Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
The other day Wick Fowler, war correspondent of The Dallas News, and I were walking along the road in Nettuno. I saw a jeep coming with a one-star plate on the front bumper, indicating that the occupant was a brigadier general. I peered intently, trying to make out who the general was.

While I was absorbed in this endeavor, the jeep drew abreast and the general suddenly saluted us. I don’t know why he saluted – maybe he thought I was the Secretary of War. At any rate I was so startled, and so unaccustomed to being saluted by generals, that I fumbled a second and then returned the salute with my left hand.

Wick says he’ll be glad to appear at my court-martial and put in a plea of insanity for me. On the other hand, I did try, while Wick never raised an arm. So, I don’t think even a plea of insanity will save him. Wick was a nice fellow, too.

We still don’t know, incidentally, who the general was.

One in ten billion

You’ve read about the little Cub planes that fly slowly around over the frontlines, doing artillery spotting for us. They’re a wonderful little branch of the service, and the risks they take are tremendous.

The Germans try to shoot them down with ack-ack, and occasionally a German fighter will sneak in and take a pass at them. But the Cub is so slow that the fighters usually overshoot, and the Cub can drop down and land immediately.

The saddest story I’ve ever heard about a Cub happened here on the 5th Army beachhead. A “Long Tom” – or 155 rifle – was the unwitting villain in this case.

The certain gun fired only one shell that entire day – but that one shell, with all the sky to travel in, made a direct hit on one of our Cubs in the air and blew it to smithereens. It was one of those incredible one-in-ten-billion possibilities, but it happened.

Not nervous – much

In my column the other day about our experience when the war correspondents’ villa was bombed, I said that after it was over, I didn’t feel shaky or nervous.

Since then, little memories of the bombing have gradually come back into my consciousness. I recall now that I went to take my pocket comb out of my shirt pocket to comb my hair, but instead actually took my handkerchief out of my hip pocket and started combing my hair with the handkerchief.

And at noon I realized I had smoked a whole pack of cigarettes since 7:30 a.m.

Me nervous? Why, I should say not.

The day after the bombing, I got a little package of chewing gum and lifesavers and whatnot. I tore the return address off the package and put it on my table in order to write a note of thanks to the sender.

The package and address were both lost in the bombing. All I remember is that it was from Spencer, Iowa. So, will whoever sent it please accept my thanks?

Sergeant is mourned

I’ve spoken of soldiers’ wartime pets so many times that you’re probably bored with the subject. But here’s one more.

The headquarters of a certain tank regiment where I have many friends had a beautiful police dog named “Sergeant.” He belonged to everybody, was a lovable dog, liked to go through a whole repertoire of tricks, and was almost human in his sensitiveness.

He had even become plane-raid conscious, and when he heard planes in the sky would run and get in his own private foxhole – or any foxhole, if he were away from home.

“Sergeant” was dutifully in his foxhole yesterday when he died. Shrapnel from an airburst got him. He wasn’t killed instantly, and they had to destroy him.

The outfit lost two officers, four men and a dog in that raid. It is not belittling the men who died to say that “Sergeant’s” death shared a high place in the grief of those who were left.

[NormanStewart]

@NormanStewart

“Sergeant” was dutifully in his foxhole yesterday when he died. Shrapnel from an airburst got him. He wasn’t killed instantly, and they had to destroy him.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Here on the Anzio beachhead, nobody is immune.

It’s not only a standing joke, but a standing fact, that a lot of frontline people would not voluntarily come back into the hot Anzio-Nettuno area for a small fortune.

People whose jobs through all the wars of history have been safe ones up here are as vulnerable as the fighting man. Bakers and typewriter repairmen and clerks are not absolved from shells and bombs. Table waiters are in the same boat.

When I’m back in the harbor area writing, I eat at a mess for staff officers. Twice within 10 days, big shells have demolished buildings on either side of this mess.

The four boys who serve us here asked if I would mention them in the paper. I said I certainly would, not only because they’re doing a dangerous job but also because they are four of the most courteous and best-dispositioned men I’ve ever met. They are:

Cpl. Harold Gibson of Booth Bay Harbor, Maine; Pvt. Lloyd Farlee of Pierce, Nebraska; Pvt. Herb Wullschleger of Wichita, Kansas, and Pvt. Charles Roderick of Salem, Massachusetts.

The girl he left behind

Here is a sad story. It concerns a tank driver named Cpl. Donald Vore, a farm boy from Auxvasse, Missouri.

The corporal had a girl back home he was crazy about. After he came to Italy, she sent a beautiful, new, big photograph of herself. Like more tankmen, he carried it with him in his tank.

The other day, a shell hit the tank. It caught fire, and the whole crew piled out and ran as far as they could. Cpl. Vore had gone a little way when he suddenly stopped, turned, and went dashing back to the tank.

Flames were shooting out of it, and its heavy ammunition was beginning to go off. But he went right into the flaming tank, disappeared a moment, and came climbing out – with his girl’s picture safely in his hand.

A few hours later, the crew came trudging back to home base. Mail had arrived during their absence. There was a letter for Cpl. Vore from his girl. He tore it open. The letter was merely to tell him she had married somebody else.

They said that if it hadn’t been such a long walk back, and he hadn’t been so tired. Cpl. Vore would have returned to his tank and deposited the picture in the flames.

About a year ago, I wrote an item about the numerous uses we had found for the brushless shaving cream issued to frontline troops.

Its virtues are legion. It is perfect for sun and windburn, nurses shampoo their hair in it, it soothes fleabites and softens chapped hands and cracked fingers. And now the soldiers have discovered that if they’ll massage their feet with it once a day, it goes a long way toward preventing the dreaded trench foot.

It’s a shame somebody doesn’t shave with it once in a while.

The relaxation of death

Some soldiers were telling me the other day about running onto another soldier stretched out in the back seat of a jeep, way up front, almost in No-Man’s-Land.

His helmet was down over his eyes, and he had a half-smoked cigar in his mouth. They were in dangerous territory, and they went to take a closer look at a soldier so nonchalant.

He was dead. A sniper had shot him through the back of the helmet. He was just lying there, looking perfectly relaxed, the cigar still in his mouth. He had been dead two days.

The other day, I ran onto Maj. Henry Frankel of Brooklyn.

I’ve been crossing his trail ever since July of 1942 in Ireland, and every time I see him, he has gone up a notch in rank. When I first knew him, he was a lieutenant.

Maj. Frankel speaks about eight languages, but as far as I can see, a man with his luck doesn’t need to speak anything. Listen to this –

The other day, he was digging a dugout in the backyard of a place he had picked out for billeting, and he dug up a case and a half of fine cognac, numerous bottles of Benedictine, anisette and old wines, a box of silverware, and a gallon of olive oil.

Being an honest man, Maj. Frankel hunted up the Italian owner who had buried it, and gave him back everything except the 18 bottles of cognac. These he kept as a reminder of his own meticulous honesty, and shared them with other patched and deserving Americans.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
The real drama of this Anzio beachhead campaign is the supply system. I’d almost like to write that sentence twice – to make sure you get it. The supplying of this 5th Army beachhead has been one of the superlative chapters of our Mediterranean war.

The beachhead is really like a little island. Everything has to come by water. Without a steady flow of food and ammunition, the beachhead would perish.

All this concentration of shelling and bombing against the Anzio-Nettuno area is for the purpose of hindering out movement of supplies. They have hindered it some. I can’t give you the percentage, but you’d be surprised how low it really is. They certainly haven’t hindered us enough. For the supplies keep coming, and the stockpiles have now grown so great and so numerous that we’ve almost run out of room for establishing new dumps.

Many branches of the service deserve credit for the supply miracle – the Navy, the Merchant Marine, the Combat Engineers, the Quartermaster Corps.

And again, let me remind you that the British are always there, too. You don’t hear much about them from me, because my job is to write about the Americans. But in all our Allied work down here the British do their part too (and in case of shipping to Anzio, the Greeks and Poles as well).

American Army Engineers are in command of all port facilities at the beachhead.

Much wreckage at Anzio

The city of Anzio is a mess today. Just off the waterfront, there is absolutely nothing but wreckage. And the wreckage grows day by day under German shelling and bombing. We call Anzio a “potential Bizerte,” for soon it may be in as complete a state of wreckage as was that thoroughly wrecked city in Tunisia.

Yet our soldiers and sailors continue to live and work in Anzio. There isn’t a man in town who hasn’t had dozens of “experiences.” If you try to tell a bomb story, anybody in Anzio can top it. Casualties occur daily. But the men go on and on.

The American soldier’s irrepressible sense of humor still displays itself in Anzio. Down on the dock is a big, boxlike cart in which they pick up slop buckets and trash that gets in the way on the dock front.

The cart is freshly painted snow-white, and printed in neat blue letters on each side is “Anzio Harbor Department of Sanitation.” You’d have to see the bedlam of wreckage to get the full irony of the “Sanitation” part.

At a corner in Anzio some soldiers have set up a broken statue of a woman (the place is lousy with statues), and put a sign under it saying, “Anzio Annie.” If somebody would write a poem about her, she might become as famous as “Dirty Gertie.”

I noticed another sign – this one not funny – along the waterfront. This sign said, “No Parking – For Ambulances Only.”

‘Anzio anxiety’ abounds

Everybody jokes about the perilous life in the Anzio-Nettuno area. I’ve been with it long enough myself to appreciate the humor of nervousness. Some people have had to leave because of nerves, and those who stay like to make fun of their own shakes.

The jitters are known as “Anzio anxiety” and “Nettuno neurosis.” A lieutenant will hold out his hand and purposely make it tremble, and say, “See, I’m not nervous.”

Then there is “Anzio foot,” where your feet are pointing in one direction and your face in another – the position sometimes momentarily assumed when you’re going somewhere and the scream of a shell suddenly turns you on another cruise.

Also, we have the “Anzio walk,” a new dance in which the performer jumps, jerks, cowers, cringes and twitches his head this way and that, something halfway between the process of dodging shells and just going plain nuts.

You wouldn’t imagine people could joke about the proximity of death; but you sometimes have to joke about it – or else.

And through all this, men keep working and supplies keep coming in. I can’t, of course, tell you in figures the total of this magnificent job they’ve done.

But I can say that today this beachhead is receiving nine times as much supplies daily as they figured in the beginning was possible. It has been a thrilling privilege to be here and see them do it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
The mechanics of supplying the 5th Army forces on the Anzio beachhead are undeniably beautiful in execution.

We have taken a port full of sunken ships and jumbled streets and wrecked buildings and cleared through paths through it for the movement of our ships and vehicles.

Once our supplies reach the vicinity of beachhead waters, they are under shellfire and bombing raids that may come any moment of the day or night. In addition, German E-boats and destroyers lurk on the edge of our concentration of ships, and naval forces must be always on the lookout for them.

Our supplies are unloaded in many ways. Some few ships can go right up to a dock. Others go to nearby beaches. The bigger freight ships have to lie off the harbor and be unloaded into smaller boats which in turn unload onto the docks or beaches.

All day long the waters in a great semicircle around Anzio, reaching to the horizon, are churned by big and little ships moving constantly back and forth. It resembles the hustle and bustle of New York Harbor.

On the far edges lie cruisers and other battle craft. In the vicinity there is always a white hospital ship to evacuate our wounded and sick from the beachhead.

Lay smokescreens at dusk

Along toward dusk small, fast craft shoot in and out of the great flock of ships, laying smokescreens, while smoke pots ashore put out their blinding cloud of fog.

At night when the raiders come over a mighty bedlam of ack-ack crushes all thought on shore and far out to sea as the ships themselves let go at the groan and grind of German motors in the sky.

Sometimes the raiders drop flares, and then the universe is lighted with a glare more cruel and penetrating than the brightest day, and every human on the beachhead feels that the Germans are looking down at him individually with their evil eyes.

When the moon is full, it throws its swath of gold across the lovely Mediterranean, and sometimes the nights are so calm and moon-tinged and gentle that you cannot remember or believe that the purpose of everything around you is death.

When there is no moon, it is so black you have to grope your way about, and even the ominous split-second flashes from our own big guns do not help you to see.

Sometimes the shelling and the raiding are furious and frenzied. At other times hour after quiet hour goes by without a single crack of an exploding shell. But always the possibility and the anticipation are there.

All these things you can see from the window of the house where we live. There are times when you can stand with your elbows on the windowsill and your chin in your hand, and see right before you a battlefield in action in the three dimensions of land, sea and air, all so spectacular that even Hollywood might well bow in deference to a drama beyond its own powers of creation.

The streets and roads around Anzio are under a steady thundering flow of heavy war traffic. The movement is endlessly fascinating. One day I stood by the road just to watch for a while, and of the first 12 vehicles that passed, each was something different.

There was a tank, and a great machine shop on heavy tractor treads that shook the earth as it passed, and a jeep of a one-star general, and a “duck,” and a high-wheeled British truck, and a famous American six-by-six, and a prime mover trundling the great “Long Tom” gun with its slim, graceful barrel pointing rearward.

Military police highball traffic

Then came a command car, and a stubby new gun covered with canvas, on four rubber-tired wheels, and an ambulance, and a crew of wire stringers, and a weapon carrier. Then a big self-propelled gun on tractor treads, and finally another “duck” to start the heterogeneous cycle over again.

Everywhere there is activity. Soldier-workmen saw down trees and cut down concrete lampposts so that trucks may use the sidewalks of the narrow streets. Huge shovels mounted on truck chassis stand amid the wreckage or buildings scooping up brick and stone to be hauled away in trucks for repairing damaged roads.

Allied military police stand on every corner and crossroad to highball traffic on through, and, believe me, it’s highballed.

Everything moves with a great urgency, a great vitality. The less hesitation the better in this land where shells whistle and groan. There is little hesitation anywhere around Anzio.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 20, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Probably the two outstanding features of our handling of supplies on this 5th Army beachhead have been the “duck,” or amphibious truck, and our system of carrying regular trucks fully loaded aboard many ships so they can be driven right off when they reach here.

Without the “ducks,” some of our invasion landings would have been pretty close to impossible. It is a leading lady in this drama up here.

All day long you see a thin, black line of tiny boats moving back and forth between shore and ships at anchor a mile or two out. They remind you of ants at work. These are “ducks,” going constantly back and forth all the time, day and night. There are hundreds of them.

One day I stood on the beach and hooked a ride on one of them. A duck has no crew except the driver. My driver was Pvt. Paul Schneider of Seattle. He is only 22, yet from appearances he could have been any age up to 40. His black whiskers were caked with dust, he wore green celluloid sunglasses, and all his upper front teeth were out, giving him a half-childish, half-ancient look.

His teeth were knocked out in an auto wreck before he left the States, and he has never been still long enough since to get a plate made. I asked him if he didn’t have trouble eating, and he said:

No, I get along fine. There’s nothing to chew in C-rations anyway.

As soon as we drove down into the war and got our truck officially turned into a boat in introduced myself, and Pvt. Schneider said:

Oh yes, I just finished reading your book. It was all right.

Man for Ernie’s money

From that moment, Pvt. Schneider was, for my money, the champion

Once in the water, Pvt. Schneider shifted a few gears and pulled a lever to start a bilge pump. The engine made a terrific clatter, and we could hardly hear each other.

We had gone only a little way when Pvt. Schneider yelled, “Would you like to drive it?” I said, “Sure.” So, he took his foot off the throttle and we traded seats.

Driving a duck is funny. You turn the wheel, and about 15 seconds later you get the reaction to it. You anticipate the waves, and turn toward them a little.

I must admit that I felt very big and important, driving a rust and battered-up old duck out through the shell-strewn waters of Anzio after another load of the precious supplies that keep everything going on this tiny cameo of a beachhead.

Ducks go day and night

Some forms of unloading stop at night, but the ducks work right on through. Each driver does a 12-hour shift; but he does get some rest at the dump out in the country while he waits to be unloaded.

Pvt. Schneider says their big worry is not being shelled, but being run down at night by the bigger and faster ships known as LCTs. We have lost a few ducks that way.

The ducks take an awful beating being slammed up against the sides of ships by the waves while waiting for winches to swing netloads of stuff down into them. Sometimes the swinging load hits the driver on the head.

On our trip we carried back bunches of 20mm machine-gun ammunition.

The tires don’t last long on a duck. They are soft, for ease in climbing out onto the beaches, and won’t take too much running around on land.

Another trouble is that salt water gets in the brakes. Every now and then, you hear a story of a wreck caused by the brakes going out. But on the whole the duck is almost as wonderful in this war as the jeep.

Pvt. Schneider has worn out two ducks and is on his third one. He has had some close shaves, but has never been hit. When you go a long time, as he has done, with fire all around you and you never get hit, you sometimes build up a feeling of infallibility about yourself, and you don’t worry too much about what might happen.

Pvt. Schneider was just out of high school when he went into the Army, via the National Guard. His wife works in a defense plant at Seattle. He has been through the invasions of Sicily, Salerno and Anzio.

He says he would just as soon drive a duck as do anything else. This is exactly the fine philosophy you’d expect of a man who reads good books.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Lt. Eugene Tousineau of Detroit is the official greeter for the new Anzio Chamber of Commerce. He visits every ship as soon as it drops anchor in Anzio waters, and “extends the key to the city.” Most of his guests would prefer being ridden out of town on a rail.

He’s the guy who checks the cargo of every incoming ship and checks daily on the progress and the quality of their unloading.

All day long he rides around in an LCVP (EDITOR’S NOTE: Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) climbing rope ladders up the sides of ships, snaking back down on single ropes – just holding on with his hands while his bouncing steel boat below tries to crush him. “I’ve got $10,000 insurance,” he laughs.

All day he is out there on the water with shells speckling the whole area. I wouldn’t have his job for a million dollars. But he enjoys it.

I rode around with him one day seeing how the ships unload, seeing how it feels to be sitting there at anchor aboard a ship full of explosives within range of enemy artillery. It doesn’t feel too good.

Lt. Tousineau has been on this job for six weeks. He is an ebullient fellow who insists on enjoying whatever he does, regardless.

Rank means nothing

He goes aboard ships and serves notice to ship’s officers. He bawls out some people even though he’s only a second lieutenant, and commiserates with others who have been bawled out by somebody that matters.

If things aren’t going well enough on a certain ship, he’ll say to the Army officer in charge, “No excuse for this, sir,” and never bat an eye. But that’s the way wars are won.

Riding around with us that day was Lt. John Coyle of Philadelphia, who is learning the game. Our supply shipping has become so thick that the checking job is too much for one man, so the two will divide it between them in the future.

Lt. Tousineau has had dozens of Hairbreadth Harry escapes. Shells explode in the water, bombs drop beside his house at night. He has even climbed off a ship just a few minutes before it was hit.

Before the war, Lt. Tousineau was a nightclub manager, a sandhog and numerous other things. He is tall and dark, has a very long and narrow face and a little pencil mustache, and looks like the Anzio edition of Cesar Romero.

He calls himself the “bad boy” of his regiment. “I get a commendation one day and a reprimand the next,” he says. “The colonel will commend me for good work under dangerous conditions and then I’ll go to Naples and get ticketed for having my hands in my pockets.” But that’s the Army, and Lt. Tousineau can take it.

Crew not nautical

The lieutenant has a crew of four soldiers who run his boat. The former crew, according to the lieutenant, got “Anzio anxiety” and took off, so he picked his own men.

Volunteers for the boat job were called for. Nobody volunteered. So, four men were assigned. Now that they’ve got the hang of it, everybody else in the company is mad at himself for not volunteering, for it’s a soft job. All they do all day long is ride around in this boat and dodge a shell now and then.

None of them knew anything about boats before Anzio. They learned by trying. Pvt. James Davis, a farm boy from Covert, Michigan, said:

We didn’t know nothin’ from sour apples about a boat, but we went along.

Later, as we lay alongside a British ship, I heard Pvt. Davis say, “Let’s go ashore onto that boat.” Such nautical sabotage as that would turn Adm. Dewey over in his grave.

When these soldiers first started learning how to run a boat, they sometimes got seasick, but they don’t anymore. And they have become fairly indifferent to shells too.

They don’t even wear their steel helmets half the time. When shells begin coming too close, Pvt. Davis will remark:

For a month I’ve been telling that fellow to take a furlough and go to Rome and have himself a time. But he doesn’t seem to get my message.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
The greatest apprehension I’ve found in the Anzio-Nettuno area is not among the men on shore who have been under it constantly for weeks, but among the crews of ships that sit out in the Mediterranean, unloading.

It takes several days to unload a big freighter, and during all that time they are subject to shelling from land and air raids from the sky. Their situation, I’ll admit, is not an enviable one.

It’s true that few of them get hit, considering the amount of shooting the Germans do out there. Yet there is always the possibility. And what gives them the creeps is when they’re sitting on a ship full of ammunition or high explosive.

The crews of these big freighters are members of the Merchant Marine. They merely operate the ship. They don’t do the stevedoring work of unloading. That’s done by soldiers.

They have a good system for this. At Naples, a whole company of port-battalion soldiers is put on each ship just before it sails. They make the trip up and back with the vessel, do the unloading at Anzio, and when they return to Naples, they go back to their regular dock jobs there. A different company goes aboard for the next trip.

New system promotes efficiency

The result is that each one-time unloading crew is so anxious to get unloading and get out of Anzio that everybody works with a vim and the material flies.

Up until a few weeks ago, all unloading was done by port-battalion groups based at Anzio. As soon as the crew finished one ship, it would have to go to work on another. There wasn’t any end to it. The boys just felt they couldn’t win. Since the new system went into effect, efficiency has shot up like a rocket.

The bigger ships are unloaded just as they would be at a dock, with winches hoisting out big netfuls of cargo from the deep holds and swinging them over the sides and letting them down – not onto a dock, however, but into flat-bottomed LCTs which carry the stuff to the beaches.

Each hold has a dozen or more men working down below, plus the winch crews and signalmen. They are all soldiers. They work in 12-hour shifts, but they get intervals of rest.

I was aboard one Liberty ship about 10:00 a.m. all five hatches were bringing up stuff. You could lean over and watch the men down below piling up ration boxes. And on the deck immediately below us you could see scores of other soldiers trying to sleep, the deafening noise of the winches making no difference to them. They were the night shift. They slept on folding cots between blankets, with their clothes on.

One crew boss was Sgt. Sam Lynch of Wilmington, Delaware. He is a veteran soldier, having served four months in the Arctic and 14 months on this side. Before the war, he was a fireman on the Pennsylvania Railroad and later a railway mail clerk. He is married and has one child.

Feel defenseless on ship

I asked him how he liked coming up to Anzio on a ship and he said he didn’t like it any too well. He said:

The trouble is that you feel so darned defenseless. If you could just man a gun and shoot back, it wouldn’t be so bad.

But the Navy operates the gun crews aboard all these freight ships and the soldiers can only sit there idle and sweat it out when bombs or shells start flying.

You should see them work when a ship is about finished and it looks as though they might not get through in time to catch the next convoy.

They laugh and tell a story about one ship which finished 45 minutes after the convoy started. The skipper pulled anchor and started chasing the convoy. The Navy radioed him orders to stop and wait. But this fellow kept right on going. He simply figured he’d rather face disciplinary action at Naples than German bombers for one more night at Anzio.

The Navy’s premise was that he was in greater danger from German subs and E-boats while running alone after the convoy than he would be from another night at Anzio. They have it all figured out by percentages, and they are right.

But this fellow was lucky and caught up with the convoy. I never heard what his supporters did when he got there, but I bet they didn’t invite him out for a round of golf.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Once on shore, our supplies for the Anzio beachhead are taken over by the Quartermaster Corps (food and clothing) and the Ordnance Department (ammunition).

The Quartermaster Corps traditionally is seldom in great danger. Up here on the beachhead they are blowing that tradition all to hell.

The Quartermaster Corps has been under fire ever since the beachhead was established, and still is. Its casualties from enemy action have been relatively high.

Around 70% of the Quartermaster troops on the beachhead are colored boys. They help unload ships right at the dock. They drive trucks. They man the supply dumps. Hardly a day goes by without casualties among then. But they take this bombing and shelling bravely. They make an awful lot of funny remarks about it, but they take it.

We drove out to one of the ration dumps where wooden boxes of rations are stacked head-high in piles for hundreds of yards, as in a lumber yard. Trucks from the waterfront add continually to the stock, other trucks from the various outfits continually haul it away.

Our ration dumps are not at all immune from shellfire. This single one has had more than 100 shells in it. Many of the soldier-workmen have been killed or wounded.

Ration dumps seldom burn

Ration dumps seldom burn, because you can’t burn C-rations. But early in the beachhead’s existence, they hit a dump of cigarettes and millions of them went up in smoke.

Our local dumps of ammunition, food, and equipment of a thousand kinds are now so numerous that a German artilleryman could shut his eyes and fire in our general direction and be almost bound to hit something.

Our dumps do get hit; but the fires are put out quickly, the losses are immediately replaced, and the reserve grows bigger and bigger.

The boss of the Quartermaster troops is a former newspaperman – Lt. Col. Cornelius Holcomb of Seattle. He worked on The Seattle Times for 12 years before going into the Army. He is a heavily built, smiling, fast-talking, cigar-smoking man who takes terrific pride in the job his colored boys have done. He said there’s one thing about having colored troops – you always eat like a king. If you need a cook, you just say, “Company, halt! Any cooks in this outfit?” And then pick out whoever looks best.

The colonel himself has had many close squeaks up here. Just before I saw him, a bomb had landed outside his bivouac door. It blew in one wall, and hurt several men.

Another time he was standing in a doorway on the Anzio waterfront talking to a lieutenant. Stone steps led from the doorway down into a basement behind him.

Bomb hits in front of door

As they talked, the colonel heard a bomb whistle. He dropped down on the steps and yelled to the lieutenant, “Hit the deck!”

The bomb hit smack in front of the door and the lieutenant came tumbling down on top of them. “Are you hurt?” Col. Holcomb asked. The lieutenant didn’t answer. Holcomb nosed back to see what was the matter. The lieutenant’s head was lying over in a corner.

Soon a medical man came and asked the blood-covered colonel if he was hurt. Col. Holcomb said no. “Are you sure?” the doctor asked. “I don’t think I am,” the colonel said.

“Well, you better drink this anyway,” the doctor said. And poured him a water glass full of rum which had him in the clouds all day.

In the Quartermaster Corps, they’ve begun a system of sending the key man away after about six weeks on the beachhead and giving them a week’s rest at some nice place like Sorrento.

A man who goes day and night on an urgent job under the constant strain of danger finally begins to feel a little punchy or “slug-butt,” as the saying goes. In other words, he has the beginnings of “Anzio Anxiety,” without even knowing it.

But after a week’s rest, he comes back to the job in high gear, full of good spirits, and big and brave. It’s too bad all forms of war can’t be fought that way.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 25, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
In addition to its regular job of furnishing food and clothing to the troops, the Quartermaster Corps of the 5th Army beachhead runs the bakery, a laundry for the hospitals, a big salvage depot of old equipment, and the military cemetery.

Hospital pillows and sheets are the only laundry done on the beachhead by the Army. Everything else the individual soldiers either wash themselves or hire Italian farm women to do. People like me just go dirty and enjoy it.

The Army laundry is on several big mobile trucks hidden under the sharp slope of a low hill. They are so well camouflaged that a photographer who went out to take some pictures came away without any – he said the pictures wouldn’t show anything.

This laundry can turn out 3,000 pieces in 10 hours of work. About 80 men are in the laundry platoon. They are dug in and live fairly nicely.

Laundrymen have been killed in other campaigns, but so far, they’ve escaped up here. Their worst disaster was that the little shower-bath building they built for themselves has been destroyed three times by “ducks” which got out of control when their brakes failed and came plunging over the bluff.

‘Ducks’ have names

Continuing with “ducks” for a moment, in one company all these amphibian trucks have been given names. The men have stenciled the names on the sides in big white letters, and every name starts with “A.”

There are such names as Avalon and Ark Royal. Some bitter soul named his duck Atabrine, and an even bitterer one called his Assinine - misspelling the word, with two s’s, just to rub it in.

Our salvage dump is a touching place. Every day five or six truckloads of assorted personal stuff are dumped on the ground in an open space near town. It is mostly the clothing of soldiers who have been killed or wounded. It is mud-caked and often bloody.

Negro soldiers sort it out and classify it for cleaning. They poke through the great heap, picking out shoes of the same size to put together, picking out knives and forks and leggings and underwear and cans of C ration and goggles and canteens and sorting them into different piles.

Everything that can be used again is returned to the issue bins as it is or sent to Naples for repair.

They find many odd things in the pockets of the discarded clothing. And they have to watch out, for pockets sometimes carry hand grenades.

You feel sad and tightlipped when you look closely through the great pile. Inanimate things can sometimes speak so forcefully – a helmet with a bullet hole in the front, one overshoe all ripped with shrapnel, a portable typewriter pitifully and irreparably smashed, a pair of muddy pants, bloody and with one leg gone.

Cemetery is neat – and big

The cemetery is neat and its rows of wooden crosses are very white – and it is very big. All the American dead of the beachhead are buried in one cemetery.

Trucks bring the bodies in daily. Italian civilians and American soldiers dig the graves. They try to keep ahead by 50 graves or so. Only once or twice have they been swamped. Each man is buried in a white mattress cover.

The graves are five feet deep and close together. A little separate section is for the Germans, and there are more than 300 in it. We have only a few American dead who are unidentified. Meticulous records are kept on everything.

They had to hunt quite a while to find a knoll high enough on this Anzio beachhead so that they wouldn’t hit water five feet down. The men who keep the graves live beneath ground themselves, in nearby dugouts.

Even the dead are not safe on the beachhead, nor the living who care for the dead. Many times, German shells have landed in the cemetery. Men have been wounded as they dug graves. Once a body was uprooted and had to be reburied.

The inevitable pet dog barks and scampers around the area, not realizing where he is. The soldiers say at times he has kept them from going nuts.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 26, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
Taking over a wrecked port and making it work is, like everything in war, first of all a matter of thorough organization.

At Anzio, the British Navy and the American Army have the thing organized down to a “t.” Soldier executives and clerks, sitting at regular desks in regular offices, do paperwork and make telephone calls and keep charts and make decisions just as they would in a shipping office in New York.

Seldom do three hours pass without shells or bombs shaking the town around then, and everywhere there is wreckage. Yet they have fixed up their offices and quarters in a fairly business-as-usual way.

When I walked into the Port Commander’s Office, who should it be but the same man I rode into Licata with on the morning of D-Day of the invasion of Sicily last July. He was a major then, but is now Lt. Col. Charles Monnier of Dixon and Tremont, Illinois. As an engineer, he has been helping capture ports and then turning them from chaos into usefulness ever since he hit Africa a year and a half ago.

In their wisdom built up through actual practice, such men as Col. Monnier know exactly what to look for, what to do and how to do it when they come in to work on the wreckage of a place like Anzio.

There is no guesswork about their progress. On the walls of the shipping room are big blackboards and charts and graphs. Hour by hour the total of the day’s supplies brought ashore is chalked up on the blackboard.

The big graph is brought up to date every evening. You can look back over it, and translate the activities of the past three months day by day, and see what happened and why.

Fuel dump innovation

Up here the Quartermaster Corps, which handles supplies after they are put ashore, has had to improvise and innovate. One of their main problems is how to keep gasoline fires from spreading when shells hit the dumps, which they do constantly.

So, Lt. Col. Cornelius Holcomb of Seattle had a brain throb. He had the gasoline dumps broken up into small caches, each bunch about as big as a room and about two cans high.

Then he had bulldozers dig up a thick-walled ditch around every cache. This shuts off the air that seeps in from the bottom and makes gasoline fires so bad. Since then they’ve had dozens of hits, but seldom a fire.

I was riding through the wreckage of Anzio and saw a big bulldozer in a vacant lot. On it was the name “Ernie,” spelled out in big blue metal letters wired to the radiator. So, I stopped to look into this phenomenon. The displayer of this proud name was Pvt. Ernie Dygert of Red Lodge, Montana. His father owns a big ranch there.

Young Dygert has driven trucks, ducks and bulldozers in the Army. His main job here is filling up shell craters. He doesn’t seem to mind living in Anzio (the same can’t be said for his namesake).

It’s the spirit that counts

Maj. John C. Strickland of Oklahoma City is the area quartermaster. On his desk is a unique paperweight – a small can of Vienna sausage.

His wife sent it to him. He keeps it as an ironic souvenir. He wrote her that as an Army quartermaster he handles millions of cans of it, and eats it in various forms a dozen times a week, but thanks anyway.

You’ve never seen a shell hit the water? Well, a dud makes a little white splash only a few feet high. A medium-sized shell makes a waterspout about a hundred feet high.

And one of the big shells makes a white geyser a couple of hundred feet in the air. A tall, thin, beautiful thing, like a real geyser, and out from it a quarter of a mile go little corollary white splashes as shrapnel gouges the surface.

Sometimes you hear the shell whine, see the geyser, hear the explosion and feel the concussion, all at once. That’s when they’re landing only 50 yards or so from you. And you’d just as soon they wouldn’t.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 27, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
When the time finally came for me to leave the Anzio beachhead, I had a choice of coming out by airplane, by LST ship or by hospital ship. I chose the hospital ship, because I’d never been on one.

At the beachhead, the hospital ships lie two or three miles out while loading. Ambulances bring patients from the tent hospitals to the waterfront. There they are loaded on the small, flat-decked LCTs, which have canvas over the tops to keep off rain.

Usually more than half the men in each load are walking cases. They sit or stand at one end of the deck, while the litter cases lie in rows on the other. I went out to the hospital ship with such a load of wounded.

Once out there, we had to lie off and wait for an hour or so while previous LCTs finished unloading their wounded. As we lay there, the officers in charge decided to transfer the walking wounded off another LCT onto ours. So, it drew alongside, threw over a line, and the two ships came against each other. The slightly wounded and sick men jumped across whenever the ships hit together.

A heavy swell was running and the ships would draw a few feet apart and then come together with a terrific bang. It was punishing to the wounded men. I stood among them, and every time we’d hit, they would shut their eyes and clench their teeth.

Pounding worse than shells

One mature man, all encased in a cast, looked at me pleadingly and said:

Don’t those blankety-blank so-and-sos know there are men here who are badly hurt?

Occasionally shells screamed across the town and exploded in the water in our vicinity. The wounded men didn’t cringe or pay any attention to this near danger, but the pounding of the ships together made them wild.

Once alongside the big white hospital ship, the wounded are hoisted by slings, just as you’d hoist cargo. A sling is a wooden, boxlike affair which holds two litters on the bottom and two on top. Up they go as the winches grind. Litter bearers wait on deck to carry them to their wards. The merchant seamen also pitch in and help carry.

Each badly wounded man carries his own X-ray negative with him in a big brown envelope. As one load was being hoisted, the breeze tore an envelope out of a wounded man’s hand and it went fluttering through the air. Immediately a cry went up, “Grab that X-ray, somebody.” Fortunately, it came down on the deck of the smaller ship below and was rescued.

It took about four hours to load the more than 500 wounded and sick men aboard our ship. As soon as it was finished, we pulled anchor and sailed. Hospital ships, like other ships, prefer to sit in the waters of Anzio just as short a time as possible.

Hospital ships have luxuries

Our hospital ships run up to Anzio frequently, because we want to keep our hospitals there free for any sudden flood of new patients. Also, being in a hospital on the beachhead isn’t any too safe.

The hospital ships are mostly former luxury liners. Right now, most of those here are British, but the one I came on was American.

Its officers and crew are all merchant seamen. Its medical staff is all Army – 10 doctors, 33 nurses and about 80 enlisted men. Maj. Theodore Pauli of Pontiac, Michigan, commands.

These ships ferry back and forth on trips like this for a few months, then make a trip back to America with wounded. My ship has been back to the States three times since it first came over less than a year ago.

In a sense, a hospital ship is the nearest thing to peacetime that I’ve seen in a war zone. The ship runs with lights on all over it, the staff has good beds and good cabins, there is hot water 24 hours a day, the food is wonderful.

I was given a top bunk in a cabin with one of the doctors. After nosing around into all the nice conveniences of the place, I discovered we also had a toilet and a shower.

I asked unbelievingly if the bath worked. They said sure it worked. So, I took a bath for half an hour and felt very weak and civilized and wonderful afterwards.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Naples, Italy – (by wireless)
On the hospital ship which I rode back from Anzio, part of two decks remained just about as they were when the vessel was a luxury cruise ship in the Caribbean. In this part the permanent staff of doctors and nurses live, and also the officers of the ship.

But the rest has been altered just as liners are altered when made into troopships.

Cabin walls have been cut out to form big wards. Double-deck steel beds have been installed. The whole thing is fitted like a hospital operating room and wards.

The wounded men get beautiful treatment. They lie on mattresses and have clean white sheets – the first time since coming overseas for most of them.

There is a nurse to each ward, and the bigger wards have more than one. Enlisted men serve the meals and help the nurses.

The doctors have little to do. On this run the wounded are on the ship less than 24 hours. Their wounds have been thoroughly attended before the men are brought aboard, and it’s seldom that anything drastic develops on the short voyage.

Pennsylvanian aboard

One of the doctors took me in tow and showed me the entire ship after supper. He was Capt. Benjamin Halporn of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Capt. Halporn’s wife is also a doctor back in Harrisburg, practicing under her own name, Dr. Miriam R. Polk.

Capt. Halporn said:

We really have so little to do we almost forget how. My wife back home does more work in one day than I do in a month.

But that’s nobody fault. The doctors must be on the ship for advice and emergency.

As we went around the ship, our trip turned into a kind of personal-appearance tour. When we left one ward, the nurse came running after us and said to me, “Do you mind coming back? The boys want to talk to you.”

And while I stood beside the bunk gabbing with a couple of wounded men, another one across the ward yelled, “Hey, Ernie, come over here. We want to see what you look like.”

If this keeps up, I’ll have to have my face lifted. Nobody with a mug like mine has a right to go around scaring wounded men.

The boys had read about the proposal in Congress to give “fight pay” to combat troops and they were for it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The proposal resulted from a suggestion by Ernie Pyle.

Most of them said it wasn’t so much the money as to give them some recognition and distinction, and money seemed the only way to do it.

Men made comfortable

As we went around, some of the wounded would call to the doctor and he would have a nurse attend to them. One boy with an arm wound was bleeding too much, and needed a new bandage. Another one in a shoulder case said good-naturedly that he couldn’t tell by the feel whether he was bleeding or just sweating under his cast.

A Negro boy with a shattered leg said his cast was too tight and hurt his instep. So, the doctor drew a curved line on it with his pencil and ordered the cast sawed off there. Each cast has written on it the type of wound beneath it.

We stopped beside one man whose right leg was in a cast. The writing of it revealed that he was a British Commando. The doctor asked him if he were in pain, and he smiled and said with some effort, “Quite a bit, sir, but not too much.”

When you ask a wounded man how he got hit, the majority of them are eager to tell you in great detail just how it happened. But those in the most pain are listless and uninterested in what goes on around them.

Mattress for everyone

When the ship is overcrowded there aren’t bunks enough for everybody. So those who aren’t in bad shape – merely sick or with slight wounds – sleep on mattresses on the floor of what used to be the salon.

Everybody does have a mattress, which is just so much velvet to any soldier.

Down below in smaller wards were the shock cases.

Actually, most of them were what doctors call “exhaustion” cases and would be all right after a few days’ rest.

Their wards had heavy screen doors that could be locked, but not a single door was closed, which showed that the boys weren’t in too bad shape.

In addition, the ship has four padded calls for extreme shock cases. The steel door to each one has a little sliding panel peephole. Only one cell was occupied.

This was a boy who refused to keep his clothes on. We peeked in and he was lying on his mattress on the floor, stark naked and asleep.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Naples, Italy – (by wireless)
A Red Cross worker rides each hospital ship, not only to do anything for the wounded she can, but also to help keep the ship’s staff and crew happy.

On our ship, the Red Cross girl was Percy Gill of Palo Alto, California. She used to teach physical education at Castilleja School for Girls.

After supper, she passed out a bottle of Coca-Cola to every man on the ship. It was the first time most of the boys had had one since leaving America. The Merchant Marine seamen in the crew always help her pass the cokes around.

Miss Gill has a tiny office filled with books, toilet supplies, musical instruments and magazines. As soon as the wounded men are brought aboard, she gives everyone a pack of cigarettes and a toothbrush, for most of them have lost their gear.

Some completely empty-handed

As they were swung aboard, you see some completely emptyhanded and others carrying their pitiful little possessions in their tin hats, balanced on their stomachs. Some have on hospital pajamas, some just OD shirts, some only their dirty gray underwear.

Miss Gill does not intrude herself on the men, for she knows that the most badly wounded want to be left alone. Now and then she’ll give a boy a book and discover that he’s still looking at the same page three hours later. Another boy used his as a fan all afternoon.

Miss Gill has books in French, and in German too. Every shipload has a few wounded prisoners. We had two on my trip. One was a startled-looking German kid whose card showed him to be only 17. The prisoners are treated just the same as anybody else.

Miss Gill’s musical warehouse includes an accordion, four guitars, a violin, two saxophones, a clarinet, a trombone, and two dozen harmonicas. She doesn’t have many requests for either the musical instruments or the books on these short trips between the beachhead and Naples, for there’s hardly time. But on the long trip back to America they are a godsend, for the men are feeling better by then and time goes slowly. On one 16-day trip across the ocean the wounded men read 3,000 books – an average of six to a man.

Relief from mud and cold

It is a relief and a comfort for men to be on a hospital ship after their months of mud and cold and misery and danger and finally the agony of their wounding. It is a relief because the hospital ship is so little like war, and because those who operate it are in a world apart from the world these men have known.

There’s no blackout at all. Nobody is ever dirty or cold. Cabin windows have no shutters. You can smoke on deck. Big spotlights slung on brackets point their dazzling beams at the big red cross painted on the ship’s sides.

The ship takes its course far outside the channels of regular war shipping, and instead of keeping radio secrecy we broadcast our position every 15 minutes. The hospital ship wants the enemy to know where it is so no mistake can be made.

Our ship has had several “incidents.” It has been stopped by surfaced submarines and been circled by enemy planes. But the enemy has always respected it. The greatest danger is going to such places as Anzio, or standing in ports during air raids.

Scene of quiet and peace

Usually, the ward lights are left on until 10:30 p.m. But on our trip, they were turned off at 9:30, for we were to dock very early next morning and the men had to wakened by 5:00 a.m. to give the nurses time to get the wounded all washed and fed.

By 10 o’clock, the inside of the ship was dim and quiet. Nurses went about softly in the faint glow of the blue nightlight. The doctors, all through, were playing chess and solitaire in their small salon on the top deck. A few soldiers strolled on deck or hung over the rail. It was warm and gentle outside. The washing of the water seemed like a purring against the ship’s sides.

It was wonderful to be going away from war instead of toward it. For the badly wounded there was a sense of completion of a task, for the others a sense of respite. And the sheets and the soft beds and the security of walls lent a confidence in things present and to come.

There was intense suffering aboard that ship. But by 10:30, you could somehow feel the quiet, masked composure that comes to men of turmoil when they settle down for the night in the clasp of a strange new safety.

And early next morning we were here.