The Pittsburgh Press (January 3, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
The cannoneers of an artillery battery lead a life that is deadly with monotony and devoid of any comfort or diversity or hope of diversity.
Ordinarily, they are firing only a small part of any one day. The rest of the time they either play poker, do their washing, sew buttons, write letter on their knees, or just sit around doing absolutely nothing and talking the same kind of small talk day after day after day.
If they had a comfortable place to loaf in, it wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s never anything but a water can or a sandbag to sit on, and a little straw on the ground to lie on. There’s no place to put anything, and the cramped confines of your pup tent are your castle.
And yet the average cannoneer that I was with was in good spirits and seemingly resigned without bitterness to going on and on that way indefinitely.
The regiment recently began a rotation system of letting a few men in each battery off on leave to go to Naples for five days. Naples is a nice city and the boys can get a bath and a good bed, go sightseeing, drink some wine, and maybe even have a date.
Little Cpl. Peewee Graham recently got back from Naples and he still has to undergo constant kidding about the hell he possibly raised in the big city.
The rotation plan of sending 1% per month of each outfit back to America also comes in for a lot of discussion. It isn’t working very well so far, and the quota has been cut to half of 1%. It’s an optimist indeed who figures the quota will ever get around to him personally.
Chances all figured out
Sgt. Jack McCray has his own chances all figured out. He says the way things are going now, he will get his five days in Naples around next July and will get to go back to America 17 years from now.
The boys, incidentally, cut cards to see who goes on the Naples junkets.
The shell they fire from these 155mm howitzers has a single metal band around it. Two or three times a day in every battery one of these bands will fly off as a shell leaves the gun, and the band will go careening and screaming through the air on its own. These are called “rotating bands.” They’re liable to go in any direction, and they make a variety of noises, one of which sounds like a whipped dog yowling in terror.
I was standing one morning with a bunch of cannoneers when a rotating band of the whipped-dog type cut loose from another battery, whereupon one of the soldiers said:
We’ve run out of ammunition, so we’re shootin’ dogs at ‘em now.
Dogs also figure in the conversation about food. Every day or so, somebody jokingly brings up the suggestion that the cook is putting Italian dogs in the chow. One of the boys said:
As soon as I don’t see no more dogs around, I’m gonna quit eatin’.
One day an ammunition truck drove past and it had a little black-and-white dog standing on top of the hood with his ears up and tail up, looking so damned important you almost had to laugh. When the truck came back the little dog was running ahead of it, nosing around into everything, still acting awfully important. When he saw us, he came bounding into the gun pit, walked right across a row of shells lying there, and continued busily on his way.
Big guns scare dogs
I don’t know why that struck the soldiers as so odd, but they kept talking about the dog walking right across those shells, as though there might have been some danger of his setting them off, which of course there wasn’t. In fact, the men themselves walk and sit on them all the time.
Lots of soldiers have picked up local dogs as pets. The dogs here are better and healthier looking than those in Africa.
Some dogs are absolutely indifferent to a blast from the heavy guns, while it scares others to death. At night, after a salvo, you can hear the farmers’ dogs all around yelling in fright as though they had been kicked. And the cannoneers say that sometimes a dog will just stand and shake all over with fright after a big gun has gone off.
In that respect, there is a lot of similarity between a dog and me.