Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
I’m sure the most interesting psychological thing around an American airdrome in Italy these days is the “rubbing out” process of the last few missions a combat airman goes on before he reaches that final one and returns to America.

It interests not only the man himself but everybody on the field from cook to crew chief. When a pilot gets within five missions of the finish, everybody knows and watches his total. If one plane is missing when the group gets back, the first thing on everybody’s mind is wonderment over whether or not it’s the guy who is about finished.

Most squadron leaders deliberately pick what are expected to be easy millions for the pilot nearing the finish. There have been so many ironic cases of pilots “getting it” on their last flight that the leaders are as nervous about it as the pilots.

In some outfits, pilots go home automatically after a certain number of missions. In others they go only if the flight surgeon thinks they are too battle-worn or nervous to continue for another 10 or so. I have yet to hear of a pilot who asked to fly beyond his allotted missions, although I am not saying there haven’t been such cases.

When a pilot comes back from his last trip, he turns out of formation as he nears the field and comes down wide open and screaming to “buzz” the field just above the ground. It is a gesture of elation similar to that of a fighter pilot doing a snap roll over the home field after shooting down a Nazi plane.

Even debt is cancelled

The pilots do all kinds of things after they finish. A friend of mine – Capt. Dean Schuyler of 144-55 87th Ave., Jamaica, Long Island, felt so good the night he got down that he cancelled a $300 debt another pilot owed him.

Another one who finished the same day – Lt. Swithin Shortlidge of West Grove, Pennsylvania – shaved off the beard he had been growing for months.

Last fall, Lt. Shortlidge fell down and knocked out his upper front teeth and cut his chin. He started the beard then because he couldn’t shave for a while, and he finally decided to keep it until he had finished his missions. The dentist made him a false plate to cover up the gaping hole in his mouth, but he refuses to wear it. With a long beard and a big grim and no teeth, he was a sight to behold.

Lt. Jimmy Griswold of Maywood, California, finished his missions while I was on the field. I asked if his last one was the hardest. He said:

No, it was all right once I got in the air, but thinking about it ahead of time almost had me in the asylum.

It’s just hard work

We were sitting around the mess-hall table, and Dan Schuyler said:

Yes, we thought it was going to be very romantic. And it was, for the first few missions when everything was new and strange and you were just learning. But since then, it’s been a job to do, just a job of muddy, hard work.

Most dive-bomber pilots go home without any enemy planes to their credit, for attacking enemy planes isn’t their job. Jimmy Griswold says the first thing his younger brother is going to ask him is how many planes he shot down, and when he says “None at all,” his brother is going to look at him awfully funny.

Some pilots finish and get home in as little as five months, while others are overseas more than a year before getting in their missions. Occasionally sickness or wounds will keep one out of the air for weeks, and he falls behind.

There is one hard-luck pilot – an excellent one too – who was laid up a long time with a bad flak wound in the leg. Then just after he started flying again, the jeep he was riding in was strafed by an enemy fighter and he went back to the hospital with another bad leg wound. As a result, he is far behind on his missions and is just now starting in again while all his pals have gone home.

The saddest thing about the strafing was that the pilot who was driving the jeep had just finished his last mission and had his orders home – and he was killed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The several Air Force units I’ve been with lately are lousy with Hoosiers. I thought I’d take down their names and put them in the column, but the list got so long I realized it would sound like discrimination and the 47 other states might get mad at me.

So I decided to compromise and name only one. He is Lt. James F. Short of Clinton, Indiana. He has been in the Army four years, and was a sergeant up until he got his commission a year ago. He calls himself “one of the 90-day wonders.” He’s only 22, and he is the assistant operations officer of his squadron.

The reason I picked Lt. Short out of all the Hoosiers is that he was born and raised five miles from that proud metropolis from which I sprang – Dana, Indiana.

Compass is enlarged

One afternoon on our field we had an exciting half hour. We had two full groups of dive bombers on the field plus a menagerie of night fighters, day fighters, photo planes, light bombers and cargo ships. We were all standing out waiting for our squadron to come back from a mission, when lo and behold the entire caboodle came back at once. It was the damndest melee in the sky you ever saw. It was as though somebody had broken open a hornet’s nest.

One group of dive bombers approached the field from one direction, and the other from the opposite, at exactly the same time. They both came over the field at about 400 feet, and when they met at mid-runway, they all chandelled off in a thousand directions.

Before that I had thought there were only 360 points on the compass, but now we all know better. Planes were going in at least three times that many directions.

And three to come

Of course, everybody knew what he was doing and it was actually well regulated, but it looked like a madhouse even to other pilots on the ground. Our squadron leader stood there putting on an act of alternately tearing his hair and hiding his face.

In the midst of all this confusion, a Flying Fortress flew over the field and we saw white parachutes begin to spring out behind it. At first, we thought they must be having a practice jump, but you don’t make practice jumps over a frontline. The plane was in trouble.

One by one these scores of dive bombers got themselves successfully landed, and in the meantime seven parachutes had come out of the Fortress. That meant three still inside, and she was still flying.

Finally, the air was clear and the Fortress approached for a landing. The entire complement of the field, several thousand men were standing on top of anything they could find to see the excitement, and the ambulance and firetrucks were all ready. As the Fort approached the field, we could see that the bomb-bay doors were still open.

A bomber is bombed

The big plane touched the runway as softly as down, rolled straight in and through and gradually came to a stop, and we all heaved sighs of relief. The fliers on the ground began acting comically exaggerated scenes of how the ambulance drivers’ faces would fall as they’d reach over in disgust and turn off their switches.

A little later we went around and got the story on the Fortress. One of those unbelievable things had happened that sometimes occur in the best regulated wars. A fellow Flying Fortress had dropped its bombs on this one in midair.

Fortunately, they were only carrying 25-pound fragmentation bombs that day instead of large ones. A couple of these bombs had blown the left wing full of great jagged holes, had knocked out one engine and the radio, and jammed the bomb-bay doors.

One bomb stays alive

But that’s the mildest part of the story. The payoff was that one bomb hadn’t gone off and was still lodged inside the Fortress’ wing, liable to explode at any moment and blow the wing clear off.

When we finally left the plane was roped off, the field engineering officer had got a tall stepladder, had climbed up to the wing, and had been standing there on the stepladder for an hour looking down at the bomb and wondering why he ever chose to be an engineer anyway.

Later that evening some of our pilots and I went to a neighboring field to see some friends. They were complaining about the traffic on their field and said they believed they’d bring their 50 planes over to our field. At which we all howled and said:

Sure, come on over. In the confusion over there you wouldn’t even be noticed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 31, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
One evening, Sgt. James E. Knight, a flight chief from McAlester, Oklahoma, took me in tow and we spent the evening gabbing with about 50 mechanics at this dive-bomber airdrome.

The men at this base live in the same big apartment building as the officers. Their quarters were exactly the same, except that the men have their places fixed up more comfortably and keep them neater than the officers.

You’ll find that true in almost any Air Force group in the combat area, because the men, being craftsmen, can make things the average officer doesn’t know how to make. They fix up stoves and lights and shelves, and make little gadgets that give a homey touch to their quarters.

Sgt. Charlie Bennett, a youngster on the maintenance crew from York, South Carolina, has made a beautiful ashtray from the base of a German 88mm shell, with American machine-gun bullets sticking out of it. It’s too heavy to lug around for a year or more of war, so Charlie thinks he’ll sent it home.

One of Charlie’s roommates is Sgt. Mintford Blair of Spokane, a crew chief in the dive-bomber squadron. In the same group is Blair’s uncle, Sgt. Ted Chapman, an electrical specialist. Uncle and nephew are about the same age. They enlisted together two years ago, and have been lucky enough to stay together ever since.

Superstitious about 7 planes

Sgt. Knight, being a flight chief, has charge of about six planes. Another flight chief is Sgt. Orville Reeves of Fittstown, Oklahoma. Sgt. Reeves is one of the few people I’ve run unto in the Air Forces who have superstitions. Superstitiousness is rare even among the pilots. The last war’s phobia against three-on-a-match is almost unheard of now.

Sgt. Reeves normally has six planes in his charge, but sometimes he will have more. His idiosyncrasy is that he won’t accept seven. he doesn’t mind the work, and he’ll accept two extra planes, but not one.

The reason is that three different times since they’ve come overseas, he has had an extra plane shoved onto him – making a total of seven – and every time his flight has lost a plane the following day. So he’ll have none of it anymore, and you can’t blame him.

Sgt. Knight carries a whole walletful of pictures of his wife and year-old baby. He saw his son only once, when he was a week old. Knight says he’s now “sweating out” a picture of his youngster in the Italian colonel’s suit he sent him for Christmas. Most of the boys have sent home shawls or cameos or lace or something.

A word about the 4-Fs

Sgt. Knight is one of the many mechanics who feel they are not personally doing enough to help win the war. For instance, Knight says all the men under him are now so well trained that he has almost nothing to do, and that he could go back and take flight warning and would hardly be missed around here.

You would think that after seeing what the combat pilots go through, the mechanics would be content to stay on the ground. Yet when applications for flight training were reopened, 10% of the squadron applied.

Always in the combat area you’ll hear soldiers on ground jobs talking earnestly along this line: Why couldn’t well-trained 4-Fs do their jobs and release them for combat?

They know that a guy doesn’t have to be a Samson to stand ordinary Army life, and they point out cases such as that of the soldier who was discharged from the Army on physical grounds; yet was capable of playing swell football when he got back to civil life.

Constantly, also, the Air Force boys pay tribute to the infantry. In two weeks around the airfield. I think I heard the subject brought up 200 times. Pilots and mechanics both feel the same way – their hats are off to the infantry.

One pilot said to me:

What must you think of us, anyhow, knowing as you do what the infantry goes through and then finding that all we talk about is when we can get our missions in and go home?

I told him I thought they were acting like very normal human beings, and that, furthermore, bad as infantry life is, I believed the average infantryman looked on the combat pilot’s job as too dangerous to be envied.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 1, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
One night I was gossiping in a tent with a bunch of dive-bomber pilots, and one of them who was sitting next to me said in a sudden, offhand way:

I wonder what those Germans in that truck are doing tonight?

He was referring to a truck he had strafed and blown up the afternoon before. Such things sometimes sort of get under their skins. The pilots like to go on a hunt, and it’s thrilling to sweep down and shoot hell out of something, the same as it is to shoot a running deer, but underneath they don’t relish the idea of killing people who aren’t trying to kill then.

The pilot said to himself, “Some of them aren’t doing anything tonight,” and then the subject was changed.

Every time I go to an airdrome, it seems as if I always sleep n the cot of the last pilot who has been shot down. It’s quite natural, since there are usually just enough cots set up to go around, and you sleep on whichever one is empty. I don’t mind it, because I’m not superstitious. But it does impress you after it has happened several times in a row.

One is afraid of combat

I have found that almost every combat unit has (1) one pilot so nerveless that he thinks his narrow escapes are funny, and means it; (2) a majority who truly love to fly and at times find a certain real exhilaration in combat, but who on the whole exist only for the day when they can do their flying more peacefully, and (3) one pilot who absolutely hates airplanes and keeps going, if at all, only through sheer willpower.

In recent weeks, I’ve known of two pilots who developed such neuroses against airplanes that they had to be sent to a rest spot where they wouldn’t see a plane for six months.

The other night I was talking with a swell lieutenant who said frankly that although he liked planes and liked to fly, he was scared of combat. He admitted he had balled up a good many missions, and he said he was absolutely no good as a combat pilot.

If all this gives you the impression that pilots are worried to death and go around with long faced, then I’ve committed a crime. The pilot I’ve just spoken of is one of the happy-go-lucky type. I suppose pilots as a class are the gayest people in the Army. When they come back from a mission, they’re usually full of high spirits. And when they sit around together of an evening, nine-tenths of their conversation is exuberant and full of howling jokes. There is nothing whatever of the grimness in their conduct that you get in the infantry while it is in the line.

Oklahoman hilarious actor

As an example, one night during supper we heard some terrific shouting in the adjoining room, as though a politician were making a Fourth of July speech. Finally, we moved to the door to see what it was all about, and there sat a roomful 0f pilots before their finished supper plates, giving rapt attention to another pilot who was on his feet delivering a burlesque harangue on the merits of snake-oil hair tonic.

This pilot was Lt. Robert J. Horrigan of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has an infectious grim and a perpetual sense of mimicry. It turned out that his father, now a banker in Tulsa, for many years was on the stage as a magician and his uncle was a famous juggler. The two even toured Europe with their act.

Bob Horrigan would like to go on the stage himself after the war, but he supposes he won’t. his current ambition is to land an airplane on the Tulsa Airport with his family and friends all out to meet him. He wouldn’t even object to a small brass band.

The nicest thing about Horrigan’s impromptu acting is that he gets as tickled as his audience does. His final act is a 100% sound imitation of the unconventional scene of a Messerschmitt shooting down a Spitfire. The audience of pilots yells its delight as though there wasn’t a care in the world.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 2, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
In the past our Army has worried some because the soldiers didn’t have a very good idea of what the war around them was all about. This was largely because the Army never told them. But several months ago, a definite program of making our combat troops better informed was inaugurated, and it is taking effect now in many phases of our operations overseas with which I am not acquainted. But I have seen one example of it in the Air Forces.

In the bomber group which I have been visiting, pilots come down to the enlisted men’s mess hall every evening and tell them what happened on their missions that day. Our squadron flew three missions on this particular day so three pilots came down that night – one to describe each mission.

They brought maps with them and told the soldiers exactly what they were trying to bomb, how successful they were, how much flak they ran into, how many enemy fighters they saw, and what road strafing they did on the way home. They also told the men why each point was selected to bomb, and what its destruction would mean.

The pilots made it informal, and one of them who had had a rather tough mission wound up by saying:

I think I earned my pay today.

The next one got up and said:

Well, I didn’t earn mine.

His flight had had an easy ride, encountering no fighters and little flak.

Receive summary of ground war

Later I was with a squadron of 20 bombers and sat in on their early-morning briefing. The briefing officer, before starting on the details of the forthcoming mission, gave the crews a complete summary of the ground war throughout the Italian and Russian fronts in the previous 24 hours, as brought in over the teletype system.

All this is a good thing. It’s easier to fight when you know what the other fellow is doing and how he is getting along.

At this 20-bomber field one of the enlisted gunners finished his allotted number of missions the day I got there. He was Sgt. Lester C. Eadman of Weyauwega, Wisconsin. Sgt. Eadman has been overseas 15 months and was wounded in the leg by flak last winter in one of the raids over Tunis. Eadman just cleaned up and loafed all the next day after his last mission, and he looked mighty satisfied with everything.

A lot of pilots and enlisted men who have finished their missions get married as soon as they hit home. Three gunners in this same group went home together recently and all three were married within two days after they got to the States.

Pin-ups vs. girl back home

There has been a controversy in the Stars and Stripes over the pin-up girls vs. the girl back home. One soldier wrote in and said the picture of his one-and-only was good enough for him and to hell with pin-up pictures. but he had a lot of dissenters. Personally, I don’t see that there’s much conflict. I’ve ever heard of a soldier writing to his real girl to break off the engagement because he had fallen in love with a picture.

Looking at a pin-up girl is pleasant, and sort of academic. Everybody carries pictures of his own family, anyway, and gets them out on the slightest pretext. I’ve looked at thousands of pictures of wives and three-month-old babies of soldiers, and have said “Hmm!” and “Ah, beautiful!” and “My, what a strapping youngster!” until I’m red in the face. Don’t get the idea that I mind it. Not at all. It gives me an excuse to haul out my own pictures and show them right back.

My, how many women look alike!

But from this vast experience of looking at pictures of other men’s wives, I’ve got one definite cross-section impression, and that is how much alike so many women in the world look. Don’t shoot, boys, I didn’t mean YOUR wife.

The reason I have brought up the subject of pin-up girls is to tell of a pin-up gallery in one room occupied by six mechanics of my dive-bomber squadron. Tacked on their walls are three dozen of the most striking pin-ups you ever saw.

Before long the squadron will have to move and give up its present nice quarters. When it does I think the pin-ups should be left there and the room roped off by the Italian government as a monument to the American occupation. I’ll bet the place, if given a few centuries’ time, would become as historic as Pompeii.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The British Army recently announced a new system of wound and foreign-service stripes, similar to ours of the last war. I’ve wondered for a long time when we would get around to doing it ourselves, and if you ask me the sooner the better.

The new British wound insigne is to be straight up-and-down gold strip an inch and a half long on the left forearm. There will be one for each wound. Similar stripes of red will be granted for each year of service in the war.

Ours of the last war was a golden “V” on the right sleeve for each wound, and the same on the left sleeve for each six months of service abroad.

A little thing like a stripe can do wonders for morale. And certainly it’s pointless to wait till everybody gets home, for the average soldier will get into civvies the moment he gets his discharge. Over here and right now is when wound and service stripes would give a guy a chance to get a little kick out of wearing his record on his sleeve.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind parading a few stripes myself. Very shortly I’ll have a total of two years overseas since World War II began, and since I’m now at the age where hardening of the arteries may whisk me off at any moment. I’d like somebody to see my stripes before it’s too late.

Typewriter breaks down

A thing I’ve always feared in war zones has at last happened – my typewriter has broken down.

A certain metal bracket has cracked right in two, and you can no longer turn the cylinder and make a new line by hitting the little lever on the side.

Fortunately, you can still turn the cylinder the old-fashioned way, but that’s like a soldier with a machine gun who has to stop and load every bullet separately. It will be possible to get the little gadget welded the next time I get to an airfield, but jumping around as we d that may the weeks away.

Still, all in all, breakdown could be much worse, and I don’t know that a broken typewriter makes so much difference anyhow to a correspondent who is unable to think of anything better than his broken typewriter to write about.

That bet on beer bottles

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the boys in a certain artillery battery were betting on whether Schlitz beer ever came in green bottles or not.

Well, R. Ray Parsons of Indianapolis writes that the Schlitz bottle was brown for many years but that because of the wartime bottle shortage it is now often put in green bottles. That settles the argument but the best part is yet to come.

Mr. Parsons was a private in the AEF in the last war and he is a Schlitz salesman. He now has and his enthusiasm for the ripe quality of his own suds, that he offers to buy the two artillerymen all the beer they can drink in a week after they get back to America. If they’ll write him, he’ll make the date.

That would be fine but, Mr. Parsons, what the artillerymen and everybody else want is beer over here right now. Everybody but me, of course.

Must cut voting red tape

All America seems to be worrying about whether the soldiers are going to get to vote. It sounds as though Congress is practically in fistfights about it.

Well, if you’ll met have the platform a moment, I think I can tell you how it is. I can’t answer for the Army which is either in training or in behind-the-lines routine jobs, but I think I can answer for the frontline combat soldier, and the answer is this:

Sure he wants to vote, if you ask him he’ll say yes. But he actually thinks little about it, and if there’s going to be any red tape about it, he’ll say nuts to it.

The average combat soldier is so consumed with the job of merely keeping alive, and with contributing what bare little he can to his own miserable existence, that he has little room in him for thinking about the ballot. If you offered him his choice between voting in November and finding a dirty cowshed to lie down in out of the rain tonight, the cowshed would win.

Won’t fuss with questionnaires

If the Army could set up the machinery and some day all of a sudden tell every soldier in the combat zone to step up and mark his “X” if he wanted to, then 99% of the frontline troops would vote.

But if soldiers have to full out long questionnaires from their home states, sign affidavits, and fuss around with reading and writing out complicated lists, then I think 99% of those same frontline troops would say:

To hell with it, he’d rather have a cigar ration at suppertime instead.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1944)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Here’s that man again, for better or for worse.

It’s a good thing the winning of the war doesn’t depend on me. If my business were shooting Germans, I’d never get the trigger pulled for sneezing. Each zero hour would have to be postponed until I found my liniment and hot-water bottle.

I am the chief depository overseas of the common American cold. One cold at a time is not good enough for me, nor even two. In the past five weeks I’ve piled three colds one on top of the other.

The main trouble is that I’m allergic to the remedies that benefit other people. Things work backwards on me.

Codeine and aspirin make me much worse. Sleeping tablets keep me awake. Stimulating doses put me to sleep. It’s been proved that I cannot take vitamins. Tonics destroy my appetite. Cough sirup throws me into convulsions of whooping. I would suggest that an efficient hanging from the nearest olive tree is my only panacea.

Please try to forgive me for this recent absenteeism, and I pray that it doesn’t happen too often. I don’t want you to find out how well the war can get along without me.

Tribute to Clapper

Late though it is I can’t pass back to the war without a last word for Ray Clapper, who went to his death in the Pacific. His passing hit us hard over here.

He had many friends in this war theater, as he had in the others. He traveled to all the wars because he felt it his duty to inform himself, and everywhere he went he was liked for himself and respected for his find mind.

We had known each other for 20 years. Time and again he went out of his way to do little things that would help me, and to say nice things about me in his column, and I cannot remember that I ever did one thing for him. Those accusing regrets come when it is too late.

War correspondents try not to think of how high their ratio of casualties has been in this war. At least they try not to think of it in terms of themselves, but Ray Clapper’s death sort of set us back on our heels, Somehow it always seemed impossible that anything could ever happen to him. It made us wonder who is next.

When The Stars and Stripes announced Ray Clapper’s death, I think the most frequent comment in this area was one that would have made Ray proud. People said:

The old story again. It’s always the best ones that get it.

Climax in Coca-Cola

Here is our final report on that bottle of Coca-Cola that was raffled off last month in a field-artillery brigade.

It all started in November when a former member of this brigade, now back in the States – Pvt. Frederick Williams of Daytona Beach, Florida – sent two bottes of coke to two of his buddies still over here – Cpl. Victor Glover of Daytona Beach and Sgt. Woodrow Daniels of Jacksonville, Florida.

Nobody in the outfit had seen a Coca-Cola in more than a year, so they drank one and then began having ideas about the other. At last, they decided to put it up in a raffle, and use the proceeds to care for children whose fathers had been killed in this brigade.

The lottery was announced in the brigade’s little mimeographed newspaper, and chances on the coke were put on sale at 25¢ apiece. Before the first week was up, the cash box had more than $1,000 in it.

The money came in quarters, dollars, shillings, pounds, francs and lire. They had to appoint a committee to administer the affair. At the end of the third week, the fund exceeded $3,000. Then Pvt. Lamyl Yancey of Harlan, Kentucky, got a miniature bottle of Coca-Cola and he put it up as second prize.

Just before the grand drawing, the fund reached $4,000. Then the slips were put in a German shell case, and the brigade commander drew out two numbers.

The winnah and new champion was Sgt. William de Schneider of Hackensack, New Jersey. The little bottle went to Sgt. Lawrence Presnell of Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Sgt. Schneider was appalled by what had happened to him. That one coke was the equivalent in value of 80,000 bottles back home. He said:

I don’t think I care to drink a $4,000 bottle. I think I’ll sent it home and keep it a few years.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

He couldn’t even talk about his operation!

From a letter sent to Ernie Pyle by a newsreel cameraman, hospitalized in Italy:

Dear Ernie:

When they wheeled me in here, I felt like a slow-motion tennis ball going over the net at Forest Hills. Everybody’s head moved from left to right, and vice versa on the other side of the ward.

You see, the hospital grapevine or village tom-toms had given out the news that a war correspondent was being wheeled in. I understand the tension was terrific until I came out of the morphia. The first question all and sundry asked me was not how I felt or what was wrong with me but – did I know Ernie Pyle.

When I said I knew him slightly, I became quite popular, and questions flew right and left.

This note is to ask you to come over for a few minutes and say hello to some of these broken lads. It would please them beyond description, and there are many things and incidents here that would interest you as well.

Considering the cubic content of suffering within the four walls, it really is a very happy dump.

In Italy – (by wireless)
For several days, I’ve been living with an infantry company of the 34th Division. The 34th is the oldest division on this side of the Atlantic. It has been away from home two full years.

Two years is a long time overseas, even if you do nothing but travel around and work hard. But when, in addition, you fill two years with campaign after bitter campaign, a division of men eventually becomes wise and worn and old, like a much-read book or a cottage that wears its aging stone stoutly, ignoring the patchwork of new concrete that holds it together.

Today, in any frontline rifle company of around 200 men in the 34th, you find usually fewer than a dozen men who came overseas with the division originally. In one battalion, not a single one of the original officers is left.

That doesn’t mean they’ve all been killed, but it does mean that through casualties of all sorts, plus sickness and transfer and some small rotation back to the States, a division has almost a complete turnover in two years of fighting. Only its number remains the same. But even a number can come to have character and life, to those who are intimate with its heritage. I was with the 34th as long as June of 1942, in Ireland, and I have a feeling about it.

Remarkable Lt. Jack Sheehy

I came to the regimental command post in a jeep after dark one night.

Regimental handed me down to battalion, and battalion on down to the company I was to stay with. They were bivouacked for the moment in an olive grove, with their company command post in a stone Italian farmhouse – the first time their CP had been inside walls since they hit Italy five months ago.

The company commander is Lt. John J. Sheehy of New York City. The division was originally all Iowa and Minnesota men, but now you’ll find men from everywhere. The Iowans are the veterans, however, and they still stand out.

Jack Sheehy is tall and thin, and quite young, and of course he’s Irish. In the regiment, he is considered pretty remarkable. Any time you mention him among higher officers, they nod and say:

Yes, Sheehy is a case.

I don’t know exactly what causes this, but I gather from innuendo that he is addicted to using his noggin in spectacular ways in the pinches, and that he fears neither German soldiers nor American brass hats. He is an extremely likable and respected company commander.

Proud of men, and vice versa

Lt. Sheehy used to be a clerk for American Airlines in New York. He says that after the war he’s going into salesmanship of some kind, because he figures his gift of gab will carry him through – which surprised me, because during all the time I was with him, he was far from garrulous, but actually very kind and reserved.

I’ve never seen a man prouder of his company than Lt. Sheehy, and the men in it are proud, too. I’ve been around war long enough to know that nine-tenths of morale is pride in your outfit and confidence in your leader and fellow fighters.

A lot of people have morale confused with the desire to fight. I don’t know of one soldier in 10,000 who wants to fight. They certainly don’t in my company. The old-timers are sick to death of battle, and the new replacements are scared to death of it. And yet the company goes on into battle, and it is a proud company.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 16, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
When I joined “X” Company, it was in one of those lulls that sometimes come in war. The company was still “in the lines,” as you say, but not actually fighting.

They had taken a town a few days before, and since then had been waiting for the next attack. We moved forward twice while I was with them, always in night marches, and on the last move the company went into battle again.

These intervals give the soldiers time to restore their gear and recuperate their spirits. Usually, they come weeks apart.

In areas recently passed over by battles, the towns have been largely evacuated – in fact, practically all of them are mere heaps of rubble from bombing and shelling – and no stores are open. There is little chance of buying wine.

But this regiment had gone sniffing into cellars in a depopulated town and turned up with all kinds of exotic liquors which they dug out of the rubble.

The result was that you could make a tour on foot of a dozen company and battalion command posts around the perimeter of the town and in nearly every one discover a shelf full of the finest stuff imaginable.

A drinker’s delight

It was ironic to walk into a half-demolished building and find a command post set up in the remaining rooms, with soldiers sitting in front of a crackling fireplace, and at 10 o’clock in the morning

Our company command post consisted of one table, one chair and one telephone, in a second-story room of a stone farmhouse. In most of these two-story farmhouses, the stairway goes up the outside. You hang blankets at the door for blackout, and burn candles.

Five platoons of the company were bivouacked in olive orchards in a circle around the farmhouse, the farthest foxhole being not more than 200 yards away.

I’ve always been struck by the works some men will put into a home as temporary as a foxhole. I’ve been with men in this company who would arrive at a new bivouac at midnight, dig a hole just big enough to sleep in the rest of the night, then work all the next day in a deep, elaborate, roofed-over foxhole, even though they knew they had to leave the same evening and never see that hole again.

Bullet-pocked trees

In the olive groves throughout this bitter Cassino area, there are pitiful testimonials to closeup warfare. In our grove, I don’t believe there was a single one of the thousands of old trees that hadn’t at least one bullet scar in it. Knocked-off branches littered the ground. Some trees were cut clear down by shells. The stone walls had shell gaps every so often, and every standing thing was bullet-pocked.

You couldn’t walk 50 feet without hitting a shell or bomb crater. Every house and shed had at least a corner knocked off.

Some soldiers were sleeping in the haymow of a stone barn. They had to get up into it via a stepladder they had pieced together, because the steps had been blown away. Between the house and the barn ran a footpath on a sort of ledge. Our men had been caught there that first night by a tank in the valley below firing at them point-blank. One soldier had been killed instantly, and as we walked along the path a few days later his steel helmet was still lying there, bloody and riddled with holes. Another soldier had a leg blown off, but lived.

The men were telling me of a replacement – a green soldier – who joined the company the day after, when this soldier’s leg was still lying in the path. The new soldier stopped and stared at it and kept on staring.

The other boys watched him from a distance. They say that when anyone came along the path the new man would move off to one side so as not to be seen. But as soon as they would pass, he would come back and star, sort of hypnotized. He never said anything about it afterwards, and nobody said anything to him. Somebody buried the leg the next day.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Of the nearly 200 men who came overseas in the company I’m with now, only eight are left. In those eight men you will find everything a military man would like to have in a soldier.

They have all been in the Army nearly three years. They have been away from America two years. They have served in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, Algeria, Tunisia and Italy. They have been at it so long they have become truly more soldier than civilian.

Their life consists wholly and only of war, for they are and always have been frontline infantrymen. They have survived because the fates have been kind to them, certainly, but also because they have become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.

None of them likes war. They all want to go home, but they have been at it so long they know how to take care of themselves and to lead others. Every company is built around a little group like them.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say these boys haven’t changed since they left America. Of course, they have changed – they have had to. And yet when I sit and talk with them, they seem just like ordinary humans back home.

Iowa boy is great soldier

Take Sgt. Paul Allumbaugh, for instance. He’s an Iowan boy and a great soldier, yet so quiet, kind and good-natured you can’t imagine him ever killing anybody. He’s only 21, after these years of fighting, and when shaved and cleaned up after battle he doesn’t look a bit older. At first, he looks too small to be a soldier, but then you realize how well built he is.

He is good-looking, and his face is the kind you instinctively like.

Sgt. Allumbaugh’s nickname is Tag. He has gone through the whole thing so far without a wound, although narrow escapes have been countless. He had one bullet scratch across his hand and another across a foot. These are not counted as wounds.

Tag served for three months in the British Commandos when volunteers were asked for out of his company in Scotland. He fought with them in Africa too, then came back with his buddies – and his relatives. At one time this outfit was practically the Allumbaugh family, with Tag and his brother and five cousins in it, all from Shenandoah, Iowa. All seven of them are still alive, but their fates have been varied.

Tag’s brother Donald was captured a year ago and is still a German prisoner. Two cousins were captured also but one of these has escaped. Of the remaining three, one is soon going home on rotation, one is in the engineers and one is still in this division.

Lived in captured dugout

While my company was in its brief olive-grove bivouac, Tag was living in a captured German dugout with his close buddy, Sgt. William Knobbs of Keokuk, Iowa. They had such a battle getting the place that they decided to live in it for a while.

Sgt. Knobbs’ nickname is Knobby, and he too has had some close shaves. Once a bullet went right through his helmet, across the top of his head. It burned the hair off in a groove just as though you had shaved it yet it never broke the skin.

Knobby said his wife has never known he has been in combat. Then he corrected himself. He said actually she did know through friends, but not from him. He has never once written her of any of his experiences or said he was in battle.

Some of the remarks the men recount in fun are pathetically revealing and touching. Take the thing Sgt. Pierson said one day in battle. Jack Pierson is a wonderful guy. He was in the Commandos with Tag. He’s almost a Sgt. Quiet, except that he’s good looking, smart and friendly. But he is tough. As the other men say:

Jack is really a touch man. he would be rough even back home.

‘One-man Army’

He comes from Sidney, Iowa. He is older than most of the others. For many years he ran a piledriver doing construction work along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. He calls himself a river rat. The boys here call him a “one-man Army.” He has been wounded once.

Jack is married and has three children. He has a girl, 9, a boy, 7, and then he has Junior, who is going on 2 and whom Jack has never seen. Jack pretty much dotes on Junior and everybody in the company knows about Junior and knows how badly Jack wants to see him.

Well, one day in battle they were having it tough. There were rifle fire, mortars and hand grenades all around, and soldiers on both sides getting knocked off like flies. Tag Allumbaugh was lying within shouting distance of where Jack was pinned down and he yelled over:

How you doin’, Jack?

And then this man who was hard in peacetime and is hard in war called back a resigned answer that expresses in a general way every combat soldier’s pathetic reason for wanting to live and hating to die.

He called back – and he wasn’t joking – and he said:

It don’t look like I’m gonna get to see Junior.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The little handful of old-timers left in my company have been together so long they form a little family of their own. They sort of stand apart from the newer bulk of the company.

Out of their wisdom they seek the best place to settle down in a new bivouac. They are the first to find an abandoned German dugout, or a cozy pig shed, or a case of brandy in the cellar of a bombed building. And by right of seniority, they take it.

Most of them are sergeants and platoon leaders by now. Such men as Tat Allumbaugh and Knobby Knobbs and Jack Pierson, whom I’ve mentioned before, and Sgt. Ed Kattleman of Cincinnati, and Buck Eversole of Twin Falls, Idaho, and 1st Sgt. Bill Wood of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Sgt. Pete commers of Imogene, Iowa, and Pvt. Eddie Young of Pontiac, Michigan.

So much depends on this little group of noncoms, and war is such a familiarizing force that they are almost on the same basis as the officers. In this company the officers eat separately when they’re in bivouac, but that’s about the only class distinction.

Little military formality

There is little military formality. I had to laugh one afternoon when Lt. Tony Libertore of Charleston, South Carolina, was lying on the ground with several of these sergeants sitting around him, just gabbing about this and that.

Lt. Libertore made some remark. I forget what it was, and Jack Pierson rocked back and forth with his hands tucked around his knees, and said:

Why, you horse’s behind. It ain’t that way at all.

Even in fun, you don’t talk that way with an officer until you’ve been through that famous valley of death and out again together.

Then Lt. Libertore started telling me all that he had to put up with. He said:

Now take Tag and Knobby. They treat me like dirt. They browbeat me all the time. But word came around this afternoon that six men were to be picked for rest camp, and boy they’ve been “sirring” me to death ever since, and bringing me gifts and asking if I needed anything.

Listen with appreciative grins

Tag and Knobby sat there listening with appreciative grins on their facts.

These old-timers in the company sort of took me in and made me feel a part of them. One afternoon, Lt. Sheehy asked if I’d ever shot a carbine and I said no, but that I’d always wanted to. So, he said:

Well, let’s go out and shoot at something.

At the time, we were a couple of miles back of the fighting. Our company was to march that night and start its own attack next day. That afternoon, they had nothing to do, and were just like a man who takes a day off from the office to lie around home. There was distant artillery and the day was warm and sunny and lazy.

The lieutenant went to get his gun, and just by acclamation the little circle of veterans went after theirs, too. When they came back, they had carbines, Tommy guns, Garands .45s, and the German automatic known as the P-38, similar to the Lueger. We walked about a quarter mile from our olive orchard down into a broad, protected gully.

Slope is too rocky

Then with seasoned eyes they looked around for a place to do some target shooting. They’d look at one slope and say:

No, that’s too rocky. The bullets will ricochet, and they might hit some of our artillery batteries over the hill.

They looked at another slope and turned it down because we’d seen some Italian children running across it a little while before. Finally they picked a gravelly bank that seemed to have nothing behind it, and we started shooting. There weren’t any tin cans or anything, so we’d pick out tiny white rocks in the bank. The distance was about 75 yards.

I’d been jokingly bragging on the way down about what a crack rifle shot I was, so now I had to make good or else. And I did! nothing could make me any prouder than that I picked off little white rocks right along with these veterans.

Shoot for half an hour

We must have shot for half an hour. We traded guns all around so I could try them all. Buck Eversole showed me how they hold a Tommy gun and spray a slope full of krauts.

Finally, the lieutenant said:

We better stop or the colonel might raise hell about wasting ammunition.

Toward the end the boys made it comical, holding the guns out at arm’s length and shutting their eyes like girls, and holding down the trigger and just letting her jump.

It was really an incongruous interlude – war is full of them. Eight of the finest and most hardened soldiers in the American Army out in picnic fashion shooting at rocks and having fun two miles behind the line where tomorrow they would again be shooting to kill.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Most infantry companies in the American frontlines are now composed largely of replacements, as they are in all armies after more than a year of fighting.

Some of these replacements have been here only a few weeks. Others came so long ago they are now as seasoned as the original men of the company.

The new boys are afraid, of course, and very eager to hear and to learn. They hang onto the words of the old-timers. I suppose the anticipation during the last few days before your first battle is one of the worst ordeals of a lifetime. Now and then, one will crack up before he has ever gone into action.

One day I was wandering through an olive grove talking with some of these newer kids when I saw a soldier, sitting on the edge of his foxhole, wearing a black silk opera hat. That’s what I said – an opera hat.

The owner was Pvt. Gordon T. Winter. He’s a Canadian. His father owns an immense sheep ranch near Lindbergh, Alberta, 200 miles northeast of Edmonton.

Pvt. Winter said he found the top hat in a demolished house in a nearby village and just thought he’d bring it along. He said:

I’m going to wear it in the next attack. The Germans will think I’m crazy, and they’re afraid of crazy people.

Private played dead

In the same foxhole was a thin, friendly boy who seemed hardly old enough to be in high school. There was fuzz instead of whiskers on his face and he had that eager-to-be-nice attitude that marked him as not long away from home.

This was Pvt. Robert Lee Whichard of Baltimore. It turned out that he was only 18. He has been overseas only since early winter. He has seen action already. He was laughing when telling me about the first time he was in battle.

Apparently, it was a pretty wild melee, and ground was changing hands back and forth. Pvt. Whichard said he was lying on the ground shooting, “or maybe not shooting, I don’t know,” because he admits he was pretty scared.

He happened to look up and here were German soldiers walking past him. Bob said he was so scared he just rolled over and lay still. Pretty soon mortar shells began dropping and the Germans decided to retire. So, they came back past him, and he still lay there playing dead until finally they were gone.

Bob says the other night he dreamed his feet were so cold that he ran to the battalion aid station and there were his mother and sister fixing some hot food over a wood fire for him and poking up the fire so he could warm his feet. But before either the food or his feet were warm, he woke up – and his feet were still cold.

Another soldier came past and said he’d dreamed the night before that he was home and his mother was cooking pork chops by the tubful for him to eat. This one was Cpl. Pamal Meena, whose father is a Syrian minister in Cleveland.

The post office system has broken down as far as Cpl. Meena is concerned. He has been overseas five months and has never got a letter. The corporal has not been in combat but is ready for it. He says he hasn’t decided whether he is going to be a minister, like his father, but he has taken to reading his Bible since he came to war.

Has Ernie in stitches

One day I was walking through another olive orchard which held the 34th Division headquarters, and I noticed a soldier under a tree cleaning a sewing machine.

This was Pvt. Leonard Vitale of Council Bluffs, Iowa. He’s an old-timer in the division. As I looked around, I saw a couple of other sewing machines sitting on boxes. I asked:

Good Lord, what are you doing? Starting a sewing-machine factory?

Pvt. Vitale said no, he was just getting set to do altering and mending for division headquarters. The first two sewing machines he had bought from Italians, and an AMG officer had given him the newest machine. It was a Singer, in an elaborate mahogany cabinet.

Pvt. Vitale said he wasn’t an expert tailor but had picked up some of the rudiments during the three and a half years he’d spent in the CCC and thought he would do all right and make a little money on the side. As I walked away, he called out:

I’ll have this war sewed up in a couple of months.

I grabbed a rifle from a nearby MP and shot the punster through and through before he had me in stitches.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The company commander said to me:

Every man in this company deserves the Silver Star.

We walked around in the olive grove where the men of the company were sitting on the edges of their foxholes, talking or cleaning their gear.

He said:

Let’s go over here. I want to introduce you to my personal hero.

I figured that the lieutenant’s own “personal hero,” out of a whole company of men who deserved the Silver Star, must be a real soldier indeed.

Then the company commander introduced me to Sgt. Frank Eversole, who shook hands sort of timidly and said, “Pleased to meet you,” and then didn’t say any more.

I could tell by his eyes and by his slow and courteous speech when he did talk that he was a Westerner. Conversation with him was sort of hard, but I didn’t mind his reticence for I know how Westerners like to size people up first.

The sergeant wore a brown stocking cap on the back of his head. His eyes were the piercing kind. I noticed his hands – they were outdoor hands, strong and rough.

Later in the afternoon, I came past his foxhole again, and we sat and talked a little while alone. We didn’t talk about the war, but mainly about our West, and just sat and made figures on the ground with sticks as we talked.

We got started that way, and in the days that followed I came to know him well. He is to me, and to all those with whom he serves, one of the great men of the war.

Cowboy before the war

Frank Eversole’s nickname is “Buck.” The other boys in the company sometimes call him “Buck Overshoes,” simply because Eversole sounds a bit like “overshoes.”

Buck was a cowboy before the war. He was born in the little town of Missouri Valley, Iowa, and his mother still lives there. But Buck went West on his own before he was 16, and ever since has worked as a ranch hand. He is 38, and unmarried.

He worked a long time around Twin Falls, Idaho, and then later down in Nevada. Like so many cowboys, he made the rodeos in season. He was never a star or anything. Usually, he just rode the broncs out of the chute for pay - $7.50 a ride. Once he did win a fine saddle. He has ridden at Cheyenne and the other big rodeos.

Like any cowboy, he loves animals. Here in Italy one afternoon Buck and some other boys were pinned down inside a one-room stone shed by terrific German shellfire. As they sat there, a frightened mule came charging through the door. There simply wasn’t room inside for men and mule both, so Buck got up and shooed him out the door. Thirty feet from the door, a direct hit killed the mule. Buck has always felt guilty about it.

Another time Buck ran onto a mule that was down and crying in pain from a bad shell wound. Buck took his .45 and out a bullet through its head. Buck says:

I wouldn’t have shot him except he was hurtin’ so.

Cold, deliberate in battle

Buck Eversole has the Purple Heart and two Silver Stars for bravery. He is cold and deliberate in battle. His commanders depend more on him than any other man. He has been wounded once, and had countless narrow escapes. He has killed many Germans.

He is the kind of man you instinctively feel safer with then with other people. He is not helpless like most of us. He is practical. He can improvise, patch things, fix things.

His grammar is the unschooled grammar of the plains and the soil. He uses profanity, but never violently. Even in the familiarity of his own group his voice is always low. He is such a confirmed soldier by now that he always says “sir” to any stranger. It is impossible to conceive of his doing anything dishonest.

After the war, Buck will go back West to the land he loves. He wants to get a little place and feed a few head of cattle, and be independent.

He says:

I don’t want to be just a ranch hand no more. It’s all right and I like it all right, but it’s a rough life and it don’t get you anywhere. When you get a little older you kinda like a place of your own.

Buck Eversole has no hatred for Germans. He kills because he’s trying to keep alive himself. The years roll over him and the war becomes his only world, and battle his only profession. He armors himself with a philosophy of acceptance of what may happen.

He says very quietly:

I’m mighty sick of it all, but there ain’t no use to complain. I just figure it this way, that I’ve been given a job to do and I’ve got to do it. And if I don’t like through it, there’s nothing I can do about it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Buck Eversole is a platoon sergeant in an infantry company. That means he has charge of about 40 frontline fighting men.

He has been at the front for more than a year. War is old to him and he has become almost the master of it. He is a senior partner now in the institution of death.

His platoon has turned over many times as battle whittles down the old ones and the replacement system brings up the new ones. Only a handful now are veterans.

In his slow, barely audible Western voice, so full of honesty and sincerity, Buck told me one night:

It gets so it kinda gets you, seein’ these new kids come up.

Some of them have just got fuzz on their faces, and don’t know what it’s all about, and they’re scared to death. No matter what, some of them are bound to get killed.

We talked about some of the other old-time noncoms who could take battle themselves, but had gradually grown morose under the responsibility of leading green boys to their slaughter. Buck spoke of one sergeant especially, a brave and hardened man, who went to his captain and asked him to be reduced to a private in the lines.

Buck finally said:

I know it ain’t my fault that they get killed. And I do the best I can for them, but I’ve got so I feel like a murder. I hate to look at them when the new ones come in.

Buck and Nazi play house

Buck himself has been fortunate. Once he was shot through the arm. His own skill and wisdom have saved him many times, but luck has saved him countless other times.

One night Buck and an officer took refuge from shelling in a two-room Italian stone house. As they sat there, a shall came through the wall of the far room, crossed the room and buried itself in the middle wall with its nose pointing upward. It didn’t go off.

Another time Buck was leading his platoon on a night attack. They were walking in Indian file. Suddenly a mine went off, and killed the entire squad following Buck. He himself had miraculously walked through the minefield without hitting a one.

One day Buck went stalking a German officer in close combat, and wound up with the German on one side of a farmhouse and Buck on the other. They kept throwing grenades over the house at each other without success.

Finally, Buck stepped around one corner of the house, and came face to face with the German, who’d had the same idea.

Buck was ready and pulled the trigger first. His slug hit the German just above the heart. The German had a wonderful pair of binoculars slung over his shoulders, and the bullet smashed them to bits. Buck had wanted some German binoculars for a long time.

Fraternity of peril

The ties that grow up between men who live savagely and die relentlessly together are ties of great strength. There is a sense of fidelity to each other among little corps of men who have endured so long and whose hope in the end can be but so small.

One afternoon while I was with the company Sgt. Buck Eversole’s turn came to go back to rest camp for five days. The company was due to attack that night.

Buck went to his company commander and said:

Lieutenant, I don’t think I better go. I’ll stay if you need me.

The lieutenant said:

Of course I need you, Buck, I always need you. But it’s your turn and I want you to go. In fact, you’re ordered to go.

The truck taking the few boys away to rest camp left just at dusk. It was drizzling and the valleys were swathed in a dismal mist. Artillery of both sides flashed and rumbled around the horizon. The encroaching darkness was heavy and foreboding.

Buck came to the little group of old-timers in the company with whom I was standing, to say goodbye. You’d have thought he was leaving forever. He shook hands all around, and his smile seemed sick and vulnerable. He was a man stalling off his departure.

He said, “Well, good luck to you all.” And then he said, “I’ll be back in just five days.”

I walked with him toward the truck in the dusk. He kept his eyes on the ground, and I think he would have cried if he knew how, and he said to me very quietly:

This is the first battle I’ve ever missed that this battalion has been in. even when I was in the hospital with my arm they were in bivouac. This will be the first one I’ve ever missed. I sure do hope they have good luck.

And then he said:

I feel like a deserter.

He climbed in, and the truck dissolved into the blackness. I went back and lay down on the ground among my other friends waiting for the night orders to march. I lay there in the darkness thinking – terribly touched by the great simple devotion of this soldier who was a cowboy – and thinking of the millions far away at home who must remain forever unaware of the powerful fraternalism in the ghastly brotherhood of war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Our company was alerted for its night march just before suppertime. We got the word about 4 in the afternoon, and we ate at 4:30. Word was passed around to collect 24 hours’ field rations at suppertime and a full supply of ammunition.

At chow time, the soldiers all held their tin hats crooked in their left arms while holding their mess kits in their right. At the end of the mess line, the soldiers out five “C” ration cans into each man’s hat and one bar of “D” ration.

After supper, the men rolled their one blanket inside their one shelter half while there was still light. It was chilly. A misty rain began to fall. The men just lay or sat in their foxholes under the doubtful shelter of the olive trees.

Darkness came over the olive grove, the artillery raged and flashed around half the horizon, and the concussion crashed and ran across the sky along the sounding board of the low clouds. We of our little company were swallowed in a great blackness.

We were connected to the war by one field telephone which ran to the battalion command post a quarter mile away. nobody knew when the marching order would come. We just had to sit there and wait.

There were only two places to get out of the rain. Both were pig sheds dug into the side of a bank by an Italian farmer and stacked over with straw.

Lt. Jack Sheehy, the company commander, and four enlisted men and I crawled into one and dragged the phone in after us. A few sergeants went into the other.

Huddle in pig shed

We lay down on the ground there in the pig shed. We had on our heavy coats but the chill came through. The lieutenant had an extra blanket which he carried unrolled when not actually in battle, so he spread it out and he and I both sat under it. We huddled against each other and became a little warmer.

The lieutenant said:

I used to read your column back home, and I never supposed we’d ever meet. Imagine us lying together here on the ground in Italy.

Then we talked a little while in low tones, but pretty soon somebody started to snore and before long all of us were asleep although it was still only 7 o’clock.

Every now and then, the lieutenant would phone battalion to see if any orders had come yet. Finally, he was told the line to regimental headquarters was out.

Linemen were out in the darkness feeling with their hands, tracing the entire length of the line trying to find the break. Around 9 o’clock, it was open again. Still no marching orders came.

A dark form appeared fairly silhouetted in the open end of the shed and asked if Lt. Sheehy was there. The lieutenant answered yes.

The form asked:

Can the men unroll their blankets? They’re wet and cold.

The lieutenant thought a moment and then he said, “No, better not. We should get the word to go any minute now, certainly within half an hour. They better keep them rolled.” The form said, “Yes, sir,” and merged back into the darkness.

Grove is deathly still

By 10, everybody in the shed had awakened from their nap. Our grove was deathly still, as though no one existed in it, for the night was full of distant warfare.

Now and then, we’d get clear under the blanket and light a cigarette and hide it under the blanker when we puffed it. Over on the far hillside where the Germans were, we could see a distant light. We finally decided it was probably a lamp in some unwitting Italian farmhouse.

For a little while, there was a sudden splurge of flares in the distance. The first was orange and then came some in green, and then a white and then some more orange ones. Our soldiers couldn’t tell whether they were German or ours.

Between flashes of artillery, we could hear quite loud blasts of machine guns. Even I can distinguish between a German machine gun and ours for theirs is much faster.

Machine guns are rarely fired except in flashes, so the barrel won’t get too hot, but once some jerry just held the trigger down and let her roll for about 15 seconds. A soldier said:

Boy, he’ll have to put on a new barrel after that one.

The time dragged on and we grew colder and stiffer. At last, nearly at midnight, the phone rang in the stillness of our pig shed. It was the order to go.

One of the boys said:

It’s going to be a hell of a thing to move. The ground is slick and you can’t see your hand in front of you.

One sergeant went out to start the word for the company to assemble. Another disconnected the field telephone and carried it under his arm. Everybody wrestled into the harness of his heavy packs.

The lieutenant told the first sergeant:

Assemble down by the kitchen tent. Platoons will form in this order – headquarters, third, first, second, and heavy weapons. Let’s go.

The first sergeant moved off. I moved after him. The first two steps were fine. On the third step, I went down into a ditch and said a bad word. That’s the way it was with everybody all the rest of the night.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
After the marching order came, it took our company about 15 minutes to get itself together, with the head of the line assembled at the appointed place in front of the kitchen tent at the edge of the olive grove.

It was midnight. The night was utterly black. It was the dark of the moon, and thick, low clouds further darkened the sky. One soldier said:

In two years overseas, this is the blackest night we’ve ever moved.

With a couple of others, I felt my way from our pig shed down to where we thought the kitchen tent was. We knew we were near it, but we couldn’t see it.

One soldier said:

It’s up ahead about 50 feet.

I butted in and said:

No, it’s over to the right about 30 feet.

Just at that moment, a flash of fire from one of our nearby cannon brightened the countryside for a split second, and we saw the tent. It was six feet in front of us. That’s how dark it was.

One by one the platoon leaders felt their way up to the head of the column, reported their platoons ready in line, and felt their way back. Finally, the lieutenant said, “Let’s go.”

Let’s get along

There’s no military formality about a night movement of infantry. You don’t try to keep step. Nobody says “Forward march,” or any of that parade ground stuff. After a rest, the lieutenant says, “All right, let’s get along.” And everybody gets up and starts.

In trying to get out of the orchard, we lost our various places. Finally, everybody stopped and called each other’s names in order to get reassembled. The lieutenant and the sergeant would call for me occasionally to make sure I was still along.

When we fell in again, I was marching behind Sgt. Vincent Conners of Imogene, Iowa. His nickname is “Pete.” We hadn’t gone far before I realized that the place behind Pete was the best spot in the column for me, for I had found a little secret.

He had a rolled-up map about two feet long stuck horizontally through the pack harness on his back. By keeping close to it, I could just barely make out the vague white shape of this map. And that was my beacon throughout the night.

It was amazing how you could read the terrain ahead of you
by the movement of that thin white line. If it went down a couple of inches, I knew Pete had stepped into a hole. If it went down fast, I knew he had struck a slope. If it went down sideways, I knew his feet were sliding on a slippery slope.

In that split second before my own step followed his, I could correct for whatever had happened to him. As a result, I was down only once the whole night.

Magnificent cussing

We were startled to hear some magnificent cussing down at one side, and recognized the company commander’s voice. He had stepped right off into a narrow ditch about two feet deep and gone down on his back. Bundled as he was with packsacks, he couldn’t get out of the ditch. He finally made it on the third try.

The thing that always amazes me about these inhuman night movements of troops in war areas is how good-natured the men are about it. A certain fundamental appreciation for the ridiculous carries them through. As we slogged along, slipping and crawling and getting muddier and muddier, the soldier behind me said:

I’m going to write my Congressman about this.

Another soldier answered:

Hell, I don’t even know who my Congressman is. I did three years ago, but I don’t know.

The company’s first sergeant is Bill Wood of Council Bluffs, Iowa, a tall man who carried a heavy pack, and when he fell there was a lot of him to go down. Whenever Bill would fall, we’d hear him and stop. And then we could hear him clawing with his feet and getting part way up and then hitting the mud again, and cussing more eloquently with each attempt.

It really was so funny we all had to laugh. When Bill finally got back in line, he was good and mad, and he said he couldn’t see anything funny about it.

It took us half an hour to feel our way out of the big orchard and down a few feet onto the so-called road, which was actually not much more than a furrow worn by Italian mule carts. There were knee-deep ruts and bucket-sized rocks.

Once on the road, the column halted to let a train of pack mules pass. As we stood there, the thought occurred to all of us:

It’s bad enough to be floundering around on the ground and mud, but now it’ll be like groveling in a barnyard.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 25, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
At long last our company was really underway on its night movement up into the line. It was just past midnight, and very black. The trail was never straight. It went up and down, across streams, and almost constantly around trees.

How the leaders ever followed it is beyond me. The trees on each side had been marked previously with white tape or toilet paper, but even so we did get lose a couple of times and had to backtrack.

The rain had stopped, but the mud was thick. You literally felt each step out with the toes of tour boots. Every half hour or so we’d stop and send runners back to see how the tail end of the column was doing. Word came back that they were doing fine, and that we could step up the pace if we wanted to.

Somewhere in the night, both ahead of us and strung out behind us in files, was the rest of our battalion. In fact, the whole regiment of more than 3,000 men was moving that night, but we knew nothing about the rest.

Throughout the night, the artillery of both sides kept up a steady pounding. When we started, our own guns were loud in our ears. Gradually we drew away from them, and finally the explosion of their shells on German soil was louder than the blast of the guns.

Rifle fire gets louder

The German shells traveled off at a tangent from us, and we were in no danger. The machine-gun and rifle fire grew louder as our slow procession came nearer the lines. Now and then a frontline flare would light up the sky, and we could see red bullets ricocheting.

The nagging of artillery eventually gets plain aggravating. It’s always worse on a cloudy night, for the sounds crash and reverberate against the low ceiling. One gun blast along can set off a continuous rebounding of sound against clouds and rocky slopes that will keep going for 10 seconds and more.

And on cloudy nights you can hear shells tearing above your head more loudly than on a clear night. In fact, that night the rustle was so magnified that when we stopped to rest and tried to talk, you couldn’t hear what the other fellow said if a shell was passing overhead. And they were passing almost constantly.

At last, we passed through a village and stopped on the far edge to rest while the column leader went into a house for further directions. We had caught up with the mules.

One of the muleskinners out in the darkness kept up a long monolog on the subject of the mules being completely done up. Nobody would answer him, and he would go on:

They’re plumb done in. They can’t go another foot. If we try to go on, they’ll fall down and die.

Huffy muleskinner

Finally, some soldier in the darkness told him to shut up. We all privately endorsed his suggestion. But the monologist got huffy and wanted to know who that was. The voice said it wasn’t anybody, just a new replacement soldier.

Then the muleskinner waxed sarcastic and louder. He had an objectionable manner, even in the dark.

He said:

Oh, oh! So we’ve got a baby right from the States telling me how to run mules! A tenderfoot, huh? Trying to talk to us veterans! A hero right from the States, huh?

Whereupon one of the real veterans in our company called out to the gabby skinner:

Aw, shut up! You probably haven’t been overseas two months yourself.

He must have hit the nail on the head, or else his voice carried command, for that’s the last we heard of the muleskinner.

It was almost midnight when the company reached its bivouac area and dug its foxholes into the mud. Always that’s the first thing to do. it becomes pure instinct. The drippy, misty dawn found our men dispersed and hidden in the bottom of shallow, muddy depressions of their own digging, eating cold hash from C-ration cans.

They attacked just after dawn. The Germans were only a short distance away. I stayed behind when the company went forward.

In the continuously circulating nature of my job, I may never again see the men in this outfit. But to me, they will always be “my” company.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 26, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Sometimes a person says the silliest things without being able to account for them.

For example, one night our command post made a move of about five miles. I went in a jeep, perched high atop a lot of bedrolls.

The night was pure black and the road was vicious. We were in low gear all the time, and even that was too fast. Many times we completely lost the trail, and would wander off and bump into trees or fall into deep ditches.

It was one of those sudden nosedives that my story is about. We were far off the trail, but didn’t know it. Suddenly the front end of the jeep dropped about three feet and everything stopped right there. That is, everything but me.

I went sailing right over the driver’s shoulder, hit the steering wheel, and slid out onto the hood. And I remember that as I flew past the driver I said, “Excuse me.”

That’s all there is to the story.

Has been wounded twice

Our company had a mascot which had been with it more than a year. It was an impetuous little black-and-white dog named Josie, a native of North Africa. Josie’s name gradually had been transformed into Squirt.

Squirt was extremely affectionate, and when she came romping back to camp after a whirl with some gay Italian dog, she would jump all over the old-time sergeants and lick their faces until they had to push her away.

Squirt had been wounded twice, which is an unusual experience for a dog. But more a source of wonderment to the soldiers is how, unchaperoned and free-reined as her life is, she has managed to survive all the time without becoming a mother.

Shell was all a mistake

While I was with my company, we had one afternoon that was beautifully sunshiny and warm. Incessant but distant artillery walled the far horizons, yet nothing came into our area, and the day seemed infinitely peaceful.

We ate supper about an hour before dark, in the grove back of a stone farmhouse. We had just started eating when all of a sudden “Whyyyeeeooowww-Bang” came a shell right over our heads and whammed into the hillside on beyond us.

It was so close and so unexpected that even the veterans ducked, and the soldiers took to their foxholes pronto. Lt. Jack Sheehy, the company commander, ducked too, but then he immediately said:

There won’t be any more. That one was a mistake.

Lt. Sheehy used to be a clerk for American Airlines, but he has been at war a long time. He instantly figured out that the Germans had pulled a tank out of the woods a mile or so away, and were trying to shell the hillside ahead of us. And their first practice shot had gone high and come over the ridge.

His theory was proved right a few moments later, when shells began pounding steadily on the other hillside just over the ridge. Which shows how wise a man can become in the ways of a world utterly foreign to a ticket desk in the dimly remembered city of New York.

German ‘fire’ pills handy

Eggs are now 30¢ apiece over here, and it’s hard to get any even at that price.

Our soldiers tell of a small white oil they discovered in captured German combat rations. It is a “fire” oil, which produces heat without either flame or smoke, and which is sufficient to heat a cup of coffee or a can of ration.

I forgot to ask how you start the pill going. I do know that our troops would like to have something similar for frontline mountaintop work, for just one warm meal a day would mean a great deal.

On further nosing around, I discovered that we have specialists over here studying just such a thing. And that when the invasion of Western Europe starts, the British troops at least are to be equipped with them, and possibly ours will too.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
When soldiers sit around during lull periods at the front, they talk about everything under the sun. Out of my recent times with frontline outfits, I’ve tried to remember some of the things they talked about.

Two things eventually come up in every extended conversation – the latest rumor about the outfit, and discussions of what home is like and when we’ll get home.

The latest rumor was that my outfit was to get no more replacements for men lost in battle, which led inevitably to a believe that they were to be withdrawn and sent him. nobody really believed it, but everybody wanted to believe it. there were also rumors that the outfit was going to England and to India.

Memories of what America was like are actually getting pretty dim to men who have been overseas two years. As one Iowa boy said:

Why, even England is dim in my memory now, and we were there long after we were in the States.

One boy said that no matter where we went was bad for him, because we’d have to go by ship and he had an absolute horror of ships. He didn’t exactly say so, but I believe he’s rather stay here the rest of his life than make that ocean crossing again.

Shell tagged ‘screaming meanie’

One night, in a group of some soldiers and officers, the question came up whether you should yell or not when making a close-in attack.

An officer thought it was good psychology because the Germans are afraid of night attacks, and a good barrage of Indian yells would further demoralize them.

But the soldiers mainly disagreed. They said Jerry didn’t scare so easily as all that, and when you yell you just give your position away.

Speaking of noise, you’ve probably heard the term “screaming meemies,” for a certain noisy type of German shells. The boys at the front call them “screaming meanies” instead, and brother, they are bad indeed to listen to.

The Germans call the gun the nebelwerfer. It is a six-barreled gun which fires one barrel right after another, electrically. The gun doesn’t go off with a roar, but the shells swish forward with a sound of unparalleled viciousness and power, as though gigantic gears were grinding. Actually, it sounds as though some mammoth man were grinding them out of a machine with a huge crank.

Whenever a shelling starts, we always stop and listen, and somebody makes a remark like, “Grind ‘em out, boy; keep on turning!” or, “Boy, Jerry’s getting’ mad again!”

The “screaming meanies” are frightful in sound when they’re coming at you, and even when they’re going off at an angle far from you, they make a long-drawn-out moaning sound that is bloodcurdling.

Prefer Italy to Africa

The soldiers talk about the Italian people, and on the whole the average soldier doesn’t dislike the Italians too much. Nine out of 10 much prefer Italy to Africa. And the sight of the poor children always gets them.

At an Army chow line near a village or close to farms, you see a few solemn and patient children with tin buckets waiting to get what is left over.

One soldier said to me:

I just can’t bear to eat when they stand and look at me like they do. Lots of times I’ve filled my mess kit and just walked over and dumped it in their buckets and gone back to my foxhole. I wasn’t hungry.

Don’t want to go to Pacific

Bad as this war is, the average soldier hopes he’ll never be sent to the Pacific. He hates the Japs more than the Germans, but he has heard about the horrible jungle fighting and the Jap beastliness, and he prefers to fight somebody of his own kind.

One night, a colonel was talking offhandedly about the war, and how people felt and everything, and he said:

The whole trouble with everything is vitamins. We got along all right before everybody had to have so many vitamins a day.

Very often the rotation system of sending one-half of one percent of the men back to the States each month comes up in the conversation. The boys in my company were all upset because a sergeant in another company had just been taken who had much less time overseas than they.

And a soldier said:

You, know, I’ve never yet seen a battlefield after we passed over it. We always just keep going ahead. Sometime I’d like to walk over the country we fought over. I said walk, not run.