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.