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.