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.