Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 1, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
During the latter days of the Sicilian campaign, I spent all my time with the combat engineers of two different divisions.

For months I have been wanting to write about engineers and when I finally got around to it, it seemed as though fate had picked out the time for me – the engineers were in it up to their ears.

Scores of times during the Sicilian fighting, I heard the expression voiced by everybody from generals to privates that “This is certainly an engineers’ war.” And indeed it was.

Every foot of our advance upon the gradually-withdrawing enemy was measured by the speed with which our engineers could open the highways, clear the mines, and bypass the blown bridges.

In northeastern Sicily, where the mountains are close together and the valleys are steep and narrow, it was an ideal country for withdrawing, and the Germans made full use of it.

They blew almost every bridge they crossed. In the American area alone, they destroyed nearly 160 bridges. They mined the bypasses around the bridges, they mined the beaches, they even mined orchards and groves of trees that would be a logical bivouac for our troops.

Detector, bulldozer magic instruments

They didn’t fatally delay us, but they did give themselves time for considerable escaping. The average blown bridge was fairly easy to bypass and we’d have the mines cleared and a rough trail gouged out by a bulldozer within a couple of hours; but now and then they’d pick a lulu of a spot which would take anywhere up to 24 hours to get around.

And in reading of the work of these engineers you must understand that a 24-hour job over there would take many days in normal construction practice. The mine detector and the bulldozer are the two magic instruments of our engineering. As one sergeant said:

This has been a bulldozer campaign.

In Sicily, our Army would have been as helpless without the bulldozer as it would have been without the jeep. The bridges in Sicily were blown much more completely than they were in Tunisia. Back there they’d just drop one span with explosives. But over here they’d blow down the whole damn bridge, from abutment to abutment. They used as high as a thousand pounds of explosives to a bridge, and on one long, seven-span bridge they blew all seven spans. It was really senseless, and the pure waste of the thing outraged our engineers. Knocking down one or two spans would have delayed us just as much as destroying all of them.

The bridges of Sicily are graceful and beautiful old arches of stone or brick-facing, with rubble fill, and shattering them so completely was something like chopping down a shade tree or defacing a church.

They’ll all have to be rebuilt after the war and it’s going to take a lot more money than necessary to replace all those hundreds of spans. But I suppose the Germans and Italians figured dear old Uncle Sam would pay for it all, anyhow, so they might as well have their fun.

Nazis hit 2 high spots

Frequently the Germans, by blowing out a road carved out of the side of a sheer cliff, caused us more trouble than by bridge-blowing. In these instances, it was often impossible to bypass at all, so traffic had to be held up until an emergency bridge could be thrown across the gap.

Once in a while you would come to a bridge that hadn’t been blown. Usually that was because the river bed was so flat, and bypassing so easy, it wasn’t worth wasting explosives. Driving across a whole bridge makes you feel funny, almost immoral.

We have one whole bridge the Germans didn’t count on. They had it all prepared for blowing and left one man behind to set off the charge at the last moment. But he never got it done. Our advance patrols spotted him and shot the villain dead.

The Germans were even more prodigal with mines here than in Tunisia. Engineers of the 45th Division found one minefield, covering six acres, containing 800 mines. Our losses from mines have been fairly heavy, especially among officers. They scout ahead to survey demolitions, and run into mines before the detecting parties get there.

The enemy hit two high spots in their demolition and mine-planting. One was when they dropped a 50-yard strip of cliff-ledge coast road, overhanging the sea, with no possible way of bypassing. The other was when they planted mines along the road that crosses the lava beds in the foothills north of Mt. Etna. The metal in the lava threw our mine detectors helter-skelter, and we had a terrible time finding the mines.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 2, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
The engineering forces with our Army are trained and organized to a high degree, and engineering morale is proud and high.

Strange thing, it used to be the fashion to sort of sneer at the engineers, but that day has passed. Even the infantry takes off its hat to them – for not infrequently the engineers are actually out ahead of the infantry.

Before launching into many details of how the engineers work, I’ll explain how their organization is set up, for it will make it easier for you to understand their job. Each infantry division has a battalion of engineers which is actually part of that division and works and suffers with it. The battalion consists of four companies totaling around 800 men.

Sometimes all the companies are working in separate places with various infantry regiments. At other times, in mountainous country, when the whole division is strung out in a single line 20 miles or more long, the engineer companies keep leapfrogging each other, letting one company go into 24-hour reserve for a much-needed rest about every three days.

Behind these division engineers are what are called corps engineers. They are under control of the Second Army Corps and can be shifted anywhere at the corps’ command. Corps engineers follow up the division engineers, strengthening and smoothing the necessarily makeshift work of the division engineers.

Engineers mutual-esteem society

Capt. Ben Billups of Alamogordo, New Mexico, put it this way:

Our job is to clear the way for our division of roughly two thousand vehicles to move ahead just as quickly as possible. We are interested only in the division. If we were to build a temporary span across a blown bridge, and that span were to collapse one second after the last division truck had crossed, we would have done the theoretically perfect job. For we would have cleared the division, yet not wasted a minute of time doing more than we needed to do when we passed.

Then it is the corps engineers’ job to create a more permanent bridge for the supply convoys that will be following for days and weeks afterward.

Often there is jealousy and contempt between groups of similar types working under divisions and corps. But in the engineers, it is a sort of mutual-esteem society. Each respects and is proud of the other. The corps engineers are so good they are constantly at the heels of the division engineers, and a few times, with the division engineers 100% occupied with an especially difficult demolition, they’ve pushed ahead and tackled fresh demolitions themselves.

At first, particularly, all the officers of the engineers’ battalion were graduate engineers in civil life, but with the Army expanding so rapidly and professional experience running so thin, some young officers now assigned to the engineers have just come out of officers’ school and have little or no engineering experience.

Jack-of-all-trades

Of the enlisted men. only a handful in each company ever had any construction experience. The rest are just run-of-the-mine – one-time clerks, butchers, cowpunchers. That little handful of experienced enlisted men carries the load and they are as vital as anything I know of in the Army.

Practically every man in an engineering company has to double in half a dozen brasses. Today he’ll be running a mine detector, tomorrow he’ll be a stonemason, next day a carpenter, and the day after a plain pick-and-shovel man. But unlike the common laborer at home, he’s picking and shoveling under fire about half the time.

In the Book of Organization, the duties of the engineers are manifold. But in the specialized warfare in Sicily many of their book duties just didn’t exist and their main work was concentrated down into four very vital categories: road building and bridge bypassing; clearing of minefields; finding and purifying water for the whole division; and providing the division with maps. The latter two don’t sound spectacular but, believe me, they’re important and I’ll tell you about them at length before this series ends.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 3, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
Sicily was known to be short of water in summertime, so our invasion forces brought enough water with them to last five days. In the case of the 45th Division, this amounted to 155,000 gallons.

It was brought in tanks and in individual five-gallon cans. There were three ships with tanks of 10,000 gallons each. On the transports there were 125,000 gallons, all in five-gallon cans. That meant that this one division brought with it from Africa 25,000 cans of water. Just think of it – 25,000 cans! And other divisions did the same.

Actually, we didn’t have as much trouble finding water as we’d expected, and we needn’t have brought so much with us, but you never know. Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach, but I think you could almost say an army marches on its water. Without water you’re sunk.

As an old punster, how in the hell can you sink without water? Well, I said it; you figure it out.

2 gallons per man

Throughout the Sicilian campaign, the 45th Division used about 50,000 gallons of water a day, or two gallons per man. Just as a comparison, the daily water consumption in Las Vegas, New Mexico, a city of 12,000, is a million gallons a day, or almost 100 gallons a person.

Although the difference seems fantastic, still our troops used more than absolutely necessary, for an army can exist and fight on one gallon a day per man.

It falls to the engineers to provide water for the Army. Engineer officers scout the country right behind the retiring enemy, looking for watering places.

They always keep three water points set up constantly for each division – one for each of the three regiments, and usually a couple of extra ones. When a water point is found, the engineers wheel in their portable purifying unit. This consists of a motorized pump, a sand filter, a chlorinating machine, and a collapsible 3,000-gallon canvas tank which stands about shoulder-high when put up.

Purified water is pumped into this canvas tank. Then all day and all night, vehicles of the regiment from miles around line up and fill their cans, tanks, and radiators.

Painted signs saying “Water Point,” with an arrow pointing the direction, are staked along the roads for miles around.

The sources of our water in Sicily were mainly wells, mountain springs, little streams, shell craters, and irrigation ditches. The engineers of the 45th Division found one shell crater that contained a broken water main, and the seepage into this crater provided water for days. They also discovered that some of Sicily’s dry river beds had underground streams flowing beneath, and by drilling down a few feet, they could pump up all they needed.

Sicilian supplies untapped

Another time, they put pumps into a tiny little irrigation ditch only four inches deep and a foot wide. You wouldn’t think it would furnish enough water for a mule, yet it kept flowing and carried them safely through.

In their municipal water systems, the Sicilians use everything from modern 20-inch cast-iron pipe down to primitive earthen aqueducts still surviving from Roman days.

Our engineers made it a practice not to tap the local water supplies. We made a good many friends that way, for the Sicilians said the Germans used no such delicacy. In fact, we leaned over the other way, and furnished water to scores of thousands of Sicilians whose supply had been shattered by bombing.

It doesn’t make much difference what shape the water is in when you find it, for it is pumped through the filter machine which takes out the sediment. Then purifying substances are shot in as it passes through the pumps. The chlorine we inject comes in powder form in one-gallon cans. We usually use one part of chlorine to a million parts of water.

The 45th’s engineers brought with them enough chlorine to last six months. In addition to chlorine, alum and soda ash is injected into the water. After you’ve drunk this water for as long as we have, you don’t notice the odd taste.

The 45th brought six complete water-purifying units with it and also brought a unit for distilling drinking water out of sea water, but this never had to be used.

Maybe a little ‘vino’

When he marches or goes into battle, an infantryman usually carries two canteens instead of one, but here in the hot summer it isn’t unusual at all to see a soldier carrying six canteens tied to the end of a leather strap like a bunch of grapes – half his canteens being captured Italian ones covered with gray felt for keeping the water cool.

And, I might add out of the side of my mouth, if you got real nosey, you might discover that a couple of those canteens, instead of holding our beautiful pure water, were bearing a strange red fluid known colloquially as “vino,” to be used, no doubt, for rubbing on fleabites.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 4, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
One of the outfits with which I lived for a while on the Sicilian front was the 120th Engineers Battalion, attached to the 45th Division.

The bulk of the 120th hail from my adopted state of New Mexico. They are part of the old New Mexico outfit, most of which was lost on Bataan. It was good to get back to these slow-talking, wise and easy people of the desert, and good to speak of places like Las Cruces, Socorro, and Santa Rosa. It was good to find somebody who lives within sight of my own picket fence on the mesa.

The 120th is made up of Spanish-Americans, Indians, straight New Mexicans, and a smattering of men from the East. It is commanded by Lt. Col. Lewis Frantz, who was superintendent of the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Light & Power Company before entering service.

Col. Frantz has now been in the Army for three years and has not been home during all that time. The 45th Division spent nearly two and a half years in training, and everybody almost went nuts thinking they’d never get overseas.

The strangest case of self-consciousness along that line that I’ve run onto is Capt. Waldo Lowe of Las Cruces. He had a chance to go home on furlough last Christmas, but didn’t because he was ashamed to be seen at home after spending two years in the Army and still not getting out of the United States.

And now he can’t go home

Now that he has leaped the overseas hurdle and feels qualified to go home, he can’t get there, of course. The executive officer of the unit is Maj. Jerry Hines, athletic director of the New Mexico Aggies for many years. Maj. Hines is expecting a football player in his family about mid-September. He says he hopes to get home in time to see him graduated from college.

Two of my Albuquerque home-towners are Capt. James Bezemek, 2003 N 4th St., whose father is county treasurer there, and Capt. Richard Strong, 113 Harvard St.

Capt. Strong was company commander when I saw him, but has since been promoted to the battalion staff. He and his two sergeants had one of the narrowest escapes in the battalion when their jeep (which they’d abandoned for a magnificent ditch about two seconds before) got a direct hit from an “88” and blew all to pieces. The sergeants were Martin Quintana, who used to be a machinist for the Santa Fe at Albuquerque, and John W. Trujillo, of Socorro.

A similar narrow escape happened to Capt. Ben Billups, of Alamogordo, New Mexico, a few days later when his brand-new amphibious jeep which he’d had just one day was hit and burned up. I would have been with him if I hadn’t got sick and gone to the hospital that morning. It’s a smart guy who knows just when to get sick.

The unit’s losses from mines and shellfire have been moderately heavy. Col. Frantz estimated that half of their work has been done under at least spasmodic shellfire, and at one time his engineers were 8.5 miles out ahead of the infantry.

Parachutes make silk sheets

The colonel himself is a big, drawling, typical Southwesterner whose stamina amazes everybody, for he is no spring chicken. During the critical periods he would be on the go till 4 a.m., snatch a few hours’ sleep on the ground, and be off again at 7 a.m.

In action, the officers just flop down on the hard rocky ground like everybody else, but when they go into reserve, they fixe up bedrolls on smooth places under trees, with blankets and mosquito nets. In fact, a few of the battalion officers right now are sporting the luxury of white silk sheets. They found a torn parachute and gave a Sicilian woman some canned food to cut it up and sew it into sheets for them.

A good percentage of the battalion speaks Spanish, and occasionally you’ll heard some of the officers talking Spanish among themselves, just to keep in practice, I suppose. This New Mexico bunch misses more than anything, I believe, the Spanish dishes they are accustomed to in that part of the country.

Their folks occasionally send them cans of chili and peppers, and then they have a minor feast. Capt. Pete Erwin, of Las Vegas and Santa Fe, has a quart of chicos – New Mexico dried corn – which he is saving for Christmas dinner.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 6, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (Sept. 2, by wireless)
The other day I promised to tell you something about maps. You may have never seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among frontline officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be perfectly useless without his map.

It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps.

The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When it came from America, the 45th Division brought with it 83 tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that would be, but it would surely run close to half a million.

The 45th’s maps were far superior to any we’d been using and here’s the reason: Our maps were fundamentally based on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos were immediately flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.

They kept this process of correction open right up to the last minute. The 45th sailed from America only a short time before we invaded Sicily, and in the last week before it sailed the Map Section in Washington printed, placed in waterproofed cases, and delivered to the boats those 83 tons of maps, hot off the presses.

Help from Ancient Romans

The 120th Engineers went back into antiquity for one of their jobs. They were scouting for a bypass around a blown bridge when they stumbled onto a Roman stone road, centuries old and now unused and nearly covered with sand grass. They cleaned up the old highway, and used it for a mile and a half. If it hadn’t been for this antique road, it would have taken 400 men 12 hours to build a bypass. By using it, the job was done in four hours by 150 men.

The engineers were very careful throughout the campaign about tearing up native property. They used much extra labor and time to avoid damaging orchards, buildings or vineyards. Sometimes they’d build a road clear around an orchard rather than through it.

This consideration helped make us many friends here.

Bulldozer’s adventure

I met a bulldozer driver who operates his huge, clumsy machine with such utter skill that it is like watching a magician do card tricks. The driver is Joseph Campagnone, of 14 Middle St., Newton, Massachusetts. An Italian who came to America seven years ago, when he was 16, he has a brother in the Italian Army who was captured by the British in Egypt.

His mother and sisters live near Naples. I asked Joe if he had a funny feeling about fighting his own people and he said:

No, I guess we’ve got to fight somebody and it might as well be them as anybody else.

Campagnone has been a “cat” driver ever since he started working. He is so astonishingly adept at manipulating the big machine that groups of soldiers gather at the crater’s edge to admire and comment.

Joe has had one close shave. He was bulldozing a bypass around a blown bridge when the blade of his machine hit a mine. The explosion blew him off and stunned him, but he was not wounded. The driverless dozer continued to run and drove itself over a 50-foot cliff, and turned a somersault as it fell. It landed right side up with the engine still going.

Bathing not for Ernie

Our troops along the coast occasionally got a chance to bathe in the Mediterranean. Up in the mountains you’d see hundreds of soldiers, stark-naked, bathing in Sicilian horse troughs, or out of their steel helmets. The American soldier has a fundamental phobia about bodily cleanliness which is considered all nonsense by us philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 7, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle returned to the United States today for a well-earned rest after 14 months spent in Ireland, England, Africa and Sicily. The following column and several others still to be printed were written before he left Sicily.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
When the 45th Division went into reserve along the north coast of Sicily after several weeks of hard fighting, I moved on with the 3rd Division, which took up the ax and drove the enemy on to Messina.

I am still doing Engineers, and it was on my very first day with the 3rd that we hit the most difficult and spectacular engineering job of the Sicilian campaign.

You’ve doubtless noticed Point Calava on your maps. It is a great stub of rock that sticks out into the sea, forming a high ridge running back into the interior. The coast highway is tunneled through this big rock, and on either side of the tunnel the road sticks out like a shelf on the sheer rock wall.

Our Engineers figured the Germans would blow the tunnel entrance to seal it up. But they didn’t. They had an even better idea. They picked out a spot about 50 feet beyond the tunnel mouth and blew a hole 150 feet long in the road shelf. They blew it so deeply and thoroughly that if you dropped a rock into it, the rock would never stop rolling until it bounced into the sea a couple of hundred feet below.

We were beautifully bottlenecked. You couldn’t bypass the rock, for it dropped sheer into the sea. You couldn’t bypass over the mountain; that would take weeks. You couldn’t fill the hole, for it would keep sliding off into the water.

All you could do was bridge it, and that was a hell of a job. But bridge it they did, and in only 24 hours.

Infantry crawls across chasm

When the first Engineer officers went up to inspect the tunnel, I went with them. We had to leave the jeep at a blown bridge and walk the last four miles uphill. We went with an infantry battalion that was following the retreating Germans.

When we got there, we found the tunnel floor mined. But each spot where they’d dug into the hard rock floor left its telltale mark, so it was no job for the Engineers to uncover and unscrew the detonators of scores of mines. Then we went on through to the vast hole beyond, and the engineering officers began making their calculations.

As we did so, the regiment of infantry crawled across the chasm, one man at a time. You could just barely make it on foot by holding on to the rock juttings and practically crawling.

Another regiment went up over the ridge and took out after the evacuating enemy with only what weapons and provisions they could carry on their backs. Before another 24 hours, they’d be 20 miles ahead of us and in contact with the enemy, so getting this hole bridged and supplies and supporting guns to them was indeed a matter of life and death.

Room for only so many

It was around 2 p.m. when we got there and in two hours the little platform of highway at the crater mouth resembled a littered street in front of a burning building. Air hoses covered the ground, serpentined over each other. Three big air compressors were parked side by side, their engines cutting off and on in that erratically deliberate manner of air compressors, and jackhammers clattered their nerve-shattering din.

Bulldozers came to clear off the stone-blocked highway at the crater edge. Trucks, with long trailers bearing railroad irons and huge timbers, came and unloaded. Steel cable was brought up, and kegs of spikes, and all kinds of crowbars and sledges.

The thousands of vehicles of the division were halted some 10 miles back in order to keep the highway clear for the engineers. One platoon of men at a time worked in the hole. There was no use throwing in the whole company, for there was room for only so many.

At suppertime, hot rations were brought up by truck. The 3rd Division Engineers went on K ration at noon, but morning and evening they get hot food up to them, regardless of the job.

If you could see how they toll, you would know how important this hot food is. By dusk, the work was in full swing and half the men were stripped to the waist.

The night air of the Mediterranean was tropical. The moon came out at twilight and extended our light for a little while. The moon was new and pale, and transient, high-flying night clouds brushed it and scattered shadows down on us.

Then its frail light went out, and the blinding nightlong darkness settled over the insidious abyss. But the work never slowed nor halted throughout the night.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle has just arrived in the United States after more than 14 months with U.S. troops in the British Isles, Africa and Sicily. The following column was dispatched before he left Sicily. After a rest of about two months, Mr. Pyle will return to the war fronts, probably in the Pacific theater.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
We are writing these few days about the spectacular bridging of a practically bottomless hole blown in a northern Sicilian coast road by the Germans in their retreat toward Messina.

It took our engineers 24 hours to bridge this enormous gap, but the men of the 3rd Division didn’t just sit and twiddle their thumbs during that time.

The infantry was sent across on foot and continued after the Germans. Some supplies and guns were sent around the roadblock by boat, and even the engineers themselves continued on ahead by boat. They had discovered other craters blown in the road several miles ahead. These were smaller ones that could be filled in by a bulldozer except that you couldn’t get a bulldozer across that vast hole they were trying to bridge.

So, the engineers commandeered two little Sicilian fishing boats about twice the size of rowboats. They lashed them together, nailed planking across them, and ran the bulldozer onto this improvised barge. They tied an amphibious jeep in front of it, and went chugging around Point Calava at about one mile an hour.

‘Engineers’ homemade Navy’

As we looked down at them laboring along so slowly. Lt. Col. Leonard Bingham, commanding officer of the 3rd Division’s 10th Engineers, grinned and said:

There goes the engineers’ homemade Navy.

The real Navy during the night had carried forward supplies and guns in armed landing craft. These were the cause of a funny incident around midnight. Our engineers had drilled and laid blasting charges to blow off part of the rock wall that overhung the Point Calava crater.

When all was ready, everybody went back in the tunnel to get out of the way. When the blast went off, the whole mountain shook and you quivered with positive belief that the tunnel was coming down. The noise there in the silent night was shocking.

Now just as this happened, a small fleet of these naval craft was passing in the darkness, just offshore. The sudden blast alarmed them. They apparently thought they were being fired upon from the shore. For just as our men were returning to their work at the crater edge, there came ringing up from the dark water below, so clear it sounded like an execution order, the resounding naval command:

Prepare to return fire.

Boy, you should have seen our men scatter! They hit the ground and scampered back into the tunnel as though Stukas were diving on them. We don’t know to this day exactly what happened out there, but we do know the Navy never did fire.

During the night, Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott, commanding the 3rd Division, came up to see how the work was coming along. Bridging that hole was his main interest in life that night. He couldn’t help any, of course, but somehow, he couldn’t bear to leave. He stood around and talked to officers, and after a while he went off a few feet to one side and sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette.

Private orders general around

A moment later, a passing soldier saw the glow and leaned over and said, “Hey, gimme a light, will you?” The general did and the soldier never knew he had been ordering the general around.

Gen. Truscott, like many men of great action, has the ability to refresh himself by tiny catnaps of five or 10 minutes. So instead of going back to his command post and going to bed, he stretched out there against some rocks and dozed off. One of the working engineers came past, dragging some air hose. It got tangled up in the general’s feet. The tired soldier was annoyed, and he said crossly to the dark, anonymous figure on the ground:

If you’re not working, get the hell out of the way.

The general got up and moved farther back without saying a word.

The men worked on and on, and every one of the company officers stayed throughout the night, just to be there to make decisions when difficulties arose. But I got so sleepy I couldn’t stand it, and I caught a commuting truck back to the company camp and turned in. An hour before daylight I heard them rout out a platoon that had been resting.

They ate breakfast noisily, loaded into trucks, and were off just at dawn. A little later three truckloads of tired men pulled into camp, gobbled some breakfast, and fell into their blankets on the ground. The feverish attack on that vital highway obstruction had not lagged a moment during the whole night.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle has arrived in the United States for a well-earned rest after 14 months in Europe and Africa. This column and others to follow were written by Ernie and wirelessed home before he left Sicily.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
It was an hour after daylight when I returned to the German-blown highway crater which our 3rd Division engineers had been working on all night.

It really didn’t look as though they’d accomplished much, but an engineer’s eye would have seen that the groundwork was all laid. They had drilled and blasted two holes far down the jagged slope. These were to set upright timbers into so they wouldn’t slide downhill when weight was applied.

The far side of the crater had been blasted out and leveled off so it formed a road across about one-third of the hole. Small ledges had been jackhammered at each end of the crater and timbers bolted into them, forming abutments. Steel hooks had been embedded deep into the rock to hold wire cables.

At about 10 a.m., the huge uprights were slid down the bank, caught by a group of men clinging to the steep slope below, and their ends worked into the blasted holes. Similar heavy timbers were slowly and cautiously worked out from the bank until their tops rested on the uprights.

Wire-walking act

A half-naked soldier, doing practically a wire-walking act, edged out over the timber and bored a long hole down through two timbers with an air-driven bit. Then he hammered a steel rod into it, tying them together.

Then they slung steel cable from one end of the crater to the other, wrapped it around the upright stanchions and drew it tight with a winch mounted on a truck.

Now came the coolie scene as 20 shirtless, sweating soldiers to each of the long, spliced timbers carried and slid them out across the chasm, resting them on the two wooden spans just erected. They sagged in the middle, but still the cable beneath took most of the strain. Big stringers were bolted down, heavy flooring was carried on and nailed to the stringers.

First, Maj. Gen. Truscott arrived again and sat on a log talking with the engineering officers, waiting patiently. Around dusk of the day before, the engineers had told me they’d have jeeps across the crater by noon of the next day.

High noon on the nose

But even they will have had to admit it was pure coincidence that the first jeep rolled cautiously across the miracle bridge at high noon, to the very second.

In that first jeep was Gen. Truscott and his driver, facing a 200-foot tumble into the sea if the bridge gave way. The engineers had insisted they send a test jeep across first. But when he saw it was ready, the general just got in and went. It wasn’t done dramatically but it was a sort of dramatic thing. It showed that the “Old Man” had complete faith in his engineers.

Jeeps snaked across the rickety bridge behind the general while the engineers kept stations beneath the bridge to watch and measure the sag under each load. The bridge squeaked and bent as the jeeps crept over. But it held, and nothing else matters. When the vital spearhead of the division got across, traffic was halted again and the engineers were given three hours to strengthen the bridge for heavier traffic by inserting a third heavy upright in the middle.

They had built a jerry bridge, a comical bridge, a proud bridge, but above all the kind of bridge that wins wars. The general was mighty pleased.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle has returned to the United States for a much-needed rest after 14 months in Europe and Africa. This column was written before his departure from Sicily.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
I don’t know what it is that impels some men, either in peace or in wartime, to extend themselves beyond all expectation, or what holds other men back to do just as little as possible. In any group of soldiers, you’ll find both kinds.

The work of combat engineers usually comes in spurts, and it is so terribly vital when it does come, that the percentage of fast workers is probably higher than in most other branches.

On the Point Calava road crater job there were two men I couldn’t take my eyes off. They worked like demons. Both were corporals and had little to gain by their extraordinary labors, except maybe some slight future promotion. And I doubt that’s what drove them.

These two men were Gordon Uttech, of Merrill, Wisconsin, and Alvin Tolliver, of Alamosa, Colorado. Both were air-compressor operators and rock drillers. Uttech worked all night, and when the night shift was relieved for breakfast, he refused to go. He worked on throughout the day without sleep and in the final hours of the job, he went down under the frail bridge to check the sag and strain, as heavier and heavier vehicles passed over it.

Never cease, never rest

Tolliver, too, worked without ceasing, never resting, never even stopping to wipe off the sweat that made his stripped body look as though it were coated with olive oil. I never saw him stop once throughout the day. He seemed to work without instruction from anybody, knowing what jobs to do and doing them alone. He rasseled the great chattering jackhammers into the rock. He spread and rewound his air hose. He changed drills. He regulated his compressor. He drove eye-hooks into the rock, chopped down big planks to fit the rocky ledge he’d created.

I couldn’t help being proud of those men, who gave more than was asked.

Before ending this series on the engineers, I’d like to mention a few of the officers – for after all, the poor officers deserve some credit once in a while.

The whole battalion, known as the 10th Engineers of the 3rd Division, is commanded by Lt. Col. Leonard Bingham. He is a Regular Army man and therefore his home is wherever he is, but his wife lives in St. Paul, at 1480 Fairmount Ave., so he calls that home.

We usually picture Regular Army officers cut in a harsh and rigid cast, but that has not been my experience. Over here, I’ve found them to be as human as anybody else and the closer you get to the front, the finer they seem to be.

Col. Bingham, for instance, worked all night along with the rest, and he’s the one who has to take it from the division staff officers who want a hole bridged in two hours instead of 24. But he never got cross nor raised his voice.

Still digging for oil

The commander of the company I was with is Lt. Edwin Swift, of Rocky Ford, Colorado. Just before the war, he spent two years in Venezuela with Standard Oil. He hasn’t discovered oil over here yet, but some German-blown holes he’s filled were almost deep enough to hit oil.

Lt. Robert Springmeyer is from Provo, Utah. He’s an engineer by profession and a recent father. When he got the parental news, he somehow managed to buy a box of cigars, but he ran out of recipients when the box was about half gone. So now, after a long grueling job, he shaves, takes a helmet bath and then sits down against a tree and lights a big gift cigar in his own honor, the rascal.

Lt. Gilmore Reid is from 846 North Hamilton, Indianapolis. His dad runs the Purity Cone & Chip Company, which makes potato chips. Young Reid is an artist and also a railroad hobbyist. He once did a painting of a freight train at a small Midwestern station, and when he got word recently that it had been printed in color in a railroad magazine, he felt he’d practically reached the zenith of his heart’s desire.

That’s all on the Engineers. If you wake up some morning and find that the Germans have blown a big hole in your backyard, or boobytrapped your refrigerator, just give us a ring and we’ll be right over with a bulldozer and some dynamite, and fix you up.

HELP WANTED

The Army Corps of Engineers has asked the Press to publish the following request with Ernie Pyle’s column.

One hundred thousand men with construction skills are needed urgently for overseas service with the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army, to do the kind of work described by Ernie Pyle in this series on the work of the engineers.

Construction men who want to build and fight with the Army Engineers should go to any Army recruiting station or any office of the Corps of Engineers. In Pittsburgh, the Army recruiting station is in the Old Post Office Building and the Engineers Corps is on the 9th Floor, New Post Office.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle has returned to the United States for a much-needed rest after 14 months in Europe and Africa. This column was written before his departure from Sicily.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy – (by wireless)
The backbone of any Army company is the first sergeant. I know one who is a beaut.

His name is, of all things, Adelard Levesque. It’s pronounced “Levek” but the soldiers call him “Pop.” He’s 42 years old, but doesn’t look it.

Of all the thousands of men I’ve met in the Army, he comes the nearest to being the fictional version of the tough, competent, old-line first sergeant. Levesque was in the last war as a mere boy. He fought in France and stayed on with the Army of Occupation in Germany until 1921.

He isn’t a Regular Army man. He spent 20 years out in the big world between war, raising a family, making a living, and seeing and doing things. He has been a West Coast iron worker and practically anything else you can mention. He has four sons in the Army and, if I remember correctly, one daughter in the Navy.

Ruggedly handsome fellow

He calls Marysville, California, his home. He is a ruggedly handsome fellow with a black mustache, and clothes that are always neat even when dirty. His energy never runs down. He talks loud and continuously. He cusses fluently and orders everybody around, including officers.

At first my mouth hung open in amazement until gradually I began to catch the spirit of Levesque. He isn’t smart-alecky nor fresh. It’s just that he’s a natural-born center of any stage. He’s a leader, and he’s one of these gifted, practical men who can do anything under the sun, and usually do it better than the next fellow.

To top it all off, he speaks perfect French and is picking up Italian like a snowball. One of his commanders told me:

He talks too much and too big, but he can back up every word he says. I sure hope we never lose him.

I asked one enlisted man about him, since they are the ones his tongue falls on most heavily. The man said:

Hell, I don’t know what this company would do without him. Sure, he talks all the time, but we don’t pay any attention. Listen at him beatin’ his gums now. He musta got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

Uses excellent grammar

Actually, the sergeant isn’t so ferocious. He is widely informed, and his grammar is excellent. He can discuss politics as well as bulldozers. He is alert to your own conversation and to every little thing that goes on.

One day on a mountain road, he stopped our jeep and asked the driver some questions. As he walked back to his own jeep, he turned and ordered my driver:

Go get those maps. Send a bulldozer back up here. Bring five gallons of gas, and get your spare tire fixed. Goddammit, why don’t you take care of your vehicle?

“Spare tire?” the driver asked.

The sergeant roared:

Yes, goddammit. It’s flat.

He had discovered it merely by the slight pressure of his hand as he leaned against it while talking to us. Everything he does is like that.

If you could have been on hand during the last half-hour of work on the Point Calava bridge I’ve written about recently, you would have seen as fine a drama as ever you paid $8.80 a seat for in New York.

The bridge is almost finished. The climax of 24 hours of frenzied work has come. Everybody is through. Only one man can do the final touches of bracing and balancing. That man is sitting on the end of a beam way out there over the chasm, a hammer in his hand, his legs wrapped around the beam as though he were riding a bronco.

Puts on one-man show

The squirrel out there on the beam is, of course, Sgt. Levesque. He wears his steel helmet and his pack harness. He never takes it off, even though the day is sweltering.

His face is dirty and grave and sweating. He is in complete charge of all he surveys. On the opposite banks of the crater, two huge soldier audiences stand watching this noisily profane craftsman play out his role.

Their preoccupation is a tribute to his skill. I’ve never seen a more intent audience. It includes all ranks, from privates to generals.

The sergeant yells to the winch man on the bank:

Gimme some slack. Gimme some slack, goddammit. That’s enough – hold it. Throw me a sledge. Where the hell’s a spike, goddammit? Hasn’t anybody got a spike?

How does that look from the bank now, colonel? She about level? Okay, slack away. Watch that air hose. Let her clear down. Hey, you under there, watch yourself, goddammit.

Sgt. Levesque drives the final spike deeply with his sledge. He looks around at his work and finds it finished.

With an air of completion, he clambers to his feet and walks the narrow beam back to safety. You could almost sense the curtain going down, and I know everybody in the crowd had to stifle an impulse to cheer.

If somebody writes another What Price Glory? after this war I know who should play the leading role. Who? Why, Sgt. Levesque, goddammit, who do you suppose?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 13, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: Ernie Pyle is now in the United States. He will take a well-deserved rest before going on to new adventures. This is one of the columns he wrote before leaving Sicily last week.

Somewhere in Sicily, Italy –
As the Sicilian campaign drew to an end some weeks ago and we went into our rest bivouac, rumors by the score popped up out of thin air and swept like a forest fire through the troops.

No. 1 rumor in every outfit, of course, was that ships already were waiting to take them back to the States. That one was so old I don’t think half the men will believe it’s true when the war ends, and they actually do start back.

Other rumors had them staying in Sicily as occupation troops, going to England, going to China, and – ugly thought – going right on as the spearhead of the next invasion.

Some people worry about such rumors that constantly sweep our armies, but personally I think they are harmless. When the Army doesn’t have women, furloughs, ice cream, beer or clean clothes, it certainly has to have something to look forward to, even if only a faint hope for some kind of change that lies buried in an illogical rumor.

In fact, I don’t know how we would endure war without our rumors.

A few days after the Sicilian campaign ended, I went back to Palermo to get in touch with what we jokingly call “civilization.”

Lots of mosquitoes!

The Army had commandeered several hotels, and I was put up in a dungeon-like cell that overlooked an alley inhabited with a melee of Sicilians who screamed constantly and never cleaned up anything.

They apparently had the concession for raising and furnishing the hotel with mosquitoes, for they came floating up like smoke from that alley. I tried mosquito netting over my bed, and just before climbing in for my first repose off the ground in five weeks, I decided I had better inspect the lovely white sheets.

My haul was three bedbugs and a baby scorpion. Civilization, she is wonderful!

In the field, most of us had mosquito nets. The mosquitoes weren’t really so bad in the country, but there were just enough to keep us worried about malaria. We strung up nets over our bedrolls in scores of fashions – all the way from tying them to tree branches, to hanging them over Italian aluminum tent poles stuck in the ground.

The climate was ideal for our Sicilian campaign. The days were hot, but nothing approaching the summer heat of Kansas or Washington.

Down on the coast the nights were just right for sleeping with one blanket. Up in the mountains, it actually got cold at night. There wasn’t a drop of rain. The Army Engineers still thank Allah every hour for the dryness, because rains would have washed out their bypasses around the blown bridges and made the movement of our vehicles almost impossible.

Nobody uses tents

Because of the climate, nobody uses tents anymore for sleeping. You just throw your blankets down on the ground and sleep in the open. Until you sleep under the open skies, you never realize how many shooting stars there are at night.

And one night, there was a frightening red glow in the east that lasted only a couple of seconds. It colored the whole eastern heavens. It was neither flares nor gunfire, so it must have been Mt. Etna, boiling and snarling.

In the Sicilian villages we passed through, the local people would take little embroidered cushions out of their parlors and give them to our soldiers to sit on while resting. It was funny to march with a sweaty infantry company, and see grimy doughboys with pink and white lacy cushions tucked under their harness among grenades, shovels and canteens.

The hazelnut and almond season came in just as the campaign ended. Practically every camp had a hundred-pound sack of almonds lying on the ground where the soldiers could just sit and crack the nuts on rocks and gorge as though it were Christmas. The local people gave us hazelnuts as we passed through the towns. I saw one company in which nearly every man took off his steel helmet and filled it full of hazelnuts, and then marched on down the road with the heavily-laden hat held in the crook of his arm.

Hazelnuts, red wine, hardtack and thou. Or what am I thinking of?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 14, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: Ernie Pyle has returned to the United States after 15 months in Ireland, England, Africa and Sicily. Before taking a much-needed rest, Mr. Pyle has written a couple of homecoming columns.

Washington – (Sept. 11)
How should a war correspondent who has been away a long time begin his first column after he returns to his homeland?

Frankly, I don’t know. I can’t truthfully say “My, it’s wonderful to be back,” because I haven’t had a moment to sense whether it’s wonderful or not. In my first 48 hours in America, I got two hours’ sleep, said “no” 324 times, lost my pocketbook and caught a bad cold.

That pocketbook business, incidentally, is sort of disheartening to a guy who returns full of eagerness for his own people. The wallet contained about a hundred dollars and all my War Department credentials and private papers. It had my name and address in it at least a dozen times, but it has not yet been returned.

Whoever got it, if he had a crumb of decency, could certainly send back the papers even if he kept the money. Anybody who wouldn’t do that, it seems to me, would make a fine client for some oil-boilers. This thing happened in New York on my first day home. And here I’ve been ranting for a year about the lowly Arab!

Return is explained

Perhaps you who read this column wonder why I came home just at this special time, when events are boiling over in Italy.

Well, I might as well tell you truthfully. I knew, of course, that the Italian invasion was coming up, but I chose to skip it. I made that decision because I realized, in the middle of Sicily, that I had been too close to the war for too long.

I was fed up, and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too, and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you’re very apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired.

I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion. I couldn’t find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers.

When we fought through Sicily, it was to many of us like seeing the same movie for the fourth time. Battles differ from one another only in their physical environment – the emotions of fear and exhaustion and exaltation and hatred are about the same in all of them. Through repetition, I had worn clear down to the nub my ability to weight and describe. You can’t do a painting when your oils have turned to water.

There is, in the months and years ahead, still a lot of war to be written about. So I decided, all of a sudden one day in Sicily, that you who read and I who write would both benefit in the long run if I came home to refreshen my sagging brain and drooping frame. To put it bluntly, I just got too tired in the head. So here I am.

It has been 15 months since I left America. Things at home have changed a lot in that time, I’m sure. But at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much change.

When I rode in from the airport in New York, and checked into the hotel, everything was so perfectly natural that it truly seemed as though I had never been away at all. It was all so normal, so exactly like what it had been on other returns, that I couldn’t realize that now I was going through that beautiful hour that millions of our men overseas spend a good part of their waking hours yearning for and dreaming about. I do hope that when their hour comes, they’ll find themselves more capable of enthrallment by it.

Sugar bowl surprise

On the whole, the few little things that struck me the most were normal things that I had thought would be gone by now. I was surprised to find sugar bowls on the table. We have plenty of sugar in the Army overseas, but we had figured you were very short over here.

And I was astonished at finding the store windows of New York looking so full and so beautiful. I’d like to take a pocketful of money and just go on a spree, buying everything that was smart and pretty whether I really wanted it or not.

We’ve had nothing to spend money on for so long, over on the other side. The countries we’ve been in were so denuded; why, England was shorter of everything after one year of war than we are after nearly two.

The decline of traffic on the streets was noticeable; and how much nicer it is too, isn’t it? In fact, it’s too nice, and I propose to recreate some of our old congestion by getting out my own jalopy and dashing nonessentially around the streets for a month or so.

Well, anyway, on second thought, it’s wonderful to be home.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 15, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Washington –
There are a few little African items. I’d like to wind up before this column stops and goes on furlough.

For example, I never got around to telling you about Bob Hope when he was over there. I ran across Bob Hope and his crew in Sicily. In fact, for a couple of days, we did the highlights and shadows of one bombed Sicilian city in such hilarious conjunction that it looked as though I were becoming a member of the troupe.

There are certain dissenters to the policy of sending American entertainers overseas. Now and then you’ll hear some officer say:

After all, we’re over here to fight, not to be entertained. Don’t they know there’s a war on?

But it has been my experience that the most confirmed users of such phrases are usually a good many miles behind the lines. If it’s all possible to give the troops a little touch of America through these movie stars, then I’m all for it.

Bob Hope is one of the best that ever went to Africa. He has the right touch with soldiers. He can handle himself as well in a hospital full of suffering men as before a rough audience of 10,000 war-coarsened ones.

When Hope goes into a hospital, he’s liable to go up to a poor guy swathed in bandages, and instead of spreading out the old sympathy he will shake hands and say something such as:

Did you see my show this evening, or were you already sick?

Army can’t use them

At their regular show, Hope carefully explains the draft status of his troupe, so that the soldiers won’t think they’re draft dodgers. He says that his singer Jack Pepper has been classified 5-X, or “too fat to fight.” Hope himself is in Class 4-Z, meaning “Coward.” And their guitar player Tony Romano is Double S Double F, meaning “Single man with children.” Sure, it gets a laugh.

The Hope troupe, which included lovely Frances Langford as the fourth member, really found out about war when they were over there. Every time they’d stop in a city, there’d be a raid there that night. Actually, it got to look as though the Germans were deliberately after them.

They had the distinction, while in Sicily, of playing closer to the frontlines than any other entertainers, and playing to the biggest audiences. One afternoon they did their outdoor show for 19,000 men.

If this column appears in Hollywood, let it be taken as legal testimony in verification that no matter what narrow-escape story Bob tells when he gets back, it’s true.

I don’t know Gen. Eisenhower very well, because I was at the headquarters city very little during the African campaign, and had no occasion to bother him with my presence anyhow.

But I do admire him greatly, and I suppose just to salve my own vanity and to be able to say I’d seen him recently. I went in to say goodbye the day before I left Africa.

General approval

The general is an observant man. He both flattered me and put me at ease by congratulating me on some recent ones of these columns which he’d read in Stars & Stripes. He left his desk and sat in a big lounging chair in the corner while we talked.

I told him (and with sincerity) that I’d seen our Army grow in Africa from an insufficient, green, bumbling organization up to the point of perfection where now, unless he was able to tell me something wrong with it, I would have to go home without being able to criticize a thing over there.

He said if you could sit at his desk for 18 hours it would seem to you that everything was wrong with it. But I know that in that informal remark the general was tasking the mechanic’s view, and that actually he knows it’s a pretty well-oiled machine by now.

As I left his office, I said half-jokingly:

Is there anything you want me to tell the folks at home when I get there?

He grinned and said:

Oh, just tell them to stick together.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 16, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Washington –
John Steinbeck is a recent addition to our corps of war correspondents in the Mediterranean, as you know. He is now with the invasion forces somewhere along the Italian shores.

Some people are speaking of Steinbeck and me as competitors in the field of war columning. I’m flattered by the inference. But there is neither competition nor comparison. It would be belittling Steinbeck’s genius to compare him with any daily deadline-catcher.

I’ve always been a Steinbeck worshiper. For my money, he’s the greatest writer in the world. I think it one of literature’s losses that he never got to England during the Blitz, to record the moving spirit of that unrecapturable winter. But while he was missing that he was producing The Moon is Down, so maybe it was all right after all.

I’m glad that Steinbeck is at last with the wars. For he carries to them a delicate sympathy for mortal man’s transient nobilities and beastlinesses that I believe no other writer possesses.

Surely, we have no other writer so likely to catch on paper the inner things that most people don’t know about war – the pitiableness of bravery, the vulgarity, the grotesquely warped values, the childlike tenderness in all of us.

They meet in Africa

I met Steinbeck for the first time in Africa, just after returning from Sicily.

For some reason, I had always been afraid of Steinbeck, even while admiring him. Several times in California, I’d passed up the chance to meet him. And there in Africa, it was several days before I got up the courage to introduce myself.

And then, as so often happens in such cases, Steinbeck turned out to be human as hell, friendly, story-telly, laughy and gay. He even admits he’s awfully homesick, though he’s been gone only three months.

He is a big bruiser of a guy who belies the fine edge of sensitiveness within him. He goes around needing a haircut and with his sleeves rolled up, looking almost as unmilitary as I do.

Walk along the streets with him and you’ll find his mind constantly pierced and impressed by every little event or scene before him. Sometimes he’s serious and sometimes he’s funny and sometimes he’s sardonic. But it’s always himself; he isn’t one of those people who act.

He makes such remarks as:

There’s something about a jeep that brings out the worst in every driver.

And one day we were standing on the curb when a dirty, ragged Arab child ran up and asked for money.

Steinbeck looked down at him a long time with mock gravity, and then he said:

Do you mean to tell me that to your hopeless heritage of malnutrition, ignorance and internecine warfare, you now propose to add the degradation of charity?

The bewildered child turned and ran away.

Enjoys his own stories

If somebody tells a story Steinbeck will tell one too, and laugh at his own stories like the rest of us humans. Correspondent H. R. Knickerbocker has a good description of him. Knick says:

A lot of these celebrated writers, when you meet them, act as though they might let out some secret of their profession if they opened their mouths. But this guy Steinbeck, hell, he gives forth and keeps on giving.

I don’t know how long Steinbeck intends to stay abroad. I hope not too long. You don’t have to live with war forever to absorb its basic character. A few months will equip him with all the sight and understanding of war he needs for the production of a great book. The war is better for having him in it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (September 17, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Washington –
This is the last of these columns before we go on furlough. I’ve never looked forward to any experience in my life as I now look forward to a month of blank, utter rest.

I came across from Africa by Clipper. It was the third time I’d flown the Atlantic. Our trip was a special, unscheduled one, bringing a planeload of Navy men back from Africa for schooling and new assignments.

On the long stages of the homeward journey, the sailors would help the stewards carry out the dishes after out meals. And as the sailors slept in the chill air of the high altitudes, the stewards would carefully cover them with blankets. It was sort of touching.

There were no bombs, so we all slept on the floor or in our seats. Most of the sailors crossed the ocean and arrived in New York in their blue work dungarees, although some did change to whites just before we arrived.

Sent home to study

At one of our stops, a spectator asked:

What are these boys, survivors from a torpedoed ship?

Actually, none of them was. They were all skilled craftsmen being sent home to study a little and then go to sea again with new ships.

One of the pleasures of being back in America is that I have to make only one copy of this column. Over in Sicily, I was making seven copies of every one.

I’d send two copies by courier plane from Sicily back to the headquarters city – one copy for transmission, the other for the censor’s files. Then next day I’d send two duplicates, just in case the first sea got lost, which it sometimes did.

Those four copies were in abbreviated cable form. Then, in addition, I’d make three copies in full form – two to be sent to Stars & Stripes, which publishes this column, and one to keep for myself, just in case everything got lost.

Two of three times everything did get lost, but it was always so long afterward before I found it out that the columns weren’t any good by then anyhow.

During these few days that I’m writing here in Washington, I just write a page and walk over and hand it to my boss. I’m trying to work up to the day when I can get him to write it for me, and then I’ll have the literary situation reduced to the irreducible and utopian minimum – I won’t have to make any copies at all!

In Washington, I did something that millions of soldiers would give an eyetooth to do. I put on civilian clothes.

The only suit I have in the world is in London. But a year ago last spring, I’d left some bags in storage here in Washington, so I delved into them looking for odd pieces of civilian raiment. I found two old sportscoats with the elbows out, but no pants at all. Since I am not blessed with the right kind of legs to justify going around the streets of Washington without pants, I had to go out and buy a new pair.

Lingering at the mirror

Also, I splurged on a new hat and new pair of shoes. Now I am a sight for sore eyes. I’m so damn handsome I haven’t been able to tear myself away from the mirror.

My lost pocketbook has been returned. It came in the mail, from Wilmington, Delaware. IT was nicely wrapped in tissue paper, with brown paper around that, and neatly addressed in pen and ink.

All my credentials and private papers – my correspondent’s card, my inoculation list, my Short Snorter bills, my last war discharge, even a British one-pound note – were all there, all intact. But the hundred bucks in American money was gone.

I’m grateful beyond words for the return of the wallet and the credentials. And it’s comforting to know that our thieves are honest thieves. And what would I do with a hundred bucks if I had it?

That’s all, now, for quite a while. Take care of yourselves. And please don’t wake me up till October.

[adamsano]

Although I will miss Ernie’s columns from the European War Theater, I recognize his strong desire to break from the war to rest and recuperate. He has been a valuable part of the war effort and I expect to hear from him again in the future. Thank You, Ernie.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

This is the first of a new series of columns by Ernie Pyle, in which the famous war reporter tells his impressions and experiences at home. Mr. Pyle is about to push off on a new assignment to the war zones.

They say that when people lie in hospitals for two or three months, they have to learn to walk all over again when they finally get out of bed.

That’s the way I feel about column-writing after being away from it for nearly eight weeks. I feel as though I should take a correspondence course in how to start the first sentence. Even more so, I feel how nice it would be never to write a column again at all.

It really is hard to start back to the old grind. It’s hard to regiment yourself to daily, consecutive toil. It’s hard to force yourself away from home, with all its close ties and warm routines. But in these times, a fellow can’t just sit forever.

So, there’ll be a few “home” columns, and then there may be some days’ lapse while this pale chronicler again is being wafted across the oceans. And then, if all goes well, the old war columns will start once more.

Ernie dreads going back again

It is one of our popular heroic myths that anybody who comes back from the combat zone begins to itch after a few weeks, and finally gets so homesick for the front he can hardly stand it. In the movies, he starts back before his furlough is up.

Pap! And also tish! I’ve never hated to do anything as badly in my life as I hate to go back to the front. I dread it, and I’m afraid of it. But what can a guy do? I know millions of others who are reluctant, too, and they can’t even get home. So here we go.

The decision, it’s true, is my own. Nobody is forcing me to go back. Probably that’s the reason I feel so glum about it. Going back is all my own fault. I could kick myself.

During my stay at home, I’ve met a good many men back from overseas, men who really had been through the mill. I could sense in them the beginning of restlessness. Some even admitted they would like to go back overseas. But – and this is my point – I never met a single one who would ever go back into actual combat again if he could help it.

What returned soldiers actually do feel, after a while, is a sort of guilt at being here so comfortable and nice, when the guys you went through so much with are still over there taking it. You feel like a deserter and a heel – not so much to the war effort, but to your friends who are still over there freezing and getting shot at.

Few are really touched here

People at home all ask you about the same questions:

1. When will the war end? One guess is as good as another, if not better.

2. What has become of the 7th Army? I don’t know, and couldn’t tell if I did know.

3. What do you think about the home front? Honestly, it’s hard for me to say. I don’t truly feel that we’re very much at war here at home, but for some reason I can’t seem to get very exercised about it.

In home spirit, we aren’t in the war as deeply as some other countries, but I don’t see how we could be. With us so big and scattered, and the enemy so far away, the war is bound to seem academic to most of us. Only those who have received the dreaded telegram from the War Department feel it really.

Materially, it seems to me we hardly have been touched by war here at home. Okay, it’s hard to buy liquor, and women’s socks are awful, and you have to ride the bus, but so what? Our little annoying restrictions and shortages are so puny compared to those of other countries. We are still so rich and so well-fed and so plentiful.

I can’t see that it’s anybody’s fault, or even that it’s shameful, especially. We haven’t had anything yet, on a national scale, to burn and crucify us into anything greater than we were to begin with.

To most of us, the war doesn’t really hurt. The war is only a sense of oppression that hangs above our hearts. It’s an insecurity that we sense, not a pain that we feel. And I don’t see how it could be otherwise, unless we were fighting on our own doorsteps, in our own cities.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

This is the second in a short series of columns by Ernie Pyle about his impressions and experiences while enjoying a brief rest at home. Mr. Pyle soon will be back on the wat fronts to resume his epic reporting about our fighting men.

This is certainly an immodest kind of column for a fellow to be writing, but then of course I am an immodest fellow.

Which is just a way of introducing our thesis for today, entitled “What Does It Feel Like to Be a Celebrity?” The subject being, of all people, me in person!

I wouldn’t be writing like this except that people – all the way from Washington bellhops clear up to my own Aunt Mary on the farm – tell me that I am now a celebrity. So, let’s assume for purposes of no-argument that it’s true, and get on with our business of “what does it feel like to be one?”

Well, it feels pretty good. It has its ups and its downs. Every now and then you get sort of panicky. Once in a while you get resentful. Most of the time you just feel too rushed and a little bewildered, and kinda pleased.

I suppose the main thing is that 99 out of 100 of us are born with a certain amount of vanity, or pride, or egotism or whatever you want to call it. And when you hit a point where you’re recognized every time you step out, you can’t help but feel short of sparkly inside.

Furthermore, you get a lot of things by being “known” that you’d never get otherwise. I mean stores will get “shortage” articles from under the counter and sell them to you; railroad and airline men will give you a reservation after turning other people away; the plumber and the typewriter repairman, who aren’t accepting calls before a week from Saturday, will come immediately when you phone. All that is wonderful.

‘Blooey’ goes your private life

On the deeper side, I think anybody who tries as hard as I do to write a good column would be dishonest if he said the compliments of thousands of people meant nothing to him. The compliments of just one person mean a lot to me. When you finally get enough compliments to make you a celebrity, you feel hugely rewarded.

Celebrity, though, has its drawbacks. Your private life vanishes. The most sincere plaudits of people, when multiplied and piled too high, can become something obsessing you, claiming your life away from you.

Since returning to America two months ago, we have had hundreds and hundreds of offers, requests, demands, and even time-taking favors bestowed upon us. We have declined nearly everything proposed, yet the mere act of saying “No,” if you have to say it enough times, eventually consumes much of your time and most of your mind.

Under normal conditions, a man gives most of his time to his job and his family. That’s the way it should be.

But when the bolt of fame strikes, a guy better be mighty careful or he’s going to wind up giving most of his time to his new career of being a celebrity, and practically no time at all to his family and real friends. And the job which gave him prominence in the first place will be done merely at odd moments, with his mind on something else.

Ernie kids his famous self

I want to avoid that, and believe I can, but I think it takes a little practice. I’m not concerned that my head will be turned by too much attention; but I am concerned that lack of experience may make me fumble considerably before I learn the right method of achieving a balanced life again. Apparently, you just have to enlarge yourself inside, to make room for a little more than you’ve bargained for. It’s a harder nut to crack than you might think.

Actually, we have a lot of fun, my friends and me, kidding ourselves about this new fame.

For example, the day our book came out. The New York Times Book Review Section gave it the entire front page, and a wonderful review it was, too. So, after reading it through elatedly a couple of times, I thumbed through the rest of the section, and then said to my friend Lee Miller:

Why, the dirty so-and-so’s, they’ve also reviewed some other people’s books in this issue!

I think that on the whole I’m fairly safe from the perils of celebrity. For one thing, it came a little too late. I’m 43, and it doesn’t matter so much anymore.

My life has been pretty full and pretty pleasant; I’ve got most everything I ever wanted, but I’ve had some blows, too; I’ve contributed a little and received a great deal. Through the years, I did my job the best I could, and this is what happened. I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t ask for this, I could have done without it, but now that it’s here, I’m pretty sure I can take it.

As I said in the beginning, this is all kind of immodest. But it’s all kind of true, too.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 12, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle, before he again takes off for the war fronts, is writing a short series of columns on what he has seen, heard and felt at home. This is the third.

Clinton, Indiana –
My father is in the hospital for the first time in his life. He celebrated his 76th birthday there the other day.

He has been in the hospital for six weeks now, and has a month to go. He enjoys it more than anything that’s happened to him in years.

My father stumbled and fell at the foot of some steps in the basement of Rhoades’ store in Dana, the last of September. He didn’t break anything, but he was so badly bruised and wrenched that he couldn’t move, and Mr. Lunger had to carry him upstairs in his arms. Mr. Lunger said my dad felt just like a feather, for he’s a little fellow like me.

They put him in an ambulance and brought him to the Clinton Hospital, eight miles from our home near Dana. He couldn’t move at all for several days, he was so sore.

Then he got to having nightmares and staggering around in his room at night, so the surgeon put a splint on his hip to keep him in bed.

Splint becomes ‘flint’

It’s merely a safety precaution, for the doc says he might break his already weakened hipbone just be wandering around the room. My dad gets mixed up and calls the splint a “flint” when he tells about it.

The nurses all adore my dad, because he is mild and undemanding and extremely grateful for everything they do. As a consequence, they do more for him than anybody else. They joke with him and poke fun at him, and he likes that.

The night my dad had his night-long nightmare was quite an occasion. Actually, he was delirious, for part of the time he thought he was in Rockville, 25 miles away, and part o the time out in a tent in the hospital grounds (he must have been reading too many of my war stories, for there isn’t any tent in the hospital grounds).

At any rate, it was while he was “in the tent” that he had to get up. He got out of bed and couldn’t find the door to the bathroom. He got completely lost there in the dark. Then he felt the foot of the bed, and since he figured he was in a tent with no floor but the ground, what difference did it make? The nurses caught him at that, and put him back in bed. I don’t believe I’ve heard my father get as tickled in 40 years as when he recounts the story.

After a while, the nurses found him wandering around the room again., they asked him what he thought he was doing. He said why, he was just trying to find his way back to the hospital. He thought he was up at Dana, and it was time for him to be getting back.

After that, they put sideboards on his bed, so he couldn’t get out. But he thought some strange men in the room were after him, and in trying to get away he worked his legs out through the spaces in the sideboard, and got caught and all tangled up, and was hanging practically upside down when the nurses found him. After that, they put the “flint” on his hip, to keep him in bed for sure. He hasn’t had any nightmares since.

Keeps score on new babies

My father really seems to relish being in the hospital. He has a nice corner room where he can look out at the front lawn and see people come in. His general health is good, and he looks fine. The nurses give him a bath every morning, and one of them shaves him.

He says the hospital food is wonderful. They’ve really converted him down here. He has never eaten butter nor drunk coffee in his life; now he’s consuming both and loving it. He has about 10 visitors a day, and he keeps his door open all the time for fear he’ll miss something going on out in the hall.

The Clinton Hospital, like hospitals all over the county I’m told, is producing more babies than at any time in history. As one of the nurses said:

The Army is sure shelling out the babies.

My dad is quite struck with this wholesale addition to the population, and every morning asks the nurses the score for the night. He and the nurses make jokes about it. My dad is scared to death they’ll get mixed up and take him to the delivery room someday.

My dad is neither blind nor deaf, but he is a little of each. His eyes are so bad people have to read his letters to him, and you have to speak rather loud to him. Which leads to a little story.

The night I arrived, several members of our family met the train and we drove right to the hospital. The folks hung back so I could go ahead into the room alone.

So, I went in and my father held out his hand, and we talked together for about a minute, and then the rest of them came in. He greeted them all, and then asked if they had been to the depot yet. They said yes, and then my dad said:

Did Ernest come?

So, they all howled and said:

Who do you think you’ve been talking to the last few minutes?

He said:

Why, I thought it was Clyde Howard.

Clyde is the barber up at Dana. My dad was very chagrined.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 13, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

While preparing to return to the wear zones for a new series of columns about U.S. fighting men, Ernie Pyle has written several columns about his visit home. This is the fourth.

Dana, Indiana –
My Aunt Mary Bales stays alone on the farm while my father is in the hospital. She goes to bed about 9, but doesn’t sleep very well because she’s scared.

She doesn’t know what she’s scared of, unless it’s just the dark, and strange noises outdoors. I know how it is, for I was always afraid of darkness on the farm too.

Betty the dog sleeps on the front porch, and Aunt Mary depends on her to keep the “buggers” away. That’s an old Midwest term I’d completely forgotten. It means “spooks.”

Betty is the dog we got for my mother when she was alive. My mother called her Snooky but Aunt Mary called her Betty. Now that my mother is gone, it has become permanently Betty. It has never sounded quite right to me.

The dog is older now, and not quite so frisky. But every now and then she’ll get a spell, and if you keep yelling at her to urge her on, she’ll circle the house about 10 times at a dead run, as though she were chasing a rabbit.

We haven’t any livestock left except chickens, so the work isn’t hard for my Aunt Mary. But she never stops for a second, and never runs out of something to do. In a couple of years, she’ll be 80. You’d have a hard time making anybody believe it.

‘Only’ the labor lost

About three years ago, my folks built an outside chimney on the west side of the house, so they could put an oil stove in the west room. But something was wrong with it, and the stove never worked very well. On days of west winds, the fire would blow clear out.

They decided it was because the chimney was hollow clear to the ground, thus making a suction or something. So, a few days before I got home, Aunt Mary decided to fix it.

She spent an entire day carrying bucketfuls of dirt and small rocks in from the gravel pit, then getting up on a chair and pouring the stuff with a little shovel down through the stovepipe hole. It took from early morning till suppertime to get the hollow chimney filled up almost level with the flue.

We haven’t tried the stove since then, but as Aunt Mary says:

Maybe it won’t work, but it didn’t work the other way either, so all I could lose was a day’s work.

We have a new baseburner in the front room. Rather it isn’t new, but a second-hand one a neighbor sold us. It’s a great big thing, but it doesn’t seem to heat as well as our old one did. They say that’s the way when you get awfully used to something. And we were certainly used to that old baseburner. I forget whether my Aunt Mary said we’d had it for 24 years or 40 years. Anyhow the grate inside it finally burned out, and since you can’t buy a new grate nowadays, we had to drum up a second-hand stove.

I’m crazy about baseburners. They heat so evenly, and never go out. And as somebody said, there’s nothing warmer or cozier than to come home at night and see the soft gentle glow of the baseburner shining through the front window out of the dark room.

Postcard from ‘somebody good’

I think I’ve told you in years past about my father’s weekly postcard from San Diego. It started four or five years ago, before my mother died. Once a week there’d come a postcard from San Diego addressed to “Ernie Pyle’s Mother.” It never said anything except some little cheery greeting, but it never failed to come. We didn’t know who sent them.

Then after my mother died in the spring of 1941, the cards came addressed to “Ernie Pyle’s Father.” They’d still coming, one every week. One arrived during my visit. We must have more than 200 of them by now. We still don’t know who sends them. Just somebody good, that’s all we know.

My Aunt Mary is an emotional woman, and sentimental too, and very expressive. She is terribly proud of the fame that has come to this column, and tells me so in every letter. And she often says:

Oh, if your mother could only be here to see this success.

But my Aunt Mary is wrong. My mother wouldn’t care much about all this. She would only care whether her son was genuine, and modest, and kind. It she thought he was that, nothing in the world could make her half as proud. On our visits home before she died, she hardly ever spoke of our travels or work or the outside world at all.

And my father feels pretty much the same way. It’s the little things that count. I do think he’s sort of pleased at the way things have gone, but he never mentions it.

I brought him one of my books when I came past, and a little ivory kangaroo I’d bought in Khartoum. They’re both on the table beside his hospital bed. I notice he shows visitors the kangaroo first, and says proudly:

See what Ernest brought me from Egypt.

The book is dedicated to my father on the flyleaf, but he hasn’t noticed it yet, and I haven’t said anything to him about it.