Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Cherbourg Peninsula, France – (by wireless)
Just a column of little items…

The other day a friend and I were in a mid-peninsula town not many miles from Cherbourg, and we stopped to ask a couple of young French policemen wearing dark blue uniforms and Sam Browne belts where to go to buy a certain article.

Being quite hospitable, they jumped in the car and went along to show us. After we finished our buying, we all got back in the car. We tried to ask the policemen where they were going. They in turn asked us where we were going.

Knowing it was hopeless in our limited French to explain that we were going to our camp up the road, we merely said Cherbourg, meaning our camp was in that direction.

But the Frenchmen thought we meant to drive right into Cherbourg, which was still in German hands. Quick as a flash, they jumped up, hit the driver on the shoulder to get the car stopped, shook hands rapidly all around, saluted, and scurried out with a terrified “Au revoir.” None of that Cherbourg stuff for those boys.

Some of the German officers are pleased at being captured, but your dyed-in-the-wool Nazi is not. They brought in a young one the other day who was furious. He considered it thoroughly unethical that we fought so hard.

The Americans had attacked all night, and the Germans don’t like night attacks. When this special fellow was brought in, he protested in rage: “You Americans! The way you fight! This is not war! This is madness!”

The German was so outraged he never even got the irony of his own remark – that madness though it be, it works.

Another high-ranking officer was brought in and the first thing he asked was the whereabouts of his personal orderly. When told that his orderly was deader than a mackerel, he flew off the handle and accused us of depriving him of his personal comfort.

“Who’s going to dig my foxhole for me?” he demanded.

You remember that in the early days of the invasion, a whole bevy of high-ranking Allied officers came to visit us – Gens. Marshall, Eisenhower and Arnold; Adms. King and Ramsey – there was so much brass you just bumped two-star generals without even begging pardon.

Now, generals, it seems, like to be brave. Or I should say that, being generals, they know they must appear to be brave in order to set an example. Consequently, a high-ranking general never ducks or bats an eye when a shell hits near him.

Well, the military police charged with conducting this glittering array of generals around our beachhead tried to get them to ride in armored cars, since the country was still full of snipers.

But, being generals, they said no, certainly not, no armored cars for us, we’ll just go in open command cars like anybody else. And that’s the way they did go.

But what the generals didn’t know was this: taking no chances on such a collection of talent, the MPs hid armored cars and tanks all along their route, behind hedges and under bushes, out of sight so that the generals couldn’t see them, but they’re ready for action just in case anything did happen.

The most wrecked town I have seen so far is Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, known simply as “San Sahvure.” Its buildings are gutted and leaning, its streets choked with rubble, and vehicles drive over the top of it.

Bombing and shellfire from both sides did it. This place looks exactly like World War I pictures of such places as Verdun. At the edge of the town, the bomb craters are so immense that you could put whole houses in them.

A veteran of the last war pretty well summed up the two wars the other day when he said, “This is just like the last war, only the holes are bigger.”

So far as I know, we have entered France without anybody making a historic remark about it. Last time you know, it was “Lafayette, we are here.”

The nearest I have heard to a historic remark was made by an ack-ack gunner, sitting on a mound of earth about two weeks after D-Day, reading The Stars and Stripes from London. All of a sudden, he said, “Say, where’s this Normandy beachhead it talks about in here?”

I looked at him closely and saw that he was serious, so I said, “Why, you’re sitting on it.”

And he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. I never knowed that.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Cherbourg Peninsula, France – (by wireless)
The American soldiers here are impressed by the loveliness of the Normandy countryside. Except for swampy places, it is almost a dreamland of beauty. Everything is so green and rich and natural looking.

There are no fences as such. All the little fields are bordered either by high trees or by earthen ridges built up about waist high and now, after many centuries, completely covered with grass, shrubbery, ferns and flowers.

Normandy differs from the English landscape mainly in that rural England is fastidiously trimmed and cropped like a Venetian garden, while in Normandy the grass needs cutting and the hedgerows are wild and everything has less of neatness and more of the way nature makes it.

The main roads in Normandy are macadam and the side roads gravel. The roads are winding, narrow and difficult for heavy military traffic. In many places we’ve made roads one-way for miles at a stretch.

The average American finds the climate of Normandy abominable, even in June. We have about one nice day for every three bad ones. On nice days, the sky is clear blue and the sun is out and everything seems wonderful, except that there is still a hidden chill in the air, and even in your tent or under a shade tree, you’re cold.

And on the bad days, the whole universe is dark and you need lights in your tent at noontime, and it drizzles or sprinkles, and often a cold wind blows, and your bones and your heart, too, are miserable.

Most everybody has on his long underwear. I wear four sweaters in addition to my regular uniform. Overcoats were taken away from our troops before we left England, and there are a lot of our boys not too warmly clad.

There is a constant dampness in the air. At night you put your clothes under your bedroll or they’re wet in the morning. All this dampness makes for ruddy cheeks and green grass. But ruddy cheeks are for girls and green grass for cows, and personally I find the ordinary American is happiest when he’s good and stinking hot.

It is the custom throughout our Army, as you doubtless know, for soldiers to paint names on their vehicles. They have names on airplanes, tanks, jeeps, trucks, guns and practically everything that moves.

Sometimes they have girls’ names, and often they are trick names such as Sad Sack, or Invasion Blues or Hitler’s Menace.

Well, the boys have already started painting French names on their vehicles. I saw a jeep named Biento, which means “soon,” and a motorcycle named Char de Mort, which means “Chariot of Death.”

Pretty soon we will be seeing jeeps named Yvonne and Ma Petite Chérie.

The names of a lot of the French towns in our area are tongue twisters for our troops, so the towns quickly became known by some unanimous application of Americanese. For instance, Bricquebec is often called Bricabrac. And Isigny was first known as Insignia but has now evolved into Easy Knee, which is closer to the French pronunciation.

I heard a funny story of one of our young fighter pilots who had to bail out one day recently high over the English Channel.

It seems the pilots carry a small bottle of brandy in their first-aid kits, for use if they are in the water a long time or have been hurt in landing.

Well, this young pilot, once he was safely out of his plane and floating down, figured he might as well drink his before he hit the water. So, he fished it out of his pocket and drained her down while still many thousands of feet in the air.

At high altitude, liquor hits you harder than at sea level. Furthermore, this kid wasn’t accustomed to drinking. The combination of the two had him tighter than a goat by the time he floated down into the channel.

A destroyer had spotted him coming down, and it fished him out almost as soon as he hit the water. Even the cold plunge didn’t sober him up. He was giddy and staggering around and they couldn’t keep him in one spot long enough to dry him off.

The captain of the destroyer sensed what had happened, and being afraid the kid would take cold wandering around the deck, he came up and said with affected harshness, “What the hell are you doing here? Get below where you belong.”

Whereupon the wet young lieutenant drew himself up in indignation and, with all the thick-tongued harshness of a plastered guest who’s been insulted by his host, replied: “I assure you I don’t propose to remain where I am not wanted.”

And forthwith he jumped overboard. The destroyer had to rescue him again.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (June 30, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One of the most vital responsibilities during these opening weeks of our war on the continent of Europe has been the protection of our unloading beaches and ports.

For over and through them must pass, without interruption, and in great masses, our building of men and material in sufficient masses to roll the Germans clear back out of France.

Nothing must be allowed to interfere with that unloading. Everything we can lay our hands on is thrown into the guarding of those beaches and ports. Allied ground troops police them from the land side. Our two navies protect them from sneak attacks by sea. Our great air supremacy makes daytime air assaults rare and costly.

It is only at night that the Germans have a chance. They do keep peeking away at us with night bombers, but their main success in this so far has been in keeping us awake and making us dig out foxholes deeper.

The job of protecting the beaches at night has been given over to the anti-aircraft artillery, or ack-ack. I read recently that we have here on the beachhead the greatest concentration of anti-aircraft guns ever assembled in an equivalent space. After three solid weeks of being kept awake all night long by guns, and having to snatch your little sleep in odd moments during the daytime, that is not hard to believe.

Here on the beachhead the falling flak becomes a real menace – one of the few times I’ve known that to happen in this war. Every night for weeks, pieces of exploded shells have come whizzing to earth within 50 yards of my tent. One an unexploded ack-ack shell buried itself half a stone’s throw from my tent.

A good portion of our Army on the beachhead now sleeps all night in foxholes, and some of the troops have swung over to the Anzio beachhead custom of building dugouts in order to be safe from falling flak.

For a long time, I have intended doing a series about the anti-aircraft gunners. I’m glad I never got around to it before, for here on the Normandy beachhead our ack-ack seems to have reached its peak.

Figures are not permission but I can say that right now we have many, many ack-ack soldiers on the beachhead and that by the time everything has arrived the number will be much larger.

And that is speaking only of ack-ack men who do nothing else. In addition there are thousands of gunners attached to divisions and other units who double in brass when planes come over and shoot at anything that passes low.

Our ack-ack is commanded by a general officer, which indicates how important it is. His hundreds of gun batteries even intercept planes before they near the beaches. The gun positions are plotted on a big wall map in his command tent, just as the battlelines are plotted by infantry units. A daily score is kept of the planes shot down – confirmed ones and probables. Just as an example of the effectiveness of our ack-ack, one four-gun battery alone shot down 15 planes in the first two weeks.

Up to the time this is written, the Germans don’t seem to have made up their minds exactly what they are trying to do in the air, they wander around all night long, usually in singles but sometimes in numbers, but they don’t do a great deal of bombing. Most of them turn away at the first great burst from one of our 90mm guns. Our ack-ack men say they think the German pilots are yellow, but having seen the quality of German fighting for nearly two years now that is hard for me to believe.

Often they drop flares that will light up the whole beach area, and then fail to follow through by the light of their flares. The ack-ack men say that no more than two out of ten planes that approach the beachhead ever make their bomb runs over our shipping. You are liable to get a bomb anywhere along the coastal area, for many of the Germans apparently just salvo their bombs and hightail home.

It is indeed a spectacle to watch the anti-aircraft fire when the Germans actually get over the beach area. All the machine guns on the ships lying off the beaches cut loose with their red tracer bullets, and those on shore do too, their bullets arch in all direction and fuse into a sky-filling pattern. The lines of tracers bend and wave and seem like streams of red water from hoses. The whole thing becomes a gigantic, animated fountain of red in the black sky. And above all this are the split-second golden flashes of big gun shells as they explode high up toward the stars.

The noise is terrific. Sometimes low clouds catch the crack of these many guns and scramble them all into one gigantic roar which rolls and thunders like the bloodcurdling approach of a hurricane.

Your tent walls puff from the concussion of the guns and bombs, and the earth trembles and shakes. If you’re sleeping in a foxhole, little clouds of dirt come rolling down upon you.

When the planes are really close and the guns are pounding out a mania of sound, you put your steel helmet in bed and sometimes you drop off to sleep with it on and wake up with it on the morning and feel very foolish.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 1, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
American anti-aircraft gunners began playing their important part in the Battle of Normandy right on D-Day and shortly after H-Hour.

Ordinarily you wouldn’t think of the anti-aircraft coming ashore with the infantry, but a little bit of everything came ashore on that memorable day – from riflemen to press censors, from combat engineers to chaplains – and everybody had a hand in it.’

The ack-ack was given a place in the very early waves because the general in command felt that the Germans would throw what air strength they had onto the beaches that day and he wanted his men there to repel it.

As it turned out, the Germans didn’t use their planes at all, and the ack-ack wasn’t needed to protect the landings from air attack. So, like many other units, they turned themselves into infantry or artillery and helped win the battle of the beaches.

They took infantry-like casualties, too. One unit lost half of its men and guns.

When I started rounding up material for this ack-ack series I ran onto the story of one crew of ack-ackers who had knocked out a German 88 deeply encased in a thick concrete emplacement – and did it with a tiny 37mm gun, which is somewhat akin to David slaying Goliath.

So, I hunted up this crew to see how they did it. By that time, they had moved several miles inland. I found them at the edge of a small open field far out in the country.

Their guns had been dug into the ground. Two men sat constantly in their bucket seats behind the gun, keeping watch on the sky even in the daytime. The others slept in their pup tents under the bushes, or just loafed around and brewed an occasional cup of coffee.

The commander of this gun is Sgt. Hyman Haas of Brooklyn. Sgt. Haas is an enthusiastic and flattering young man who was practically besides himself with delight when I showed up at their remote position, for he had read this column back in New York but hadn’t supposed our trails would ever cross in an army this big. When I told him I wanted to write a little about his crew, he beamed and said, “Oh boy! Wait till Flatbush Avenue hears about this!”

Their story is this…

They came ashore behind the first wave of infantry. A narrow valley leading away from the beach at that point was blocked by the German 88, which stopped everything in front of it. So driver Bill Hendrix from Shreveport, Louisiana, turned their halftrack around and drove the front end back into the water so the gun would be pointing in the right direction.

Then the boys poured 23 rounds into the pillbox. Some of their shells hit the small gun slit and went inside. At the end of their firing, what Germans were left came out with their hands up.

The boys were very proud of their achievement, but I was kind of amused at their modesty. One of them said, “The credit should go to Lt. Gibbs, because he gave us the order to fire.”

The lieutenant is Wallace Gibbs of RFD 2, Charlotte, North Caroline. The other members of the crew are Cpl. John Jourdain of New Orleans; Pvt. Frank Bartolomeo of Uledi, Pennsylvania; Pvt. Joseph Sharpe of Clover, South Carolina; Pfc. Frank Furey of Brooklyn; Cpl. Austin Laurent Jr. of New Orleans, and Pvt., Raymond Bullock of Coello, Illinois.

Their gun is named “BLIP,” which represents the first letters of Brooklyn, Louisiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania, where most of the crew come from.

Our ack-ack on the Normandy beachhead can be divided into three categories. First are the machine guns, both .50-caliber and 20mm. Airplanes have to be fairly low for these to be effective.

The ack-ack branch has thousands of such guns, and so does every other fighting unit. When a low-flying strafer comes in, everybody who has anything bigger than a rifle shoots at him, whether he is an ack-ack man or not.

The second big category of ack-ack is the Bofors, a 40mm long-barreled gun which can fire rapidly and with great accuracy at medium altitudes.

Our ack-ack is equipped with thousands of these, and although they can’t see their targets at night, they put a lot of shells into the sky anyhow.

The big gun, and the elite, of our ack-ack is the 90mm. This is for high-altitude shooting. It is the gun which keeps most of the planes away, and which has such a high score of planes shot down. I spent two days and nights with one of these crews, and in the next two or three days I will try to tell you what life is like for them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 3, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
This ack-ack crew of mine is having is first taste of war. And after three weeks or so of it they feel that they are the best gun crew in the best battery of the best ack-ack battalion on the beachhead.

It would be close to impossible for a German bomber to pick out their position at night, yet this crew feels that the Germans have singled them out because they’re so good. As far as I can learn, practically all the other gun crews feel the same way. That’s what is known in military terms as good morale.

My crew consists of 13 men. Some of them operate the dials on the gun, others load and fire it, others lug the big shells from a storage pit a few feet away.

These big 90mm guns usually operate in batteries, and a battery consists of four guns and the family of technicians necessary to operate the many scientific devices that control the guns.

The four guns of this particular battery are dug into the ground in a small open field, about 50 yards apart. The gunners sleep in pup tents or under halftracks hidden under trees and camouflage nets.

The boys work all night and sleep in the daytime. They haven’t dug foxholes, for the only danger is at night and they are up firing all night.

The guns require a great deal of daytime work to keep them in shape, so half of the boys sleep in the forenoon and half in the afternoon while the other half work.

Their life is rugged, but they don’t see the seamiest side of the war. They stay quite a while in one place, which makes for comfort, and they are beyond enemy artillery range. Their only danger is from bombing or strafing, and that is not too great. They are so new at war that they still try to keep themselves clean. They shave and wash their clothes regularly.

Their service section has not come over yet from England, so they have to cook their own meals. They’re pretty sick of this and will be glad when the service boys and field kitchens catch up with them. they eat ten-in-one rations, heating them over a fire of wooden sticks sunk into a shallow hole in the ground.

The sergeant who is commander of my gun crew is a farm boy from Iowa, and none of the crew are past their middle 20s. only two of the 13 are married. They have been overseas more than six months, and like everybody else they are terribly anxious to go home. They like to think in terms of anniversaries, and much of their conversation is given to remembering what they were doing a year ago today when they were in camp back in America. They all hope they won’t have to go to the Pacific when the European war is over.

My crew are a swell bunch of boys. They all work hard and they work well together. There are no goldbrickers in the crew. As in any group of a dozen men, some are talkative and some are quiet. There are no smart-alecks among them.

Only one man in the crew speaks French. That one has already made friends with the farmers nearby, and they get such stuff as eggs and butter occasionally. They have been promised some chicken, but it hasn’t showed up yet.

Although the noise and concussions of their gun are terrific, they have got used to it and none of them wears cotton in his ears. They say the two best morale-boosters are The Stars and Stripes and letters from home.

My boys are very proud of their first night on the soil of France. They began firing immediately from a field not far from the beach. The snipers were still thick in the surrounding hedges, and bullets were singing around them all night. The boys like to tell over and over how the infantry all around them were crouching and crawling along while they had to stand straight up and dig their guns in.

It takes about 12 hours of good hard work to dig in the guns when they move to a new position. They dig in one gun at a time while the three others are firing. My gun is dug into a circular pit about four feet deep and 20 feet across. This has been rimmed with a parapet of sandbags and dirt, until when you stand on the floor of the pit you can just see over the top. The boys are safe down there from anything but a direct hit.

Their gun is covered in the daytime by a large camouflage net. My crew fires anywhere from 10 to 150 shells a night. In the very early days on the beachhead, they kept firing one night until they had only half a dozen shells left. But the supply has been built up now, and there is no danger of their running short again.

The first night I was with them was a slow night and they fired only nine shells. The boys were terribly disappointed. They said it would have to turn out that the night I was with them would be the quietest and also the coldest they had ever had.

So just because of that I stayed a second night with them. And that time we fired all night long. It was indicated that we had brought down seven of the 15 planes we fired at and the boys were elated.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 5, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The Germans are methodical in their night air attacks on our positions in Normandy, as they are in everything else. You begin to hear the fair, faraway drone of the first bomber around 11:20 every night.

Our own planes patrol above us until darkness. It gets dusk around 11, and you are suddenly aware that the skies which have been roaring all day with our own fighters and bombers are now strangely silent. Nothing is in the air.

The ack-ack gunners, who have been loafing near their pup tents or sleeping or telling stories, now go to their guns. They bring blankets from the pup tents and pile them up against the wall of the gun pit, for the nights get very cold and they will wrap up during the long lulls in the shooting.

The gunners merely loaf in the gun pits as the dusk deepens into darkness, waiting for the first telephoned order to start shooting. They smoke a few last-minute cigarettes. Once it is dark, they can’t smoke except by draping blankets over themselves for blackout. They do smoke some that way during the night, but not much.

In four or five places in the wall of the circular pit, shelves have been dug and wooden shell boxes inserted to hold reserve shells. It is just like pigeonholes in a filing cabinet.

When the firing starts, two ammunition carriers bring new shells from a dump a few feet away up to the rim of the gun pit and hand them down to a carrier waiting below, who keeps the pigeonholes filled. The gun is constantly turning in the pit and there is always a pigeonhole of fresh shells right behind it.

The shells are as long as your arm and they weight better than 40 pounds. After each salvo the empty shell case kicks out onto the floor of the pit. These lie there until there is a lull in the firing, when the boys toss them over the rim of the pit. Next morning, they are gathered up and put in boxes for eventual shipment back to America, where they are retooled for further use.

Each gun is connected by telephone to the battery command post, in a dugout. At all times one member of each gun crew has a phone to his ear. When a plane is picked up within range, the battery commander gives a telephonic order, “Stand by!” Each gun commander shouts the order to his crew, and the boys all jump to their positions.

Everybody in the crew knows his job and does it. There is no necessity for harshness or short words on the part of the gun commander. When a plane either gets shot down or goes out of range, and there is nothing else in the vicinity the command is given, “Rest!” and the crews relax and squat or lie around on the floor of the pit, but they don’t leave the pit.

Sometimes the rest will be for only a few seconds. Other time it may last a couple of hours. In the long lulls the gunners wrap up in blankets and sleep on the floor of the pit – all except the man at the telephone.

It is the usual German pattern to have a lull from about 2:00 to 4:00 a.m., and then get in another good batch of bombing attempts in the last hour before dawn.

The nights are very short here now – from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. – for which everybody is grateful. It actually starts breaking a faint dawn just about 4:30, but the Germans keep roaming around the sky until real daylight comes.

Our own patrol planes hit the sky at daylight and the Germans skedaddle. In the first few days, when our patrol planes had to come all the way from England, the boys tell of mornings when they could see our planes approaching from one direction and the Germans heading for home at the opposite side of the sky.

As soon as it is broad daylight and the last “Rest!” is given, the boys crank down the barrel of their gun until it is horizontal, and then take a sight through it onto the stone turret of a nearby barn – to make sure the night’s shooting hasn’t moved the gun off its position. Then some of them gather up the empty shells, others get wood fires started for heating breakfast, and others raise and tie the camouflage net.

They’re all through at 7:00 a.m., and half of the shift crawl into their pup tent beds while the other half go to work with oil, ramrod and waste cloth to clean up and readjust the gun. There will be no more shooting until darkness comes again.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 6, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
It is 11:15 at night. The sky darkens into an indistinct dusk, but it is not yet fully dark. You can make out the high hedgerow surrounding our field and the seven long barrels of the other ack-ack guns of our battery poking upwards.

We all lean against the wall of our gun pit, just waiting for our night’s work to start. We have plenty of time yet. The Germans won’t be here for 10 or 15 minutes.

But no. Suddenly the gun commander, who is at the phone, yells, “Stand by!”

The men jump to their positions. The plane is invisible, but you can hear the distant motors throbbing in the sky. Somehow you can always sense, just for the tempo in which things start, when it is going to be a heavy night. You feel now that this will be one.

One of the gunners turns a switch on the side of the gun, and it goes into remote control. From now on, a mystic machine at the far end of the field handles the pointing of the gun, through electrical cables. It is all automatic. The long snout of the barrel begins weaving in the air and the mechanism that directs it makes a buzzing noise. The barrel goes up and down, to the right and back to the left, grinding and whining and jerking. It is like a giant cobra, maddened and with its head raised, weaving back and forth before striking.

Finally, the gun settles rigidly in one spot and the gun commander calls out: “On target! Three rounds! Commence firing!”

The gun blasts forth with sickening force. A brief sheet of flame shoots from the muzzle. Dense, sickening smoke boils around in the gun pit. You hear the empty shell case clank to the ground.

Darkly silhouetted figures move silently, reloading. In a few seconds, the gun blasts again. And one again. The smoke is stifling now. You feel the blast sweep over you and set you back a little.

The salvo is fired. The men step back. You take your fingers from your ears. The smoke gradually clears. And now once more the gun is intently weaving about, grinding and whining and seeking for a new prey.

That’s the way it is all night. You never see a thing. You only hear the thrump, thrump of motors in the sky and see the flash of guns and the streaking of red tracers far away. You never see the plane you’re shooting at, unless it goes down in flames, and “flamers” are rare.

I found out one thing by being with the ack-ack at night. And that is that you’re much less nervous when you’re out in the open with a gun in front of you than when you’re doubled up under blankets in your tent, coiled and intent for every little change of sound, doubtful and imagining and terrified.

We shoot off and on, with “rest” periods of only a few minutes, for a couple of hours. The Germans are busy boys tonight.

Then suddenly a flare pops in the sky, out to sea, in front of us. Gradually the night brightens until the whole universe is alight and we can easily make each other out in the gun pit and see everything around us in the field.

Now everybody is tense and starring. We all dread flares. Planes are throbbing and droning all around in the sky above the light. Surely the Germans will go for the ships that are standing off the beach or they may even pick out the gun batteries and come for us in the brightness.

The red tracers of the machine guns begin arching toward the flares but can’t reach them. Then our own “Stand by!” order comes, and the gun whines and swings and feels its way into the sky until it is dead on the high flare.

Yes, we are shooting at the flare, and our showering bursts of flak hit it, too.

You don’t completely shoot out a flare. But you break it up into small pieces, and the light is dimmed, and the pieces come floating down more rapidly and the whole thing is over sooner.

Flares in the sky are always frightening. They strip you naked, and make you want to cower and hide and peek out from behind an elbow. You feel a great, welcome privacy when the last piece flickers to the ground, and you can go back to shooting at the darkness from out of the dark.