Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The hospital was in our hands but just surely. On up the street a block there seemed to be fighting. I say seemed to be, because actually you can’t always tell. Street fighting is just as confusing as field fighting.

One side will bang away for a while, then the other side. Between these sallies there are long lulls, with only stray and isolated shots. Just an occasional soldier is sneaking about, and you don’t see anything of the enemy at all. You can’t tell half the time just what the situation us, and neither can the soldiers.

About a block beyond the hospital entrance, two American tanks were sitting in the middle of the street, one about 50 yards ahead of the other. I walked toward them. Our infantrymen were in doorways along the street.

I got within about 50 feet of our front tank when it let go its 75mm gun. The blast was terrific there in the narrow street. Glass came tinkling down from nearby windows, smoke puffed around the tank, and the empty street was shaking and trembling with the concussion.

As the tank continued to shoot, I ducked into a doorway, because I figured the Germans would shoot back. Inside the doorway there was a sort of street-level cellar, dirt-floored. Apparently there was a wine shop above, for the cellar was stacked with wire crates for holding wine bottles on their sides. There were lots of bottles, but they were all empty.

Crew comes boiling out of turret

I went back to the doorway and stood peeking out at the tank. It started backing up. Then suddenly a yellow flame pierced the bottom of the tank and there was a crash of such intensity that I automatically blinked my eyes. The tank, hardly 50 feet from where I was standing, had been hit by an enemy shell.

A second shot ripped the pavement at the side of the tank. There was smoke all around, but the tank didn’t catch fire. In a moment, the crew came boiling out of the turret.

Grim as it was, I almost had to laugh as they ran toward us. I never have seen men run so violently. They ran all over, with arms and heads going up and down and with marathon race grimaces. They plunged into my doorway.

I spent the next excited hour with them. we changed to another doorway and sat on boxes in the empty hallway. The floor and steps were thick with blood where a soldier had been treated within the hour.

What had happened to the tank was this: They had been firing away at a pillbox ahead when their 75 backfired, filling the tank with smoke and blinding them.

They decided to back up in order to get their bearings, but after backing a few yards the driver was so blinded that he stopped. Unfortunately, he stopped exactly at the foot of a side street. More unfortunately, there was another German pillbox up the side street/ all the Germans had to do was take east aim and let go at the sitting duck.

The first shot hit a tread, so the tank couldn’t move. That was when the boys got out. I don’t know why the Germans didn’t fire at them as they poured out.

The escaped tankers naturally were excited, but they were as jubilant as June-bugs and ready for more. They never had been in combat before the invasion of Normandy, yet in three weeks their tank had been shot up three times. Each time it was repaired and put back in action. And it can be repaired again this time. The name of their tank, appropriately, is Be Back Soon.

*Leave tank motor running

The main worry of these boys was the fact that they had left the engine running. We could hear it chugging away. It’s bad for a tank motor to idle very long. But now they were afraid to go back and turn the motor off, for the tank was still right in line with the hidden German gun.

Also, they had come out wearing their leather crash helmets. Their steel helmets were still inside the tank, so were their rifles.

“We’ll be a lot of good without helmets or rifles!” one of them said.

The crew consisted of Cpl. Martin Kennelly of Chicago (the tank commander), Sgt, L. Wortham of Leeds, Alabama (driver), Pvt. Ralph Ogren of Minneapolis (assistant driver), Cpl. Albin Stoops of Marshalltown, Delaware (gunner), and Pvt. Charles Rains of Kansas City (the loader).

Pvt. Rains was the oldest of the bunch, and the only married one. He used to work as a guard at the Sears-Roebuck plant in Kansas City.

“I was MP to 1,500 women,” he said with a grin, “and how I’d like to be back doing that!”

The other tankers all expressed loud approval of this sentiment.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Tank commander Martin Kennelly of Chicago wanted to show me just where his tank had been hit. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t seen it for himself yet, for he came running up the street the moment he jumped out of the tank.

So, when the firing died down a little, we sneaked up the street until we were almost even with the disabled tank. But we were careful not to get out heads around the corner of the side street, for that was where the Germans had fired from.

The first shell had hit the heavy steel brace that the tread runs on, and the plunged on through the side of the tank, very low.

Kennelly said in amazement:

Say, it went right through our lower ammunition storage box! I don’t know what kept the ammunition from going off. We’d have been a mess if it had. Boy, it sure would have got hot in there in a hurry!

The street was still empty. Beyond the tank about two blocks was a German truck, sitting all alone in the middle of the street. It had been blown up, and its tires had burned off. This truck was the only thing you could see. There wasn’t a human being in sight anywhere.

Then an American soldier came running up the street shouting for somebody to send a medic. He said a man was badly wounded just ahead. He was extremely excited, yelling, and getting madder because there was no medic in sight.

Word was passed down the line, and pretty soon a medic came out of a doorway and started up the street. The excited soldier yelled at him and began cussing, and the medic broke into a run. They ran past the tanks together, and up the street a way they ducked into a doorway.

Lot of dangerous-sounding noise

On the corner just across the street from where we were standing was a smashed pillbox. It was in a cutaway corner like the entrances to some of our corner drugstores at home, except that instead of their being a door there was a pillbox of reinforced concrete, with gun slits.

The tank boys had shot it to extinction and then moved their tank up even with it to get the range of the next pillbox. That one was about a block ahead, set in a niche in the wall of a building. That’s what the boys had been shooting at when their tank was hit. They knocked it out, however, before being knocked out themselves.

For an hour, there was a lull in the fighting. Nobody did anything about a third pillbox, around the corner. Our second tank pulled back a little and just waited. Infantrymen worked their way up to second-story windows and fired their rifles up the side street without actually seeing anything to shoot at.

Now and then blasts from a 20mm gun would splatter the buildings around us. Then our second tank would blast back in that general direction, over the low roofs, with its machine gun. There was a lot of dangerous-sounding noise, but I don’t think anybody on either side got hit.

Then we saw coming up the street, past the wrecked German truck I spoke of, a group of German soldiers. An officer walked in front, carrying a Red Cross flag on a stick. Bob Capa, the photographer, braved the dangerous funnel at the end of the side street where the damaged tank stood, leapfrogging past it and on down the street to meet the Germans.

First, he snapped some pictures of them. Then, since he speaks German, he led them on back to our side of the invisible fence of battle. Eight of them were carrying two litters bearing two wounded German soldiers. The others walked behind with their hands up. They went on past us to the hospital. We assumed that they were from the second knocked-out pillbox.

Don’t always have tanks to help

I didn’t stay to see how the remaining pillbox was knocked out. But I suppose our second tank eventually pulled up to the corner, turned, and let the pillbox have it. After that the area would be clear of everything but snipers.

The infantry, who up till then had been forced to keep in doorways, would now continue up the street and poke into the side streets and into the houses until everything was clear.

That’s how a strongpoint in a city is taken. At least that’s how ours was taken. You don’t always have tanks to help, and you don’t always do it with so little shedding of blood.

But the city was already crumbling when we started in on this strongpoint, which was one of the last, and they didn’t hold on too bitterly. But we didn’t know that when we started.

I hope this has given you a faint idea of what street fighting is like. If you got out of it much more than a headful of confusion than you’ve got out of it exactly the same thing as the soldiers who do it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One day while we were up on the Cherbourg Peninsula, I decided all of a sudden that I couldn’t face C rations that evening. And Bob Capa, the photographer, said he never could face C rations in the first place. So, we laid a plan.

We got a friendly mess sergeant to drum us up some cans of Vienna sausage, some sugar, canned peas, and whatnot, and we put them in a pasteboard box.

Then we walked around a couple of hedgerows to our motor pool and dug out Pvt. Lawrence Wedley Cogan from the comfortable lair he had prepared for himself in an oats field.

Pvt. Cogan drives a command car for the G-2 section of the 9th Infantry Division. When we can catch him not driving for G-2, we can talk him into driving us somewhere.

So, we piled in and dir4ected Chauffeur Cogan to set out for the nearby village of Les Pieux. When we got there, Capa, who speaks eight languages – and, as his friends say, “none of them well” – went into a restaurant to make his investigations.

Pretty soon he came to the door and motioned. So, Cogan parked the car behind a building, we took our box of canned stuff, and in we went.

C rations for a café dinner

It was a typical French village restaurant, with low ceilings, and floors that sagged, and it consisted of four or five rooms. It was crammed with French people, for we had only just taken Les Pieux and not many Americans had found the place yet.

The woman who ran the place took us to a long table. Pvt. Cogan was dirty with the grease and dust of his job and went off to wash before eating again in civilized fashion.

The cosmopolitan Capa made a deal and we traded our rations for the café’s regular dinner, in order not to take anything away from the French. We had expected to pay the full price anyhow, but when the bill came, they charged us only for the cooking, and wouldn’t take a bit more.

The restaurant had no small tables, only one long one in each room. Consequently, we were seated with French people. They seemed eager to be friendly, and pretty soon we were in the thick of conversation. That is, Capa and the French were in conversation, and occasionally he would relay the gist of it to Cogan and me, the hicks.

The people told us about the German occupation, but they didn’t have much bad to say about the Germans. Then we talked of the French underground, which had just been coming out in the open in the previous few days.

Throughout our dinner, Pvt. Cogan, in his soiled coveralls, listened and beamed and ate and took in eagerly the words he couldn’t understand and the scene so new and strange to him.

One middle-aged Frenchwoman made over him because he looked so young. Cogan isn’t bashful, but he couldn’t talk French so he just grinned. Pvt. Cogan joined the Army at 17. He was overseas before he was 18, and he is only 19 now. His home is Alexandria, Virginia. He is one of the nicest human beings you ever met.

Cogan wants to see action

No matter what you ask him to do, or what time of night it is, or in what weather you dig him out, he does it good-naturedly and without the silent surliness of some drivers.

When we left the restaurant, he was all a-bubble and said over and over again that he’d had the best time that evening he had ever had in the Army. Imagine him, he said, seeing foreign stuff like this as young as he is.

Next day, the international trio – Capa, Cogan and Pyle – went out again. But this time it was different. This was the trip I’ve been writing about the past several days, when we went into Cherbourg with am attacking infantry company of the 9th Division.

When we got to our forward battalion command post, we got out of the car and told Cogan to go back about a mile and wait for us, as it was too dangerous to wait up there. And do you know what Cogan did? Cogan looked at us almost pleadingly, and said: “Would you let me go with you?”

We said of course, if he wanted to. Cogan jumped out of the car like a jumping-jack, buckled n two big belts of ammunition, grabbed his rifle, and was ready to go.

He stayed with us clear through that afternoon. When Capa went farthest forward to get his pictures of surrendering Germans, Cogan hopped along behind him with his loaded rifle, as though to protect him.

Fine soldier, that Cogan

Of course, what he did will seem asinine to any combat soldier who would give a fortune to keep out of combat instead of seeking it. Yet the willingness to do anything that is asked of you, and the eagerness to experience things that aren’t asked of you, make a real trooper.

When we got to camp that night, Capa said: “That, Cogan, he’s one of the finest soldiers I’ve ever met in this Army.” Righto.

[adamsano]

Norman, I very much appreciate you making all of these posts to relive these days in real-time. However, I don’t look forward to the end of times for Ernie.