns. Smart girl, that O’Leary.
Sgt. Mary Murray is 43, with a young face and graying hair. She has traveled all over the world as a fur salesman. She married into the Navy and lived for many years in China. She saw the Japanese invasions of Manchukuo and Shanghai in 1931 and 1937. Now she is chief cook at one of the three WAC messes, and she says she never enjoyed anything more in her life.
Every afternoon there is a string of G.I.s at her back kitchen door waiting for coffee and a chance to talk to Mary. She hears more battle stories than any other WAC. For some reason, the men want to tell her everything. Dogfaces just back from the front unburden their horror stories to her, and what some of them have been through almost makes her cry at night when she relays the hair-raising experiences to the other girls.
There isn’t a more popular WAC with the soldiers than Murray, and she thinks they are all wonderful. Slightly tipsy soldiers weep on her shoulder and occasionally ask to kiss her because she reminds them of their mother.
She kisses them back, but wishes their impulses were stirred by something less maternal.
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