Ernie is a keen observer of people and his written words particularly regarding military men and women reflect his utmost respect of all people, This is one reason I so enjoy his columns. Interestingly, he often describes many occupations or jobs previously held by military members that have become obsolete or disappeared. Given the lexicon of his time, I found his descriptions of the negro men made them into simpletons who can only serve as stewards. By August 1943, Ernie has observed and written about thousands of military men and women of all ranks and ages in Europe and Africa during countless battles and as a firsthand witness to ravages of war on human beings, yet he does not question that the negros are treated differently as second class citizens. Ernie impresses me as being very perceptive so I wonder if he did see the problem and was not allowed to report on it. Other than reading his columns here, I do not know much about Ernie, Therefore, I wonder if Ernie would have subsequently questioned and written about race relations had he not died in April 1945 on Okinawa.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 7, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
It is an axiom that the closer you get to the front, the less you know about what is going on. During the invasion of Sicily, we would often say that we wished we were back in New York so we could find out how we were doing.
During the first two days, we had no word at all in our sector about the two American sectors to our right. Even though we were within sight and sound of their gunfire we knew nothing about how they were faring. You in America knew, but we didn’t.
Aboard ship, we were better off than the troops on land, for we did get some news by radio. Many of the troops inland didn’t know about the bombing of Rome till nearly a week later.
On our ship, what news we did get came mostly from BBC in London, the German radio in Berlin, and our little daily newspaper assembled from worldwide shortwave broadcasts picked up during the night.
Our skipper, Cdr. Rufus Young, feels that a lack of news is bad for morale, so he did all he could to give the ship’s crew the news. He asked me to edit the daily mimeographed paper, and took one radio operator off his regular watch and just gave him his own time to sit and sample various air channels for news.
Missed only one day
This operator was Frank Donohue, radioman second class, of 139-49 87th Ave., Jamaica, Long Island. He started in as a child with the Commercial Cable Company and has been a radio operator for 18 years, though he is still a young man. He was working for Press Wireless when he joined the Navy a year ago.
He has had so much experience taking down news dispatches that he has a good news sense. He took as much pride in our little paper as I did, and it got so he would sort out the stories by subjects before waking me at 3 a.m. Then while I assembled and rewrote the stuff, he would bring us cups of coffee and cut the stencils for the mimeograph.
It was always daylight when we finished, and I would stop on the bridge to talk for a little while with the men of the early-morning watch. Off Sicily, as everywhere else in the world, dawn is the most perfect part of the day – if you’ve got the nerve to get up and see it.
We did our work in a big steel-walled room where about 30 other radio operators were taking down code messages by typewriter, so it did seem sort of like a newspaper office. Throughout the invasion period we missed getting out our paper only one day. That was on the morning of our landings. Getting up at 3 a.m. every day and not getting any sleep in the daytime almost got me down before it was over, but there was considerable satisfaction in feeling that you were not entirely useless aboard ship.
Here’s that girl again
Such a privilege would doubtless seem fantastic to a German soldier, but we listened every night throughout our invasion to the Berlin broadcasts and to the special propaganda program directed at American troops.
The master of ceremonies on this program is a girl who purports to be an American and who tries to tell the boys that their sweethearts will marry somebody else while they are over here fighting a phony war for the “Jewish” Roosevelt, and that there will be no jobs for them when they get home. The boys listen to her partly to get mad, partly to get a laugh, and partly because the program always has excellent music.
The girl calls herself Midge. The soldiers in North Africa called her Axis Sally, and the boys aboard our ship nicknamed her Olga.
The biggest laugh the boys had had since joining the Navy was the night the traitorous Olga was complaining about something horrible President Roosevelt had done. She said it made her almost ashamed to be an American!
Olga has a come-hither voice, and she speaks straight American. Every night you’d hear the boys conjecturing about what she looked like. Some thought she was probably an old hag with a fat face and peroxide hair, but the majority liked to visualize her as looking as gorgeous as she sounded.
The most frequently expressed opinion heard aboard ship was that if they ever got to Berlin, they’d like first to sock Olga on the chin – and then make love to her.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 9, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Before closing this series about the Navy, I want to tell you of one member of our ship’s crew who didn’t make the invasion trip with us. She was the ship’s dog, and this is the story of her and her master.
He is a Regular Navy man, a chief petty officer of many years’ service. He is tattooed, wind-burned, a bachelor, and quietly profane. His officers say he is an excellent worker. I’m not giving his name because the story concerns his getting drunk.
It seems that several months ago, some sailors from our ship had picked up a German shepherd puppy. She belonged to the whole crew, but the puppy took to our friend and he took to it, and sort of by acclamation she became recognized as his dog.
The puppy grew into a beautiful dog, smart, alert and sweet. But when hot weather came along, she got the mange. Our friend doctored it with everything he could find, and other sailors helped him with the doctoring, but still the mange got worse. They finally clipped her hair close, so they could get medicine on her skin more thoroughly, but nothing did any good.
When they hit the last port before leaving Africa, my friend told me he went ashore and searched the country for a French or American Army veterinary, but couldn’t find any.
She was buried at sea
When I came aboard ship, this beautiful dog was frisky and alert, but the sailors had given up all hope of curing her. Something had to be done. The others left it up to our friend. Whatever he chose to do had their approval. He told me later that you couldn’t just put her ashore, for she had grown up aboard ship and wouldn’t know how to take care of herself on land.
So, our friend solved it in his own way, the morning after I came aboard. He didn’t ask anybody to help him or tell anybody what he was going to do. He just tied a weight around her neck and let her down into the water. That was her end – in the tradition of the sea.
I heard about it a few hours later, and stopped by the rail to tell our friend I was sorry. He couldn’t talk about it. He just said:
Let’s go below and have a cup of coffee.
A few hours after that, I saw that he had started having something else.
In the midafternoon, I saw one of the ship’s officers talking to him very seriously. It didn’t look too good. Drinking aboard ship just doesn’t go. The next day our friend was called before the mast and given a light suspension of privileges.
At lunch the boys were kidding him about it and he said, well, hell, he wasn’t sore about it, for obviously they had to do something to him.
That evening I happened to be sitting with the officer who had sentenced our friend, and just to make conversation I mentioned that it was sad about the dog being gone. He sat up and said, “What!”
Ernie off to new adventures
I said yes, the dog was gone.
He said, “My God!” And then he said:
He’s one of the best men on the ship, and I knew something was wrong, but I tried for half an hour to get it out of him and he wouldn’t tell me.
The officer sat there looking as though he was sick, and again he said:
So that was it! My God!
By the end of the first week after the Sicilian invasion, there was almost no indication of warfare along our beachfront. Every night the German radio told us we were getting bombed, but actually a stultifying peace had settled over us.
Hour by hour we could feel the ship slide back into her normal ways. The watches were dropped down to “Condition Three,” which is almost the peacetime regime. The ship’s laundry reopened for the first time in weeks. Movies were borrowed and shown after supper. The wearing of white hats became optional once more. The men went swimming over the side, and fished with rod and reel from the forecastle head. The captain had time on his hands and played gin rummy with me when I got worn out with writing. Finally, liberty parties were let ashore for sightseeing.
I knew then that the war, for our little family in this special phase, was over. So, I shouldered my barracks bags and trundled myself ashore in Sicily for good.
These few weeks with the Navy were grand, and I hated to part from the friends I had made. Too, this taste of civilized living had been a strange delight, and yet for some perverse reason I seemed to look forward to going back to the old soldier’s way of sleeping on the ground and not washing before breakfast, and fighting off fleas. Man is a funny creature.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 10, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Our troops have found Sicily on the whole perhaps a little better than North Africa. Certainly, the people are just as friendly, if not more so. So, this whole thing seems kind of ridiculous, when you sit down and think about it.
Here these people are our enemies. They declared war on us. We had to come clear over here and fight them – and now that we’re here, they look upon us as their friends.
If anything, their attitude is more that of a liberated people than was the case in French North Africa, and they seem to look to us more eagerly for relief from their hunger. In several of the smaller mountain towns, our troops were greeted by signs saying “Welcome,” in English, pasted on the walls of buildings, and American flags were fluttering from windows.
Of course there are some Sicilians who treat us as enemies. There has been some small sabotage, such as cutting our phone wires. But on the whole, the Sicilians certainly are more for us than the Arabs of Africa were.
Sicily is really a beautiful country. Up here in the north it is all mountainous, and all but the most rugged of the mountains are covered with fields or orchards. Right now, everything is dry and burned up, as we so often see our own Midwest in dry summers. They say this is the driest summer in years.
It’s like Garden of Eden
Our ceaseless convoys chew up the gravel roads, and the dust becomes suffocating, but in springtime Sicily must look like the Garden of Eden. The land is wonderfully fertile. Sicilians would not have to be poor and starving if they were capable of organizing and using their land to its fullest.
Driving over Sicily, you have a feeling of far greater antiquity than you get even from looking at the Roman ruins in North Africa. Towns sit right smack on the top of needle-point mountain peaks. They were built that way in the old days for protection. Today, a motorcar can’t even get up to many of them.
The houses are of a cement-colored stone, and they blend into the mountains so that often you can’t see a city at all from a few miles away.
In these mountain towns, the streets are too narrow for vehicles, the passageways are dirty, and the goat and burro are common.
In the very remotest and most ancient town, you’ll find that half the people have relatives in America, and there is always somebody popping up from behind every bush or around every corner who lived for 12 years in Buffalo or 30 years in Chicago.
Yum, yum, watermelons–
Farming is still done in Biblical style. The grain-threshing season is now on, and how do you suppose they do it? Simply by tying three mules together and running them around in a small circle all day long while another fellow keeps throwing grain under their hoofs with a wooden pitchfork.
We hit Sicily in the middle of the fruit and vegetable season. The troops went for fresh tomatoes like sourdoughs going for gold in the Klondike. Tomatoes and watermelons too. I’ve never seen so many watermelons in my life. They are mostly small round ones, and do they taste good to an old watermelon devourer like myself! Also, we eat fresh peaches, grapes, figs and even mulberries.
At first when we hit a new town the people in their gratitude gave away their fruit to the troops. But it didn’t take them long to learn, and soon they were holding out for trades of rations or other Army stuff. The people don’t want money. When we ask them to work for us, they say they will but that we must pay them in merchandise, not money.
The most sought-after thing is shoes. Most of the people are going around in sandals made of old auto tires. I believe you could take two dozen pairs of G.I. shoes and buy half the island of Sicily.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 11, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Since Sicily was a new country for me, I figured I might as well get sick right away and get it over with. So, on my fifth day ashore, they threw me into an ambulance and off we went hunting for a hospital.
We were looking for a certain clearing station, and we couldn’t find it because it was moving forward while we were moving back, and we passed on different roads. The result was that the determined ambulance boys drove nearly halfway across Sicily before they finally gave up and started back.
We drove a total of 75 agonizing miles over dusty gravel roads, and then found the hospital all set up and ready for business within four miles of where we had started from in the first place.
The clearing station was a small tent hospital, a sort of flag stop for wounded on the way back from the lines. The first regular hospital was about 15 miles to the rear.
The average patient stays in the clearing station only a few hours at most. But once the doctors got a squint at me, they beamed, rubbed their rubber gloves, and cried:
Ah! Here is the medical freak we have been waiting for. We’ll just keep this guy and play with him awhile.
Everything but a hot dog!
So, they put me to bed on a cot, gave me paregoric and bismuth, aspirin and codeine, soup and tomato juice, and finally wound up with morphine and a handful of sulfaguanidine. The only thing I can say on behalf of my treatment is that I am well and hearty again.
My family physician in this case was Capt. Joe Doran, of Iowa City, Iowa. Capt. Doran is a young and enthusiastic doctor who is different from most frontline doctors in that his main interest lies in treating sick soldiers rather than wounded ones. Capt. Doran likes to get at the seat of a man’s ills. In furtherance of this, he has a nice little laboratory set up in one of the tents, complete with microscope and glass tubes. He is always taking specimens from his patients and then peering at them like Dr. Arrowsmith.
Capt. Doran’s germ quest upon me was somewhat agitated by the fact that upon the evening of my arrival, he received a letter saying he had become a father for the second time, about six weeks previously. He was so overjoyed he gave me an extra shot of morphine and I was asleep before I could say “Congratulations!”
They kept me in what is known as a semi-comatose condition for about 24 hours, and then began to get puzzled. At first, they thought I had dysentery, but the little laboratory showed no dysentery. Then they thought I had malaria, so they called in a couple of Italian malaria experts from down the highway. They chatted in English, punched my finger, took blood specimens, and reported back later that I had no malaria.
He had ‘battlefield fever’
By that time, I was getting better anyhow, so they decided that what I had was a nonconforming and just now fairly common illness which they call “battlefield fever.” With this you ache all over and have a very high temperature.
The doctors say it is caused by a combination of too much dust, bad eating, not enough sleep, exhaustion, and the unconscious nerve tension that comes to everybody in a frontline area. You don’t die of battlefield fever, but you think you’re going to.
They put me in a corner of a tent, and in this corner at various times there were three officers with similar fevers. Their illnesses were brief, like mine, and they all left before I did, so their families needn’t worry upon reading that they were ill.
One of my classmates was a redheaded and bespectacled lieutenant named Rahe Chamberlin, from Clarksville, Ohio. Since coming into the Army, Chamberlin has bought a half interest in a grocery store back home. Whenever they would bring us fruit juice in cans, he would take a good gander to see if it was a product his partner was selling.
Another fellow sufferer was Lt. Richard Van Syckle, of Sewaren, New Jersey. He used to be in the automobile business at Perth Amboy. He is married to Clare Raftery, a delicious former Powers model, and he carries magazine-cover pictures of her in his map case.
Major’s claim to fame
The third was Maj. Ellzey Brown of Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Maj. Brown used to be president and general sales manager of the Cleveland Tractor Company. He is a tough outdoor man, and he was so thoroughly disgusted at getting sick that it made him even sicker. He celebrated his 44th birthday just before entering the hospital.
Maj. Brown distinguished himself in our midst by paying a flat hundred dollars to the station’s chaplain for a $14 air mattress. His own gear was lost in the original Sicily landings and, as he says, money meant nothing over here anyhow, so why not pay a hundred dollars for something that will help a little?
The Pittsburgh Press (August 12, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
All my life I have enjoyed being in hospitals (as soon as the original moaning-and-groaning stage was past), and my recent time at a frontline Army clearing station was no exception.
On the third day I was scared to death that I was well enough to leave. But the doctor looked thoughtful and said he wanted me to stay another day. I would have kissed him if he had been a nurse instead of a man with a mustache and a stethoscope.
That was the only trouble with the hospital – it didn’t have any nurses. In fact, we lacked a number of the usual hospital touches. We were hidden, inevitably, in an olive grove, and our floors were merely the earth. The toilet was a ditch with canvas around it. And if you washed, you did so in your own steel helmet. There were no such things as hospital pajamas or bathrobes. I arrived in my Army coveralls and left in my coveralls, and I never once had them off all the time I was there.
During the day they kept the sides of our tent rolled up, and it was pleasant enough lying there with nothing to do. But at night the tent had to be tightly closed for the blackout, and it became deadly stuffy. And all night long the litter-bearers would be coming and going with new wounded. It made an eerie scene in the dim glow of our single lantern, and sleep was almost impossible.
Doctor humors Ernie
So the last couple of nights we moved our cots outdoors and slept again under the wide starry skies of Sicily, and attendants brought our medicine out there in the dark. German bombers came over but we just lay there. Every morning a chaplain would come around with a big boxful of cigarettes, tooth powder and stuff.
The doctor had me on a liquid diet at first, but I gradually talked him into advancing me to a soft diet and finally to a regular one. That progression from liquid to soft to regular diet was one of the great experiences of my life, for believe it or not, all three diets were exactly the same thing – soup and canned tomato juice.
When I accused the doctor of duping me, he grinned and said:
Well, it comes under the heading of keeping the patient happy by pretending to humor his whims.
Happy! I was hungry! But as you see, I survived, and actually I must say I have never been treated more grandly anywhere than by those doctors and men.
During the time I lay at the clearing station with my own slight aches and pains, hundreds of wounded soldiers passed through on their way back to hospitals in the rear. I was in one of five small tents in which they were deposited on litters while waiting for ambulances, so I lay right among them for four days and nights. It couldn’t help but be a moving and depressing experience, and yet there was something good about it too.
Ward-boys always attentive
The two main impressions I got out of it were (1) the thoughtful and attentive attitude of the doctors and ward-boys toward the wounded men, and (2) the grand spirit of the wounded men themselves. I’ll write tomorrow about the second of these two.
As pitiful as wounded men are, it is easy to become hardened and cross with so many passing through your hands. You could eventually get to look upon them all as just so many nuisances who came deliberately to cause you more work. Yet the ward-boys treated their wounded as though they were members of their own family.
I paid particular attention as I lay there, and no wounded man ever made a request that a ward-boy didn’t go jumping to fulfill.
This was especially true of the ward-masters, who are responsible for whole tents. There were three that impressed me greatly.
One was Cpl. Herman Whitt, of Enid, Oklahoma. Before the war he was a salesman for a biscuit company. He married a beautiful Indian girl back home. Cpl. Whitt is tall, nice-looking, and talked very slowly and softly. He says he feels better about the war, doing this job of caring for the wounded than if he were up there killing people himself.
Our night ward-master was Cpl. Woodrow Cox of Milo, Oklahoma. He too is tall than six feet, and he was a ranch hand back home, yet his voice is almost like a musical instrument, and he talks with that snaillike Oklahoma drawl that is so soothing in times of excitement.
The third was Cpl. Rodney Benton, of 8030 West 5th St., Oklahoma City. You could see the difference between city and country in these boys. Rodney was all git-up-and-git. He talked faster and moved faster than the others. But all three had the same deep conscientiousness in their work and their feeling for the wounded.
Rodney is one of twins, and his identical brother Robert is a corporal in this division’s other clearing station. They are 23. Both had two years of premedical work at the University of Oklahoma, and they intend to be doctors. So you see they were in their glory here. In fact, they almost drove the doctors nuts asking questions all the time.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 13, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
It was flabbergasting to lie among a tentful or wounded soldiers recently and hear them cuss and beg to be sent right back into the fight.
Of course, not all of them do. It depends on the severity of their wounds, and on their individual personalities, just as it would in peacetime. But I will say that at least a third of the moderately wounded men ask if they can’t be returned to duty immediately.
When I took sick, I was with the 45th Division, made up largely of men from Oklahoma and West Texas. You don’t realize how different certain parts of our country are from others until you see their men set off in a frame, as it were, in some strange, faraway place like this.
The men of Oklahoma are drawling and soft-spoken. They are not smart-alecks. Something of the purity of the soil seems to be in them. Even their cussing is simpler and more profound than the torrential obscenities of Eastern city men. An Oklahoman of the plains is straight and direct. He is slow to criticize and hard to anger, but once he is convinced of the wrong of something, brother, watch out.
They’re real fighters too
These wounded me of Oklahoma have got madder about the war than anybody I have seen on this side of the ocean. They weren’t so mad before they got into action, but now!
And these men of the 45th, the newest division over here, have already fought so well they have drawn the high praise of the commanding general of the corps of which the division is a part.
It was these quiet men from the farms, ranches and small towns of Oklahoma who poured through my tent with their wounds. I lay there and listened for what each one would say first.
One fellow, seeing a friend, called out:
I think I’m gonna make her.
Meaning he was going to pull through.
Another said:
Have they got beds in the hospital? Lord, how I want to go to bed.
Another said:
I’m hungry, but I can’t eat anything. I keep getting sick at my stomach.
Another said, as he winced from their probing for a deeply buried piece of shrapnel in his leg:
Go ahead, you’re the doc. I can stand it.
Another said:
I’ll have to write the old lady tonight and tell her she missed out on that $10,000 again.
Another, who was put down beside me, said:
Hi, pop, how you getting along? I call you pop because you’re gray-headed. You don’t mind, do you?
I told him I didn’t care what he called me. He was friendly, but you could tell from his forward attitude that he was not from Oklahoma. When I asked him, it turned out he was from New Jersey.
One big blond Oklahoman had slight flesh wounds in the face and the back of his neck. He had a patch on his upper lip which prevented his moving it, and made him talk in a grave, straight-faced manner that was comical. I’ve never seen anybody so mad in my life. He went from one doctor to another trying to get somebody to sign his card returning him to duty.
Dying men brought in
The doctors explained patiently that if he returned to the front his wounds would get infected and he would be a burden to his company instead of a help. They tried to entice him by telling him there would be nurses back in the hospital. But he said:
To hell with the nurses, I want to get back to fightin’.
Dying men were brought into our tent, men whose death rattle silenced the conversation and made all the rest of us grave.
When a man was almost gone, the surgeons would put a piece of gauze over his face. He could breathe through it but we couldn’t see his face well.
Twice within five minutes chaplains came running. One of these occasions haunted me for hours.
The man was still semi-conscious. The chaplain knelt down beside him and two ward-boys squatted nearby. The chaplain said:
John, I’m going to say a prayer for you.
Somehow this stark announcement hit me like a hammer. He didn’t say, “I’m going to pray for you to get well,” he just said he was going to say a prayer, and it was obvious to me that he meant the final prayer. It was as though he had said:
Brother, you may not know it, but your goose is cooked.
Then he died all alone
He said a short prayer, and the weak, gasping man tried in vain to repeat the words after him. When he had finished, the chaplain added:
John, you’re doing fine, you’re doing fine.
Then he rose and dashed off on some other business, and the ward-boys went about their duties.
The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there on his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full. Of course, it couldn’t be otherwise, but the awful aloneness of that man as he went through the last few minutes of his life was what tormented me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he died, but it would have been out of order and I didn’t do it. I wish now I had.
Although no human was with the dying soldier, he was not alone. However, Ernie’s statement that he should have gone to the dying soldier highlights his humanity and compassion. I suspect he became somewhat accustomed to death while on the battlefield and his hospital stay sensitized him to the cost of war.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 14, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (August 11, by wireless)
Probably it isn’t clear to you just how the Army’s setup for the care of the sick and wounded works on a battlefront. So, I’ll try to picture it for you.
Let’s take the medical structure for a whole division, such as the 45th, which I have been with recently. A division runs roughly 15,000 men. And almost 1,000 of that number are medical men.
To begin right at the front, three enlisted medical-aid men go along with every company. They give what first aid they can on the battlefield. Then litter-bearers carry the wounded back to a battalion aid station.
Sometimes a wounded man is taken back right away. Other times he may be pinned down by fire so that the aid men can’t get to him, and he will have to lie out there for hours before help comes. Right there in the beginning is the biggest obstacle, and the weakest feature of the Army’s medical setup.
Once a soldier is removed from the battlefield, his treatment is superb. The battalion aid station is his first of many stops as he is worked to the rear, and finally to a hospital. An aid station is merely where the battalion surgeon and his assistant happen to be. It isn’t a tent or anything like that – it’s just the surgeon’s medical chest and a few stretchers under a tree. Each station is staffed by two doctors and 36 enlisted men. They are very frequently under fire.
Clearing stations leapfrog
At an aid station a wounded man gets what is immediately necessary, depending on the severity of his wounds. The idea all along is to do as little actual surgical work as possible, but at each stop merely to keep a man in good enough condition to stand the trip on back to the hospital, where they have full facilities for any kind of work. Hence if a soldier’s stomach is ripped open, they do an emergency operation right at the front but leave further operating to be done at a hospital. If his leg is shattered by shrapnel, they bind it up in a metal rack, but the operating and setting isn’t done till he gets back to the hospital. They use morphine and blood plasma copiously at the forward stations to keep sinking men going.
From the battalion aid station, the wounded are taken by ambulance, jeep, truck or any other means back to a collecting station. This is a few tents run by five doctors and a hundred enlisted men, anywhere from a quarter of a mile to several miles behind the lines. There is one collecting station for each regiment, making three to a division.
Here they have facilities for doing things the aid station can’t do. If the need is urgent, they redress the wounds and give the men more morphine, and they perform quite a lot of operations. Then the men are sent by ambulance on back to a clearing station.
The 45th Division has two clearing stations. Only one works at a time. While one works, the other takes a few hours’ rest, then leapfrogs ahead of the other one, sets up its tents and begins taking the patients. In emergencies, both clearing stations work at once, temporarily abandoning their rest-and-leapfrog routine.
All these various crews – the company aid men, the battalion aid station, the collecting station, and the clearing station – are all part of the division. They move with it, fight when it does, and rest when it does.
Stations can move quickly
Then back to the clearing stations the hospitals begin. The first hospitals are usually 40 miles or more back of the fighting. The hospitals are separate things. They belong to no division, but take patients from everywhere.
They get bigger as you go back, and in the case of Sicily patients are evacuated from the hospitals right onto hospital ships and taken back to still bigger hospitals in Africa.
The main underlying motive of all frontline stations is to get patients evacuated quickly and keep the decks clear so they will always have room for any sudden catastrophic run of battle casualties.
A clearing station such as the one I was in is really a small hospital. It consists of five doctors, one dentist, one chaplain, and 60 enlisted men. It is contained in six big tents and a few little ones for the fluoroscope room, the office, and so forth. Everybody sleeps outdoors on the ground, including the commanding officer. The mess is outdoors under a tree.
The station can knock down, move, and set up again in an incredibly short time. They are as proficient as a circus. Once, during a rapid advance, my station moved three times in one day.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 16, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Army ambulances carry four stretchers each, or nine sitting wounded. When they reach a clearing station, they back up to the surgical tent and unload.
The men lie there on their stretchers on the floor of the tent while the aid men look at their medical tags to see how severe the wounds are, in order to handle the worse ones first. Those who don’t need further attention are carried right on through to the ward tents to wait for the next ambulance going back to a hospital.
Those who have graver wounds are carried into the operating room. Two big Army trunks sit upended there on the dirt floor. The trunks contain all kinds of surgical supplies in drawers. On top of each trunk is fastened a steel rod which curves up at each end. The wounded man is carried in his litter and set on these two trunks. The curved rods keep him from sliding off. Thus, his litter forms his operating table.
A portable surgical lamp stands in a tripod over the wounded man. A little motor and generator outside the tent furnish power, but usually the doctors just use flashlights. One or two surgeons in coveralls or ordinary uniform bend over the man and remove his dressings. Medical-aid men crowd around behind, handing them compresses or bandages with steel forceps from a sterile cabinet. Other aid men give the patient another shot of morphine or inject blood plasma or give him a drink of water from a tin cup through a rubber tube they put in his mouth.
Lots of morphine used
Incidentally, one of the duties of the surgical ward-boys is to keep the sweat wiped off the surgeon’s face so it won’t drop down onto the wound.
Just outside the surgical tent is a small trench filled with bloody shirt sleeves and pant legs the surgeons have snipped off wounded men in order to get at the wounds more quickly. The surgeons redress the wounds, and sprinkle on sulfanilamide powder. Sometimes they poke for buried shrapnel, or recompress broken arteries to stop the flow of blood, or inject plasma if the patient is turning pale.
They don’t give general anesthesia here. Occasionally they give a local, but usually the wounded man is so doped up with morphine by the time he reaches here he doesn’t feel much pain. The surgeons believe in using lots of morphine. It spares a man so much pain and consequently relieves the general shock to his system.
Wounds hard to look at
On my third day at the clearing station, when I was beginning to feel better, I spent most of my time around this operating table. As they would undress each new wound, I held firmly to a lamp bracket above my head, for I was still weak and I didn’t want to disgrace myself by suddenly keeling over at the sight of a bad wound.
Many of the wounds were hard to look at, and yet Lt. Michael de Giorgio said he had never seen a human body so badly smashed up in Sicily as he had in traffic accidents back in New York, where he practiced.
One stalwart fellow had caught a machine-gun bullet right alongside his nose. It had made a small clean hole and gone clear through his cheek, leaving a larger hole just beneath his ear as it came out. It gave you the willies to look at it, yet the doctors said it wasn’t serious at all and would heal with no bad effects.
The nerviest fellow I saw had two big holes in his back. You could have put your whole hand in either one of them. As the surgeons worked on him, he lay on his stomach and talked a blue streak.
‘Got five’ with a grenade
He said:
I killed five of the sonsabitches with a hand grenade just before they got me. What made me so damn mad was that I was just out of reach of my rifle and couldn’t crawl over to it, or I’da got five more of them. Jeez, I’m hungry! I ain’t had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.
But most of the wounded say nothing at all when brought in – either because they see no acquaintances to talk to or because they’re too weak from their wounds or too dopey from morphine. Of the hundreds that passed through while I was there, I never heard but one man groaning with pain.
Another thing that struck me, as the wounded came through in a ceaseless stream on their stretchers, was how dirt and exhaustion reduce human faces to such a common denominator. It got so everybody they carried in looked alike. The only break in the procession of tired and dirty men who all looked exactly alike would be when an extreme blond was carried in. His light hair would seem like a flower in a row of weeds.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 17, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Every day at the front produces its quota of freak wounds and hairbreadth escapes. Almost any wounded man has missed death by a matter of inches. Sometimes a bullet can go clear through a man and not hurt him much, while at other times an infinitesimal fragment of a shell can pick out one tiny vital spot and kill him.
Bullets and fragments do crazy things. Our surgeons picked out more than 200 pieces of shrapnel from one fellow. There was hardly a square inch of him, from head to toe, that wasn’t touched. Yet none of them made a vital hit, and the soldier will live.
I remember one soldier who had a hole in the front of his leg just below the hip. It was about the size of a half dollar. It didn’t look bad at all, yet beneath that little wound the leg bone was shattered and arteries were severed, and the surgeons were working hard to get the arteries closed so he wouldn’t bleed to death.
Another fellow I saw had caught a small shell fragment in the wrist. It had entered at a shallow angle and gone clear up the arm to the elbow, and remained buried there. The skin wasn’t even broken at the elbow, but right over the spot where the fragment stopped was a blister as big as a pigeon egg. The blister had been generated by the terrific heat of that tiny piece of metal.
Welding by artillery
That’s one thing most people don’t realize – that fragments from bursting shells are white-hot. I remember an impressive example that happened on our ship during an air raid just before we left Africa. A heavy bomb hit about 100 yards away. Among the many fragments that hit our ship was one about half as big as a tennis ball. It first struck a bronze water pipe along the ship’s rail, then tore through a steel bulkhead into the radio room, hit a sailor in the shoulder, turned at right angles and went through a radio set, and finally went through one more steel bulkhead before it stopped.
When we picked up the fragment, it had a quarter-inch plate of solid bronze welded on one side of it. The fragment’s intense heat had simply welded on a sheet of bronze as it went through the water pipe at the rail. It was welded as solidly as though it had been done on purpose.
They’ve got the medicine
Here in northern Sicily, it is all hill fighting, as it was in northern Tunisia, only worse. Getting the wounded out is often a problem. We had one wounded man who had been lowered by ropes over a sheer 75-foot cliff. He said he wasn’t so concerned about his wounds, but the thought that maybe the rope would break gave him the worst scare of his life.
German medical facilities are apparently as good as ours. Medical supply dumps that we captured show that they are well-supplied with the finest stuff.
We know that their system for collecting their wounded and burying their dead is good, for it is only after the most sudden and rapid advances on our part that we find their dead unburied.
We have captured several big Italian medical dumps. Our doctors found our surgical instruments far superior to the Italians’, but both the Germans and the Italians have bandages and compresses that are better than ours.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 18, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
We had many kinds of human beings among the wounded in our clearing-station tent during the time I spent there.
We had a couple of slightly wounded Puerto Ricans, one of whom still carried his guitar and sat up on his stretcher and strummed on it ever so lightly. There were full-blooded Indians, and Negroes, and New York Italians, and plain American ranch hands, and Spanish-Americans from down Mexico way.
There were local Sicilians who had been hit by trucks. There was a captured Italian soldier who said his own officers had shot him in the face for refusing to attack. There were two American aviators who had been fished out of the sea. There were some of our own medics who had been wounded as they worked under shellfire.
There was one German soldier who had been shot apparently while trying to escape to Italy in a small boat. He was young, thin and scared to death. He objected furiously to being given a shot of morphine, apparently thinking we were torturing him. Then when he discovered he was being treated exactly like everybody else, his amazement grew. You could see bewilderment and gratitude in his face when the ward-boys brought him water and then food. And when, finally, the chaplain, making his morning rounds, gave him cigarettes, candy, toothpowder and soap, the same as all the rest, he sat up grinning and played with them as if he were a child on Christmas morning.
It took him five minutes to find out how to get the cellophane wrapper off his pack of cigarettes, and our whole tent stopped to watch in amusement.
Overboard for blood plasma
Some of the wounded were sick at the stomach. One tough-looking New York Italian, faint with malaria, tried to crawl outside the tent to be sick but passed out cold on the way. He was lying there on the ground in his drawers, yellow as death, when we noticed him. They carried him back, and 10 minutes later, he was all over his sudden attack and as chipper as anybody.
Some were as hungry as bears. Others couldn’t eat a bite. One fellow, with his shattered arm sticking up at right angles in its metal rack, gobbled chicken-noodle soup that a ward-boy fed him while the doctor punched and probed at his other arm to insert the big needle that feeds blood plasma.
And while we are on the subject of plasma, the doctors asked me at least a dozen times to write about plasma. They said:
Write lots about it, go clear overboard for it, say that plasma is the outstanding medical discovery of the war.
So, I beg you folks back home to give and keep on giving your blood. We’ve got plenty on hand here now, but if we ever run into mass casualties such as they have on the Russian front, we will need untold amounts of it.
They say plasma is absolutely magical. They say scores of thousands who died in the last war could have been saved by it. Thousands have already been saved by it in this war.
They cite case after case where a wounded man was all but dead and, within a few minutes after a plasma injection, would be sitting up and talking, with all the life and color back in his face.
The doctors asked me to repeat what you have been told so many times already – that it doesn’t make any difference what type your blood is, and that the normal person has no ill or weakening effects from giving his blood.
Doctors work ghastly hours
A frontline clearing station is made up of doctors and men who were ordinary, normal people back home. But here they live a rough-and-tumble life. They sleep on the ground, work ghastly hours, are sometimes under fire, and handle a flow of wounded that would sicken and dishearten a person less immune to it.
They’ll get little glory back home when it’s all over, but they have some recompense right here in the gratitude of the men they treat. Time and again as I lay in my tent, I heard wounded soldiers discussing among themselves the wonderful treatment they had had at the hands of the medics.
I have written already about some of the enlisted men of this clearing station, so before finishing, I’ll give you the doctors’ names. This is one of the few clearing stations that are a part of the 45th Division.
The station commandant is Capt. Carl Carrico of 2408 Reba Drive, Houston, Texas. His wife and eight-year-old boy are in Houston. He is a slow, friendly man, speckled all over with big red freckles, who takes his turn at surgery along with the others. He usually works in coveralls.
The other surgeons are Capt. Carson Oglesbee of Muskogee, Oklahoma; Capt. Leander Powers of Savannah, Georgia; Capt. William Dugan of Hamburg, New York, and Lt. Michael de Giorgio of New York.
The station’s medical doctor is Capt. Joe Doran of Iowa City. The dentist is Capt. Leonard Cheek of Ada, Oklahoma. And the chaplain is Lt. Arthur Mahr, formerly of the First United Lutheran Church, Indianapolis. Other chaplains of the division are frequently around inquiring for men of their outfits or giving last rites.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 19, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
This is the first of a series of articles on the general who has been in the frontlines leading the American charge across Sicily.
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
As all of you who have followed this column know, we have kept our pen pointed mainly at the common soldier – the well-known G.I. – for lo, these many months, and let the exalted high command shift for itself. But now for the next few days, we are going to reverse things and write about an American general.
This is because he is pretty important, but not very well known to the public, and because I thought you might feel a little better if you knew what kind of man was in direct charge of your boys who have been doing the fighting in Sicily.
The man I speak of is Lt. Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley, who is the head of a corps of the U.S. Army.
Gen. Bradley is what you might call third in the American command over here. Gen. Eisenhower is at the top of everything. Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. is the head man for our forces in Sicily. And Lt. Gen. Bradley commands the corps which has been making the main effort.
Gen. Bradley has been written about very little, and would continue to be written about very little if he had his way. He is innately modesty and humble and, on top of that, he knows that too much publicity can sometimes wreck a man’s career. But he also realizes that when a soldier is in such a position as his, he more or less becomes public property. So, he has consented graciously to my doing this series about him.
I make no bones about the fact that I am a tremendous admirer of Gen. Bradley. I don’t believe I have ever known a person to be so unanimously loved and respected by the men around and under him. In writing of him, it would be easy to slip into embarrassing overpraise, so I will try deliberately to avoid that.
Gen. Bradley came to Africa in mid-February and joined the frontline troops at Gafsa in central Tunisia, during the bitter fighting at El Guettar. He was deputy corps commander then, under Gen. Patton.
After El Guettar, Gen. Patton was called back to work on the preparations for the Sicilian invasion, and Gen. Bradley was put in command of a corps for the final great phase of our fight in northern Tunisia.
He handled that campaign so well that after it was over, he was promoted to lieutenant general, given a Distinguished Service Medal, and decorated twice by the French. He has continued to command a corps through the Sicilian campaign, and again he has handled it with distinction. Nobody knows what lies ahead for him, but we who have seen him work cannot believe that his path leads anywhere but upward.
When Gen. Bradley first showed up at Gafsa, he hardly said a word for two weeks. He just worked around, absorbing everything and getting acquainted, telling everybody to keep on doing his job just as he had been doing. In fact, he hasn’t said very much right up to this moment. Yet, after a few weeks, his influence began to be felt, and gradually, before anyone was hardly aware of it, he had this corps in the palm of his hand, and every man in it would now go to hell and back for him.
One day a colonel stopped me under a tree and said this about the general:
He has the greatness of simplicity and the simplicity of greatness.
A second lieutenant friend of mine who has served with the Canadians and twice been decorated for bravery told me this:
He is the finest officer, without exception, that I have ever served under.
And now and then you’ll hear a correspondent remark something like this:
Say, that Bradley is my man. I think he’s an old fox.
They always say it as if they were startled and quite pleased by their own sagacity at suddenly having discovered it.
But Gen. Bradley isn’t an old fox at all. He is too direct to be a fox. If he has two outstanding traits, they are simplicity and honesty. There is no pretense about him, either in method or in personality. He is just what he is, and that happens to be a plain Midwesterner with common sense and common honesty, who has studied and practiced all his adult life for the job he is doing now. And he is doing it in just the same calm way he would play a game of bridge or drive a car to the station.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 20, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Lt. Gen. Omar Nelson Bradley is 50. He is married, and has a daughter who is the apple of his eye.
Mrs. Bradley is living at West Point for the duration, as are the wives of several other generals in this area. Their daughter, Elizabeth, who is 19, will be a senior at Vassar this fall. It’s only 30 miles from Vassar to West Point, so she can be with her mother for weekends.
Each of them writes to the general about three times a week, so on the average, he gets about one letter a day from home. They usually write him V-letters.
He writes back about twice a week, although during hard campaigns, two or three weeks sometimes get by without his having time to write. When he does write, he pecks out the letters on a portable typewriter, using a very proficient two-finger system.
Elizabeth is majoring in French at Vassar, and this summer she had the ecstatic experience of talking to Gen. Henri Giraud in his own language and asking him about her father, whom Giraud had seen just before leaving Africa. Gen. Bradley, incidentally, doesn’t speak any foreign language.
‘Second greatest general’
The whole Bradley family is devout in its esteem for Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army’s Chief of Staff. When Gen. Bradley got his third star, Elizabeth wrote him a letter of congratulations in which she said they knew he was “the greatest general in the world – next to Gen. Marshall.”
Gen. Bradley is a tall man, who seems thin although he weighs 182 pounds. His legs are long and he is a terrific walker. Recently, Hanson Baldwin did a piece about him in The New York Times which Mrs. Bradley wrote her husband was “an excellent piece except he called you medium height, which makes me furious.” Actually, the general is just half an inch under 6 feet, in his socks.
The general is deeply tanned. He is getting bald on top, and the rest of his hair is cut short and speckled with gray. His head flares out above the ears more than the average man’s, giving him a “dome” and an air of erudition. He wears faintly tinted tortoise-rimmed glasses.
It would be toying with the truth to call him handsome, instead of good-looking. His face shows the kindness and calmness that lie behind it.
To me, Gen. Bradley looks like a schoolteacher rather than a soldier. When I told him that, he said I wasn’t so far wrong, because his father was a country schoolteacher and he himself has taught at West Point and other places. His specialty was mathematics.
The general doesn’t smoke at all. He takes his cigarette rations and gives them away. He drinks and swears in great moderation. There is no vulgarity in his speech. Back home, he says, he and Mrs. Bradley probably took one drink a month before supper. Over here, where liquor is hard to get, he drinks hardly ever, but he does pour a dust-cutting libation for visitors who show up at suppertime. He has three bottles of champagne that somebody gave him, and he had been saving them for the capture of Messina.
The general’s voice is high and clear, but he speaks so gently you don’t hear him very far away. His aides say they have never known him to speak harshly to anyone. He can be firm, terribly firm, but he is never gross, nor rude. His quality of “ordinariness” puts people at their ease.
‘Makes you feel like a general’
A quaking candidate for a commission in the officers’ school at Fort Benning, Georgia, was once interviewed by Gen. Bradley, and when the soldier came out, he said:
Why, he made me feel like a general myself.
He is just the opposite of a “smoothie.” His conversation is not brilliant or unusual, but it is packed with sincerity. The general still has the Midwest in his vocabulary – he uses such expressions as “fighting to beat the band” and “a horse of another color.”
Gen. Bradley is a hard man to write about, in a way, just because he is so normal. He has no idiosyncrasies, no superstitions, no hobbies. He doesn’t collect seashells. He doesn’t read Schopenhauer. There is nothing odd or spectacular about him.
He laughs good-naturedly at small things and has an ordinary Midwestern sense of humor. One day at Sidi Nsir, after Gen. Eisenhower had been visiting there, Gen. Bradley walked into the room where his chief of staff was working and said:
Bill, Gen. Eisenhower says you’re out of uniform today.
The chief of staff – a colonel and an old friend of Gen. Bradley’s – was perturbed. He looked at his leggings, his necktie, his shirt – everything seemed all right to him. And then Gen. Bradley said:
No, no, it isn’t your clothes. You’ve got on the wrong insignia.
Whereupon he walked over, unpinned the eagle from the colonel’s shirt collar, and pinned on a star. That was his way of informing his friend he had been promoted to brigadier general.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 21, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
About the only superstition Omar N. Bradley has ever shown was when he was promoted to lieutenant general in June, just after the fall of Tunisia.
He knew his promotion had gone to Congress. He saw it published in the papers, and even received letters of congratulation from Washington – yet he wouldn’t pin on his third star until the official orders were actually in his hand, some weeks later.
Gen. Bradley seldom gets nervous, and he is never excited. Once, here in Sicily, a sniper took a potshot at him as he was riding in a command car, whereupon the general and two enlisted men, armed only with carbines, got out of the car and started looking for the sniper. The sniper beat it, and they couldn’t find him.
On the day we launched our final victorious attack west of Mateur last spring, the general suddenly had nothing to do. He had planned and worked strenuously for weeks to prepare for it; but once it was underway, he could only wait in personal inaction. That day did make him a little nervous, so he called two young captains who were his aides and they started on a long walk. Back in the hills, far away from everything, they stopped and the captains threw rocks into the air while the general cracked them with his rifle. That was what he did while the battle was on.
Gen. Bradley is notoriously good with a rifle. He has a sergeant driver who has been with him for years, and one reason he likes him so much is that the sergeant is a crack shot too.
Baseball, golf, hunting hobbies
In his younger days, Gen. Bradley was very athletic. He was a second-string football man at West Point and a regular on the baseball team. Baseball is his greatest love. He played left field for three years at the Point and back in the States, he never misses a chance to see a big-league game. He still holds the record for the longest baseball throw ever made at West Point. He has forgotten now how far it was, but he says it “gets longer” by legend every year.
He is a good golfer, and in peacetime usually played a couple of times a week. But when war was declared, he gave up golf for the duration.
He and Mrs. Bradley play bridge, and the general is a good poker player. He plays for moderate stakes and keeps a “poker fund” so that any losses can be paid out of that and not affect the family budget.
Hunting stands alongside baseball among his great loves. Back home, he had two bird dogs – Molly and Pete. When he came overseas, he gave Pete to an Army friend and Mrs. Bradley kept Molly. A third dog, named Tip, was 14 years old and died just before he left.
Back in Georgia, when he was commandant at Fort Benning, the general’s usual hunting partners were some of his enlisted men.
Hometown honors him
Gen. Bradley was born in Moberly, Missouri, on Lincoln’s birthday of 1893.
His hometown has recently named its airport after him, and while I was with him, he received a letter from Moberly in an envelope all decorated with printed slogans about the “Dedication of Bradley Field – Home of Lt. Gen. Bradley.” And there was a picture of him on the envelope. Gen. Bradley looked at it and said:
It looks funny to get a letter with your own picture on it, doesn’t it?
Bradley graduated from West Point in 1915. He rose to the temporary rank of major in the last war, but all his service was in the United States. Today he says:
I’ve spent 25 years trying to explain why I wasn’t overseas in the last war, so thank goodness I’ll be spared that this time.
They say that when he got orders to come overseas last winter, he was as happy as a bug. During his long Army career, Bradley served twice on the faculty at West Point, did one three-year hitch in Hawaii, spent many years at command schools preparing for just such a wartime job as he has now, and wound up in 1941 as a brigadier general in command of Fort Benning. There he expanded the Officer Candidate School, which last year turned out 40,000 new Army officers.
In February 1942, he was made a major general and assigned to the command of the 82nd Infantry Division. Later, he commanded the 28th Infantry Division, and he was on that command when ordered to Africa.
His permanent Army rank is that of colonel, and because of the fact that in achieving the wartime rank of lieutenant general, he was passed over many men his senior, he leans over backward not to say or do anything that would make it seem he felt in any way above them.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 23, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Men who work under Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley say he is the fairest man they have ever known. There is absolutely no pretense about him in any way, and he hated ostentation.
He doesn’t fly his three-star flag except when formal occasions compel it. And his aides are full of stories about how he has hung in the background rather than call attention to himself by pushing up where he had a right to be. He doesn’t even own a Sam Browne belt or a dress cap.
Oddly enough, for a man so quiet and modest as he is, he doesn’t mind public speaking. He is no ringing orator, but after you listen to him for a while, his speech becomes powerful by its tone of intense sincerity.
During vital periods of each campaign, the general always comes to our correspondents’ camp and, in front of a big map, gives us a complete fill-in on the situation. When he first did this, we all liked him but weren’t especially impressed. But he grew on us just as he grows on everybody he works with, and today there isn’t a correspondent who doesn’t swear by him.
He isn’t easygoing
Despite his mildness, the general is not what you would call easygoing. Nobody runs over him. He has complete confidence in himself, and once he makes up his mind, nothing sways him. He is as resolute as rock, and people who work with him must produce or get out. They don’t get the traditional Army bawling-out from him, but they get the gate.
He has a nice quality of respecting other people’s opinions and of paying close attention to other people’s conversation. I have noticed that when he makes a phone call he always says “If you please” to the Army operator. And on the road, when an Army truck pulls out to let his three-star jeep pass, he always turns and says “Thank you” to the driver.
When he passes a bunch of engineers toiling and sweating to create a bypass around a blown-up bridge, he calls out, “You’re doing a nice job here,” to the startled lieutenant in charge.
The general rides around the front a great deal. During the campaign in northern Sicily, he averaged five hours a day in his jeep, and sometimes ran it up to eight. He laughs and says jeep riding is good for the liver.
A few times he used planes. He hopes to have a small plane of his own that will land practically anywhere, as it would save him hours each day.
On the front bumper of the general’s jeep is a red-and-white plate displaying three stars, and of course this draws a salute from every officer or soldier who is on his toes. In heavy traffic the general is returning salutes constantly. I told him that what he needed most was a little boy to do his saluting for him. He laughed and said:
Oh, that’s the way I get my exercise.
When he drives through a town the Sicilians all yell and wave, and the general waves back. Italian policemen, discharged soldiers, and even civilians snap up to the salute, and the general always salutes them back. Once in a while they give him the Fascist salute, out of old habit, and he returns that too, but in the American way.
He doesn’t affect a swagger stick, but he does sometimes carry an ordinary wooden cane with a steel spike in the end. It was given to him by former Congressman Faddis of Pennsylvania.
Hates to order bombing of city
Almost every day he visits the headquarters of each division that is in the lines. He says he could do the work by telephone, but by going in person he can talk things over with the whole division staff, and if they are planning something he doesn’t think is good, he can talk them around to seeing it his way, rather than just flatly ordering it done.
I stood with him one day on a high observation post looking ahead at a town where we were having very tough going. The Germans simply wouldn’t crack (They did later, of course). All of our officers, including the general, were worried. He said:
We’ve put enough pressure on already to break this situation, but still they hang on, so we’ll have to figure out some other way. Some commanders believe in the theory of direct attack, accepting a 30% loss of men and getting to your objective quickly, but I’ve tried to figure a plan for this to save as many lives as possible.
I said to him:
I never could be a general. I couldn’t stand up under the responsibility of making a decision that would take human lives.
And he said:
Well, you don’t sleep any too well from it. But we’re in it now, and we can’t get out without some loss of life. I hate like the devil to order the bombing of a city, and yet it sometimes has to be done.
In speaking of being bombed and of enduring the sadness of our own casualties, he said:
It’s really harder on some of the newer officers than it is on me. For although I don’t like it, after all I’ve spent 30 years preparing a frame of mind for accepting such a thing.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 24, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Gen. Bradley has around him at the front, in addition to his military staff of more than a hundred officers, a little official “family” and it really is like a little family.
It consists of his two young captain aides, his sergeant driver, his corporal orderly, and his brigadier general chief of staff, whom I’m not permitted to name.
The two aides are Capt. Chester Hansen of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Capt. Lewis Bridge of Lodi, California. Both are 25, both graduated from college in 1939, Hansen from Syracuse University and Bridge from California Aggies. Their nicknames are Chet and Lew and that’s what the general calls them.
Both captains went through Officers’ Training School at Fort Benning when Gen. Bradley was commanding there and both came right out of the officers’ school into his family. They’ve been with him for 16 months and consider themselves the two most fortunate young officers in the American Army. They sleep in cots under a tree about 50 yards from the general’s truck, which is also parked under a tree since the general has an aversion to occupying buildings and usually keeps a command post in tents out in the open.
He drives just right
Around headquarters the two aides are on call constantly, but for jeep traveling with the general they take alternate days. Both are bright, understanding, likable fellows who worship at the general’s feet and do a good job representing him, in the same thoughtful manner he uses.
The general’s driver is Sgt. Alex Stout, of Port Barre, Louisiana, below Baton Rouge. Although he is only 23, he has been in the Army six years. He doesn’t, however, intend to make it a career. Recently, his grandmothers died and left him a fertile 275-acre farm and when the war is over, he is going back to farm it himself.
Sgt. Stout was married last Christmas Day. His wife is waiting back in Louisiana. He has a brother Noah who is a captain in the Army in Australia. Sgt. Stout has been driving for Gen. Bradley for two and a half years. He is so good that when the general reached North Africa, he sent back to the States for him.
Sgt. Stout takes meticulous pride in the general’s jeep. He has it fixed up with sponge-rubber cushions, and a built-in ration box under the back seat, and keeps it neat as a pin.
Gen. Bradley says having a good driver is important, for he relaxes while he’s riding and he can’t have a driver who annoys him by going too slow or one who keeps him tense by reckless driving. One night last winter, the general had a blackout driver who was so cautious and creepy he had to take the wheel himself and drive half the night.
An orderly orderly
Sgt. Stout is another devoted fan of the general’s. The sergeant says:
He does everything for you. I go to him with my headaches, go to him for advice, go to him for money. He treats me just like my own father does.
The general’s orderly is Cpl. Frank Cekada of Calumet, Michigan. Frank is the newest one of the general’s family, having been with him only since last March.
Frank says a colonel in Oran picked him for the job because he always kept himself looking neat and clean. He was driving a truck before he got this assignment. He had never been an orderly before but soon caught on. Frank’s duties are, as he puts it, “to keep the general happy.” He cleans the quarters, looks after the luggage while moving, and whenever he can’t find Sicilian women to do the general’s washing, Frank does it himself.
Frank is 24, and before the war was, of all things, a bartender. He says the general treats him like a personal friend and he hopes nothing happens to this job.
Gen. Bradley lives in an Army truck which has been fixed up like a tourist trailer. In the front end is a nice wide bed running crosswise of the truck, with a blanket bearing the initials of the U.S. Military Academy. Along one side is a desk with drawers under it. On the other side were a closet and washbasin. A field telephone in a leather case hangs on the end of the desk. There is a big calendar on the wall and each day is marked off with an x. There is a bookrack with four or five columns of military textbooks, one called Our Enemy, Japan, and a French grammar which the general never finds time to study.
On the front wall over the bed are painted the dates of the campaigns in North Africa, with the beginning and ending dates, and the Sicily with the invasion date.
He studies his map
We conjectured on what date the Sicilian campaign would end, and oddly enough the general’s date was a little farther off than mine. There are no pictures in the truck, no gadgets on the tables. The general has not sent home any souvenirs, in fact he has acquired only two for himself. One was a German Luger from Tunisia and the other a lovely Sicilian dagger with the Fascist emblem on the handle. On the wall opposite the table is a big map of this area of Sicily. It probably is the most important piece of equipment in the place.
The general sat there alone at night studying the map for hours, thinking and planning moves for the morrow over the frightful country ahead. There alone before his map many of the most important decisions were made.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 25, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
At one time, in central Sicily, we correspondents were camped in a peach orchard behind the country home of an Italian baron. Apparently, the baron had skedaddled, as nobility is wont to do, before the fighting started. German and Italian troops had been occupying the place before we came.
The baron had built himself a big stone house that was pink and palatial, with a marvelous view over miles of rolling country. It had the usual royal peacocks strutting around but not a bath in the place. The dining room ceiling was hand-painted and the staircase gigantic, yet the royal family used porcelain washbowls and old-fashioned thundermugs. It was the perfect shabby rococo domicile of what H. R. Knickerbocker calls the “wretched aristocracy of Europe.”
While the baron lived in this comparative luxury, his employees lived in sheds and even caves in the big rocky hill just back of the house. They looked like gypsies.
Italians loot the house
When we arrived, the interior of the castle was a wreck. I’ve never seen such a complete shambles. Every room was knee-deep in debris. The enemy had thoroughly looted the place before fleeing. And servants gave us the shameful news that most of the looting and destruction was done by Italian soldiers rather than German.
They’d gone through the house shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer. Expensive dishes were thrown on the tile floor, antique vases shattered, women’s clothes dumped in jumbled heaps, pictures torn down, medicine cabinets dashed against walls, dressers broken up, wine bottles dropped on the floor, their contents turning the trash heap into a gooey mass as it dried.
It was truly the work of beasts. We tiptoed into the place gingerly, suspecting boobytraps, but finally decided it had not been fixed up. Then some of us rummaged around the debris seeing if anything left was worth taking as souvenirs. As far as I have seen, Americans have been good about not looting. Usually, they take only what is left from the Germans’ and Italians’ destruction or what the inhabitants voluntarily give them. All I could salvage were a few pieces of lace from the sewing-room floor.
Then we decided the dining room was the least messy place in the building, so we set to with grass brooms and shovels and water and cleaned it up. Thus, it became our press room. The Signal Corps ran wires from a portable generator to give us light so we could work by night.
One day, I was writing while all the other correspondents were away and a stray soldier peered in after having wandered in astonishment through the jumbled house.
He asked, “What is this place?”
I told him it was the former home of an Italian baron. His next question was so typically American you had to laugh despite a little shame at the average soldiers’ bad grammar and lack of learning.
A menagerie next door
He said:
What is these barons, anyway? Is they something like lords in England?
To avoid a technical discussion, I told him that for all practical purposes they were somewhat along the same line. He went away apparently satisfied.
Our orchard bivouac behind the castle was fine except for one thing. That was the barnyard collection that surrounded us. About an hour before dawn, we were always awakened by the most startling orchestra of weird and ghoulish noises ever put together.
Guinea hens would cackle, ducks would quack, calves bawl, babies cry, men shout, peacocks jabber and turkeys gobble. And to cap it all, a lone donkey at just the right dramatic moment in this hideous cacophony would let loose a long sardonic heehaw that turned your exasperation into outlandish laughter.
The baron’s servants were a poor-looking lot, yet they seemed very nice. Their kids hung around our camp all day, very quiet and meek. They looked at us so hungrily we couldn’t resist giving them cans of food. We tried to teach them to say grazia (thanks, in Italian) but with no success.
One day, some of us correspondents were doing our washing when one of the Sicilian women came up and took it away from us and washed it herself. When she finished, we asked her, “How much?”
They’re not lazy anyway
She said, “Nothing at all.” We said we’d give her some food. She said she didn’t expect any, that she was just doing it for us free, but we gave her some food anyway.
Stories like that are countless. The Army engineers tell me how the Sicilians would come up where they were working, grab shovels and start digging themselves and refuse to take anything for it. Whatever else you can say about them, the Sicilians don’t seem lazy.
One soldier summed it up when he said:
After living nine months with Arabs, the sight of somebody working voluntarily is almost too much for me.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 26, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
The awarding of bravery medals is a rather dry and formal thing and I never heretofore bothered to cover any of these festivities, but the other night, I learned that three old friends of mine were in a group to be decorated, so I went down to have supper with them and see the show.
My three friends are Lt. Col. Harry Goslee, 3008 Neil Ave., Columbus, Ohio; Maj. John Hurley, 66 Rockaway Ave., San Francisco, California, and Maj. Mitchell Mabardy, of Assonet, Massachusetts. Goslee is headquarters commandant of a certain outfit, and Majs. Hurley and Mabardy are provost marshals in charge of military police.
They were camped under big beech trees on the Sicilian hillside just back of the battlefront. I went down about 5:30 and found my friends sitting on folding chairs under a tree outside their tent, looking through field glasses at fighting far ahead.
Any soldier will verify that one of the outstanding traits of war are those incongruous interludes of quiet that pop up now and then in the midst of the worst horror. This evening was one of them. Our troops were in a bitter fight for the town of Troina, standing up like a great rock pinnacle on a hilltop a few miles ahead.
That afternoon, our High Command had called for an all-out air and artillery bombardment of the city. When it came, it was terrific. Planes by the score roared over and dropped their deadly loads, and as they left our artillery put down the most devastating barrage we’ve ever used against a single point, even outdoing any shooting we did in Tunisia.
City seems to fly apart
Up there in Troina a complete holocaust took place. Through our glasses the old city seemed to fly apart. Great clouds of dust and black smoke rose into the sky until the whole horizon was leaded and fogged. Our biggest bombs exploded with such roars that we felt the concussion clear back where we were, and our artillery in a great semi-circle crashed and roared like some gigantic inhuman beast that had broken loose and was out to destroy the world.
Germans by the hundreds were dying up there at the end of our binocular vision, and all over the mountainous horizon the world seemed to be ending. And yet we sat there in easy chairs under a tree sipping cool drinks, relaxed and peaceful at the end of the day’s work. Sitting there looking at it as though we were spectators at a play. It just didn’t seem possible that it could be true. After a while we walked up to the officers’ mess in a big tent under a tree and ate captured German steak which tasted very good indeed.
Then after supper the six men and three officers who were to receive awards lined up outside the tent. They were nine legitimate heroes all right. I know, for I was in the vicinity when they did their deed.
Fire provides target
It was the night before my birthday and the German bombers kept us awake all night with their flares and their bombings, and for a while it looked as though I might never get to be 43 years old. What happened in this special case was that one of our generator motors caught fire during the night and it had to happen at a very inopportune moment. When the next wave of bombers came over, the Germans naturally used the fire as a target.
The three officers and six MPs dashed to the fire to put it out. They stuck right at their work as the Germans dived on them. They stayed while the bombs blasted around them and shrapnel flew. I was sleeping about a quarter of a mile away, and the last stick of bombs almost seemed to blow me out of the bedroll – so you can visualize what those men went through. The nine of them were awarded the Silver Star a few days afterwards.
The nine lined up in a row with Col. Goslee at the end. The commanding general came out of his tent. Col. Goslee called the nine to attention. They stood like ramrods while the citations were read off. There was no audience except myself and two Army Signal Corps photographers taking pictures of the ceremony.
Besides the three officers, the six who received medals were Sgt. Edward Gough, 2252 E 72nd St., Brooklyn, New York; Sgt. Charles Mitchell, 3246 3rd Ave., Brooklyn, New York; Sgt. Homer Moore, of Nicholls, Georgia; Sgt. Earl Sechrist, of Windsor, Pennsylvania; Pfc. Barney Swint, of Douglasville, Texas, and Pfc. Harold Tripp, of Worthington, Minnesota.
Both comical and pathetic
I believe the men went through more torture receiving the awards than in earning them, they were all so tense and scared. It was either comical or pathetic, whichever way it happened to strike you. Col. Goslee stared rigidly ahead in a thunderstruck manner. His left hand hung relaxed, but I noticed his right fist was clamped so tightly his fingers were turning blue.
The men were like uncomfortable stone statues. As the general approached, each man’s Adam’s apple would go up and down two or three times in a throat so constricted I thought he was going to choke.
The moment the last man was congratulated, the general left and the whole group broke up in relief and the men went separate ways.
As a spectacle it was sort of dull, but to each man it was one of those little pinnacles of triumph that will stand out until the day he dies. You often hear soldiers say:
I don’t want any medals. I just want to see the Statue of Liberty again.
But just the same you don’t hear of anybody forgetting to come around, all nervous and shined up fit to kill, on the evening he is to be decorated.
The Pittsburgh Press (August 27, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Yesterday I wrote about going down to see some old friends decorated for bravery. After it was over, we went back to the tent where one of them lives and sat there talking about old times and how good it was to get together again.
One officer had a bottle of champagne he had been saving for some occasion and since this seemed to be at least a good imitation of an occasion he got it out and we passed it around, the half dozen of us drinking it warm and out of the bottle. My palate has never been educated up to champagne and I’d just as soon have had a good swig of Bevo, but after all an event is an event and you can’t let your old friends down.
We sat out under the trees and a chill wind came up and somebody brought me a jacket to slip on. It had lieutenant colonel’s leaves on the shoulders and I suppose I could have been arrested for impersonating an officer, but I was in a nice position, having the head military policeman of the area sitting next to me, so I just flaunted my colonel’s leaves and hoped some stranger would come by to salute me.
Our host was Lt. Col. Goslee, of Columbus, Ohio. He calls himself a professional reserve officer as he has been on active duty for 10 years now. He was with us back in the first days at Oran, then got shunted off to another job and missed the fighting in Tunisia. But this summer he got switched back onto the main track again and lately he’s been making hay fast while the bombs fall.
Daughter asks for Ernie
Back home he has a wife, and a daughter of 15 who keeps writing him, the precious child, asking if he’s seen me. He also has a Dalmatian dog named Colonel who volunteered – or was volunteered – four months ago in the Dogs for Defense Army and is now serving somewhere in Virginia. Col. Goslee’s home flew two service stars in the front window – one for the man and one for the dog.
Dusk came on and we moved inside the tent so we could light our cigarettes. Our conversation drifted back to other days – Oran of last November and bitter cold Tébessa in January and the sadness of our retreat from Sbeitla and the chill sweeping winds of Gafsa and later in the spring the beauties of Béja and the final wonderful feeling of victory at Ferryville.
And we talked of how tired we had all gradually become, and nobody seemed like a hero who’d just been decorated for bravery. We talked of the miles we’ve covered and the moves we’ve made in the last nine months, of countries we’ve seen and how the whole war machine, though it grows dirtier and tireder month after month, also grows mature and smooth and more capable.
Bond with old friends
In this long time all of us over here have met thousands of different soldiers and officers. Yet those of us who became friends right at the very beginning in Africa or even back in England seem to have a bond between us as though we were members of a fraternity or a little family, and when you get back with each other again it’s comfortable and old-shoelike. We talked of people no longer with us – such people as Lt. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall and Maj. Ed Adkins, both on duty back in Memphis now. Ed, in his job as headquarters commandant, used to be a focal point of this little sitting-around group in Tunisia, just as Col. Goslee is in the same job here in Sicily.
Ed Adkins was a favorite and his name came up frequently in our conversation. He was crazy to get back to the States and we knew he’s happy there, and yet we laughed and prophesied that he reads these lines in a Memphis paper – reads how we were still going on and on, still moving every few days, still listening now and then for the uneven groan of the German night bombers, still fighting dust, darkness, and weariness and once in a while sitting around talking after supper, on cots in a blacked-out tent – when he reads about it, and visualizes us, he’s going to be so homesick for the front that he’ll probably cry.
They tell me all the soldiers who have been through the mill and have returned to America are like that. They get an itch for the old miserable life – a disgusting, illogical yearning to be back again in the place they hated. I’m sure it’s true, but I know a lot of soldiers who would like a chance to put that theory to the test.