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.