Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 7, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The six hours of nighttime go swiftly for our ack-ack battery, which is a blessing. Time races when you are firing. And in the long lulls between the waves of enemy planes you doze and catnap and the time gets away.

Once, during a lull long after midnight, half a dozen of the boys in our gun pit start singing softly. Their voices are excellent. Very low and sweetly they sing in perfect harmony such songs as “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” and “Tipperary.”

There isn’t anything forced, or dramatic, about it. It’s just half a dozen young fellows singing because they like to sing – and the fact that they are in a gun pit in France shooting at people, trying to kill them, is just a circumstance.

The night grows bitterly chill. Between firings every man drapes an Army blanket around his shoulders, and sometimes up over his head, cape-like. In the darkness they are just silhouettes, looking strange and foreign like Arabs.

After 2 o’clock, there is a long lull. Gradually the boys wrap up in their blankets and lie down on the floor of the pit and fall asleep. Pretty soon you hear them snoring. I talk with the gun commander for a few minutes, in low tones. Then my eyes get heavy too.

Night silent as the grave

I wrap a blanket around me and sit down on the floor of the pit, leaning against the wall. The night is now as silent as a grave. Not a shot, not a movement anywhere.

My head slacks over to one side. But I can’t relax enough to sleep in that position. And it is so cold. I am so sleepy I hurt, and I berate myself because I can’t go to sleep like the others.

But I’m asleep all the time. For suddenly a voice shouts “Stand by!” – and it is as shocking as a bucket of cold water in your face. You look quickly at your watch and realize that an hour has passed. All the silent forms come frantically to life. Blankets fly. Men bump into each other.

“Commence firing!” rings out above the confusion, and immediately the great gun is blasting away, and smoke again fills the gun pit.

Sleep and rouse up. Catnap and fire. The night wears on. Sometimes a passing truck sounds exactly like a faraway plane. Frightened French dogs bark in distant barnyards.

Things are always confusing and mysterious in war. Just before dawn, an airplane draws nearer and nearer, lower and lower, yet we get no order to shoot and we wonder why. But machine guns and Bofors guns for miles around go after it.

The plane comes booming on in, in a long dive. He seems to be heading right at us. We feel like ducking low in the pit. He actually crosses the end of our field less than a hundred yards from us, and only two or three hundred feet up. Our hearts are pounding.

We don’t know who he is or what he is doing. Our own planes are not supposed to be in the air. Yet if this is a German, why doesn’t he bomb or strafe us? We never find out.

Ghostly shape in the sky

The first hint of dawn comes. Most of us are asleep again. Suddenly one of the boys calls out, “Look! What’s that?”

We stare into the faint light, and there just above us goes a great, silent, grotesque shape, floating slowly through the air. It is a ghostly sight.

Then we recognize it, and all of us feel a sense of relief. It is one of our barrage balloons which has broken loose and is drifting to earth. Something snags it in the next field, and it hangs there poised above the apple trees until somebody comes and gets it long after daylight.

As fuller light comes, we start lighting cigarettes in the open. The battery commander asks over the phone how many shells were fired, and tells us our tentative score for the night is seven planes shot down. The crew is proud and pleased.

Dawn brings an imagined warmth and we throw off our blankets. Our eyes feel gravelly and our heads groggy. The blast of the gun has kicked up so much dirt that our faces are as grimy as though we had driven all night in a dust storm. The green Norman countryside is wet and glistening with dew.

Then we hear our own planes drumming in the distance. Suddenly they pop out of a cloud bank and are over us. Security for another day has come, and we surrender willingly the burden of protecting the beaches. The last “Rest!” is given and we put the gun away until another darkness comes.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 8, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The commander of my ack-ack crew is Sgt. Joseph Samuelson, a farm boy from Odebolt, Iowa.

“Sam” is a quiet fellow with a mellow voice. His mouth is very wide and right now his lips are chapped and cracked from the cold climate. He is conscientious and the others like him.

Two of the crew are from the same hometown – Manchester, New Hampshire. They are Pvts. Armand Provencher and Jim Bresnahan. In fact, there are six Manchester boys in this battery, and 15 in the battalion. They all went into the Army on the same day at the same place, and now they are firing within a few miles of each other in France.

Pvt. Provencher is of French-Canadian extraction and is the only one of our crew who speaks French, so he does all the foraging. His family speaks French in their home back in New Hampshire. I had always heard that the French-Canadian brand of French was unintelligible to real Frenchmen, but Provencher says he doesn’t have any trouble.

Three of the boys are from Massachusetts – Cpl. Charles Malatesta of Malden, Pvt. George Slaven of Southbridge, and Pvt. Walter Covel of Roxbury.

Covel has heavy black whiskers and it takes two razorblades to shave him. With a two-day growth, he looks like a hobo, and then when he cleans up, you hardly recognize him. He asked if I’d say hello for him in the column to his mom and Bernie. I didn’t ask who Bernie was, but it probably wouldn’t be hard to guess.

Druggist sets up store

George Slaven is the entrepreneur of the battery. Back home he owns a drugstore, which his wife is running while he is away fighting. His wife keeps sending him stuff from the store until he has built up a miniature drugstore over here. He has such things as aspirin, lip pomade, shampoo and so on. He used to have a stock of cigars but they’re all gone now. The boys say he gets more packages from home than any 15 other men in the battery.

Slaven and Malatesta are the only married men in the crew. Malatesta wanted me to tell his wife in the column that he loves her. So, since it is springtime and there’s no law I know of against a man being fond of his wife, here goes.

Pvt. Bill Mallea of Shelton, Connecticut, is the oracle of the group. He tells long and fascinating stories and thinks about the world situation and has a great sense of fun. He is the oldest man in the crew, although he isn’t so old.

He’s political-minded, and says he is going to become an alderman in Shelton after the war. He calls himself “Honest Bill” Mallea. He is one of the ammunition carriers, and during lulls in the firing at night, he curls up in an ammo dugout about 20 feet from the gun pit and sleeps on top of the shells. He sleeps so well you can hear him snoring clear over in the gun pit.

All are pleasant lads

I didn’t pick up much about the rest of the boys, but they are all pleasant lads who work hard and get along together. These others are Cpl. Henry Omen of Depew, New York; Pvt. Harold Dunlap of Poplar Bluff, Missouri; Pvt. Norman Kimmey of Hanover, Pennsylvania; Cpl. Clyde Libbey of Lincoln, Maine; Pvt. Jerry Fullington of Fremont, Nebraska, and Cpl. Bill Nelson of Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

Cpl. Libbey is from the potato-growing country in Maine, and I told him “that girl” and I stayed all night in Lincoln about seven years ago. But unfortunately, all I could remember about Lincoln was that we stayed there, so our attempts to dig up some mutual acquaintance or even a building we both remembered fell kind of flat.

On my second day with the battery, the boys asked their officers if it was all right for them to write in their letters home that I was staying with them. The officers said yes, so the boys all got out paper, and since it had turned warm for a change, we sat and lay around on the grass while they wrote short letters home, using ammunition and ration boxes for writing boards. When they got through, all of them had me sign their letters.

The boys say they didn’t choose ack-ack but were just automatically put into it. They do like it, however, as long as they have to be in the Army. They are all over being gun-shy, and now that they have been through their opening weeks of war, they aren’t even especially afraid.

Their battery commander is Capt. Julius Reiver of Wilmington, Delaware. He stays up all night, too, directing their firing from his dugout, where information is phoned in to him.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 10, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One of the favorite generals among the war correspondents is Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy, commander of the 9th Division.

We like him because he is absolutely honest with us, because he is sort of old-shoe and easy to talk with, and because we think he is a mighty good general. We have known him in Tunisia and Sicily, and now here in France.

Like his big chief, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, Gen. Eddy looks more like a schoolmaster than a soldier. He is a big, tall man but he wears glasses and his eyes have a sort of squint. He talks like a Middle Westerner, which he is. He still claims Chicago as home, although he has been an Army officer for 28 years. He was wounded in the last war. He is not glib, but he talks well and laughs easily.

In spite of being a professional soldier, he despises war, and like any ordinary soul is appalled by the waste and tragedy of it. He wants to win it and get home just as badly as anybody else.

When the general is in the field, he lives in a truck that used to be a machine shop. They have fixed it up nicely for him with a bed, a desk, cabinets, and rugs. His orderly is an obliging dark-skinned sergeant who is a native of Ecuador.

Some of his officers sleep in foxholes, but the general sleeps in his truck. One night, however, while I was with his division, it got too hot even for him. Fragments from shells bursting nearby started hitting the top of the truck, so he got out.

The general has a small mess in a tent separate from the rest of the division staff. This is because he has a good many visiting generals, and since they talk business while they eat, they must have some privacy.

Usually, he stays at his desk during the morning and makes a tour of regimental and battalion command posts during the afternoon. Usually, he goes to the front in an unarmed jeep, with another jeep right behind him carrying a machine-gunner and a rifleman on the alert for snipers. His drivers say when they start out: “Hold on, for the general doesn’t spare the horses when he’s traveling.”

Carries telephone in jeep

He carries a portable telephone in his jeep, and if he suddenly wants to talk with any of his units he just stops along the road and plugs into one of the wires that are lying on the ground.

Gen. Eddy especially likes to show up in places where his soldiers wouldn’t expect to see him. He knows that it helps the soldiers’ spirits to see their commanding general right up at the front where it is hot. So, he walks around the front with his long stride, never ducking or appearing to be concerned at all.

One day I rode around with him on one of his tours. At one command post, we were sitting on the grass under a tree, looking at maps, with a group of officers around us.

Our own artillery was banging nearby, but nothing was coming out way. Then, like a flash of lightning, here came a shell just over our heads, so low it went right through the treetops, it seemed. It didn’t whine, it swished. Everybody, including full colonels, flopped over and began grabbing grass. The shell exploded in the next orchard.

Gen. Eddy didn’t move. He just said: “Why, that was one of our shells.”

And since I had known Gen. Eddy for quite a while, I was bold enough to ask:

General, if that was one of ours, all I can say is that this is a hell of a way to run a war. We’re fighting toward the North, and that shell was going due South.

The general just laughed.

The general also likes to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning once in a while and go poking around into message centers and mess halls, giving the boys a start. It was one of these night meanderings that produced his favorite war story.

It was in Africa. They were in a new bivouac. It was raining cats and dogs, and the ground was knee-deep in mud. The tent pegs wouldn’t stay in and the pup tents kept coming down.

Holds light for soldier

As he walked, he passed a soldier trying to redrive the stake that held down the front of his pup tent. The soldier was using his steel helmet as a hammer, and he was having a bad time of it. Every now and then, he would miss the stake with the helmet and would squash mud all over himself. He was cussing and fuming.

The general was using his flashlight, and when the soldiers saw the light, he called out: “Hey, Bud, come and hold that light for me, will you?”

So, Gen. Eddy obediently squatted down and held the light while the soldier pounded and spattered mud, and they finally got the peg driven. Then, as they got up, the general said: “Soldier, what’s your name?”

The startled soldier gasped, leaned forward and looked closely, then blurted out: “Goddelmighty!”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 11, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
During the Cherbourg Peninsula campaign, I spent nine days with the 9th Infantry Division – the division that cut the peninsula, and one of the three that overwhelmed the great port of Cherbourg.

The Cherbourg campaign is old stuff by now, and you are not longer particularly interested in it. But the 9th Division has been in this war for a long time and will be in it for a long time to come. So, I would like to tell you some things about it.

The Ninth is one of our best divisions. It landed in Africa and it fought through Tunisia and Sicily. Then it went to England last fall, and trained all winter for the invasion of France. It was one of the American divisions in the invasion that had previous battle experience.

Now an odd thing had happened to the Ninth while we were in the Mediterranean. For some reason which we have never fathomed, the Ninth wasn’t released through censorship as early as it should have been, while other divisions were.

As a result, the Ninth got a complex that it was being slighted. They fought hard, took heavy casualties, and di a fine job generally, but nobody back home knew anything about it.

Set up public relations section

This lack of recognition definitely affected morale. Every commanding general is aware that publicity for his unit is a factor in morale. Not publicity in the manufactured sense, but a public report to the folks back home on what an outfit endures and what it accomplishes.

Your average doughfoot will go through his normal hell a lot more willingly if he knows that he is getting some credit for it and that the home folks know about it.

As a result of this neglect in the Mediterranean, the Ninth laid careful plans so that it wouldn’t happen again. In the first place, a new censorship policy was arrived at, under which the identities of the divisions taking part in this campaign would be publicly released just as soon as it was definitely established that the Germans knew they were in combat.

With that big hurdle accomplished, the Ninth made sure that the correspondents themselves would feel at home with then. They set up a small public relations section, with an officer in charge, and a squad of enlisted men to move the correspondents’ gear, and a truck to haul it, and three tents with cots, electric lights and tables.

Correspondents who came with the Ninth could get a meal, a place to write, a jeep for the front, or a courtier to the rear – and at the time they asked for it.

Of course, in spite of all such facilities, a division has to be good in the first place if it is going to get good publicity. The Ninth is good. It performed like a beautiful machine in the Cherbourg campaign. Its previous battle experience paid off. Not only in individual fighting but in the perfect way the whole organization clicked. As I have tried to tell before, war depends a great deal more on organization than most people would ever dream.

Keeps right on enemy’s neck

The Ninth did something in this campaign that we haven’t always done in the past. It kept tenaciously on the enemy’s neck. When the Germans would withdraw a little, the Ninth was right on top of them. it never gave them a chance to reassemble or get their balance.

The Ninth moved so fast it got to be funny. I was based at the division command post, and we struck our tents and moved forward six times in seven days.

That works the daylight out of the boys who take down and put up the tents. I overheard one of the boys saying, “I’d rather be with Ringling Brothers.”

Usually, a division headquarters is a fairly safe place. But with the Ninth, it was different. Something was always happening.

One night they have a bad shelling and lost some personnel. Every now and then snipers would pick off somebody. In all the time I was with them, we never had an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Our own big guns were all around us and they would fire all night. Usually German planes were over too, droning around in the darkness and making us tense and nervous.

One night I was sitting in a tent with Capt. Lindsey Nelson of Knoxville, when there was a loud explosion, then a shrill whine through the treetops over our heads. But we didn’t jump, or hit the dirt. Instead, I said:

I know what that is. That’s the rotating band off one of our shells. As an old artilleryman I’ve heard lots of rotating bands. Sometimes they sound like a dog howling. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

“Sure,” said Capt. Nelson, “that’s what it was, a rotating band.”

But our harmless rotating band, we found a few minutes later, was a jagged, red-hot, foot-square fragment of steel from a 240mm German shell which landed a hundred yards from us. It’s wonderful to be a wise guy.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 12, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
This war in Normandy is a war from hedgerow to hedgerow, and when we get into a town or city, it is a war from street to street.

The other day I went along, quite accidentally, I assure you – with an infantry company that had been assigned to clean out a pocket in the suburbs of a city.

Since this episode was typical of the way an infantry company advances into a city held by the enemy, I would like to try to give you a picture of it. I can’t do it in just one column, so you’ll have to read this in instalments covering several days. I hope your patience holds out.

As I say, I hadn’t intended to do it. I started out in the normal fashion that afternoon to go up to a battalion command post and just look around. I was traveling with correspondent Charles Wertenbaker and photographer Bob Capa, both of TIME and LIFE magazines.

Well, when we got to the CP, we were practically at the frontlines. The post was in a church that stood on a narrow street. In the courtyard across the street, MPs were frisking freshly taken prisoners.

Russians have wives with ‘em

I mingled among the prisoners awhile. They were still holding their hands high in the air, and you’re pretty close in the front when prisoners do that. They were obviously frightened and eager to please their captors. A soldier standing beside me asked one German kid about the insignia on his cap, so the kid gave the insignia to him.

The prisoners had a rank odor about them, like silage. Some of them were Russians, and two of these had their wives with them. They had been living together right at the front. The women thought we were going to shoot their husbands and they were frantic.

That’s one way the Germans keep these conscripted Russians fighting – they have thoroughly sold them on the belief that we will shoot them as soon as they are captured.

Below us there were big fires in the city, and piles of black smoke. Explosions were going on all around us. Our own big shells would rustle over our heads and explode on beyond with a crash. German 200mm shells would spray over our heads and hit somewhere in the town behind us. Single rifle shots and machine-pistol blurps were constant. The whole thing made you feel tense and jumpy. The nearest Germans were only 200 yards away.

We were just hanging around absorbing all this stuff when a young lieutenant, in a trench coat and wearing sunglasses – although the day was miserably dark and chill – came up and said:

Our company is starting in a few minutes to go up this road and clean out a strongpoint. It’s about half a mile from here. There are probably snipers in some of the houses along the way. Do you want to go along with us?

Ernie accepts and starts walking

I certainly didn’t. Going into battle with an infantry company is not the way to live to a ripe old age. But when you are invited, what can you do?

So I said, “Sure.” And so did Wertenbaker and Capa. Wert never seems nervous, and Capa is notorious for his daring. Fine company for me to be keeping.

We started walking. Soldiers of the company were already strung out on both sides of the road ahead of us, just lying and waiting till their officers came along and said so.

We walked until we were at the head of the column. As we walked, the young officer introduced himself. He was Lt. Orion Shockley of Jefferson City, Missouri. I asked him how he got the odd name Orion. He said he was named after Mark Twain’s brother.

Shockley was executive officer of the company. The company commander was Lt. Lawrence McLaughlin from Boston. One of the company officers was a replacement who had arrived just three hours previously and had never been in battle before. I noticed that he ducked sometimes at our own shells, but he was trying his best to seem calm.

The soldiers around us had a two-week growth of beard. Their clothes were worn slick and very dirty. They still wore the uncomfortable gas-impregnated clothes they had come ashore in.

The boys were tired. They had been fighting and moving constantly forward on foot for nearly three weeks without rest – sleeping on the ground, wet most of the time., always tense, eating cold rations, seeing their friends die.

One came up to me and said, almost belligerently:

Why don’t you tell the folks back home what this is like? All they hear about is victories and lots of glory stuff. They don’t know that for every hundred yards we advance somebody gets killed. Why don’t you tell them how tough this life is?

Exhaustion makes ‘em that way

I told him that was what I tried to do all the time. This fellow was pretty fed up with it all. He said he didn’t see why his outfit wasn’t sent home, that they had done all the fighting.

That wasn’t true at all, for we have other divisions that have fought more and taken heavier casualties than this one. Exhaustion will make a man feel like that. A few days’ rest usually has him smiling again.

As we waited to start our advance, the low black skies of Normandy let loose on us and we gradually became hopelessly soaked to the skin.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 13, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Lt. Orion Shockley came over with a map and explained to us just what his company was going to do.

There was a German strongpoint of pillboxes and machine-gun nests about half a mile down the street ahead of us.

Our troops had made wedges into the city on both sides of us, but nobody yet had been up this street. The street, they thought, was almost certainly under rifle fire.

The lieutenant said:

This is how we’ll do it. A rifle platoon goes first. Right behind them will go part of a heavy-weapons platoon, with machine guns to cover the first platoon.

Then comes another rifle platoon. Then a small section with mortars, in case they run into something pretty heavy. Then another rifle platoon. And brining up the rear, the rest of the heavy-weapons outfit to protect us from behind.

We don’t know what we’ll run into, and I don’t want to stick you right out in front, so why don’t you come along with me? We’ll go in the middle of the company.

I said, “Okay.” By this time, I wasn’t scared. You seldom are once you’re into something. Anticipation is the worst. Fortunately, this little foray came up so suddenly there wasn’t time for much anticipation.

Soldier crouch lower behind wall

The rain kept on coming down, and you could sense that it had set in for the afternoon. None of us had raincoats, and by evening there wasn’t a dry thread on any of us. I could go back to a tent for the night, but the soldiers would have to sleep the way they were.

We were just ready to start when all of a sudden, bullets came whipping savagely right above our heads.

“It’s those damn 20mm’s again,” the lieutenant said. “Better hold it up a minute.”

The soldiers all crouched lower behind the wall. The vicious little shells whanged into a grassy hillside just beyond us. A French suburban farmer was hitching up his horses in a barnyard on the hillside. He ran into the house. Shells struck all around it.

Two dead Germans and a dead American still lay in his driveway. We could see them when we moved up a few feet.

The shells stopped, and finally the order to start was given. As we left the protection of the high wall, we had to cross a little culvert right out in the open and then make a turn in the road.

The men went forward one at a time. They crouched and ran, ape-like, across this dangerous space. Then, beyond the culvert, they filtered to either side of the road, stopping and squatting down every now and then to wait a few moments.

The lieutenant kept yelling at them as they started:

Spread it out now. Do you want to draw fire on yourselves? Don’t bunch up like that. Keep five yards apart. Spread it out, dammit.

There is an almost irresistible pull to get close to somebody when you are in danger. In spite of themselves, the men would run up close to the fellow ahead for company.

The other lieutenant now called out:

Now you on the right, watch the left side of the street for snipers, and you on the left, watch the right side. Cover each other that way.

And a first sergeant said to a passing soldier:

Get that grenade out of its case. It won’t do you no good in the case. Throw the case away. That’s right.

Attackers hesitant, cautious

Some of the men carried grenades already fixed in the ends of their rifles. All of them had hand grenades. Some had big Browning automatic rifles. One carried a bazooka. Interspersed in the thin line of men every now and then was a medic, with his bags of bandages and a Red Cross armband on the left arm. The men didn’t talk any. They just went.

They weren’t heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were realty the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety in their faces.

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice.

They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys.

And even though they aren’t warriors born to kill, they win their battles. That’s the point.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
It was about time for me to go – out alone into that empty expanse of 15 feet – as the infantry company I was with began its move into the street that led to what we did not know.

One of the soldiers asked if I didn’t have a rifle. Every time you’re really in the battle lines, they’ll ask you that. I said no, correspondents weren’t allowed to; it was against international law. The soldiers thought that didn’t seem right.

Finally, the sergeant motioned – it was my turn. I ran with bent knees, shoulders hunched, out across the culvert and across the open space. Lord, but you felt lonely out there.

I had to stop right in the middle of the open space, to keep my distance behind the man ahead. I got down behind a little bush, as though that would have stopped anything.

Just before starting I had got into a conversation with a group of soldiers who were to go right behind me. I was just starting to put down the boys’ names when my turn came to go. So, it wasn’t till an hour or more later, during one of our long waits as we sat crouching against some buildings, that I worked my way back along the line and took down their names.

Pittsburgh soldier ‘company mate’

It was pouring rain, and as we squatted down for me to write on my knee, each soldier would have to hold my helmet over my notebook to keep it from being soaked. Here are the names of just a few of my “company mates” in that little escapade that afternoon…

Sgt. Joseph Palajsa of Pittsburgh.

Pvt. Arthur Greene of Auburn, Massachusetts. His New England accent was so broad I had to have him spell out “Arthur” and “Auburn” before I could catch what he said.

Pvt. Dick Medici of Detroit.

Lt. James Giles, a platoon leader from Athens, Tennessee. He was so wet, so worn, so soldier-looking that I was startled when he said “lieutenant,” for I thought he was a G.I.

Pvt. Arthur Slageter of Cincinnati.

Pvt. Robert Edie of New Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Edie is 30, he is married, and he used to work in a brewery back home. He is a bazooka man, but his bazooka was broken that day so he was just carrying a rifle.

These boys were 9th Division veterans, most of whom had fought in Tunisia and Sicily too.

Gradually we moved on, a few feet at a time. The soldiers hugged the walls on both sides of the street, crouching all the time. The city around us was still full of sound and fury. You couldn’t tell where anything was coming from or going to.

The houses had not been blown down along this street. But now and then, a wall would have a round hole through it, and the windows had all been knocked out by concussion and shattered glass littered the pavements. Gnarled telephone wire was lying everywhere.

It was a poor district. Most of the people had left the city. Shots, incidentally, always sound louder and distorted in the vacuum-like emptiness of a nearly deserted city. Lonely doors and shutters banged noisily back and forth.

All of a sudden, a bunch of dogs came yowling down the street, chasing each other. Apparently their owners had left without them, and they were running wild. They made such a noise that we shooed them on in the erroneous fear that they would attract the Germans’ attention.

Dog trembling with fear

The street was a winding one and we couldn’t see as far ahead as our forward platoon. But soon we could hear rifle shots not far ahead, and the rat-tat-tat of our machine guns, and the quick blirp-blirp of German machine pistols.

For a long time, we didn’t move at all. While we were waiting, the lieutenant decided to go into the house we were in front of. A middle-aged Frenchman and his wife were in the kitchen. They were poor people.

The woman was holding a terrier dog in her arms, belly up, the way you cuddle a baby, and soothing it by rubbing her cheek against its head. The dog was trembling with fear from the noise.

Pretty soon the word was passed back down the line that the street had been cleared as far as a German hospital about a quarter of a mile ahead. There were lots of our own wounded in that hospital and they were now being liberated.

So, Lt. Shockley and Wertenbaker and Capa and myself got up and went up the street, still keeping close to the walls. I lost the others before I had gone far. For as I would pass doorways, soldiers would call out to me and I would duck in and talk for a moment and put down a name or two.

By now the boys along the line were feeling cheerier, for no word of casualties had been passed back. And up here, the city was built up enough so that the waiting riflemen had the protection of doorways. It took me half an hour to work my way up to the hospital – and then the excitement began.