Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 13, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
A junior and miniature edition of W. C. Fields is what Sgt. Gilford Muncy is. You should hear his story of the night he fell into the abandoned gun pit and couldn’t get out because he couldn’t think where he was.

Sgt. Muncy can’t be much over five feet, and he is sort of pudgy and has very narrow shoulders, and his face has a wise, devilish, old look like one of the Seven Dwarfs.

Sgt. Muncy is 29. He comes from Hyden, Kentucky, up in the hills, and he wouldn’t mind at all if you called him a hillbilly. In fact, he sort of trades on it. He talks just like the mountaineers in the cartoons. I think it sort of hurts his pride that he can’t claim to have been a moonshiner.

Everybody laughs at Sgt. Muncy and with him, and everybody thinks he’s great. He likes people, and is uncommonly generous and kind. It’s a poor day when he doesn’t survive at least one escapade that is slightly out of this world.

The gunners’ tent which Sgt. Muncy dominates is a sight to behold. It is often the scene of rioting and deviltry. It is probably the most tired-out tent in Italy.

The top is full of holes. That’s caused by their gasoline stove blowing up frequently. One wall has big adhesive patches on it. That’s where a happy guest tried to carve his initials in the canvas. The back wall bears the marks of a nervous visitor who went right through it one night during an air raid.

Fabulous tent stove

The two outstanding features of Sgt. Muncy’s tent are the late evening meals cooked there and the fabulous stove, which has been known to blow up seven times in one day. Once it exploded just as a guest entered, and blew him clear out into the grapevines.

The other boys had told me all about Sgt. Muncy’s stove, so one morning, just as he was starting on a mission (he’s an aerial gunner), I introduced myself, and said I’d like to drop past that evening and see his stove blow up. Sgt. Muncy said:

We’d sure like to have you, but the stove’s liable to get contrary and not blow up tonight. Lots of times when we have company, it don’t blow up at all.

So I went over that night. The tent has a dirt floor which is swept out whenever they figure inspection is about due.

Sgt. Muncy once had a fastidious streak in him, and decided to levy a 50¢ fine on anybody who threw anything on the floor, such as cigarette butts, apple cores, walnut shells, etc. Before the first evening was over, he had fined himself $11.50.

They have great feasts in the Sgt. Muncy tent. Fried chicken is their special dish. They buy chickens from the village at $5 per chicken. Sgt. Muncy said:

I represent $300 worth of chickens cooked on that old stove there.

One night, Sgt. Jack Bohn of Scranton, Pennsylvania, made chicken soup while Sgt. Muncy did the rest. All the guests, who weren’t tasting very well anyhow, thought the soup was wonderful. But Jack couldn’t quite get it down. Eventually, he discovered the reason – he had put half a cake of G.I. soap in it, thinking it was butter.

Now and then they have steak. One night Sgt. Muncy was in bed when one of his soldier friends came in from town feeling fine. He had with him three or four big steaks.

The friend asked:

Where’s your sledgehammer?

“Over there in that pile of stuff, I reckon,” Sgt. Muncy said, and went back to sleep.

Rocks, mud and steak

Pretty soon he was awakened and here was this guy with all the steaks lying on the dirt floor, and just beating hell out of them with an eight-pound sledge. Then he threw them in the skillet, and Muncy had to get up and help share the feast.

Sgt. Muncy says:

I’ve still got rocks and mud in my teeth.

To Sgt. Muncy and his tentmates, all Italians are “gooks.” They don’t remember how they started that. It’s not a term of contempt at all, for Sgt. Muncy loves them and they love him.

Sgt. Muncy says:

I don’t care where I go it, people like me. Why, when we moved from our last place, all them gooks around there cried when I left.

He dressed up and played Santa for them at Christmas, and he is always giving them stuff.

We sat and talked and laughed until almost lights-out, and finally I said:

Well, if the stove isn’t going to blow up, I guess I have to go.

So, Sgt. Muncy jumped up and said, “Wait a minute.” He turned off the gasoline, let the fire in the tin-bellied stove die out and cool, then turned the gas on again. They let it sit that way a little while, and all the rest got behind boxes and things and Sgt. Bohn got off as far as he could and threw a lighted match at the stove door.

But as Sgt. Muncy had feared, the stove was contrary and wouldn’t blow up that night. They were all very humiliated.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
As I got to know the A-20 gunners better and better, they gradually began to tell me their inner feelings about a life of flying in combat.

Several had just about completed their missions, yet they said they were willing to stay if need and fly extra missions.

In any squadron, you’ll find many men willing to fly beyond the stated missions if it’s put up to them, but you’ll average only about one who actually is eager to go on. In our squadron, I found such a gunner in Sgt. John D. Baker of Indianapolis.

Sgt. Baker is 21. He has flown more missions than anybody in the squadron, men or officers. He says it is his ambition to fly a hundred.

Many in our squadron have gone beyond the required goal. Some are still flying, and others have gone on to the breaking point and had to be grounded. The flight surgeons try to sense when the strain is beginning to get a man.

Some of them seem to have nerves that are untouchable. One of my pilot friends told me that on a mission earlier in the day, when the flak was breaking all around, he didn’t think much of the danger but kept thinking that if a fragment should break the plexiglass globe, and let the below-zero air rush through the plane, he would be one mad pilot.

Another told of the funny reflexes you have up there. For example, every combat airman knows you needn’t worry about the flak you see, for it you see it, the danger is over and you haven’t been hit. Yet this pilot, after a harmless puff of smoke ahead of him, goes around it.

Ernie advises a gunner

One of the gunners – a man with a fine record – told me he had not only become terrified of combat but had actually become afraid to fly at all.

He said that when the generators came on that morning, and the radio in their tent started crackling, it made him dream they were being attacked in the air. He dreamed that a bullet came up through the fuselage and hit him in the throat.

Another told me he felt he just couldn’t go on. He had completed his allotted missions, and nobody could doubt his courage. He wanted to go and ask to be grounded, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

So, I urged him to go ahead. Afterwards, I got both sides of the story. The officers told me later they were kicking themselves for not noticing the gunner’s nervousness in time and for letting it go until he had to hurt his pride by asking to be grounded.

But those are men’s innermost feelings. They don’t express them very often. They don’t spend much time sitting around glooming to each other about their chances.

Their outlook and conversation is just as normal as that of a man in no danger at all. They play jokes, and write letters, and listen to the radio, and send gifts home, and drink a little vino and carry on just like anybody else.

It’s only when a man “has had it” – the combat expression for anyone who has had more than he can take – that he sits alone and doesn’t say much, and begins to stare.

Job has to be done

Sgt. Alban J. Petchal of Steubenville, Ohio, and Charles Ramseur of Gold Hill, North Carolina, have flown their allotted missions, have been wounded, and both are true veterans, quiet and kind and efficient.

Sgt. Petchal, although an Easterner, is in a way something of the same kind of man as my cowboy friend, Sgt. Buck Eversole. He doesn’t like any part of war, but he has done his job and done it well.

Sgt. Petchal never heard of Buck Eversole, and yet the morning I left he spoke about his place in the war with the same sort of sadly restrained philosophy, and even in almost the same words that Buck Eversole had used at the front. He said:

The job has to be done, and somebody has to do it, and we happen to be the ones that were picked to do it, so we’ll go on doing it the best we can.

And Sgt. Ramseur said:

I don’t ever want to fly again. But if they tell me to keep on flying, then I’ll just keep on flying, that’s all. You can’t do anything else.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Maj. Burt Cochrane is executive officer of the squadron with which I’ve been living. He is not a flying man, but he takes most of the onerous duties off the shoulders of the squadron commander, who is always a flying man.

Maj. Cochrane is the perfect example of a man going all-out for his country. He doesn’t want to be over here at all. He is 55, and a grandfather. But he fought through the last war, kept his commission in the reserve, and just couldn’t picture himself not being in this one. He has been away from home three years.

In civil life, Maj. Cochrane is what you might call a gentleman cattle-raiser. He owns about 300 acres in the beautiful rolling country north of San Francisco, not far from Jack London’s famous Valley of the Moon. The nearest town is Kenwood.

He turns out about 75 head of beef cattle a year, has a lovely home, beautiful riding horses, and lives an almost Utopian life. He left the city eight years ago, and says he never knew what happiness was until he got out into the hills.

Maj. Cochrane is quiet and courteous. Enlisted men and officers both like and respect him. He is so soldierly that he continually says “sir” even to me, although I’m a civilian and much younger than he.

Kiss boy goodbye

One of the newer and much-trusted pilots in my squadron is a good-natured, tow-headed youngster named Lt. Leroy Kaegi (pronounced Keggy). He is from Ashland, Oregon.

Lt. Kaegi had quite a day recently. Two missions, morning and afternoon. Returning from his morning mission, he couldn’t get one of his wheels down. He had to fly around for an hour and finally stall the plane in order to shake the wheel loose.

Then just as he was ready to take off on his afternoon mission, some major came rushing up to the plane in a jeep, jumped out and yelled:

Hey, wait a minute. This girl wants to kiss you goodbye.

Lt. Kaegi had never seen the girl before, but she was American and she was beautiful. So out he popped and gave her a great big smackeroo, and then dashed back in again. When he got back, all he could take about was this strange and wonderful thing that had happened to him. He said he was so excited he took off with his upper cowl flap open.

The girl, I found later, was Louise Allbritton of Hollywood. She’s over with June Clyde, entertaining troops for the USO. They are both swell gals.

Since Lt. Kaegi’s adventure, I’ve been hanging around the planes at takeoff time for a week, just hoping, but nothing seems to come of it except that I get a lot of dirt blown in my face.

Shot-up champion

One day I was standing around an A-20 bomber when the crew chief came up and pulled a clipping out of his pocket. It was a piece about his plane written more than a year ago by my friend Hal Boyle of the Associated Press.

At that time, the plane was the most shot-up ship in the squadron, with more than 100 holes in it. The crew chief, Sgt. Earl Wayne Sutter of Oklahoma City, has had this same ship since just before they left England nearly a year and a half ago. He’s very proud of its record. And it still holds the record, too. By now, it has more than 300 holes in it. But Sgt. Sutter and his gang just patch them up, and it keeps on flying. With all that riddling only one crew member has ever been hurt, and he only slightly.

Crew members for the past several weeks have been wearing “flak vests.” These look something like a lifejacket and are made of steep strips covered with canvas. They weight about 25 pounds.

There have been several instances already where these bests have saved men from being wounded by flak. The oddest instance was of one gunner who took his vest off because it felt too heavy, and threw it on the floor. By chance it happened to fall across his foot. A moment later, a piece of flak came through the wall and smashed into the flak vest. If it hadn’t been lying where it was, he would have had a bad foot wound.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 16, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
I heard a funny story about a demonstration, back of the lines, of a new type of rifle grenade.

It seems a lot of high-ranking officers were invited to the demonstration, including generals and colonels. Rows of chairs were placed for them out in the open.

Then a soldier fired the new grenade. It landed about 150 yards ahead of the officers, and failed to go off. No sooner had it hit the ground than a big black dog, doubtless with retriever blood in him, dashed out, grabbed the grenade in his mouth, and started back toward the assembled brass.

They say you never saw such a scramble as the visiting dignitaries made getting out of their chairs and heading rapidly to the rear. Fortunately, the grenade was so hot the dog had to drop it. At last reports, it still hadn’t gone off.

An old dog man, himself

Speaking of dogs, the 47th Bomb Group has more of them than any outfit I’ve been with yet. It’s hard for an infantryman to take care of a dog, but the Air Force men are often based at the same field for weeks or months, and can live a sort of permanent life.

One of the soldiers was telling about an order put out some months ago by the doctors, requiring that all dogs in camp be shot. For some reason, it was never carried out.

Then the soldier said:

Boy, I’d like to see any doctor try to have our dogs killed now, with this new squadron commander we’ve got.

He was referring to Lt. Col. Reginald Clizbe, who is a dog man himself. Incidentally, Clizbe was a major when we mentioned him a few days ago, but now he has gone up a step.

Too black to picture

Col. Clizbe has a coal-black Labrador retriever named Tarfu. That’s one of those mystic Air Force names which you’ll have to get somebody else to explain to you.

Col. Clizbe got Tarfu in England when he was so tiny, he carried him inside his shirt. Now he’s as big as a German shepherd. He is wonderfully smart, and good too. He is so black that Col. Clizbe can’t even get a good snapshot of him. He was raised on the treeless and windswept plains around two airdromes in Tunisia, and he still hasn’t learned to use a tree.

There’s a great communion between man and dog. Tarfu almost goes frantic when it’s time for the colonel to return from a mission.

Col. Clizbe has a large doghouse for Tarfu, built out of frag bomb boxes, and he keeps it right in the tent with him. Anytime he says “Bed,” whether it’s day or night, Tarfu goes reluctantly into his doghouse and lies down.

Likes a face wash

Of a morning when Col. Clizbe gets up. Tarfu waits about 15 seconds, then slips out of his doghouse, gets into Col. Clizbe’s sleeping bag, and burrows clear down out of sight. If he were a little dog, it wouldn’t be so funny, but he’s so big he practically fills the bag.

Unlike most dogs, he loves to have his face washed. After Col. Clizbe gets through washing his own face of a morning, he washes Tarfu’s.

I actually get jealous when I see some of the soldiers over here with dogs deeply attached to them. it’s the nearest thing to civility in this weird foreign life of ours.

Pitt partner in Italy

Of late I’ve had to carry around a little vial of something called liver essence, and get a slug of it injected into me by a needle about twice a week.

It’s supposed to be good for hemoglobin. Mine has got down to 20 points below what is required to keep a man alive, which seems to me a great joke on the medical profession, since I’m still here.

At any rate, my latest needle pricking was done by Capt. John R. Grant, who is doctor for a service squadron I happened to be near. Capt. Grant comes from Pittsburgh. He drives a jeep with “Pitt Panther” painted on the front of it. In front of his dispensary is a red-and-white sign which says, “Limp in, leap out.” That’s good psychology, but it didn’t work on me. I limped in, and crawled out. It gives me the willies to have people sticking needles into me.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
Italian trains are running again, and they have some electric trains out of Naples that are as modern as ours at home.

But no transportation here is back to pre-war proportions, and everything is packed with masses of humanity. People ride on top of the cars and hang all over the sides.

The funniest thing about this to me is that whenever a train approaches a tunnel it stops in order to let the hangers-on get off, so they won’t be raked off by the tunnel walls.

One of the items on the Naples black market these days is American Army C-ration. Where the black market gets them I don’t know, but a can of C-ration meat-and-vegetable hash sells for 25 cents.

An Italian housewife who I know slightly bought three cans of C-ration hash the other day. But when she got home, she discovered she had been hoodwinked, for the cans were filled with sand.

Some smart operator had simply gathered up a batch of empty cans and lids, put sand in the cans, and then neatly crimped the lids back on.

Quotes wrong price

At the entrance to one airfield which I visit occasionally, a ragged Italian woman sits on the ground selling apples, hazelnuts and English walnuts to the soldiers.

These roadside merchants prefer not to sell to the Italians at all, because our soldiers willingly pay higher prices than the natives. But the other day another Italian woman stopped in front of this vendor and gathered up an apronful of apples. Then she started to pay for them. The vendor woman unfortunately quoted her the soldier price. The prospective customer looked at her a moment, and then in a rage threw all the apples right in her face.

Note to postal clerk Henry Rosner of Pittsburgh – I got your message. Thanks a lot.

Several weeks ago, Sgt. Bill Mauldin, the Army cartoonist, bought a pair of rubber panties in Naples and sent them home to Phoenix for his six-month-old baby.

His wife apparently spread the word, for since then Bill has had about 20 requests from young mothers in America wanting rubber pants for their babies. Apparently, this article is extinct back home.

Bill is in a spot, and has had to declare rubber panties extinct over here too.

Eiderdown sleeping bag cherished

Sherman Montrose is the boss of all the civilian photographers over here. He works for NEA Service and has covered the Solomons, the Aleutians and Italy, which makes him one of the most veteran of correspondents in this war.

Monty has one piece of equipment which everybody would like to steal. It’s a pure eiderdown sleeping bag. It’s just a thin envelope which you crawl into, and is so wonderfully warm you don’t need anything else except a shelter half to keep the rain off.

Monty had it made back in the days when eiderdown was still available. It cost $60. He packs it in his hand the way a woman carries a shopping bag.

The Red Cross asked me the other day to speak on a transatlantic broadcast in connection with its $200 million drive.

But since public speaking is not one of my most glittering talents, and since the whole program would probably collapse if I tried to make a speech about it, we compromised and I promised to write a few lines.

So here they are. I’ve seen the Red Cross operate in Ireland, England, Africa, Sicily and Italy, and I’m very much for it. Its task is tremendous and it does a great good.

You won’t be making any mistake if you fork over a little dough for the Red Cross. Why, even I am going to donate a mile.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
One of the most fabulous characters in this war theater is Lt. Rudolph Charles von Ripper. He is so fabulous you might be justified in thinking him a phony until you got to know him.

I’ve known him since last summer in Algeria. Most of the other correspondents know him. One whole fighting infantry division knows him. He’s no phony.

Von Ripper is the kind they write books about. He was born in Austria. His father was a general in the Imperial Austrian Army, his mother a baroness. They had money. He could have had a rich, formal, royal type of existence.

Instead, he ran away from home at 15, worked in the sawmills, collected garbage, was a coalminer for a while, and then a clown in a small traveling circus.

At 19, he went into the French Foreign Legion, served two years, and was wounded in action. After that, he went back to Europe and studied art. He is fundamentally an artist.

He traveled continuously. He lived in London and Paris. He lived in Shanghai during 1928. Then he returned to Berlin, joined liberal groups, and did occasional cartoons. Because he helped friends hiding from the Nazis, he was arrested in 1933, accused of high treason, and sent to a concentration camp.

A life of extremes

Dollfuss of Austria got him out after seven months. Then he went to the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain and hibernated for a year, doing political, satirical drawing.

All his life has been a fluctuation between these violent extremes of saloon intellectualism and the hard, steady reality of personal participation in war. You don’t think of an artist as being tough or worldly, yet Von Ripper has been shot in battle more than 20 times.

In 1936, he went to Spain as an aerial gunner in the Loyalist Air Force. He got 16 slugs in his leg during that adventure, and barely came out alive.

Back in Austria in 1938, he saw there was no possibility of organizing even a token resistance against Hitler, so he left for America. He became an American citizen five years later. By that time, he was a private in the United States Army.

His Army career has been a curious one. At first, he was a hospital laboratory technician. Then he was transferred to the newly-formed Army Arts Corps, and left for North Africa last May to paint battle pictures for the War Department.

Doesn’t mind being shot at

I happened to meet him a few days after he arrived on this side. He had hardly got started on his artwork when Congress abolished the whole program. So, he went back to being a regular soldier again, this time an infantryman. He was transferred to the 34th Division.

Last fall, he was put in a frontline regiment, and in October, he was wounded by shell splinters. He doesn’t seem to mind being shot at all. A month later, while leading a night patrol, he got four machine-pistol slugs in him.

All this time overseas, he had been a sergeant, but after his November wounding, he was given a battlefield commission as second lieutenant, and transferred to the division’s engineers. Later, it was possible for him to resume his artwork in his spare time.

Right now, Lt. Von Ripper has a nice little room on the top floor of an apartment building in Naples taken over by the Army. Here he works at a huge drawing board, doing watercolors and pen-and-ink sketches of war. He sleeps on a cot in the same room. Around the walls are tacked dozens of his sketches.

Now and then he returns to the front with his old outfit. Whenever he does, he’s out in front getting shot at before you can say scat. He’s quite a guy.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 20, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The following is Ernie Pyle’s story of the bombing of his hotel at the Anzio beachhead where he was slightly wounded. The second column about Lt. von Ripper will be published later.

With the 5th Army beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
Yes, we almost got it this time. I’ll try to tell you how it feels. I’m speaking of the bombing of our villa on the Anzio Beachhead which you may have read about in the news dispatches.

We correspondents here stay in a villa run by the 5th Army’s Public Relations Section. In this house live five officers, 12 enlisted men and a dozen correspondents, both American and British.

The house is located on the waterfront. The current sometimes washes over our back steps. The house is a huge, rambling affair with four stories down on the beach and then another complete section of three stories just above it on the bluff, all connected by a series of interior stairways.

For weeks, long-range artillery shells had been hitting in the water or on shore within a couple of hundred yards of us. Raiders came over nightly, yet ever since D-Day, this villa had seemed to be charmed.

The night before our bombing Sgt. Slim Aarons of Yank Magazine said:

Those shells are so close that if the German gunner had just hiccoughed when he fired, bang would have gone our house.

And I said:

It seems to me we’ve about used up our luck. It’s inevitable that this house will be hit before we leave here.

Villa called ‘Shell Alley’

Most of the correspondents and staff lived in the part of the house down by the water, it being considered safer because it was lower down.

But I had been sleeping alone in the room in the top part because it was a lighter place to work in the daytime. We called it “Shell Alley” up there because the Anzio-bound shells seemed to come in a groove right past our eaves day and night.

On this certain morning, I had awakened early and was just lying there for a few minutes before getting up. It was just 7:00 and the sun was out bright.

Suddenly the anti-aircraft guns let loose. Ordinarily I don’t get out of bed during a raid, but I did get up this one morning. I was sleeping in long underwear and shirt so I just put on my steel helmet, slipped on some wool-lined slippers and went to the window for a look at the shooting.

I had just reached the window when a terrible blast swirled me around and threw me into the middle of the room. I don’t remember whether I heard any noise or not.

The half of the window that was shut was ripped out and hurled across the room. The glass was blown into thousands of little pieces. Why the splinters or the window frame itself didn’t hit me, I don’t know.

From the moment of the first blast until it was over, probably not more than 15 seconds passes. Those 15 seconds were so fast and confusing that I truly can’t say what took place and the other correspondents reported the same.

There was debris flying back and forth all over the room. One gigantic explosion came after another. The concussion was terrific. It was like a great blast of air in which your body felt as light and as helpless as a leaf tossed in a whirlwind.

I jumped into one corner of the room and squatted down and just cowered there. I definitely thought it was the end. Outside of that, I don’t remember what my emotions were.

Suddenly one whole wall of my room flew in, burying the bed where I’d been a few seconds before under hundreds of pounds of brick, stone and mortar. Later, when we dug out my sleeping bed, we found the steel frame of the bed broken and twisted. If I hadn’t gone to the window, I would have two broken legs and crushed chest today.

Frets over missing steel hat

Then the wooden doors were ripped off their hinges and crashed into the room. Another wall started to tumble, but caught only partway down. The French doors leading to the balcony blew out and one of my chairs was upended through the open door.

As I sat cowering in the corner, I remember fretting because my steel hat had blown off with the first blast and I couldn’t find it. Later I found it right beside me.

I was astonished at feeling no pain, for debris went tearing around every inch of the room and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been hit. But the only wound I got was a tiny cut on my right cheek from flying glass, and I didn’t even know when that happened. The first time I knew of it was when blood ran down my chin and dropped into my hat.

I had several unfinished columns lying on my table and the continuing blasts scattered them helter-skelter over the room and holes were punched in the paper. I remember thinking, “Well, it won’t make any different now anyhow.”

Finally, the terrible nearby explosions ceased and gradually the ack-ack died down and at least I began to have some feeling of relief that it was over and I was still alive. But I stayed crouched in the corner until the last shot was fired.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The following is the second part of Ernie Pyle’s account of the bombing raid in which he had a narrow escape. His story is Lt. von Ripper will be resumed later.

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
When our bombing was over, my room was a shambles. It was the sort of thing you see only in the movies.

More than half the room was knee-deep with broken brick and tiles and mortar. The other half was a disarray, all covered with plaster dust and broken glass. My typewriter was full of mortar and broken glass, but was not damaged.

My pants had been lying on the chair that went through the door, so I dug them out from under the debris, put them on and started down to the other half of the house.

Down below everything was a mess. The ceilings had come down upon men still in bed. Some beds were a foot deep in debris. That nobody was killed was a pure miracle.

Bill Strand of The Chicago Tribune was out in the littered hallway in his underwear, holding his left arm. Maj. Jay Vessels of Duluth, Minnesota, was running around without a stitch of clothing. We checked rapidly and found that everybody was still alive.

The boys couldn’t believe it when they saw me coming in. Wick Fowler of The Dallas News had thought the bombs had made direct hits on the upper part of the house. He had just said to George Tucker of the Associated Press, “Well, they got Ernie.”

‘Old Indestructible’

But after they saw I was all right, they began to laugh and called me “Old Indestructible.” I guess I was the luckiest man in the house, at that, although old Dame Fortune was certainly riding with all of us that morning.

The German raiders had dropped a whole stick of bombs right across our area. They were apparently 500-pounders, and they hit within 30 feet of our house.

Many odd things happened, as they do in all bombings. Truthfully, I don’t remember my walls coming down at all, though I must have been looking at them when they fell.

Oddly, the wall that fell on my bed was across the room from where the bomb hit. In other words, it fell toward the bomb. That is caused by the bomb’s terrific blast creating a vacuum; when air rushes back to the center of that vacuum, its power is as great as the original rush of air outward.

At night, I always put a pack of cigarettes on the floor beside my bed. When I went to get a cigarette after the bombing, I found they’d all been blown out of the park.

The cot occupied by Bob Vermillion of the United Press was covered a foot deep with broken tile and plaster. When it was all over somebody heard him call out plaintively:

Will somebody come and take this stuff off of me?

First aid of sorts

After seeing the other correspondents, I went back to my shattered room to look around again, and in came Sgt. Bob Geake of Fort Wayne, Indiana, the first sergeant of our outfit. He had some iodine, and was going around painting up those who had been scratched.

Bob took out a dirty handkerchief, spit on it two or three times, then washed the blood off my face before putting on the iodine, which could hardly be called the last word in sterilization.

Three of the other boys were rushed off to the tent hospital. After an hour or so, five of us drove out to the hospital in a jeep to see how they were.

We found them not in bad shape, and then we sat around a stove in one of the tents and drank coffee and talked with some of the officers.

By now my head and ears had started to ache from the concussion blasts, and several of the others were feeling the same, so the doctors have us codeine and aspirin.

Much to my surprise, I wasn’t weak or shaky after it was all over. In fact, I felt fine – partly buoyed up by elation over still being alive, I suppose. But by noon, I was starting to get jumpy, and by mid-afternoon I felt very old and “beat up,” as they say, and the passage of the afternoon shells over our house really gave me the woolies.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

NOTE: Mr. Pyle wrote this column for use following a previous article on Lt. von Ripper, which appeared Saturday, March 18. In the meantime, however, Ernie’s report of the bombing in which he suffered a slight personal injury was received and because of its timeliness published ahead of the Von Ripper story, which is concluded herewith.

In Italy – (by wireless)
You know Lt. Rudolf C. von Ripper, the soldier-artist about whom we were writing yesterday. Well, we’ll finish him up today.

Von Ripper is a soldier of fortune, in a way, yet he doesn’t look or act like one. He is intelligent, and his approach is simple rather than adventurous. He is 39, but seems younger.

He is medium tall, slightly stooped, and one eye has a cast that makes it appear to be looking beyond you. His face is long and thin, and his teeth are prominent. His knowledge of the English language is profound and his grammar perfect, but he still pronounced his words with a hissing imperfection. He swears lustily in English.

Von Ripper is as much at home discussing philosophy or political idealism as he is in describing the best way to take cover from a machine gun.

He is meticulous in his personal appearance, yet doesn’t seem to care whether he sleeps between satin sheets or in the freezing mud of the battlefield.

It is hard to reconcile the artist with the soldier in Von Ripper, yet he is obviously professional at both. It may be that being a fine soldier makes him a better artist.

His long experience at warfare has made him as cunning as a fox. You can’t conceive of his being rattled in a tight spot, and he seems to have been born without the normal sense of fear that inhabits most of mankind.

Has become legend at front

Von Ripper is so calm and so bold in battle that he has become a legend at the front. High officers ask his advice in planning attack. He will volunteer for anything.

Being wounded four times hasn’t touched his nerve in the slightest. In fact, he became so notorious as an audacious patrol leader that his division finally forbade his going on patrol unless by specific permission.

One night Von Ripper was returning from patrol and was stopped by an itchy-fingered sentry who called, “Who goes there?” The answer came back in a heavily German accent, “Lt. von Ripper.” He was wearing lieutenant bars, but his dog tag showed him to be a sergeant. It took an hour to get it straightened out.

Some sentries would have shot first and then investigated.

Out of this background as a proven fighting man, Von Ripper is painting the war. He has produced more than a hundred pictures already. His work goes to the War Department in Washington, but he hopes an arrangement might be made whereby a book of his war drawings could be published.

I believe that Von Ripper, like most of us over here, has finally become more interested in the personal, human side of war than in the abstract ideals for which wars are fought.

Trying to take heroics out of war

He says that in his paintings he is trying to take the applesauce out of war, trying to eliminate the heroics with which war is too often presented. From what I’ve seen of the work of other artists, Von Ripper is not alone in this sincerity. It’s hard to be close enough to war to paint it, and still consider it heroic.

Von Ripper’s dead men look awful, as dead men do. Live soldiers in foxholes have that spooky stare of exhaustion. His landscapes are sad and pitifully torn.

His sketches aren’t photographic at all. They are sometimes distorted and grotesque, and often he goes into pen-and-ink fantasy.

He has given me one of these, labeled “Self-Portrait in Italy,” which shows himself and another wounded man, against a background of wrecked walls and starving children, being led downhill by the bony arms of a chortling skeleton representing ultimate and inevitable death.

You get used to seeing things like that when you’re a soldier for a long time.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 23, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
In order to report the war on the Anzio beachhead, it was first necessary to get to the beachhead. I got here by boat, as everybody else does.

Our troops up here are supplied and replaced by daily ship convoys. Since this is a very frontline kind of war up here, isolated and horny-handed like the early old days in Tunisia, there is little red tape about it.

A correspondent who wants to come to the beachhead simply drives to the dock where the ships are loading, tells the Army captain in charge he wants to get to Anzio, and the captain says, “Okay, get on this boat here.”

I came up on an LST (landing ship tank) – a type of vessel which is being considerably publicized at home now, and which is probably the outstanding ship of our amphibious forces.

It is a great big thing, bis as an ocean freighter. The engines and crew’s quarters and bridges are all on the back end. All the rest of the ship is just a big empty warehouse sort of thing, much like a long, rectangular garage without any pillars in it.

Two huge swinging doors open in the bow, and then a heavy steel ramp comes down so that trucks and tanks and jeeps can drive in. It can land at a beach for loading and unloading, or run nose first to a dock. We loaded at a dock.

Very same LST boat

This was the second time I had been on an LST. The first time was last June at Bizerte, a few days before we took off on the invasion of Sicily.

At that time, I was living on a warship, but took a run around the harbor one day going aboard various types of landing craft, just to see what they were like. I spent about half an hour on an LST that day, and never had been aboard one since.

So, imagine my surprise when I climbed aboard for the Anzio trip, checked in with the skipper, and suddenly realized this was the very same LST, still commanded by the same man. He is Capt. Joseph Kahrs of Newark, New Jersey. He is a 37-year-old bachelor, the product of two universities, and before the war was a lawyer in practice with his father in Newark.

After Pearl Harbor, he went into the Navy. His sum total of seafaring had been several trips in peacetime.

Exactly one year to the very day after he entered the Navy, Capt. Kahrs and a crew equally as landlubberish as himself took over this brand-new LST and pointed her bow toward Africa. Only two men of the crew of more than 60 had ever been to sea before.

Just the other day they celebrated this ship’s first birthday and everybody aboard had a turkey dinner. In that one year of existence this LST had crossed the Atlantic once, taken D-Day roles in three invasion, and made a total of 23 perilous trips between Africa, Sicily and the Anzio beachhead.

They were almost blown out of the water once, and had countless miracle escapes, but never were seriously damaged. Most of the original crew are still with it, and now instead of green landlubbers they are tried and true salts.

Carry new type of barracks bag

Long lines of soldiers loaded down with gear marched along the dock to enter adjoining ships. They were replacements to bolster the fighters at Anzio.

You could tell from their faces that they were brand-new from America. They carried a new-type of barracks bag, which few of us over here had seen before. The bags were terrifically heavy, and it was all the boys could do to handle them.

One of the passing replacements remarked:

Hell, I’ve got more clothes than I had when we left America. I don’t know how we accumulate so much.

Italian children scampered along with the marching soldiers, insisting on helping with the heavy bags.

One of the oddest sights I’ve ever seen was a frail little Italian girl, not more than 9 or 10, paddling along with a barracks bag, that must have weighed 75 pounds, slung across her tiny shoulders.

The big soldier who owned it was laughing at the incongruity of the thing, and we had to laugh too. So did the little girl.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
We were due to sail for the Anzio beachhead a few hours after I got aboard our LST.

But at the last minute came a warning of a storm of gale force brewing in the Mediterranean, so we laid over for 24 hours.

Some of the sailors took the opportunity next day to go ashore, and asked if I didn’t want to go along. But I said, “What for? I’ve been ashore for three months already.” So, I stayed aboard, and just killed a full day with doing nothing.

We were tied up along the waterfront street of a small port city near Naples. All day long the dock was a riot of Italians grouped down below to catch cookies and chocolates and knickknacks the sailors and soldiers would throw down to them.

There must have been 200 people on the dock, either participating in the long-shot chance of actually catching something, or there just to look on.

Most of them were children, boys and girls both. Mostly they were ragged and dirty. Yet they were good-natured.

Call American soldiers, ‘Hey, Joe’

Every time a package of crackers went down from above, humanity fought and stamped up over it like a bunch of football players. Now and then some youngster would get hurt, and make a terrible face and cry. But mostly they’d laugh and look a little sheepish, and dash back in again after the next one.

All Italian children call all American soldiers “Hey, Joe,” and all along the dock was a chickenyard bedlam of “Hey, Joe, bis-ueet.” Each one crying at the top of his lungs to call attention to himself, and holding up his hands.

The soldier’s favorite was a stocky little fellow of about 8, with coal-black hair and a constant good humor. He was about the only one of them who wasn’t ragged, the reason being that he was entirely clad in military garb.

He had on a blue Navy sweater. Then for pants he had the biggest pair of British tropical shorts you ever saw, which came clear below his knees.

His legs were bare. He had on gray Army socks rolled down to his shoe tops. And on his feet were a pair of brand-new American G.I. shoes, which must have been at least size 8. To top it all off, he had a beguiling grin with a tooth out in the middle of it.

This youngster was adept at walking on his hands. He spent hours walking around the muddy stone street on his hands, with his feet sticking straight up in the air.

Easier to walk on hands

The soldiers and sailors were crazy about him, and every time he finished his little performance, he’d get a flood of crackers. I finally figured out that he was walking on his hands so much because it was easier than walking in those gigantic shoes.

Pretty teenage Italian girls in red sweaters would come and stand at the edge of the throng watching the fun. But the sailors and soldiers at the rail soon would spot them, and the play for them would start. Reluctant and timid at first, they would finally obey the sailors’ demand that they try to catch something too, and pretty soon would be in here battling for broken crackers.

Most Americans are touched by the raggedness and apparent hunger of the children over here. But it was hard to feel sorry for these kids, for although maybe some of them really were hungry, the rest of them were just having a wonderful mob-scene sort of good time.

It was the old women in the crowd that I could hardly bear to look at. Throughout the day there must have been a couple of dozen who came, tried for half an hour to catch something, and finally went away dejectedly.

They were horrible specimens of poverty and insanitation. They were old and pitiful, and repulsive. But their hunger most surely was genuine.

One elderly woman, dressed in tattered black and carrying a thin old shopping bag on her arm, stood at the far edge of the crowd, vainly beseeching a toss in her direction. Finally, one sailor, who had just started on a large box of Nabiscos piece by piece, changed his mind and threw the entire box toward the old woman.

It was a good throw and a good catch. She got it like an outfielder. But no sooner did she have it in her arms than the crowd was upon her. Kids and adults both tore at the box, scratched and yelled and grabbed, and in five seconds the box was empty and torn.

The poor old woman never let go. She clung to it as though it were something human. And when the last cracker was gone, she walked sort of blindly away, her head back and her eyes toward the sky, weeping with a hideous face just like that of a heartbroken child, still gripping the empty box.

It was a lot of fun watching this foreign riot of childish emotions and adult greed that day. But some of it was too real – greed born of too great a necessity – and I was glad when word came that we would sail that night.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 25, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
The sailors aboard an LST (landing ship tank) have the same outlook on life that the average soldier overseas has. That is, they devote a good part of their conversation to home, and to when they may get there.

They are pretty veteran by now, and have been under fire a lot. They’ve served the hot beaches of Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. They know a gun fired in anger when they hear one.

On the whole, although the boys who man these beachhead supply ships are frequently in great danger, they do live fairly comfortably. Their food is good, their quarters are fair, and they have such facilities as hot baths, new magazines, candy, hot meals and warmth.

The sailors sleep in folding, bunks with springs and mattresses. The officers sleep in cabins, two or so to a cabin, the same as on bigger ships.

An LST isn’t such a glorious ship to look at – it is neither sleek nor fast not impressively big – and yet it is a good ship and the crews aboard LSTs are proud of them.

LSTs roll and twist

The LSTs are great rollers – the sailors say “They’ll even roll in drydock.” They have flat bottoms and consequently they roll when there is no sea at all. They roll fast, too. Their usual tempo is a roundtrip roll every six seconds. The boys say that in a really heavy sea you can stand on the bridge and actually see the bow of the ship twist, like a monster turning its head. It isn’t an optical illusion either, but a result of the “give” in these ships.

The sailors say that when they run across a sandbar, the ship seems to work its way across like an inchworm, proceeding forward section by section.

The LST has handled every conceivable type of wartime cargo. It has carried a whole shipload of fused shells, the most dangerous kind. Among the soldiers of many nationalities that my LST has carried, the crew found the Indian troops of Jahore the most interesting. The Indians were friendly, and as curious as children. The Americans liked them. In fact, I’ve found that Americans like practically anybody who is halfway friendly.

Toilet-seat tragedy

The Indian soldiers base practically every action on their religion. They brought their own food, and it had to be cooked by certain of their own people.

They made a sort of pancake out of flour that was full of weevils and worms. But it was sacred, and if an American cook tried to help out and touched the pan, the whole panful had to be thrown away.

Even going to the toilet was a religious ritual with them. They carried special toilet-seat covers previously cleansed by some proper person, and would no more think of using an unflushed toilet then you would think of committing murder.

Capt. Joseph Kahrs told me of one touching incident that happened when the Indian troops were put ashore. One of them had fallen ill and had to be taken back to Africa.

He was the only Indian left on the ship. The tragedy of his pitiful case was that the poor unfortunate was caught without a sacred toilet seat, and he had dysentery.

“What did he do?” I inquired.

Capt. Kahrs said:

I never did ask. I couldn’t bear to know. To me, it is the most frightful incident of the war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 27, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With the Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
It was after dark when we finally backed away from the dock. We nosed out to sea for a mile or so, then dropped anchor for a couple of hours waiting on other ships to finish loading and join us.

There is an ever-present danger of submarines, and once off the beachhead the ships are frequent targets for aerial bombing and shelling from the land. Quite a few have been hit by all three methods, yet the supplies keep going through, and are often piled on the beachhead a day ahead of what was planned.

One night recently the Germans hit one of our gasoline dumps and burned up some 5,000 gallons of gasoline. One officer said:

At home, where gas is rationed, that would seem like an awful lot, but up here it’s just a drop in the bucket and makes no difference at all.

Our fleet of supply ships is manned by Americans, British and Greeks. As we lay at the dock before sailing, a British LST was on one side of us and a Greek on the other.

When we finally got underway for good, I went up to the open-air deck just above the bridge to see how a convoy forms up at night.

On these LSTs, the bridge is completely enclosed with heavy armor plating, which has little slits of thick bulletproof glass to look through. Since visibility is thus limited, the officer in charge stays on the open-air deck above and calls his instructions down to the bridge through a tube.

Moon gives faint light

The moon was swathed in clouds, but it gave a faint light. You could see landmarks, silhouetted against the horizon, but not much more.

The captain asked:

Have you ever looked through night binoculars? Try these.

The view was astonishing. Those binoculars seemed to take 25% of the darkness out of the night. With them you could see several ships in line, where you could see none before.

Far ahead of us, directly out to sea, we could see occasional flashes of gunfire. I asked what that could be, but no one knew. It seemed unlikely that a naval battle could be going on out there, and yet there were the flashes.

Capt. Joseph Kahrs said:

That’s one of the things I’ve found out about the sea. You’re always seeing and hearing things which are completely mysterious and unexplainable. You go on your way, and never do find out the answer.

The wind began to come up and the night to grow chill. It was straight sailing for the rest of the night, so I went to bed.

Ship rolls violently

The night passed with nothing more exciting than the ship doing some violent rolling. I could hear some sliding and breaking in the kitchen, and out on deck several halftracks broke their moorings and charged back and forth across the deck with a frightening sound of steel scraping on steel. We landlubbers aboard slept rather fitfully.

The officer of the deck sent a sailor to awaken me just at dawn. I got up sleepily and went back to the deck above the bridge. Anzio and Nettuno were in sight off to our right. We could see an occasional golden flash of artillery fire on shore.

The day was gray. Heavy clouds covered the sky, and rain occasionally drenched the landscape. That meant another day our troops on the beachhead would have to go without air support, but it also meant the Germans would be grounded too and our ships could land without being bombed. And for that we were selfishly glad.

Our convoy eased along until we were just off Anzio harbor. Everything was as peaceful as could be. I was walking along the deck just looking at the shore, when suddenly a shell smacked the water about a hundred yards away. It was so close we heard the whine after the blast.

At that the captain moved us farther out. The shells continued to come at about 10-minute intervals, none quite so close as the first. We all wore our steel helmets now.

Shells sing through air

Finally the signal came to enter to harbor. Capt. Kahrs stood on a little platform on the open deck, steering the ship to its moorings. I stood just behind him to watch.

The morning was raw and chilly. Yet Capt. Kahrs wore only summer khaki trousers, a light Army field jacket and, of all things, tennis shoes. He was shivering.

Shells continued to sing through the air, some hitting ahead of us, some behind. One hit the end of the stone mole just before we got to it. Another one screamed right over our heads and hit behind the mole.

At each sound we’d all duck instinctively. And the captain laughed and said:

We sure get a lot of knee-bending exercise on these trips.

We were all pretty silent and tense during those last few minutes of entering the harbor. The captain had to maneuver the ship into a tiny space just barely the width of the ship. Yet he put it in there as though he were using a pointer, and he put it in fast, too, and no monkeying around.

As you remember, the captain is a Newark lawyer in peacetime. I couldn’t help but admire this new skill of a man whose profession was so alien to the sea.

Here he stood in tennis shoes, far from home, worming his ship into a half-wrecked harbor with shells passing a few feet over his head. And he did it with complete absorption and confidence. Men can do strange and great things when they have to do them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
When you get to Anzio you waste no time getting off the boat, for you have been feeling pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.

But after a few hours in Anzio, you wish you were back on the boat, for you could hardly describe being ashore as any haven of peacefulness.

As we came into the harbor, shells skipped the water within a hundred yards of us.

In our first day ashore, a bomb exploded so close to the place where I was sitting that a fragment came through the window of the room next to mine.

On our second evening ashore, a screamer slammed into the hill so suddenly that it almost knocked us down with fright. It smacked into the trees a short distance away.

And on the third day ashore, an 88 went off within 20 yards of us.

I wished I was in New York.

Reporters under fire

When I write about my own occasional association with shells and bombs, there is one thing I want you folks at home to be sure to get straight. And that is that the other correspondents are in the same boat – many of them much more so.

You know about my own small experiences, because it’s my job to write about how these things sound and feel. But you don’t know what the other reporters go through, because it usually isn’t their job to write about themselves.

There are correspondents here on the beachhead, and on the Cassino front also who have had dozens of close shaves. I know of one correspondent who was knocked down four times by near-misses on his first day here.

Two correspondents, Reynolds Packard of the United Press and Homer Bigart of The New York Herald-Tribune, have been on the beachhead since D-Day without a moment’s respite. They’ve become so veteran that they don’t even mention a shell striking 20 yards away.

Nobody is wholly safe

On this beachhead, every inch of our territory is under German artillery fire. There is no rear area that is immune, as in most battle zones. They can reach us with their 88s, and they use everything from that on up.

I don’t mean to suggest that they keep every foot of our territory drenched with shells all the time, for they certainly don’t. They are short of ammunition, for one thing.

But they can reach us, and you never know where they’ll shoot next. You’re just as liable to get hit standing in the doorway of the villa where you sleep at night, as you are in a command post five miles out in the field.

Some days they shell us hard, and some days hours will go by without a single shell coming over. Yet nobody is wholly safe, and anybody who says he has been around Anzio two days without having a shell hit within a hundred yards of him is just bragging.

People who know the sounds of warfare intimately are puzzled and irritated by the sounds up here. For some reason, you can’t tell anything about anything.

The Germans shoot shells of half a dozen sizes, each of which makes a different sound of explosion. You can’t gauge distance at all.

One shell may land within your block and sound not much louder than a shotgun. Another landing a quarter mile away makes the earth tremble as in an earthquake, and starts your heart to pounding.

You can’t gauge direction, either. The 88 that hit within 20 yards of us didn’t make so much noise. I would have sworn it was 200 yards away and in the opposite direction.

Get weak in the knees

Sometimes you hear them coming, and sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you hear the shell whine after you’ve heard it explode. Sometimes you hear it whine and it never explodes. Sometimes the house trembles and shakes and you hear no explosion at all.

But I’ve found one thing here that’s just the same as anywhere else – and that’s that old weakness in the joints when they get to landing close.

I’ve been weak all over Tunisia and Sicily, and in parts of Italy, and I get weaker than ever up here.

When the German raiders come over at night, and the sky lights up bright as day with flares, and ack-ack guns set up a turmoil and pretty soon you hear and feel the terrible power of exploding bombs – well, your elbows get flabby and you breathe in little short jerks, and your chest feels empty, and you’re too excited to do anything but hope.