Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[adamsano]

Ernie’s writings hits the heart hard sometimes.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Normandy beachhead, France –
When I went ashore on the soil of France, the first thing I wanted to do was hunt up the other correspondents I had said goodbye to a few days previously in England, and see how they fared. Before the day of invasion, we had accepted it as a fact that not everybody would come through alive.

Correspondents sort of gang together. They know the ins and outs of war, and they all work at it in much the same manner. So, I knew about where to look, and I didn’t have much trouble finding them.

It was early in the morning, before the boys had started out on their day’s round of covering the war. I found them in foxholes dug into the rear slope of a grassy hill about a half-mile from the beach.

I picked them out from a distance, because I could spot Jack Thompson’s beard. He was sitting on the edge of a foxhole lacing his paratrooper boots. About a dozen correspondents were there, among them three especially good friends of mine – Thompson, Don Whitehead and Tex O’Reilly.

First of all, we checked with each other on what we had heard about other correspondents. Most of them were OK. One had been killed, and one was supposed to have been lost on a sunken ship, but we didn’t know who. One or two had been wounded. Three of our best friends had not been heard from at all, and it looked bad, but they have since turned up safe.

The boys were unshaven, and they eyes were red. Their muscles were stiff and their bodies ached. They had carried ashore only their typewriters and some K rations. They had gone two days without sleep, and then had slept on the ground without blankets, in wet clothes.

But none of that mattered too much after what they had been through. They were in a sort of daze from the exhaustion and mental turmoil of battle. When you asked a question, it would take them a few seconds to focus their thoughts and give you an answer.

Two of them in particular had been through all the frightful nightmare that the assault troops had experienced – because they had come ashore with them.

Don Whitehead hit the beach with one regiment just an hour after H-Hour, Thompson at the same time with another regiment. They were on the beaches for more than four hours under the hideous cloudburst of shells and bullets.

Jack Thompson said:

You’ve never seen a beach like it before. Dead and wounded men were lying so thick you could hardly take a step. One officer was killed only two feet away from me.

Whitehead was still asleep when I went to his foxhole. I said, “Get up, you lazy so-and-so.” He started grinning without even opening his eyes, for he knew who it was.

It was hard for him to wake up. He had been unable to sleep, from sheer exhaustion, and had taken a sleeping tablet.

Don has managed to steal one blanket on the beach and had that wrapped around him. He had taken off his shoes for the first time in two days. His feet were so sore from walking in wet shoes and socks that he had to give them some air.

Finally, he began to get himself up. He said:

I don’t know why I’m alive at all. It was really awful. For hours there on the beach, the shells were so close they were throwing mud and rocks all over you. It was so bad that after a while you didn’t care whether you got hit or not.

Don fished in a cardboard ration box for some cigarettes. He pulled out an envelope and threw it into the bushes. “They ain’t worth a damn,” he said. The envelope contained his anti-seasickness tablets.

He said:

I was sicker than hell while we were circling around in our landing craft to come ashore. Everybody was sick. Soldiers were lying on the floor of the LCVP sick as dogs.

Tex O’Reilly rode around in a boat for six hours waiting to get ashore. Everybody was wet and cold and seasick and scared. War is so romantic – if you’re far away from it.

Whitehead has probably been in more amphibious landings than any other correspondents over here. I know of six he has made, four of them murderously tough. And he said:

I think I have gone on one too many of these things. Not because of what might happen to me personally, but I’ve lost my perspective. It’s like dreaming the same nightmare over and over again, and when you try to write you feel that you have written it all before. You can’t think of any new or different words to say it with.

I know only too well what he means.

It is an ironic thing about correspondents who go in on the first few days of an invasion story. They are the only correspondents capable of telling the full and intimate drama and horror of the thing. And yet they are the ones who can’t get their copy out to the world. By the time they do get it out, events have swirled on and the world doesn’t care anymore.

There that morning in their foxholes on the slope of the hill those correspondents were mainly worried about the communications situation. Forty-eight hours after H-Hour, correspondents who had landed with the first wave felt sure that none of their copy had ever reached America. And even I, a day behind then, feel no assurance that these feeble essays of mine will ever see the light of day. But in philosophical moments, I can think of greater catastrophes than that.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 20, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in France – (wireless)
Would you be interested in hearing how we spent our first night in France? Well, even if you wouldn’t…

Just after supper we got an order to unload our vehicles from the LST. One of those big self-propelled bargelike things, made of steel pontoons bolted together, came up in front of our ship and the vehicles were driven off onto it.

These barges are called rhinos. They move very slowly, and it took us an hour to get to shore. Then the beachmaster signaled us not to land, for the tide wasn’t right. So, we had to loaf around out there on the water for another hour.

They were blowing up mines on the beach, and some of our bug naval guns were still thundering away at the Germans. The evening was cloudy and miserable, and it began to rain as we waited. We were all cold.

At last, the beachmaster let us in. The barge grounded about fifty yards from shore, and runways were let down.

Every one of our vehicles had been waterproofed, so that the engines wouldn’t drown out while going through the surf.

I came ashore in a jeep with Pvt. William Bates Wescott of Culver City, California. Wescott is a good-looking, intelligent man of 26 who used to be a salesman for the Edgemar Farms Dairy at Venice, California. He is at war for the first time, and all this shooting and stuff are completely new to him, but he is doing all right.

Wescott’s wife works in downtown Los Angeles, and just in case you want to take her some flowers for being the wife of such a nice guy, she’s a girl who makes Pullman reservations for the Southern Pacific Railroad at Sixth and Main.

Wescott and I were the first ones off the barge. I had waterproofed my typewriter by taping it up in a gas cape. But the water came only to the floor of the jeep. We didn’t even get out feet wet, but the waves did slosh in and get the seats of our pants wet.

It was several miles to our bivouac area. On the way we passed many bodies lying alongside the road, both German and Americans but mostly German. Some of the French people along the roads smiled and waved, while others kept their heads down and wouldn’t look up.

It was dark when we got to our bivouac, a grape and apple orchard on a hillside. We pulled in and parked under a tree. First, we posted sentries, and then Wescott dug into his big ration box in the jeep and got out some grapefruit juice crackers and sardines.

While we were eating, the first German planes of the night came over. One dropped its bombs not awfully far away – enough to give us

It was midnight by the time we had finished eating and got a camouflage over the jeep in preparation for the first light next morning. We decided to get what sleep we could. We didn’t have our bedrolls yet, but we did have two blankets apiece. We just lay down on the ground.

Another jeep had pulled under the tree with us. Altogether, our little group sleeping on the ground consisted of two colonels, three enlisted men and myself. We slept in all our clothes.

German planes kept coming over one by one. Our guns kept up their booming and crackling all night long, in fits and jerks.

After an hour or so, one of our colonels said we’d better move our blankets so our heads would be under the jeeps because pieces of flak were falling all over the orchard.

He said the flak wouldn’t kill you unless it hit you in the head. I said I guessed it would if it hit you in the stomach. He said it wouldn’t. I still think it would.

Anyhow, I moved my head under and left my stomach out in the open. My hand was right behind the front wheel, under the fender. It was a good place, but the headroom was so scant that every time I would turn over I would get a mouthful of mud from the fender.

Then we got cold. Our two blankets might as well have been handkerchiefs, for all the warmth there was in them. We lit cigarettes and smoked under our blankets. We couldn’t sleep much anyhow, for the noise of the guns.

Sometimes planes would come in low, and we would like there scrunched up in that knotty tenseness you get when waiting to be hit.

Finally, daylight came. At dawn, our planes always come over and the Germans leave, so the days are safe and secure as Far as the air is concerned.

We all got up at dawn, welcoming a chance to move around and get warm. Pvt. Wescott opened some K rations and we ate a scanty breakfast off the hood of the jeep. Then a colonel made a reconnaissance tour. When he came back, he said that our little orchard, which looked so rural and pretty in the dawn, was full of dead Germans, killed the day before. We would have to help bury them pretty soon.

That was our first night in France.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in France –
The war is constantly producing funny things as well as tragic things, so I might as well tell you some of our lighter incidents.

For example, the first night we spent in France one of the colonels who slept with us under an apple tree was an Army observer from Washington. Usually we don’t care for observers from Washington, but this colonel was a very nice guy and a good field soldier too, and everybody liked him.

While we were eating our K-rations next morning he said he had slept fine for the first hour, before we had moved in under our jeep for protection from the flak. He said that before we moved he had found a nice little mound of earth to put his head on for a pillow. He said that all his life he had had to have a pillow of some kind. After moving under the jeep he couldn’t find anything to put his head on.

With that he walked over a few feet to show us the nice mound of earth. When he looked down he started laughing. His excellent pillow of the night before had turned out in the light of day to be a pile of horse manure.

Another story concerns a masterful piece of wartime understatement by one of our truck drivers, Pvt. Carl Vonhorn of rural Cooperstown, New York. He had pulled into an apple orchard adjoining ours the night before, parked his truck in the darkness, spread his blankets on the ground in front of the truck, and gone to sleep.

When he woke up at daylight Vonhorn looked about him sleepily. And there on the ground right beside him, within arm’s reach, was a dead German soldier. And when he looked on the other side, there, equally close, were two potato-mashers. Pvt. Vonhorn got up very quickly.

Later he was telling his officers about his startling experience, and he ended his description with this philosophical remark: “It was very distasteful.”

Everybody thought that was so funny it spread around the camp like fire, and now the phrase “It’s very distasteful” has become practically a byword.

After breakfast that first morning we had to round up about fifty dead Germans and Americans in the series of orchards where we were camping, and carry them to a central spot in a pasture and bury them.

I helped carry one corpse across a couple of fields. I did it partly because the group needed an extra man, and partly because I was forcing myself to get used to it, for you can’t hide from death when you’re in a war.

This German was just a kid, surely not over fifteen. His face had already turned black, but you could sense his youth through the death-distorted features.

The boys spread a blanket on the ground beside him. Then we lifted him over onto it. One soldier and I each took hold of a foot, and two others took his arms. One of the two soldiers in front was hesitant about touching the corpse. Whereupon the other soldier said to him:

Go on, take hold of him, dammit. You might as well get used to it now, for you’ll be carrying plenty of dead ones from now on. Hell, you may even be carrying me one of these days.

So, we carried him across two fields, each of us holding a corner of the blanket. Our burden got pretty heavy, and we rested a couple of times. The boys made wisecracks along the way to cover up their distaste for the job.

When we got to the field, we weren’t sure just where the lieutenant wanted the cemetery started. So we put our man down on the ground and went back for instructions. And as we walked away the funny guy of the group turned and shook a finger at the dead German and said: “Now don’t you run away while we’re gone.”

The Germans leave snipers behind when they retreat, so all American bivouac areas are heavily guarded by sentries at night. And the sentries really mean business.

The other night a pretty important general whom I know was working late, as all our staff officers do these days. About midnight he left his tent to go to another general’s tent and talk something over.

He had gone only about twenty feet when a sentry challenged him. And just at that moment the general, groping around in the dark, fell headlong into a deep slit trench.

It was funny, even to the general, but there was nothing humorous about it to the sentry. He suspected monkey business. He rushed up to the trench, pointed his gun at the general, and in a tone that was a mixture of terror and intent to kill, he yelled: “Git out of there and git recognized, you!”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in France – (by wireless)
Folks newly arrived from America say that you people at home are grave and eager about this, our greatest operation of the war so far.

But they say also that you are giving the landings themselves an important out of proportion to what must follow before the war can end. They say you feel that now that we are on the soil of France, we will just seep rapidly ahead and the Germans will soon crumble.

It is natural for you to feel that, and nobody is blaming you. But I thought maybe in this column I could help your understanding of things if we sort of charted this European campaign. This is no attempt to predict – it is just an effort to clarify.

On the German side in Western Europe, we face an opponent who has been building his defenses and his forces for four years. A great army of men was here waiting to us, well prepared and well equipped.

On the English side of the Channel, we and the British spent more than two years building up to equality in men and arms with this opponent. Finally we reached that equality, and I am sure considerably more than equality.

Then – on June 6 – came the invasion we had waited for so long. The big show has begun. So, let’s divide the remainder of this campaign into phases.

Phase No 1 was the highly vital task of getting ashore at all. That phase could not last long. We either had to break a hole in the beach defenses and have our men flowing through that hole within a few hours, or the jig was up. Phase No. 1 came out all in our favor.

We planned Phase No. 2 so that we could throw in our first follow-up waves without casualties or delay. That was also a phase we didn’t care to dillydally about. The beaches were fairly clear of shellfire within two days.

Phase No. 2 is what we are in right now. And that is to build a wall of troops around the outer rim of our beachhead that will hold off any German counterattacks.

The whole split-second question of the first few days was whether we could get troops and supplies through our little needle’s-eye of a beachhead faster than the Germans could bring theirs from all over Europe.

As this is written, no important counterattack has developed. The Germans are having plenty of trouble moving their stuff up, because of our savage air activity. Every day that passes adds to our forces and gives us greater security.

If we can hold that outer line against all attack for a short while yet, then we will have won Phase No. 3. And right now, it certainly seems that we are winning it.

Phases 1, 2, and 3 were all preliminary ones. It took three of them merely to get us a place in Europe from which to begin. The three of them merely give us the corner lot on which we are going to build our house.

Phase No. 4 is the housebuilding phase. This is the phase you folks at home have been working so hard to make possible.

In England and America, we’ve got the men and machines and supplies and munitions to overbalance the great stockpile Germany has built up in Western Europe, But we’ve got to get it over here into France before we go on.

You may have imagined that we would hit the beach and go right on, advancing 30 miles a day till we reached the German border. We could no more do that than a baby, after taking its first step, could run a hundred-yard dash. You have to wait until your strength is built up before you can run.

That is Phase No. 4. It will go on for some time yet. Don’t be impatient. The wall in front of us will hold while we gradually pile this beachhead to the saturation point with extra men, guns, trucks, food, ammunition, gasoline, telephone wire, repair shops, hospitals, airfields, and thousands of other items – pack it until we have more than the Germans have, and with lots of reserves in addition.

Then and not until then will Phase No. 5 start. Phase No. 5 is the real war – big-scale war. How long we will have to wait between now and the beginning of Phase No. 5, I don’t know. But my guess is that it will take months rather than weeks.

Naturally there will be fighting during that time. The Germans will try to crush us back onto the beaches. We at the same time will try to extend our holdings enough to protect our accumulating men and supplies.

But Phase No. 5 will be the final one. How long it will last, I also don’t know – and in that ignorance, I have a great deal of company. I doubt if anyone in the world knows. All we do know is that things look good and that it will definitely end in our favor.

So don’t be impatient if we seem to go slowly for a while. You can’t lay the foundation of a house in the forenoon and move into the house that evening. We are just now laying the foundation of our house of war in Europe. It will take a while to build the wall and get the roof on. And then…

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 23, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Cherbourg Peninsula, France – (by wireless)
The day after troops of our 9th Division pushed through and cut off this peninsula, I went touring in a jeep over the country they had just taken.

This Norman country is truly lovely in many places. Here in the western part of the peninsula the ground becomes hilly and rolling. Everything is a vivid green, there are trees everywhere, and the view across the fields from a rise looks exactly like the rich, gentle land of Eastern Pennsylvania. It is too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of war, and yet so were parts of Tunisia and Sicily and Italy. Someday I would like to cover a war in a country that is as ugly as war itself.

Our ride was a sort of spooky one. The American troops had started north and were driving on Cherbourg. This was possible because the Germans in that section were thoroughly disorganized, and by now capable of nothing more than trying to escape.

There was no traffic whatever on the roads. You could drive for miles without seeing a soul. We have been told that the country was still full of snipers, and we knew there were batches of Germans in the woods waiting to surrender. And yet we saw nothing. The beautiful, tree-bordered lanes were empty. Cattle grazed contentedly in the fields. It was as though life had taken a holiday and death was in hiding. It gave you the willies.

Finally, we came to a stone schoolhouse which was being used as a prisoner-of-war collection point, so we stopped for a look. Here groups of prisoners were constantly being brought in. And here individual American soldiers who had been cut off behind the lines for days came wearily to rest for a while in the courtyard before going on back to hunt up their outfits.

Most of the prisoners coming in at the time were from a captured German hospital. German doctors had set up shop in a shed adjoining the school and were treating their prisoners, who had slight wounds. At the moment I walked up, one soldier had his pants down and a doctor was probing for a fragment in his hip.

Two of three of the German officers spoke some English. They were in a very good humor. One of them, a doctor, said to me:

I’ve been in the army for four years and today is the best day I have spent in the army.

In this courtyard, I ran onto two boys who had just walked back after losing their jeep and being surrounded for hours that morning by Germans.

They were Pfc. Arthur MacDonald of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Pvt. T. C. McFarland of Southern Pines, North Carolina. They were forward observers for the 9th Division’s artillery.

They had bunked down the night before in a pasture. When they woke up, they could hear voices all around, and they weren’t American voices. They peeked out and saw a German at a latrine not 30 feet away.

So, they started crawling. They crawled for hours. Finally, they got out of the danger zone, and they started walking. They met a French farmer along the road, and took him in tow.

They said:

We sure captured that Frenchman. He was so scared he could hardly talk. We used high-school French and a dictionary and finally got it through his head that all we wanted was something to eat. So, he took us to this house. He fried eggs and pork and made coffee for us.

Our morale sure was low this morning, but that Frenchman we captured fixed it up.

The boys pulled out a couple of snapshots of the Frenchman, and they were so grateful that I imagine they will carry those pictures the rest of their lives.

At this time the French in that vicinity had been “liberated” less than 12 hours, and they could hardly encompass it in their minds. They were relieved, but they hardly knew what to do.

As we left the prison enclosure and got into our jeep, we noticed four or five French countrypeople – young farmers in their 20s, I would take them to be – leaning against a nearby house.

As we sat in the jeep getting our gear adjusted, one of the farmers walked toward us, rather hesitantly and timidly. But finally, he came up and smilingly handed me a rose.

I couldn’t go around carrying a rose in my hand all afternoon, so I threw it away around the next bend. But little things like that do sort of make you feel good about the human race.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Barneville, Normandy, France – (by wireless)
From this picturesque little town, you can look down upon the western sea. In the center of Barneville is a slopping paved court, a sort of public square except that it is rectangular instead of square.

At one end of the square, an Army truck was parked. Scattered around the square were half a dozen American soldiers standing in doorways with their rifles ready. There are a few French people on the streets.

We went to the far end of the square, where three local French policemen were standing in front of the mayor’s office. They couldn’t speak any English, but they said there was one woman in town who did, and a little boy was sent running for her. Gradually a crowd of eager and curious people crushed in upon us, until there must have been 200 of them, from babies to old women.

Finally, the woman arrived – a little dark woman with graying hair, and spectacles, and a big smile. Her English was quite good, and we asked her if there were any Germans in the town. She turned and asked the policemen.

Instantly everybody in the crowd started talking at once. The sound was like that of a machine that increases in speed until its noise drowns out all else.

Finally, the policemen had to shush the crowd so the woman could answer us.

She said there were Germans all around, in the woods, but none whatever left in the town. Just then, a German stuck his head out of a nearby second-story window. Somebody saw him, and an American soldier was dispatched to get him.

Barneville is a fortunate place, because not a shell was fired into it by either side. The lieutenant with us told the woman we were glad nobody had been hurt. When she translated this for the crowd, there was much nodding in approval of our good wishes.

We must have stood and talked for an hour and a half. It was a kind of holiday for the local people. They were relieved but still not quite sure the Germans wouldn’t be back. They were still under a restraint that wouldn’t let them open up riotously. But you could sense from little things that they were glad to have us.

A little French shopkeeper came along with a spool of red, white and blue ribbon from his store. He cut off pieces about six inches long for all hands, both American and French.

In a few minutes, everybody was going around with a French tricolor in his buttonhole.

Then a ruddy-faced man of middle age, who looked like a gentleman farmer, drove up in one of those one-horse, high-wheeled work carts that the French use.

He had a German prisoner in uniform standing behind him, and another one, who was sick, lying on a stretcher. The farmer had captured these guys himself, and he looked so pleased with himself that I expected him to take a bow at any moment.

French people kept coming up and asking us for instructions. A man who looked as if he might be the town banker asked what he was supposed to do with prisoners.

We told him to bring them to the truck, and asked how many he had. To our astonishment, he said he had 70 in the woods a couple of miles away, 120 in a nearby town, and 40 in another town.

As far as I could figure it out, he had captured them all himself.

Another worried-looking Frenchman came up. He was a doctor, he said he had 26 badly wounded Germans down at the railroad station and desperately needed medical supplies. He wanted chloroform and sulfa drugs. We told him we would have some sent.

One character in the crowd looked as if he belonged in a novel of Bohemian life on the left bank in Paris. He couldn’t possibly have been anything but a poet. He wore loose, floppy clothes that made him look like a woman. His glasses were thick, and hair about a foot long curled around his ears. I wish you could have seen the expressions of our tough, dirty soldiers when they looked at him.

When we finally started away from the crowd, a little old fellow in faded blue overalls ran up and asked us, in sign language, to come to his safe for a drink. Since we didn’t dare violate the spirit of hands-across-the-sea that was then wafting about the town we had to sacrifice ourselves and accept.

So, we sat down on wooden benches at a long bare table while the little Frenchman puttered and sputtered around. He let two policemen and his own family in, and then took the handle out of the front door so nobody else could get in.

The Germans had drunk up all his stock except for some wine and some eau de vie. In case you don’t know, eau de vie is a savage liquid made by boiling barded wire, soapsuds, watch springs, and old tent pegs together. The better brands have a touch of nitroglycerine for flavor.

So, the little Frenchman filled our tiny glasses. We raised them, tough glasses all around, vived la France all over the place, and goodwill-toward-men rang out through the air and tears ran down our cheeks.

In this case, however, the tears were largely induced by our violent efforts to refrain from clutching at our throats and crying out in anguish. This goodwill business is a tough life, and I think every American who connects with a glass of eau de vie should get a Purple Heart.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 26, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in France – (by wireless)
Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet there is something sneaking about it that outrages the American sense of fairness.

I had never sensed this before we landed in France and began pushing the Germans back. We have had snipers before – in Bizerte and Cassino and lots of other places. But always on a small scale.

Here in Normandy, the Germans have gone for sniping in a wholesale manner. There are snipers everywhere. There are snipers in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass. But mainly they’re in the high, bushy hedgerows that form the fences of all the Norman fields and line every roadside and lane.

It is perfect sniping country. A man can hide himself in the thick fence-row shrubbery with several days’ rations, and it’s like hunting a needle in a haystack to find him. Every mile we advance, there are dozens of snipers left behind us. They pick off our soldiers one by one as they walk down the roads or across the fields.

It isn’t safe to move into a new bivouac area until the snipers have been cleaned out. The first bivouac I moved into had shots ringing through it for a full day before all the hidden gunmen were rounded up. It gives you the same spooky feeling that you get on moving into a place you suspect of being sown with mines.

In past campaigns, our soldiers would talk about the occasional snipers with contempt and disgust. But here sniping has become more important and taking precautions against it is something we have had to learn and learn fast.

One officer friend of mine said, “Individual soldiers have become sniper-wise before, but now we’re sniper-conscious as whole units.”

Snipers kill as many Americans as they can, and then when their food and ammunition run out, they surrender. To an American, that isn’t quite ethical. The average American soldier has little feeling against the average German soldier who has fought an open fight and put into print. He is learning how to kill the snipers before the time comes for them to surrender.

As a matter of fact, this part of France is very difficult for anything but fighting between small groups. It is a country of little fields, every one bordered by a thick hedge and a high fence of trees. There is hardly any place where you can see beyond the field ahead of you. Most of the time a soldier doesn’t see more than a hundred yards in any direction.

In other places, the ground is flooded and swampy with a growth of high, jungle-like grass. In this kind of stuff, it is almost man-to-man warfare. One officer who has served a long time in the Pacific says this fighting is the nearest thing to Guadalcanal that he has seen since.

Thousands of little personal stories will dribble out of D-Day on the Normandy beachhead. A few that I pick up from time to time I will pass along to you.

The freakiest story I’ve heard is of an officer who was shot through the face. He had his mouth wide open at that time, yelling at somebody. The bullet went in one cheek and right out the other cheek. That sounds dreadful, but actually the wound is a fairly slight one and the officer will be in action again before very long.

Capt. Ralph L. Haga of Prospect, Virginia, claims the distinction of being the first American chaplain to set foot on French soil in World War II.

He hid the beach 65 minutes after H-Hour, with the combat engineer unit to which he is attached. Like everybody else, he had rough going, but he wasn’t hurt. He is a Methodist and before the war was a pastor at Bassett, Virginia.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 27, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Cherbourg Peninsula, France – (wireless)
For a couple of days, I rode around the Cherbourg Peninsula with Bert Brandt, war photographer for ACME Newspictures.

You may have seen by now some of the pictures Bert took during that time, so I would like to tell you how they came about.

Picture No. 1: This showed a large crowd of French people, led by the mayor of their town, advancing toward an American soldier with outstretched hands of welcome.

Well, that was taken in Barneville. The people really did welcome us, but of course the actual picture had to be staged.

The people were very pleased and eager. The soldier Bert picked out to receive the throng was Sgt. Max Monsorno of Woodhaven, Long Island. He was one of the 9th Division men left to guard the town after the others had pressed on through.

Bert instructed the crowd in its act, through the only Barneville woman who spoke English. She told them how they should advance toward the sergeant, all smiling and be sure to look at the sergeant and not look at the camera. Then Bert yelled “Go!” The mayor walked towards Sgt. Monsorno with his hand out. The crowd surged up behind him. Bert snapped a picture and then shouted at them to do it again. It seemed the mayor wasn’t smiling big enough to suit Bert.

More instructions. More interpretations. A little girl jumped up and down with delight. The older people got more excited. Sgt. Monsorno gave the mayor a colossal stage smile, to show him how.

Then Bert yelled “Go!” again, the mayor almost cut his head in two with a smile, and the little girls threw their flowers, and the whole crowd waved their arms. Everybody was very happy, including Bert. And we hope we made you very happy too.

Picture No. 2: Dead horses and wrecked German vehicles along the roadside. The circumstances were these:

We had caught the Germans trying to retreat down the road from Bricquebec to Barneville, and plastered them with artillery. The devastation along that road was immense.

The Germans were moving with many horse-drawn vehicles as well as trucks. They were in two wheeled French work carts, in fancy passenger bugles, in light wagons along the style of our own Wild West covered wagons.

At spots, the wreckages piled so high that traffic couldn’t get through until our own engineers dragged the debris off the road. Hundreds of carts and guns and dead horses littered the road. German bodies lay sprawling big holes, pockmarked the macadam, burned out trucks lay dead by the roadsides, masses have broken and entwining telephone wires snarled the highway. That was the scene when Bert Brandt took Picture No. 2.

The picture was of a bulldozer methodically pushing dead horses and spattered trucks, all in the same scoopful off a road into an orchard. The dozer driver went after his job with a grim got-to-do-it look on his face.

There were scores of pitifully dead horses within a space of a few yards. Some of them lay as if asleep. Others were in distorted, gnarled positions, their leg bones cracked and broken as the bulldozer pushed. A little bunch of French people stood looking on.

Bert took his pictures while standing on the hood of a command car in which he had been riding. I sat in the back seat, calling to him to hurry up and finish. Of all the war I’ve seen, that is the site which has come the nearest to making me sick at the stomach.

Picture No. 3: Two sweet little French girls, about six years old, throwing flowers to me as we passed them in our car. The circumstances:

We were on our way back to camp after taking the picture of the horses. We passed through a concrete roadblock Germans had built just north of Bricquebec. As we passed through to a little girl standing on top through some flowers to us, but they missed in the flowers fell on the road behind us. We had gone about 50 yards when Bert said, “Say, that would make a picture. Let’s go back and get it.”

So, we backed up, got out and indicated by sign language that we wanted the little girls to do it again. They were smart as whips. They got the idea instantly. Furthermore, there were two of the prettiest little girls you ever saw in your life.

We picked some more flowers for them. Then Bert got set in the road ahead. I got in the back seat. Bert had me put my goggles back over my eyes so that it would look as if we were going fast, although we were actually barely moving for the picture.

We had to retake the picture three times. The little girls, in their eagerness, would throw the flowers too soon. Finally, I acted as director, and as the car approached, I kept saying, “No, no, no,” and then I remembered the French word “maintenant,” which means “now,” and so at the right moment I called out “maintenant!” and they threw flowers and everything was perfect.

Then I got out of my car and I had no sooner hit the ground. Then I was attacked by my two little friends, plus half a dozen more who had arrived and who had been watching and they were all over me like a swarm of bees laughing and kissing and hugging me till I was almost smothered.

It was completely impulsive and I don’t think it had anything to do with the liberation or the war. I think it was motivated by the simple fundamental that the French like to kiss people. They don’t even care who they kiss. Vive la France!