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.