Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 6, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
The Italian mules we’ve been using to pack supplies to our troops fighting in the mountains are smaller and weaker than the average American mule. Also, they have been taken around in trucks from one place to another until a lot of them are sick from it.

At first, we misjudged them and put too heavy a load on them. In fact, we put on more than an American mule could carry over such a trail. We lashed on four cans of water and two cases of rations, making a load of around 240 pounds. The mules just couldn’t take it. They’d all be sick next day. So now we load them with only two cans of water and one of rations, cutting the weight to 120 pounds.

They say the Italians are cruel to their mules on the trail but take good care of them when they’re not working.

The Italian method of saving “giddyap” to a mule is to go “brrrrr,” the way we do when we are cold. If you stand along the pack trail at night and listen to the skinners’ “brr-ing” their miles upward, it sounds as if the whole population is freezing to death.

At first, there were some white mules in the pack train, but they were too easy to see by moonlight, so we stopped using them. A few hours are used in some of the outfits, and several were discovered with the brand of the Italian royal family.

Mule shoe shortage

When the mules arrived from Sardinia, the most pressing problem was to get them shod. It took days to scour the country and jig up shoes for them. Then horseshoe nails became the problem. They finally found enough racetrack nails to do the job.

Horseshoe nails are so scarce and so precious in Italy that the nails had to be counted out to the civilian blacksmiths to keep them from stealing them. If a smith broke a nail, he had to bring the pieces back before he could get another one.

Some of the pack trains are run exclusively by Americans. I’ve been told the Americans are better mule skinners than the Italians and I’ve also been told the opposite, so I don’t know which is right. But as one soldier said about the Americans:

Them old city boys hadn’t never fooled around with mules before, so they didn’t go so good at first.

In emergencies, some pack trains were sent up the mountains in the daytime, but it was dangerous business, for the Germans kept the trail pretty well plastered with shells.

Luckily there have been no casualties on the trail in my outfit, but seven Italian soldiers were wounded in the mule pack in a dive-bombing.

The Italians are very nervous about bombs and shells. Any night the shells stary dropping too close to the mule pack, the Italians disappear into their foxholes as if by magic, and you can never find them in the dark to rout them out again.

The men have fared much better than the mules, for unfortunately a mule doesn’t know about foxholes. My outfit alone has lost 50 mules to shellfire and bombing, and another 100 are sick from overwork and too much riding around in trucks.

Interpreters for the asking

The Italian mule outfit is under two Italian lieutenants who wear plumed Tyrolean caps and look sort of romantic. Neither of them speaks English, but in the American Army you only have to tell twice a find a soldier who speaks Italian, so the little group has an interpreter. Everybody has to depend so heavily upon him that he practically runs the show.

He is Cpl. Anthony Savino of Newark, New Jersey. His job would drive anybody crazy. The Italians are not as quick as efficient as we are, and about the time Savino gets a pack train all ready, everything collapses and chaos takes place. Then he catches it from both sides.

The officer in charge of this mule pack is Lt. Harmon W. Williams of Flint, Michigan. He was named after Gen. Harmon, who won fame in the last war. Some nights Lt. Williams is up till 3:00 a.m. seeing that all the skinners get back down the mountain. Other nights he gets to bed as early as 7:00 p.m. he sleeps whenever he can. For it’s an unusual night when he isn’t routed out to get some emergency supplies to the top.

He sleeps in a stone cowshed along with a dozen of his enlisted men. He was an undertaker in civil life, and is an anti-tank man in the Army, but a mule expert for the moment.

Cpl. Savino takes his interpreting job so seriously that he even talks about it in his sleep. I slept in the same cowshed with the boys, and one night when I happened to wake up about 3:00 a.m., I heard Savino saying:

Well, if we can’t use them as interpreters, let’s make guides out of them.

He thought that was pretty funny when I told him about it. He had never known before that he talked in his sleep.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 7, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
The human packers of supplies to our group high in the Italian mountains interested me much more than the mule trains, partly because their job was much harder and partly because thy talk instead of heehawing.

You can get an idea of the magnitude of this human freight service when you realize that in one 10-day period Americans soldiers packed up this one mountain nearly 100,000 pounds of supplies for their battalion. That was just one outfit. The same thing was being duplicated in a dozen or more places during the same time.

More than half the trail was out in the open, across bare rocks, all under German artillery fire. The top part of the trail was so steep th9ey anchored weights alongside the path for the men to pull themselves upward with.

We tried to hire Italians to do the packing, but after the first day they were never seen again. I heard a report that on one mountain Italian women had volunteered and were carrying up five-gallon cans balanced on their heads, but I was never able to verify this story. I think it’s a myth.

Some of the soldiers carry the water cans on their shoulders while others lash them onto pack boards. At first some of the packers would cheat a little and pour out some of the precious water when the can became too heavy. But the laws of physics soon stopped this, for with the can only partly filled the water would slosh around inside and throw the packers off balance and make it doubly hard to walk.

Miniature Paul Bunyan

From the bottom of the mountain to the top, a good walker carrying nothing whatever could make it in three hours. Carrying a heavy load, it took longer than that, and yet there were some fantastic exhibitions of human strength on that mountain.

The champion packer in our outfit was Pvt. Lester Scarborough, but he had left the area when I was there and I never did get to see him. He was from somewhere in West Virginia, and he was a miniature Paul Bunyan.

He had been sick and was supposed to be convalescing, yet he could take a full can of water to the top and be clear back down again in 2½ hours, where others took three hours and longer just to get up.

He didn’t do this just once, but day after day. He reached the climax of his carrying career when he made four roundtrips in one day – the fourth one being an emergency dash to the mountaintop to help beat off a German mortar attack.

Pvt. Scarborough is no giant. He is 18 years old, stands only 5 feet 7½, and weighs only 135 pounds. I have never heard of so much strength in such a small package.

Bewhiskered and begrimed

When I went up the trail my guard was Pvt. Fred Ford of East St. Louis. He is a tall, rugged fellow, and he had two weeks of whiskers and grime on his face. He looked sort of ferocious but turned out to be pleasant and friendly.

Like practically all the regular packers, Pvt. Ford was a line soldier who had fought for weeks on top and was supposed to be down for a rest. He was a Browning automatic rifleman in an infantry company. And there’s a funny thing about that.

Pvt. Ford said:

I threw dozens of hand grenades, and even rocks, and I guess I killed plenty of Germans. But I never had a single chance to shoot that automatic rifle.

On the back of his jacket Pvt. Ford has printed in purple ink his serial number, the name “Betty,” and underneath that “East St. Louis, Illinois.” Betty is his wife, and she is a chemist in a defense plant.

Pvt. Ford’s feet were all taped up because of blisters, and he walked on his toes to save his heels from rubbing. He said:

Sometimes going up the mountain you get to the point where you know you can’t make it, but somehow you always do.

Actually, some of them don’t. I saw packer after packer report back in at the bottom of the trail saying he “couldn’t make her.” He’d dumped his load and come back down.

A few of these may have been malingerers, but most of them were genuine. The men were exhausted, and their feet were broken out, and infirmities such as arthritis, hernia or heart weakness would leap to the fore on those man-killing climbs.

Mountain aeronautics

When we started back down, German shells began dropping quite a way behind us.

Pvt. Ford said:

If I get to going too fast for you, just yell. When they start shelling, we practically fly down the mountain. We don’t stop for nothing.

But I didn’t have any pressing business engagements along the way to detain us, so Pvt. Ford and I flew down the mountainside together, going so fast the rocks we kicked loose couldn’t even keep up with us.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 8, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
You’ve heard of trench mouth and athlete’s foot, but now another occupational disease of warfare has sprung up on both sides here in the Italian war. It isa called “trench foot.” The Germans as well as the Americans have it. It was well known in the last war.

Trench foot comes from a man’s feet being wet and cold for long periods and from his not taking off his shoes often enough. In the mountains, the soldiers sometimes go for two weeks and longer without ever having their shows off and without ever being dry.

With trench foot, the tissues gradually seem to go dead, and sores break out. It is almost the same as the circulation being stopped and the flesh dying. In extreme cases gangrene occurs. We have had cases where amputation was necessary. And in other cases, the soldier won’t be able to walk again for six months.

In a way it’s much like frostbite, and as in frostbite, it is the wrong thing to put your feet in hot water when you get an opportunity.

Sometimes they’ve let their trench foot go so long without complaining that they have finally been unable to walk and have had to be taken down the mountain in litters.

Others get down under their own power, agonizingly. Recently one boy was a day and half getting down the mountain on what would normally be a two-hour descent. He arrived at the bottom barefooted, carrying his shoes in his hand, and with his feet bleeding. He was in a sort of daze from the pain.

One battalion has been experimenting by having its soldiers wrap part of a cellophane gas cap around their feet between their shocks and their shoes, in order to keep their feet dry. The battalion surgeon doesn’t yet know whether the experiment will work, because right in the middle of it we had a week of dry weather.

Cavemen in the Stone Age

The fighting on the mountaintop sometimes almost reaches the caveman stage. The Americans and Germans are frequently so close that they actually throe rocks at each other.

They use up many times as many hand grenades as we have had in any other phase of the Mediterranean war. And you have to be pretty close when you throw hand grenades.

Rocks play a big part in the mountain wat. You hide behind rocks, you throw rocks, you sleep in rock crevices, and you even get killed by flying rocks.

When an artillery shell bursts on the loose rock surface, rock fragments are thrown for many yards. In one battalion, 15% of the casualties are from flying rocks.

Also, now and then an artillery burst from a steep hillside will loosen big boulders which go leaping and bounding down the mountainside for thousands of yards. The boys say such a rock sounds like a windstorm coming down the mountainside.

Comin’ round the mountain

When soldiers come down the mountain out of battle, they are dirty, grimy, unshaven and weary. They look 10 years older than they are. They don’t smile much.

But the human body and mind recover rapidly. A couple of days down below and they begin to pick up. It’s funny to see a bunch of combat soldiers after they’ve shaved and washed up. As one said:

We all look sick after we’ve cleaned up, we’re so white.

It’s funny to hear them talk. One night in our cowshed, I heard one of them say how he was going to keep his son out of the next war.

He said:

As soon as I get home, I’m going to put 10-pound weights in his hands and make him jump off the garage roof, to break down his arches. I’m going to feed him a little ground glass to give him a bad stomach, and I’m going to make him read by candlelight all the time to ruin his eyes. When I get through with him, he’ll be double-4 double-F.

Another favorite expression of soldiers just out of combat runs like this:

Well, let’s go down to Naples and start a second draft.

Meaning let’s conscript all the clerks, drivers, waiters, MPs, office workers and so on that flood any big city near a fighting area, and send them up in the mountains to fight.

The funny thing is they wouldn’t have to draft many soldiers down there. A simple call for volunteers would be enough, I really believe. One of the paradoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 10, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle has written many, many moving columns, but none more stirring than his description of the touching farewells to a young Army captain, killed in Italy. It is beautiful writing, about a heartbreaking scene. Ernie will never forget it, and we doubt if you will.

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had been in this company since long before he left the States. He was very young, only is his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

A sergeant told me:

After my own father, he comes next.

A soldier said:

He always looked after us. He’d go to bat for us every time.

Another said:

I’ve never known him to do anything unkind.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow down. The moon was nearly full and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley. Soldiers made shadows as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came belly down across the wooden packsaddle, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

Makes you feel small

The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies, when they got to the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half-light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the other. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don’t ask silly questions…

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about him. We talked for an hour or more; the dead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall.

It’s Capt. Waskow

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there in the moonlight in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting.

One of them said quickly:

This one is Capt. Waskow.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You don’t cover up dead men in combat zones. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The uncertain mules moved off to their olive groves. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud:

God damn it!

That’s all he said, and then he walked away.

Another one came, and he said, “God damn it to hell anyway!” He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.

Holds dead captain’s hand

Another man came. I think it was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the dim light, for everybody was grimy and dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face and then spoke directly to him, as though he were alive:

I’m sorry, old man.

Then a solder came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tender, and he said:

I sure am sorry, sir.

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the Captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the Captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 11, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontlines in Italy – (by wireless)
There is an old stone building sitting on the bare mountainside at the top of the mule trail. It is used as a medical-aid station, but even so the Germans put a few score shells around it every day.

While I was there one day back during the holiday season, we were standing around outside – a dozen or more medics, telephone linemen, packers and slightly injured men – when all of a sudden came that familiar and rapid whine and we all ducked.

The shell exploded with a terrific blast about a hundred yards away, and for 20 seconds afterwards we had a very weird Christmas atmosphere indeed as big and little pieces of shrapnel tinkled and clattered down upon the rocks around us with a ringing metallic sound.

No package for him

Practically everybody I’ve run into in the Army got Christmas packages. I know of one captain – Frank Knebel of Pottsville, Pennsylvania – who got 24 boxes from home.

Nearly every soldier’s package had at least one ironic item in it, such as brushless shaving cream or lifesavers which we’re saturated with. But most of them were pretty nice collections.

It sounds like a burlesque joke, but there were boys who actually got cans of Spam from home. Others got fancy straw house slippers, and some got black silk socks as though they were going to a nightclub this evening in full dress. But the finniest gift I saw was a beautiful blue polka-dot necktie.

I didn’t get any Christmas packages, but then I came from America very recently; now that I think of it, maybe that is the reason. But I didn’t get any last year either, and last Christmas I had already been out of America for seven months.

Cleanliness stands out

One day, when I was on the mountain trail, a wounded paratrooper captain walked into the aid station in the old stone building. He was Francis Sheehan of Indianapolis.

Capt. Sheehan is a man with a finely sensitive face, who almost seemed out of place in such a rugged outfit as the paratroops. He stood out among the other wounded because he was cleanly shaven, and although his face was dirty it was recent dirt, and not the basic grime that comes of not having washed for weeks and weeks.

The reason was that he had gone up the mountain only the day before, to relieve a battalion medical officer who had been wounded. Capt. Sheehan was on the mountain only a few hours when he, too, was wounded.

His family will have received notice from the War Department before they read this, and they may be relieved to know that the wound was not serious. He got a machine-gun bullet in his right shoulder, but it apparently missed the bones.

An old reader

Capt. Sheehan graduated from Indiana University Medical School in 1938, and had a residency at City Hospital in Indianapolis before he went into the paratroops. We happened to get together because he used to read this column in The Indianapolis Times.

The captain walked on down the mountain without help, and said that actually the wound didn’t even hurt much.

There is an Army hospital where I go occasionally to see another wounded friend, and I have got acquainted with several of the patients. One of those is Walter Jentzen of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Jentzen, of course, was in hospital pajamas, and I though all the time he was a private, he seemed so quiet and humble. When I went to write down his name, it turned out he was a lieutenant. He has a two-month-old baby in Carlsbad that he would sure like to see.

Tortures himself, too

This is the second time he has been wounded. In Sicily, he was shot when a German tank let loose on him. And here, very early in the Italian campaign, he got a shell fragment in his chest. A notebook which he always carries in his left shirt pocket was all that saved him. He’s been in the hospital more than a month now and is just about ready to go back to duty.

Jentzen used to manage creamery plants in Albuquerque Portales and Las Cruces. So, having come from Albuquerque so recently, I tortured him by telling him what the New Mexico sun felt like, how the air smelled, and how beautiful the Sandias were at present.

The only trouble with torturing a guy that way is that you torture yourself at the same time.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 12, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
In one frontline outfit I was with recently, I noticed the boys always used the word “Uncle” when they meant the powers that be. They said, “You do whatever Uncle tells you,” or “I wish Uncle would hurry up with those overshoes.”

Another slang term is “eyeballing,” which means viewing and gendering around, such as “eyeballing into Naples.”

At the front one morning, I heard another expression which may be old, but which sounded funny at the time. About a dozen soldiers and I were sleeping in a goat shed. The soldiers hadn’t shaved for weeks, or washed either. And they always slept with their clothes on. When they first came out of their blankets on a cold morning, they were enough to frighten children.

It was at that early-morning moment when one soldier looked for a long time at another one and then said:

Cripes, you look like a tree full of owls.

Mess sergeant gains 46 pounds

Imagine my surprise and delight one day when, after several days of C and K rations, we wandered into a division command post and sat down to a luncheon of fresh, crisp, American-style fried chicken, the kind we have in Indiana. Texas’ now famous 36th Division was the provider.

One of the jovial mess sergeants in the 36th Division is Charles Morgan of Gladewater, Texas. His wife is in Mexia, Texas, and she’s hardly going to know him when he gets back. When the sergeant went into the Army, he weighed 189 pounds. Now he weighs 235.

The soldiers who fight on top of the mountains, who don’t dare build a fire even in daytime because the smoke would attract attention, have discovered that the paraffin-scaled pasteboard box the K ration comes in will burn without smoke, and will burn just long enough to heat one canteen cup of coffee.

The other day I was on a mountain trail and met three German prisoners coming down, with one dogface trailing behind them with a Tommy gun.

Some Signal Corps movie photographers were on the trail and they stopped the little cavalcade for pictures. They asked the soldier to take the Germans back up the trail about 50 feet, then march them down again past the cameras.

At first, the Germans were puzzled, but when they sensed what was happening, they began their overcoat collars snugly and straightened their pants, and came marching past with big grins on their faces, as vain as children.

Christmas brightens Nazi prisoner

Speaking of vanity, one regiment of the 36th Division had some fine photographs of me taken at their outdoor box toilet on the hillside. They think it’s a great joke, and no doubt plan to blackmail me into buying the film from them.

But I’ve got them whipped. I’ve lived the war life so long, where everything is public, that I just don’t care. In fact, I might even pay them to publish the picture.

A strange little incident happened a few weeks ago at one of the prisoner-collecting points, where German prisoners were being interviewed.

One of the German kids who came through seemed terribly depressed. When the examiners get a case like that, they try to find out what the trouble is, other than the normal depression over being captured. But they couldn’t seem to get at this boy.

Finally, just to make light conversation, one of them said:

Well, cheer up, at least you’ll be able to spend Christmas with us.

Thereupon the boy sat up and said eagerly:

Do you celebrate Christmas, too?

He didn’t know that we knew about Christmas, and apparently had been brooding over the prospect of spending it with a heathen people.

After that, he was bright and chipper.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 13, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
During my time with various parts of the 36th Division, I fell in with one of the regimental surgeons – Capt. Emmett L. Allamon of Port Arthur, Texas.

Capt. Allamon is an unusual man. He is slight in build, he talks with a direct look and a flattering smile, and his mind is very acute and analytical. He has the idiosyncrasy of hesitating a couple of seconds between phrases, and then when he speaks, he rattles the phrases off so fast you feel you’ve been left behind.

Capt. Allamon has distinguished himself a couple of times in Italy. His regimental commander commended him the other day for running his jeep right down to the edge of a battlefield and pulling out the wounded. And before that he had the interesting experience of being a German prisoner for six days.

Taken prisoners by Germans

He and his first sergeant, Frank T. Holland of West, Texas, were captured shortly after we struck Italy. They weren’t really treated as prisoners but as fellow medics. About 20 American wounded were captured at the same time, and the Germans let Capt. Allamon do all the operating and the dressing of their wounds.

Then after two days, the Germans had to retreat. Apparently, the German medical officers didn’t want to turn in the captain and sergeant as regular prisoners, so they held a conference, finally took the question to their colonel, and came back with the verdict that the two Americans should retreat with them.

None of the Germans spoke English, but Capt. Allamon spoke just enough French to get along. They retreated for four days, and then early one morning they found the sentry asleep and just walked away.

An Italian farm family hid them for several days. The Italian grapevine carried the word of their presence to the nearest town in Allied hands. It was thus that one morning an Italian arrived and said they could come with him. The two Americans walked with him for nine miles, found a British scout car waiting for them, and eventually landed back with their own outfit.

Enclosed aid station comforts wounded

Capt. Allamon says he learned from the Germans that it’s best to put your medical-aid station in a building, even if it’s only an old goat shed, rather than in tents. There is something psychologically comforting about having rigid walls around you in the combat zone. Also, Capt. Allamon has a theory that the greatest medicine you can give a wounded man is some warmth and comfort.

So, he always gets his aid stations into a building, if possible, has a fire going in the fireplace day and night, and has hot coffee always ready. The minute a man is carried in, or walks in, he is given coffee and a cigarette, he warms himself before the fire, he feels a sense of security again, and his spirits rise. I know it works, for I have sat in one of Capt. Allamon’s aid stations night after night and seen it work.

Ex-newsboys make best soldiers

Capt. Allamon, like all frontline medical officers, is touched by what he calls the “mental wreckage” of war – the men whose spirits break under the unnatural strain and incessant danger of the battlefield.

Capt. Allamon feels that American children in recent generations have had too much parental protection and too little opportunity for self-efficiency, and that the resulting weakness makes a man crumble when faced with something he feels he cannot bear.

The captain says that if he could pick a company of men best suited for warfare, he’d choose all ex-newsboys. He thinks they would have shifted for themselves so early in life that they would have built up an inner strength that would carry them through battle.

Personally, I am sort of on the fence. I hate to think of an America of 130 million people so hard inside that nothing could touch them.

And, on the other hand, it is only a comparative few who do crack up. The mystery to me is that there is anybody at all, no matter how strong, who can keep his spirits from breaking in the midst of battle.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The Stars and Stripes in the last war had many men on its staff who later broke into great prominence in the literary and magazine world. It is too early yet to tell what the various Army newspapers throughout the world in this war will produce, but we have a couple of likely candidates over here.

Soldiers and correspondents both would cast a willing vote for them right now. One is a reporter, the other a cartoonist. The reporter is Sgt. Jack Foisie of Berkeley, California; the cartoonist is Sgt. Bill Mauldin of Phoenix, Arizona.

Both are very young, both are quiet and earnest, both have native talent, and both have that ephemeral and uncultivated ability to express the soldiers’ viewpoint.

Sgt. Foisie has been on the staff of Stars and Stripes only since the invasion of Italy last July, yet he is already the man for whom the paper gets the most requests from units that want somebody to write about them.

Foisie has been overseas almost 15 months. Before transferring to the Stars and Stripes, he was in a tank-destroyer unit. He drove a half-track and ran a .50-caliber machine gun.

He fought all through Tunisia. He was never wounded, but in the Battle of Sidi Bouzid last February, he lost his half-track by a hit from an 88mm cannon. Along with it he lost everything he had, including his portable typewriter.

Before the war, Foisie was a reporter on The San Francisco Chronicle. When he went into the Army, he was determined not to lose the writing touch, so he brought his typewriter with him and wrote scads of letters to the folks back home, just to keep his hand in.

Doesn’t need practice now

He says his folks can’t understand how he could write them so often when he was in combat and is so bad about writing now that he has a quieter job. The answer is, of course, that he doesn’t have to write letters for practice anymore.

Toward the end of the Tunisian campaign, Jack wrote to Stars and Stripes and asked if there were any chance of getting on the staff. Capt. Boo Neville, the editor, wrote back a two-word letter:

Why not?

Jack thought he was being facetious and supposed that was the end of it. But 10 days later, here came official transfer papers with travel orders calling for transportation by airplane.

This airplane business so astounded and impressed Jack’s company commander that he cleaned up, put on his dress blouse for the first time in Africa, and personally drove Jack the 50 miles to the nearest airdrome to see him off.

Among correspondents Foisie has a reputation of always being willing to go anywhere and do anything. But he is shy, and for months kept in the background, just filling his job and saying nothing. Now that he knows everybody he jokes and kids as much as the rest.

When I first knew him, last summer in Sicily, he had a fairly marked hesitation in his speech. But on rejoining him in Italy, I noticed that it was gone. I spoke to him about it and he said he thought it was because he had gained more confidence in himself.

Although he is a good soldier, Foisie went up and down in rank six or eight times before joining Stars and Stripes, due largely to the whims of various commanders.

Loses regard for rank

His ups and downs destroyed all his regard for rank and now he truly doesn’t care whether he’s private, sergeant or lieutenant. He actually argued against it when they made him a sergeant on Stars and Stripes, and wouldn’t wear his chevrons until forced to.

Jack Foisie is 24. He is a darkish blond, with hair starting to thin in spots. He has a big chin, and his eyes are set back in his head, giving him the appearance of looking out of two narrow slits. He is left-handed, does not smoke, and is of French extraction but speaks little French.

He was born and raised in Seattle and went to the University of Washington for two years – until his folks moved to Berkeley. His father is Frank P. Foisie, head of the waterfront employers of the Pacific Coast, which means he’s the man who sits across the table and argues with Harry Bridges.

After the war, Jack has two ambitions – to finish school and to get married. The marriage business comes first. Her name is Florence McTighe and she lives in Trenton, New Jersey. The big question will be how to make a Californian out of her.

Foisie has lived a rugged life both as a combat soldier and as a reporter. Recently he has been on special assessment, living in town and making trips out to the airfield by jeep. He has found it interesting but is beginning to be a little frightened.

He said:

I’m getting soft. The life is too nice. It would be better to be back at the front living with doughboys and writing about them.

Tomorrow we’ll tell about Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

‘Finest cartoonist of the war’

“Corp’l Ginnis and his Very pistol will now contribute Th’ Star o’ Bethlehem.”

“No complaints, Sir – Except Company K is puttin’ rocks in its snowballs again.”

Ernie Pyle’s column today tells about Sgt. Bill Mauldin of Phoenix who draws cartoons for the Italian edition of the Stars and Stripes, serviceman’s newspaper. Ernie says it is agreed generally that the sergeant’s cartoons are the best of any produced by servicemen in this war. Here are two samples of Sgt. Mauldin’s work, reproduced in the United States for the first time.

In Italy – (by wireless)
Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also terribly grim and real.

Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training-camp life, which you at home are best acquainted with. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast Army which is actually up there in that other world doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.

Mauldin’s central cartoon character is a soldier, unshaven, unwashed, unsmiling. He looks more like a hobo than like your son. He looks, in fact, exactly like a doughfoot who has been in the lines for two months. And that isn’t pretty.

Mauldin’s cartoons in a way are bitter. His work is so mature that I had pictured him as a man approaching middle age. Yet he is only 22, and he looks even younger. He himself could never have raised the heavy black beard of his cartoon dogface. His whiskers are soft and scant, his nose is upturned good-naturedly and his eyes have a twinkle.

His maturity comes simply from a native understanding of things, and from being a soldier himself for a long time. He has been in the Army three and a half years.

64 KP days in four months

Bill Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, New Mexico. He now calls Phoenix, Arizona, home base, but we of New Mexico could claim him without much resistance on his part.

Bill has drawn ever since he was a child. He always drew pictures of the things he wanted to grow up to be, such as cowboys and soldiers, not realizing that what he really wanted to become was a man who draws pictures.

He graduated from high school in Phoenix at 17, took a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and at 18 was in the Army. He did 64 days of KP duty in his first four months. That fairly cured him of a lifelong worship of uniforms.

Mauldin belongs to the 45th Division. Their record has been a fine one, and their losses have been heavy. Mauldin’s typical grim cartoon soldier is really a 45th Division infantryman, and he is one who truly has been through the mill.

Mauldin was detached from straight soldier duty after a year in the infantry, and put to work on the division’s weekly paper. His true war cartoons started in Sicily and have continued on through Italy, gradually gaining recognition. Capt. Bob Neville, Stars and Stripes editor, shakes his head with a veteran’s admiration and says of Mauldin:

He’s got it. Already he’s the outstanding cartoonist of the war.

Mauldin works in a cold, dark little studio in the back of Stars and Stripes’ Naples office. He wears silver-rimmed glasses when he works. His eyes used to be good, but he damaged them in his early Army days by drawing for too many hours at night with poor light.

He averages about three days out of 10 at the front, then comes back and draws up a large batch of cartoons. If the weather is good, he sketches a few details at the front. But the weather is usually lousy.

Wears Purple Heart medal

He says:

You don’t need to sketch details anyhow. You come back with a picture of misery and cold and danger in your mind and you don’t need any more details than that.

His cartoon in Stars and Stripes is headed “Up Front… by Mauldin.” The other day some soldier wrote in a nasty letter asking what the hell did Mauldin know about the front.

Stars and Stripes printed the letter. Beneath it in italics, they printed a short editor’s note:

Sgt. Bill Mauldin received the Purple Heart for wounds received while serving in Italy with Pvt. Blank’s own regiment.

That’s known as telling ‘em.

Bill Mauldin is a rather quiet fellow, a little above medium size. He smokes and swears a little, and talks frankly and pleasantly. He is not eccentric in any way.

Even though he’s just a kid, he’s a husband and father. He married in 1942 while in camp in Texas, and his son was born last Aug. 20 while Bill was in Sicily. His wife and child are living in Phoenix now. Bill carries pictures of them in his pocketbook.

Unfortunately for you and Mauldin both, the American public has no opportunity to see his daily drawings. But that isn’t worrying him. He realizes this is his big chance.

After the war, he wants to settle again in the Southwest, which he and I love. He wants to go on doing cartoons of those same guys who are now fighting in the Italian hills, except that by then they’ll be in civilian clothes and living as they should be.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
I was really starting to worry. Here I’d been in Italy a month and I was continuing to feel fine. What was going to become of my record of being sick in every country I’d ever set foot on? Could I be slipping in my old age?

But it’s all right now. I knew how to fix that. I just took a bath, and sure enough next day I started to sniffle. By neglecting the snuffles for the next two days, I promoted myself a first-class cold. And now everything is fine.

The only trouble with this cold is that I can’t find anything funny to write about it. I’ve moved into town for my convalescence, have a nice room in an apartment house, have good food and several friends, and don’t even feel too badly.

The only reason I’m mentioning it at all is just to let you know my record is intact. I’m ashamed not to have had a really bad sickness, but maybe I can do better when we hit Germany.

While sick I stayed at the apartment of some Air Force friends. Pilots from the various fields drop in there when they’re in town on leave. One of them is Maj. Edwin A. Bland Jr., commander of a bomber squadron.

Ed almost got his’n

Ed Bland is a tall, friendly fellow with blond haircut in crew style. He loves to fly and is torn between flying after the war or going back to Colorado and settling down to enjoy the mountains.

Ed almost got his’n a couple of weeks ago. These boys dive absolutely straight down at their target for about 8,000 feet and pull out at very low altitudes. This certain day, Ed couldn’t get his plane out of the dive.

The tab on his rubber had either been shot or torn loose by the pressure of the dive. The stick vibrated so violently that it flew out of his hands and he lost control.

The only chance of saving himself was to get hold of that stick again. I asked him if it was vibrating so fast he couldn’t grab it. He said, “Hell, it was going so fast I couldn’t even see it.” And he meant it.

So, Ed clasped his hands, reached clear up to the dash, then lowered his hands toward the cockpit floor and drew the, back toward him. He knew the stick had to be somewhere inside the circle of his arms.

As he gradually pulled back, the stick beat upon his hands and arms with killing pain, but he kept going back until finally he had hold of it. The infernally flailing stick hit with such fury it literally pulled a big hunk of flesh out of the palm of his hand, but he finally got the plane out of the dive, just by brute strength.

He was only 400 feet above the ground when he leveled off. It was as narrow an escape as a man ever wants to have. Ed said:

I thought it was my time. I figured my number had come up, and I sort of said goodbye to everybody.

In the summer of 1941, I decided to get a new car. As usual I wanted a convertible. The Pontiac dealer in Albuquerque didn’t have a convertible but said he could have one sent from the district agency in Pueblo, Colorado.

Memorable convertible

So, three days later the shiny convertible arrived. It was a beauty and is still a beauty, even though it has spent half its life sitting in storage. But I’m happy just to have to anyhow, and it is often in my thoughts the way your wife, or your fireplace at home, or your dog, is often in your thoughts.

Now what, you are probably asking, does a convertible coupe in Albuquerque have to do with a dive-bomber pilot in Italy?

Well, when Maj. Ed Bland came to our apartment, he told me about that car. It seems that in the spring of 1941 he was a salesman for the Pontiac people in Pueblo.

They had just one convertible left, and salesman Ed had it all sold and was ready to deliver it next day. And then came word that the Albuquerque dealer wanted that car to deliver to me. So, they took it away from Ed and he thereby lost his $80 commission. He was so disgusted he joined the Army a month later.

I said:

Well, it looks as if I owe you 80 bucks, to be real ethical about it.

But Ed just laughed, and I didn’t have 80 bucks with me anyhow. And one thing led to another until we became good friends, and it wound up that I’m going out to live with Maj. Bland’s dive-bomber boys for a few days.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
It has been more than a year since I last spent any time with our Air Forces overseas. So now for a little while I’ll try to tell you what a gigantic thing our “air” has become in this theater.

In the past year I have written so much about the ground forces that they have become an obsession with me. They live and die so miserably and they do it with such determined acceptance that your admiration for them blinds you to the rest of the war.

To any individual the war is seldom any bigger than the space of a few hundred yards on each side of him. All the war in the world is concentrated down into his own personal fight. To me all the war of the world has seemed to be borne by the few thousand frontline soldiers here, destined merely by chance to suffer and die for the rest of us.

All over the world other millions are fighting too, many of them under conditions as wretched as our infantry faces in Italy. But it is easy to forget them in your intentness upon your own hundred yards.

Death comes recently

But now, remembering once again, this column will do its stuff with the Air Forces. We may break it up with a short nostalgic jump back to the infantry now and then, but on the whole for the next few weeks we’ll be learning about the flying men.

You have to make some psychological adjustments when you switch from the infantry to the Air Forces. The association with death is on a different basis. You approach death rather decently in the Air Forces.

You die well-fed and clean-shaven, if that’s any comfort. You’re at the front only a few hours of the day, instead of day and night for months on end. In the evening you come back to something approximating a home and fireside.

In the Air Forces, you still have some semblance of an orderly life, even though you may be living in tents. But in the infantry, you must become half-beast in order to survive.

The subtle difference

Here is your subtle difference between the two: When I’m with the infantry I never shave, for anyone clean-shaven is an obvious outside and apt to be abused. But in the Air Forces if you go for three days without shaving you get to feeling self-conscious, like a bum among nice people, so you shave in order to conform.

I’m now with a dive bomber squadron of the 12th Air Force Command. There are about 50 officers and 250 enlisted men in a squadron.

They all live, officers and men too, in a big apartment house that the Italian government built to house war workers and their families. It looks like one of our own government housing projects.

It is out in the country at the edge of a small town. The Germans demolished the big nearby factories beyond, but left the homes intact. When our squadron moved into this building, it was their first time under a roof in six months of combat.

Stoves and dates

Now our airmen have wood stoves in their rooms, they sleep in sleeping bags on folding cots, they have shelves to put their things on, they have electric light, they eat at tables sitting on stools, and have an Italian boy to clear the dishes away.

They have an Italian barber, and their clothes are clean and pressed. They have a small recreation room with soldier-drawn murals on the walls. They can go to a nearby town of an evening and see American movies, in theaters taken over by the Army. They can have dates with nurses. They can play cards. They can read by good light in a warm room.

Don’t get the wrong impression. Their life is not luxurious. At home we wouldn’t consider it adequate. It has the security of walls and doors, but it is a dog’s life at that.

The toilets don’t work, so you have to flush them with a tin hat full of water dipped out of an always-filled bathtub. The lights go out frequently and you have to use candles.

Teamwork developed

It’s tough getting up two hours before daylight for a dawn mission. The floors are cold, hard tile. There are no rugs. Some of the windows are still blown out.

And yet, as the airmen unblushingly admit, their life is paradise compared with the infantry. They are fully appreciative of what the infantry goes through. There has recently been a program of sending pilots up to the front as liaison officers for a few days at a time. They come back and tell the others, so that the whole Air Corps may know the ground problem and how their brothers are living up there in the mud.

It has resulted in an eagerness to help out those ground kids that is actually touching. On days when the squadron divebombs the Germans just ahead of our own lines, it isn’t as academic to them as it used to be. Now the pilots are thinking of how much that special bomb may help the American boys down below them.

It is teamwork with a soul in it, and we’re fighting better than ever before.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The dive bomber has never been fully accepted by the Allied armies. The British have always been against it – they call the German Stuka a vastly overrated instrument of war – and America has more or less followed suit.

Our Navy has used the dive bomber to good effect in the Pacific. But in the Mediterranean this weapon didn’t show up until the beginning of the Sicilian campaign, and it has never been built up in great numbers.

In the dive-bomber groups over here, we have several hundred pilots and mechanics who believe with a fanatical enthusiasm that the dive bomber is the most wonderful machine produced in this war. I don’t want to enter into the argument, when I’m in no position to know, but regardless I’m going to write a little about these dive-bomber boys. For they are probably the most spectacular part of our Air Forces.

The function of the dive bomber is to work in extremely close support of our own infantry. For instance, suppose there is a German gun position just over a hill which our troops cannot get at with our guns and which is holding us up.

They call on the dive bombers and give them the location. Within an hour, and sometimes much quicker, they come screaming out of the sky right on top of that gun and blow it up.

They can do the same to bunched enemy troops, bridges, tank columns, convoys, or ammunition dumps. Because of their great accuracy they can bomb much closer to our own troops than other planes would dare. Most of the time they work less than a thousand yards ahead of our frontlines, and they have had missions much closer than that.

Invaders earned name

The group I am with has been in combat six months. During that time, they have flown 10,000 sorties, fired more than a million rounds of .50-caliber ammunition, and dropped three million pounds of bombs. That’s more than the entire 8th Air Force in England dropped in its first year of operation.

Our dive bombers are known as A-36 Invaders. Actually, they are nothing more than the famous P-51 Mustang equipped with diving brakes. For a long time, they didn’t have any name at all, and then one day in Sicily one of the pilots of the squadron said:

Why don’t we call them Invaders, since we’re invading?

The name was carried home in newspaper dispatches, and today even the company that makes them calls them Invaders.

The pilot who originated the name was Lt. Robert B. Walsh of Felt, Idaho. He has since completed his allotted missions and gone back to the States. His younger brother is now in the same squadron as a replacement pilot.

The P-51 Mustang is a wonderful fighter. But when you transform it into an A-36 by the addition of diving brakes, it becomes a grand dive bomber as well.

The brakes are necessary because of the long straight-down dive on the target. A regular fighter would get to going too fast. The controls would become rigid, and the pilot would have to start pulling out of his dive so early that he’d have to drop his bombs from too great a height.

These boys dive about 8,000 feet before dropping their bombs. Without brakes, they would ordinarily build up to around 700 miles an hour in such a dive, but the brakes hold them to about 390.

The brakes are nothing but metal flaps in the form of griddles about two feet long and eight or 10 inches high. They lie flat on the wings during ordinary flights.

Wiggle wings and drive

The dive bombers approach their target in formation. When the leader has made sure he has spotted the target he wiggles his wings, raises his diving brakes, rolls on his back, then noses over and down he goes. The next man behind follows almost instantly.

They follow one right after the other, not more than 150 feet apart. There’s no danger of their running over the next one ahead, for the brakes hold them all at the same speed.

They’re so close together that as many as 20 dive bombers have been seen in a dive all at once, making a straight line up into the sky like a gigantic stream of water.

At about 4,000 feet the pilot releases his bombs. Then he starts his pullout. The strain is terrific, and all the pilots “black out” a little bit. It lasts only four or five seconds, and is not a complete blackout. It is more a heaviness in the head and a darkness before the eyes, the pilots say.

Once straightened out of the dive, they go right on down to “the deck,” which means flying close to the ground. For by this time everything in the vicinity that can shoot has opened up, and the safest place to be is right down close, streaking for home as fast as they can go.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 20, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
If you ever heard a dive bombing by our A-36 Invader planes, you’d never forget it.

Even in normal flight, this plane makes a sort of screaming noise, and when that is multiplied manyfold by the velocity of the dive, you can hear the wail for miles.

On the ground, it sounds as though they are coming directly down upon you. It is a horrifying thing. The German Stuka could never touch them for sheer frightfulness of sound.

Also, the Stuka has always dived at an angle. But these planes literally come straight down. If you look up and see one a mile above you, you can’t tell where it’s headed. It could strike anywhere within a mile on any side of you. That’s the reason it spreads its terror so wide.

But our pilots have to hand it to the Germans on the ground. They have steeled themselves to stand by their guns and keep shooting. Pilots say the Italians would shoot until the bombs were almost come out and start shooting again after the bombs had exploded. But not the Germans – they stick to their guns.

German truck in gunsights

Maj. Ed Bland, a squadron leader, was telling me about coming suddenly over a hilltop one day and finding a German truck right in his gunsights.

Now it’s the natural human impulse, when you see a plane come upon you, to dive for the ditch. But the German gunner in this truck swung a gun around and started shooting at Bland. German and American tracer bullets were streaming back and forth in the same groove in opposite directions, almost hitting each other. The German never stopped firing until Bland’s six machine guns suddenly chewed the truck into complete disintegration.

Our dive bombers don’t have much trouble with German fighters. The reasons are several. For one thing, the Luftwaffe is weak over here now. For another, the dive bombers’ job is to work on the infantry frontlines so they seldom get back where the German fighters are. And for another, the Invader is such a good fighter itself that the Jerries aren’t too anxious to tangle with it.

Some never caught in a fight

There have been pilots in this squadron who have finished their allotted missions and gone back to America without ever firing a shot at an enemy plane in the air. And that’s the way it should be, for their job is to dive-bomb, not to get caught in a fight.

For several months the posting period back to America was set at a certain number of missions. Then it was suddenly upped by more than a score. There were pilots here who were within one mission of going home when the order came. So, they had to stay and fly a few more months. Some of them never lived to finish the new allotment.

There is an odd psychological factor in the system of being sent home after a certain number of missions. When pilots get within three or four missions of the finish, they get so nervous they almost jump out of their skins. A good many have been killed on their very last mission.

The squadron leaders wish there were some way they could surprise a man and send him home with still six or eight missions to go, thus soaring him the agony of those last few trips.

Nowhere in our fighting forces is cooperation closer or friendship greater than between Americans and British in the air. I have yet to hear an American pilot make a disparaging remark about a British flier. Our pilots say the British are cooler under fire than we are. The British attitude and manner of speech amuse our pilots, but they’re never contemptuous.

Spitfires mother crippled Invader

They like to listen in on their radios as the RAF pilots talk to each other. For example, one day they heard one pilot call to another:

I say, old chap, there is a Jerry on your tail.

To which the imperiled pilot replied:

Quite so, quite so, thanks very much, old man.

And another time, one of our Invaders got shot up over the target. His engine was smoking and his pressure was down and he was losing attitude. He made for the coast all alone, easy meat for any German fighter that might come along. He was just barely staying in the air, and he was a sad and lonely boy indeed.

Then suddenly, he heard over his earphones a distinctly British voice saying:

Cheer up, chicken, we have you.

He looked around and two Spitfires, one on either side, were mothering him back to his home field.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Although our dive-bomber pilots are largely spared the worry of German fighter planes, they are plenty concerned over the anti-aircraft flak and other ground fire. The German ack-ack over the frontlines is smothering. Here’s the way it works:

Suppose our planes make a big circle back of the German lines in order to approach the target from a new angle, which they do every day.

Well, the Germans may pick them up 40 miles from their target. Our men have to fly every inch of that through heavy flak.

It’s a game of wits. The pilots above and the gunners on the ground know each other’s actions so well by now that it’s almost impossible for either side to do anything new.

If our pilots do think of a new evasive maneuver one day, the Germans have it figured out by the next; and vice versa, if the German gunners shoot a different pattern one day, our pilots have it figured out before the next mission.

Constant evasive action

The planes have to fly in constant “evasive action,” which means going right, going left, going up, going down, all the time they are over enemy territory. If they flew in a straight line for as long as 15 seconds, the Germans would pick them off.

A pilot sits up there and figures this way:

Right now, they’ve got a bearing on me. In a certain number of seconds, they’ll shoot and in a few more seconds the shell will be up here. It’s up to me to be somewhere else then.

But he also knows that the Germans know he will turn, and that consequently they will send up shells to one side or the other or above or below his present position.

Thus, he must never make exactly the same move two days in a row. By constantly turning, climbing, ducking, he makes a calculated hit almost impossible. His worst danger is just flying by chance right into a shell burst.

I asked one of the pilots:

Why wouldn’t it be a good idea to fool them about once every two weeks by just flying straight ahead for a while?

He said:

Because they’ve got that figured out too. They always keep the air dead ahead of you full of shells, just in case.

Some freakish escapes

Pilots have some freakish escapes from shell blasts. Several have had shells explode within a foot or two of their plane without getting hurt.

They say it sounds as if you’d fired off a dozen shotguns in the cockpit. The concussion tosses the plane around like a cork, yet often these close bursts don’t damage the plane at all.

A friend of mine, Lt. Jimmy Groswold of Los Angeles, was thrown violently into a dive by a shell that must have exploded within a foot of a tail of his plane, yet there wasn’t a mark on it when he got home.

The German gunners are canny. For instance, on a bad day when there is a high layer of clouds with just a few holes through which the bombers might dive, they’ll fill up those holes with flak when they hear planes overhead.

It isn’t the heavy flak up above or the medium flak on the way down that worries the pilots as much as the small-arms fire from the ground after they’ve finished their dive.

If you’d ever been in a raid on either side, you’d understand. I know that when German planes come over our lines the whole valley for miles and miles becomes one vast fountain of flying lead with bullets going up by the thousands. It’s actually like a water spray, filling the air as far as you can see.

Our dive-bomber pilots have to fly through this every day. They “hit the deck” the minute they’ve pulled out of their bombing dive, for it’s harder to see a plane that is close to the ground. Also, when they’re almost down to earth the Germans firing at them may shoot their own troops – but even that doesn’t stop them, they keep banging away.

The pilots say it’s the accidental bullet they’re most afraid of. They say that nine times out of 10, it’s some goof standing out in the field shooting wildly into the air that gets a hit.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
If you hang around a fighter or dive-bomber airdrome for a while, you will constantly hear about low-flying missions.

That means jobs on which you fly so low you are practically on the ground. Often you are so low you would hit a man standing on the ground.

On such a mission a pilot goes out “looking for things.” He will shoot at practically anything he sees. He’ll come whipping up over a slight rise, then zip down the other side, and in his gunsights, there may be a gun, a truck, a train, a whole line of German soldiers, a supply dump. Whatever he finds he shoots up.

The squadron of A-36 Invader dive bombers that I’m with has had some freakish happenings on these missions.

For example, Lt. Miles C. Wood of Dade City, Florida, almost shot himself down the other day. He was strafing, and he flew so low that his bullets kicked up rocks and he flew into the rocks. They dented his propeller and punched holes in his wings. He was lucky to get home at all. Even a hunk of mud will dent a wing at that speed.

Flies through eight-strand cable

Another pilot flew right through an eight-strand steel cable the Germans had stretched on poles above some treetops. This is one of their many tricks, and this one almost worked. The pilot landed at his home field with the cable still trailing from his wing.

My friend Maj. Ed Bland, the squadron leader, is so interested in his strafing one day that he didn’t notice a high-tension line just ahead. When he did see it, it was too late to pull over it. So, he flew under it – at about 300 miles an hour.

And since I’ve been on this field one of the pilots was diving on a truck and got so interested in what he was doing that he ran into a tree. The plane somehow stayed in the air, although the leading edge of the wing was pushed up about eight inches and was crumpled like an accordion.

He got the plane back over our lines, but finally it went into a spin and he had to bail out. He broke his leg getting out of the cockpit, hit his head on the tail as he went past, and then smashed his leg further when he hit the ground.

Apologizes for losing plane

He is the luckiest man the squadron has had yet. Everybody was concerned about him, and grateful that he lived. Yet when his squadron commander went to see him in the hospital, the first thing the injured pilot did was to start apologizing for losing the plane.

Dive-bomber pilots fly so low that they even have German tracer bullets coming down at them, from the hillsides, instead of coming up as they usually do. They fly so low that Italians behind the German lines come running to their doors and wave, while now and then some dirty guy who has different sentiments will run out and take a shot at them.

As I have said, the Germans are full of tricks. They send up all kinds of weird things from their ack-ack guns. They have one shell that looks, when it explodes, as if you’d emptied a wastebasket full of turpentine. They shoot all kinds of wire and link “daisy chains” into the air to snag our propellers.

Bullets ricochet off haystack

But the weirdest one I’ve heard of was described by a pilot who was on the tail of a Messerschmitt one day. Just as he was pulling the trigger, the fleeing German released out of the tail of his plane a parachute with a long steel cable attached to it. The American pilot by fast maneuvering got out of its way, but he did lose his German.

On a low-flying mission you’re justified in shooting at anything. One day, one of our pilots, after a boring mission in which he saw nothing worth destroying, decided to set a haystack afire. He came diving down on it, pouring in bullets, when suddenly he saw his tracers ricocheting off the haystack. Now you know bullets don’t ricochet off ordinary haystacks, so our pilot gave it the works – and thus destroyed a brand-new pillbox.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Our fighter and bomber pilots laugh about some of their accidental successes.

A light-bomber outfit was making a run with a brand-new replacement pilot, out on his first mission. Their target was very close to our own lines. As they were making their turn, this new pilot lost formation and swung way out on the outside of the others.

Realizing his mistake, and seeing he was about to get left behind, he just salvoed his bombs and went streaking to catch up with the formation.

The squadron leader saw it and felt sure this neophyte had dropped his bombs on our own troops. When he got home, he sat there by the telephone, sweating, waiting for the inevitable phone call.

Pretty soon the phone rang. A voice announced itself as Gen. So-and-So. The squadron leader’s heart sank. When a general phones, it bodes no good. The general boomed:

Say, who is that crazy pilot that left your formation and dropped his bombs off to the side?

The squadron leader got ready to faint. He knew the next sentence would be that those bombs had killed 300 American troops. But instead, the general shouted:

Well, whoever he was, give him my congratulations. He got a direct hit on a gun we’ve been trying to get for two weeks. Wiped it off. Excellent work.

Direct hits on straw stacks

Another time, one of our artillery observers saw three big German tanks pull into a field several mules back of the German lines. The crews jumped out and began pitching straw over them, and in a few minutes, they resembled a straw stack.

Not five minutes later, our dive bombers came over. Their target was a gun position in an adjacent orchard. But their aim was bad, and their bombs landed directly on the three straw-covered tanks.

It was just an accident, but the Germans probably winder what the world’s coming to when Americans can have planes over and blowing up your tanks five minutes after you’ve hidden them.

One time our dive bombers couldn’t find their principal target because of bad weather. They were on their way home when they picked up their alternate target, a supply dump at a crossroads.

The first plane dived in and dropped its bombs. Instantly a gigantic flame shot 1,500 feet into the air. Before the last plane had finished its dive – a matter of only a few seconds – the pillar of smoke was 4,000 feet high.

They really hit the jackpot, but they don’t know what the jackpot was. They can’t conceive of anything that would flame that high so quickly.

Lost pilot fires 12 planes

Another time a pilot went out on a reconnaissance mission. Because of hazy weather, and because two adjacent passes in the mountains looked exactly alike, he took the wrong one and got lost, although he didn’t know he was lost.

He kept on flying by his map for a long time, although actually he was far north of where his map ran out. At last it began to dawn on him that something was wrong.

Just as he was getting good and worried, he looked down and directly under him was a field with a dozen or more small German planes lined up alongside the runway. So down he went in a surprise dive, set the German planes afire, and then headed rapidly south.

He found his home field just as he ran out of gas. When the boys asked where he’d been, he didn’t know. It took the pilot and his squadron commander two hours of intense study of their maps to figure out what field he had shot up so beautifully. He had been 200 miles north of where he intended to be.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 25, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The A-36 dive bomber squadron that I’m with is living well now but that hasn’t always been so. In fact, this is the first time they’ve been in a building since they went into combat six months ago.

They have flown from 10 different fields in those six months. They have lived in tents, under trees, and in foxholes. They have lived in mud so deep the planes had to be towed to the runway, and in dust so thick they had to take off by instruments.

They have flown from fields so close to enemy lines that they could fly a bombing mission and be back in 10 minutes. So close in fact that ground crews could stand on the fields and watch their own planes going into their bombing dives.

Once, here in Italy, the air over their field was so full of wounded planes from other stations that the squadron commander had to get out and act as traffic manager, deciding himself which planes were in greatest danger and should be allowed to come in first.

Pilot turnover is high

The turnover of pilots is high in any combat outfit – partly due to casualties, but mainly due to the system of relieving pilots after a certain number of missions. It would be unusual for a combat airman to be overseas more than a year, at the present rate.

Take this squadron of Invader dive bombers, for instance.

They came into combat just six months ago, yet today only three of the original 50 pilots are left. Twelve have been casualties, and the rest have finished their missions and gone home. The three originals will be homeward bound in a few days.

These dive bomber boys have compiled some statistics about their operations. They find that a new pilot, starting in to build up the required missions for going home, has about a 75% chance of coming through safety, and if shot down he has almost a 50-50 chance of becoming a prisoner.

A dozen times, during my stay with this squadron, pilots have voluntarily brought up the subject of how wonderful the enlisted men are. The men take a terrific personal pride in their planes and they work like dogs keeping them in good shape.

The enlisted men of this squadron are an extremely high-class bunch. Being trained technicians, they were mostly at least 25 at the beginning. You could put officers’ uniforms on half of them and never know the difference.

Yearn for news from home

While I was on the field, they pumped me about conditions and politics at home, and about the end of the war and the peace, as though I were an information bureau.

These mechanics are fully conscious of three things about their jobs – that their life is immeasurably better than that of the infantrymen and that they should be grateful; that the pilot who flies out to battle is the one of their family who really take it; and that pilots’ lives often depend on their work. The result is that they work with a great conscientiousness.

When a favorite pilot fails to come back the enlisted men take it as hard as do the officers, and mechanic whose plane has been shot down is like boy who has lost his dad.

The ground crews have quite a spirit of rivalry. Recently two ships were running a neck-and-neck race for the most missions flown. Then one of the ships came back so badly damaged it had to be worked on for several days and it fell way behind in the race. It almost broke the crew chief’s heart.

Examples of zeal

Here are two little examples of the zeal with which the enlisted men work:

• As the planes were taxiing out one day for their daily mission, it was discovered that the tire on the tail wheel of one was flat. Ordinarily it would just have been left behind. But the crew came running, other crews pitched in to help, and they had a new wheel on the plane by the time the next-to-last ship of the squadron was taking off.

• Often, during hot times, the squadron will fly two and three missions a day. One day a plane came in full of holes, but not basically damaged. Usually, it would take a day or two to patch the holes, but in their excitement and pride of accomplishment the crews had that plane patched and ready to go on the next mission an hour and a half later.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 26, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Maj. Ed Bland, commander of the dive-bomber squadron I’ve been with, is the most envied man in the squadron. That’s because he acquired four cases of Coca-Cola.

Maj. Bland accomplished this remarkable feat by getting acquainted with a naval officer. The Navy often has such rarities as this, and is usually good about sharing them with Army friends.

The major is a very popular man ordinarily but now he has become doubly popular. The Coca-Cola is down to two cases already and going fast.

Speaking of Coca-Cola, do you remember the item in this column a month or so ago, about the soldier who got a bottle of it from home and decided to give it as first prize in a lottery? The proceeds were to be used for adopting the child of a soldier killed in this outfit.

When I left them, more than $1,000 had already been taken in. I haven’t had a chance to get back there and find out who won the bottle, but here’s the reason I bring the subject up again:

Rome radio’s version

It seems the Rome radio picked up the item, completely distorted it, and used it for home-front propaganda. The way it came out on the Rome radio was that our soldiers were so short of supplies they were paying as high as $10,000 for just one bottle of Coca-Cola. They not only gave the story a completely false meaning but they deftly added $9,000 to the kitty. Well, that’s one way to fight a war.

Back to Maj. Bland – he never knows what to say when people ask where he’s from. Sometimes he answers Oklahoma and sometimes Colorado.

He was raised in Waurika, Oklahoma, where his parents still live. But he married a girl from Fort Morgan, Colorado, and home to most soldiers is wherever their wife is. Ed’s plane is named Annie Jane for his wife.

He has seen their baby only once – he got home for a few hours when the baby was four days old, and then came right overseas.

His father is agent for the Rock Island Railway. Ed often thinks how ironic it is that his father has spent a lifetime making trains run and here his son is overseas shooting up trains as fast as he can so they won’t run.

Best friend down there

Ed has had one of the “small world” experiences, only it hasn’t finally culminated yet. His best friend back in Waurika was a doctor named Ralph S. Phelan. They haven’t seen each other for three years and had lost track of each other.

But just the other day Ed found out that his friend is Capt. Phelan of the Medical Corps and that for months he has been up in the frontlines here in Italy working right below the skies where Ed does his dive bombing every day. They haven’t yet got around to seeing each other.

The youngest pilot in the squadron is Lt. Robert L. Drew, who is 19. He comes from Fort Thomas, Kentucky, but as young as he is he outranks his own father, for young Drew is a first lieutenant while his dad is only a shavetail.

The father, Robert W. Drew, was in the Navy in the last war, ran a flying-boat service on the Ohio River in recent years, and is now a ferry-command pilot back home.

One of my friends in this squadron is Cpl. Adolph Seeger, who owns a farm two miles outside of Evansville, Indiana. Cpl. Seeger is a driver. Although most of the other enlisted men live in the same apartment building the pilots live in, Cpl. Seeger voluntarily sleeps in a tent at the motor pool in order to be near at hand in emergencies.

Cpl. Seeger thinks it is odd that he should be over here driving a car which doesn’t seem to him very important, while at home his 64-acre farm lies idle because there’s no one left to farm it. His mother lives there all alone.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 27, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Around the airdrome they joke about how one pilot won his victory over an enemy plane.

It seems he caught a tiny observation plane, similar to our Cubs, while he was out on a low-level mission. As soon as the frightened little enemy saw our ships, he got as low to the ground as he could. One of our planes pulled up and came down at him in a dive. The little plane was so slow that our pilot misjudged its speed and completely missed him. But as he shot on past, his propeller blast caught the little ship, threw it upside down, and it dived into the ground – quite fatally.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say.

You laugh at some very sad things in wartime. For instance, the pilots tell with merriment about the fate of a German motorcyclist.

Our planes were strafing a mountain road one day. They saw this German motorcyclist, who in his terror kept looking back over his shoulder at the approaching planes, and consequently rode right off the highway and over the edge of a 400-foot cliff.

In describing what it feels like to fly one of our high-powered fighting planes, one of our pilots said:

You’re just sitting there with a thousand horses in your lap and a feather in your tail.

Mushily patriotic scenes booed

One night I went into a little Italian town with some pilots to see the movie This Is the Army. The Air Forces had taken over a local theater, and as long as you were in uniform all you had to do was to walk in and sit down. About a third of the audience were pilots and the rest mechanics. I couldn’t help but be interested in their reaction to the picture. On the whole they applauded, but every time the action got a little gooey or mushily patriotic, you could hear a combination boo and groan go through the audience. Soldiers at the front can’t stomach flag-waving from back home.

I’ve just had a letter from a couple of lieutenants in the Army Postal Service enclosing their plan for saving soldiers a lot of letter writing.

Novel idea, but it won’t work

Their plan is based on the theory that the soldier could write just one V-letter and have it mailed to eight or 10 different people back home. That would be accomplished by writing extra addresses on a special pad; then in the laboratory the letter could be photographed over and over, slipping on a new address each time.

It’s a novel idea, but I’ve inquired around among soldiers about it and I’ve yet to find one who wants to write the same thing to a lot of people.

Imagination still occasionally gets the best of some of our letter writers. I heard the other day of a soldier who wrote to his girl that he had been wounded, and then wrote his mother and tipped her off that he had just made it up.

Non-flier gets Zeros in Italy

And another one who doesn’t fly at all wrote home that he had just shot down three Zeros. That’s really good going, especially in Italy, and tops my own record. The most I’ve been able to destroy in one day was an Italian vegetable cart.

Geographical notes: Mt. Vesuvius has a couple of streaks of red lava running down the side from the cone. They show up wonderfully at night and are fascinating. The volcano smokes continually.

The other night in Naples, we had a couple of small earthquake shocks which shook our cots and scared us half to death.

[NormanStewart]

@Ernie Pyle

Mt. Vesuvius has a couple of streaks of red lava running down the side from the cone. They show up wonderfully at night and are fascinating. The volcano smokes continually.