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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The Pittsburgh Press (July 12, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Last of five articles on the WACs.
North Africa –
The WACs in North Africa say they use about the same military slang the Army uses. No battlefield language of their own has grown up. They grouse mostly about the same thing soldiers do – their officers, their work, their food – yet actually they don’t find any of these very bad.
The WACs have not lived the rough-and-tumble life of Army nurses. They don’t have to wear G.I. underwear nor heavy field shoes. They eat at tables, take regular baths, and always look crisp and neat.
The only real danger they have been in was air raids on their city, and now these seem to have stopped.
Now and then, you hear some officer or soldier say:
Well, I always said a woman’s place was in the home, and I still think so.
But the bulk of the Army which comes in contact with the WACs doesn’t feel that way at all. The Army knows how well the girls can work, and the enlisted men appreciate that it is not easy for a girl to leave her home and country and come far across the ocean to live. They feel a sort of camaraderie with the WACs.
The WACs themselves are much prouder of being over here, I believe, than the men are. I doubt if even a handful of them would go home if given a chance.
The most soldierly of all the WACs I’ve seen is Anne Bradley of Philadelphia. Furthermore, she is so good-looking it makes you hurt. In addition, she had a personality that breaks you down, without resistance, and to top off the indignity of one small person having all these blessings, she’s got brains as well.
Sgt. Bradley so definitely should be an officer that I asked her boss about it, and the reply was this:
She would be an officer now if she had stayed in America, but she passed up that chance in order to get overseas, and we can’t promote in the field the way the Army does. If I could just put a second lieutenant’s bars on Bradley right now, my worries would be over.
The sergeant is so photogenic that she is on some of the WAC recruiting posters. But she has never pretended to be a professional beauty. Actually, she is a career woman. She is only 24, yet before enlisting, she was personnel director of the Beechnut Packing Company.
She runs her half of the company with gay-hearted quips that have a terrible firmness. When she walks, it’s like an animated statue, she’s so straight.
Margaret Miller of Stow, Ohio, is what is known as company artificer. That means carpenter and jack of all trades. Margaret is short, dark and stubby, has a boyish bob, wears overalls, carries a hammer, and goes by the name “Butch.”
She does all the fixing around the joint, repairs the plumbing, moves furniture, patches holes in the floor, and puts up wooden crosses to hold mosquito nets over beds.
Butch says that for the two years previous to joining the WACs, she was a combination bartender and bouncer in a saloon. She gets her really heavy work done by saving it up till the garbagemen come past. She gives them a bottle of wine and some fast talk, and presto, everything is moved.
I asked the sergeant if Butch had any boyfriends, and she said:
Does she! The first week we were here, one G.I. wrote several times a day threatening to blow his brains out if she didn’t tell him she loved him. And she wouldn’t, because she didn’t.
There is an anti-aircraft battery near Butch’s barracks and she is always taking hot coffee out to the boys. One evening, Butch didn’t show up at “lights out,” so they sent some of the girls to look for her. Butch had delivered her coffee and started home all right, but got tired and lay down in the grass for a while. The searching party found her there, fast asleep.
Ernie Pyle has informed us from Africa that he will not be sending any dispatches for a few days.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 14, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the invasion fleet – (by wireless, delayed)
When I came aboard the vessel that was to carry us through the invasion, I was struck with the odd bleakness of the walls and ceilings throughout the ship.
At first, I thought it was a new and very unbecoming type of interior decoration but then shortly I realized that this strange effect was merely part of the Navy procedure of stripping for action. Inside our ship there were many other precautions. As you go into battle all excess rags and blankets are taken ashore or stowed away and locked up. The bunk mattresses are set on edge against the walls to act as absorbent cushions against torpedo or shell fragments. The entire crew must be fully dressed in shoes, shirts, and pants – no working in shorts or undershirts because of the danger of burns.
The Navy’s traditional white hats are left below for the duration of the action. No white clothing is allowed to show on deck. Steel helmets, painted battleship gray, are worn during engagement. Men who go on night watches are awakened 45 minutes ahead of time instead of the usual few minutes and ordered to be on deck half an hour before going on watch, for it takes that long for the eyes to become accustomed to the full darkness.
All souvenir firearms are turned in and the ammunition thrown overboard. There was one locked room full of German and Italian rifles and revolvers which the sailors had gotten from frontline soldiers. Failure to throw away ammunition was a court-martial offense. The officers didn’t want stray bullets whizzing around in case of fire.
Ernie gets a Mae West
Food supplies were taken from their regular hampers and stored all about the ship so that our entire supply couldn’t be destroyed by one hit. All movie film was taken ashore. No flashlights, even hooded ones, were allowed on deck.
Doors opening on deck have switches just the reverse of refrigerators – when you open the door the lights inside go out. All linoleum had been removed from the floors, all curtains taken down.
Because of weight limitations on the plane which brought me here I had to leave my Army gas mask behind so the Navy issued me a Navy mask along with all the sailors before departure. They also gave me one of those bright yellow Mae West life preservers like aviators wear.
Throughout the invasion period, the entire crew was on one of two statutes – either “General Quarters” or “Condition Two.” General Quarters is the Navy term for full alert and means everybody on full duty until the crisis ends. It may be 20 minutes or it may be 48 hours. Condition Two is half alert, four hours on, four hours off, but the off hours are spent right at your battle station. It merely gives you a little chance to relax.
They listen to Olga
Our ship is so crowded it takes three sittings in Officers’ Mess to feed the men. Every bunk has two officers assigned to it, one sleeps while the other works.
The ship’s officers were told the whole invasion plan in great detail just after we sailed. Charles Corte, ACME photographer, who was the only other correspondent on this ship, and I, also were given a detailed picture of what lay ahead. The crew was given the plan a little at a time after sailing. In addition, a mimeographed set of instructions and warnings was distributed about the ship before sailing. It ended as follows:
This operation will be a completely offensive one. The ship will be at General Quarters or Condition Two throughout the operation. It may extend over a long period of time. Opportunities for rest will not come very often. You can be sure that you will have something to talk about when this is over. This ship must do her stuff.
The night before we sailed, the crew listened as usual to the German propaganda radio program which features Olga, the American girl turned Nazi, who was trying to scare them, disillusion them and depress them. As usual they laughed with amusement and scorn at her childishly treasonish talk.
In a vague and indirect way, I suppose, the privilege of listening to your enemy trying to undermine you the very night before you go out to face him expresses what we are fighting for.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 15, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the invasion fleet – (by wireless, delayed)
Our ship has been in African waters many months but this invasion is the first violent action its crew has ever been through. Only three or four men, who’d been torpedoed in the Pacific, had ever before had any close association with the probability of sudden death.
I’ve come to know a great many of the sailors aboard and I know they went into this thing just as soldiers go into the first battle – seemingly calm but inside frightened and sick with worry. It’s the lull in the last couple of days before starting that hits you so hard. In the preparation period, your fate seems far away and once in action you are too busy to be afraid. It’s just those last couple of days when you have time to think so much.
The night before we sailed, I sat in the darkness on the forward deck helping half a dozen sailors eat a can of stolen pineapple. Some of the men of our little group were hardened and mature. Others were almost children. They all talked seriously and their gravity was touching. The older ones tried to rationalize how the law of averages made it unlikely that our ship out of all the hundreds in action would be hit.
‘If I get through alive–’
They spoke of the inferiority of the Italian fleet and argued pro and con over whether Germany has some hidden Luftwaffe up her sleeve she might whisk out to destroy us. Younger ones spoke but little. They talked to me of their plans and hopes for going to college or getting married after the war, always epilogued by the phrase:
If I get through this fracas alive.
As we sat there on the hard deck, squatting in a circle around our pineapple can like Indians, we all seemed terribly pathetic to me. Even the dizziest of us knew that within less than 48 hours, many of us stood an excellent chance of being in this world no more. I don’t believe one of us was afraid of the physical part of dying. That isn’t the way it is.
Your emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up your future. I suppose that seems like splitting hairs and that it really all comes under the heading of fear, yet somehow to us, there is a difference.
These gravely yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things – things such as seeing “the old lady” again, of going to college, of staying in the Navy for a career, of holding on your knee just once your own kid whom you’ve never seen, of becoming again champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and, yes, even of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico.
Ernie eavesdrops
When you huddle around together on the dark decks on your last wholly secure night, it’s these little hopes and ambitions that make up the sum total of your worry at leaving rather than any visualization of physical agony tomorrow.
Our deck and the shelf-like deck above us were dotted with little groups huddled around talking. You couldn’t see them but you could hear them. I deliberately listened around for a while. Every group was talking in some way about their chances of survival. A dozen times, I overheard this same remark:
Well, I don’t worry about it because I look at it this way. If your number’s up, then it’s up and if it ain’t, you’ll come through no matter what.
Every single person who expressed himself that way was a liar and knew it but, hell, a guy has to say something on the last night. I heard oldsters offering to make bets at even money we wouldn’t get hit at all and 2 to 1 we wouldn’t get hit seriously. Those were the offers but I don’t think any bets were actually made.
Somehow it seemed sort of sacrilegious to bet on your own life.
Simple, undramatic patriotism
Once I heard somebody in the darkness start cussing and give this answer to some sailor critic who was proclaiming how he’d run things:
Well, I figure that Captain up there in the cabin has got a little more in his noggin than you have or he wouldn’t be Captain, so I’ll put my money on him.
And another sailor voice chimed in with:
Hell, yes, that Captain has slept through more watches than you and I have spent time in the Navy.
And so it went on that last night of safety. I never heard anybody say anything patriotic like the storybooks have people saying. There was philosophizing but it was simply and undramatic. I’m sure no man would have stayed ashore if given the chance. There was something bigger than the awful dread that would have kept them there. With me, it was probably an irresistible egotism in seeing myself part of the historic naval movement. With others, it was, I think, just the application of plain, ordinary, unspoken, even unrecognized, patriotism.
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Ernie beautifully captures that gut feeling men have experienced just before battle for centuries and everyday since.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 16, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the invasion fleet – (by wireless, delayed)
Before sailing on the invasion, our ship had been lying far out in the harbor tired to a buoy for several days. Several times a day, “General Quarters” would sound and the crew would dash to their battle stations but always it was a photo plane or perhaps one of our own.
Then we moved into a pier. That very night, the raiders came and our ship got its baptism of fire. I had got out of bed at 3 a.m. as usual to stumble sleepily up to the radio shack to go over the news reports which the wireless had picked up.
There were several radio operators on watch and we were sitting around drinking coffee while we worked. Then around 4 a.m., all of a sudden, “General Quarters” sounded. It was still pitch dark. The whole ship came to life with a scurry and rattling, sailors dashing to stations before you’d have thought they could get their shoes on.
Big guns let loose
Shooting had already started around the harbor so we knew this time it was real. I kept on working and the radio operators did too, or rather tried to work. So many people were going in and out of the radio shack that we were in darkness half the time since the lights automatically went off when the door opened.
Then the biggest guns of our ship let loose. They made such a horrifying noise we thought we’d been hit by a bomb every time they went off. Dust and debris came drifting down from the ceiling to smear up everything. Nearby bombs shook us up, too.
One by one the electric lightbulbs were shattered from the blasts. The thick steel walls of the cabin shook and rattled as though they were tin. The entire vessel shivered under each blast. The harbor was lousy with ships and they were all shooting. The raiders were dropping flares all over the sky and the searchlights on the warships were fanning the heavens.
Four enemy planes downed
Shrapnel rained down on the decks making a terrific clatter. All this went on for an hour and a half. When it was over and everything was added up, we found four planes had been shot down. Our casualties were negligible and no damage was done the ship except little holes from near-misses. Three men on our ship had been wounded.
Best of all, we were credited with shooting down one of the planes!
Now this raid of course was only one of scores of thousands that have been conducted in this war. Standing alone it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. I’m mentioning it to show you what a little taste of the genuine thing can do for a bunch of young Americans.
As I wrote yesterday, our kids on this ship had never been in action. The majority of them were strictly peacetime sailors, still half-civilian in character. They’d never been shot at, never shit one of their own guns except in practice and because of this they had been very sober, a little unsure and more than a little worried about the invasion ordeal that lay so near ahead of them.
And then, all within an hour and a half, they became veterans. Their zeal went up like one of those shooting graph lines in the movies when business is good. Boys who had been all butterfingers were loading shells like machinery after 15 minutes when it became real. Boys who had previously gone through their routine lifelessly were now yelling with bitter seriousness:
Dammit, can’t you pass them shells faster?
Sailors compare notes
One of my friends aboard ship is Norman Somberg, aerographer third class, of Miami. We had been talking the day before and he told how he had gone two years to the University of Georgia studying journalism and wanted to get in it after the war. I noticed he always added:
If I live through it.
Just at dawn, as the raid ended, he came running up to me full of steam and yelled:
Did you see that plane go down smoking! Boy, if I could get off the train at Miami right now with the folks and my girl there to meet me, I couldn’t be any happier than I was when I saw we’d got that guy.
It was worth a day’s pay to be on this ship the day after the raid. All day long, the sailors went gabble, gabble, gabble, each telling the other how
This crew of sailors had just gone through what hundreds of thousands of other soldiers and sailors had already experienced – the conversion from peaceful people into fighters. There’s nothing especially remarkable about it but it is moving to be on hand and see it happen.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 17, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Southern Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
At the end of the first day of our invasion of Sicily, we Americans looked about us with awe and unbelief and not a little alarm.
It had all been so easy it gave you a jumpy, insecure feeling of something dreadfully wrong somewhere. We had expected a terrific slaughter on the beaches and there was none.
Instead of thousands of casualties along the 14-mile front of our special sector, we added up a total that was astonishingly small.
By sunset of the first day the Army had taken everything we had hoped to get during the first five days.
Even by midafternoon the country for miles inland was so saturated with American troops and vehicles it looked like Tunisia after months of our habitation instead of a hostile land just attacked that morning.
And the Navy which had the job of bringing the vast invading force to Sicily was three days ahead of its schedule of unloading ships.
Convoys had started back to Africa for new loads before the first day was over.
The invading fleet had escaped without losses other than normal, mechanical breakdowns. Reports from the other two sectors of the American assault front indicated they had much the same surprising welcome we got.
Americans are wondering
It was wonderful and yet it all was so illogical. Even if the Italians did want to quit, why did the Germans let them? What had happened? What did the enemy have up its sleeve?
As this is written on the morning of the second day, we don’t yet know. Nobody is under any illusion that the battle of Sicily is over. Strong counterattacks are inevitable. Already German dive-bombings are coming at the scale of two per hour but whatever happens we’ve got a head start that is all in our favor.
For this invasion I was accredited to the Navy. I intended writing mainly about the seaborne aspect of the invasion and had not intended to go ashore at all for several days, but the way things went I couldn’t resist the chance to see what it was like over there on land, so I hopped an assault barge and spent all the first day ashore.
When we got our first look at Sicily, we were all disappointed. I for one had always romanticized it in my mind as a lush green, picturesque island. I guess I must have been thinking of the Isle of Capri.
Wind slows landing
Instead, at any rate, the south coast of Sicily is a drab, light-brown country. There aren’t many trees. The fields of grain had been harvested and they were dry and naked and dusty. The villages are pale gray and indistinguishable at a distance from the rest of the country. Water is extremely scarce.
Good-sized hills rise a half mile or so back of the beach and on the hillsides grass fires started by the shells of our gunboats burn smokily by day and flamingly by night.
It is cooler than North Africa; in fact, it would be delightful were it not for the violent wind that rises in the afternoon and blows so fiercely you can hardly talk in the open. This wind, whipping our barges about in the shallow water delayed us more than the Italian soldiers did.
The people of Sicily on that first day seemed relieved and friendly. They seemed like people who had just been liberated rather than conquered. Prisoners came in grinning, calling greetings to their captors. Civilians on the roads and in the towns smiled and waved. Kids saluted. Many gave their version of the V sign by holding up both arms. The people told us they didn’t want to fight.
It’s as bad as Africa
Our soldiers weren’t very responsive to the Sicilians’ greetings. They were too busy getting all possible equipment ashore, rounding up the real enemies and establishing a foothold, to indulge in the hand-waving monkey business.
After all, we are still at war and these people though absurd and pathetic are enemies and caused us misery coming all this way to whip them.
On the whole the people were a pretty third-rate-looking lot. They were poorly dressed and looked like they always had been. Most of them hadn’t much expression at all and they kept getting in the way of traffic just like the Arabs. Most of our invading soldiers, at the end of the first day in Sicily, summed up their impressions of their newly-acquired soil and its inhabitants by saying:
Hell, this is just as bad as Africa.
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The Pittsburgh Press (July 19, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Southern Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
When I went ashore on the south coast of Sicily about six hours after our first assault troops had landed, the beach was already thoroughly organized.
It was really an incredible scene – incredible in that we’d done so much in just a few hours. It actually looked as if we’d been working there for months. Our shore troops and Navy gunboats had knocked out the last of the enemy artillery on the hillsides shortly after daylight.
From then on, that first day was just a normal one of unloading ships on the beach as fast as possible. The only interruptions were a half dozen or so lightning-like dive bombings.
The American invading fleet was divided into separate fleets and each invaded a certain section of the coast and operated independently from the others. The fleet I was with carried infantry and was on the western end of the invasion. Our designated territory covered about 15 miles of beachfront.
Invasion fleet blankets the sea
Our fleet had hundreds of ships in it, all the way from tiny sub-chasers up to powerful cruisers. The bulk of it, of course, was made up of scores of new-type landing craft carrying men, trucks, tanks, supplies of all kinds.
Perhaps you visualize our whole force having been unloaded from big boats into tiny ones, then taken ashore. This happened only to the big transports which used to be ocean liners, and we had none of these in our special fleet. Actually, every ship in our fleet, except the gunboats, was capable of landing right on the beach. They were flat-bottomed and could beach themselves anywhere.
When daylight came, this immense fleet lay like a blanket over the water extending as far out in the Mediterranean as you could see. There wasn’t room to handle them all on the beach at once so they’d come in at signals from the command ship, unload, and steam back out to wait until enough were unloaded from the convoy to go back for a second load.
Little craft, carrying about 200 soldiers, could unload in a few months, but the bigger ones with tanks and trucks and heavy guns took much longer. It was not as especially good beach for our purposes, for it sloped off too gradually, making the boats ground 50 yards or more from ashore.
Most of the men had to jump into waist deep water and wade in. the water was cold, but a high wind dried off your clothes in less than half an hour. Your shoes kept squishing inside for the rest of the day. As far as I know, not a man was lost by drowning in the whole operation.
Not a single traffic jam
The beach itself was organized immediately into a great metropolitan-like docks extending for miles. Hundreds of soldiers wearing black and yellow armbands with the letters SP, standing for shore Police, directed traffic off the incoming boats.
Big white silken banners above five feet square tied to two poles and with colored symbols on them gave the ships at sea the spot where they should land. On the shore, painted wooden markers were set up immediately, directing various units to designated rendezvous areas.
Our whole, vast organization on shore took form so quickly it just lefty you aghast. By midafternoon, the countryside extending far inland was packed with vehicles and troops of every description. There were enough tanks sitting on the hillside to fight a big battle. Jeeps were dashing everywhere. Phone wires were laid on the ground and command posts set up in orchards and old buildings. Medical units worked under trees or in abandoned stone sheds.
Amazed natives stare in wonder
The fields were stacked with thousands of boxes ammunition. Field kitchens were being set up to replace the K rations the soldiers had carried on with throughout the first day.
The Americans worked grimly and with great speed. I saw a few cases of officers being rather excited, but mostly it was a calm, determined, efficient horde of men who descended on this strange land. The amazed Sicilians just stood and started in wonder at the swift precision of it all.
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