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.