I very much enjoyed this column, Ernie captures Pruitt perfectly.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 25, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A B-26 base, England –
Sgt. Phil Scheier is a radio gunner. That is, he operates the radio of his B-26 bomber when it needs operating, and when over enemy territory he switches to one of the plane’s machine guns.
It’s hard to think of Sgt. Scheier as a tough gunner. In fact, it’s hard to think of him as an enlisted man. He is what you would call the “officer type” – he would seem more natural with a major’s leaves on his shoulders than a sergeant’s stripes on his arms. But he doesn’t feel that way about it.
He says:
I’m the only satisfied soldier in the Army. I’ve found a home in the Army. I like what I’m doing, and I wouldn’t trade my job for any other in the Army.
Not that he intends to stay in after the war. He’s 28, but he intends to go to college as soon as he gets out of uniform. He has been a radio scriptwriter for several years, but he wants to go to Columbia School of Journalism and learn how to be a big fascinating newspaperman like me.
Sgt. Scheier’s home is at Richmond, Staten Island. Like the others, he has a DFC and an Air Medal with clusters.
He says:
When I won a Boy Scout medal once, they got out the band and had a big celebration. But when you get the DFC, you just sign a paper and a guy hands it to you as though it was nothing.
Later, when I mentioned that I would like to put that remark in the column, Sgt. Scheler laughed and said: “Oh, I just made that up. I never was a Boy Scout.”
Sgt. Kenneth Brown of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, is one of two men in my barracks who have the Purple Heart. He was hit in the back and arm by flak several months ago. He is a good-natured guy, and he has the next war figured out.
He isn’t going to go hide in a cave or on a desert island, as so many jokingly threaten to do. He thinks he has a better way. The minute the war starts, he’s going to get a sand table and start making humps and valleys and drawing lines in the sand. He figures that will automatically makes him a general and then he’ll be all right.
Sgt. Kenneth Hackett used to work at the Martin plant near Baltimore, which makes these B-26 bombers. He is 34, and he had supposed that if he ever got into the Army, he would be put in some backwash job far removed from combat.
“I sure never figured when I was helping build these planes that someday I’d be flying over France in one of them as a radio gunner,” he says. But here he is, with half his allotted missions run off.
Sgt. Hackett’s home is at North Miami. In fact, his father is chief of police in that section. But the sergeant’s wife and daughter are in Baltimore.
Hackett showed me a snapshot of his daughter Theda sitting on the fender of their automobile. He said she was 12, and I thought he was kidding. She seemed so grownup that I thought she must be his sweetheart instead of his daughter. But I was convinced when the other boys chimed in and said, “Tell him about the lipstick.”
So here is the lipstick story. It seems Theda wrote her daddy that all the other girls her age were using rouge and lipstick and was it all right if she did too.
Well, it wasn’t all right. Sgt. Hackett says maybe he’s old-fashioned but he sent word back to Theda that if she started using lipstick now, he’d skin her alive when he got back, or words to that effect. And he didn’t take time to write it in a letter. He sent it by full-rate cablegram.
Sgt. Howard Hanson is acting first sergeant of this squadron. He’s the guy that runs the show and routs people out of bed and hands out demerits and bawls people out. In addition to that, he is an engineer-gunner. He has long ago flown his allotted number of combat missions, and he is still flying.
Sgt. Hanson is 37 and therefore is automatically known in the Army as Pappy. Any soldier over 35 is almost always called Pop or Pappy. Sgt. Hanson doesn’t care. He likes his work and has a job to do and wants to get it done.
“I know what I’m fighting for,” he says. “Here’s what.” And he hands you a snapshot of his family – wife, girl and boy. The girl is almost grown and the boy is in the uniform of a prep school. Hanson’s home is at Topeka, Kansas.
Pappy used to be in the motor freight business before the war. I suppose in a way you could say he’s still in the motor freight business. Kind of ticklish freight, though.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 26, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A B-26 base, England – (by wireless)
Sgt. Walter Hassinger is from Hutchinson, Kansas. He is 29, and in a way the most remarkable man at this station.
In the first place, he is a radio gunner who has more missions under his belt than any other crew member here. And in the second place he has contributed more to satisfied living and general morale than anybody else.
What Hassinger did was this – he spent $400 of his own money creating a little private radio station and hooking it by loudspeakers into barracks all over the place, until finally his station is heard by 1,700 men.
Over this station he rebroadcasts news bulletins, repeats orders and instructions that come from headquarters, plays phonograph records, and carries on a spasmodic monologue razzing the officers and just gabbing about everything from the abominable weather to the latest guy who has wrecked a jeep.
Still another Kansan. This one is Lt. Frank Willms of Coffeyville. That’s the hometown of Walter Johnson, the famous pitcher. Lt. Willms says he has never met Walter but knows the rest of the Johnson family.
Lt. Willms isn’t in the group I’ve been visiting, although he is a B-26 pilot. The reason I’m mentioning him is his hair. I met him one night at a party in London. His hand stands so startlingly straight up that you are struck suddenly rigid when you see it and you can’t help but remark on it. And Lt. Willms’ reply to my obvious puzzlement was this:
On my first mission I was so scared it stood up like that, and I’ve never been able to get it to lie back down.
Lt. Jim Gray is from Wichita Falls, Texas, and he looks like a Texan – windburned and unsmooth. He’s far over his allotted missions, and if it weren’t for the coming invasion, he would probably be on his way home by now.
Like every other Texan in the Air Forces – and it seems to be half Texans – he has to take a lot of razzing about his state. But he’s proud of it, and always in plain sight under the end of his cot you can see a beautifully scrolled pair of cowboy boots.
Lt. Gray is a firm believer in the flak vest. In case you don’t know, a flak vest is a sort of coat of mail, made up of little squares of steel platings. It hangs from your shoulders and covers your chest and back.
One day a hunk of hot metal about the size of a walnut struck him right in the chest. He says it felt as if some giant had him with his fist. It bent the steel plating but didn’t go through. Without it, he would have been a dead duck.
Sgt. Hanson, who flies with him, has taken the bent plate out and is keeping it as a souvenir. Lt. Gray keeps the hung of shrapnel itself, with a little tag on it.
The lieutenant is anxious to get home. Not so much because he is homesick but because, as he says, “I’d like to fly in a little Texas weather for a change?”
The weather over here is the fliers’ biggest complaint. As you’ve heard, it’s dark and cloudy and rainy most of the time. And the weather changes like lightning. They say that sometimes you can start to take off and the other end of the runway will close in before you get there. How these mighty air fleets ever operate at all is a modern miracle.
In this area, I ran into an old friend of mine. He’s Texas too – Maj. Robert Rousel, who used to be managing editor of the Houston Press. He is about my age, and like me he is starting to feel decrepit. He’s in the planning section of the bomber command, and he says it’s a worse than running a newspaper. The pressure of detail and the responsibility of mapping these complex missions for the whole command sometimes gets him mentally swamped. At such time he just gets up and walks out half a day. Sometimes he goes flying, sometimes he plays golf.
He said:
I played golf yesterday and I’m sure I’m the only man in England who ever succeeded in playing 18 holes without even once, not one time, going on the fairway.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 27, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A B-26 base, England –
Every pilot and enlisted combat crewman on this bomber station has an English bicycle, for the distances are long on a big airdrome. The boys in my hut have to go about a mile to flying line and about a quarter of a mile to eat. Breakfast ends at 8, and like human beings the world over, those not flying get up just in time to run fast and beat the breakfast deadline by five seconds.
They eat at long wooden tables, sitting on benches. But they have white tablecloths, and soldiers to serve them. At supper they have to wear neckties and their dress blouses. The officers’ club bar opens a half an hour before supper and some of the boys go and have a couple of drinks before eating. As everywhere else in England, the whiskey and gin are all gone a few minutes after the bar opens.
The enlisted crewmen eat in a big room adjoining the officers’ mess. They eat exactly the same food, but they eat it a little differently. They line up and pass through a chow line. White porcelain plates are furnished them, but they have to bring their own knife, fork, spoon and canteen cup.
Their tables are not covered. When they are through, they carry out their own dishes and empty anything left over into a garbage pail, but they don’t have to wash their dishes. The enlisted men don’t have to dress up, even for supper.
Everybody feels that the food is exceptionally good. Since I’ve been here, we’ve had real eggs for breakfast, and for other meals such things as pork chops, hamburger steak, chocolate cake and ice cream.
Of course, both of these messes are for combat crews only. Ground personnel eat at a different mess. They don’t have quite as fine a choice as the fliers, but I guess nobody begrudges them a little extra.
In various clubrooms on the airdrome, and even in some of the huts, there are numerous paintings on the walls of beautiful girls, colored maps of Europe, and so on. One hut has been beautifully decorated by one of the occupants – Lt. C. V. Cripe, a bombardier from Elkhart, Indiana. He also paints insignia on planes.
This same hut has a tiny little garden walk leading up to the door. On a high post flanking the walk there hang white wooden boards with the name of each flier in the hut painted in green letters, and under the name rows of little green bombs representing the number of missions he has been on.
All the names are of officers except for the bottom board, which says “Pfc. Gin Fizz,” and under it are painted five little puppy dogs marching along in a row with their tails up.
Pfc. Gin Fizz is a little white dog with a face like a gargoyle, and altogether the most ratty and repulsive-looking animal I’ve ever seen. But she produces beautiful pups practically like an assembly line, and the station is covered with her offspring.
Dogs are rampant on this station. They have everything from fat fuzzy little puppies with eyes barely open to a gigantic Great Dane. This one magnificent beast is owned by Lt. Richard Lightfine of Garden City, Long Island, and goes by the name of Tray.
The gunner sergeants in the barracks where I’ve been living have a breedless but lovable cur named Omer. It came by its name in a peculiar fashion.
Some months ago, the squadron made a raid on a town in France named St. Omer. One plane got shot up over the target, and back in England had to make a forced landing at a strange field. While waiting for the crippled plane to be patched up the crew acquired this puppy. In celebration of their return from the dead, they named him Omer. Omer sleeps impartially on anybody’s cot, and the boys bring him scraps from the mess hall in their canteen cups. Omer doesn’t even know he’s at war, and he has a wonderful time.
This station has a glee club too, and a very good one. They gave a concert for the people of the nearest village and I went along to hear it.
The club has 29 men in it, mostly ground men but some fliers. The director is Cpl. Frank Parisi of Bedford, Ohio. He taught music in junior high school there.
The club has already given 10 concerts, and they are so good they are booked for three concerts weekly for the next six weeks and slated to sing in London. So, you see lots of things besides shooting and dying can go along with a war.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 29, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England –
The good news from Italy has been tinged with bad for some of us who still have strong roots and half our hearts in that cruel battleground.
The name of Roderick MacDonald means nothing to you in America, but it meant much to many of us who marched with the wars in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. For Mac was one of our bunch – a war correspondent – and he was killed the other day at Cassino.
Mac was a Scot. His family emigrated to Australia and he was schooled there and eventually went to work for The Sydney Morning Herald. He left Australia in 1941 and followed the wars in China, the Near East and all through Africa.
We first knew him in Tunisia. Just after Tunis fell, he came down with a savage recurrence of malaria and spent three weeks in a hospital. Finally, he got strong enough to get back to Algiers during that peaceful interval between Tunisia and Sicily.
During that time, our public-relations section was set up in a camp on the sandy and gentle shore of the Mediterranean, some 20 miles outside of Algiers. That’s where I used up six weeks of peace – one of the grandest six weeks of my life, just lolling in my tent, eating well, working a little, reading a lot, mostly loafing and being wonderfully warm.
Roderick MacDonald sent word that he was in a hotel at Algiers, and I got a jeep and went and picked him up. He was so weak he couldn’t even carry his bedroll. We brought him out to camp and put him in the tent next to mine.
For days he lay listlessly, with strength enough only to get up for meals. The sun was broiling and he would strip down to his shorts and lie there in the hot sand, baking his body a sleek brown. Gradually life began to flow into him again his face filled out, the glaze left his eyes, and the famous MacDonald smith and MacDonald barbed retort began to return.
Mac had everything to live for, and he loved being alive. He was young, tall, handsome, brilliant, engaging. He had a sensitive mind, and he would have been a novelist had there been no war.
Among Americans he was the best liked British correspondent I have ever known. With his Scottish and Australian heritage, he understood us. He would kid the pants off us about the way we talked, and mimic our flat pronunciation in his yarns. He in turn took the same razzing about his Oxford accent.
He had never been in America, but it was his one ambition to go there.
Like most correspondents, Mac felt that he had to write a book. He had it about two-thirds finished when he came to our camp to recuperate. During the latter days of his stay, when his strength had returned, he tapped away belligerently on his little typewriter, cussing the day he ever started the book, resenting the deadline his London publishers were heckling him with. But he did finish it.
The day I arrived in London from Italy, I went into a bookstore, and I noticed Mac’s book. I bought it just because I knew Mac, and brought it home and put it on the table, but never did read it.
Now I will read it. What an ironic world, that only the compulsion of death makes us do for our friends – in more ways than merely reading a book – what we should have done while they still lived.
I suppose my best friend in Italy was Lt. Col. Ed Bland, a dive bomber squadron leader. He was tall, blond Westerner of 28, who looked much older than he was and who had the open honesty and good humor of the West. Word has just come that he has been shot down.
Probably the story has been told already in America, for Ed was popular with all the correspondents. The letter that brought the word to me said this:
Ed was strafing about 30 feet above the ground when a small shell set his plane afire underneath. Ed didn’t know it until his wingman radioed him. Then he climbed to 1,500 feet and bailed out.
The wingman said his chute didn’t open till he was 200 feet from the ground. There was a great deal of shooting, and one theory is that it was directed at him, but majority opinion ruled differently and the boys believe he is OK.
Wick Fowler of The Dallas News was a close friend of Ed’s. We used to sit around indulging in idiotic talk and Ed was always talking about how funny it would be to telephone Rome for hotel reservations and throw the German into a panic.
After I left Italy, Ed’s oil line stopped up one day on a mission near Rome and he was certain he would have to bail out. Later, he told Wick that while he was in trouble and sure he’d have to jump he got to thinking about that telephone idea and had to laugh at himself.
And now that he really has bailed out, Wick sends along this thought in a letter:
Ed’s time was short at 1,500 but I have a hunch the telephone idea came to him again on the way down.
If Ed did call up Rome for reservations, I hope the Germans gave him the royal suite, for he’s the best there is.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 30, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England –
The top commanders who have toiled and slaved for months planning the second front have been under a man-killing strain of work and responsibility.
Thousands of men of high rank have labored endlessly. They are up early, they work all day, and after supper they go back to work far into the night. Seldom can you get one of them to take a day off.
Among the greatly conscientious ones in this category is Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, who will lead all the American troops in the second front.
The other day I ran into Sgt. Alex Stout from Louisiana, who has been Gen. Bradley’s driver for several years. The general is very fond of Alex, and in turn Alex is not afraid to look at his king or to plot on his behalf.
Alex keeps saying:
General, you’re working too hard. If you won’t take a day off, why don’t you get in the car and we’ll just drive around the country for a couple of hours?
He was persistent. One day he put it to his boss again and the general said, well, as soon as he filled two more appointments, he would go out for a half-hour ride. So, Alex got him in the car and headed for the country.
Alex says:
We drove for two hours. I told him I was lost and couldn’t find my way back to town. But I knew where I was all the time, all right.
The Zippo Manufacturing Company of Bradford, Pennsylvania, makes Zippo cigarette lighters. In peacetime they are nickel-plated and shiny. In wartime they are black, with a rough finish.
Zippos are not available at all to civilians. In Army PXs all around the world, where a batch comes in occasionally, there are long waiting lists.
Well, some months ago, I had a letter from the president of the Zippo Company. It seems he is devoted to this column. It seems further that he’d had an idea. He had sent to our headquarters in Washington to get my signature, and then he was having the signature engraved on a special nickel-plated lighter and he is going to send it to me as a gift.
Pretty soon there was another letter. The president of the Zippo Company had had another brainstorm. In addition to my super-heterodyne lighter, he was going to send 50 of the regular ones for me to give to friends.
I was amused at the modesty of the president’s letter. He said, “You probably know nothing about the Zippo lighter.”
If he only knew how the soldiers covet them. They’ll burn in the wind, and pilots say they are the only kind that will light at extreme altitudes. Why, they’re so popular I’ve had three of them stolen from me in the past year.
Well, at last the fighters have come, forwarded all the way from Italy. My own lighter is a beauty, with my name on one side and a little American flag on the other. I’m smoking twice as much as usual just because I enjoy lighting the thing.
The 50 others are going like hot cakes. I find myself equipped with a wonderful weapon for winning friends and influencing people. Thanks from all of us, Mr. Zippo.
The Army occasionally gets the correspondents together for instructions on preparing for the second front. Sometimes we have fun at these meetings.
For example, the other day an officer got up and said the time had come for us to make our powers of attorney and prepare our wills, if we hadn’t done so already. Everybody in the room laughed – you know, one of those crackly, mirthless laughs of a man who is a little sick at his stomach.
And then the officer was explaining that we could take with us only what we could carry on our backs, and the rest of our stuff would be turned over to the Army and would probably catch up with us a couple of weeks after we reached the other side.
Whereupon one correspondent, newly arrived in these parts, asked:
Should we carry our steel helmets and gas masks or put them in the luggage to be forwarded later?
The poor fellow was almost laughed out of the room. Does one send for the fire department two weeks after the house was burned down?
You just can’t break down English traditions. For example, I registered at a hotel as Ernie Pyle and then on another line gave my full three names, as the law requires.
And do you know how my hotel bill comes? It comes weekly in a sealed envelope on which is typed, “E. Taylor-Pyle, Esq.”
In a couple of weeks, if I’m a good boy, I hope to have “The Honorable” put in front of my name.
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The Pittsburgh Press (May 31, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in England –
I went out the other day with a tank-destroyer unit. They have been over here long enough to form an opinion of English weather but you can’t write it in a nice newspaper like this.
It was the first time in ages I had been with a combat outfit which had not yet been in battle. There isn’t so much difference as you might think. The really noticeable difference is their eagerness to “get a crack at the Jerries.” After they’ve been cracking at them a few months, they’ll be just as eager to let somebody else have a turn at it.
But outside of that they talk and act about the same as men who have been in combat. They cuss a lot, razz each other about their home states, complain about the food, take great pride in their guns, and talk about how they wish they were home, just as though they had been away for years.
This unit has been training together for nearly two years. They don’t yet realize what a terrific advantage that gives them, but they will realize it as soon as they are in battle.
They are a vast team of firepower composed of dozens of little teams each one centering around one gun. They have done it so long they know automatically what to do. They all know every man on the team and they know his personality and how he will react. They have faith in each other. Only those who have fought know what confidence that produces.
A typical gun commander is Sgt. Dick Showalter of Muncie, Indiana. I have a special reason for mentioning him. For while I was talking with a group of soldiers, he came up and introduced himself and said: “I married a girl from your hometown.”
Now things like that are always happening to me, except that nine times out of ten the people are mixed up. People will come up and say, “Don’t you remember me? I used to deliver papers at your house.” And it will turn out they lived in a town I had never heard of, and were thinking of two other fellows.
When Sgt. Showalter said he had married a girl from my hometown, I slightly arched my handsome eyebrows and said, “Yes?”
“Yes,” he said, “I married Edna Kuhns.”
I said:
Why, I was raised with the Kuhns kids. They lived just across the fence from our farm. I’ve known them all my life.
“That’s what I said,” said Sgt. Showalter. And then we left the crowd and sat on the grass, leaning against a rock, and talked about Dana, Indiana, and Muncie and things.
Sgt. Showalter worked in factories before the war. He has been commander of his gun for more than a year and a half. He is a small fellow, quiet, serious, conscientious, and extremely proud of his crew and of the way they take their responsibility.
One of Showalter’s best buddies in his crew in Pfc. Bob Cartwright of Daytona Beach, Florida. He is a cannoneer – a small, reddish, good-natured fellow.
When we met, I said, “What’s that you’ve got in your mouth?”
He grinned and said, “Chawlin’ tobacco.” Which was just what I thought it was.
He manages to keep well stocked by trading stuff with boys who don’t chew. Bob is very young. He didn’t know much when he came into the Army, but Showalter says he’s the best there is now.
As I said, the boys are very proud of their guns. They say they’ve had fine training and lots of practice on moving targets. They say that on direct fire they can hit a moving tank at about a mile and almost never miss. They’re anxious to get at it and get it over with and get back home.
They know it won’t be easy on the other side. They’re living rough now. But they know it will be lots rougher pretty soon.
They know, they’ll be on C and K rations, and they’ve had experience with them on maneuvers. But when I spoke of our best ration – the 10-in-1 field ration – they had never heard of it.
They have been working hard since they hit England. They’ve made long night trips and done a lot of practice firing and sometimes they have to work as late as 10 o’clock at night.
When I saw them, they were making preparations for moving overseas. It takes a lot of work to get your equipment ready for an amphibious move. They’ve worked so hard they haven’t had time to get bored. There are some American outfits that have been here for two years without action, and there are Canadians who have been marching up and down for four years. How they’ve kept from going nuts is beyond me.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 1, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in England –
The commander of the tank destroyer battalion I have been visiting is Lt. Col. Joseph Deeley of Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. He used to run a wool-carding mill there. I like his attitude toward things.
When I first showed up, he was perfectly courteous but he made plenty sure I had proper credentials and whatnot. As he said, they have had plenty of security preached into them back home, and this indeed is a critical period and he isn’t taking any chances.
But once he had assured himself I was all right, he called in his sergeants and told them to go around and tell their men they were perfectly free ti show me any and all equipment they had and talk to me as freely as they wanted to.
As I told him later, I don’t think he need have bothered. For these boys, approaching war for the first time, pumped me so thoroughly on what war is like that I hardly got a chance to ask any questions of them. Maybe I’ll have to write some security regulations of my own just out of self-protection. Who the devil is reporting this war, anyway?
One company commander, Capt. Charles Harding of Olmsted Falls, near Cleveland, had just had a letter from home telling him to keep an eye out for me. He figured that in a war this big our paths would never cross, but they did.
Another Ohioan came up and introduced himself. This was Pfc. James Francis McClory of Cleveland. McClory is what is aptly known in the battalion as a “character.” He used to be a prizefighter. Being in the horny-handed world of pugilists, he has a great affinity for apes. There’s an almost-human ape at the zoo in a nearby city which McClory goes to see every time he gets a pass. He calls him “Alfred the Ape,” and says he sure wishes he could take him back to Cleveland.
McClory used to work for the Cleveland Welding Company, which made bicycles. When I asked him what he did, he said, “Oh, I was just a hod knocker.”
You can kid lots with McClory. When I want to write down his name, I out “Sergeant” in front of it, and he says, “No, no, I’d never get to be a sergeant if the war lasted 50 years.”
So I said, “Well, ‘Corporal’ then.” But he said, “No, I ain’t even got sense enough to be a corporal.”
So I said:
Well, we simply can’t have you a private. What would the McClorys of the world think with you only a private?
So we compromised and made his a PFC.
McClory is one of those guys who are good for the morale of an outfit. He is always doing or saying something funny. And he is a good soldier. He is one of the kind who are fanatically loyal.
He has a great affection for his company commander, Capt. John Jay Kennedy of Roslindale, Massachusetts. Once when some gasoline caught fire, McClory threw himself on the captain and knocked him out of the way, saving him from serious injury. Another time, when Capt. Kennedy’s mother was very ill, McClory took the last money he had and telegraphed home to his parish to have a mass said for the captain’s mother.
A number of men in the battalion told me later that McClory was the kind of man they would like to have with them when the going got tough.
Here in England this battalion is living in pyramidal tents, sleeping on cots. But when they start across, they will take only pup tents and two blankets apiece and they will be sleeping on the ground. Their barracks bags with extra clothes and stuff will catch up with them some time in the dim future.
I had been under the impression that all troops recently arrived from the States would be wearing the new infantry boots which we have been issuing in Italy. I had heard that the old cumbersome and unsatisfactory legging was in limbo. But these boys all wore leggings and had never heard of the new boot.
English dogs have begun to attach themselves to the tank destroyer boys, as they do to any and all camps of soldiers. These boys haven’t actually adopted any of them as individual pets, because they can’t take them along to the continent. They are, however, pet-minded. They say that back in the States they had a number of pigs for pets. In that case, you could have your pet and eat it, too.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 2, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England –
There was a knock at my door and two young lieutenants with silver wings and bright medals on their chests walked in. They were in town on leave and had decided to pay a social call.
They are the pilot and navigator of a Flying Fortress. They came to see me because I had known the pilot’s mother in San Francisco. She is Mrs. Mary White, she used to manage the coffee shop at the Hotel Californian, which was my home whenever I was in San Francisco.
Her son, Lt. Bill White, is a likeable young fellow whose blond hair sticks up high from his forehead and whose eyes crinkle when he smiles.
His navigator is Lt. John D. Bowser of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They’ve been over here whacking at the Germans since February.
The boys were in the midst of an eight-day leave, given them as a sort of reward for having survived a ducking in the cold North Sea. They had had to “ditch,” as the expression goes, and after a crew ditches it always gets a leave of absence.
They had a close call when they ditched. They had been to Berlin – their second mission over the big city. The flak was pretty bad. On the way back Bill White looked out and saw a big hole in the right wing. It didn’t seem to be causing any trouble. Pretty soon he glanced in the other direction and here was a big hole in his left wing.
At first, he thought he was crazy and had forgotten which wing he’d seen the hole in. His head went back and forth as though at a tennis match. Actually, there were identical holes in the two wings.
But that wasn’t what put them in the drink. Apparently, the ignition system had been hit, for every now and then all four motors would stop for about five seconds at a time and then pick up again.
Finally, the engines started going clear out, one by one. They saw for sure that they couldn’t make the coast of England. Lt. White had everybody get in “ditching position.” The radioman sent his distress signal. They hit the water. The plane broke in two. And yet not a man was scratched or bruised.
When they hit, salt water rushed up over the windshield in gigantic waves. The plane stopped moving and Bill looked up. All he could see was water. He thought they had dived straight into the sea and were going on down head first.
He said:
I thought this was it. I was so convinced I weas going to drown that I almost just sat there and didn’t even try to get out.
But actually, they came piling out of that plane like rockets. They said that in training they had been taught you would be all right if you could get out in 30 seconds. They were all out in 10 seconds.
The plane sank 40 seconds after hitting the water. They were 25 miles from shore. The men clung to their rubber dinghies, and in less than an hour a rescue boat came alongside and took them aboard.
Since returning they’ve had a wonderful time talking about their experience. They call themselves sailors now. Before this happened, the crew used to do a lot of joking about “White’s little air force goes to war.” Now they’ve changed it to “White’s little air force goes to sea.”
Whenever a ditched flier is fished out of the North Sea or the Channel, the RAF gives him a little felt insignia about an inch high in the form of a half wing, showing a fish skipping over the water. This is his membership badge in the “Goldfish Club.” He is to sew it under his lapel, and throw back the lapel to show it when occasion demands. It isn’t worn outwardly, I presume, because we don’t want German agents to know how many guys have been fished out of the water.
The boys have another memento of their saltwater bath. They all have Short Snorter bills, of course. But they’ve started a new series of signatures on bills which they call “Dinghy Snorters.” Only fliers who’ve had to ditch are allowed to bills. They flattered me by asking me to sign, and said mine would be the only non-Goldfish signature permitted on their bills.
All ten of the ditched crew had wristwatches. Two watches, apparently waterproof, are still running. The eight others were corroded by salt water and have stopped.
Lt. White still wears his, even though it doesn’t run. But while he ruined his watch, he did save $40. He had ordered a $40 pair of fancy boots made, which he had expected to be ready the day before this mission. They weren’t. He was pretty sore about it then, but now he’s glad, for he would have had them on.
These two boys really enjoy their job, I believe. They get an exhilaration out of it. They see the funny side of life, and they’re able to take things as they come. But still, of course, they would like to be home.
Lt. White’s mother now works at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and we sat around here in London wishing we were sitting at dusk at the “Top of the Mark,” looking out over the steepled sea of San Francisco, so serene in its soft envelopment of peaceful mist.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 3, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England –
England is certainly the crossroads of this warring world right now. Never a day passes but that I run onto half a dozen people I have known in Albuquerque, Washington, Tunisia, Ireland, the Belgian Congo or Cairo.
One reason I mention this is that nine times out of ten, these people have picked up weight since I last saw them. Time and time again I’ve run onto officers and men who in the thick of the war in Tunisia were lean and thin and hard, and now their faces are filled out and they have gained anywhere from 10 to 40 pounds.
This is due mainly, I suppose, to the fact that their lives haven’t been physically active, as in the field. For months they have been planning the invasion, working hard at desks, eating regularly and well, and getting little exercise. They all hate the physical inactivity of this long planning stage, and they will be glad in a way when they can get outdoors again to hard living.
When our trails cross again, their paunches will be down, and their faces thin and brown and dirty, and they will look hard and alive and like the friends I used to know. They’ll look better. It’s a silly world.
In roaming around the country the other day, I ran into Lt. Col. William Profitt Sr., whom I used to see occasionally in Africa and Sicily.
His old outfit was the first hospital unit ashore in the African invasion, landing at dawn on D-Day. They are so proud of that record that they’ll tear your eyes out at the slightest intimation that you’re confusing them with the second unit to land.
This is the hospital my friend Lt. Mary Ann Sullivan of Boston served with. She finally wound up as chief nurse of the unit. But when I dropped in to say hello, I discovered that Lt. Sullivan had gone back to America a couple of months ago.
She well deserved to go, too. She had been overseas nearly three years, having come originally with the Harvard unit. She had a ship sunk under her at sea, and was shot at innumerable times. She lived like a beast of the field for nearly a year, and she bore the great burden of directing a staff of nurses and supplying both medical care and cheerful understanding to thousands of wounded men.
My friend Col. Profitt and I sat in easy chairs in front of his cozy fireplace and chatted away in dire contrast to our other evenings on the windy plains of Tunisia.
He was telling me about a storm they had just after I left them in Sicily last summer. They were bivouacked on the edge of a cliff by the sea, and the wind blew so hard it blew all their tents over the cliff just at daylight one morning.
Everybody turned to with such a mighty effort that in two hours and a quarter they had every one of their 450 patients dry and under cover again.
This unit is very sentimental about the number 13. They have been mixed up with 13 so many times they wouldn’t trade it for a dozen black cats or four-leaf clovers. They’ve even always sailed in convoys of 13 ships. Col. Profitt said he believed they would refuse to go if they were ever assigned to a convoy of 14 ships.
Most of the original gang of nurses, I hear, are still with the hospital after a solid year of war and nearly two years overseas.
Everywhere you go around our camps and marshaling areas everything is being waterproofed for the invasion. That’s perfectly natural, of course, since land vehicles won’t run through water onto the beaches unless all the vital mechanisms are covered up.
But the thing that surprises me is that so much of the equipment has been prepared in wooden boxes. I’m staying up nights with a hammer and saw preparing a large box for myself, with horseshoes tacked all over it.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 5, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
Here I’ve been gallavantin’ around with lieutenant generals again. If this keeps up, I’m going to lose my amateur standing. This time it is Jimmy Doolittle, who is still the same magnificent guy with three stars on his shoulder that he used to be with a captain’s bars.
Gen. Doolittle runs the American 8th Air Force. It is a grim and stupendous job, but he manages to keep the famous Doolittle sense of humor about it.
Doolittle, as you know, is rather short and getting almost bald. Since arriving in England from Italy, he has diabolically started a couple of false rumors circulating about himself.
One is that his nickname used to be “Curly,” and he occasionally throws his head back as though tossing hair out of his eyes. His other claim is that he used to be six feet tall but has worried himself down to his present small height in the past five months.
Jimmy Doolittle has more gifts than any one man has a right to be blessed with. He has been one of America’s greatest pilots for more than 25 years. He is bold and completely fearless. Along with that he has a great technical mind and a highly perfected education in engineering.
In addition to his professional skill, he is one of the most engaging humans you ever ran across. His voice is clear and keen, he talks with animation, and his tone carries a sense of quick and right decision.
He is one of the greatest of storytellers. He is the only man I’ve ever known who can tell stories all evening long and never tell one you’ve heard before. He can tell them in any dialect, from Swedish to Chinese.
Above all he loves to tell stories on himself. Here is an example:
The other day he had his plane set up for a flight to northern England. The weather turned awful, and one of his crew suggested that they cancel the trip. As Jimmy said, he would probably have canceled it himself, but when the junior officer suggested it, he sort of had to go ahead and go.
They were hanging around the operations room, getting the latest reports. The crew thought Gen. Doolittle had left the room. The junior officers were talking about the dangers of making the trip in such weather. They didn’t think the general ought to take the chance. And then he overhead one of them say, “I don’t think the b****** gives a damn about the weather.”
The poor officer almost died when he discovered that the general had heard him.
Other passengers said that throughout the flight this benighted fellow just say staring at the floor and now and then shaking his head like a condemned man.
The general thinks it was wonderful. No, he didn’t do anything about it, for he was flattered by the compliment.
Doolittle says:
But only one thing saved him. If he had used the word “old” in front of b******, I would’ve had him hung.
He tells another one. He was at a Flying Fortress base one afternoon when the planes were coming back in. Many of them had been pretty badly shot up and had wounded men aboard.
The general walked up to one plane from which the crew had just got out. The upper part of the tail gun turret was shot away. Gen. Doolittle said to the tail gunner, “Were you in there when it happened?”
The gunner, a little peevishly, replied, “Yes, sir.”
As the general walked away the annoyed gunner turned to a fellow crewman and said in a loud voice: “Where in the hell did he think I was, out buying a ham sandwich?”
A frightened junior officer, fearing the general might have overhead, said, “My God, man, don’t you know who that was?”
The tail gunner snapped:
Sure I know, and I don’t give a damn. That was a stupid question.
With which Jimmy Doolittle, the least stupid of people, fully agrees when he tells the story.
Another time the general went with his chief, Lt. Gen. Spaatz, to visit a bomber station which had been having very bad luck and heavy losses. They thought maybe their presence would pick the boys up a bit. So they visited around awhile. And when they get ready to leave, a veteran Fortress pilot walked up to them.
He said:
I know why you’re out here. You think our morale is shot because we’ve been taking it on the nose. Well, I can tell you our morale is all right. There is only one thing that hurts our morale. And that’s having three-star generals coming around to see what’s the matter with it.
Jimmy tells these stories wonderfully, with more zest and humor than I can out into them second-handed. As he says, the heartbreaks and tragedies of war sometimes push all your gaiety down into the depths. But if a man can keep a sense of the ridiculous about himself, he is all right. Jimmy Doolittle can.
More of this tomorrow.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 6, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
Lt. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, head of the 8th Air Force over here, noticed one day in the roster of officers at his staff headquarters the name of a Capt. Doolittle.
The name is not a very ordinary one, and he made a mental note that some day he would look the fellow up for a little chat. One day not long after that his phone rang and the voice at the other end said, “This is Capt. Doolittle.”
The general said:
Oh, yes, I had noticed your name and I meant to call you up sometime.
“I’d like to come in and see you,” said the voice at the other end.
The general said:
Why yes, do that. I’m pretty busy these days, but I’ll switch you to my aide and he’ll make an appointment for you. Glad you called, captain, I’ll look forward to seeing you.
He was just ready to hang up when the voice came back plaintively over the phone:
But Dad, this is me. Don’t you recognize me? I’ve got a package for you from Mom.
The general exploded, “Well, why in hell didn’t you say so in the first place?!”
It was Capt. Jimmy Doolittle Jr., a B-26 pilot in the 9th Air Force. The general hasn’t got around yet to seeing the other Capt. Doolittle. It’ll probably turn out to be his brother or something.
The last time I had seen Gen. Doolittle was some 16 months ago, way down at the desert airdrome of Biskra on the edge of the Sahara. That was when he was running our African bomber force that was plastering the Tunisian ports.
Gen. Doolittle flew in one afternoon from the far forward airdrome of Youks-les-Bains. The night before, his entire crew except for the co-pilot had been killed in a German bombing at the Youks Field.
His crew had manned their plane’s guns until it got too hot, and then made a run for an old bomb crater 50 yards away. It was one of those heartbreaking freaks of hard luck. A bomb hit the crater just as they reached it, and blew them all to pieces.
Gen. Doolittle has written hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters to people who have lost sons or husbands in his air forces. But one of the men in that crew was the hardest subject he has ever had to write home about. Here is the reason:
When he led the famous raid on Tokyo, Doolittle had a mechanic who had been with him a long time. Doolittle was a colonel then. The mechanic went on the Tokyo raid with him.
You remember the details of that raid, which have gradually seeped out. The planes were badly scattered. Some were shot down over Japanese territory. Others ran out of gas. Some of the crews bailed out. Others landed in Russia. The remainders splattered themselves all over the rice paddles of China.
That night Doolittle was lower than he had ever been before in his life. There wasn’t any humor in the world for him that night. He sat with his head down and thought to himself:
You have balled up the biggest chance anybody could ever have. You have sure made a mess of this affair. You’ve lost most of your planes. The whole thing was a miserable failure. You’ll spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth for thus, and be lucky to get out of it that easy.
As he sat there, this sergeant-mechanic came up and said, “Don’t feel so bad about it, Colonel.”
Doolittle paid no attention. But the sergeant kept at him.
It’s not as bad as it seems. Why, I’ll bet you that within a year you’ll have a Congressional Medal for it and be a brigadier general.
Doolittle just snorted. The sergeant said:
Well, I’ll bet you so, And I’d like to ask one thing. As long as you’re flying, I’d like to be your mechanic.
That finally got inside Doolittle’s gloom. Somebody had confidence in him. He began to buck up. So, he said:
Son, as long as I’ve got an airplane, you’re its mechanic, even if we live to be a thousand years old.
As you know, he did get a Congressional Medal of Honor, and now he has not only one star but the three of a lieutenant general. And that sergeant, who devoted himself to Col. Doolittle that miserable night out there in China, was still Gen. Doolittle’s mechanic the night they landed at Youks-les-Bains in February of 1943. He was one of the men who ran for the shell hole that night.
Gen. Doolittle had to write the letter to his parents.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 10, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ernie Pyle arrived on the beachhead with the Allied assault forces. Transmission difficulties have so far prevented his sending any account of his experiences in Normandy. The following, written on the way across the Channel, describes some of the preliminaries to the invasion.
On the Normandy beachhead – (June 6, delayed)
It will be several days before military security permits us to describe in much detail the landings just made in the long-awaited Allied invasion of Europe.
Indeed, it will be some time before we have a really clear picture of what has happened or what is happening at the moment. You must experience the terrible confusion of warfare and frantic, nightmarish thunder and smoke and bedlam of battle to realize this. So, we will take up this short interval by telling you how things led up to the invasion from the correspondents’ viewpoint. This column is being written on a ship in a convoy, crossing the English Channel, so that it will be ready to send back to England by dispatch boat as soon as we hit the beach.
When we secretly left London a few days ago, more than 45 American correspondents were gathered in Britain for this impending moment in history.
But only 28 of those 450 were to take part in what was termed the assault phase. I was one of those 28. Some of the rest will come over later, some will cover other armies, some will never come at all.
We assault correspondents were under military jurisdiction for the past month while waiting. We had complete freedom in London, but occasionally the Army would suddenly order us in batches to take trips around England.
Also, during those last few weeks we were called frequently to mass conferences and we were briefed by several commanding generals. We had completed all our field equipment, got our inoculations up to date, finished our official accrediting to Supreme Allied Headquarters, and even sent off our bedrolls 10 days before the final call (We will rejoin them some time later on this side – we hope).
Of the 28 correspondents in the Assault Group about two-thirds has already seen action in various war theaters. The old-timers sort of gravitated together, people such as Bill Stoneman, Don Whitehead, Jack Thompson, Clark Lee, Tex O’Reilly and myself.
We conjectured on when we would get the final call; conjectured on what assignments we would draw, for only a few of us knew what unit we would go with. And in more pensive moments we also conjectured on our chances of coming through alive.
We felt our chances were not very good. And we were not happy about it. Men like Don Whitehead and Clark Lee, who had been through the mill so long and so boldly, began to get nerves. And frankly I was the worst of the lot, and continued to be.
I began having terrible periods of depression and often would dream hideous dreams about it. All the time fear lay blackly deep upon our consciousness. It bore down on your heart like an all-consuming weight. People would talk to you and you wouldn’t hear what they were saying.
The Army said they would try and give us 24 hours’ notice of departure. Actually, the call came at 9 o’clock one morning and we were ordered to be at a certain place with full field kit at 10:30. Some went away and left hotel rooms still running up bills. Many had dates that night but did not dare to phone and call them off.
As we arrived one by one at the appointed place, we looked both knowingly and sheepishly at each other. The Army continued to tell us that was just another exercise, but we knew inside ourselves that this was it.
Bill Stoneham, who has been wounded once, never shows the slightest concern about these things. Whether he feels any concern or not, I do not know. Bill has a humorous, sardonic manner. While we were waiting for departure into the unknown, he took out a pencil and notebook as though starting to interview me.
Tell me, Mr. Pyle, how does it feel to be an assault correspondent?
Being a man made of few words, I said, “It feels awful.”
When everybody was ready, our luggage went into a truck and we went into jeeps. I can’t tell you where we boarded the ship, of course, but I can say I personally rode two days in a jeep and made the last 30 miles on a 2½-ton truck.
The first night we spent all together at an assembly area in an Army tent camp. There we drew our final battle kit – such things as clothing impregnated against gas attack, a shovel to dig foxholes, seasickness capsules, a carton of cigarettes, a medical kit, rations and one funny little item which I can’t mention but which was good for many purposes, we also drew three blankets just for the night, since our bedrolls had gone on ahead.
The weather was cold and three blankets were not enough. I hardly slept at all. When we awakened early the next morning, Jack Thompson said, “That’s the coldest night I have ever spent.”
Don Whitehead said, “It’s just as miserable as it always was.”
You see, we had all been living comfortably in hotels or apartments for the last few weeks. We had got a little soft, and here we were again starting back to the old horrible life we had known for so long – sleeping on the ground, only cold water, rations, foxholes, and dirt. We were off to war again.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 12, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-Day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.
By the time we got here, the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column, I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles, they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-Hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-Hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-Hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. “We’ve done it again,” they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 13, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
On our first morning after leaving London, the Army gave us assault correspondents a semi-final set of instructions and sent us off in jeeps in separate groups, each group to be divided up later until we were all separated.
We still weren’t given any details of the coming invasion. We still didn’t know where we were to go aboard ship, or what units we would be with.
As each batch left, the oldsters among us would shake hands. And because we weren’t feeling very brilliant, almost our only words to each other were, “Take it easy.”
The following morning, at another camp, I was called at 4:00 a.m. All around me officers were cussing and getting up. This was the headquarters of a certain outfit, and they were moving out in a motor convoy at dawn.
For months, these officers had been living a civilized existence, with good beds, good food, dress-up uniforms, polished desks and a normal social existence. But now once again they were in battle clothes. They wore steel helmets and combat boots, and many carried packs on their backs.
They joked in the sleepy pre-dawn darkness. One said to another, “What are you dressed up for, a masquerade?”
Everybody was overloaded with gear. One officer said:
The Germans will have to come to us. We can never get to them with all this load.
The most-repeated question, asking jokingly, said, “Is your trip necessary?”
These men had spent months helping to plan this gigantic invasion. They were relieved to finish the weary routine of paperwork at last, and glad to start pulling their plans into action. If they had any personal concern about themselves, they didn’t show it.
I rode with the convoy commander, who was an old friend. We were in an open jeep. It was just starting to get daylight when we pulled out. And just as we left, it began raining – that dismal, cold, cruel rain that England is so capable of. It rained like that a year and a half ago when we left for Africa.
We drove all day. Motorcycles nursed each of our three sections along. We would hail every two hours for a stretch. At noon, we opened K rations. It was bitter cold.
Enlisted men had brought along a wire-haired terrier which belonged to one of the sergeants. We couldn’t have an invasion without a few dogs along. At the rest halts, the terrier would get out in the fields to play and chase rocks with never any worry. It seemed wonderful to be a dog.
The English roads had been almost wholly cleared of normal traffic. British civil and army police were at every crossing. As we neared the embarkation point, people along the roads stood at their doors and windows and smiled bon voyage to us. Happy children gave us the American OK sign – thumb and forefinger in a circle. One boy smilingly pointed a stick at us like a gun, and one of the soldiers pointed his rifle back and asked us with a grin: “Shall I let him have it?”
One little girl, thinking the Lord knows what, made a nasty face at us.
Along toward evening we reached our ship. It was an LST, and it was already nearly loaded with trucks and armored cars and soldiers. Its ramp was down in the water, several yards from shore, and being an old campaigner, I just waded aboard. But the officers behind me yelled up at the deck: “Hey, tell the captain to move the ship up closer.”
So, they waited a few minutes, and the ramp was eased up onto dry ground, and our whole convoy walked around. Being an old campaigner, I was the only one in the crowd to get his feet wet.
We had hardly got aboard when the lines were cast off and we pulled out. That evening the colonel commanding the troops on our ship gave me the whole invasion plan in detail – the secret the whole world had waited years to hear, and once you have heard it you become permanently a part of it. Now you were committed. It was too late to back out now, even if your heart failed you.
I asked a good many questions, and I realized my voice was shaking when I spoke but I couldn’t help it. Yes, it would be tough, the colonel admitted. Our own part would be precarious. He hoped to go in with as few casualties as possible, but there would be casualties.
From a vague anticipatory dread, the invasion now turned into a horrible reality for me.
In a matter of hours, this holocaust of our own planning would swirl over us. No man could guarantee his own fate. It was almost too much for me. A feeling of utter desperation obsessed me throughout the night. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. before I got to sleep and then it was a sleep harassed and torn by an awful knowledge.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 14, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
On the way to the invasion, I rode an LST – the watery workhouse of this war. We carried armored reconnaissance troops.
We felt good about our position in the convoy, for we were about a third of the way back in the column. That meant we had ships on all sides of us and we wouldn’t be on the outside in case of attack.
Our convoy was made up entirely of LSTs. Each of us towed a big steel pontoon section, these to be used as barges and docks in the shallow waters along the beach. And behind each pontoon, we also towed a smaller pontoon with two huge outboard motors on it – a thing called a “rhino.”
Several ships broke cable and lost their pontoons during the journey. Special Coast Guard tugs were assigned to pick them up. We lost our own rhino on the last night out, and I don’t know whether it was picked up or not.
We were told that if the ship sank, our chances of being picked up would be slight. The water was so cold we would lose consciousness in 15 minutes, and die within four hours.
So, we all conjectured about the possibility of clambering out onto the trailing pontoon if the ship went down. That brought up the question whether the pontoon would be cut loose if the ship sank, or be dragged under the water by its huge steel cable.
To show how rumors get around, one soldier said he had learned that the ship had a sailor standing aft with an ax, for the sole purpose of hacking the cable in two if the ship were torpedoed. Later, I asked the captain, and he said there wasn’t any such man at all.
Funny little things happen in a convoy. The steering gear on one ship broke in midafternoon and the ship came slowly careening around like a skidding automobile until it was crosswise of the convoy and the ship behind had to veer around it.
You see, we were lined up in straight columns, extending as far ahead and behind as we could see. On both sides of us ran destroyers and corvettes for escort, but as I’ve said before, it never seems to the participants in a convoy that the escort is adequate.
Our only scare came late in the night before we hit the invasion area. I was in my bank, and the colonel with whom I was rooming came down from the bridge.
“How are things going?” I asked.
He said:
Terrible. Another convoy came along and pushed us out of the swept channel. One engine has broken clear down, and the other can only run at third speed. The wind and tide are drifting us toward the Belgian coast. We’re steering straight west but barely holding our direction.
I thought how ironic it would be to wind up this war by drifting alone onto a hostile beach and spending the rest of the war in a prison camp – if we didn’t hit a mine first. But fortunately, I was too sleepy to worry about it. When I awakened at dawn, we had both engines going and were back in line again in the swept channel. Moral: Always be too sleepy to give a damn.
My own devastating sense of fear and depression, of which I have spoken before, disappeared the moment we were underway. As I write this, the old familiar crack and roar of big guns is all around us, and the beach is a great brown haze of smoke and dust, and we know that bombers will be over us tonight. Yet all that haunting premonition, that soul-consuming dread, is gone, and the war is prosaic to me again. And I believe that is true of everyone aboard, even those who have never been in combat before.
The night before sailing, we were instructed to take two anti-seasickness capsules before breakfast the next day, and follow them up with one every four hours throughout the voyage. The capsules had been issued to us with our battle kits.
Well, we took the first two and they almost killed us. The capsules have a strong sleeping powder in them, and by noon all the Army personnel aboard were in a drugged stupor. Fortunately, the Navy, being proud, didn’t take any, so somebody was left to run the ships. The capsules not only put us to sleep but they constructed our throats, made our mouths bone-dry and dilated the pupils of our eyes until we could hardly see.
When we recovered from this insidious jag, along toward evening, we all threw our seasickness medicine away, and after that we felt fine. Although the Channel crossing was rough, I didn’t hear of a single man aboard our ship who got sick.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 15, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
The ship on which I rode to the invasion of the continent brought certain components of the second wave of assault troops. We arrived in the congested waters of the beachhead shortly after dawn on D-Day.
We aboard this ship had secretly dreaded the trip, for we had expected attacks from U-boats, E-boats, and at nighttime from aircraft. Yet nothing whatever happened.
We were at sea for a much longer time than it would ordinarily take to make a beeline journey from England to France. The convoy we sailed in was one of several which comprised what is known as a “force.”
As we came down, the English Channel was crammed with forces going both ways, and as I write it, still is. Minesweepers had swept wide channels for us, all the way from England to France. These were marked with buoys. Each channel was miles wide.
We surely saw there before us more ships than any human had ever seen before at one glance. And going north were other vast convoys, some composed of fast liners speeding back to England for new loads of troops and equipment.
As far as you could see in every direction the ocean was infested with ships. There must have been every type of oceangoing vessel in the world. I even thought I saw a paddlewheel steamer in the distance, but that was probably an illusion.
There were battleships and all other kinds of warships clear down to patrol boats. There were great fleets of Liberty ships. There were fleets of luxury liners turned into troop transports, and fleets of big landing craft and tank carriers and tankers. And in and out through it all were nondescript ships – converted yachts, riverboats, tugs and barges.
The best way I can describe this vast armada and the frantic urgency of the traffic is to suggest that you visualize New York Harbor on its busiest day of the year and then just enlarge that scene until it takes in all the ocean the human eye can reach, clear around the horizon. And over the horizon, there are dozens of times that many.
We were not able to go ashore immediately after arriving off the invasion coast amidst the great pool of ships in what was known as the “transport area.”
Everything is highly organized in an invasion, and every ship, even the tiniest one, is always under exact orders timed to the minute. But at one time, our convoy was so pushed along by the wind and the currents that we were five hours ahead of schedule, despite the fact that our engines had been stopped half the time. We lost this by circling.
Although we arrived just on time, they weren’t ready for us on the beaches and we spent several hours weaving in and out among the multitude of ships just off the beachhead, and finally just settled down to await our turn.
That was when the most incongruous – to us – part of the invasion came. Here we were in a front-row seat at a great military epic. Shells from battleships were whamming over our heads, and occasionally a dead man floated face downward past us. Hundreds and hundreds of ships laden with death milled around us. We could stand at the rail and see both our shells and German shells exploding on the beaches, where struggling men were leaping ashore, desperately hauling guns and equipment in through the water.
We were in the very vortex of the war – and yet, as we sat there waiting, Lt. Chuck Conick and I played gin rummy in the wardroom and Bing Crosby sang “Sweet Leilani” over the ship’s phonograph.
Angry shells hitting near us would make heavy thuds as the concussion carried through the water and struck the hull of our ship. But in our wardroom men in gas-impregnated uniforms and wearing lifebelts sat reading Life and listening to the BBC telling us how the war before our eyes was going.
But it isn’t like that ashore. No, it isn’t like that shore.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 16, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France – (June 8)
I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.
The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.
You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide, you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were LCTs turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.
We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.
As I stood up there, I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with Tommy guns.
The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.
They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.
If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.
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The Pittsburgh Press (June 17, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Normandy beachhead, France –
In the preceding column, we told about the D-Day wreckage among our machines of war that were expended in taking one of the Normandy beaches.
But there is another and more human litter. It extended in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach. This is the strewn personal gear, gear that will never be needed again, of those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe.
Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bible and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out – one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.
Here are torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits and jumbled heaps of lifebelts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and out it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
Soldiers carry strange things ashore with them. in every invasion, you’ll find at least one soldier hitting the beach at H-Hour with a banjo slung over his shoulder. The most ironic piece of equipment marking our beach – this beach of first despair, then victory – is a tennis racket that some soldier had brought along. It lies lonesomely on the sand, clamped in its rack, not a string broken.
Two of the most dominant items in the beach refuse are cigarettes and writing paper. Each soldier was issued a carton of cigarettes just before he started. Today these cartons by the thousands, watersoaked and spilled out, mark the line of our first savage blow.
Writing paper and airmail envelopes come second. The boys had intended to do a lot of writing in France. Letters that would have filled those blank, abandoned pages.
Always there are dogs in every invasion. There is a dog still on the beach today, still pitifully looking for his master.
He stays at the water’s edge, near a boat that lies twisted and half sunk at the waterline. He barks appealingly to every soldier who approaches, trots eagerly along with him for a few feet, and then, sensing himself unwanted in all this haste, runs back to wait in vain for his own people at his own empty boat.
Over and around this long thin line of personal anguish, fresh men today are rushing vast supplies to keep our armies pushing on into France. Other squads of men pick amidst the wreckage to salvage ammunition and equipment that are still usable.
Men worked and slept on the beach for days before the last D-Day victim was taken away for burial.
I stepped over the form of one youngster whom I thought dead. But when I looked down, I saw he was only sleeping. He was very young, and very tired. He lay on one elbow, his hand suspended in the air about six inches from the ground. And in the palm of his hand, he held a large, smooth rock.
I stood and looked at him a long time. He seemed in his sleep to hold that rock lovingly, as though it were his last link with a vanishing world. I have no idea at all why he went to sleep with the rock in his hand, or what kept him from dropping it once he was asleep. It was just one of those little things without explanation, that a person remembers for a long time.
The strong swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers’ bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them.
As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood.
They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.
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Ernie’s writings hits the heart hard sometimes.
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