The Pittsburgh Press (December 18, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
I’ve been living with a gun crew that has fought through four big Mediterranean campaigns. These men have been away from America for nearly 17 months.
It has been more than a year since any of them has slept in a bed. When they turned in their old gun a few weeks ago for a new one, it had fired more than 6,000 rounds.
Originally the whole crew was from South Carolina and they were a closely knit bunch, but transfers and illnesses over the months have whittled the Carolinians down to five. People from such strange and unorthodox places as California and Missouri have infiltrated.
But Carolina still sets the pace, and a year of rassling with French and Italian hasn’t changed their accent a bit. Practically everybody has a nickname. You hear such odd ones as “Rabbit” and “Wartime” and “Tamper” and “Mote.” I’ve noticed that most of the crew call their gun “howzer” instead of “howitzer,” and they say “far” instead of “fire.”
The officers are mostly Southern too, and I must say this outfit comes the nearest to being a real democracy of any I’ve seen in the Army. The battery officers work, live and play with their men. It is a team, rather than a case of somebody above giving orders and somebody below taking them.
They bow to the infantry
Most of the men are from small towns or farms. They are mostly hill people. As I wrote of them more than a year ago in England, there is something fundamentally fine and sound about their character that must have been put there by a closeness to their hills and their trees and their soil.
They are natively courteous. Most of them have little education, and their grammar is atrocious, but their thinking is clear and they seem to have a friendliness toward all people that much of America doesn’t have. They have an acceptance of their miserable fate and a sense of gaiety and good humor, despite their hardships, that you seldom find in other Army outfits.
The artillery lives tough, but it, too, like nearly every other branch of the Army, bows in sympathy and admiration to the infantry. One day we were sitting on our steel hats, planted in the mud around a bonfire made of empty pasteboard powder cases, when one member of the gun crew said:
We live like kings in comparison to the infantry.
“What’s that you say?” burst in another cannoneer. The sentence was repeated.
The questioner said:
Oh, I thought you said we live like kings. I thought you must be crazy in the head. But if you compare us with the infantry, that’s all right. Those poor guys really have to take it.
The average artilleryman’s outlook on life, I think, can be summed up by saying he’s uncompromisingly proud of his battery, he’s thankful and appreciate of being in the artillery, and he wants to go home so bad he talks about it nearly 20% of the time.
The artillery doesn’t live in as great danger as the infantry. For example, not a single officer out of this regiment has been lost in more than a year of combat. They always try to lay in their guns behind a hill where the enemy’s long-range guns can’t reach. Also, they are heavily protected by anti-aircraft concentrations to drive off German bombers.
Tragedy strikes twice
But casualties are bound to happen regardless. Tragedy has struck twice in my battery of four guns since it came to Italy only a few weeks ago. No. 2 gun blew up from a premature explosion as they were putting in a shell. Three men were killed and half a dozen wounded.
Not long before that some German raiders did get through and a bomb explosion killed three men and wounded nearly a dozen others. I was told over and over the story of one of the three who died. His legs were blown off clear up to his body. He stayed conscious, but couldn’t possibly live long.
When the medical men went to help him, he raised what we left of himself up on his elbows and said:
I’m done for, so don’t waste time on me. Go help the other boys.
He lived seven minutes, conscious all the time.
Things like that knock the boys down for a few days. But if they don’t come too often, they can take it without serious damage to their fighting spirit.
It’s when casualties become so great that those who remain feel they have no chance to live, if they must go on and on, that morale in an Army gets low.
The morale is excellent in this battery I’ve been living with. They gripe, of course, but they are never grim or even mad about the toughness of their life. The only thing is they’re important for movement – they’d fire all day and move all night every day and every night if they could only keep going forward swiftly.
Because everywhere in our army “forward,” no matter what direction, is toward home.