Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
All the highways from Naples north are thick with speeding convoys of supplies, day and night.

Lights are used right up to the combat zone. Both British and American trucks crowd the roads. Drivers pound the big trucks along at 40 and 50 miles an hour, and the main highways are no place for a nervous Nellie.

The highways over here were originally good macadam, but now they are filled with holes from the intensity of the traffic. Engineers work on them constantly.

At the edges of the cities, the roads are wide and lined with stately sycamore trees, you feel as though you were driving through a beautiful tunnel.

Both the American and British armies have put up thousands of stenciled and painted signs along the roads, directing drivers to the numerous units.

When you come to a central crossroads you can see anywhere up to a hundred signs clustered on top of small stakes, like a flower garden in bloom.

If you were really puzzled about your destination, you’d have to pull off and study the hodgepodge for five minutes before finding out anything.

Somebody in our Army must have been a roadside advertising man before the war, for we have all kinds of signs along the highways in addition to the direction signs. They are tacked onto trees, telephone poles and posts.

Signs Burma Shave style

There are many in the Burma Shave poetic style, the several phrases being on separate boards about 50 yards apart, such as this one:

If you leave… good clothes behind… you may need them… some other time.

That’s an admonition against the American soldier’s habit of abandoning gear when he gets more than he can carry.

Another one in Burma Shave fashion, and of dubious rhyme, says:

Some like gold… some like silver… we always salvage… bring it, will you?

There are also frequent warnings against venereal disease, and one sign way out in the country says, “Is your tent clean?” A lot of frontline soldiers who haven’t even been in a pup tent for months would get a laugh out of that one.

As we advance mule by slow mile across the Italian mountains and valleys, our many command posts are set up wherever possible in Italian farm or village houses.

The house are mostly all alike. They are very old and substantial-looking, yet they shake all over from the blast of our nearby guns.

Sometimes the Italian family still lives in one room of the house while the Americans occupy the rest. At other times the family has gone – nobody knows where – and taken with it everything but the heaviest furniture.

Faded pictures still hang on the walls – wedding-group pictures od 40 years ago, and a full-face picture of some mustachioed young buck, in the uniform of the last war, and old, old pictures of grandpa and grandma, and always a number of pictures of Christ and various religious scenes and mottoes.

Pictures invariably of same sort

I’ve billeted in dozens of Italian homes on the farms and little towns of our frontlines, and invariably the faded pictures on the walls are of the same sort.

In one house, nothing was left inside except the heavy cupboards and two heavy suitcases stored on top of the cupboards. We didn’t nose into the suitcases, but I noticed that one bore the label of a big Italian steamship line and underneath the label it said, in English, “Steerage Passenger.” Somebody in that poor family had been to America and back.

One day I heard a soldier say:

I’d sure like to see just one good old-fashioned frame house. I haven’t seen a wooden building since we came to Italy.

They say there are frame buildings farther north, but in this part of Italy everything is brick or stone. You almost never see a building afire.

These pitiful towns like Vairano and San Pietro and San Vittore and Cervaro and even Cassino, which have been absolutely pulverized by exploding shells and bombs, have gone down stone by stone and never from flame. They die hard, but they die.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 1, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
In my usual role of running other people’s business, I’ve been thrashing around with an idea – honest. It’s to give the combat soldier some little form of recognition more than he is getting now.

Everybody who serves overseas, no matter where or what he’s doing, gets extra pay. Enlisted men get 20% additional and officers 10%.

Airmen get an extra 50%above this for flight pay. As a result, officer-fliers get 60% above their normal base pay and enlisted fliers such as gunners and radio operators get 70%.

All that is fine and as it should be, but the idea I was toying with is why not give your genuine combat ground soldier something corresponding to flight pay? Maybe a good phrase for it would be “fight pay.”

Of any one million men overseas, probably no more than 100,000 are in actual combat with the enemy. But as it is now, there is no official distinction between the dogface lying for days and nights under constant mortar fire on an Italian hill, and the headquarters clerk living comfortably in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro.

Their two worlds are so far apart the human mind can barely grasp the magnitude of the difference. One lives like a beast and his kind die in great numbers. The other is merely working away from home. Both are doing necessary jobs, but it seems to me the actual warrior deserves something to set him apart. And medals are not enough.

Recognition of miserable job

When I was at the front the last time several infantry officers brought up this same suggestion. They say combat pay would mean a lot to the fighting man. It would put him into a proud category and make him feel that somebody appreciates what he endures.

Obviously, no soldier would ever go into combat just to get extra “fight pay.” That isn’t the point. There is not enough money in the world to pay

But it would put a mark of distinction on him, any single individual his due for battle suffering.

One of the meanest stunts I’ve heard of was a Christmas envelope full of clippings that a practical joker back home sent a soldier over here.

The clippings consisted of colored ads cut out of magazines – and they showed every luscious American thing from huge platters of ham and eggs on up to vacationists lolling in bright bathing robes on the sand, surrounded by beautiful babes. There ought to be a law.

An even meaner trick

On second thought, I know even a meaner trick than that one. In fact, this one would take first prize in an orneriness contest at any season, Christmas or otherwise. The worst is that it happened to a frontline infantryman.

Some of his friends back home sent him three bottles of whisky for Christmas. They came separately, were wonderfully packed, and the bottles came through without a break.

The first bottle tasted fine to the cold kids at the front, but when the second and third ones came the boys found they had been opened and drained along the way, then carefully resealed and continued on their journey.

Of course, mailing them in the first place was illegal, but that’s beside the point. The point is that somewhere in the world there is a louse of a man with two quarts of whisky inside him who should have his neck wrung off.

At one of our airdromes recently a German plane sneaked over and dropped five-pronged steel spikes over the field. Our fliers called it a “jacks raid,” since the spikes resembled the “jacks” that kids used to play with in school, only much bigger. These vicious spikes would puncture the tires when our planes taxied out.

So, the field engineers got a huge magnet, attached it to the front of a truck, and swept the field free of the spikes. Then they were loaded into our planes and dropped on German airfields. There haven’t been any “jacks raids” since.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Pompeii, Italy –
Maj. Ed Bland got fed up with flying for a living and I got fed up with writing for a living and Cpl. Harry Cowe got fed up with being a corporal for a living, so the three of us said “To hell with it,” and we got into Maj. Bland’s jeep and came touring out to Pompeii.

The only thing in all Italy I have really wanted to see is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but that’s up north and I will probably leave Italy before we get that far. So, Pompeii is the first and probably the last real sightseeing I will get to do in Italy.

Someone had told me he was disappointed in Pompeii because so little of the ruins had been uncovered, but I think he must have got on the wrong side of the mountain, for there’s certainly plenty uncovered.

The buried city originally had 25,000 people, and two-thirds of the whole city has been dug out. The preserved part surely must be almost a mile square. Pompeii, as you may know, was buried by a rain of ashes and dust and cinders that covered the city 20 to 24 feet deep and smothered everybody to death.

The eruption didn’t come from Vesuvius, as most people think, but from Vesuvius’ sister volcano, named Somma, now extinct. The burying took place in 79 AD and the ruins weren’t discovered until the 18th century.

‘Watch your jeep, mister?’

When we stopped the jeep in the little barren square in front of the main gate to Pompeii, we were assaulted by a swarm of Italian urchins so grabby and insistent that we had to pick one out and appoint him to watch our jeep.

Then we bought tickets for 10¢ apiece and went through the turnstiles. A few Italian men in civilian clothes tagged along as we started to walk, asking if we wanted a guide.

We picked one out. Many of the guides spoke fruit-stand English, such as “Dissa ees da bedaroom.” But ours spoke with quite a cultured accent. He said he once lived in New York but had been a Pompeii guide since long before the war.

His name was Ugo Prosperi. He was tall and thin and looked American. He wore a fedora hat and a long dark overcoat with fur collar and gray trousers and gray spats. He smoked a thin cigar and addressed us constantly as “sir.”

There’s no use in my trying to describe Pompeii in a wartime column. Thousands of you back home have already seen it and the rest of you could hardly visualize it anyhow, so I will merely try to give you Pompeii’s wartime aspect.

Around 100 bombs have fallen within the old Pompeii since the war. The ruins, of course, have never been deliberately bombed by either side. The bombs that fell inside the walls were strays. Actually, not much damage has been done. But our guide, spotting Maj. Bland as an Air Force man, made four or five deadpan but subtle digs about the bombings.

All we could do was wink at each other. Maj. Bland has dive-bombed a lot of Italy, but never around Pompeii.

Dozens of small parties were wandering around the ruins, each with a guide and all composed of military people on leave.

Pompeii has risqué side

Down the street came a British brigadier smoking a pipe and a Scot officer wearing kilts. We turned a corner and met a group of naval ensigns in from the sea, all carrying canes just as if they were on the college campus back in England.

There were gay young American fliers in leather jackets and groups of crumpled-looking doughboys on leave from the frontlines, eating peanuts.

War hasn’t made much difference in the scribbling habits of the Americans and British. On the walls of Pompeii, you will see hundreds of names written in pencil – Pvt. Joe Doakes from Kansas City, Sgt. Jock McLean from Glasgow.

Pompeii is noted for the dirty pictures on the walls of certain houses. In peacetime, the guides had to be discreet with mixed groups of tourists, but they don’t have to pull their punches now except when a bunch of nurses or WACs happens along.

As in peacetime, they will sell you obscene little good-luck emblems in silver or bronze and books of “feelthy” photographs. Whether or not we bought any is a military secret.

Maj. Bland from Oklahoma and Cpl. Cowe from Seattle and I from Indiana and New Mexico spent three hours in the ruins of old Pompeii and decided we enjoyed it, but the next time we go sightseeing, we hope it can be through the less ancient ruins of Berlin.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 3, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The Mediterranean Allied Air Force, under the command of Lt. Gen. Ira Baker, covers everything in this whole Mediterranean theater from Casablanca on the Atlantic almost to the Cairo at the edge of Asia.

It is a gigantic force. Although there are many British planes and pilots in it, and even a few squadrons of Frenchmen, still it is predominantly an American air theater.

The main geographical objective of our push into Italy was to get heavy-bomber bases

Our heavy-bomber force is still being built up, and has not yet really begun on its program of blasting Germany proper, but planes have been flowing across the South Atlantic all winter.

Soon good weather will be here, and then woe upon Germany from south as well as west.

Right now, I’m living with a light-bomber group – the 47th – which flies the fast twin-engined Douglas-built plane known as the A-20 Boston.

Some on second tour of combat duty

The 47th is a veteran outfit. It fought through Tunisia. It helped beat the Germans back at Kasserine a year ago. it flew from Souk-el-Arba and Cape Bon and Malta and Sicily, and now it is on the front in Italy.

Like most air groups of long service, it has almost no flying personnel left who came overseas with it. Its casualty rate has been low, but the crewmen have all reached or passed their allotted number of missions and gone home.

In fact, some of its members went home so long ago that they are now back overseas on their second tour of combat duty, fighting out of England or in the South Pacific. The ground-crew men get letters from them sometimes.

I’ve been living with a certain squadron of the 47th. It has changed commanders while I’ve been with it. The previous commander was Maj. Cy Stafford, a brilliant young pilot-engineer from Oak Park, Illinois.

Maj. Stafford has been promoted to the group staff, and his place as squadron commander has been taken by Maj. Reginald Clizbe of Centralia, Washington.

Maj. Clizbe is a veteran in combat, but for several months has been on staff duty. He is pleased to get back to the small and intimate familiarity of a squadron. As he says:

Squadron commander is the best job in the Air Corps.

On his first day, Maj. Clizbe got a plane and went out and practiced while the rest went on their mission. I was staying in the same tent with him, and although at that time I didn’t know him very well I could tell he was worried and preoccupied.

He wasn’t afraid. Everybody knew that. But he was rusty, everybody’s eyes were on him, and he was scared to death he would foul up on his first mission.

He flew the morning mission on his second day in command. He flew a wing position, and he did all right. He was in good spirits when they came back before lunch.

There was another mission that afternoon. Instead of resting, Maj. Clizbe put himself on the board for that one too, this time leading a flight of three. It was at his revetment when the planes came back just before dusk. When they got out, Maj. Clizbe was a changed man. He was just like a football player after winning a game.

Forgets it’s his birthday

It had been a perfect mission. The bomb pattern had smothered the target. They’d started fires. Their breakout from the bomb run was just right, and the planes got only a little flak. The new man had his teeth into the game again, and he was over the hump. He was all elation and enthusiasm.

He said:

We’ll give ‘em hell from now on.

All evening he kept smiling to himself, and he was like somebody released from a great oppression. That night he went to bed around 9 o’clock, for he was tired, and he had assigned himself to lead the mission early next morning. Just before he went to sleep, he happened to think of something. He raised up and said:

Say, this is my birthday! I’d forgotten about it. Boy, I couldn’t have had a better birthday present than those two missions today.

And he really meant it.

The major was back in the war. He was doing a job again in person, with his own hands and brain, and he went to sleep with a fine satisfaction.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 4, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The 47th Group of A-20 light bombers is based on a magnificent field that was bulldozed out of a gigantic vineyard by British engineers in three days’ time.

Its dark earthen runway is more than a mile long, and off it scores of crooked taxi paths lead out to where each plane is individually parked among the grapevines. The field never gets really muddy, for the soil is volcanic and water drains through it.

Every morning the ground is lightly frozen and the grass and the shoulder-high grapevines are covered with white frost. In sunny weather, it is warm in midday, but by 4 p.m. the evening chill has set in and your breath shows as you talk.

Guards theoretically keep Italians out of the airfield area, but you’ll always see a little knot of them standing behind some plane watching the mechanics work. It is an odd sensation to walk along a narrow path and hear a dirty and ragged Italian girl singing grand opera as she works on the vines. Or to go to an outdoor toilet and suddenly discover a bunch of Italian peasant women looking over the low canvas wall at you as they walk past. They don’t seem to care, and you don’t either.

Everybody lives in tent

Everybody lives in square, pyramidal tents, officers and men exactly alike. The tents are scattered throughout the vineyard, 50 yards or so apart, and they are hard to see at a distance.

There are from four to six men in a tent. They all sleep on folding cots and most of them have the big warm air-force sleeping bags. They live comfortably.

The inside of each tent depends on the personality of its occupants. Some are neat and bright and furnished with countless little home comforts of the boys’ own carpentering. Others are shoddy and cave-like, surpassing only a little the bare requirements of life.

All the tents have stoves in the middle. They are homemade from 20-gallon oil drums. Back of each tent is a can of 100-octane gasoline sitting on a waist-high stool. A metal pipe leads under the tent wall and across the floor to the stove.

It is the old siphon system, pure and simple. You have to suck on the pipe and get a mouthful of gasoline to get the flow started. After that you control it with a petcock at the stove end. Stoves blow up frequently, but seldom do any damage.

Some of the tents have wooden floors made by knocking apart the long boxes that frag bombs come in, and nailing them into sections. Others have only dirt floors.

Any old radio program

Many tents have radios. The boys listen to all kinds of stations – our own Naples broadcast, the BBC, the distorted Rome radio, the cynical admonishments of Axis Sally that we’ll go home (if we are lucky) only to find our jobs gone and our girls married to other guys. But most of all they listen to the sweet music from German stations and to the American swing music of our own.

The day begins early on an airfield. Just before dawn the portable generators on wheels which are scattered among the grapevines begin to put-put and lights go on everywhere.

Nobody ever turns a light on or off. The generators stop at 10 each night, and the lights simply go out. Thus when the generators start again at 6 in the morning, your light automatically goes on and your radio starts.

One man in each tent will leap out of his sleeping bag and get the stove going, and then leap back for a few minutes. Little strings of oily gray smoke soon begin to sprout upward out of the vineyard.

In a few minutes you hear engines barking on the other side of the runway, and then with a deep voice that seems to shake the whole silent countryside the planes thunder down the runway and take to the air. These are out on early test hops. A few unfortunates have had to get out of their sacks at 4 a.m. to get them going.

Everybody is up by 6:30 at the latest. Guys clad only in long gray underwear dash comically out under the nearest olive tree and dash shivering back into the tent.

A little cold water out of a five-gallon can is dashed onto their faces. They jump into their clothes in nothing flat. They are on the way to breakfast as full daylight comes.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 6, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
At this airfield, from which A-20 light bombers fly, breakfast is finished at 7:30. But even before that the squadron commanders and operations officers have driven in jeeps around to the other side of the field to get briefs from the group staff on the morning’s mission.

Each squadron in the group lives in a separate area. They form three distinct families, which fuse into one big unit only when they are in the air.

The plane crews assemble around the operations tent immediately after breakfast. They pick up their parachutes and their new flak vests from a nearby tent. They stand around outside zipping on their heavy flying clothes while they await the call to briefing.

Pretty soon it comes and they crowd into the tent and sit on rows of frag-bomb boxes, as in a little school. The squadron intelligence officer gets up on a low platform and starts talking.

They say this officer’s briefings are the best in the group. I’ve attended scores of briefings in England and Africa, and usually they’re repetitious and dull. But this squadron’s briefings are interesting. The intelligence officer is intensely thorough. The crews get a detailed picture of what they’re to do. And above all he is honest.

Briefing includes war news resume

One of the gunners said to me:

Some briefing officers will tell you flatly you won’t get any flak, and then when you get there it just pours up. Now our intelligence officer, he’ll say:

I don’t think you’ll get much flak today, but you know the Germans have mobile ack-ack, and they can concentrate it overnight, so watch out.

One thing in his briefing is a resumé of the war news. This is being done more and more in the Army, and it is important, because any soldier likes to know what is going on around him.

He gives the whole Italian war situation, both ground and air, of the previous 24 hours. He tells them also any news that has come from England or Russia.

Then he goes into the briefing. Behind him are a big map and two big blackboards. The map is of central Italy. He points out the target on the map.

Then on the blackboard is drawn in chalk a detailed map of the target area. This sketch covers an area 40 or 50 miles square. It invariably includes the coastline, so that crews can orient the target with the coast.

‘Blown-up’ sketch of target area

The second blackboard has a “blown-up” sketch of the target area, covering territory only a couple of miles square. It contains full details for helping the crews identify the target when they get there, such as exact towns and roads, little lakes, groves of trees, and even an isolated white farmhouse.

When the intelligence officer is through, the flight leader gets up. Usually that is Capt. Gene Vance from Pueblo, Colorado, who used to be a newspaperman himself.

Capt. Vance tells them what type of bomb they’re carrying, and how many fighters and what kind will be escorting them. He also goes into great detail on just how each flight will “break away” out of the bomb run,” plus a few methods to avoid flak.

He advises what route to take home if anybody gets lost. Sometimes they have to throw out bundles of pamphlets as well as drop bombs, and he advises the exact formation to fly so that the bundle won’t hit the following plane.

At the end, he gives them a time set. Everybody looks at his watch and Capt. Vance says:

It is now 23 seconds till 10 minutes to 9. It is now 20 seconds–15 seconds–10 seconds–5–4–3–2–1. Check. Ten minutes to 9.

The crews, looking sober, file out and get into their trucks.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 7, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Pilots fly planes, and mechanics fix planes, and bombardiers drop bombs out of planes, and they’ve all been written about. But I’ve never heard anybody mention the guys who out the bombs in the planes, so here goes.

They are called armorers. They not only “bomb up” the planes, but it is their job to keep all the planes’ guns in tiptop working order.

In the 47th Group – A-20 light bombers – there is theoretically one armorer to each plane. But they’re short now, and each armorer usually has two planes to care of.

An armorer is as proud of his plane as the pilot is. He calls it “my plane,” and when this plans fails to come back, he feels horrible. Among the armorers, everybody knows whose plane has the most missions.

Each morning a truck takes them to the area where their planes are dispersed. They start bombing up about an hour and a half before takeoff time.

For really heavy bombs, the planes are equipped with a hitting device. Smaller bombs, even up to 300-pound ones, are lifted by hand. To do this, the armorers of several planes form themselves into a team of four or five men, and go from one plane to another helping each other until their little family is all bombed up.

123 missions to date

I went around one day with a team composed of Sgt. Steve Major of Monessen, Pennsylvania; Cpl. Vincent Cline of Paragould, Arkansas; Cpl. John Peoples of Alameda, California; Cpl. Robert Gerrie of Chicago, and Cpl. James La Barr of Dallas, Pennsylvania. Cpl. La Barr’s plane, incidentally, has more missions than any other – 123 – and is going up by one and two a day.

The bombs have already been hauled out, and are lying on the ground alongside the planes, when the armorers arrive. This day they were loading 25-pound demolition bombs. These were about three feet long and 10 inches thick, and tapered at both ends.

The boys roll them to the planes by kicking them along with their feet. They roll six under each plane. The bomb-bay doors are already hanging down open. The armorers crawl under them and then can stand erect with their heads inside the bomb bay.

One of them takes an 18-inch clamp from the bay wall and hooks it into the two steel rings in the back. Then two of them grab the bomb and heave it up. As it rises, a third gets under it and lifts with his shoulders. The two others put it into position.

It is good heavy heaving. Only the rugged ones stay on as armorers. Now and then, somebody slips and a bomb falls on an armorer, but serious accidents are rare.

After the bombs are clamped inside the bomb bay, they put in the fuses. The bomb has a steel plug in each end. The boys unscrew these plugs, and screw the fuses into the hole. I never knew before that our bombs had fuses on both ends. I asked what it was for. The boys said so that if one fuse didn’t work, the other one would.

Little propeller whirls

Each fuse has a little metal propeller on it. When the bomb is dropped the propeller starts whirling and after dropping about 500 feet it unscrews itself to become a plunger and “arm” the bomb, as they call it. Then when the bomb hits the ground, this plunger is forced back and the bomb is discharged.

There must, of course, be some guarantee that propellers don’t get to whirling inside the planes. So, the boys take a piece of wire and fasten it into the clamp from which the bomb hangs. Then they run each end through two small holes in the propellers, thus locking them.

When the bomb is released, this wire remains fastened to the plane and the ends slip out of the little propellers, freeing them.

If the pilot has to salvo his bombs over free territory, where he doesn’t want them to go off, he can pull a different lever which releases the wire and lets it fall still attached to the bomb, thus keeping the little propellers locked.

The armorer’s job is really not a hard one, except for this heavy lifting which lasts only a few minutes a day. What disgusts armorers the most is when the command keeps changing its mind about what kind of bombload is to be carried on the next mission.

Sometimes, they’ll get an order to bomb up with 500-pounders, then it’ll be changed to frag bombs, then changed again to 250-pounders. On every change they have to take out the bombs and put in new ones.

The boys say the all-time record was one day when they changed bombs 12 times and it finally wound up that the planes never went out after all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 8, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Sgt. Steve Major is 6½ feet and weighs 222 pounds stripped. Despite that weight, he looks slim, because he is so tall.

Steve is an armorer in the 47th Bombardment Group. He is 23, and comes from Monessen, Pennsylvania. He is good-looking and good-natured, and always has something to say.

As he rides along in a truck, he’ll shake his fist at some tough-looking crew chief and yell at him, “You ugly so-and-so.” Nobody could possibly get mad at him.

Steve has been in the Army nearly six years, and is an excellent soldier. He quit high school and enlisted when he was 17, and served one shift in Panama. When his first three years were up, he stayed out just six days and then reenlisted on the condition they send him to California. They did. Steve likes to see the world.

I asked him if he would stay in the Army after the war. He said:

No, the Army’s all right, but I’ve had enough of it. I’ve got 3,000 coconuts in the bank, and I’m going to get some education after the war and be a salesman.

Another soldier said:

Yeah, I’ll get. You look like a 30-year man to me.

‘Living good’

Steve has a good, calm philosophy about everything. He is even philosophical about his part in the war.

He says:

I tried to be a pilot – too big. Tried to be a gunner – too big. So, I’m an armorer. Okay, I’m happy. What the hell.

He says further:

This job is easy. We work hard for a little while every day, and then the rest of the day we don’t do much. Any civilian could do this work after a little training. It’s just like a regular job, only we’re away from home.

It’s not like last winter in Tunisia when we lived on British rations and damned near froze to death and got raided every day. Everything’s different now. We’re living good here. Why, this is better than it was back home in camp.

Steve doesn’t go on missions. He’s so big he’d be in the way. The plane of which he was armorer was lost several weeks ago, so now he helps out the other boys. He sleeps in a tent right out on the line, in order to be near his job.

Steve is cool in the punches. They tell about one thing he did over here. His plane came back one day with its full load of bombs.

When they dropped the unexploded bombs down to the ground, he discovered one of the fuses was on.

A few of the fuses that day had been set for 45 seconds’ delay, but he didn’t know how much of the 45 seconds had been used up before he made his discovery. The natural impulse would have been to run as fast and as far as he could before the bomb went off.

But Steve just sat there on the ground and unscrewed the fuse with his hands and then tossed it aside just as it went off – harmlessly.

Likes to travel

Sgt. Major loves to travel. And I believe he gets more out of it than any soldier I’ve met. You can drop him down at a new field in any old country, and within a week he’ll know half the natives in the adjoining village.

Steve’s parents were Austrian and Yugoslavian, and he speaks four Slav dialects. In Panama, he learned Spanish, and over here he writes down 20 new Italian words every night and memorizes them. He gets along fine in Italian.

On his afternoons off, he gets a train or bus and goes out by himself seeing the country. Invariably he gets into conversations with the people.

Half the time he winds up going to somebody’s home for a meal. He says:

I’ve been in rich homes and poor homes over here. There are pretty good people, but they’re so damned emotional. They get into the wildest arguments with each other over the most trivial things. But they’re good-hearted.

Steve isn’t obsessed like the average soldier about getting home. He takes the war as it comes, and doesn’t fuss. He’d like to see home again, but he doesn’t want to stay even when he gets here.

His big worry is that he’ll meet some woman who’ll have him married to her before he knows what’s happened. He doesn’t want to be tied down. He wants to travel and be free and roam around the world, talking to people, as soon as this little bombing job of his is finished.

[adamsano]

I was curious about Steve after the war and searched him. He lived to be 101 years old. Born August 17, 1920 and died June 6, 2022. He settled in his home town and did continue to travel. He married and had a family. He is highlighted in Ernie’s book, Brave Men. He became a master plumber and served his community in many ways.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 9, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Most of my time with the 47th Group of A-20 Boston light bombers has been spent with the gunners. All the gunners are sergeants. Each plane carries two. They ride in the rear compartment of the plane.

The top gunner sits in a glass-enclosed bubble rising above the fuselage. The bottom gunner sits on the floor during takeoff, and after they’re in the air he opens a trap door, and swivels his machine gun down into the open hole.

Due to the nature of their missions and to the inferiority of German fighter strength in Italy, the A-20 gunners seldom have a battle in the air. Their main worry is flak, and that’s plenty to worry about.

The gunners live in pyramidal tents, four and five to a tent. Some of their tents are fixed up inside even nicer than the officers’. Others are bare.

The gunners have to stand in chow line the same as other soldiers, and eat out of mess kits. Now and then they ever have to go on cleanup detail and help pick up trash throughout their area. They must keep their own tents clean, and stand frequent inspection.

They count missions

I found them a high-class, sincere bunch of boys. Those who really love to fly in combat are the exceptions. Most of them take it in workaday fashion, but they keep a fanatical count on the number of missions flown, each one of which takes them a little nearer to the final goal – the end of their tour of duty.

Ordinarily a gunner goes on only one mission a day, but with the increased air activity of late they sometimes go both morning and afternoon, day after day. There are boys here who arrived only in December and are already almost finished with their missions whereas it used to take six months and more to run up the allotted total.

Life in the combat air forces is fairly informal. In several days on this field, I’ve seen only one salute. But that’s all right, for the Air Forces don’t need the same type of discipline that less specialized branches require.

The enlisted gunners and the commissioned pilots work so closely together that they feel themselves in the same boat.

Don’t like braggarts

Gunners don’t like braggarts, either among commissioned officers or their own fellows. After I got to know them, they told me of some of their own number who talked too big, and of some with the bad judgment to tell “whoppers” even to their gunners.

One night I sat in their tent with five gunners for about three hours. After I had been with them some time, their natural reserve in front of a stranger had worn off, and we talked and talked about everything under the sun, and about what men think and feel who are caught in the endless meshing of the war machine,

One by one they told me of the experiences they had been through. Every man in the tent was living on borrowed time. Every one had stayed alive at least once only by a seeming miracle. Several had been badly wounded, but were back in action again.

When I started to leave, they said apologetically:

We’re kind of ashamed. Here we’ve been doing all the talking, when actually we wanted to hear your experiences.

And I tried to say:

People like you saying things like that! Just one of your ordinary missions is more than everything I’ve seen put together.

And they said:

Well, anyhow, you don’t know how much we appreciate your coning and talking with us. We don’t get to talk to anyone outside very often. It has meant a lot.

And as I followed the twisting path by flashlight back to my own tent among the grapevines, I couldn’t help but feel humble and inconsequential before these boys who are afraid and yet brave, who yearn for something or somebody to anchor to, who are so sincere they even want to listen to the talk of a mere spectator at war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 10, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Gunner Sgt. Alban Petchal, who comes from Steubenville, Ohio, said that if I would come over to their tent after supper they’d see if they couldn’t drum up a snack before bedtime. He said they often cooked just to pass the time.

So, I went over about 8 o’clock and Sgt. Petchal said:

I didn’t put the potatoes on yet. We were afraid you weren’t coming.

The potatoes were already peeled. Petchal sliced some thin and dropped them into a skillet on top of the fiery gasoline stove. When he got them a crispy brown, he said:

Have you ever eaten eggs scrambled right in with potatoes?

Sgt. Petchal said that’s the way his mother always fixed them, so broke up a few eggs in the skillet, scrambled them with the potatoes, and served them in the mess kits. They were wonderful.

The eggs cost 20¢ apiece.

There were seven boys in the tent, all aerial gunners. We sat and talked for a long time about things in general. Finally I started to out down their names, and one by one I discovered that every boy in that tent with one exception had been through at least one violent experience.

One from Pennsylvania

Sgt. Robert Sweigert is from Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The others good-naturedly call him “Pretty Boy,” because he is sort of suave looking. He had on nothing but shorts, and while I was there, he shaved and then took a sponge bath out of a wash pan.

Sgt. Sweigert was wounded once by flak and spent two months in a hospital. Another time his plane made a crash landing after being badly shot up, and it broke in two and caught fire when it hit. Yet the crew escaped. The boys showed me snapshots of the demolished plane.

Then we turned to Sgt. Guadalupe Tanguma of San Antonio, Texas. He had just got his orders home, and may be in America by the time this gets into print. He was feeling wonderful about it.

Sgt. Tanguma is of Spanish blood, speaks fluent Spanish, and therefore gets along fairly well in Italian. His experience was a gruesome one, although it turned out fine.

His plane went into a dive and he couldn’t get to the pilot’s compartment, so all Tanguma and the other gunner could do was try to get out. They finally made it.

Tanguma landed upside down in a tree. Italians came running and got him down. He gave the parachute to the crowd. Forty-five minutes after his jump, he was in a farmhouse eating fried eggs.

An Italian volunteered as guide and started walking with him. The Italians wouldn’t take money for their help. The other gunner got back also.

Fliers rated ‘tops’

Next, I put down Sgt. Charles Ramseur of Gold Hill, North Carolina. Sgt. Ramseur used to fly with my dive-bombing friend Maj. Ed Bland, and Maj. Bland says he’s tops.

Ramseur was about to shave off a half-inch growth of whiskers. He was feeling a little abashed because the first sergeant had spoken sharply about it that afternoon. When he did shave, he left a mustache and a straggly little goatee.

Ramseur is the quiet, courteous, unschooled but natively refined type you find so often in the hill country in the South. He hopes to be going home soon, although his orders haven’t been put through yet.

Ramseur has taught himself engraving since being in the Army. At least it’s a form of engraving. He pricks out designs on all his medals with a penknife. His canteen top is covered with names and flight insignia.

He has a photo album with aluminum covers made from a German plane, and all over it are engraved names and places. Sgt. Ramseur hopes maybe this talent might lead to an engraver’s job after the war.

On the fiber lining of his steel helmet, he has chronicled his missions, with a small bomb representing each one. They cover the entire front of the helmet, and he looks at them with relief.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 11, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
The other aerial gunners in our tent went on with their story.

Sgt. Robert Fleming of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sgt. Steve Ujhelji – pronounced “You-haley” – of Salem, Oregon, were together as gunners in a foray that won their pilot the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The pilot was Lt. George Gibson, also from Salem, Oregon. Lt. Gibson’s nickname is “Hoot,“ and that has gradually been warped into “Hooch” for reasons beyond my power to fathom. Hooch has finished his missions and gone home. I knew him before he left, and he was a wonderful pilot.

He was another of those great, good-natured people that everybody likes. He would tell you seriously, and I know he meant it, that he was the world’s worst combat pilot, that he had bawled up half the missions he had gone on, that he was scared to death, and that he was just hanging on by the skin of his teeth trying to finish.

But he did finish, and before doing so he crash-landed his badly shot-up plane one day so expertly that he not only saved the lives of his crew, but also that of a fighter pilot who was landing his damaged plane from the opposite direction and running directly into Hooch.

He knows a good story

He got the DSC. If you should ever run into him back home, just ignore the DSC and ask him to tell you the story about the British motorcyclist.

Finally, we got around to my host, Sgt. Albam Petchal of Steubenville, Ohio. When he stopped out the tent door to throw out a wash pan of water, the other boys told me he had the worst experiences of all.

Last summer, Petchal was flying as gunner in a flight of bombers coming over from America. They had reached Central Africa, and were flying north toward the combat zone. Somehow Petchal’s plane got separated from the rest of the flight, and wound up far out over the Sahara Desert and out of gas.

They rode the plane into the sand dunes, which were everywhere and about two stories high. They bounced across the tops of four and slammed head-on into the fifth.

All three men were painfully hurt. They crawled out, made a shelter out of their life raft under the wings, and patched up their wounds as best they could.

They stayed there for three days and nights. On the third day, Sgt. Petchal walked eight miles away on a reconnaissance and then walked back. He thought he saw trees and camels, but it ruined out to be the old storybook mirage.

Despite their pitiful condition, they started walking for good on the fourth day. They sprinkled the wrecked plane with gasoline and set it afire. It was said to see it burn. They carried a five-gallon can of water between them, slung from a stick.

Their wounds pained them constantly. They almost froze at night. Petchal kept getting sick at his stomach. The two officers became semi-delirious and quarreled violently. One day they saw three planes in the distance, too far away to attract.

Finally, they found tracks, and the same day ran onto a camel caravan. The Arabs fed them and took them with them. The boys tried to ride the camels, but it was so rough and horrible that they finally had to get off and walk.

End of the rainbow

On the night of the 10th day, they came to the end of their rainbow. Soldiers from a French desert outpost rode up to the caravan and took charge of them. They had by then walked more than a hundred miles.

They were in the hospital for several weeks, and then, after such a harrowing start as that, Sgt. Petchal finally arrived at the front. And since that day he has flown more than 60 combat missions. He is due to go home before long.

Petchal has been wounded by enemy flak, but we never got around to that.

The only man without an “experience” was Sgt. John McDonnell of Cedarhurst, Long Island. He is a good-looking, friendly and hospitable fellow.

Friends at home sent him some brown liquid in a G. Washington coffee bottled for Christmas. It looks like coffee, but it isn’t coffee. Sgt. McDonnell is saving it to celebrate his last mission. He offered to open it for me, but some hidden nobility in me reared its ugly head and I told him to save it.

Sgt. McDonnell has gone more than four-fifths of the way through his allotted missions, and has never yet laid eyes on an enemy plane. Furthermore, there has been only one tiny flak hit on his plane in all that time.

The sergeant says:

That suits me fine. I hope it stays that way.

And so do I.