The Pittsburgh Press (January 3, 1943)
The censors in North Africa have allowed Ernie Pyle to transmit a remarkably candid dispatch about conditions there.
Pyle says the situation is very tough, that losses have been far higher than is realized, and that we have left in office a number of officials originally installed by the Nazis. This “soft-gloving of snakes,” as he calls it, endangers our position.
Be sure to read this dispatch in MONDAY’S PRESS
The Pittsburgh Press (January 4, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
Oran, Algeria – (by wireless)
Men who bring our convoys from America, some of whom have just recently arrived, tell me the people at home don’t have a correct impression of things over here.
Merchant Marine officers, who have been here a couple of days, are astonished by the difference between what they thought the situation was and what it actually is. They say people at home think the North African campaign is a walkaway and will be over quickly; that our losses have been practically nil; that the French here love us to death, and that all German influence has been cleaned out.
If you think that, it is because we newspapermen here have failed at getting the finer points over to you.
Because this campaign at first was as much diplomatic as military, the powers that be didn’t permit our itchy typewriter fingers to delve into things internationally, which were ticklish enough without that. I believe misconceptions at home must have grown out of some missing part of the picture.
It would be very bad for another wave of extreme optimism to sweep over the United States. So, maybe I can explain a little bit about why things over here, though all right for the long run, are not all strawberries and cream right now.
In Tunisia, for instance, we seem to be stalemated for the moment. The reasons are two. Our Army is a green army, and most of our Tunisian troops are in actual battle for the first time against seasoned troops and commanders. It will take us months of fighting to gain the experience our enemies start with.
In the second place, nobody knew exactly how much resistance the French would put up here, so we had to be set for full resistance. That meant, when the French capitulated in three days, we had to move eastward at once, or leave the Germans unhampered to build a big force in Tunisia.
So, we moved several hundred miles and, with the British, began fighting. But we simply didn’t have enough stuff on hand to knock the Germans out instantly. Nobody is to blame for this. I think our Army is doing wonderfully – both in fighting with what we have and in getting more here – but we are fighting an army as tough in spirit as ours, vastly more experienced, and more easily supplied.
So, you must expect to wait a while before Tunisia is cleared and Rommel jumps into the sea.
Our losses in men so far are not appalling, by any means, but we are losing men. The other day, an American ship brought the first newspaper from home I had seen since the occupation, and it said only 12 men were lost in taking Oran. The losses, in fact, were not great, but they were a good many twelve times 12.
Most of our convalescent wounded have been sent to England. Some newly-arrived Americans feel that, if more of the wounded were sent home, it would put new grim vigor into the American people. We aren’t the sort of people from whom wounded men have to be concealed.
The biggest puzzle to us who are on the scene is our policy of dealing with Axis agents and sympathizers in North Africa. We have taken into custody only the most out-and-out Axis agents, such as the German Armistice Missions and a few others. That done, we have turned the authority of arrest back to the French. The procedure is that we investigate, and they arrest. As it winds up, we investigate, period.
Our policy is still appeasement. It stems from what might be called the national hodgepodge of French emotions. Frenchmen today think and feel in lots of different directions. We moved softly at first, in order to capture as many French hearts as French square miles. Now that phase is over. We are here in full swing. We occupy countries and pretend not to. We are tender in order to avoid offending our friends, the French, in line with the policy of interfering as little as possible with French municipal life.
We have left in office most of the small-fry officials put there by the Germans before we came. We are permitting fascist societies to continue to exist. Actual sniping has been stopped, but there is still sabotage. The loyal French see this and wonder what manner of people we are. They are used to force, and expect us to use it against the common enemy, which includes the French Nazis. Our enemies see it, laugh, and call us soft. Both sides are puzzled by a country at war which still lets enemies run loose to work against it.
There are an astonishing number of Axis sympathizers among the French in North Africa. Not a majority, of course, but more than you would imagine. This in itself is a great puzzle to me. I can’t fathom the thought processes of a Frenchman who prefers German victory and perpetual domination rather than a temporary occupation resulting in eventual French freedom.
But there are such people, and they are hindering us, and we over here think you folks at home should know three things: That the going will be tough and probably long before we have cleaned up Africa and are ready to move to bigger fronts. That the French are fundamentally behind us, but that a strange, illogical stratum is against us. And that our fundamental policy still is one of soft-gloving snakes in our midst.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 5, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (by wireless)
I have been delving further into this strange business of Axis sympathies among the people of French North Africa. It is very involved.
The population was all mixed – Arabs, Jews, Spanish and French. And there didn’t seem to be much national loyalty. It looked as if the people, being without any deep love of the country, favored whichever side appeared more likely to feather their nest.
Outside the big cities, Algeria hadn’t fared badly under the Germans. But the cities had been actually starving, because the Germans bought produce direct from the farms, and the cities couldn’t get it.
America has already contributed shiploads of food to the Algerian people, but for some reason little of it showed up in the public markets. City housewives find the stalls bare as usual, and they mutter about “les Américains.”
The Germans paid high prices to the farmers for their crops, and paid in French money. They didn’t levy the terrific indemnities here that they did in France. Hence the farm population actually prospered, and had almost nothing to kick about.
Now this year, Algeria has the biggest orange crop since the war started. In distant sections, oranges were actually rotting on the trees for lack of transportation. The farmers blame the Americans for this, and I suppose with some justice. True, we have already arranged to ship vast cargoes of oranges to England in returning convoys, but we can’t spare enough transportation to get the whole crop to the docks.
Buying of crop would help
As far as I can see, the only way to get the Arab, French, and Spanish farmers on our side would be to buy the whole orange crop, even at the high prices the Germans paid.
When the Germans took control, they demobilized the French North African Army. That suited the people fine. They didn’t want to fight anyway. But now the army is mobilized again, and people are saying:
Under the Germans, we didn’t have to fight. Under the Americans, our leaders make us go into the army again.
They are passive about it, but many of them are not happy. There was a deep fascist tinge among some of the officers of the regular army. I’ve tried to find out the reason. As far as I could learn, it was mostly a seeking for an ordered world to live in. The people and the army alike were disillusioned and shattered by the foul mess into which Paris had fallen – the mess that resulted in catastrophe to France. They were, and are, bitter against the politicians and the general slovenliness in high places. They wanted no more of it. They wanted things to run smoothly. They wanted security – and they visualized it as guaranteed by the methodical rule of the Axis.
The German propaganda here has been expert. The people have been convinced that Germany will win. Lacking any great nationalistic feeling, the people jumped onto whatever seems to be the leading bandwagon, and they think it’s Germany. Propaganda has also made them think America is very weak. Literally, they believe we don’t have enough steel to run our factories or enough oil for our motors.
Americans misinterpreted
German propaganda has drilled into them the glories of the New Order. These people believe that life for them under German control would be milk and honey, perpetual security and prosperity. They really believe it. Also, our troops have made a poor impression, in contrast to the few Germans they’ve seen. We admittedly are not rigid-minded people. Our Army doesn’t have the strict and snappy discipline of the Germans. Our boys sing in the streets, unbutton their shirt collars, laugh and shout, and forget to salute. A lot of Algerians misinterpret this as inefficiency. They think such a carefree army can’t possibly whip the grim Germans.
Most of the minor peoples of the world expect discipline. They admire strict rulers because to them strictness is synonymous with strength. The Algerians couldn’t conceive of the fact that our strength lies in our freedom.
Out of it all I gather a new respect for Americans, sloppy though we may be. They may call us Uncle Shylock, but I know of no country on earth that actually is less grabby. In all my traveling both before and during the war, I have been revolted by the nasty, shriveled greediness of soul that inhabits so much of the world. The more I see of the Americans and the British, the most I like us. And although Germany is our bitter enemy, at least the Germans have the character to be wholly loyal to their own country.
Once more, I want to say that this stratum about which I am writing is not a majority of the people of North Africa. Much of the population is just as fervent for Allied victory as we are. But there is this Axis tinge, and I wanted to try to explain why it existed. Personally, I don’t feel that it can do us any grave harm.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 6, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (by wireless)
Our convoy unloading ports in North Africa are pleasant places to be in – when the Germans are too busy to drop bombs on them, which fortunately is most of the time. Out there on the open docks, the sun beams down warmly, and the air is clear and fresh. Vast quantities of bombs and trucks and guns and food come pouring out of the busy hatches.
Thousands and thousands of American troops unload these ships as they come in. At one port where I recently visited, enough American soldiers to make a good-sized city were working as stevedores. About a fourth of them were colored troops. In addition, there were thousands of Arab stevedores. The Americans are working a three-shift day, right around the clock.
The amount of material pouring out of these ships is impressive. As you stand and look around, you feel that further shipments could be stopped right then, that this is enough. Yet on soberer thought you realize that it is only a drop in the bucket. You realize that the British and Germans in the Middle East have often captured many times this much stuff from each other without stopping the fight. The flood now coming in must continue indefinitely and grow to an absolute cascade before it will be enough.
Convoys arrivals exceed hopes
Convoys are coming through with remarkable safety, even the slow ones. And ships are turned around quickly, though they aren’t approaching any world’s records. With escort ships as scarce as they are, I had supposed that one convoy a fortnight would be a good average. Actually, there are many times that.
There is never a time when there are not ships unloading. There is never a time when new convoys are not about due to take their places. Day by day, the whole of North Africa grows nearer the saturation point with American soldiers, machines of war, and supplies. Before long they will be ready to spill out in a smothering flow over the enemy.
At one port, the commanding officer was given a table of expectancy – he was to have the port ready to unload a certain number of tons per day within a certain time after the occupation. Within a week, he had exactly tripled his goal.
To do that, he had to clear scuttled ships out of the harbor, clear battle debris off the docks, repair damaged utilities, organize thousands of men at the docks.
The whole thing was magnificently planned ahead of time, just as was the whole occupation. For example, they knew just how many ships would be in the harbor. They even assumed that those ships would be sunk or scuttled, and they came prepared to raise them, with soldier-divers trained in England.
Another example of detailed planning: Photographic planes took pictures of the docks. By careful study of the pictures, the Army could tell the exact amount of coal piled on the docks and then figure the total needed to run the utilities and railroads. They brought exactly the amount necessary beyond what was on the docks. It amounted to one whole shipload.
At first, all the thousands of stevedoring troops were quartered in tents right on the docks. Now, they are billeted in empty buildings around the town and in a tent camp out in the country. The men work in brown coveralls and all kinds of headgear.
The Arabs’ working shift is ironically called “the vacation.” Their normal working day consists of two “vacations" of three hours and 20 minutes each, but now they work three hours overtime. They get the going scale here, 50 francs a day, which is about 67¢.
Accidents will happen
In many harbors on the night of the occupation, the French scuttled their ships with a degree of cooperation. That is, on many ships they only opened the seacocks and let the ships ease over on their sides, leaving them in condition to be raised easily.
In other cases, their ships lie on the bottom badly damaged. Even today, you can see masts and funnels sticking above the surface of harbors. Some of the hulks are completely underwater. They impede navigation, but the harbors are usable with careful maneuvering.
Under our arrangements with the local government, French pilots take all ships in and out. They have accidentally run a number of ships over sunken hulks and torn out their bottoms. Diving crews recently worked for two weeks patching a hulk sunk close to the channel, and finally had it ready to start pumping air. They expected it to be afloat the next day. That morning, a ship leaving the harbor with a French pilot somehow happened to hit the submerged hulk, and it tore off all the patches. Now they have to to start all over again. It will take another two weeks to raise the ship.
There are many wars besides the big one up at the front.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 7, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (by wireless)
A fine collection of freak stories about the mails is growing up over here. Recently we had a flood of mail both from England and America. Mailsacks were piled on the docks by the thousand, making mounds as big as strawstacks. The Army Post Office, working with remarkable speed, sorted and delivered all of it in three days.
Some people got as many as 75 letters all at once. One fellow I know got two letters – one a notification that a friend had subscribed to the Reader’s Digest for him, which he already knew, and the other a mimeographed letter which his wife had sent him, though he had received no personal letter from her in weeks. The recipient uses very unchurchly language when he talks about it.
Another man I know, a colonel from San Francisco, hasn’t heard from his wife in three months, or from his friends in longer than that. This recent deluge of mail brought him just one letter. It was from a vice president of the Goodrich Tire Company, warning him that it was his patriotic duty to conserve his tires.
Old movies shown again
But here I think was the best one: Capt. Raymond Ferguson of Los Angeles had a Christmas box from his aunt. It was the first one she had sent in many years, and he was quite touched when
he saw who it was from.
American movies, prohibited during the German occupation, are being shown again. There are some modem theaters in the bigger cities, but no new films have arrived yet.
They are dragging out some unbelievable antiques. One theater showed a film starring Sessue Hayakawa, who has been gone so long you have to be middle-aged to remember him at all. Another star was the dog Rin Tin Tin, dead lo these many years.
Gossip-column items: Capt. Stan Pickens, Charlotte Coca Cola king, came to town and bought an Algerian violin in a wooden case, to while away his spare hours at camp. He paid $22 for it and was lucky to find one at any price, as the music stores were nearly bare… Lt. Col. Gurney Taylor has just been in to use my bath again. That’s two baths for the colonel in less than a week. It makes him so damn clean he is conspicuous.
…Staff Sgt. Chuck Conick of Pittsburgh got a whole flock of Pittsburgh Presses the other day and came rushing over to show me my own column. Unfortunately, the papers were four months old and I was just arriving in England and far behind the times as usual. I’ve just had the novel experience of driving an Army truck 50 miles along African roads at nighttime, to help out a fellow who was getting a little tired. It was the first time I’d driven since leaving America six months before, and it felt wonderful.
Army newspaper printed
Traffic in Africa, incidentally, is righthanded, the same as at home. After all those months in lefthanded England, I felt, during the first few days, as if I was on the wrong side of the road… The latest rumor to hit town is that the ship we came from England on was sunk on the way back. I’d hate to think of that faithful ship being on the bottom of the ocean.
A large batch of officer promotions came through, catching many officers without the insignia of their new rank. They’ll have to continue wearing their old ones, as no American insignia are available here. I heard of one ambitious and farsighted second lieutenant who came loaded with all possible insignia up to three stars.
The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes is already printing an African edition. Lt. Col. Egbert White and Lt. Harry Harchar flew down to Algiers from London, and with Sgt. Bob Neville set up shop and were printing in less than a week. The paper is now a weekly but it may become a daily. It is doubly welcome down here, where you get only old newspapers printed in French.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 8, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
Oran, Algeria – (by wireless)
The Army’s Special Services Branch, whose job is to provide relaxation and entertainment for the soldiers, is having a tough time over here.
There are lots of reasons why it’s so tough. They haven’t any money and there isn’t much to buy here even if they had money. Lots of their athletic equipment never showed up, and they don’t know where it is. There are no stage or movie facilities at the camps, and you run onto all kinds of snags in dickering with the local business people for theaters, restaurants, and auditoriums.
But they have made some progress. They’ve picked up a local troupe of singers and dancers with the very un-French name of Robert Taylor Shows, who travel from camp to camp. They have also just hired a local circus, with wild animals and trapeze performers, to visit camps.
Since the Special Services Branch has no money, the soldiers have to pay admission, but they have plenty of money.
Movie people are headaches
There are no plans for bringing over Hollywood people, as has been done in England. They say the reason is that there’s no place at the camps for them to perform, and they are headaches to handle anyway, being temperamental.
But it seems to me that sincere entertainers could perform on the ground, out under the sky, and that thew Army could tolerate a few Hollywood headaches if the troops really benefited – and there is no question about the stars being extremely popular with our troops in England.
They say here that a soldier’s three first needs are: (1) good mail service; (2) movies, radios, and phonographs; (3) cigarettes and candy. Cigarettes are being issued free now, six packs a week, but the other items are very short in Africa.
Every radio in Oran has been bought up by the Army. Music stores are cleaned out. All the camps want more musical instruments; they are even advertising in the newspapers for second-hand ones.
Dancing is revived
Many camps rigged up their own forms of entertainment. Some had bands, and gave big dances which delighted the local people since dancing had been banned during more than two years of German rule.
Boxing is popular in the camps, and tournaments are being arranged. Boxing gloves are one thing that did show up in sizable amounts.
But it is simple athletic games in which lots of men can participate that the Special Services Branch is concentrating on in lieu of better things. Three such games – kick baseball, speedball, and touch football – have been inaugurated. In addition, I’ve seen lots of handball and even badminton being played at the more remote camps.
In town the Red Cross as usual has done a good job of setting up clubs and restaurants for troops on leave. The Army itself supervised the opening of two nightclubs for officers, and is negotiating for clubs for enlisted men, noncoms, and Negro troops.
Men need something to do
But with the shortage of sports equipment in the camps, and the towns so far away and no regular transportation, and with the different customs and different language, in a country stripped of almost everything a person would want to buy, life becomes far different from what it was in England. Some of the harder heads say:
Well, this is war and we’re at the front. The time for coddling troops is over.
But it happens that only a very tiny percentage of our troops in Africa are at the front. The rest are far behind the lines, doing the drab, hard work of supplying the Army or waiting impatiently to get into action. And as the war grows fiercer and troops come back from the front to rest, they will have to have something to do. So, if this is the spot we’ve picked to do our fighting in, I’m in favor of doing as much as possible to brighten dull and cheerless ones.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 9, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (by wireless)
Of all the American troops who are about to bust a hamstring to get into battle, I suppose the Rangers are the worst.
That’s because they’re trained like racehorses, and if they can’t race every day they get to fretting.
As you know, the Rangers are American commandos. For months their training has been a violent, double-barreled curriculum of body toughening and scientific elimination of the enemy. All summer and fall in the cold waters of Scotland, they practiced until they were as indestructible as Superman and as deadly as executioners. Then they had a shot of the real business. A few went on the Dieppe raid, and all of them came to Africa.
Here they had one specific and highly dangerous job to do. And they did it so expertly that they suffered almost no casualties and spared all the Frenchmen’s lives.
Rangers want more lands to storm
Since then, the Rangers have had nothing to do. They are in camp now, running through mock landings, swimming in the Mediterranean on the coldest days, doing military police duty in a nearby town. And they are gradually going nuts waiting to get into action again.
Since the specialty of the Rangers is landing on enemy beaches and storming gun positions, I asked one of them:
Do you suppose you’ll just have to sit here until we invade another continent?
He said:
My God, I hope not! It might be too long a wait.
I have got acquainted with one Ranger officer, Capt. Manning Jacob. He called Morristown, New Jersey, home, but before the war he was an oil operator in South Texas.
Capt. Jacob took me on a cross-country walk, following a detachment of Rangers. I had to run to keep up. Finally, I couldn’t go on any longer, and had to sit down and pant. I thought to myself:
I’m ashamed of being so soft and feeble, but after all I’m past 40 and I shouldn’t be expected to keep up with guys like Jacob.
And then it turned out that this lethal athlete called Capt. Jacob is 40 years old himself. Maybe he gets more vitamins than I did.
At any rate, the Rangers are good. If somebody doesn’t think up a new shore for them to storm pretty quick, they may resort to storming Africa all over again.
It’s a small world, Ernie finds
A nurse in an old blue sweater came walking down a muddy street at an Army hospital out in the country. An Army friend with me yelled at her, and stopped and introduced me. And the nurse said:
Well, at last! I’ve been saving sugar for you for two years, but I never expected to meet you here.
I had never seen the nurse before in my life, so a little inquiring about the sugar, business was necessary. The facts in the case are as follows:
Mary Ann Sullivan is a former surgical supervisor in Boston City Hospital. She and her sister nurses were reading this column two years ago, when I was in London and complaining bitterly in the public prints about not getting enough sugar. So, it seems the nurses laughed about it and started saving sugar. Whenever a cube was left over, they would save it, and laugh and say:
This one’s for Ernie.
Then a year ago, these nurses joined a Harvard unit and set sail for England. And they carried with them that sugar especially earmarked for me. Their motive was high but it came to naught. For the Germans torpedoed their ship and my sugar went to the bottom of the Atlantic.
The nurses were eventually picked up and taken to Iceland, then to England, and finally to Africa. And here we all are, and isn’t it a small world after all even if my sugar is gone?
Mary Ann felt badly about my sugar being sunk, but she did bring out a hospitable commodity which both censorship and the ethics of war forbid me to mention. So, our meeting after two years was not without a certain rare delicacy to put in our mouths after all.
Mary Ann wants action too
Mary Ann Sullivan came ashore in Africa on the very first morning of the landings. They operated on wounded men for hours, with snipers’ bullets still pinging on the walls, which is just the kind of life Mary Ann had been waiting for.
She is so steamed up she can hardly wait for the next battle. She is now with a mobile surgical truck, which she calls the super-commando truck. It is equipped to rush into the thick of things, slam on the brakes, and operate on wounded men for 36 hours without replenishments.
I am arranging officially with General Headquarters to be wounded in Mary Ann’s vicinity.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 11, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria –
Being with the troops in Africa is, in many ways, like attending a national political convention. Especially if you’re around one of the headquarters set up in the various coastal cities.
In Oran, for instance, the censor’s office serves as the press box, and that’s where you meet other correspondents and exchange dope and listen to the radio news. Everybody eats at two big messes set up by the Army. If you want to see somebody and can’t find him, you wait till mealtime and you’re bound to see him there.
As at a convention, you run your legs off from one building to another, looking up various officers and having confabs. Everybody fills your ear full of dope, rumor, and fact. Most of it you can’t use, and most of it isn’t true anyway.
Convention-like, people wander in and out of my room all day and night. Some of them you know, and some you don’t. Rooms are scarce, and you’re liable to have one friend and two strangers sleeping on your floor.
Parade of faces goes on and on
You shake hands with scores of people whose faces you know, but you can’t remember their names or at what camp in Ireland or England you met them. And you’re always running surprisingly onto some genuine acquaintance.
A moment ago, Pvt. Crosby Lewis walked into my room. He’s a brilliant young American who joined the Canadian Army and was sent to England two years ago. Now he’s with us. The last time I saw him was at a cocktail party in London announcing his engagement.
Last evening, I bumped into Lt. Col. Louis Plain of the Marine Corps, who was one of my friends at Londonderry last summer. He’s a big Clevelander, hard as nails, who got the Marine situation well in hand here and then lost his voice, so he just makes motions.
On my first day here a beaming fellow in British uniform came up and started pumping my hand. It was Guy Ramsey, of the London News-Chronicle, whom I last saw nearly two years ago when we were following Wendell Willkie in England. Ramsey is the greatest reciter of limericks in England. All of them are unprintable.
Fellow college man turns up
Way out in the country one night, I was introduced in the darkness to Maj. William H. Pennington. We chatted a few moments, and it turned out we were in school together at Indiana University 20 years ago.
Yesterday, a fellow came up whom 1 hadn’t seen for 10 years. He was Grainger Sutton, once a linotype operator on the Washington Daily News. He is a major now.
So it goes. Friends you had in England, good friends from America, people you hadn’t seen for two decades. Tomorrow, they’ll disappear again.
In wartime, people leave without saying goodbye – a fellow will be gone for three or four days before you realize his absence. It’s no use to inquire. You just accept it, and months from now you’ll be pumping his hand in some other foreign country. Or maybe you’ll never see him again. You can never tell.
Luggage is nuisance
Personal luggage in wartime is a paradox. You must have it, and in order to have it you must carry it with you, and you can’t carry it with you because there’s too much of it. You have to carry your own bed and tent, some extra rations, your clothes, and a lot of purely military stuff such as gas mask, dust mask, tin hat, canteen, mess kit, and so on.
No man can carry all that on his back; I personally couldn’t carry that much if there were two of me. Consequently, it has to go on trucks. And inevitably it gets lost. The result of this overweight of baggage is that people simply abandon part of it, even if they don’t lose it. They’ll be less comfortable, but they just can’t lug it all. Go into any billet or barracks and you’ll find bedding, or clothes, or barracks bags that the guy ahead of you left.
In the room I’m now occupying, I picked up a nice cap which fitted me better than my own, and I also took the blankets I found on the floor and left mine in their place, because they were nicer than mine. There’s also a brand-new mess kit here if anybody wants it.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 12, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria –
Back in England, I spent some time with the Army’s Medical Corps, intending to write about our preparations for tending wounded soldiers. But I never wrote the columns. The sight of surgeons being taught to operate at the front, of huge warehouses filled to the roofs with bandages, of scores of hospitals built for men then healthy who would soon be cripples – it was shocking and too morbid, and I couldn’t write about it.
But now all that preparation is being put to use. Our doctors and nurses and medical aides have had their first battle experience. The hospitals are going full blast, and it doesn’t seem morbid in actuality, as it did in contemplation.
In the Oran area, where our heaviest casualties occurred, the wounded are in five big hospitals. Three were French hospitals taken over by the Army, one is an abandoned French barracks turned into a hospital, and one is a huge tent hospital out in an oatfield. It is the most amazing thing I have seen., and I’ll write about it later.
So far, the doctors can be, and are, proud of their work. The nurses have already covered themselves with glory. The wounded have only praise for those who pulled them through.
Our only deaths in the original occupation were those killed outright and those so badly wounded that nothing could have saved them. In other words, we lost almost nobody from infection or from medical shortcomings in the hurly-burly of battle.
Sulfanilamide saves hundreds
You’ve already read of the miracles wrought by sulfanilamide in the first battles of Africa. Doctors and men both still talk about it constantly, almost with awe. Doctors knew it was practically a miracle drug, but they hadn’t realized quite how miraculous.
Every soldier was issued a sulfanilamide packet before he left England, some even before they left America. It consisted of 12 tablets for swallowing, and a small sack of the same stuff in powdered form for sprinkling on wounds. The soldiers used it as instructed, and the result was an almost complete lack of infection. Hundreds are alive today who would have been dead without it. Men lay out for 24 hours and more before they could be taken in, and the sulfanilamide saved them.
It’s amusing to hear the soldiers talk about it. Sulfanilamide is a pretty big word for many of them. They call it everything from snuffalide to sulphermillanoid.
There’s one interesting sidelight on it – some of the wounded soldiers didn’t have any sulfanilamide left, because they had surreptitiously taken it all to cure venereal diseases. They say you can knock a venereal case in four or five days with it, and thus don’t have to report in sick.
One doctor told me that most American wounds were in the legs, while most of the French wounds were in the head. The explanation seemed to be that we were advancing and thus out in the open, while the French were behind barracks with just their heads showing. Both sides treated the wounded of the other side all during the battle, and our soldiers are full of gratitude for the way they were treated in the French hospitals. They say the French nurses would even steal cigarettes for them.
Morale of wounded is high
The mixup of French emotions that showed itself during the fighting was fantastic. One French motor launch went about Oran Harbor firing with a machine gun at wounded Americans, while other Frenchmen in rowboats were facing the bullets trying to rescue them.
I know of one landing party sent ashore with the special mission of capturing four merchant ships. They took them all without firing a shot. The captain of one ship greeted the party with “What was the matter? We expected you last night,” and the skipper of another met the party at the gangway with a bottle of gin.
There was much fraternization. In one town where fighting was heavy, the bodies of five men were found in a burned truck. Three were Americans and two were French.
Morphine was a great lifesaver. Pure shock is the cause of many deaths; but if morphine can be given to deaden the pain, shock, cases often pull through. Many officers carried morphine and gave injections right on the field. My friend Lt. Col. Louis Plain of the Marine Corps, who had never given an injection in his life, gave six on the beach at Arzew.
Many of our wounded men already had returned to duty. Those permanently disabled would be sent home as soon as they were able. Those still recovering were anxious to return to their outfits. I inquired especially among the wounded soldiers about this, and it was a fact that they were busting to get back into the fray again. Morale was never higher.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 13, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Jan. 12)
When a soldier is in a perilous predicament or especially aggravated with the rough-and-tumble life of the battlefront, he usually pacifies himself by thinking, “If the folks at home could only see me now!”
And if the folks of Charlotte, North Carolina, could only peep down out of the African sky and see their family doctors and nurses in their new kind of life – what a surprise they’d have! For a bunch of men and women from Charlotte are operating the only American tent hospital so far set up in North Africa, and they’re doing a dramatically beautiful job. They’re really like something out of Hollywood, and I’ve visited them time after time just out of fascination.
They are far from any town, set in the middle of a big oatfield, out on the rolling plains. They began setting up the day after troops had battled their way over that very ground. They took in their first patients the next morning. Now the hospital has more than 700 patients, it takes 400 people to run it, and there are more than 300 tents covering 80 acres of oat stubble. The stubble field was picked so the mud and dust wouldn’t be so bad – but they are anyway.
Everything is in tents, from operating room to toilets. Everything was set up in three days. They can knock down and be on the move in another three days, and they expect it to happen at any moment. They are like a giant medical Ringling Brothers.
They are known as the evacuation hospital. They were taken into active service last April, practically denuding the Charlotte Memorial Hospital of doctors and nurses.
They arrived in England in mid-August. They stood off the North African coast with the great overwhelming convoy that brought our occupying troops, and they came ashore in assault boats the morning after the occupation. They jumped immediately to work.
There are 50 Charlotte men in the unit – mostly doctors and surgeons, but a few businessmen who do the non-medical part of running a hospital. There are 50 nurses too. None had ever lived any closer to nature than an occasional hunting trip. Today they have become nomads of the desert, living on the ground and under the sky, and they loved it.
Their commanding officer is a Regular Army man – Lt. Col. Rollin Bauchspies, who only recently joined them. He’s a tough, hoarse, friendly guy who cusses continuously and drinks hard liquor and drives his own jeep and says to hell with regulations, dying people can’t wait. He’s a Pennsylvanian and says he could lick the whole damn Dixie tribe if he had to, but you see he doesn’t have to because the whole outfit vibrates with accomplishment and they’re all proud together.
The officers and nurses live two in a tent on two sides of a company street – nurses on one side, officers on the other. The street has a neat sign at the end on which is painted “Carolina Avenue." Some Yankee has painted under this: “Rebel Street."
The 300 enlisted men who do the non-medical work live in their little shelter tents just on beyond. They’re mostly from New England. They’ve built a little wall of whitewashed rocks between the two areas, and put up a sign saying “Mason-Dixon Line.’’
The chief nurse is 1st Lt. Bessie Fullbright. In true Southern style, everybody calls her “Miss Bessie.” They’ve even got a small detachment of Negro engineer troops, just to make everybody feel at home. The nurses wear khaki overalls because of the mud and dust. Doctors go around tieless and with knit brown caps on their heads. Pink feminine panties fly from a long line among the brown warlike tents. On the flagpole is a Red Cross flag, made from a bed sheet and a French soldier’s red sash.
You wash outdoors in cold water, and go to a Chic Sale with a canvas wall around it. You eat and read by lanternlight. You almost never take a bath. You seldom drive the 20 miles into town because you get to like it out there, and you feel so healthy.
Planes bound for destruction of the Axis roar tent-high over your weird city of canvas. At night a trillion stars shower down out of the clear African night. You sleep on a folding cot under a mosquito bar, with your tent flap open.
You’re up in the darkness of 6:30 a.m., and boy, was it cold! You sort of put off washing your faces till later in the day. Your whole crude existence is built around the call of those 700 men whose lives depend on you – and you realize you’re happier than you have been in a long time.
Yes, if the folks back in Charlotte could only see them now!
The Pittsburgh Press (January 14, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Jan. 13)
When the Evacuation Hospital – the bunch of doctors and nurses recruited in Charlotte, North Carolina – arrived in Africa, they were neophytes at living in the field, for that part of their training had been overlooked.
Lt. Col. Rollin Bauchspies had taken over command while they were on the boat coming from England, and he’d had no time to give them the neglected field training.
So, they arrived in the middle of an African oatfield with 300 tents to set up, and not a soul knew how to put up a shelter-half or drive a tent peg properly. But they soon learned. Col. Bauchspies, who did know how, being a Regular Army man, got out and drove tent pegs himself. Everybody worked like a slave. Doctors helped dig ditches. Nurses helped unload trucks.
One amateur electrician among the enlisted men started wiring the office tents for lights. A couple of carpenters-by-trade made themselves known, and went to work. A professional sign painter turned up among the first patients, and painted the street signs around the hospital that help give it a civilized touch.
In a few days, the veterans had taught the tenderfeet how to make themselves comfortable living in the rough. Now the tents of officers and nurses are touchingly homelike. There is canvas on the floor. There are mosquito nets over the cots and framed pictures of wives and children standing on the wooden tables. The Charlotte doctors and nurses were wise enough to bring air mattresses and sleeping bags, and they’ve never slept more comfortably.
Of course, getting up in the cold before daylight and washing in cold water behind your tent out of a canvas washpan takes some getting used to. And yet it grows on you. Everything out here is so open, so free, so exempt from city turmoil.
Maj. Paul Sanger is chief surgeon of the hospital. He was chief surgeon back in Charlotte. He is a highly skilled, well-to-do professional man. He told me:
I never go into town. I feel better out here than I’ve ever felt in my life. We were all prima donnas back home. We had every comfort that money could buy. We would have been shocked at the idea of living like this. But we love it. We all do. I suppose we’ll be making our families live in tents when we get home.
Lt. Col. Preston White, chief medical officer, is from Lexington, Virginia. He’s an older man than the others, but he’s as enthusiastic as a child over the whole hospital setup. And he too has become an addict of outdoor living.
He says:
We have only a quart of water a day to wash, shave and wash clothes in, so we don’t take many baths. Maybe we don’t smell so good, but when you’re all in the same boat you don’t notice it. And you sure feel good living out like this.
The hospital is already spreading a fame for its food. Anybody in the army knows that a field hospital is the best place to eat. The other night, we had big juicy steaks for dinner. I asked Col. Bauchspies:
Where did these come from?
He said:
Hell, I wouldn’t dare ask. I suppose Stan stole them.
Stan is Capt. Stanton Pickens, the Coca-Cola king of Charlotte. He came along as mess officer. His brother, Lt. Col. Bob Pickens, is a friend of mine in London. Stan set such a good table that the trucks bringing patients from outlying camps always manage to arrive just at lunchtime. And another indication – Stan made arrangements with a local Arab to collect their garbage, for which he was to give the hospital a crate of oranges every three days. But it seems everybody cleaned his plate, and the Arab is getting so little garbage he wants to give oranges only every four days now.
The hospital’s supply officer is Capt. William F. Medearis. He’s a Charlotte bigwig. They say he owns all of Main Street, plus half the real estate and all the laundries. He is national secretary-treasurer of the Laundry Association. He turned down a lieutenant-colonelcy in Washington in order to come to Africa with his friends.
Capt. George C. Snyder, who commands the non-medical detachment of enlisted men at the hospital, shares the Coca-Cola honors with Capt. Pickens. Between them they have that special goldmine sewed up in Charlotte. But they’ve got nary a bottle of it here.
There are two Capt. Otis Jones’ in the outfit. They’re no relation and never heard of each other until they joined the Army. One is the chaplain, and he’s from Bude, Mississippi, near Natchez. The other is a Charlotte obstetrician. Since none of the soldiers is given to having babies, Dr. Jones is registrar for the hospital. So, they wisecrack that he “delivers papers’’ over here.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 15, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Jan. 14)
Today I’ll try to picture to you the pioneer-like manner in which a field tent hospital operates in wartime.
The Evacuation Hospital is a dark-green sea of tents as you approach it over the mud road leading across a field. It blends so well with the fields and against the low rolling mountains in the distance that you can hardly pick it out half a mile away.
Even the first tent has a “going concern" air about it – there’s a neatly-painted sign on a stake saying “Headquarters," and a little dirt walk lined with whitewashed rocks leads up to it. Inside that tent, men work at crude tables with folding legs. Before them are file cases that fold up into small portable trunks. Field telephones rest in their leather cases. It is the same equipment we saw in all the camps in England and Ireland, and now its quickly movable character is being genuinely put to work.
Back of headquarters the tents spread out and form a city, with streets between the rows. The whole place is laid out just as it was planned on paper in Washington years ago. But the little touches – the street signs, the whitewashed rock borders all over the place – they are additional, and are the volunteer work of the enlisted men.
At the receiving tent, trucks and ambulances arrive with wounded men transferred from other hospitals, with sick men from incoming ships, with ill and injured from our dozens of camps around the countryside, with airmen stricken at high altitudes.
Those able to walk go down a line of desks, where their history is taken for the files. In the next tent they turn in all their belongings. That tent is stacked high with barracks bags. Rifles and mud-covered bayonets stick out of the bags. Attendants gingerly accept hand grenades and give the owner a receipt.
In the next tent the patient turns in his clothes and gets a tag in return. He is given a pair of flannel pajamas and a red corduroy bathrobe. He must keep his own shoes, for the hospital has no house-slippers. Then he goes to whatever ward-tent his type of illness indicates. His belongings are taken by truck to the opposite end of the hospital a quarter mile away, to await his exit.
The surgical and laboratory tents sit in the middle of the big compound. There are three fully-equipped surgeries, and they are astonishingly modern. All equipment is brand-new. It is like the newest hospital in New York, except that the floor is canvas-covered dirt, the walls canvas, and the street outside is a deeply rutted boghole of red clay.
When an operation is going on, a triple flap is pulled over the tent entrance, and a heavy mosquito bar dropped over that. Inside, the air becomes stiflingly hot even now; next summer it will be cruel. Patients are brought up the muddy street on a field stretcher running on bicycle wheels. Surgeons wear white robes, white masks, rubber gloves. All is white, and you are struck with the vast amount of sheeting, swabs, bandages and towels – all white – around a desert operating table.
The light above the surgeons is fiery bright. The hospital taps a nearby high-tension line for its operating-room current. If that fails, there is a whole progression downward for emergency – a generator run by a gas engine, a portable battery set, then powerful flashlights, then lanterns, then candles, and finally just matches if it ever comes to that.
There is an X-ray room, and a fluoroscope. The darkroom was a tent within a tent. All the new equipment shone and sparkled, sitting incongruously on its dirt floor.
One tent is a laboratory, filled with basins and test tubes and burners. Another is a drugstore, where thousands of prescriptions are filled from endless bottles on shelves. And all this, mind you, every bit of it from tents to kitchen stoves to anesthetics, came to Africa on a single boat.
Then there is the dentist’s office, in one end of a surgical tent. The chair is just a hard green metal one, tilted back. There are no arms to hold to when it hurts. The drill is run by the dentist pumping on an old-fashioned treadle. Yet the dentist, Maj. Vaiden Kendrick, says he can do anything he did back home in Charlotte. He offered to make me a plate just to prove it, but I gnashed my original teeth at him and fled.
Then on to the wards. There are more than 40 tents of them. Each tent holds 20 men, on folding cots. The floor is stubble. It sounds makeshift, but the patients are thoroughly comfortable.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 16, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Jan. 15)
The American nurses — and there are lots of them — have turned out just as you would expect: wonderfully. Army doctors, and patients too, are unanimous in their praise for them. Doctors tell me that in that first rush of casualties they were calmer than the men.
One hospital unit had a nurse they were afraid of. She had seemed neurotic and hysterical on the way down. The head doctor detailed another nurse just to watch her all through the hectic first hours of tending the wounded. But he needn’t have. He admits now she was the calmest of the lot.
The head of one hospital, a full colonel who was in the last war, worked in the improvised hospitals set up at Arzew to tend the freshly wounded. He says they worked 36 hours without sleep, with wounded men lying around knee-deep, waiting for attention. He says not a soul in the outfit cracked up or got flustered.
He says:
You’re so busy you didn’t think about it being horrible. You aren’t yourself. Actually you seem to become somebody else. And after it’s over, you’re thrilled by it. Gosh, I hope I’m not stuck in a base hospital. I want to get on to the front.
The Carolina nurses of the Evacuation Hospital about which I have been writing have taken it like soldiers. For the first ten days they had to live like animals, even using open ditches for toilets, but they never complained.
At this tent hospital, one nurse is always on duty in each tentful of 20 men. She has medical orderlies to help her. In bad weather, the nurses wear Army coveralls, but Lt. Col. Rollin Bauchspies, the hospital commandant, wants them to put on dresses once in a while, for he says the effect on the men is astounding. The touch of femininity, the knowledge that a woman is around, gives a wounded man courage and confidence and a feeling of security. And the more feminine she looks, the better.
Only about 100 of the hospital’s 700 patients were wounded men. The others are just sick with ordinary things such as flu, appendicitis, sprains. They’ve got a whole tentful of mumps, and a few cases of malaria and dysentery.
At the far end of the hospital, behind an evil-looking barricade of barbed wire, is what Col. Bauchspies called “Casanova Park.” Back there are 150 soldiers with venereal disease.
I asked:
What’s the barbed wire for? They wouldn’t try to get out anyhow.
The colonel said:
It’s just to make them feel like heels. There’s no damned excuse for a soldier getting caught nowadays unless he just doesn’t care. When he gets a venereal he’s no good to his country and somebody else has to do his work. So I want him to feel ashamed, even though he does get the finest medical treatment at the same time.
The wounded soldiers are now mostly able to be on their feet. On warm days they come out in their bathrobes and sit for hours in the sun, out in the stubblefield. Most of them are getting a good tan. At night they play cards on their bunks, by the light of lanterns hanging from the ridgepoles. The usual bunkhouse profanity is strangely absent from those tents, for there is always a nurse around.
The boys like to talk about their experiences. I’ve spent much time with a tentful of men wounded in the harbor battle at Oran, and they recount the fight by the hour.
The deafened soldier I wrote about the other day – Sgt. Ralph Gower – is in this hospital. I’ve been back to talk to him several times. He grows more remarkable every time you see him. I don’t know what the boys will do without him when he leaves. They call him “the wee sergeant.” They picked up the “wee” when they were training in Scotland, and it has been tagged onto him ever since. The other day he said, with his deadpan Arkansas expression:
I’m glad I’m deaf so I won’t have to listen to that damned “wee sergeant” stuff anymore.
Though wounded veterans by now, and alive only by a miracle, those patients are just the ordinary American boys they always were, friendly and enthusiastic and sensible. Only occasionally do you find one who seems affected by his experiences – one officer broods over having lost so many of his men, another deafened boy stays to himself and refuses to try to learn lip-reading.
But on the whole, they are just as normal as though nothing had happened. They haven’t been paid and they can’t get trace of their friends and they don’t know where they’ll be sent, but still, they don’t complain except just a little, and they say very calmly that they guess it’s enough just to be alive.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 18, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Jan. 17)
There were a lot of things the Charlotte doctors and nurses hadn’t visualized before they set up their big tent hospital here in the field. The natives, for instance. Arabs in their long gowns come wandering across the plains hoping the miraculous Americans could cure their ailments. So, the hospital has had to set up a separate tent for them. They have local people in there wounded by shrapnel in the first battle. They have one 81-year-old woman whose arm was blown off. They have several patients they’ve done normal operations on.
They had one Arab woman shot through the stomach. Her condition was grave, but on the second morning her husband arrived, said he had to go to work and there wasn’t anybody to take care of the kids, and for her to get the hell home where she belonged. So, she got up and walked out. The doctors don’t think she could have lived through the day. But you know how it is with us Arabs – we don’t like our women gadding about when there’s work at home.
While I was there, a ragged Arab with a long stick came in with his 10-year-old boy. The child had a hideous rash over his neck and face. Through the interpreter, the Arab said he had been praying and praying for the Americans to come, so they could do something for his boy. His belief in us was touching, but the doctors fear the scourge is beyond their ken.
The Army’s Arabic interpreters, incidentally, are completely accidental. They weren’t assigned to the hospital unit by design or anything. It just happened.
One is Pvt. Israel Tabi, of 245 Broome St., New York City. He was born in Yemen, and came to America when he was 20. He’s 35 now, and a house painter by profession. So far as he knows, his parents are still in Arabia, and who can tell, he might see them someday. He says the Arabic spoken here is quite similar to what he knew. I mentioned that he was performing a very valuable service. Pvt. Tabi is volubly patriotic. He said:
I will do anything for my country. Whatever they ask me to do, I will do. I will work day and night. I love my country. I will do anything for it.
The other interpreter is an Egyptian – Pvt. Abraham Casper Leon Saide (pronounced Sadie). He lives at 343½ Seneca St., Buffalo, New York. He is a watch repairer by trade. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, is now 34, and came to America in 1924. He speaks Turkish, Greek, Egyptian and all those exotic languages. It looks as though Pvt. Saide might have a very useful career ahead of him in the Army.
The hospital already has handled more than 1,000 patients and hasn’t lost a one. The doctors run to the nearest stake and knock on wood when they say it. The surgeons have performed more than 125 operations.
There’s no red tape about whether a patient is legally entitled to enter the hospital or not. They take anybody who comes – soldier, civilian, Arab, Frenchman, anybody. The way they ignore formalities when emergency arises is one of the things that have made me feel so warmly toward this battlefront hospital. The other day we were looking at those round-bellied iron stoves half-buried in the ground in each tent.
I asked the commander, Lt. Col. Bauchspies:
What do you burn in them?
He said:
Wood.
I asked:
Where do you get the wood?
He said:
Steal it.
When you’re saving lives, you don’t requisition and wait; you forage and borrow and even steal if necessary. And nobody stands on rank. Recently, Maj. Gen. Fredendall made an inspection tour through the hospital. Col. Bauchspies croaked hoarsely like a frog.
The general asked:
How did you lose your voice?
The colonel said:
I lost it driving tent pegs.
The general said:
Your guard looks nice. Where did they get those new rifles?
The colonel said:
I daren’t tell you, sir.
The general smiled. And nodded.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 19, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 18)
While bad weather stymies the ground fighting in Tunisia, the air war on both sides has been daily increasing in intensity until it has reached a really violent tempo.
Not a day passes without heavy bombing of Axis ports, vicious strafing of cities and airdromes, losses on both sides and constant watchful patrolling.
Here, at one of our airdromes, all of us can assure you that being bombed is no fun. Yet these tired, hard-worked Americans jokingly decided to send a telegram to Allied headquarters asking them to arrange for the Jerrys to stop there each evening and pick up our mail.
I am living at this airdrome for a while. It can’t be named, although the Germans obviously know where it is, since they call on us frequently. Furthermore, they announced quite a while ago by radio that they would destroy the place within three days.
I hadn’t been here three hours till the Germans came. They arrived just at dusk. And they came arrogantly, flying low. Some of them must have regretted their audacity, for they never got home. The fireworks that met them were beautiful from the ground, but must have been hideous up where they were.
They dropped bombs on several parts of the field, but their aim was marred at the last minute. There were no direct hits on anything. Not a man was scratched, though the stories of near misses multiplied into the hundreds by the next day.
One soldier who had found a bottle of wine was lying in a pup tent drinking. He never got up during the raid just lay there cussing at the Germans:
You can’t touch me, you blankety-blanks! Go to hell, you so-and-so’s!
When the raid was over, he was untouched, but the tent a foot above him was riddled with shrapnel.
Another soldier made a practice of keeping a canteen hanging just above his head. That night when he went to take a drink, the canteen was empty. Investigation revealed a shrapnel hole, through which the water had run out.
Another soldier had the front sight of his rifle shot off by a German machine-gun bullet.
Some of the soldiers were actually picking tiny bits of shrapnel out of their coats all the next day. Yet, as I said, not a drop of American blood was shed.
When this airdrome was first set up the soldiers dug slit trenches just deep enough to lie down in during a raid, but after each new bombing the trenches get deeper.
Everybody makes fun of himself but keeps on digging. Today some of these trenches are more than eight feet deep. I’ll bet there has been more whole-hearted digging here in two weeks than WPA did in two years.
The officers don’t have to hound their men. They dig with a will of their own, and with a vengeance. If we stay here long enough we’ll probably have to install elevators to get to the bottom of the trenches.
After supper you see officers as well as men out digging. Each little group has its own trench design. Some are just square holes. Some form an L. Some are regulation zigzag.
The ground here is dry, and the trenches don’t fill up with water as they do in the coastal and mountain camps. The earth is as hard as concrete. You have to use an ax as well as a pick and shovel.
You’d love our air-raid alarm system. It consists of a dinner bell hanging from a date palm tree outside headquarters. When the radio watchers give the order the dinner bell is rung. Then the warning is carried to the far ends of the vast airdrome by sentries shooting revolvers and rifles into the air. At night it sounds like a small battle.
When the alarm goes, the soldiers get excited and mad too. When the Germans come over, the anti-aircraft guns throw up a fantastic Fourth of July torrent of red tracer bullets. But to the soldiers on the ground that isn’t enough, so they let loose with everything from Colt .45s up to Tommy guns.
If the Germans don’t kill us, we’ll probably shoot ourselves.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 20, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 19)
This airdrome is away from the dark and rainy coastal belt of the Mediterranean.
The only way I can picture it for you is to suggest that you try to visualize some flat endless space in the desert of our own Southwest, with purple mountains in the distance and sand everywhere. Out an oasis of date palms down upon it, so big it would take an hour to walk from one end to the other.
Here the sun shines down warmly out of an incredibly blue sky. At night, there are stars by the million, but a dry and piercing chill comes down with the darkness.
Here is Africa as we have pictured it back home. The green fields and European-style cities of the coast have been left behind. Here the villages are sun-caked abode. Arabs, in their rags, dominate the population.
It is a long way between villages. Now and then you see a camel on the road. The wind blows some days, suffocating you with flying sand. It is hard on men and engines both. Little rippled drifts of yellow sand form around shrubs in the desert, and our soldiers wear tinted dust goggles.
It does rain here, but very seldom. Soldiers who have lived knee-deep in the perpetual winter mud of the coastal belt call this the best place in Africa to be.
We are not far from the enemy, as the crow flies. All day our air patrols cover the desert for hundreds of miles, keeping track of enemy movements in our direction. Even camel trains are on patrol, under the French Army. All troops are constantly in readiness for a descent by enemy parachutists.
Infantry and anti-tank units arrive and bivouac around the countryside for our protection. Truck trains come across the mountains bringing new loads of gasoline and bombs. American cargo planes, flying in formation, with fighter escort, arrive daily with airplane parts and other urgent supplies – and sometimes with mail.
Our ground troops – and it takes an unbelievable number to run a great airdrome like this – live in their little pup tents, scattered all over the vast field. Nobody lives in buildings here. Everybody is in tents – the men in little tents, the officers in bigger ones that hold four.
All the tents have dirt piled along their outside edges to keep sand from drifting in and light from leaking out.
In England, and even in Africa, in coastal cities, there is considerable carelessness about blackouts. But believe me, not here! Nobody has to post any official order. Every soldier is his own blackout warden, and a strict one.
The men are tense, and the danger is real. Every dusk brings its possibility of death, and any spot of light in this camp is likely to get a bullet through it.
The soldiers as usual have made their tiny tents touchingly homelike. Many of them have dug big rectangular holes five feet into the ground, with steps leading down, and set their tents over the top. It makes a fine wardroom down there.
One friend of mine, Sgt. Cheedle Caviness, who happens to be a nephew of Senator Hatch of New Mexico, rustled himself a folding cot and then dug holes in the ground for its legs to fit into in order to make it low enough to out inside his tent. He says:
I got tired of sweating out those hard lumps in my back.
The troops are so scattered that there are a dozen separate messes. The food is cooked in tents on portable ranges. The mess lines are outdoors. The men have built high benches where they set their mess kits while they east standing up.
The toilets are nothing more than trenches.
Nobody ever takes a bath, except maybe a quickie from a pan. Once in a while, you can go to the nearest town and indulge in the local Turkish baths, which are a little weird but give you the illusion of being clean.
Personally, I haven’t taken a bath in so long I’m afraid to now for fear of catching another cold.
Life at this airdrome is far from what would be considered normal at home. Yet morale is high. For one thing, it is so much better than the cold and mud of the coast. For another, there is serious work for everybody to do – vital work, for you are working to preserve your life.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 21, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 20)
Everything is temporary around thus airdrome near the front. It is in violent contrast to the fine airports at home and to the permanent stations we have in England.
Gone are the luxurious English lounges, billiard rooms and bar, and the twice daily custom of tea, which are part of every RAF station. Here there is no bar, no tea, no billiards. A few of the troops throw footballs around in the evening for relaxation.
There is no place for the officers to sit down together during their off hours unless they sit on the ground or on empty gasoline cans. The commanding officer’s desk is merely a board laid across four empty wooden crosses.
The supply rooms for rations and plane parts are just little corrals built up of empty gasoline tins filled with sand and laid like bricks. I think the American Army would collapse all over the world without its empty gasoline tins. They’ve become a truer symbol of America than the eagle.
The briefing room for bomber crews is a large tent with maps of enemy territory tacked on a board that is nailed to two posts set in the ground. In front of the board is a little platform made of gasoline tins sprinkled with sand. The crews just stand there and listen to their instructions.
Somehow, it’s not quite the way we picture it from books and movies. In those picturizations, we see only the actual takeoffs – everything else is blotted out of our minds, and the whole field seems to be devoted solely to starting the bombers on their mission.
Actually, the greater portion of the men at this airdrome know nothing about a mission until they see the planes start forming up in the air above. All work goes on as usual. The start of a mission is only another cog in the immense job of the day.
A cover patrol of fighter planes hovers above just in case. When the mission is finally formed, the local fighter bunch comes in and a new batch takes off to go along with the bombers.
Work is routine while they are away, but everybody is watchful when the time means for them to start coming back. It is true that people watch and count as the planes start appearing on the horizon. But this is a useless pastime, for not half a dozen people on the field know exactly how many really are due back. With the air constantly full of planes, and so many circling and waiting and new ships arriving from other fields, it is almost impossible to count correctly the number of planes starting on a mission. Nevertheless, the ground crews try, and they start counting as the planes come home.
There are other things they look for just as intently when the planes return. They look for feathered propellers, and for planes sort of straggling and limping along. They look for returning fighters to peel off and do a victory roll across the field, showing that they’ve shot down a German. When this happens, you hear cheers all over the field.
If any planes fail to return, the news gets around the field by word of mouth in a few hours. People are sorry, but actual grief never shows.
There is never a moment during daylight when there are no planes in the air. The first patrols take off before dawn and the last ones land after dark. All day there is a ceaseless coming and going. New bunches of replacement planes arrive and depart in workhouse manner. Casuals drop in just a few days out of America, England or India. Actually, the air above seems much like Bolling Field at Washington.
It is hard to believe the whole thing was set up with one purpose only – destruction and death. It is just as hard to believe that destruction and death can likewise come to us out of the same blue sky. But as one officer said:
We’ve got to realize it, for, believe me, everything is for keeps now.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 22, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 21)
Our airmen over here have been dishing it out to the Germans; on the other hand, they have been taking it too. Our ratio of losses is vastly lower than that of the Germans, yet our boys have had to fly constantly against terrible opposition. It has made quick veterans out of them. They have gone through more here in Africa than they ever did on missions to Europe from English bases.
It is generally agreed among airmen that the bombing runup over Bizerte is one of the hottest spots in the world to fly through. It lasts less than a minute, but you have to fly straight and steady through an absolute cloudburst of noise and black smoke puffs – little black puffs of death everywhere you look – and after a few of those, something begins to jump inside you.
There is no lack of bravery among our bomber and fighter pilots. But also, they are human beings, and I doubt if there’s one among them who wouldn’t like to be sent home. The English have long had a system of resting aircrewmen after a certain number of missions over enemy territory. This consists of transferring such men to non-combatant flying for several months, after which they go back for another tour of combat duty. Rumors are rampant among our fliers that we will soon have such a system.
Many of our pilots have executed as many as 25 missions, and are certainly due for a rest of some kind soon. They rest all their hope in a belief that they would be transferred back to America. Wishfulness becomes almost fact, and you hear pilot gunners say:
I’ve got half enough trips now to go home.
…or:
I’ve got two-thirds enough.
The fact is that no permanent system of posting the men for leave or transfer has been worked out yet. But some crews are going home very soon. In fact, they may be there by the time you read this. They are going back for a much-deserved respite from combat, and to train and organize new crews. After several months they will probably return and start a second tour of combat missions. Many British pilots are now on their third tour of combat duty.
It is unlikely that our air crews will ever have a system whereby a certain number of missions will earn a one-way ticket home. It would be wonderful for them to know they could quit the front forever after 30 missions and spend the rest of the war working at home, but airmen will be needed too badly ever to permit that. It is more likely that some crews will be sent home just for a while and that others will take their rest periods over here.
There are discussions of rest camps in the mountains, and recreation centers staffed in such a way as to give the men some American female companionship – that being one of the most important lacks for soldiers on foreign soil. But whatever the system, and whatever the number of missions before posting, there’ll be a wild rush for the planes when the magic last mission comes up. If we are working our men hard, we can take comfort from the fact that the Germans are working theirs hard too.
New bombers and fighters arrive at this field several times a week, in little groups. We hear reports that absolute floods of planes are on the way, that planes are backed up all along the route clear to Miami. I talked to one crew that was ready to go into action here only six days after leaving Connecticut.
Also, specialists from Washington pop in on quick flying trips, stay a few days, and head back across the ocean to give firsthand information on war needs at the front. I am sure that what they see must have made their eyes pop out of their heads. Things are being done over here that just aren’t possible on paper.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 23, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 22)
You read the official communiqués a few days ago about a devastating raid by our Flying Fortresses on a huge German bomber airdrome near Tripoli. What you didn’t read, at least in any detail, is the story contains in these next three columns.
It was late afternoon at our desert airdrome. The sun was lazy, the air was warm, and a faint haze of propeller dust hung over the field, giving it softness. It was time for the planes to start coming back from their mission, and one by one they did come – big Flying Fortresses and fiery little Lightnings. Nobody paid a great deal of attention, for this returning is a daily routine thing.
Finally, they were all in – all, that is, except one. Operations reported a Fortress missing. Returning pilots said it had lagged behind and lost altitude just after leaving the target. The last report said the Fortress couldn’t stay in the air more than five minutes. Hours had passed since then. So, it was gone.
Ten men were in that plane. The day’s accomplishments had been great, but the thought of 10 lost friends cast a pall over us. We had already seen death that afternoon. One of the returning Fortresses had released a red flare over the field, and I had stood with others beneath the great plane as they handed its dead pilot, head downward, through the escape hatch onto a stretcher.
The faces of his crew were grave, and nobody talked very loud. One man clutched a leather cap with blood on it. The pilot’s hands were very white. Everybody knew the pilot. He was so young, a couple of hours before. The war came inside us then, and we felt it deeply.
Half a dozen of us went to the high control tower. We go there every evening, for two things – to watch the sunset, and to get word on the progress of the German bombers that frequently come just after dusk to blast our airdrome.
The sunsets in the desert are truly things with souls. The violence of their color is incredible. They splatter the sky and the clouds with a surging beauty. The mountains stand dark against the horizon, and palm trees silhouette themselves dramatically against the fiery west.
As we stood on the tower looking down over this powerful scene, the day began folding itself up. Fighter planes, which patrol the field all day, were coming in. All the soldiers in the tent camps had finished supper. That noiseless peace that sometimes comes just before dusk hung over the airdrome. Men talked in low tones about the dead pilot and the lost Fortress. We thought we would wait a few minutes more to see if the Germans were coming over.
And then an electric thing happened. Far off in the dusk, a red flare shot into the sky. It made an arc against the dark background of the mountains and fell to the earth. It couldn’t be anything else. It had to be. The ten dead men were coming home!
An officer yelled:
Where’s the flare gun? Gimme a green flare!
He ran to the edge of the tower, shouted, “Look out below!” and fired a green rocket into the air. Then we saw the plane – just a tiny black speck. It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.
I am a layman, and no longer of the fraternity that flies, but I can feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.
All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With our nervous systems, we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came – so slowly that it was cruel to watch.
It reached the far end of the airdrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out – it seemed to us – for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?
They cleared the last plane, and they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down die runway, the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.
The last of the sunset died, and the sky turned into blackness, which would help the Germans if they came on schedule with their bombs. But nobody cared. Our 10 dead men were miraculously back from the grave.
The Pittsburgh Press (January 25, 1943)
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 24)
The 10 men who brought their Flying Fortress home from a raid on Tripoli, after they had been given up for lost, will undoubtedly get decorations. Nothing quite like it has happened before in this war. Here is the full story.
The Tripoli Airdrome was heavily defended, by both fighter planes and anti-aircraft guns. Flying into that hailstorm, as one pilot said, was like a mouse attacking a dozen cats.
The Thunderbird – for that was the name of this Fortress – was first hit just as it dropped its bombload. One engine went out. Then a few moments later, the other engine on the same side went. When both engines go out on the same side, it is usually fatal. And therein lies the difference of this feat from other instances of bringing damaged bombers home.
The Thunderbird was forced to drop below the other Fortresses. And the moment a Fortress drops down or lags behind, German fighters are on it like vultures. The boys don’t know how many Germans were in the air, but they think there must have been 30.
Our Lightning fighters, escorting the Fortresses, stuck by the Thunderbird and fought as long as they could, but finally they had to leave or they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to make it home.
The last fighter left the crippled Fortress about 40 miles from Tripoli. Fortunately, the swarm of German fighters started home at the same time, for their gas was low too.
The Thunderbird flew on another 20 miles. Then a single German fighter appeared, and dived at them. Its guns did great damage to the already-crippled plane, but simply couldn’t knock it out of the air.
Finally, the fighter ran out of ammunition, and left. Our boys were alone now with their grave troubles. Two engines were gone, most of the guns were out of commission, and they were still more than 400 miles from home. The radio was out. They were losing altitude, 500 feet a minute, and now they were down to 2,000.
The pilot called up his crew and held a consultation. Did they want to jump? They all said they would ride the plane as long as it was in the air. He decided to keep going.
The ship was completely out of trim, cocked over at a terrible angle. But they gradually got it trimmed so that it stopped losing altitude.
By now, they were down to 900 feet, and a solid wall of mountains ahead barred the way homeward. They flew along parallel to those mountains for a long time, but they were now miraculously gaining some altitude. Finally, they got the thing to 1,500 feet.
The lowest pass is 1,600 feet, but they came across at 1,500. Explain that if you can! Maybe it’s as the pilot said:
We didn’t come over the mountains, we came through them.
The copilot said:
I was blowing on the windshield trying to push her along. Once I almost wanted to reach a foot down and sort of walk us along over the pass.
And the navigator said:
If I had been on the wingtip, I could have touched the ground with my hand when we went through the pass.
The air currents were bad. One wing was cocked way down. It was hard to hold. The pilots had a horrible fear that the low wing would drop clear down and they roll over and go into a spin. But they didn’t.
The navigator came into the cockpit, and he and the pilots navigated the plane home. Never for a second could they feel any real assurance of making it. They were practically rigid, but they talked a blue streak all the time, and cussed, as airmen do.
Everything seemed against them. The gas consumption doubled, squandering their precious supply. To top off their misery, they had a bad headwind. The gas gauge went down and down.
At last, the navigator said they were only 40 miles from home, but those 40 miles passed as though they were driving a horse and buggy. Dusk, coming down on the sandy haze, made the vast flat desert an indefinite thing. One oasis looks exactly like another. But they knew when they were near home. Then they shot their red flare and waited for the green flare from our control tower. A minute later, it came – the most beautiful sight that crew has ever seen.
When the plane touched the ground, they cut the switches and let it roll. For it had no brakes. At the end of the roll, the big Fortress veered off the side of the runway. And then it climaxed its historic homecoming by spinning madly around five times and then running backwards for 50 yards before it stopped. When they checked the gas gauges, they found one tank dry and the other down to 20 gallons.
Deep dusk enveloped the field. Five more minutes and they never would have found it. This weary, crippled Fortress had flown for the incredible time of four and a half hours on one pair of motors. Any pilot will tell you it’s impossible.
That night, I was with the pilot and some of the crew and we drank a toast. One visitor raised his glass and said:
Here’s to your safe return.
But the pilot raised his own glass and said instead:
Here’s to a goddamned good airplane!
And the others of the crew raised their glasses and repeated:
Here’s to a goddamned good airplane!
And here is the climax. During the agonizing homeward crawl, this one crippled plane shot down the fantastic total of six German fighters. These were officially confirmed.