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.