The Pittsburgh Press (May 8, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
About the most touching thing that has ever happened to me, I think, happened in Casablanca.
One afternoon, there was a knock at my hotel door. When I opened it, in walked six soldiers. Two of them I had known in Italy. They were in a predicament.
They were at a camp outside Casablanca, on their way back to America for specialized training. They were frontliners, men who had been through the mill. Most of them had been overseas for nearly two years. They were specialty selected men and carried in their pockets official orders sending them home.
But they had got so far as Casablanca and then hit one of those famous Army dead-end streets. They had been “frozen.” The details are too involved to explain. But they had become officially lost.
About to give up hope
For weeks they had pleaded, appealed, explored every approach imaginable, to try to get themselves unfrozen and on the way. They just couldn’t find out anything. They had exhausted all their possibilities and were just sitting there without hope. They were truly desperate. Then they heard I was in town, and with a new ray of hope came to see me.
These six had been chosen as representatives of 180 such men out at the camp. As I say, I had known two of them in Italy – Sgt. James Knight of Oklahoma and Pvt. Gerard Stillwell of Minnesota. I knew they were swell boys and true veterans.
Now it happened that in Casablanca I had some old-time friends who were pretty high-ranking officers. So, I picked up the phone and told one of them the story. He was a full colonel, and when he heard the story, he was furious. He asked if I could bring my soldier friends and meet him at the Red Cross Club immediately.
So we met. The big Red Cross lobby was full of soldiers, reading or talking or loafing. Officers aren’t supposed to come into an enlisted men’s club, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to the colonel.
Out of my six boys, I chose the two I had known in Italy to talk to the colonel. The four others sat at a distance.
The colonel is handsome and straight, silver-haired but youngish and a very vital kind of man. He is the kind real soldiers trust and are proud to say “Sir” to.
Sgt. Knight sat on the edge of a deep leather chair facing the colonel, and Pvt. Stillwell knelt on the floor in front of him, and they told their story. Their great sincerity and desperation showed in every word they said.
Colonel promises decision
The colonel took some notes as they talked, and asked some blunt and pointed questions.
For the first time in six weeks, the boys had found somebody who gave a damn. The colonel’s interest was electric. As old soldiers, they could instantly sense that here was an officer who meant business.
They finished, and then he said:
I’ll get a decision on this. I promise that by tomorrow night you will know one way or the other. Don’t get up too much hope. You might be sent back to your outfits instead of going home. But at least you’ll know right away.
That was all the boys wanted. They had got to the point where they didn’t much care whether they got home or not. All they wanted was for somebody to recognize that they existed.
I left Africa that night, so I don’t know what the decision was. But I have enough faith in my friend to feel positive that some immediate decision was obtained.
The colonel was busy, and as he started to rush out, he said to me, “Come jump in my car and I’ll take you back to your hotel.” But as we had risen from our chairs, I could sense that soldiers all over the lobby were getting up and starting to move tentatively toward us. I told the colonel I’d stay at the club awhile.
The moment he left I was surrounded by soldiers. There were more than 100 of them, mostly from this gang of lost men out at the transient camp. I didn’t know them, but they knew me, from Tunisia and Sicily and Italy.
Were frantic to get unlost
They surged around and talked and tried to tell me how desperate they had become. They tried to say they didn’t just selfishly want to go home, but were frantic to get unlost and get to doing something in the war again, even if it meant going back to the front at once.
Then they pulled out notebooks and franc notes, lira and postcards and snapshots of wives, sweethearts, and shoved them at me to sign. One boy even ruined a fresh $10 bill with my signature. I sat and wrote my name for 20 minutes without stopping.
Then they asked if they could take some snapshots on the sidewalk out front. So we moved out in a great body and held up sidewalk traffic while soldier after soldier snapped his camera.
Finally, we were through and I said goodbye and asked the way back to my hotel. And at that, a white-helmeted MP stepped out of the crowd and said, “We’ll take you back, sir.”
And so, in the splendor of a weapons carrier with an MP on either side of me, I rode back to the hotel. And that is the end of the story. I tell it because a man cannot help but feel proud to be thought well of by frontline soldiers.
Most men ‘stuck’ at Casablanca ‘frozen’ March 17 by Army
Washington –
War Department officials, shown the above Ernie Pyle dispatch, said today that they believed most of the men “stuck” at Casablanca were caught by the Army order of March 17 “freezing” – pending further instructions – all prospective Air Force trainees overseas who had not yet left for the States.Two weeks later, the Department ordered the “frozen” men reassigned in the theaters from which they had been scheduled to depart for air training.
Gen. H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, in announcing that the Air Forces training program had been cut back – because air casualties were lighter than anticipated, and the demands of the ground forces were increasing – spoke of his “full knowledge of the disappointment” this would bring to personnel of the ground and service forces volunteering for air training, and expressed his “heartfelt appreciation for their proffered services.”
Sgt. Knight and Pvt. Stillwell, mentioned by Mr. Pyle, have now been restored to their original units, the War Department said. It added that Stillwell arrived in Casablanca March 4, just missing the ship home, and Knight arrived March 20. The men were never “lost,” it was said, but were under orders at all times pending War Department action.