Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 16, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is writing a short series of columns on his experiences and impressions at home while taking a rest from his arduous assignment in the war zones. He is about to shove off again for the battlefronts.

Washington –
Miss Malvina Thompson, who is Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal secretary, called up at 3:30 and said could I come over at 5 and have tea with Mrs. Roosevelt. Being a man of few words, I said, “Sure.”

I did add, however, that the only coat I had was an old gray one with the elbows out, and I mean out. Miss Thompson said they didn’t care, if I didn’t.

So, I washed my face and at 4:40 put on my Army mackinaw and walked around Lafayette Park for 20 minutes to get up my courage, and then plunged into the White House.

A butler took my coat, and an usher stood waiting to escort me into the waiting room. I shook hands with him out of excitement, which I suppose I shouldn’t have done.

I sat in a small red velvet room on the ground floor. Down the hall I could hear Mrs. Roosevelt laughing and talking with people, and then she was at my door, with the usher introducing us.

Mrs. Roosevelt is very, very happy-like. She said she wanted to see my coat because Miss Thompson had told her I would be ragged. So, I showed her my elbows and said I sure wasn’t fooling. I told her I thought it ridiculous to buy new clothes when I was out of uniform only a few weeks, and she said:

Perfectly ridiculous. I agree with you.

We went up to the second floor in an elevator which she operated herself, and into a pleasant west room which had bookcases and several small desk pictures of the President scattered around.

In a minute Miss Thompson joined us, and Mrs. Roosevelt very flatteringly quoted Miss Thompson as having said this was one tea she wanted to come to. I had supposed there was always a crowd at 5 o’clock tea at the White House, but there were only the three of us.

Ernie’s a little weakish

At first, I was a little weakish, and sweaty around the upper lip, and I kept wiping my face with a handkerchief. But Mrs. Roosevelt kept talking and I didn’t need to think much until after I had calmed down a little.

One of the first things she said was:

I wish you would do for the boys in the South Pacific what you’ve done for those in Africa.

I told her we had considered that as the next trip, but had finally come to the conclusion I had better stick to Europe awhile.

She said well maybe that was right, but she’d learned from her trip that the boys in the Pacific felt neglected. You have such a sense of Mrs. Roosevelt’s sincerity and genuine interest in people that I had to hold onto myself to keep from saying:

Okay, I’ve changed my plans. I’m going to the Pacific.

Mrs. Roosevelt spoke frequently of the President, either as Franklin, Mr. Roosevelt, or the President. I was amazed at the candid way in which she related what she had said to him about something, or what he had said to her.

A good part of her conversation was devoted to her feelings about preparing for the post-war period; how important it was that we have jobs all ready for the soldiers when they come back; how we must make factories more modern and homes more livable.

But the conversation wasn’t all on such matters. She spoke of Quent Reynolds and his broadcast, and of John Steinbeck, whom she has never met but admires.

In turn, I told her a couple of little war stories. Miss Thompson and I both smoked one cigarette after another. Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t smoke, but seemed to keep herself busy at the tea table. After it was over, I had the impression she had been pouring tea the whole hour, yet actually we only had one cup around.

Splutters into his tea

Finally, we got off onto column writing, and how long it takes each of us. Ordinarily Mrs. Roosevelt dictates hers at the end of the day, in about half an hour., I told her it took me half a day to write a column, and she said:

Yes, but you write a much better column than I do!

Since it is bad taste to dispute the opinion of the First Lady, I just spluttered into my tea.

I’d been worried about how I was to know when to leave. A couple of times I uncrossed my legs in small tentative rising gestures, but neither time did Mrs. Roosevelt or Miss Thompson respond to the cue, so I figured it was still all right.

Finally, I realized it was 10 minutes till 6, so I got up and said I must let them get to their other appointments. So, they got up, and Miss Thompson said goodbye, and Mrs. Roosevelt took me back down in the elevator.

She said this was the same elevator the Teddy Roosevelt kids used to ride their ponies up and down in, and that you could still see the hoof scars on it, and indeed it was very old and scuffed up.

We shook hands in the lobby, and I left with the feeling that I had been talking to a woman who is unique, who is remarkable, and who is all good. As a mutual friend said, you have a hard time to keep from loving her.

The colored butler held my old Army mackinaw, opened the door, and said a friendly goodbye. At the front gate, one of the policemen asked how soon I was going back overseas. After that, I walked off across Lafayette Park alone, in the chill dusk air, feeling light as a feather.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 17, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is writing a short series of columns on his experiences and impressions at home while taking a rest from his arduous assignment in the war zones. He is about to shove off again for the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
You don’t seem to feel the war so very much here in Albuquerque. There are plenty of reasons you should feel it; but I think maybe the bigness of the West, and the stoicism of the Indians, and the magnificence of the sky – somehow, it’s all so big it can sort of absorb tragedy, and tears, and sorrow.

Few communities have been harder hit by the war than Albuquerque. I mean really hit – in the heart. Nearly 400 Albuquerque boys vanished on Bataan. More than 1,300 from throughout this sparsely-populated state were lost with the Philippines.

News of the Albuquerque boys is scarce. Official death notices have been received on 113 of them. More than 300 are still listed as “missing.” Unquestionably many of the remainder are dead by now, from disease and starvation in the Jap prison camps.

The parents of these 1,300 boys feel that they were martyred but it’s too late to do anything about that now, so they don’t make an issue of it.

Form society to aid captives

Instead, they have formed an association, to do what they can – which isn’t much. It is called the Bataan Relief Organization. Their sole purpose is to try to get little relief shipments to their suffering children in the Jap camps.

It would, of course, please the families of this suffering group if our High Command were to direct the mass of American might immediately at the Philippines and at Japan’s heart. It is only human nature that they should feel that way.

Yet they realize the war is broader and greater than their own grief, so they do not attempt to lobby the War Department in any way. They do send an occasional delegate to Washington, but it’s to arrange for relief shipments to their boys, and nothing else.

The Spanish-American people of one community alone recently collected $38 in pennies, nickels and dimes to help send the organization’s president, Dr. V. H. Spensley, to Washington.

Around three-fourths of the 1,300 lost men are of Spanish or Indian blood. Many families have two sons gone with Bataan. The man who laid the brickwork for our house is among them. So is the boy called “Lightning” who used to deliver our groceries. Everywhere you go, you notice the inroads Bataan made upon Albuquerque.

The biggest shipment sent to the boys so far went on the Gripsholm in September. The first shipment of relief packages, sent more than a year ago, reached the prison camps in January, and unquestionably saved many lives.

The last shipment on the Gripsholm cost $27 a box. The contents were meticulously chosen. From $8 to $12 worth of every package was made up of vitamin and salt tablets. Each box also included 250 malted-milk tablets.

In addition to that went candy, antiseptic pencils, underwear, socks, sweaters, shoestrings, chewing gum and razors (they bought up every razor in Albuquerque). Everything that came in glass or tin cans was repacked. The state police helped pick up the packages from all over the state. At the last minute, some packages were specially flown to New York by TWA to catch the Gripsholm.

War bond goal doubled

The Relief Organization holds meetings, gives dances, and is very active. In January, it fostered a statewide “MacArthur Day.” It conducted a one-week war bond and stamp drive, with a quota of $300,000, and raised over $600,000.

The government gave it the right to name a Flying Fortress, so in July the Spirit of Bataan was christened at the Albuquerque Air Base.

The Bataan Relief Organization lists as its purpose:

To obtain immediate relief for all American soldiers held as Japanese prisoners of war, their release as quickly as possible, and their safe delivery home.

And as one of the officers adds:

…trying desperately to keep the heroic deeds of these almost forgotten heroes kindled in the hearts of their countrymen.

My old set in Albuquerque has ceased to exist. It wasn’t a set of young bucks either, but of mature, some of them middle-aged, men. The fun we used to have playing croquet, bowling, shooting at tin cans, and sometimes just going downtown and raising Cain – it will all have to wait for years now before it can ever be resumed. For there’s nobody around anymore.

Earl Mount, the big-hearted, hard-bitten contractor, is in the Aleutians; Arthur McCollum, always sad because he never got overseas in the last war, has made it in this one; Barney Livingstone, the newspaperman, is serving the Navy in Washington; Doc Connor has been freed from delivering babies and has gone into the Navy. There were five of us – and all five of us are gone. But when we all get back – Albuquerque, look out!

[NormanStewart]

@NormanStewart

bowling

Did someone say bowling?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 18, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is writing a short series of columns on his experiences and impressions at home while taking a rest from his arduous assignment in the war zones. He is about to shove off again for the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
During a part of my vacation here in Albuquerque my old friend Paige Cavanaugh came over from Inglewood, California, and spent his vacation.

Cavanaugh is a farm boy from Salem, Indiana, who was on the Mexican border when he was 16, was in France throughout the last war, somehow made his way through Indiana University in the early ‘20s, and then went to California, where he has been fretting about the weather for the last two decades.

Cavanaugh says it took him two years to get from private to PFC in the last war, and he’s afraid he couldn’t equal such a meteoric rise in this one, so he’s decided to sit it out.

Cavanaugh and I both like to work (at certain times and at certain things). So, while he was here, we mowed the lawn twice, spread fertilizer and iron sulphate on it, cleaned and adjusted all the nozzles on the sprinkler system, poisoned several an-tholes, split and stacked in the shed a ton of fireplace wood, and washed the dishes every day.

In addition to that Cavanaugh all alone spaded up every foot of ground of the big south lot, just in order to get the stickers turned under so the dog could run around without getting them in her feet.

‘Wanton destruction’ begins

When all that was done, we went to work on the woodshed, which is the catchall. Every house has a catchall, in some form or other. The woodshed was so stacked with junk you could hardly get the door open. I said:

I’ll fix that. We will use the principle of wanton destruction. We will pillage and we will burn.

So, Cavanaugh dug a great hole in the backyard. You could have put half a jeep in it. And then we began carrying stuff out of the woodshed and throwing it in that hole. When it was full, we set a match to it.

All afternoon we carried stuff out of the woodshed and stacked onto the fire. People up in the Jemez Mountains thought we were Indians, trying to signal a message. I don’t know what our neighbors thought, and don’t want to know.

But one thing on our destruction list stumped us. That was a big old-fashioned radio that weighed about 60 pounds and hadn’t played a note for years.

I was going to burn it, but Cavanaugh said no, it was too good to destroy, let’s give it to somebody. So, we looked up several radio repair shops, and started out.

I said:

I’ll bet we have trouble. People will think there’s some catch to giving a radio away, and will be suspicious.

And I was right. I went into a radio shop and explained the circumstances. I said:

We haven’t got room for it at our house. It’s old, but it’s big and has lots of parts in it you could use. There’s no catch to it. We just want to give it away.

The woman behind the counter gave me the old don’t-you-try-to-cheat-me-young-man look and said condescendingly:

Well, bring it in, we’ll look at it.

So, Cavanaugh lugged the huge thing in, almost breaking his back. The woman gave him the cold eye, and never so much as said thank you.

After we left, we got mad. As the afternoon wore on, we got madder. I said:

That guy will spend $5 fixing that thing up, and sell it for $75.

Cavanaugh said:

Sure he will. And they didn’t even say thank you. Let’s go and take it away from them.

Stuck with it again

And by jimmy we did. We just went back and said we’d changed our minds, and lugged the thing back to the car. Now we were stuck with it again.

On the way home we stopped to see our friend Sister Margaret Jane, who is Mother Superior at St. Joseph’s Hospital. We told her what we’d done, and Sister almost died laughing at our audacity. Then she said:

Well, if you don’t know what to do with it, give it to me. One of the workmen can fix it up, and we can sure use it around here.

So, we lugged it into the ambulance entrance of the hospital, heaved a great sigh of relief, and went on home. After a while the phone rang. It was Sister Margaret Jane. She was laughing so hard she could barely talk.

We asked:

What’s the matter?

She said:

Why, we’ve just plugged the radio in and it started right off playing. There wasn’t anything the matter with it at all!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 19, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In a short series of columns, Ernie Pyle is describing his experiences on the home front, before taking up soon another assignment to the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
When I get back to the front, nobody less than a brigadier general had better try to high-hat me. Not that anybody ever did, but I’m just issuing a warning.

For I am a colonel myself. Not just a colonel once; not just a colonel twice; but three times a colonel. Yep – a New Mexico colonel. Aide-de-camp on the staff of the Governor.

Governor Clyde Tingley started it, several years ago. Then along came Governor Johnny Miles, and he kept up the tradition by making me a colonel again. And now the newest Governor – Jack Dempsey – seeing no way out, has had to follow suit.

Personally, I like the idea. Maybe I wouldn’t like it if I weren’t a colonel, but since I am a colonel, I like it. You get special license plates saying “Staff Officer,” and the State Police leave you pretty much alone unless you kill somebody, and furthermore, the Governor takes you to lunch.

I was just getting onto the hang of how to use our ration points when my vacation was over, and now I have to leave. Rationing doesn’t seem to me so bad, once you get onto it.

Tea strainers and death

There are lots of little things you can’t buy, but honestly, I don’t see that anybody is in much pain from it, for example, it’s impossible to buy any kind of tea strainer in Albuquerque except a plastic one which soon goes to pieces. But then did you ever hear of anybody dying for lack of a tea strainer?

Our groceryman says that the point system, instead of running him out of business as he feared, has actually doubled his fruit and vegetable business.

The reason is that people buy fresh stuff all month and eat or can it, and then at the last of the coupon period, in order not to let coupons go unused, they come in and buy just as much canned stuff as they used to.

Which would seem to indicate that the theory behind rationing has slipped somewhere along the line.

One of the greatest pleasures of my vacation was to have a real auto again. After a year of jeep and truck riding, it was like a suburb of Heaven to get into our Pontiac convertible. I didn’t know whether it was going half the time or not, because you couldn’t hear the engine. And bumps, why, you’d think the country around Albuquerque was all made of velvet.

The car has to go back into storage, for unfortunately That Girl, being poetic rather than mechanical-minded, has never learned to drive. It’s a shame too, because now she either has to strike out across the mesa on foot, like a prospector, or else spend two-thirds of her not-too-lavish wages on taxicabs.

That Girl doesn’t like it

She doesn’t like this business of keeping the home fires burning while everybody else is away. But who does?

It is the ones who stay, like her, that really take the rap. For those behind life is lonely, routine, sometimes seemingly frustrated. But for us who go, new things always appear to be endured, there is excitement, and change, and misery to challenge you. There is so little time for mooning. I am glad that I can go instead of stay – if anybody has to go.

Our little house is still a gem. Now it has some Algerian rugs on the floor, Moroccan hassocks before the fireplace, Congo ivory on the mantle.

We can still see 80 miles from our front window, and the sunsets are still spellbinding. Quail still peck in our front yard. Roaming neighborhood dogs come and visit us. So do children. The postman always has something peasant to say.

We have two cups of hot tea very early in the morning, and we are sitting here drinking it when the first dawn comes over the Sandias. The sun soon warms the desert, and the day grows lazy for us who are home on furlough. Life seems too good here within these few square feet ever to bear going away.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 20, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is describing his impressions of the home front in a short series of columns before shoving off again on assignment to the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
Charlie Binkley is the man who put up our house. He was boss carpenter of the construction crew when we built, here on the edge of the mesa, three years ago.

He is a middle-aged Midwesterner – religious, friendly, deeply conscientious about his work. He still drops in to chat once in a while. He came past one recent Sunday morning.

As he walked across the yard, That Girl said to me:

Oh, I forgot to tell you. Charlie has lost both of his boys since you were here.

We shook hands and I said I was sorry about the boys, Charlie sat down and said yes it was pretty tough, and left an awful void. Your only two children gone within a few months of each other – one from an operation, one in a crash in New Guinea. Charlie said:

The Missus is about to go crazy.

There isn’t any construction anymore, so Charlie works at the air base. He is still kind to people, and drives around dropping in here and there to see the friends who live in the scores of houses he built, checking up on little things they need done, making conversation and trying to keep from being too lonesome and blank.

There’s nothing else to do

Charlie Binkley is able to take his terrible double-blow – just as most of the rest of us would take it – because there’s nothing else you can do but take it.

Out meat-man at Campbell’s grocery for years was “Mr. Mac.” We were good friends and he was always pleasant and helpful. Yet during all those years I never knew what his name actually was.

Then one day while I was at home, the phone rang, and it was “Mr. Mac” on the wire. He said:

I’m in the Navy now, just home on a few days’ furlough. I’d like to come down and swap yarns with you.

Pretty soon he came walking down the street. He is nearly 50. He had on his shipboard working clothes of Navy dungaree and jacket. The little white hat cocked on the back of the head of a middle-aged man made him look odd. His name is Rupert H. McHarney.

He said:

I’m a watertender first class. That seems a funny thing for a butcher to be. But that’s what I was in the last war, and it all came back after a few weeks.

I asked:

How did you come to go in at your age?

He said:

Well, I was in the last war and just figured we started a job that we didn’t get finished. My boy is an ensign in naval aviation, and we were fixed so I could leave. My only worry was how my mother would take it. She’s pretty old and I was afraid she would object. But when I wrote her, she wrote back and said you do whatever you feel you have to do. So, I went in.

“Mr. Mac” has been at sea constantly for a year. He has seen action in the Pacific. He can have a shore job any time, but he likes it at sea, and he takes a certain pride in holding up his end of the work among younger men. He says the only trouble he’s had was a spell of swollen ankles from walking the hard decks.

The young and the old

We’ll be an odd mixture after the war when we come back to Albuquerque: Strange young men who have never been away; strange old men who dashed out and fought at the first alarm.

In Tunisia last winter, I met and wrote about a young lieutenant in the Paratroopers named Jack Pogue. He was adjutant to the famous Col. Edson Raff. He turned out to be a fellow Nex Mexican, from Estancia Valley just over the mountains from Albuquerque.

A few days after I got home, Jack’s mother called up, she said she was teaching school at Moriarty; teaching for the first time in 15 years. She called because she just wanted to talk to somebody who’d seen Jack, even though it had been a long time.

A month went by, and she was in the city and called again, just to tell me she’d had three letters from Jack and that he was fine.

Then that same evening the phone ring again. The person at the other end was sobbing violently. Through the chokes I made out the voice of Mrs. Pogue. I knew what would be coming next, as soon as she could speak. But it was a little different from what I thought.

She sobbed:

I’ve just got the word, and had to call you – Jack’s a German prisoner.

So, I began talking fast. I said:

Well, that’s okay, Mrs. Pogue. That means he’s all right. The Germans are ethical about prisoners. He’s safe, and out of danger now, and that means he’ll come back to you after the war.

The choked answer that came back was startling – and thrilling too.

Yes, but that isn’t what Jack wanted. He wanted to FIGHT!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 22, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is describing his impressions of the home front is a short series of columns before shoving off again on assignment to the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
One of the few souvenirs I brought back from the Mediterranean was a snappy German infantry cap I’d picked up in Sicily. It just happened to fit me perfectly.

So, I took to wearing it when I drove That Girl to work every day at Kirtland Field, the big Army air base here, and thought it might cause some amusement by befuddling the sentries at the gate. But nobody paid any attention to it; in fact, I guess nobody knew what it was. I was disappointed.

That went on for a couple of weeks, and then one evening as I was on the way in, the sentry, instead of smiling and waving me through as usual, said very severely:

Pull over to the side and park, sir.

I protested I’d be late to pick up That Girl, but he repeated his order, and I’ve been around the Army enough to know an order when I hear one. He took my pass, went into the booth, and had a long conversation on the telephone. When he came out, he said, “Come with me, sir.” I knew the sentry and he’d always been friendly, but now he was so official and firm he had me scared stiff.

We started for the provost marshal’s office. I got so weak I could hardly walk. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done, but there was no doubt in my mind that whatever crime I’d committed was plenty bad.

Just getting acquainted

We went into the big provost marshal’s building and were ushered right on through to the provost’s office, in a manner which indicated that my execution was to be immediate. And there sat the provost, laughing fit to kill.

He said:

I understand you’ve been going in and out of here wearing a German cap.

I said:

I sure have, but it took somebody around here a hell of a long time to recognize it.

The provost had authorized my pass originally, but we had never met. This was just his way of getting acquainted.

So, we all laughed, the sentry gave my pass back, a little of my strength returned, and I got back in the car swearing to wear only caps made in America, preferably by Indians, after this.

Provosts are good guys

I like provost marshals. I don’t know whether it’s because they’re usually nice guys, or whether it’s just because it’s a good idea to know them. But I do think I’m friends with the provost of every division and corps I ever served with. And while in Washington I got invited to lunch one day with the chief provost of all provosts – Maj. Gen. Allen Gullion.

I’ve had some nice experiences with provosts. For example, in Tunisia and Sicily there was a regulation that everybody had to wear his steel helmet and leggings at all times.

Now the steel helmet makes me top-heavy, and hurts my neck, and the wind blows through it and I can’t hear, so I never wear mine unless actually under fire. As for the leggings, I can’t stand them except in very cold weather.

Faces fines of $120

Just before the end of Sicily, while I was riding along gaily in a jeep, I was stopped and ticketed three times in one day for not wearing my helmet and leggings. The MP’s ticket you just like traffic cops, and the tickets go through channels to headquarters, and you’re called up and fined. Each count against me called for a $40 fine, which would have socked me $120 for my day’s misdemeanors.

I didn’t think anything about it for a couple of days, and then one evening an Army messenger rode up to our little camp in the woods, handed me an official-looking envelope, and rode off. The envelope was from the provost marshal.

My heart sank. I could hardly bear to open the envelope. Of course, I knew the provost marshal, but you never can tell.

Inside the envelope were the official conviction papers. The charges were typed out, and the MP’s tickets were clipped to it. And then I saw the sentence, and almost fainted with relief. It said:

You are hereby sentenced to recite 10 times a night for the next 30 nights, as follows:

I am a good soldier, and will try to conduct myself as such by wearing my helmet and leggings at all times.

JOHN HURLEY
Major – Provost Marshal

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 23, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is describing his impressions of the home front in a short series of columns before shoving off again on assignment to the battlefronts.

Albuquerque, New Mexico –
I know another provost marshal story (or are you tired?). Just after Sicily was all over, we correspondents straggled back into Palermo. On the first night there, correspondent Chris Cunningham and photographer Chuck Corte parked their jeep on the street against regulations, and the MPs impounded it.

They spent all next day trying to get it back. They made innumerable phone calls, but the Military Police would have none of them. The only thing left to do was go plead with the provost marshal himself.

Several officers told them:

You’re just wasting your time. The colonel is a tough egg. You won’t get your jeep back, and he’ll probably throw you out of the office besides.

But they had to be have the jeep, so they decided to brave the colonel in his den. They asked if I would go along, just to bolster up their courage.

So, we marched around to the provost’s office. A long line of Army culprits was standing before the colonel’s desk, and it took about an hour for us to work up to him.

For once I had plenty of courage, as I wasn’t involved in any way, and was merely a spectator, you might say. But Chuck and Chris were having the shakes.

Finally, the colonel looked up at us, as if to say “Well, what, you swine?” And then he got up, came around the desk, and headed straight for me, with his hand out and a big smile on his face. He said:

Hello. Haven’t seen you since we met at Dakar last spring.

We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. “What trouble are you in?” he asked. I said:

Oh, I’m personally innocent of all things, but I’ve taken up associating with criminals.

I introduced the other boys and they explained their mess.

“What’s the number of your keep?” he asked. They told him.

The colonel said:

Sergeant, get this jeep out of the lot and bring it around.

And that was that. The provost in question was Claude O. Burch from Petersburg, Indiana, and it turned out he knew a Petersburg boy I used to go to school with named “Leaky” Harris. He’s been in the Army for 27 years, and he’s a nice guy despite the warnings we had. We all sat down on his desk and talked for 15 minutes.

Still wears G.I. socks

Most of the time here at home I have kept on wearing my heavy gray G.I. socks, because I’ve got used to them and they are comfortable. But they aren’t any bargain to look at.

Which takes us back to a remark a passenger made on the Clipper coming home a couple of months ago. My socks are always tumbled halfway down to my ankles, because they are too high and heavy to wear garters with, so I just let them sprawl.

A naval lieutenant had been sitting for three days across the aisle from me, where he couldn’t help but stare at my socks. Finally, on the third afternoon, when we’d all had time to get friendly and fresh with each other, he said:

You know, I’ve spent the whole trip trying to figure it out. Are those G.I. socks going up, or long underwear coming down?

A friend in the 1st Infantry Division has written to me of a post-war reunion plan that he and some of his fellow officers have. A code has been worked out, so they’ll all know when and where to meet.

Membership in the reunion group will be open only to men who have been officers in the 1st Quartermaster Company of the 1st Infantry Division at any time between March 17, 1942, and the end of the war.

The reunion is to be held on the first 17th of March after the war ends. It is to be at 1700 hours (5:00 p.m.) on the 17th floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, and headquarters will be in Room 1717.

Maj. Harlan W. Hendrick wrote me about it. A few people who have associated with the 1st Division have been invited as guests. I think the best plan would be for me to go up to Room 1717 right now, and just wait for them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (November 24, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is on his way overseas again. His column will be resumed shortly after he arrives at an unannounced point somewhere in the Mediterranean Theater.

Washington –
When I came east from New Mexico, I thought it might be nice to ride the train for a change, since I’d traveled only by auto, air and water for the past six years.

When I went to the depot, I found that getting on a train these days is about as hard as getting on a plane. They had orders not to make any reservations out of Albuquerque for two months. But the agent did have one lone space which he’d been hoarding – it was for a bedroom on the Santa Fe Chief. I decided to take it.

In the first place, I’d never had anything so flossy on a train as a bedroom. That’s really getting classy, and I enjoy a shot of class once in a while to break the monotony. Further, I thought a private bedroom would be just the thing for me to do some writing during the 27-hour journey to Chicago.

The train was fine and the bedroom was fine. Nothing was the railroad’s fault. But the next time I take a trip, I’m going to ride the rods. I’m apparently just not the train-bedroom type. For at night, I couldn’t sleep because of the air-conditioning, and in the daytime, I got so lonesome, all shut in there by myself, that I sat in the club car all the time. On my next splurge of railroad class, I guess I’d better hire a whole car and ask a few friends to come along.

Barber’s last haircut is silent

I had one experience on the train I hadn’t counted on. I got a haircut. Yep, right on the train, while crossing Illinois at 70 miles an hour. The Chief has practically everything.

The barber was a sleight, grayish man of upper middle age. He never said a word during the whole operation. And then just as he finished, he said:

You’ve had the distinction, slight as it is, of getting my last haircut in 55 years of barbering!

Now that is a distinction, so I asked for the details. It seems he was retiring from the railroad forever when we hit Chicago a few minutes later. He was going to give away all his barber tools, keeping only one razor, a hone and a strop for himself.

The barber’s name is William F. Obermeyer, and his home is in Los Angeles. He is 69 and therefore has been barbering since he was 14. He has spent 41 of those 55 years on the railroad, 30 of them with the Santa Fe.

He didn’t seem excited about the impending end of such a long career, but I guess he was, for several other passengers said he told them about it, too.

Oregon man shows appreciation

This next item falls under the “virtue is its own reward” department.

Do you remember last fall in Sicily when I was writing about the 3rd Division’s engineers repairing the Point Calava demolition, and how two soldiers especially worked on and one with more fervor and sincerity than anybody need expect of them?

Well, now comes a letter from a man in Hillsboro, Oregon, wanting to know how he could get in touch with them so he could send them $100 apiece, just out of gratitude.

His letter says:

Such men are not common, and I want to show them that I appreciate such actions and perseverance.

I’m not giving the man’s name, because I haven’t time to write and fine out whether he would object to being named. Then the two boys were Cpls. Gordon Uttach of Merrill, Wisconsin, and Alvin Tolliver of Alamosa, Colorado. I hope the Samaritan finds them, and that they enjoy their $100.

Ernie expresses his thanks

We’ve had some amusing instances of how sketchily people read these days.

While I was on vacation, some of the papers reprinted old columns starting back as far as eight years ago. In one month, those reprint columns roamed all the way from Alaska to Argentina. Each one carried an editor’s note above it, and told what year the column was written.

Yet we’ve had dozens of remarks indicating that readers hadn’t read the editor’s noted at all, and thought I was literally jumping from Dutch Harbor to Pearl Harbor to French Guiana overnight. There was even one advertising agency man in New York who, after reading the reprint of a 1938 Guatemala column, called up Washington and wanted to know how soon I’d be back from Central America.

---

That’s all for now. There will be a pause in the columns while I get to where I’m going. Take care of yourselves here in America, and thanks for being so nice to me during my two-month respite from war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 4, 1943)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 6, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (Dec. 6, by wireless)
We flew two nights and three days and then we were here. It was my fourth flight across the Atlantic. I’ve got to the point where I imagine I can see tracks in the sky from my previous crossings.

My good luck held out for the whole trip and we never had a single air bump worth mentioning in 8,000 miles. We came in Army planes all the way – some of them big, comfortable stratoliners, some of them workhorse planes with tin bucket seats. Only three of us who left the original airports in the States came clear through together.

At various times during our trip, we had as fellow passengers an American general, a Chinese major, some French fliers, a Yugoslavian and a half-dozen American girls going to far-scattered places to work as government secretaries.

Everybody thought the girls were a show troupe, and at one stop the commanding colonel was going to take them off the plane and make them give a show for his troops.

Initiated by Chinese major

The girls were good travelers and didn’t seem to mind the discomforts of flying all day and all night without rest. As soon as the plane would get off the ground, they would take off their shoes. On one of the big planes, the pilots took them up one by one and gave them the thrill of sitting in the pilot’s seat.

When we crossed the equator, the Chinese major, who was quite a cutup, got a tumbler of water and sprinkled the heads of everybody who never crossed before. Also, first-timers got themselves initiated into the Shortsnorters and started collecting bills from every country.

There were some fantastic collections of Shortsnorter bills along the ferry route. I even saw one with both Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s names on it. People paste their bills together with Scotch tape and as the string gets longer and longer, they make a roll out of it. Last spring, I saw a role in Cairo 35 feet long, but they say Adolph Menjou on a recent African trip build up one to 52 feet. Being a non-hobbyist, I hardly ever ask anybody to sign mine, but on the way over I’m sure I must have signed 500 for other people.

The man from Nebraska

In the five-day trip, we spent three nights on the ground and flew all night on two nights. At one midnight stop, American Army hostesses met us, took us to their quarters for a 15-minute refresher and some Cuba libres. At another stop in the hot tropics we were given breakfast by Maj. Bill Marsh, who asked me to put in the paper that at last I’d met somebody in the Army from Nebraska, and not only from Nebraska but Tekamah, Nebraska.

Believe it or not, Maj. Marsh couldn’t produce any proof there really is such a place, but he did have an honest face.

At another field, the starter on one of our motors broke down so they just wrapped a rope tightly around the propeller hub, tied the loose end of the rope to a jeep and then started the jeep driving away at right angles to the plane thus spinning the motor. Just the old spool-and-string principle on a larger scale. Worked beautifully every time, too.

A day’s quota of bombers

The Army’s vast ferry route to Africa is now beautifully organized. It runs with almost the precision of commercial airlines. Much of the scheduled flying is actually done by airlines on contract to the government while flying along side by side is a great flow of combat planes being taken to the front by their youthful Air Corps crews.

For security reasons, I can’t tell you the route we took or name any of the places along the way although it is already fairly well known to the public. You’d be impressed if you could see the hordes of bombers along the way. At one tropical airdrome, the field was covered by big planes and I asked the commandant why they needed so many bombers stationed there.

He said:

Oh, they’re not stationed here. They just came in this morning and are about ready to leave. That’s just our daily quota going through the front.

He sleeps to Africa

Of my four ocean crossings, this last one was the simplest and quickest. We made the actual overwater hop in a converted bomber and in only 10 hours, crossing against headwinds.

We passengers sat in old-fashioned hard seats like the first airlines used to have. The plane was cold and draughty so we all wrapped up in blankets. The front cabin was stacked full of cargo. There was a small toilet in the tail, right out in the open. Since there were two girls aboard, nobody ever went to the toilet.

It was nighttime when we took off. The dispatcher gave us a lecture on what to do in case we crashed at sea and made us put on Mae West lifejackets which we had to wear for 10 minutes after the takeoff. As soon as the 10 minutes were up, I took off mine and went sound asleep. When I awakened, we were only half an hour from Africa. That’s the way to cross the ocean.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 7, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
All along the endless American ferry network that stretches in a dozen entwining lines around the globe one main worry obsesses our troops. And that is they feel they are not doing enough to help win the war.

At these posts, so far from enemy action, life becomes pleasantly routine and monotonous, and finally a sense of frustration sets in. the men live in usually excellent permanent quarters. They have good food and all the physical comforts – and nothing ever happens. Gradually they get a feeling of backwash.

They’re ashamed of fighting the war so comfortably and so many thousands of miles from danger. they are worrying about facing the homefolks after the war, and saying they served throughout the war in a place where they bathed every day, slept on mattresses and never missed a meal.

It’s orders, sir!

There’s a saying all along the route of the Air Transport Command which expresses their feelings about being where they are.

The saying goes:

Take down your service flag, mother, your boy is in the ATC.

In one camp the boys felt this so keenly that the editor of the camp newspaper asked me if I could say something to sort of reassure them that they really were contributing their share. And I could say so honestly. Manning these fields that hand our flow of bombers and fighters on toward the combat zone is just as vital as manning a frontline field. Without it, the planes would never get there.

Soldiers are sent; they aren’t asked. It’s not these boys’ choice or fault they happen to be where they are. And as for what the people at home think, I’ve found they don’t really distinguish much between frontline and some remote area. I’ve known soldiers stationed for a year in Morocco, nearly a thousand miles from the fighting, whose parents and friends thought they were bleeding and dying.

A quick and sure cure

Just so long as you’re overseas the folks at home give you all the credit. Somebody has to man these remote outposts, and it’s just the fall of the cards that brought some soldiers there instead of into the frontlines. I see nothing shameful about living well as long as you’re not depriving somebody else. I see no virtue in suffering unless it helps somebody else.

Now and then you get a groucher who complains bitterly about the place he is, how tough life is there and how he’s like to be back home.

One officer along the way said when he got a fellow like that, he just assigned him a job unloading hospital planes bringing wounded back from Africa, and the fellow was soon cured.

Other boys themselves usually shut up a groucher pretty quickly for it is their consensus that fighting monotony and sometimes malaria is still better than fighting bullets and bombs. And that although they’d rather be at the front, they’re actually mighty lucky to be where they are and should be grateful even though a little ashamed.

The mere fact that this worry and sense of shame is so universal throughout the ferry fields seems to be unarguable proof that the average American soldier is still an alright guy.

A heritage of the war

Actually, in many parts of the world where our troops are stationed, malaria is almost as great an enemy as the Germans or Japs. The wounded will not be the only aftermath of the war.

Scores of thousands of our men will return home to be sick for years from disease picked up despite all medical precautions in these steaming, filthy corners of the globe.

On this trip we came into one field in the American tropics at the tail end of a malaria scourge. For some reason it has been much worse this fall than the previous year. Fifty-five percent of the personnel had been down with malaria. Tropical Africa is swarming with medical sanitary specialists sent over from America to see it doesn’t happen again next year.

They’d rather speed peace

On the Central African coast, soldiers who have been overseas a year are now getting 10-day furloughs. They are flown to rest camps in the north. It isn’t so much that they need rest as a change from the monotony. The rest camps are lovely places, but dull.

What the average American soldier wants on leave is female companionship and a little bottled stimulation, both of which are very limited in these parts. I’ve heard lots of soldiers overseas say they would rather not have a furlough or go to a rest camp if by not going they could get home that much sooner.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
The government is scattering a lot of American girls out over the world now to work in government offices.

They are not WACs, but civilians. Their destinations read like an itinerary of Marco Polo. They wear civilian clothes, and everywhere they stop as they fly about the work they create a warmth and a glow among the women-starved men out in the outposts.

We had five girls with us a good part of the way from America to Africa. At all the stops the soldiers, and officers too, would stand and stare, and you could sense them sort of smiling to themselves. Often, they’d wave or whistle, not in a smart-alecky fashion, but just hungry and friendly-like. And the girls would wave back.

A time or two, when we went into Officers’ Clubs at the camps, the girls would be surrounded so quickly and deeply you completely lost sight of them.

Our men on foreign soil miss desperately the companionship of white women. The mere sight of one thrills them. One day in a small South American city I was walking along the crowded sidewalks with two of our female passengers when a couple of soldiers tagged along behind us for blocks and kept saying to me in a friendly fashion:

Congratulations, soldier, you lucky dog. How we envy you.

And at one field, I heard a young officer say to one passenger:

Lady, just stand still a minute and let me stare at you.

Yes, a man without a woman is a sorry spectacle.

Perfect partnership

All the way from America to Algiers I traveled with a young lady from Los Angeles named Mrs. Peggy Pollard. In addition to a pleasant traveling companionship, we both soon saw the advantage of forming ourselves into a sort of team, for we had the perfect combination. I had friends all along the route from previous trips, and Mrs. Pollard was beautiful.

Brother, between the two of us, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t get. If I got invited somewhere, I’d suggest Mrs. Pollard be invited, too. She worked the same principle in reverse. Thus, we traveled over three continents and one ocean like a pair of Oriental potentates. We bask in the rankest sort of special privilege.

We got better quarters than other passengers, we rode special cars instead of buses, we were taken on sightseeing trips and to cocktail parties. People paid us lavish and luxurious attention. I think it’s a great tribute to the tolerance of humankind that the other passengers didn’t get sore at us.

I don’t know what I’m going to do without Mrs. Pollard when I got on from Algiers. If I could only take her to the front with me the soldiers would undoubtedly lay a red carpet through the mud for us. But it’s all over now so goodbye, dear Mrs. Pollard.

Battle of the Hotels

At one big field in Northwest Africa, we fell into the hospitable hands of two very engaging officers – Maj. Charlie Moore of Inglewood, New Jersey, and Capt. David Miller of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. They room together in a hotel where many officers of the field are billeted and it is probably the finest hotel in Africa.

Living there is pretty close to what living would be like in a very fine resort hotel back home. Both these officers have lived in hotels ever since coming to Africa a year ago. They are both doing important vital work, yet they deride and bemoan themselves for the comfort in which they live although neither asked for it, nor was responsible for it.

They call their war, “The Battle of the Hotels.” Both would much rather be a thousand miles closer to the front, in a barn.

Capt. Miller is an unusual character. He is gray-haired, 52, and has a wife and three teenage children, yet when the war came along, he would up everything and went in – and has never been out of a hotel. In the last war, he was overseas 22 months and never once in a hotel. He said:

I liked the last one better.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
We flew again over the Sahara. The desert air for a thousand feet above the ground was thick with blowing sand and you could not see the earth from your plane window.

At one place, we came down through a veil of sand to land on the outpost of a field that was isolated, bare and remote from anything in the world.

The passengers said as we got out for a few minutes’ stretch:

What an awful place to have to serve.

On the field, I got to talking to one of the soldiers, Pvt. Bob Goldy of St. Albans, Long Island, and asked how long he’d been there. He said, “Five months.”

I said in astonishment:

Five months! Why, I thought they sent you to these places for just a few weeks and then relieved you.

He said:

They do. We are supposed to come for only six weeks, but everybody who comes asks for an extension. I’m on my third extension now. We all like it here. It’s healthy and we have good quarters, good food and movies, but the main thing is that it’s small and everybody is close together.

It’s informal here and we’ve got swell officers. There are only about three dozen of us and it’s sort of the same spirit as a submarine crew has. Everybody is for everybody else. No more big camps for me if I can help it.

Goldy was very proud of their recent Thanksgiving dinner. He said their menu that day had 29 items on it, including turkey. The turkey, incidentally, won him $10. He’d made several bets with other soldiers who didn’t think any turkey would ever arrive.

Goldy said:

But I had faith in the government, so that’s just $10 more to send home to buy bonds with.

Pilots killed in sandstorm

The boys may like the desert, but still, it is an insidious place. At one of these remote Sahara fields a few months ago, a flight of fighter planes came in during a 90-mile-an-hour sandstorm. Their leader found the field but, even at an altitude of just a few feet, he couldn’t see the runway so they went their own ways and landed all over the desert.

Two of the pilots were killed. Other straggled in days later. One was saved by an Arab who ran for help across the desert, 20 miles in four hours. There are many ways to die in wartime and they are all bad.

Couple of helpful hints, free

Among the odd items a professional traveler is likely to pick up on a trip like this are these two gems:

1. At one stop in the tropics, I met an American civilian who said he always gave his chickens a spoonful of gin shortly before killing them. He said it relaxed their muscles and made them much more tender and succulent. It’s probably true, except that most of the chickens I’ve met over here would need half a pint, and gin is scarce in these parts.

2. In hot tropics, postage stamps always glue themselves together. They even glue themselves to oiled paper. The way to prevent this is to rub stamps on your hair. The oil from the hair coats the stamps and they won’t melt into anything until licked. The trick actually works, except that I always have to hire somebody with hair to go along to the post office with me.

One morning in Northwest Africa, I was routed out of bed at 6:30 by a caller who turned out to be an old Army friend – Capt. Wayne Akers of Memphis, a pilot on the ferry line with whom I flew from the Gold coast to Cairo last spring.

Capt. Akers says that after he was mentioned in this column, he got more than 50 letters from people in the States. He has just been flying transports back and forth, back and forth, all the way from India to Italy. In one year overseas, he has put in 1,200 flying hours. He’s due to go home now. He says they’re given a choice between two weeks at home and then returning to Africa, or a 30-day furlough and then reassignment for at least six months in the States.

He says everybody is taking the latter. As who wouldn’t?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
Ever since leaving America on the long trip back over, I’d had a vague feeling that something bad was going to happen. It wasn’t exactly a premonition, and I didn’t really worry about it. Yet a slight fear was there.

So, when at least we came over Algiers, after 8,000 miles of probably the most perfect long trip I ever had, I thought to myself:

Well, we crack up when we land here. I suppose it’s our last chance for anything to happen.

I was pretty tense when we skimmed down the runway. It seemed the pilot would never get the wheels on the ground. But finally, they did touch, lightly as a feather; we ran smoothly and straight. And nothing happened at all.

We sighed and were at the end of the trail. As we stepped out of the plane, the lieutenant who took the travel orders looked up and said:

How does it feel to be back?

The airport was thronged with British, American and French travelers in uniform, hundreds of them. As we were waiting for a jeep to come for us, a British captain I’d known months ago came up and asked if he could ride into town with us.

‘Welcome home!’

Pretty soon Dick Hottelet from London came past and said a startled hello. Shortly after him came Fred Clayton of the Red Cross, just landed from Italy. Then a young naval lieutenant I’d known in Morocco and an officer I’d never seen before yelled across the crowd. “Welcome home!”

Then I knew that the old fraternity of war had enmeshed me once more.

Algiers has changed some since I left it nearly three months ago. The blackout has been lifted in favor of a dimout. Everybody feels very far from the war. The barrage balloons still fly over the harbor, but they are fewer. The streets are so thick with soldiers of three nationalities you can hardly walk.

There are some American civilian women where before there were none. There are more WACs now, too. Soldiers were always saluting us correspondents, so there must be new troops in town. Great rows of boxed engines line the roads, supply dumps fill the fields, the road in from the airport is rougher from much convoying.

You have a feeling that North Africa from the Atlantic to Cairo has become a war depot of unprecedented proportions.

Everybody is friendly and terribly anxious to know how things are at home.

They ask:

Can you get enough to eat? Can you still have any fun? Have things changed much? Can you go up to a bar and buy a drink? Is there any traffic in the cities? Can you still get a glass of milk? Can you buy eggs? Are prices terribly high?

A dozen soldiers have told me their families had intimated we were probably better off here for food than they were at home. Some even wonder whether they should go home if they got a chance.

Ernie has stock answer

To all of which I answer something like this in composite:

Can you get enough to eat? You certainly can. There are a couple of meatless days a week in many places and steaks are very scarce. Yet I know places in Washington where you can get steak every night. They are not black-market, either. It’s almost impossible to buy liquor by the bottle, but you can still get plenty by the drink. Sure, you can get milk and eggs, too.

Most of your circle of men friends have gone. Gas rationing makes it a little hard to get around, but you manage. The shortage of domestic help is dire. Prices are high, but nothing compared to what the French and Italians charge us over here.

Train travel is sometimes difficult, but certainly not impossible. You can’t get a new telephone installed now, and laundry takes a long time. People are starting to hoard cigarettes. You can still telephone long distance and talk as non-essentially as you like.

The famed Pentagon isn’t so hard to get around in and is actually very handsome. Taxis won’t come to your house on call in some cities, but if you are downtown, you can still pick them up. Everybody has money, and entertainment of all kinds goes full blast. Ninety percent of the people you meet say, “I think we’re too complacent here at home.”

The people are talking a lot of Republican talk, but from what I could see of the tenor of the people, the President will stay in next year.

I found absolutely no criticism of the grand strategy or the conduct of the war, although there is plenty of it about the conduct of the home front.

And I wind up telling my overseas questioners:

The country hasn’t changed as much as you dream it has. Go ahead and go home if you ever get the chance. You’ll have the time of your life. I certainly had.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
The Army mess where I used to eat during infrequent visits to Algiers was staffed at one time by soldier-waiters. Then later we had French girls, and now upon my return our waiters are Italian prisoners. And they are in fact the best we’ve had.

They’re terribly attentive, and grin all the time, apparently because they’re so happy with their jobs. They don’t speak English, and very few of us speak Italian, so a very neat system of dining-table communications has been devised.

Each place has a little typed menu with each dish numbered. With it is a tiny slip of paper with numbers running up to 15. So you simply take a pencil and circle the number of whatever you want and hand the slip to the waiter.

Pretty soon he comes back with exactly what you ordered no matter how illogical your appetite may have been. They simply never make a mistake that way. I think we ought to try it at home.

Pvt. George McCoy used to do a daily buttonhole broadcast for WEAF on the steps of the Astor Hotel in New York. The program was called The Real McCoy. Now he’s on the staff of the Stars and Stripes doing the same thing – buttonholing soldiers on the streets and having them talk into the microphone.

Ernie is buttonholed

He calls the present program The Sidewalks of North Africa. Just before I went home last fall, George buttonholed me and got me up to his studio and made some kind of record for broadcasting to the soldiers.

I don’t know what I said because it was the second time in my life I’d ever done such a thing, and I was so scared I can’t remember.

I ran into Pvt. McCoy again yesterday and he was all aflutter. Seems he’d read in a clipping from the States how I’d turned down an offer of $1,500 for one broadcast. So he’s been running around all over Algiers telling people what a wonderful person I am because I turned down $1,500 at home but did one for nothing over here.

It’s nice of George, but the truth is I’m just plain silly.

Transient correspondents at Algiers stay in six rooms set aside for us at the Aletti Hotel. A newcomer just goes from one of the rooms to another until he finds either an empty bed or some floor space for his bedroll, and moves in. The first I stayed with John Daly of CBS. The second I slept on a balcony in the new sleeping bag That Girl bought me as a farewell gift. And now I’m in a room with Red Mueller of NBC, who is about to start home for the first time in 20 months.

Tireder and tireder

My battle friend, Chris Cunningham of the United Press, is still here after nearly two years at war. Here too are Hal Boyle and Boots Norgaard of AP, Don Coe of UP and Graham Hovey of INS, all old pals of last winter in Tunisia and all of them getting tireder and tireder of war.

Chris and Hal have been put to writing war columns similar to this one for their press associations. Hal, who always has a funny remark, says:

I’m writing for the people who look over the shoulders of the people reading Ernie Pyle’s column.

On the second day back in Algiers, I went up to Allied headquarters to give Gen. Eisenhower a copy of my book. In the outer lobby, you had to show credentials to a soldier behind the desk. After the soldier had made out my entry pass, he said:

I’m almost from your hometown.

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Montezuma, Indiana,” he said.

The soldier was Luther C. Manwaring. He is a quiet and gentlemanly young man of 25, who hasn’t been home in nearly two years. I was through Montezuma about a month ago, so I was able to tell Pvt. Manwaring that our respective hometowns were still there and thriving and hardly mussed him or me at all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 13, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Allied HQ, Algiers, Algeria – (by wireless)
Fredric March and his camp-show crew came into town the other day on the last leg of an exhausting three-month grind through the Persian Gulf area entertaining our troops.

March has one man and two girls with him. The man is Sammy Walsh, a veteran café entertainer who professes to call himself a saloon worker. He carries off the light end of the show. This is his fourth tour for the USO.

The two girls are Jeanne Darrell, a singer, and Evelyn Hamilton, who plays the accordion. Both these girls know plenty about war. Jeanne’s husband is Lt. Maries of New Zealand. Evelyn has already done one tour of 11 months in the Aleutians, she has had malaria in the Near East, and her fiancé, a paratrooper, was killed in Sicily.

Usually, these camp shows are very light. Fredric March brings the first serious role to soldiers’ entertainment I’ve run onto. It’s a pretty touchy business, but he gets it over. He reads a stirring part of a Roosevelt speech of a couple of years ago, then he does some of Tom Paine’s patriotic pronouncements, then he gives a little talk of his own.

Since he has played mostly to non-combat troops in isolated areas, he does some morale building by telling them their jobs are as necessary and contributory as anybody else’s.

Tennis and prayer rugs

March played tennis with the King of Iran and proudly shows off a magnificent silken prayer rug the King gave him. He wears a blue camp-show uniform and a leather, fleece-lined jacket of the Air Force.

He keeps a framed photo of his wife and two children on the desk wherever he goes. His brother is in Italy and he hopes to see him before leaving this theater.

My telephone rang. The man on the other end said he was from Albuquerque. When he arrived, he turned out to be a sailor. His name is Hoyt Tomlinson and his mother and sister live at 510 W Roma. Hoyt has been in the Navy for two years and is on his ninth roundtrip across the Atlantic, with a couple of invasions thrown in.

He’s a cook, first class, and likes it.

Tomlinson loves to see people from Albuquerque. One time while on liberty in New York, he was sitting in a doughnut place on Broadway when he recognized a man’s back among the sidewalk crowd. He dashed out and chased the man down the street, knocking people over as he went. The man was a Mr. Baccachi of the Sunny State Liquor Company, Albuquerque.

Sailor Tomlinson says he was so homesick at the time he started to cry. And he was so delighted at seeing somebody from home he kept Mr. Baccachi up until 3:00 a.m.

Chicken: Pro and con

Tomlinson is clean-cut and big-hearted, and he insisted on going back to his ship and bringing me stuff like a baking chicken, canned ham and so on. But since I was just leaving for the front and already overloaded, I had to forego his Western hospitality. In a few days, I’d probably give a week’s pay for half a baked chicken.

The Special Service Branch of the Army recently had an artists’ competition in the North African Theater to give art-inclined soldiers something to do. The contest brought in 500 pictures painted by 127 artists or aspiring artists, 30 of them British soldiers.

The pictures have recently been exhibited, with 1,500 people a day visiting the show. The Army got a committee of professional judges and gave a $50 War Bond for first prize, and $25 bonds for second and third. Then all through the show, they furnished ballots for soldiers and sailors in the audience to vote their choices for prizes.

The most interesting thing to me about the show was that the first three chosen by the judges weren’t even in the running on the servicemen’s list. The judges weighed intellectually while the soldiers chose on the basis of I-don’t-know-anything-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like.

My favorite picture was a sketch of President Roosevelt which looked no more like him than I do. I think the guy who drew it ought to be given $25 just for trying.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 14, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontline in Italy – (by wireless)
The war in Italy is enough. The land and the weather are both against us.

It rains and it rains. Vehicles bog down and temporary bridges wash out. The country is shockingly hard to capture from the enemy. The hills rise to high ridges of almost solid rock. You can’t go around them through the flat peaceful valleys because the Germans look down upon you and would let you have it.

So, you have to go up and over. A mere platoon of Germans, well dug in on a high, rock-spined hill, can hold out for a long time against tremendous onslaughts.

Having come from home so recently, I know you folks back there are disappointed and puzzled by the slow progress in Italy. You wonder why we move northward so imperceptibly. You are impatient for us to get to Rome.

Well, I can tell you this – our troops are just as impatient for Rome as you. But they all say such things as this:

It never was this bad in Tunisia.

We ran into a new brand of Krauts over here.

If it would only stop raining.

Every day we don’t advance is one day longer we get home.

Living like prehistoric man

Our troops are living in a way almost inconceivable to you in the States. The fertile black valleys are knee-deep in mud. Thousands of the men have not been dry for weeks. Other thousands lie at night in the high mountains with the temperature below freezing and the thin snow sifting over them.

They dig into the stones and sleep in little chasms and behind rocks and in half caves. They live like men of prehistoric times, and a club would become them more than a machine gun. How they survive the winter misery at all is beyond us who have the opportunity of drier beds in the warmer valleys.

It is not the fault of our troops, nor of their direction, that the northward path is a tedious one. It is the weather and the terrain and the weather.

If there were no German fighting troops in Italy, if there were merely German engineers to blow the bridges in the passes, if never a shot were fired at all, our northward march would still be slow.

The country over here is so difficult we’ve created a great deal of cavalry for use in the mountains. Each division has hundreds of horses and mules to carry it beyond the point where vehicles can go no farther. On beyond the mules’ ability, mere men – American men – take it on their backs.

Here is a little clue to the war over here. I flew across the Mediterranean in a cargo plane weighted down with more than a thousand pounds beyond the normal load. The cabin was filled with big pasteboard boxes which had been given priority above all other freight.

In those boxes were pack boards, hundreds of them, for husky men to pack – 100, even 150, pounds of food and ammunition on their backs – to comrades high in the miserable mountains.

They’ll get to Rome, all right

But we can take consolation from many things. The air is almost wholly ours. All day long, Spitfires patrol above our fighting troops like a half-dozen policemen running up and down the street watching for bandits. During my four days in the lines, just ended, I saw German planes only twice, then just two at a time, and they skedaddled in a hurry.

Further, our artillery prevails, and how! We are prodigal with ammunition against these rocky crags, and well we should be, for a $50 shell can often save 10 lives in country like this. Little by little, the fiendish rain if explosives upon the hillsides softens the Germans. They’re always been impressed by, and afraid of, our artillery, and we have concentrations of it here that are demoralizing.

And lastly, no matter how cold the mountains, or how wet the snow, or how sticky the mud, it’s just as miserable for the German soldier as for the American.

Our men will get to Rome all right. There’s no question about that. But the way is cruel. Right this minute, some of them are fighting hand-to-hand up there in fog and clouds so dense they can barely see each other – one man against another.

No one who has not seen this mud, these dark skies, these forbidding ridges and ghost-like clouds that unveil and then quickly hide your killer, should have the right to be impatient with the progress along the road to Rome.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 15, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontline in Italy – (by wireless)
It had been my intention to work back into the war gradually by doing maybe a couple of weeks’ columns about how things were in Naples, what Italian women looked like, and whether the island of Capri was as pretty as they say.

But I don’t know what happened. I hadn’t been in Naples two hours before I felt I couldn’t stand it, and by the next evening there I was – up in the mud again, sleeping on some straw and awakening throughout the night with the old familiar crash and thunder of the big guns in my ears.

It was the artillery for me this time. I went with an outfit I had known in England a year ago last fall, made up largely of men from the Carolinas and Eastern Tennessee.

This regiment shoots 155mm howitzers. They are terrifically big guns and, Lordy, do they make a noise! The gun weighs six tons, and the shell itself is so big it’s all an ammunition carrier can do to lug one up to the gun pit.

The regiment has all new guns now. I can’t tell you how far they shoot, but as the Carolina boys said, “It’s awful fur.”

The colonel is pleased

This retirement’s commander is a good-natured former textile-plant executive who fought all through the last war and has already spent nearly a year in the frontlines in this one.

He is humorous, as Southern as magnolia, and he loves being alive. He calls every soldier around him by his first name.

He lives in a two-man tent with his executive officer. Right now, it’s pitched on a hillside, and they have put big rocks under the lower legs of their cot to make it level. They wash from gasoline tins, and slog a quarter of a mile through deep mud for their meals.

Both are men of refinement and accustomed to fine living back home.

When I came pulling up the muddy hillside late one afternoon between showers, the colonel was sitting in a canvas chair in the door of his tent, reading a magazine. When I got within about 50 yards he looked up, let out a yell, and called out:

Well, I’ll be damned if it ain’t my old friend Ernie Pyle! Goshamighty, am I glad to see you! Ansel, this calls for a drink.

He reached under his cot and brought out a square bottle of some white Italian fluid all full of what looked like sugar Christmas trees. It was a very thick, sweetish substance, which shows what a Southerner can come to who’s been without mint juleps for a year.

Conversation valued

This colonel’s tentmate is Lt. Col. Ansel Godfrey, who used to be principal of the high school at Abbeville, South Carolina, and now calls Clinton his home. He and I and the colonel sat for two hours while they pumped me about America and told me about Italy.

The colonel said:

Boy, are you a welcome sight! You don’t know how wonderful it is to have somebody new to talk to. Ansel and I have been boring each other to death for months. Today we tell each other what we are going to do tomorrow, and then tomorrow we tell each other we did it. That’s what we’ve been driven to for conversation.

After supper and a couple of hours with these friends I told them I wanted to go live with one of their gun crews. They said all right, but since it was raining again there might not be much shooting. They said if they did get any orders during the night, they’d have whatever battery I was with do the firing.

So, I went down and introduced myself to a gun crew and warned them I probably was going to cause them to overwork, for which I apologized. Then I settled gradually in mud up to my knees.

It wound up that I stayed three days and three nights with these boys and got so I felt like a cannoneer myself.

Only once did I hear anybody singing the famous artillery song about the caissons rolling along. One cannoneer hummed it one day during a lull. You could recreate the words in your mind as he was humming:

Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail…

What a sardonic line that is in Italy, with our guns hub-deep in black, sloshy, gooey, all-encompassing mud.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (December 16, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
We will call it “Battery E” that I’ve been living with. Within the limits of security, I’ll try to tell you in these next few columns how we work, live and play so you can have some idea of how American artillery operates in this war.

Our artillery has played a huge part all through the Mediterranean fighting. It was good even last spring, and it has grown better all the time. The Germans fear it almost more than anything we have.

We’ve got plenty of it, and plenty of ammunition too. The artillery is usually a few miles back of the frontline infantry, although there have been cases right here in Italy where artillerymen have actually been under machine-gun fire.

One hill after another

In 99 cases out of 100, an artilleryman never sees what he’s shooting at, and in nine cases out of 10 he never knows what he’s shooting at. Somebody just gives him a set of figures over his telephone. He sets his gun by those figures, rams in a shell, pulls the lanyard and gets ready for the next one.

He usually shoots over a hill, and here in Italy the men say they’re getting sick of going around one hill and always finding another one just like it ahead of them. They sure wish they could get out in the open country and shoot at something just once that didn’t have a hill in front of it.

This country where we are fighting now is fertile in the valleys and is farmed up on the lower slopes of the hills, but is wild and rocky on the upper ridges. The valleys are wide, very flat, well populated and well farmed. You never saw more beautiful country. I had no idea southern Italy was so beautiful.

Cows and cannon

It rains almost constantly and everything is vivid green. When you look out across our valley rimmed all around in the distance by cloud-bound mountains, all so green in the center and lovely, even the least imaginative soldier is struck by the uncommon beauty of the scene. Little stores, farmhouses and sheds dot the valley and the hillsides.

Refugee Italians return to their homes as soon as the fighting moves on beyond them, and resume their normal business right under the noses of the big guns. Women drive huge gray hogs past the gun pits, and the crews have to yell at them when they are about to fire.

Small news of gray cows that look like Brahmans, except that they have no humps, wander up and down the trails. Little children stand in line at the battery kitchen with tin pails to get what is left over.

Italian men in old ragged uniforms mosey through the arbors. Now and then, we stop one and question him, but mostly they just come and go and nobody pays any attention.

Like the Arabs, they seem unconscious and unafraid of the warfare about them. That is, all except the planes. When German planes come over, they run and hide and quiver with absolute terror. It was that way in Sicily too. They remember what our bombers did.

His sleep is fitful

These lovely valleys and mountains are filled throughout the day and night with the roar of heavy shooting. Sometimes there are uncanny silent spells of an hour or more. Then it starts up again across the country with violent fury.

On my first night at the front, I slept only fitfully – never very wide awake, never deeply asleep. It seemed almost impossible to make the transition from a place like America to the depth of war-strewn Italy. All night long the valley beside us, and the mountains and the valleys over the hill, were dotted and punctured with the great blasts of the guns.

You could hear the shells chase each other through the sky across the mountains ahead, making a sound like cold wind through the leaves on a winter night. Then the concussion of the blasts of a dozen guns firing at once would strike the far mountains across the valley and rebound in a great mass sound that was prolonged with the immensity and the fury of an approaching sandstorm.

Between day and the dreaming

Then the nearer guns would fire and the ground under your bedroll would tremble and you could feel the awful breath of the blast push the tent walls and nudge your whole body ever so slightly. And through the darkened hodgepodge of noise, you could occasionally pick out, through experience, the slightly different tone of German shells bursting in our valley.

It didn’t really seem true. Three weeks ago, I was in Miami, eating fried chicken, sleeping in deep beds with white sheets, taking hot baths and hearing no sound more vicious than the laughing ocean waves and the laughter of friends. One world was a beautiful dream and the other a horrible nightmare, and I was still a little bit in each of them.

As I lay on the straw in the darkness, they became mixed up and I was confused and not quite sure which was which.