Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
Anzio and Nettuno run together along the coast of our beachhead, forming practically one city. There is really only one main street, which runs along the low blocks just back of the first row of waterfront buildings.

The two cities stretch for about three miles, but extend only a few blocks back from the waterfront. A low hill covered thick with tall cedar trees rises just back of them, and along some of the streets there are palm trees.

I had supposed these two places were just ancient little fishing villages. Well, they are old, but not in their present form.

Anzio is where Nero is supposed to have fiddled while Rome burned, but in more recent years he would doubtless have been sprawling in a deck chair in the patio of his seaside villa, drinking cognac.

For these two towns are now (or rather, were until recently) high-class seaside resorts. They’ve been built up in the modern manner within the last 20 years.

When you look at them from a certain place, they extend 200 yards from the water’s edge, forming a solid flank of fine stone buildings four and five stories high. Most of these are apartment houses, business buildings and rich people’s villas.

Today there is no civilian life in Anzio-Nettuno. The Germans had evacuated everybody before we came, and we found the place deserted. A few Italians have straggled back in, but they are few indeed.

No ‘business as usual’

In the path of warfare over here, “business as usual” seems to have been the motto of the natives. Adult civilians have stayed in some places despite the fall of heaven and earth upon them. They’d stay and deal with the Germans while we were blasting their towns to bits, and those who survived would stay and deal with us when the town changed hands and the Germans began showering the same death and destruction back upon us. The ties of a man’s home are sinewy and strong, and something that even war can hardly break.

But in Anzio and Nettuno, the expensive villas are deserted – the swanky furniture wrapped in burlap and stored all little hovels are empty also, and so are the stores. Scarcely a door or a window with whole shutters remains. There is no such thing as a store or shop in business today in these two towns.

When our troops first came they found things intact and undamaged, but the Germans changed that. Little by little, day by day, these cities have become eroded and torn from the shells and bombs of the enemy.

It has happened slowly. The Germans shell spasmodically. Hours will go by without a single shell coming in, and then all of a sudden, a couple of shells will smack the water just offshore.

A few buildings will go down, or the corners fly off some of them. One day’s damage is almost negligible. But it is cumulative, and after a couple of weeks you realize that less of the city is left whole than two weeks previously.

Gone between meals

Today you can’t walk half a block without finding a building half crumpled to the ground. Between breakfast and lunch, the building next to the mess where we eat was demolished. One man was killed, and our cook got a broken arm.

The sidewalks have shell holes in them. Engineers repair new holes in the streets. Military police who direct auto traffic are occasionally killed at their posts.

Broken steel girders lie across the sidewalks. Marble statues fall in littered patios. Trees are uprooted, and the splattered mud upon them dries and turns to gray. Wreckage is washed up on shore. Everywhere there is rubble and mud and broken wire.

Yet this German shelling and bombing has had only the tiniest percentage of effect on our movement of supplies and troops into the beachhead. One day of bad weather actually harms us more than a month of German shelling.

It is a thrilling thing to see an LST pull anchor when its turn comes, and drive right into the harbor despite shells all around. And it is thrilling, too, to see the incessant hurry-hurry-hurry of the supply trucks through the streets all day and all night despite anything and everything.

From all indications we are supplying our troops even better by sea than the Germans are supplying theirs by land.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 30, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
You’ve heard how flat the land of the Anzio beachhead is. You’ve heard how strange and naked our soldiers feel with no rocks to take cover behind, no mountains to provide slopes for protection.

This is a new kind of warfare for us. Here distances are short, and space is confined. The whole beachhead is the front line. The beachhead is so small that you can stand on high ground in the middle of it and see clear around the thing. That’s the truth, and it ain’t no picnic feeling either.

I remember back in the days of desert fighting around Tébessa more than a year ago, when the forward echelons of the corps staff and most of the hospitals were usually more than 80 miles back of the fighting. But here everybody is right in it together. You can drive from the rear to the front in less than half an hour, and often you’ll find the front quieter than the rear.

Hospitals are not immune from shellfire and bombing. The unromantic finance officer counting out his money in a requisitioned building is hardly more safe than the company commander 10 miles ahead of him. And the table waiter in the rear echelon mess gets blown off his feet in a manner quite contrary to the Hoyle rules of warfare.

It’s true that the beachhead land is flat, but it does have some rise and fall to it. It’s flat in a western Indiana way, not in the billiard-table flatness of the country around Amarillo, Texas, for example.

You have to go halfway across the beachhead area from the sea before the other half of it comes into view. There are general rises of a few score feet, and little mounds and gulleys, and there are groves of trees to cut up the land.

Roads – good and bad

There are a lot of little places where a few individuals can take cover from fire. The point is that the generalized flatness forbids whole armies taking cover.

Several main roads – quite good macadam roads – run in wagon-spoke fashion out through the beachhead area. A few smaller gravel roads branch off from them.

In addition, our engineers have bulldozed miles of road across the fields. The longest of these “quickie” roads is named after the commanding general here, whose name is still withheld from publication. A painted sign at one end says “Blank Boulevard,” and everybody calls it that. It’s such a super-boulevard that you have to travel over it in super-low gear with mud above your hubcaps, but still you do travel.

Space is at a premium on the beachhead. Never have I seen a war zone so crowded. Of course, men aren’t standing shoulder to shoulder, but I suppose the most indiscriminate shell dropped at any point in the beachhead would land not more than 200 yards from somebody. And the average shell finds thousands within hearing distance of its explosion. If a plane goes down in no-man’s-land, more than half the troops on the beachhead can see it fall.

Already spoken for

New units in the fighting, or old units wishing to change positions, have great difficulty in finding a place. The “already spoken for” sign covers practically all the land in the beachhead. The space problem is almost as bad as in Washington.

Because of the extreme susceptibility to shelling, our army has moved underground. At Youks and Thelepte and Biskra, in Africa a year ago, our Air Forces lived underground. But this is the first time our entire ground force has had to burrow.

Around the outside perimeter line, where the infantry lie facing the Germans a few hundreds yards away, the soldiers lie in open foxholes devoid of all comfort. But everywhere back of that, the men have dug underground and built themselves homes. Here on this beachhead the dugouts, housing from two to half a dozen men each, will surely run into the tens of thousands.

As a result of this, our losses from shelling and bombing are small. It’s only the first shell after a lull that gets many casualties. After the first one, all the men are in their dugouts. And you should see how fast they can get there when a shell whines.

In addition to safety, these dugouts provide two other comforts our troops have not always had – warmth and dryness.

A dugout is a wonderful place to sleep. In our Anzio-Nettuno sector, a whole night’s sleep is as rare as January sun in sunny Italy. But for the last three nights I’ve slept in various dugouts at the front, and slept soundly. The last two nights I’ve slept in a grove which was both bombed and shelled, and in which men were killed each night, and yet I never even work up. That’s what the combination of warmth, insulation against sound, and the sense of underground security can do for you.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 31, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
The Anzio beachhead area is practically all farms. Much of it lies in the famous old Pontine marshes. I’ve looked these up in Baedeker, and found that the Romans have been trying to drain them since 300 years before Christ.

Even Caesar took a shot at it, and so did many Popes. Mussolini was the last one to give the marshes a whirl, and as far as I can see, he did a pretty good job of it.

On these little farms of the Pontine marshes Mussolini built hundreds of modern (in the Italian manner) stone farmhouses. They’re all exactly alike, except for color, and they stipple the countryside like dots on a polka-dot dress.

Despite its flatness, the area is rather pretty. It doesn’t look like marshland. It is green now, and will be greener in a few weeks. Wheat is coming through the ground. There are rows of cedar trees throughout the area. Spots of uncultivated ground are covered with waist-high oak bushes, resembling our hazelnut bushes in the fall, crisp and brown-leafed.

Now and then you see a farmer plowing with German shells landing right in his field. We’ve tried to evacuate the people, and have evacuated thousands by boat. Daily you see our trucks moving down to the dock with loads of Italian civilians from the farms. But some of them simply won’t leave their homes.

Life goes on

Now and then the Germans will pick out one of the farmhouses, figuring we have a command post in it, I suppose, and shell it to extinction. Then, and then only, do the Italian families move out.

One unit was telling me about a family they tried in vain for days to move. Finally, a shell killed their tiny baby, just a few days old.

Here in the battle zone, as in other parts of Italy, our Army doctors are constantly turning midwife to deliver bambinos.

Farmers frequently do dry-cleaning with gasoline for our officers, and they say the job they do would pass inspection in any New York tailoring shop. Soldiers throughout the area get the remaining Italians to do their washing. Practically every inhabited farmhouse has a gigantic brown washing hanging in the backyard.

One outfit of tankers that I know sent all its spare clothes to one farmhouse to be washed. Shortly afterward the Germans picked out that house for the center of barrage.

The Italians abandoned the place, and were unhurt. But next morning, when the soldiers went to see about their clothes, all they found was dozens of American shirts and pants and socks torn into shreds by shell fragments.

Cattle in fields

In the fields there are small herds of cattle, sheep, horses and mules. Many of the cattle are slate-gray, just like Brahma cattle. And they have wide, sweeping horns very much like the majestic headgear of the famous longhorn steers of Texas. Now and then you see an Army truck radiator decorated with a pair of these horns.

Most of the livestock can graze without human attention, but as an old farmer I’ve been worrying about the cows that have nobody to milk them when the farmers leave. As you may or may not know, a milk cow that isn’t milked eventually dies a painful death.

An officer friend of mine, who has been at the front almost since D-Day, says he’s seen only one cow in trouble from not being milked, so I suppose somebody is milking them.

One unit I know of took the milking proposition into its own hands, and had fresh milk every day. Of course, that’s against Army regulations (on account of the danger of tubercular milk), but Army regulations have been known to be ignored in certain dire circumstances.

Much of the livestock is being killed by German shellfire. On any side road you won’t drive five minutes without seeing the skeleton of a cow or a horse.

And of course, some cows commit suicide. As the saying used to go in Tunisia, it was the damndest thing, but one cow stepped on a mine, a very odd mine indeed, for when it exploded it hit her right between the eyes. And here on the beachhead we’ve seen an occasional cow deliberately walk up and stick its head in front of a rifle just as it went off.

There isn’t as much of that, to my mind, as there should be. We’re fighting a horrible war that we didn’t ask for, on the land of the people who started it. Our supply problems are difficult. K-rations get pretty boring, and fresh meat is something out of Utopia.

Excuse me while I go kill a cow myself.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 1, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
The American infantry fighters on the 5th Army beachhead were having a welcome breathing spell when I dropped around to leave my calling card.

There’s nothing that suits me better than a breathing spell, so I stayed and passed the time of day. My hosts were a company of the 179th Infantry. They had just come out of the lines that morning, and had dug in on a little slope three miles back of the perimeter. The sun shone for a change, and we lay around on the ground talking and soaking up the warmth.

Every few minutes a shell would smack a few hundred yards away. Our own heavy artillery made such a booming that once in a while we had to wait a few seconds in order to be heard. Planes were high overhead constantly, and now and then you could hear the ratta-ta-tat-tat of machine-gunning up there out of sight in the blue, and see thin white vapor trails from the planes.

That scene may sound very warlike to you, but so great is the contrast between the actual lines and even a little way back, that it was actually a setting of great calm.

Always in great danger

This company had been in the frontlines more than a week. They were back to rest for a few days. There hadn’t been any real attacks from either side during their latest stay in the lines, and yet there wasn’t a moment of the day or night when they were not in great danger.

Up there in the front our men lie in shallow foxholes. The Germans are a few hundred yards on beyond them, also dug into foxholes, and buttressed in every farmhouse with machine-gun nests. The ground on the perimeter line slopes slightly down toward us – just enough to give the Germans the advantage of observation.

There are no trees or hillocks or anything up there for protection. You just lie in your foxhole from dawn till dark. If you raise your head a few feet, you get a rain of machine-gun bullets.

During these periods of comparative quiet on the front, it’s mostly a matter of watchful waiting on both sides. That doesn’t mean that nothing happens, for at night we send out patrols to feel out the German positions, and the Germans try to get behind our lines. And day and night the men on both sides are splattered with artillery, although we splatter a great deal more of it nowadays than the Germans do.

Back on the lines, where the ground is a little higher, men can dig deep into the ground and make comfortable dugouts which also give protection from shell fragments. But on the perimeter line the ground is so marshy that water rises in the bottom of a hole only 18 inches deep. Hence there are many artillery wounds.

Wounded must stay to dark

When a man is wounded, he just has to lie there and suffer till dark. Occasionally, when one is wounded badly, he’ll call out and the word is passed back and the medics will make a dash for him. But usually he just has to treat himself and wait till dark.

For more than a week, these boys lay in water in their foxholes, able to move or stretch themselves only at night. In addition to water seeping up from below, it rained from above all the time. It was cold, too, and of a morning new snow would glisten on the hills instead.

Dry socks were sent up about every other day, but that didn’t mean much. Dry socks are wet in five minutes after you put them on.

Wet feet and cold feet together eventually result in that hideous wartime occupational disease known as trench foot. Both sides have it up here, as well as in the mountains around Cassino.

The boys have learned to change their socks very quickly, and get their shores back on, because once your feet are freed of shoes, they swell so much in five minutes you can’t get the shoes back on.

Extreme cases were evacuated at night. But only the worst ones. When the company came out of the lines, some of the men could barely walk, but they had stayed it out.

Almost impossible to sleep

Living like this, it is almost impossible to sleep. You finally get to the point where you can’t stay awake, and yet you can’t sleep lying in cold water. It’s like the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

I heard of one boy who tried to sleep sitting up in his foxhole, but kept falling over into the water and waking up. He finally solved his dilemma. There was a fallen tree alongside his foxhole, so he tied some rope around his chest and tied the other end to the tree trunk, so that it held him up while he slept.

Living as these boys do, it seems to me they should all be down with pneumonia inside of a week. But cases of serious illness are fairly rare.

Maybe the answer lies in mind over matter. I asked one sergeant if a lot of men didn’t get sick from exposure up there and have to be sent back. I’ll always remember his answer.

He said:

No, not many. You just don’t get sick – that’s all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 3, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
This is a little series of vignettes about four frontline sergeants. They’re just little scenes that came along in conversation as we lay on an Italian hillside chatting one day. The four men are platoon sergeants of the 45th Division of the Allied 5th Army on the Anzio beachhead.

Sgt. Samuel Day of Covington, Kentucky, is a big guy. He weighed 257 pounds when he came into combat in January, and he still weighs 240 despite all the K-rations he’s eaten.

Sgt. Day would be hard on his feet in any circumstances. But when you get into a trench-foot world, 240 pounds is a lot of aggravation for sore dogs.

We get to discussing trench foot, and Sgt. Day told about an incident that happened to him. It seems his feet got in pretty bad shape during their last recent tour in the foxholes, so he went to the frontline medics for ointment or something.

The medics’ solution for his troubles was simple. With a straight face, they told him, “Keep your feet dry and stay off of them for two weeks!”

Sgt. Day went back to his watery foxhole, still sore-footed but unable to keep from chuckling over the irony of this advice. Their prescription for trench foot takes its place in history alongside W. C. Fields’ sure cure for insomnia – get lots of sleep!

Under weeds in ditch

Sgt. Eugene Bender of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, is the company first sergeant. He is short and curly-headed, and has a thin black mustache. When I saw him, he was sitting on a C-ration box, getting a between-battles haircut from a soldier barber.

The sergeant asked:

You don’t write news stories, do you?

I told him no, that I just sort of tried to write what it was like over here, and didn’t even especially look for hero stories, since there were so many guys who were heroes without there being any stories to it.

The sergeant said:

That’s good. Hero stories are all right, but they don’t give people at home the whole picture. You read a story in America of something terrific a guy does over here, and his folks think that happens to him every day.

Now take me. Once I was on patrol and was behind the German lines for 36 hours. We lay all day covered up with weeds in a ditch so close to Germans we could have reached out and touched them. When we finally got back, they had given us up for lost.

Now if you just wrote that story and nothing else, people would think that’s what I did all the time.

Riding waves in foxhole

Sgt. Vincent Mainente is from Astoria, Long Island, and of Italian extraction. He isn’t voluble like most Italian-Americans, but friendly in a quiet and reserved way.

Sgt. Mainente used to be a steam-heat inspector for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he says:

I sure could use some of that steam heat in my foxhole these days.

We were just lying around on the ground talking, when one of the other boys said:

Vince, tell him about your raft.

“What do you mean, raft?” I asked. So Sgt. Mainente told me.

It seems the bottom of his foxhole was covered with water, like everybody else’s. So the sergeant saved up empty wooden C-ration boxes, and one night he nailed them together and made a raft to float on top of the water in his foxhole.

From all I could gather, it wasn’t 100% successful in keeping him dry, but at least there wasn’t any harm in trying.

Just can’t take it

Sgt. Michael Adams is from Akron, Ohio. He used to work for a truck company. He has been with the regiment ever since it came overseas last spring.

Sgt. Adams seems a little older than the others; his hair is beginning to slip back in front, and you can tell by his manner of speech that he thinks deeply about things.

We got to talking about soldiers who crack up in battle or before the ones who hang back or who think they’re sick and report in to the medics as exhaustion cases.

I personally have great sympathy for battle neurosis cases, but some of the soldiers themselves don’t have. For example, Sgt. Adams was telling how some of the replacements after only a few hours under fire, will go to the company commander and say:

Captain, I can’t take it. I just can’t take it.

That makes Sgt. Adams’ blood boil. He said to me:

They can’t take it? What, what the hell do they think the rest of us stay here for, because we like it?

And it’s that spirit, I guess, that wins wars.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 4, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
As tiny and shell-raked as our Anzio beachhead is, life in some respects is astonishingly normal. For example, the 5th Army runs a daily movie here. It started less than a month after our troops first landed.

They put on two shows a day, and we’ve had such recent pictures as Abbott and Costello in Hit the Ice, Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier, and Rosalind Russell in What a Woman.

I go occasionally, just to kill time at night, since the place where I write has no electricity, and I haven’t got enough Abe Lincoln in me to do any work by candlelight.

A funny thing happened at the movie the other night. I was standing outside the building with a big bunch of soldiers waiting for the first show to end. As we stopped there, a shell suddenly whipped in, scared us out of our wits, and exploded behind the building.

When the boys came out after the first show ended, they were laughing about the odd timing in the picture’s dialog. The exploding shell made a big boom inside the theater, and just as it went off there was a pause in the film’s dialog, and the heroine slowly turned her head to the audience and said: “What was that?”

‘Rest camp’ under fire

Also, our beachhead has a rest camp (ha, ha) for infantry troops. The camp is under artillery fire, as is everything else on the beachhead.

But still it serves its purpose by getting the men out of the foxholes, and as somebody said:

There’s a hell of a lot of difference getting shells spasmodically at long range, and in being right up under Jerry’s nose where he’s aiming at you personally.

Further, our beachhead has a big modern bakery, which has been working under fire for weeks, turning out luscious, crisp loaves of white bread from its portable ovens at a pace of around 27,000 pounds a day.

More than 80 soldiers work in this bakery. It is the first draftee baking outfit in our Army, and the company will be three years old in June. They’ve been overseas a year and a half, and have baked through half a dozen bitter campaigns.

They’ve had casualties right here on the beachhead, both physical and mental, from too much shelling.

Their orders are to keep right on baking though an artillery barrage, but when air-raiders come over, they turn out the fires and go to the air-raid shelter.

Life seemed very normal in the bakery when I visited them. The shift leader at the time was Sgt. Frank Zigon of 5643 Carnegie St., Pittsburgh, who showed me around. The boys were glad to have a visitor, and they gave me a pie to take home.

They said they’d had shells on this side of them and that side of them, and in front and behind. It was believable, but everything was running so smoothly that their stories of shells seemed quite academic, like some mathematical truth without reality.

Ernie hangs onto his pie

But when I left the bakery we hadn’t gone a hundred yards till an 88 smacked into the soft ground just the width of the road from our feet. If the ground hadn’t been muddy thus absorbing the fragments, we would have got some hot steel in our jeep and probably some in our persons, as the lawyers say.

The baker boys’ story of shelling ceased to be academic right then, but I still held onto my pie.

At the movie the other night, I ran onto one of the two soldiers who had so nicely volunteered to help lug my gear off the boat the day we hit the beachhead.

They were Cpl. Bert L. Hunter of Tonkawa, Oklahoma, and Pvt. Paul Norman of Des Moines, Iowa. Hunter is in the engineers and Norman is in a signal company, and works in the message center. The boys say they don’t mind it on the beachhead.

On the boat, they and some other soldiers had a frisky little brown puppy they’d bought in Naples for two packs of cigarettes and some gumdrops.

They couldn’t think what to name the dog, so I suggested they call him “Anzio.” So Anzio it is, and he’s still here with them, having the time of his young life.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 5, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
One day I was driving on a muddy lane alongside a woods, with an officer friend who has been wounded twice and who has been at war a long time.

On both sides of the lane were soldier walking, returning to the rear. It was the typical movement of troops being relieved after a siege in the front line. Their clothes were muddy, and they were heavily laden. They looked rough, and any parade ground officer would have been shocked by their appearance. And yet I said:

I’ll bet those troops haven’t been in the line three days.

My friend thought a minute, looked more closely as they passed, and then said:

I’ll bet they haven’t been in the line at all. I’ll bet they’ve just been up in reserve and weren’t used, and now they’re being pulled back for a while.

How can you tell things like that? Well, I made my deduction on the fact that their beards weren’t very long, and although they were tired and dirty, they didn’t look tired and dirty enough.

My friend based his on that, too, but more so on the look in their eyes.

“They don’t have that stare,” he said.

A soldier who has been a long time in the line does have a “look” in his eyes that anyone with practice can discern.

Eyes that see not

It’s a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without transferring any response to the mind. It’s a look that is the display room for the thoughts that lie behind it – exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do to you. It’s a look I dread to see on men.

And yet it’s one of the perpetual astonishments of a war life to me, that humans recover as quickly as they do. you can take a unit that is pretty well exhausted, and if they are lucky enough to be blessed with some sunshine and warmth, they’ll begin to be normal after two days out of the line. The human spirit is just like a cork.

When companies like this are pulled out for a rest, they spend the first day getting dug into their new position, for safety against occasional shellings or bombings. Usually, they’ve slept little during their time in the line, so on their first night they’re asleep early, and boy, how they sleep.

Next day they get themselves cleaned up as best they can. They shave, and wash, and get on some fresh clothes if their barracks bags have been brought up. They get mail and they write letters, and they just loaf around most of the day.

Take on replacement

On both the second and third days, they take on replacements and begin getting acquainted with them. All over the bushy slope where they’re bivouacked, you see little groups of men squatting in tight circles. These are machine-gun classes. The classes are for the new men, to make sure they haven’t forgotten what they learned in training, and to get them accustomed to the great necessity of knowing their guns and depending on them.

Replacements arrive in many different stages of warfare. The best method is for replacements to come when a whole regiment is out of the line for a long rest. Then the new men can get acquainted with the older ones, they can form their natural friendships, and go into their first battle with a feeling of comradeship.

Others arrive during these very short rest periods, and have only a day or so to fit themselves into the unit before going on into the great adventure.

The worst of all is when men have to join an outfit while it’s right in the line. That has happened here on the 5th Army beachhead.

There have been cases here where a company had to have replacements immediately. It was in circumstances where no frontline movement whatever in daytime was possible. Hence the new men would have to be guided up at night, establish themselves in their foxholes in darkness, and inhabit that foxhole until it was all over.

I feel sorry for men who have to do that. It must be an awful thing to go up to the brink of possible death in the night time in a faraway land, puzzled and afraid, knowing no one and facing the worst moment of your life totally alone. That takes strength.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 6, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Our artillery up here is terrific. The beachhead being as small as it is, we can, whenever we wish, train every gun in the 5th Army forces on a single German target.

In my wartime life, I’ve had a good many stray shells in my vicinity, but not until I came to the beachhead was I ever under an actual artillery barrage.

The Germans shell us at intervals throughout the day and night, but usually there are just one or two shells at a time, with long quiet periods in between.

The other night, however, they threw a real barrage at us. It was short, but boy, it was hot. Shells were coming faster than you could count them. One guess is as good as another, but I’d estimate that in two minutes they put 150 shells in our area.

I was in bed, in a stone house, when it started, and I stayed in bed, too, simply because I was afraid to get up. I just reached out and put my steel helmet on, and covered my head with a quilt, and lay there all drawn up in a knot.

Shells came past the corner of the house so close their mere passage would shake the windows. A shell that close doesn’t whine or whistle. It just goes “Whish-bang!” The whole house was rattling and trembling from constant nearby explosions. The noise under a barrage is muddling and terrifying. Of course, we had casualties, but our own house came through unscathed.

That little barrage seemed awful to us and it was awful, but just think – we had maybe 150 shells around us in two minutes, but I know of cases where our guns have fired incessantly hour after hour until we have put 30,000 shells in a single German area.

We have had reports that the Germans were burying their dead with bulldozers, there were so many of them.

Visitors are ones who get hit

I had lunch with one of our artillery batteries which shoots the big Long Toms. They’ve been in the thick of the fighting since a year ago December – three phases of Tunisia, then Sicily, then through the Salerno-Cassino push. Yet they’ve fired more rounds since they’ve been sitting here in one spot on the Anzio beachhead than they did in the entire year before that. And they told me of another battery which fired more in four hours one night than in the previous eight months.

The Germans throw so much stuff back at them that the fields around them are gradually being plowed up. Yet this battery has had nobody killed, and only a few wounded.

They told of one soldier who was standing in a ditch the other day with one foot up on the bank. An 88 shell went right between his legs, bored into the bottom of the ditch, blew an artillery rangefinder all to pieces, and never scratched the fellow. But after it was over, he was so scared he was sick for two days.

The men of this battery say that people who come to visit them, such as nearby ack-ack crews, road patrols and ammunition truckers, are always the ones who get hit. Being in the visitor category myself, I said a quick goodbye and was last seen going rapidly around an Italian straw stack.

Won’t chalk any more shells

One gun of this battery, incidentally, has a funny little superstition. It seems that on the very first shell they ever fired when they hit Africa, in 1942, they chalked a message – the kind you’ve seen in photographs – saying “Christmas Greetings to Hitler,” and all put their names on it.

They sent the shell over, and immediately the Germans sent one back which exploded so close to the gun pit it wounded seven of the 12 men who had chalked their names on the American shell. From that day to this, that crew won’t chalk anything on a shell.

One day an Army photographer came around to take some pictures of this gun crew firing. He asked them to chalk one of those Hitler messages on the shell.

The crew obliged and he took the picture. But what the photographer doesn’t know is that the shell was never fired. After the photographer left, they carried it up the hillside, dug a hole and buried it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 7, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Practically everybody on the Anzio beachhead who is back of the outer defense line has his home underground. We correspondents don’t have, but that’s merely because we haven’t got any sense. Also, it could possibly be because we’re lazy.

At any rate, this beachhead is so dug up that an underground cross-section of it would look like a honeycomb. Even tanks and jeeps are two-thirds buried for protection.

The soldiers’ dugouts are made by digging a square or rectangular hole about shoulder deep, then roofing it with boards and logs, piling earth on top of that, and digging a trench out from it with steps leading up.

Digging is extremely easy here, for the soil is almost pure sand. Two men can dig a hole big enough for their home in an hour. Two or three hours more, if they have the timbers ready, is enough to finish the simpler type of dugout.

It’s pleasant to dig in sand, but it has its disadvantages. The sides cave in easily. Now and then a man is buried in his dugout. Even the concussion from our own big guns will start the walls of a dugout to sliding in.

Dig in near tanks

The average dugout houses two men. It’s just big enough for their blanket rolls, and you have to stoop when you get into it.

A tank crew always digs in just a few feet from the tank, for which they also dig a hole. The boys then run wires from their tank battery into their dugout, for electric lights. They have straw on the floor, and shelter halves hung at the entrance.

Most of the men sleep on the ground, while most of the officers have cots. But it’s not bad sleeping on the ground in a dugout, for you keep both warm and dry.

Some dugouts have board walls to keep the sand from caving in. others use the more primitive method of log supports in each corner with shelter halves stretched between them to hold back the sand.

It takes a lot of lumber to shore up all those thousands of dugouts. They boys rustle up anything they can find out of old buildings. The two most coveted pieces odd equipment from deserted houses are wooden doors and wall mirrors. The doors are used for dugout ceilings, and it’s a poor dugout indeed that hasn’t got a fancy mirror on the wall.

Some are elaborate

From the basic two-man dugout, which is usually bare except for a shelf, a mirror and some pinup girls, these underground homes run on up to the fantastic in elaborateness.

One of the best I’ve seen was built by Lt. Edward Jacques of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and his driver, Pvt. Russell Lusher of Marion, Indiana. They have a wooden floor, shelves and nails on the wall for every item, a writing desk with table lamp, a washstand with big mirror, porcelain lampshades with little Dutch girls pained on them – and best of all, hidden on a shelf I noticed two fresh eggs.

But the finest dugout I’ve seen belongs to four officers of a tank company. This dugout is as big as the average living room back home. You can stand up in it, and it has a rough wooden floor. It has a drawing table in the center, and numerous chairs. The four officers sleep on cots around the walls.

Books and magazines and pipes and pictures are scattered on tables all over the place, just like home. They have a radio, and on the table is a sign listing the bets of various people on when the invasion of Western Europe will come.

Brew tea, chocolate

The officers brew hot tea or chocolate every afternoon and evening.

The dugout is heated to the baling point by one of these funny Italian stoves, which for some reason are always painted pink. The officers chop their own wood for the stove.

To go with the pink stove, the boys dug up from somewhere a huge overstuffed chair covered in old-rose upholstery. They have named their dugout “The Rose Room.”

They have several electric lights, and the crowning luxury of this palatial establishment is a Rube Goldberg arrangement of ropes and pulleys, whereby one of the lieutenants can switch off the light after he gets in bed. They even have a big white dog, slightly shell-shocked, to lie on the hearth.

From all this you might draw the deduction thar war isn’t hell after all. Well, these men can and do go into battle 20 minutes away, and every day and every night shells and bombs fall around them, and it’s an unusual day when somebody isn’t killed within their own little village of dugouts.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 8, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead, Italy – (by wireless)
About 13 months ago I struggled one forenoon into a cactus patch about halfway between Sbeitla and Faid Pass, in Tunisia.

Hidden in that patch was all that was left of an armored combat team which had been overrun the day before, when the Germans made the famous surprise breakthrough which led finally to our retreat through Kasserine Pass.

A few of you more tenacious readers may remember my writing about this bunch at the time. I found them almost in a daze – and a very justifiable one, too, for they had been fleeing and groping their way across the desert for a day and a night, cut to pieces, and with the swarming Germans relentlessly upon them.

The few who escaped had never expected to survive at all, and on that weary morning they were hardly able to comprehend that they were still alive.

I had good friends in that gang, and I’ve just seen them again after 13 months. Talk about your family reunions! It was like Old Home Week for a while.

I stayed with them two days, and we fought the Tunisian wars over and over again. I can just visualize us on some far day when we cross each other’s paths back in America, boring our families and friends to distraction with our longwinded recounting and arguments about some afternoon in Tunisia.

Satch and the helmet

Maj. Rollin Elkins, sometimes known in fact as R. Lafayette Elkins, used to be a professor at Texas A&M College Station, Texas. He is one of this old gang. His nickname is “Satch,” and he goes around in the green two-piece coverall of the infantry. Everybody loves him.

That memorable night in Tunisia I excitedly went away and left my helmet and shovel lying under a halftrack in which Maj. Elkins was sleeping, and never saw them again. In our reminiscing I told the major how last fall, when I was home, several people told me that this steel helmet was now in somebody’s house out on Long Island. How it got there I haven’t the remotest idea.

But I’ve got another helmet now, and Satch Elkins has another halftrack, “Bird Dog the Second,” to replace the old one that was shot out from under him that awful Tunisian afternoon.

I saw Sgt. Pat Donadeo of Allison Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh, who is one of the best mess sergeants overseas. He has lived in the field for nearly two years, cooking in a truck on his portable kitchen, turning out excellent meals, and always having a snack for a correspondent, no matter what hour you show up.

District man forager

Sgt. Donadeo looks a little thinner, but he’s still all right. He speaks good Italian, and since hitting Italy, he has come into his own. He makes little foraging trips and comes back with such delicacies as fresh eggs, chicken, olive oil and cows.

In an earlier column, Ernie predicted that Sgt. Donadeo would be a valuable man when he got to Italy. The Pittsburgher was mentioned in two columns written in Tunisia in February and April of 1943.

And there’s Lt. Col. Daniel Talbot, who owns a big cattle ranch outside of Fort Worth, Texas. His nickname is “Pinky,” and he doesn’t look like a warrior at all, but he is.

Col. Talbot used to have a driver named Manuel Gomez from Laredo, Texas. One afternoon beyond Sidi Bouzid, a year ago, the three of us drove up to the foothills so we could look down over the valley where the Germans were. Shells were falling in the valley, and every time we’d hear one, we’d ditch the jeep and start for the gulleys, although they’d actually be landing a mile away from us.

Pvt. Gomez is still driving for the colonel, and the three of us laughed today at our inexperience and nervousness so long ago. None of us has got brave in the meantime, but all of us have enriched our knowledge of shell sounds. Today we think it’s far away when a shell missed by 200 yards.

Our tanks haven’t had much chance to do their stuff in the Italian war, because of the mountainous terrain and the incessant rains. But the tankers are ready, and they’re hoping. They know that sooner or later their big battle here on the beachhead will come. When I walked in, they laughed and said:

This must be it. Every time you’d show up in Tunisia, we’d have a battle. This must be the sign.

So you see I have my life work cut out for me. I just go around the country starting battles, like a nasty little boy, and then immediately run back and hide.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 10, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
In our old gang of Tunisian tankmen of a year and more ago, there was Capt. Jed Dailey, who comes from Sharon, Massachusetts, near Boston.

Jed was through that battle at Sidi Bouzid, and it was he who was so furious about losing his camera and his bedroll and all his films to the Germans.

I wrote about him at the time, saying he bet the Germans would develop those films eagerly, thinking they’d reveal some military secrets, but all they’d find would be a picture of a man in a silly pose with Tunisian flowers stuck behind his ears.

Jed says that after that column he got dozens of letters kidding him about putting flowers behind his ears, but he didn’t care.

He has avenged the loss of his camera, too. Since then, he has personally captured from the Germans an even better one to replace it, and has added a Luger and a fine pair of binoculars for good measure.

Speaks with Harvard ‘A’

Jed Dailey is an unusual person. I think I like him about as much as anybody I know. He is a pure Bostonian. He talks with a Harvard broad “A.” He is a far cry from the farm boy of the Kentucky hills, yet he commands a company of such boys, and they love him.

Following the battle at Kasserine, Jed Dailey was switched from a desk job to the command of a company of tanks. The job of company commander whether it’s infantry or tanks or what, is the greatest job in the Army – the greatest and the toughest.

The boys themselves have told me what they think of Jed Dailey. When he first arrived, they were contemptuous of that cultured accent and had little faith in him. They laugh now and tell how he tries to speak in a flat accent whenever he gives them a talk, but without realizing it lapses back into his broad A.

But he has lived that down, and all their other jokes about him. They’d go anywhere with him now, or for him. He has proved himself in many ways.

Whenever there is a battle he is in his own tank, directing his company. I just had the pleasure of seeing him get the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He has been wounded twice since I saw him in Tunisia.

Whenever his company pulls back from battle, Jed Dailey throws the small details of Army discipline out the back door and the men really get a rest. As they say, “He fights hard and he rests hard.” That’s the way the boys get the most out of it, and they appreciate it.

Likes to go bareheaded

Capt. Dailey is tall and his black hair stands up and roaches back and you’d have to call him good-looking. He nearly always goes bareheaded even in the danger zone. It is not an affectation; he simply likes to go bareheaded. He usually wears an Air Corps fleece-lined leather jacket that he once haggled out of some flier friend.

At the left shoulder of the jacket are two holes – one in front of the shoulder, one in back. The first hole is where a piece of shell fragment went in. The back hole is where it came out after going through his arm. They took a piece out of his leg to patch up his wounded shoulder.

The other officers laugh and say, “Jed wouldn’t sew those holes up for $10,000.” And another one says, “Not only that, but you can see where he has taken his knife and made them bigger.” You don’t talk like that in front of a man when you mean it. Jed just grins and says, “Sure.”

Before that he was wounded in the face from an airburst. When he got out of the hospital from his second wound, he had a week’s leave at Sorrento, the beautiful resort city below Naples. He stayed one night and then returned to his company, everybody at the rest camp thought he was crazy.

Jed said:

It isn’t that I am anxious to fight, but when you are commanding a combat outfit your place is with your outfit. You feel like a heel if you are able to be there and aren’t. I feel lots better since I got back.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 11, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
One night I bunked in the dugout of Sgt. Bazzel Carter of Wailing Creek, Kentucky, which is just a short way from the famous coal town of Harlan. In fact, Sgt. Carter’s brother is a miner there.

Sgt. Carter is a tank commander. He has had two tanks shot out from under him, one by bombing, the other by shellfire, but he didn’t get a scratch either time.

He is the typical man of the hills who doesn’t say much until he gets to know you, and even then, he talks very quietly and humbly.

Gradually we got acquainted. Sgt. Carter told me about his folks at home and got out pictures of his father and mother and younger brother. He hoped his mother wasn’t worrying too much about him.

He told me how he had gone to the University of Kentucky half a semester and then restlessly quit and joined the Army before we were in the war. Now he feels that he didn’t do right, because his father had worked so hard to save the money for him to go. But when the war is over, he is determined to go on with his schooling.

I hit Sgt. Carter’s bailiwick at a propitious time – for me. He had just that day received a box from his mother and in it was a quart mason jar of good old American fried chicken.

We heated it on our little Coleman stove and ate it for breakfast. When the word got around that we’d had fried chicken for breakfast we were both the envy of the others and the butt of all “plutocrat” jokes for the day.

‘Old Nick’ reaches him

For once in my life I was able to reciprocate the sharing of this gift. It’s a long story, but it seems that a friend of mine from Indiana University, Stew Butler, manages or owns a candy factory in Chicago which makes a bar called “Old Nick.” The day before I left Washington last November to return overseas, Stew called up long-distance to say he was going to send me a box of his candy every week. Never one to refuse anything, I said try it if you want to, although I’ll probably never get any of them.

So, a couple of months went by and nothing happened and I forgot all about it, and then all of a sudden, all this pent-up candy came pouring in two and three big boxes at a time. Brother, do I have candy! So lately I have been taking it to the front with me a box at a time and passing it around.

I had a box along on this trip, so I gave it to Sgt. Carter and his tank friends, and you should have seen them go for it. We get hard candy and plenty of gumdrops and lifesavers, and sugar too, but very little chocolate.

WARNING: Having had experience with Americans’ generosity before, let me urge you, too, not to start sending me candy, because very shortly I may be changing location, and it would never reach me.

Sgt. Carter fares pretty well himself on packages from home. Three are sent him every week, one by his mother, one by his sister, and one by his cousin. He gets most of them, too. They don’t send fried chicken every time, but there is always something to eat.

Sgt. Carter’s dugout is just a bare one, with straw on the floor, a tiny electric light in the ceiling and a little shelf he has anchored into the dirt wall.

He said that after he got his dugout finished and moved in, he discovered a mole burrowing in the wall. So he killed it and skinned it, and the hide is still hanging on a nearby tree.

Luxury of pantslessness

The sergeant sleeps in his overalls, but the dugout was so snug and warm I decided on the luxury of taking off my pants. Even so, I was kept awake a long time by our own guns. Not by the noise, for it was rather muffled down there below ground, but the vibration of the earth was distracting.

When the big “Long Toms,” which were almost half a mile away, would go off in battery salvo, the earth on which we were lying four feet below the surface would tremble and jerk as though it were in an earthquake. But once asleep I never awakened, even though they said later that bombers were over during the night.

Sgt. Carter gets up at 6 every morning, and the first thing he does is slip out and start the engines of his tank, which is dug in about 20 feet from his dugout. This is a daily practice just to make sure everything is in readiness for a sudden mission.

After breakfast, he showed me all through his tank. It’s so spotless you could eat off the floor. He is very proud of it, and had me sit in the driver’s seat and start the engines to hear them sing. I was proud too, just because he wanted me to.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 12, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
I suppose there is no custom in our Army more adhered to than the one of brewing some coffee or hot chocolate just before bedtime, whenever soldiers are in a place where it is possible.

It is especially the custom here on the Anzio beachhead, where nearby everybody is dug in and you can have a fire in places. The little Coleman stove is perfect for that.

And since we’ve mentioned it, real coffee is one gift the boys over here always like to receive, now that coffee rationing is ended back home.

One night I was bunking in a grove with a company of tank crewmen and they asked me along to one of their dugouts to have coffee with them. Others followed until there were 10 of us squatting on the floor of the little dugout.

This dugout was of the average size for two men, but three men were using it to sleep in. It was about shoulder-deep, and had straw on the floor, but of course no furniture at all.

The dugout was inhabited by Pvt. Ruben Cordes of Gasper, Alabama, and Pvt. Norman Cormier of Leicester, Massachusetts, both assistant tank drivers, and Pvt. Henry Sewell of Buechel, Kentucky, a tank gunner.

Company wit is whittler

Pvt. Cordes is the company wit. The boys kid him and he kids himself. When I met him just before dark, he was sitting on a kitchen chair tilted bac against a tree trunk in good Southern style, whittling silhouettes out of a piece of board.

He whittles all the time. The boys laughed and said:

You should have been here a few minutes ago. The captain was right here under the tree, chopping his own firewood, and Cordes just sat there and whittled and let him chop.

Cordes never can find anything he owns, especially his whittling knife. But now that they have moved into this dugout, he has a simple system. Whenever he loses anything, he just gets down on his knees and feels in the straw until eventually he finds it.

Most of the boys got packages from home the evening I was there. When the others saw that Cordes had a package, they started giving him cigarettes, holding lights for him, brushing his shoes and sticking lifesavers in his mouth. It turned out his box contained seven pairs of heavy wool socks which he had written home for, and he was going to keep them.

Cordes is also the pinup champ of the entire Army, as far as my investigations go. I know a bunch of Air Force mechanics who have 34 pinups in their room, but Cordes has 38 on the walls of his little dugout. “I’m glad we’re ahead of the Air Force,” one boy said.

In this feminine gallery, there is one pinup girl who me3ans more than the rest. That is Norman Cormier’s wife. Somebody did a pencil sketch of her at a party back home, and she sent it to him. It hangs on the place of honor among all his roommate’s unknown beauties.

The boys were all good-natured. When I was taking down their names and ranks, Cormier laughed when he gave his as private first class, and somebody said:

What are the people of Massachusetts going to think about you being only a pic?

They talk about ages

The other tank men in our little evening snack party were Sgt. Thomas Simpson, a tank commander, of Louisville, Kentucky; Sgt. Ralph Sharp, a tank driver from Strathmore, California; Pvt. Paul Cummins, assistant driver, from Sharonville, Ohio; Cpl. Max Hernandez from Delmar, California; SSgt. Michael Swartz, a farmer from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and may own dugout mate, Sgt. Bazzel Carter of Wallins Creek, Kentucky.

Cpl. Hernandez, a halftrack driver, describes himself as “one of those guys who wanted to see action, and now look at me.” And the others chimed in that now he was “one of those guys who wanted to see home.”

We sat there in the dugout for two or three hours, cooling our canteens with our hands and drinking sweet coffee and just gabbing. The boys pumped me about America and what I thought of the western invasion and what I knew about the authenticity of the latest crop of rumors, and how I found life on the beachhead.

Finally, it was getting late and Pvt. Cummins stretched and said, “I feel like I was 45 years old.” So I said, “Well, I feel like I was, too, and I damn near am.”

Then Sgt. Swarts asked how old I was, and I said 43, and he said he was 30, and that if he knew he’d live to be 43, he wouldn’t have a worry in the world. But I said:

Oh yes you would, you’d be just like I am, worrying whether you’d ever get to be 44 or not.

And Pvt. Cordes said he had nothing to worry about along those lines, since he didn’t have sense enough to get killed.

That’s the way the conversation goes around a dugout at nighttime – rumors, girls, hopes of home, jokes, little experiences, opinions of their officers, and an occasional offhand reference to what may happen to you in the end.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 13, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army Allied beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
One day I saw around with a tank crew, in emergency position just behind our frontline infantry. They had been there for eight days.

They hadn’t done anything. They were there just to help repel any attacks that might be coming. We keep lots of tanks located thus at all times.

This crew had its metal behemoth hidden around a small rise, half obscured by oak bushes. The men were cooking a pot of dried beans when I got there in mid-forenoon. They had coffee boiling as usual, and we drank coffee as we talked.

When tank men are out like this, 10-in-1 rations and K-rations are brought up to them at night by jeeps. They do all their own cooking, and sleep in the tank for safety. They aren’t supposed to smoke inside the tanks, but everybody does. Some crews even burn their little cookstoves right in the driver’s department.

A tank and the territory around it are a mess after five men have lived in it for eight days. The ground is strewn with boxes and tin cans and mess gear. The inside of the tank looks as though a hurricane had hit it.

This tank had everything in it from much-handled comic books to a pocket edition of the Bible. You found old socks, empty tobacco cans, half cups of cold coffee. The boys used the top of the tank for table and shelves, and this, too, was littered.

But all this disarray doesn’t keep it from being a good tank, because this crew holds the battalion record for firing its entire ammunition load in the shortest time.

Sleeping in tank not too comfortable

Sleeping five nights in a tank isn’t too comfortable, for space is very limited. They spread their blankets around the interior, sleep in their clothes, and nobody gets completely stretched out. The worst spot is around the gunner’s seat, where the man really has to sleep halfway sitting up, so they take turns sleeping in this uncomfortable spot.

After they’ve stayed at the front eight to 10 days, another company relieves them, and they move back a couple of miles, dig in, then clean up and relax for a few days.

These medium tanks carry a five-man crew. This one was commanded by Sgt. Speros Bakalos, a short, nice-looking ex-truck driver from Boston. Once, the tank he was serving in was hit, and his tank commander’s head shot clear off.

The driver is Sgt. Oscar Stewart of Bristol, Virginia. They call him “Pop,” because he is in his middle 30s. he used to work for the state highway department.

His assistant driver is Pvt. Donald Victorine of Crystal Lake, Illinois. He, incidentally, is a friend of Capt. Max Kuehnert, whom I knew in Tunisia and whose baby I had the honor of naming Sandra, though Lord knows how I ever thought of that one.

Toughest-looking soldier Ernie ever saw

The gunner is Cpl. Bud Carmichael of Monterey, California, and his assistant is Pvt. George Everhart from Thomasville, North Carolina.

Carmichael’s nickname is “Hoagy,” after the famous composer of Star Dust. This Carmichael used to be a pipefitter for the gas company in Monterey. When I saw him, he hadn’t shaved or washed for a week. He wore a brown muffler around his neck, a roll-stocking cap on his head, unbuckled overshoes, and was altogether the toughest-looking soldier I ever laid eyes on. But he belied his looks, for he was full of good nature and dry wit.

A few days later I saw the same gang again, and the other boys were saying that after I left that day they talked about me. I’d remarked upon meeting them that I’d gone to college with the real Hoagy Carmichael, so this “Hoagy” told the boys that if he’d been thinking fast, he would have replied:

That’s funny, Ernie. I don’t remember you. What seat did you sit in?

The men cook in a big aluminum pot they took out of an abandoned house, and on a huge iron skillet that Carmichael got in barter for the equivalent of $20. They call it their “$20 skillet,” and are careful of it, even washing it sometimes.

Carmichael has a photo on the barrel of his gun inside the turret – a dancing picture of Carmen Miranda and Cesar Romero. He says it gives him inspiration in battle, and then he grins until his eyes squint.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
One night I stayed in an officers’ dugout with Maj. Asbury Lee of Clearfield, Pennsylvania, and Capt. Charles H. Hollis of Clemson, South Carolina.

Maj. Lee is commander of a tank battalion. His nickname is “Az,” and his father-in-law owns the “Lee-Hoffman’s Famous Foods” restaurant in Cresson, Pennsylvania. Maj. Lee has a boy named Asbury Lee IV and a baby named Robert E. Lee.

Capt. Hollis is Maj. Lee’s executive, and was a good friend of the late correspondent Ben Robertson, who came from his hometown.

It was very dark in the dugout when Capt. Hollis got up to start the fire in the stove next morning. He fumbled around on the dirt floor for papers to use as kindling, threw in a handful, and finally got the fire going.

A little later he discovered that he had burned up three rolls of film that Maj. Lee had taken in the last few days. Later on, he discovered that he hadn’t burned up the film after all. Life at the front is very confusing.

After breakfast, Maj. Lee and I got in a jeep and drove a couple of miles up to where two companies of his tanks were bivouacked just back of the infantry.

On the way up we were sailing along across a rise when, “Bang,” an 88 shell landed 20 yards to the side of us. Aren’t you getting tired of hearing about shells landing 20 yards from me? In case you’re not, I sure am.

German fliers downed

Two minutes after this small episode we heard noises in the sky and looked up, and here came two planes falling earthward with smoke swirling behind them. Both hit just over the rise from us, close together and only a few seconds apart.

Only one parachute came down. It took it a long time, and the aviator lay very still when he hit the earth. Our medics ran out with a stretcher and got him. He was a German. A 20mm bullet had hit him from behind and lodged in his stomach. An ambulance came and took him away.

The boys cut up his parachute to make scarves, and cut one off for me. But I told them I already had two – one American and one German – and to give it to somebody else.

Hats off to infantry

After this exciting beginning of a new day, I went around picking up tank lore.

I found that tankers, like everybody else, take their hats off to the infantry.

The average doughfoot or airman says you’d never get him shut up in a tank. Once in a while you do get a tankman who has a feeling of claustrophobia about being cooped up in there, but it’s very seldom.

The boys say that more than half of them get safely out of damaged tanks, even the ones that catch fire. They tell funny stories about how four and five men come out of a burning tank all at once, when it isn’t actually possible for more than two to get through the door at the same time.

They hate snipers worse than anything else. That is because visibility is pretty poor in a tank and the commander usually rides with his door open and his head sticking out. Unseen snipers are always shooting at them.

Improvements on tanks

The boys showed me all the little improvements that have come out on recent tanks. And they also wondered why tank designers haven’t thought of some of the simplest things for making tank life more practical – such as putting racks for water cans on the rear, and a bracket where you could tie your bedding roll.

The men have welded on these necessary racks for their gear.

An armored unit’s fighting usually comes in spurts, with long intervals between.

When the tank boys are in a lull, they are used for emergency jobs. This is very unusual, but here on the beachhead everybody has to do a little of everything.

Nearly every day the men of the tank crews back in bivouac have a detail starting just at dawn. They carry mines and barbed wire up to the front for the engineers to put in place. They pack the stuff on their backs, and they don’t like it, but they do it without grumbling.