Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 22, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 21)
Our airmen over here have been dishing it out to the Germans; on the other hand, they have been taking it too. Our ratio of losses is vastly lower than that of the Germans, yet our boys have had to fly constantly against terrible opposition. It has made quick veterans out of them. They have gone through more here in Africa than they ever did on missions to Europe from English bases.

It is generally agreed among airmen that the bombing runup over Bizerte is one of the hottest spots in the world to fly through. It lasts less than a minute, but you have to fly straight and steady through an absolute cloudburst of noise and black smoke puffs – little black puffs of death everywhere you look – and after a few of those, something begins to jump inside you.

There is no lack of bravery among our bomber and fighter pilots. But also, they are human beings, and I doubt if there’s one among them who wouldn’t like to be sent home. The English have long had a system of resting aircrewmen after a certain number of missions over enemy territory. This consists of transferring such men to non-combatant flying for several months, after which they go back for another tour of combat duty. Rumors are rampant among our fliers that we will soon have such a system.

Many of our pilots have executed as many as 25 missions, and are certainly due for a rest of some kind soon. They rest all their hope in a belief that they would be transferred back to America. Wishfulness becomes almost fact, and you hear pilot gunners say:

I’ve got half enough trips now to go home.

…or:

I’ve got two-thirds enough.

The fact is that no permanent system of posting the men for leave or transfer has been worked out yet. But some crews are going home very soon. In fact, they may be there by the time you read this. They are going back for a much-deserved respite from combat, and to train and organize new crews. After several months they will probably return and start a second tour of combat missions. Many British pilots are now on their third tour of combat duty.

It is unlikely that our air crews will ever have a system whereby a certain number of missions will earn a one-way ticket home. It would be wonderful for them to know they could quit the front forever after 30 missions and spend the rest of the war working at home, but airmen will be needed too badly ever to permit that. It is more likely that some crews will be sent home just for a while and that others will take their rest periods over here.

There are discussions of rest camps in the mountains, and recreation centers staffed in such a way as to give the men some American female companionship – that being one of the most important lacks for soldiers on foreign soil. But whatever the system, and whatever the number of missions before posting, there’ll be a wild rush for the planes when the magic last mission comes up. If we are working our men hard, we can take comfort from the fact that the Germans are working theirs hard too.

New bombers and fighters arrive at this field several times a week, in little groups. We hear reports that absolute floods of planes are on the way, that planes are backed up all along the route clear to Miami. I talked to one crew that was ready to go into action here only six days after leaving Connecticut.

Also, specialists from Washington pop in on quick flying trips, stay a few days, and head back across the ocean to give firsthand information on war needs at the front. I am sure that what they see must have made their eyes pop out of their heads. Things are being done over here that just aren’t possible on paper.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 23, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 22)
You read the official communiqués a few days ago about a devastating raid by our Flying Fortresses on a huge German bomber airdrome near Tripoli. What you didn’t read, at least in any detail, is the story contains in these next three columns.

It was late afternoon at our desert airdrome. The sun was lazy, the air was warm, and a faint haze of propeller dust hung over the field, giving it softness. It was time for the planes to start coming back from their mission, and one by one they did come – big Flying Fortresses and fiery little Lightnings. Nobody paid a great deal of attention, for this returning is a daily routine thing.

Finally, they were all in – all, that is, except one. Operations reported a Fortress missing. Returning pilots said it had lagged behind and lost altitude just after leaving the target. The last report said the Fortress couldn’t stay in the air more than five minutes. Hours had passed since then. So, it was gone.

Ten men were in that plane. The day’s accomplishments had been great, but the thought of 10 lost friends cast a pall over us. We had already seen death that afternoon. One of the returning Fortresses had released a red flare over the field, and I had stood with others beneath the great plane as they handed its dead pilot, head downward, through the escape hatch onto a stretcher.

The faces of his crew were grave, and nobody talked very loud. One man clutched a leather cap with blood on it. The pilot’s hands were very white. Everybody knew the pilot. He was so young, a couple of hours before. The war came inside us then, and we felt it deeply.

Half a dozen of us went to the high control tower. We go there every evening, for two things – to watch the sunset, and to get word on the progress of the German bombers that frequently come just after dusk to blast our airdrome.

The sunsets in the desert are truly things with souls. The violence of their color is incredible. They splatter the sky and the clouds with a surging beauty. The mountains stand dark against the horizon, and palm trees silhouette themselves dramatically against the fiery west.

As we stood on the tower looking down over this powerful scene, the day began folding itself up. Fighter planes, which patrol the field all day, were coming in. All the soldiers in the tent camps had finished supper. That noiseless peace that sometimes comes just before dusk hung over the airdrome. Men talked in low tones about the dead pilot and the lost Fortress. We thought we would wait a few minutes more to see if the Germans were coming over.

And then an electric thing happened. Far off in the dusk, a red flare shot into the sky. It made an arc against the dark background of the mountains and fell to the earth. It couldn’t be anything else. It had to be. The ten dead men were coming home!

An officer yelled:

Where’s the flare gun? Gimme a green flare!

He ran to the edge of the tower, shouted, “Look out below!” and fired a green rocket into the air. Then we saw the plane – just a tiny black speck. It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.

I am a layman, and no longer of the fraternity that flies, but I can feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.

All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With our nervous systems, we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came – so slowly that it was cruel to watch.

It reached the far end of the airdrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out – it seemed to us – for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?

They cleared the last plane, and they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down die runway, the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.

The last of the sunset died, and the sky turned into blackness, which would help the Germans if they came on schedule with their bombs. But nobody cared. Our 10 dead men were miraculously back from the grave.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 25, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 24)
The 10 men who brought their Flying Fortress home from a raid on Tripoli, after they had been given up for lost, will undoubtedly get decorations. Nothing quite like it has happened before in this war. Here is the full story.

The Tripoli Airdrome was heavily defended, by both fighter planes and anti-aircraft guns. Flying into that hailstorm, as one pilot said, was like a mouse attacking a dozen cats.

The Thunderbird – for that was the name of this Fortress – was first hit just as it dropped its bombload. One engine went out. Then a few moments later, the other engine on the same side went. When both engines go out on the same side, it is usually fatal. And therein lies the difference of this feat from other instances of bringing damaged bombers home.

The Thunderbird was forced to drop below the other Fortresses. And the moment a Fortress drops down or lags behind, German fighters are on it like vultures. The boys don’t know how many Germans were in the air, but they think there must have been 30.

Our Lightning fighters, escorting the Fortresses, stuck by the Thunderbird and fought as long as they could, but finally they had to leave or they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to make it home.

The last fighter left the crippled Fortress about 40 miles from Tripoli. Fortunately, the swarm of German fighters started home at the same time, for their gas was low too.

The Thunderbird flew on another 20 miles. Then a single German fighter appeared, and dived at them. Its guns did great damage to the already-crippled plane, but simply couldn’t knock it out of the air.

Finally, the fighter ran out of ammunition, and left. Our boys were alone now with their grave troubles. Two engines were gone, most of the guns were out of commission, and they were still more than 400 miles from home. The radio was out. They were losing altitude, 500 feet a minute, and now they were down to 2,000.

The pilot called up his crew and held a consultation. Did they want to jump? They all said they would ride the plane as long as it was in the air. He decided to keep going.

The ship was completely out of trim, cocked over at a terrible angle. But they gradually got it trimmed so that it stopped losing altitude.

By now, they were down to 900 feet, and a solid wall of mountains ahead barred the way homeward. They flew along parallel to those mountains for a long time, but they were now miraculously gaining some altitude. Finally, they got the thing to 1,500 feet.

The lowest pass is 1,600 feet, but they came across at 1,500. Explain that if you can! Maybe it’s as the pilot said:

We didn’t come over the mountains, we came through them.

The copilot said:

I was blowing on the windshield trying to push her along. Once I almost wanted to reach a foot down and sort of walk us along over the pass.

And the navigator said:

If I had been on the wingtip, I could have touched the ground with my hand when we went through the pass.

The air currents were bad. One wing was cocked way down. It was hard to hold. The pilots had a horrible fear that the low wing would drop clear down and they roll over and go into a spin. But they didn’t.

The navigator came into the cockpit, and he and the pilots navigated the plane home. Never for a second could they feel any real assurance of making it. They were practically rigid, but they talked a blue streak all the time, and cussed, as airmen do.

Everything seemed against them. The gas consumption doubled, squandering their precious supply. To top off their misery, they had a bad headwind. The gas gauge went down and down.

At last, the navigator said they were only 40 miles from home, but those 40 miles passed as though they were driving a horse and buggy. Dusk, coming down on the sandy haze, made the vast flat desert an indefinite thing. One oasis looks exactly like another. But they knew when they were near home. Then they shot their red flare and waited for the green flare from our control tower. A minute later, it came – the most beautiful sight that crew has ever seen.

When the plane touched the ground, they cut the switches and let it roll. For it had no brakes. At the end of the roll, the big Fortress veered off the side of the runway. And then it climaxed its historic homecoming by spinning madly around five times and then running backwards for 50 yards before it stopped. When they checked the gas gauges, they found one tank dry and the other down to 20 gallons.

Deep dusk enveloped the field. Five more minutes and they never would have found it. This weary, crippled Fortress had flown for the incredible time of four and a half hours on one pair of motors. Any pilot will tell you it’s impossible.

That night, I was with the pilot and some of the crew and we drank a toast. One visitor raised his glass and said:

Here’s to your safe return.

But the pilot raised his own glass and said instead:

Here’s to a goddamned good airplane!

And the others of the crew raised their glasses and repeated:

Here’s to a goddamned good airplane!

And here is the climax. During the agonizing homeward crawl, this one crippled plane shot down the fantastic total of six German fighters. These were officially confirmed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 26, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 26, by wireless)
The Flying Fortress crew that made air history this month by flying 500 miles from Tripoli with its left engines out, after shooting down six enemy planes, was composed of men who were already veterans of the war in the air. They had been decorated for missions over Europe. They already had two official kills and several probables to their credit. The Tripoli mission, which only by a miracle was not their last, was their 22nd.

The skipper of the prize crew is Lt. John L. Cronkhite, of St. Petersburg, Florida. They called him Cronk. He is short, with a faint blond mustache and a very wide mouth, from which the words came in a slow drawl. His shoulders are broad, his arms husky. Usually, he doesn’t wear a tie. He says he isn’t married because nobody would have him. He’s 23.

Cronk’s father is a St. Petersburg florist. He has three pictures of his mother and father in his room. I spent the evening with Cronk and his co-pilot and navigator after their return from the dead. When he walked into the room, Cronk picked up something from the bed.

He said:

Hell, I can’t be dead. Here’s my dog tag. I forgot to take it with me. I can’t be dead, for they wouldn’t know who I was.

He and his co-pilot are bound by an unbreakable tie now, for together they pulled themselves away from death.

The co-pilot is Lt. Dana F. Dudley, of Mapleton, Maine. That is a little town of 800, and Dud says he is the only pilot who ever came from there. He is a tall and friendly fellow, who got married just before coming overseas. His wife is in Sarasota, Florida. Dud says one of the German fighters dived toward his side of the plane, and came on with bullets streaming until it was only 100 feet away. At that moment, what might have been his last thought passed through Dud’s head:

Gee, I’m glad I sent my wife that $225 this morning.

The navigator is Lt. Davey Williams, 3305 Miller St., Fort Worth, Texas. He too was recently married. The pilots give Davey all the credit for getting them home. He was about the busiest man on the trip, navigating with one hand and managing two machine guns with the other. When they thought they were done for, Davey said to the pilots:

I’ll bet those guys back home have got our stuff divided up already.

He said he mainly thought about how he was going to get word to his family that he was a German prisoner, and he felt sore that friends of his would soon get to go home to America while he’d have to spend the rest of the war in a prison camp.

I didn’t get to talk to the other members of the crew, but their stories are just the same. They all played their parts in coaxing the broken Fortress home.

They are Lt. Joe Dodson (bombardier) of Houston, Texas, and Sgts. Carl Olson of Chicago; John King of Hartford City, Indiana; Thomas Klimaszewski of Alpena, Michigan; Robert Jackman of Cleveland; Fred Littlewolf, a Chippewa Indian from Bagley, Minnesota, and Ted Nastel of Detroit.

One of those freakish little things happened to Lt. Dodson. He had hung his sunglasses on a hook in the nose compartment. A machine-gun bullet knocked out both lenses, but he didn’t touch the frame. If he hadn’t moved just a second before, the bullet, which grazed him, would have killed him.

When the Fortress finally reached home, Cronkhite decided to go through the co-pilot’s window onto the wing. As he stepped onto the wing his feet hit some oil and flew out from under him, and he went plummeting off the high wing onto the hard ground. The doctors thought he had been wounded, and picked him up and put him into an ambulance.

It sounds funny now, but as Cronkhite says:

I wouldn’t have given a damn if I had broken a leg when I fell off the wing, I was so glad to be on the ground again. I just felt like lying there forever.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 27, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 26)
This airdrome is full of stories about freakish escapes from death, as all airdromes are. But the strangest story I know is that of an airplane and its whole crew that disappeared in mid-air.

This was a veteran Flying Fortress crew. Its members had been heroes on many missions over Europe. They were leading a flight of three on their bombing run over a Tunisian port. The two wing planes were flying close on either side, the pilots following the lead plane, and suddenly it disappeared right before their eyes.

What happened is a matter of conjecture. But it seems very likely that an anti-aircraft shell made a direct hit on the plane’s bombload, setting off its own bombs, and that the whole plane blew to tiny bits instantly and just vanished. Nothing was ever seen except a little cloud of black smoke where the plane had been. Then the two other ships were flying on alone. One airman happened to be taking a picture at the very moment of the disappearance. The film showed two planes and a puff of smoke between.

A direct hit setting off a plane’s bomb load has never happened before in the American or British forces. I think it must have happened to the Germans, however, for I remember a British artillery officer telling me two years ago of a high-flying German bomber disappearing in a flash while he was looking at it through field glasses.

Fellow fliers of this ill-fated American crew were naturally pretty blue over the accident. But, as they say, when anything as freakish as that gets you, your number is just up regardless. And they go on with the war as usual.

When the boys tell you about it, they say:

Well, at least they never knew what happened to them, it was so quick.

The dearth of women, especially American women, is one of the greatest trials our soldiers overseas have to go through. There are thousands of men here, but only one woman has ever set foot on this vast airdrome. That was Margaret Bourke-White.

A sergeant who is a cook in one of the kitchens here was telling me:

You know how we’re always cussing and carrying on with each other. Well, the other day Miss Bourke-White walked through the kitchen all of a sudden. I guess we weren’t saying anything bad at the time, but we just hadn’t seen an American girl in so long that we all blushed.

I’ve met her, incidentally, for the first time, here in this remote desert spot. She is pleasant and good-looking, with prematurely graying hair. She makes quite a sight in Army trousers and wool-lined leather flying jacket.

The commanding general here is an exceptionally nice guy. We eat breakfast at his table, although usually we take out other meals out at some field mess, eating out of mess kits.

At any rate, we have marmalade for breakfast, and when the general doesn’t eat with us, I take his marmalade off his plate and eat it myself. The morning I met Miss Bourke-White, she up and asked the general if she could have his marmalade. I told her I’d been in the habit of eating it. And she said:

Your work and mine are so different nobody could ever imagine us as competitors, but from now on we’ll be better rivals for the general’s marmalade.

The eating isn’t as good here as back around Algiers and Oran. The farther east you go the more regimented the food becomes. That’s because it’s harder to buy fresh stuff from the country, and our food comes mostly out of ration cans. Not that it’s at all bad. A person could live very healthfully on it forever. But after you’ve eaten the same thing for weeks on end you get rather bored with it, to understate the case.

We are blessed with plenty of oranges, tangerines, figs and dates – especially dates. They are served at every meal here, huge platefuls of them. You can buy them in the stores or from boys in the streets of the villages.

Some of our Christmas boxes from back home were full of stuffed dates. If somebody will just send me a little sackful of sand for Easter, everything will be wonderful.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 28, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in North Africa – (Jan. 27)
Nine American boys have just had a unique baptism of war. They left America very recently on a bomber, bound for the African front. They arrived here a little later, by camelback, after a series of incredible adventures, including a battle with German fighter planes. Here is the story.

A Flying Fortress, commanded by Lt. Harry Devers of Martinsburg, West Virginia, took off from America during the holidays and flew without incident across the Atlantic and to the coast of Africa. Devers’ crew of eight was composed of Lt. Richard Banning, of Britt, Louisiana, co-pilot; Lt. Charles Watt of Jacobsburg, Ohio, navigator; Lt. Victor Coveno of 11002 Woodland Ave., Cleveland, Ohio, and five sergeant-gunners – W. K. Thames of Fayetteville, North Carolina; Joseph Obradovich of Lacrosse, Wisconsin; Richard Hasbrough of Brooklyn, New York; Harry Alsaker of Montana, and Robert Oheron of Cresline, Ohio.

After landing in Africa, they took off one recent morning and formed up with two other Fortresses for the last lap of their journey to war. They headed for the designated airdrome at the front where they were to report for action. They flew all day, and when they arrived where they thought the field should be, they couldn’t find it. So, they flew on and kept hunting. The afternoon wore on and dusk grew near.

Suddenly, out of a blank sky, two fighters dived on them. Bullets began to spatter. That was how those youngsters, fresh from America, discovered that they had wandered into enemy territory. What a fine way to start their war!

Devers’ crew began shooting back, but the fighters switched to one of the other Forts, which soon circled downward and disappeared, apparently shot down. It has not been heard from since.

The two remaining planes lost the Germans in the dusk. One made a crash landing. Devers circled over it and was given a signal not to land. Several days later, American reconnaissance planes discovered this Fortress being towed along the road, headed for Italian territory. They dived at it, guns going and set it afire.

That account for two of the Forts and gets us down to our friends mentioned above.

They were alone in the air now and they headed back west to get away from the enemy. It was dark, and they still couldn’t find the airdrome to which they were being sent, so they flew far south to make sure of getting away from the mountains. They went up to 11,000 feet, flew until their gas was gone, and then jumped.

Devers gave them all instructions before they jumped. They were flying south and he would be the last man out, so he would start walking north and all the others were to head south. The plan worked. Eight of the nine found each other within half an hour. Lt. Coveno landed in a gully half a mile away from the meeting place and spent the night there, rejoining the others next morning.

That first night they all slept on the ground, wrapped in their parachutes. They didn’t know whether they were in enemy territory or not.

At dawn an old Arab came wandering past. He was a nomadic shepherd, and he spoke neither English nor French. But he was wonderful to these boys. He led them northward, and they walked all day, covering 20 miles. Again that night they slept in their ‘chutes, and they almost froze.

The second morning they came across a caravan of 15 camels. In charge of them was an Arabian enlisted man in the French Army. He was touring the desert buying camels for the French. This Arab took the boys along with him. They learned later that he thought they were Italian parachutists and that he was capturing them.

They rode camels for two days – and they never wanted to see another camel. They had to ride bareback, and they said a camel’s back would make an excellent razor blade. They rode till they couldn’t bear it any longer, and then got off and walked. But the sand was so deep they couldn’t walk either, so they had to get back on their desert chariots.

For two days and nights they traveled by camelback across the bare sands. There were no trails, no roads. On the morning of the fourth day, they came upon a French desert garrison and there they were able to identify themselves for the first time, as Devers speaks some French.

The French officers put them to bed and arranged for a truck to take them to a meeting place with an American truck. So, finally, at the end of the fifth day, they arrived at the airdrome they had hunted so desperately five nights before.

They were tired, but not in bad shape. They were still animated, and willingly told the story over and over. We finally had to make them go to bed, at 10 o’clock.

A good sleep was too much for them. The next morning, they felt washed out and weary. Some of them were even sick at their stomachs. But in a day or two they will be normal again, when their excitement over being alive quiets down a bit.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 29, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 28)
This is a continuation of the story of nine American boys who got lost, accidentally ran into German fighter planes, and had to jump from their Fortress on their very first day in the war zone.

The bombardier, Lt. Victor Coveno of Cleveland, is the gay one of the outfit. It was all marvelous to him. He recalls all the funny little things that happened. For instance, about the German fighter who surprised them, Coveno says:

You know what I said? I said, “Let’s shoot them tin cans down.”

But the tin cans kept out of Coveno’s range.

Finally, late that night, they ran out of gas and had to jump. They had a box of vitamin pills aboard, and they each ate a handful of pills just before jumping. Coveno grabbed a .45 automatic in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and jumped that way, carrying them all the way down.

One of the sergeants tucked an orange under his right arm. And then while plunging through space he had to reach up and get the orange in his hand so he could free that arm for pulling the ripcord. He saved the orange then, but later he let it drop somewhere. He’s still cussing about it.

Coveno sang all the way down. He doesn’t remember what he sang, but he just sang because he was so damned happy about that parachute. However, it oscillated so badly he got seasick.

Parachutes in the war zone are packed with chocolate rations, and the boys stuffed a few additional rations in their pockets before jumping. On the ground, Lt. Devers ordered them to cut their rations to half portions, in case they should be in the desert a long time. As it turned out, their parachute rations were still untouched when they finally reached an American airdrome. They ate goat meat all the time with the Arabs. They don’t care much for goat meat.

Arabs are naturally wizards at finding water holes, and the boys would fill their canteens regularly. They always remembered to put in purifying pills too, which we all carry.

They slept in their parachutes all five of their nights in the desert. They didn’t sleep much, for it was too cold. Devers appointed guards each night, for they still weren’t sure where they were.

During the day, when riding razorback camels in utmost agony, they all sang that Bing Crosby-Bob Hope song, “The Road to Morocco.” They were a long way from Morocco but they felt that the song sort of fitted into their background.

The old Arab who first picked them up was a spectacular character, a true nomad moving from day to day with his family and his herd of goats. He was 80 years old, had only one eye and no teeth.

They talked to him in sign language. He told them he had heard their plane the night before. The boys tried to give him money when they parted. He wouldn’t take it, but he did accept some knives. The boys forgot to find out his name, but the Arab will be taken care of anyhow when the French find him, for the American Army will reward him.

Coveno says:

Boy, I’ve seen one beautiful Arab girl. She’s this old fellow’s granddaughter, and she’s really beautiful.

But the lieutenant heard how the Arabs feel about their women, so he didn’t make eyes at her.

Lt. Watt was the only one in the bunch who saved his ripcord. Several of the crew arrived carrying specimens of a peculiar rock, picked up from the sands. It’s called desert rose, and is a hard sandstone. It really looks like a rose. It’s a precious souvenir they’ll always keep.

All of them lost everything they had on the plane. When they arrived, they naïvely said:

We want to go to the quartermaster in the morning and get some new outfits.

Everybody laughed loudly. You don’t get new outfits here. You wear just what you’ve got on, and keep on wearing it for months and months.

These boys feel miserable about bungling their trip and losing a brand-new ship. They are humble about it. And they are almost worshipful in the presence of the veterans here who have seen so much action. But they will get a new ship, and in a few months, they will be able to talk like veterans to other new arrivals.

[NormanStewart]

@Ernie Pyle

During the day, when riding razorback camels in utmost agony, they all sang that Bing Crosby-Bob Hope song, “The Road to Morocco.”

One of my favorite Bing Crosby songs:

- YouTube

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (January 30, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 29)
There is nothing lighthearted about the imminence of death at the moment it is upon a man, but the next morning it can be very funny. It is worth a small fortune to be around an American camp on the morning after an aerial attack. Soldier comics have fertile ground then, and they go to work in the old vaudeville fashion of getting a laugh by making fun of yourself.

The other morning, I sat in a tent with a dozen airplane mechanics and heard Sgt. Claude Coggey of Richmond, Virginia, speak. The sergeant said:

I hear there’s one man who says he was not scared last night. I want to meet that man and shake his hand. Then I’ll knock him down for being a damned liar.

Me, I was never so scared in my life. As soon as those bombs started dropping, I started hunting a chaplain. Boy, I needed some morale-building. A big one came whistling down. I dived into the nearest trench and landed right on top of a chaplain. Pretty soon I had an idea. I said, “Chaplain, are you with me?” He said, “Brother, I’m ahead of you.” So, we went whisht out of the ditch and took off for the mountains.

Anybody who says a scared man can’t make 50 miles an hour uphill doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Me and the chaplain can prove it. Now and then we’d slow down to about 30 miles an hour and listen for a plane, and then speed up again. But in the moonlight the Jerries picked us out and came down shooting. I dived into an irrigation ditch full of water and went right to the bottom. After a while I said “Chaplain, you still with me?” And he said, “With you, hell, I’m under you.”

It never occurred to me till this morning what damned fools we were to get out of that ditch and run in the moonlight. It won’t happen again. After this, from 6 p.m. on, my address will be the top of that farthest mountain peak.

The reactions of the American soldiers to their first bad bombings have been exactly what you would expect of them. They take it in a way to make you proud. The following figures aren’t literal for any certain camp or particular bombing, but just my own generalization, which I believe a real survey would authenticate. Say you’ve got a camp of 5,000 men, and they go through a dive-bombing and machine-gun strafing. One man out of that 5,000 will break completely and go berserk. He may never recover. Perhaps 25 will momentarily lose their heads and start dashing around foolishly. A couple of hundred will decide to change trenches when the bombs seem too close, forgetting that the safest place is the hole where you are. The 4,774 others will stay right in their trenches, thoroughly scared, but in full possession of themselves. They’ll do exactly the right thing. The moment it’s over they’ll be out with shovels and tools helping to put out fires, working just as calmly as they would in the safety of broad daylight.

Our bombings here have proved that deep trenches are fully satisfactory as shelters. I’ve just seen a crater you could put a Ford car in, within 40 feet of an open trench full of men. An uprooted palm tree fell across the trench, and the men were covered with flying dirt, but not one was scratched. Their tents were mangled. One boy had just received a two-pound tin box of candy from his girl. Shrapnel slashed it wide open.

During the melee some running soldiers found one guy dead drunk in a ditch. He was sound asleep and snoring away. It was so funny they paused in their flight to laugh and envy him. Some men didn’t hear the alert and had to dive into trenches in their underwear and bare feet. One boy showed me his steel helmet with bullet holes front and back. I foolishly asked:

Did you have it on?

Obviously, he hadn’t.

Where German machine-gun bullets hit the ground around their tents, soldiers described the result as looking like snake holes. At first the boys would search for pieces of shrapnel as souvenirs to take home, but within a few days, shrapnel was so common they didn’t bother to pick it up.

To top it all off, every morning at sunrise you can see the dirt flying and the trenches going a little deeper.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 1, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 31)
The American soldier is a born housewife, I’ve become convinced. I’ll bet there’s not another army in the world that fixes itself a “home away from home” as quickly as ours does. I’ve seen the little home touches created by our soldiers in their barns and castles and barracks and tents all over America, Ireland, England and Africa. But nowhere has this sort of thing given such a play as here at one of our desert airdromes.

The reason is twofold: First, the climate here is so dry you can fix up something with a fair certainty that it won’t be washed away in the morning. Second, because of the constant danger of a German bashing, the boys have dug into the ground to make their homes, and the things they can do with a cave were endless, as every farm boy knows.

The basic shelter here is a pup tent, but the soldiers have dug holes and set their tents over these. And the accessories inside provide one of the greatest shows on earth. Wandering among them is better than going to a state fair. The variations are infinite.

There are a few fantastically elaborate two- and three-room apartments underground. One officer has dug his deep slit trench right inside his tent, at the foot of his bed. He has even lined the trench with blankets so he can lie six feet below ground under canvas and sleep during a raid. The finest homes are made by those who are lucky enough to get or borrow the covered-wagon ribs and canvas from a truck. They dug a hole and plant the canopy over the top.

Some of them have places fixed like sheiks’ palaces. On the dirt floors are mats bought from Arabs in a nearby village. Some have electric lights hooked to batteries. One man bought a two-burner gasoline stove from some Frenchman for $3.20. On it he and his buddies heat water for washing and fry an occasional egg. Furthermore, they have rigged up a shield from a gasoline tin and fitted it over the stove so that it channels the heat sideways and warms the tent at night.

An officer whose bedroll lies flat on the ground dug a hole two feet deep beside this ‘‘bed” so he can let his legs hang over the side normally when he sits on the bed. Many dugouts have pictures of girls back home hanging on the walls. A few boys have papered their bare walls with Arab straw mats.

One evening I stuck my nose into the dugout of Sgt. Ray Aalto, 4732 Oakton Street, Skokie, Illinois. He is an ordnance man now, caring for the guns on airplanes, but before the war he was a steam-boiler man. Aalto has one thing nobody else in camp has. He has built a fireplace inside his dugout. He has tunneled into one end of the dugout, lined the hole with gasoline tins, and made a double-jointed chimney so that no sparks nor light can show. He wishes his wife could see him now.

The deepest and most comfortable dugout I’ve seen was built by four boys in the ground crew of a fighter squadron. It is five feet deep, and on each side, they left a ledge wide enough for two bedding rolls, making two double beds. You enter by a long L-shaped trench, with steps leading down the first part of the L. At the door is a double set of blackout curtains. Inside they have rigged up candles and flashlights with blackout hoods.

Most of the soldiers go to bed an hour or so after dark, because the camp is blacked out and there’s nothing else to do. Only those with blackout lights in their dugouts can stay up and read or play cards or talk. These four boys have dug a square hole in the wall of their dugout and fitted into it a gasoline tin with a door lock, making a perfect wall safe for cigarettes, chocolates, etc. Their dugout is so deep they can stay in it during a raid. In fact, they don’t even get out of bed.

It took the four of them three days, working every minute of their spare time, to dig their hole and fix it up. The four are Pvt. Neil Chamblee of Zebulon, North Carolina, Pvt. W. T. Minges of Gastonia, North Carolina, Sgt. Robert Cook of Montpelier, Indiana, and Sgt. Richard Hughes of Weiner, Arkansas. Sgt. Hughes was especially pleased that I came around, because his mother had written him that I was in Africa and that she hoped our paths would cross, but he never supposed they would.

I believe a character analyst could walk around this camp and learn more than you could by having the boys fill out a thousand questionnaires. Hundreds of boys have done nothing at all to their tents, but I believe at least half of them have added some home touch. A fellow doesn’t think of these things and work his head off on his own time creating them unless he’s got a real lively ingenuity in him.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 2, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Feb. 1)
I don’t know whether much has been written at home about or African booklet or not. It’s on the same principle as the booklet about England that was issued to our troops there.

The African booklet is a neat little blue-backed affair of 16 pages. It was written before we came here, and consequently is prefaced by the admission that “our welcome by the inhabitants is not known at this time.” I might add that after several months of studying the situation I still don’t know what our welcome is.

The booklet describes briefly the history and geology of the North African countries. Since it always makes a good impression for a writer to pick out flaws, I’ll take the liberty of pointing out a few small errors in our booklet. For instance, it says “little rainfall is experienced along the coast.” Some Californian must have written that. If that stuff that comes down day after day along the Algerian coast in a piercing, chill, England-like downpour isn’t rain, then I must be shell-shocked.

When you’re wet to the skin for three days at a time and shivering with cold in mud halfway to their knees. I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time convincing several hundred thousand soldiers that it hasn’t been raining.

The booklet also says that:

Mirage is of fairly frequent occurrence. It generally occurs early in the morning.

It may be there are mirages in summertime, I don’t know. But the only mirage anybody has seen around here this winter would be one induced by approximately four bottles of cheap wine.

The booklet explains the new issue of American money given us. It adds that there will be little to buy over here (and they are right) and advises soldiers to allot at least 75% of their pay home. There is so little to spend money on over here that everybody has more than he knows what to do with. Officer-friends of mine say they have never saved so much money in their lives. As for me, I’m spending a total of about $5 a week (My employers will probably try to keep me here forever when they read this).

Being a financial ignoramus from way back, it’s all Greek to me why we issued this American money to begin with. For the French money still exists – both currencies are acceptable – and now that the newness has worn off, the Army is paying off in francs anyhow. The British issued a special money for their troops too. It’s all too deep for me.

The most interesting part of the book is its “Do’s and Don’ts." It warns us never to enter mosques, and never to loiter, smoke, or spit in front of a mosque.

It says that bread is holy to the Moslems, and never to cut it but always break it with the fingers, and not to let any drop on the ground. It says further that you must always eat with your right hand, even if you are a southpaw. I asked a French Algerian about this, and he says he never heard of it before. So, I’ve continued to eat left-handed and nothing has happened.

The booklet warns us not to give Moslems alcoholic drinks, not to take dogs into a house, and not to kill snakes or birds, since the Arabs believe that the souls of departed chieftains reside in them.

Finally, the book says:

Talk Arabic if you can to the people. No matter how badly you do it, they like it.

This is good advice but how any American is to go about trying to talk Arabic is more than I know. Most of us can’t even learn enough French to get by, and Arabic is an almost impossible language to learn.

The Army has put out a few little booklets giving some Arabic words and phrases. I’ll give you a few examples of how easy it is to speak Arabic. For instance, if an Arab asks you what that thing is hanging from your belt, you reply “bundikeeya sughayzara” – which means pistol. After you’d talked an hour or two along that line and were ready to call it a day, you’d say to the Arab:

Lailtak syeeda ataimsik behair.

…which means “good night.”

The book ends by saying that some Arabic sounds are almost impossible for Americans to learn. For example, it says that “kh” resembles the sound made when clearing the throat, and that “gh” is a deep gurgling noise.

If you were to sneeze, cough, whistle, choke and hiccup all at once, that would mean:

I love you, baby, meet me in front of Walgreens right after supper, and leave your veil at home.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Another forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 2)
It happens that my best flying friends in this war have been bomber men, but I wish somebody would sing a song, and a glorious one, for our fighter pilots. They are the forgotten men of our aerial war.

Not until I came up close to the African front did I realize what our fighter pilots have been through and what they are doing. Somehow or other you don’t hear much about them, but they are the sponge that is absorbing the fury of the Luftwaffe over here. They are taking it and taking it and taking it. An everlasting credit should be theirs.

In England, the fighters of the RAF got the glory because of the great Battle of Britain in 1940. But in America, our attention has been centered on the bombers. The spectacular success of the Flying Fortresses when they went into action made the public more bomber-conscious.

There is still rivalry between the fighters and the bombers, as there always has been. That in itself is probably a good thing. But of late, it has sort of slipped out of the category of rivalry – it has developed into a feeling on the part of the fighter pilots that they are neglected and unappreciated and taking a little more than their share on the nose. Their ratio of losses is higher than that of the bombers, and their ratio of credit is lower.

There have been exaggerations in the claims that the Fortresses can take care of themselves without fighter escort. Almost any bomber pilot will tell you that he is deeply grateful for the fighter cover he has in Africa, and that if he had to go without it, he would feel like a very naked man on his way to work.

Our heavy bombers now are always escorted by Lockheed Lightnings (P-38s). It is their job to keep off German fighters and to absorb whatever deadliness the Nazis deal out. It means longer trips than fighters ever made before. Sometimes they have to carry extra gas tanks, which they drop when the fight starts. They mix it with the enemy when they are already tired from long flying at high altitudes. And then if they get crippled, they have to navigate alone all the way home.

The P-38 is a marvelous airplane, and every pilot who flies it loves it. But the very thing that makes the Lightning capable of these long trips – its size – unfits it for the type of combat it faces when it gets there.

If two Lightnings and two Messerschmitt 109s got into a fight, the Americans are almost bound to come out the little end of the horn, because the Lightnings are heavier and less maneuverable.

The ideal work of the P-38 is as an interceptor, ground strafer, or light hit-and-run bomber. It would be a perfect weapon in the hands of the Germans to knock down our daylight bombers. Thank goodness they haven’t got it.

Convoying bombers is monotonous work for the fighter pilot who lives on dash and vim. These boys sometimes have to sit cramped in their little seat for six hours. In a bomber you can move around, but not in a fighter. The bomber has a big crew to do different things, but the fighter pilot is everything in one. He is his own navigator, his own radio operator, his own gunner. When you hear the pilots tell of all the things they have to do during a flight, it is amazing that they ever have the time to keep a danger eye out for Germans.

Although our fighters in North Africa have accounted for many more German planes than we have lost, still our fighter losses are high. I have been chumming with a roomful of five fighter pilots for the past week. Tonight, two of those five are gone.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Algeria – (Feb. 3, delayed)
Some people collect stamps for a hobby. Some people carve battleships out of matchsticks. Some send themselves postcards from all the foreign cities they visit. But I have a hobby that is much more interesting and ambitious than any of these.

It took shape in my mind many years ago when I was lying, wretched and miserable, with dengue fever in Mexico. Since I was a traveler anyhow, my new hobby fitted right in with my work. Great goal that formed in my head was to be sick in every country on the face of the earth, before finally cashing in my checks on home soil.

I’ve made gratifying progress in the past half-dozen years. I’ve been sick in Panama, Peru, Chile, French Guiana and the Bahama Islands.

I damn near died once in Alaska, Hawaii and Guatemala have heard my moans of anguish. Portugal contributed its aches and pains. Ireland blessed me with a high fever and violent chills. Even dear old England made me sick at times.

And then I came to Africa. For a while, it looked as though things might bog down here. I felt perfectly fine. I felt alarmingly good. It began to worry me. What would people say?

But my worries are all over now. Africa is under my belt. I’m just arising from ten days of the African flu. I burned, chilled, coughed, ached and cried out in agony. It was first-rate, grade-A, all-wool misery. In fact, one of the most satisfactory illnesses I’ve ever had. Vive l’Afrique!

My illness was what is known colloquially among us boys as the “african pip.” It is really nothing more than old-fashioned Chicago influenza. But upon this is superimposed a special type of some throat native to these parts – a sore throat so outstanding in its violence that it was awarded the Medaille Sorum Throatus d’honneur at the Paris Exposition of 1896, against sore throats from all over the world.

If the Army never does anything else for me, I’ll always contend that the Army saved my neck. They gave me better than I’d have got if I’d been paying for it. In fact, among all my touring illnesses I’ve never had better treatment than here in darkest Africa.

I lay in a perfectly good bed in a perfectly nice room in an old hotel taken over by the Army. The Army doctor who attended me happened to live in adjoining room, as all I had to do to call him was throw a glass or an ashtray against the opposite wall and he would come dashing in with stethoscope swinging.

My meals were served at bedside by white-coated Army waiters right from the general’s own mess. Several times a day, Medical Corpsmen from the Army dispensary came with little pens and hoods and alcohol burners, and gave me inhalation treatments from their boiling fumes. Army friends were continually dropping in to bring me three-month-old mail that had just arrived, or to bring me tangerines, or my cigarette rations, or the latest news or rumors of news.

It was a sulfa drug that put me on the road to health again. I wish they’d start selling sulfa drugs in grocery-store packages. So, I could write a testimonial about them. For I’m becoming quite an exhibit of the benefits of sulfa-this and sulfa-that.

In previous foreign countries, I’ve had sulfanilamide and sulfathiazole. This time, they gave me sulfadiazine. The doctor said it would probably make me sick at the stomach, but it didn’t it merely made me keenly aware of the most remarkable people all around the room, saying the most remarkable things. After a day or two, these people all packed their bags and left, and then I was a well man once more, albeit a weak one.

General weakness, general laziness, and the general’s fine food kept me glued to my room for five days after I wasn’t sick at all any longer. Finally, the colonel said if I didn’t get up and walk out for me meals, he was going to exercise the Army regulations which provide for the court-martial of correspondents.

So, I’m in circulation, the vacation is over, the record is complete, and now I might as well pick up my bedroll and move on to India or someplace, for there’s no use hanging around here and maybe being sick twice in the same place. That would be known as wasted effort.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 5, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Algeria – (Feb. 4)
I’ve dwelt all I intend to upon my recent bout with the African flu, and I must tell you
about the aggregation of plumbers, professors, horse doctors, and traveling salesmen who were delegated by the Army to pull me back to life.

First there was Pvt. Henry R. Riley, who walked in one day with his arms full of laboratory apparatus, and said he was ready to give me the inhalation treatments necessary to clear my throat and chest of its awful load. Pvt. Riley is a jockey by trade! Pvt. Riley is one of those good old boys from Oklahoma, good-natured and slow-talking. He was born in Pawhuska, and has been riding horses ever since he could remember.

His nickname is “Beans.” He says he was Leading Rider of America in 1930, booting home 187 winners that year. He rode for Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney’s Greentree Stables. Beans had to give up racing in 1933 when his weight got up to 132 pounds and he couldn’t do anything with it. He weighs 145 pounds now, is 30 years old, and feels wonderful.

After he quit riding, Beans went into the medical end of racehorse training. He says he worked under the finest veterinarians in the business. He was still making the racetrack circuits with the training stables right up to wartime. He has a wife and stepson.

I thought it necessary to make a little joke about a horse doctor being put into the Army Medical Corps and set to doctoring people, but Beans saw no inconsistency in it at all. He’s as happy as a bug in his work, and says he’d rather be in the Medical Corps than any other branch of the Army, even the cavalry.

Beans says very seriously:

Doctoring people and doctoring horses is exactly the same except you give a horse from 12 to 16 times as much. There’s a difference of opinion. Some say 12, some say 16. I always hold to 12 myself, to be on the safe side.”

Beans’ treatment worked all right with me. But from this day onward I shall never be able to look upon myself as anything more than one-twelfth of a horse.

Next on my list is the young man who brought my meals – a redheaded, nice-looking fellow perpetually ready to break out into a grin. He is Pvt. Thomas Doyle, 1422 Woodward Ave., Lakewood, Ohio. He goes either by Tom or Red, so I called him Red to remind me of the days when I had hair and it was red.

On the second meal Red came beaming in behind his tray and said:

I know now. I thought at noon I ought to know your face and I’ve been thinking ever since and finally I’ve got it. We read your column all the time at home in Cleveland.

From then on Red would bring my meals and then sit down and light a cigarette and hold conversation throughout the time I was eating. Red used to be an asbestos worker. He said:

What on earth is an asbestos worker? We put asbestos around pipes.

Red belongs to a union – Local No. 3 of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers. He laughs at the name, as he does at nearly everything else. But he sure likes his union.

Every year they give away Christmas turkeys to the members. This year, they obviously couldn’t ship turkeys all over the world, so they sent a money order for $10 to each member serving overseas.

Red grins:

Wonder what Westbrook Pegler would think of that?

Red got his $10 just a few days before Christmas. He’s trying to find something especially Algerian to buy and send home to his wife.

Yes, he got married a couple of months before going into the Army, even though he’s just a kid. His wife is a secretary at Thompson Aircraft. He married a schooldays sweetheart. He says:

I didn’t make any mistake either. I’m sure glad I did it.

Like the other boys, Red doesn’t mind being in the Army. At first, he was an infantryman, and then in England they made a fireman out of him, on the grounds that he was so asbestos-like, I suppose. And then when he got to Africa, they converted him into a waiter on tables. Red’s colonel is a pretty tough egg, not much given to compliments. But on the third day of Red’s dining-room career, the colonel complimented him on his prowess.

Red said:

That was pretty nice, but I had to laugh at getting complimented on being a waiter when I don’t want to be a waiter. Oh, it’s all right, but I’m going to try to get transferred, because I’d hate to have to say I fought the whole war with a serving tray.

One of the saddest parts about getting well was the end of the nice mealtime conversations with Red Doyle, the Asbestos Kid. But I’ve still got some more of the Army to tell you about tomorrow.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 6, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Algeria – (Feb. 5)
The sawbones who aided me to victory in my recent battle with North African flu was a young Boston doctor named Lt. Albert Deschenes. He and I had happened to be on a couple of trips together before I fell ill, consequently we already knew each other by our first names. Thus, the doctor’s bedside manner was all that the most plaintive patient could ask. Furthermore, I was the first of my breed that he had ever seen, and he felt it would be a bad omen to lose his first correspondent. So, Dr. Deschenes leveled his full professional skill in my direction and thus preserved one more lousy newspaperman for posterity.

The Army takes no pay for medical services rendered, of course, so my only hope is to keep on surviving all and sundry foreign germs for the duration, and wind up in Boston some beautiful day in 1944 and buy Dr. Al Deschenes a drink. He’ll need it by then.

Another of the Medical Corpsmen who came to render services at my bedside was Cpl. William C. Barr – a high-school teacher by profession. Barr lives at 1314 Logan Ave., Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and he taught arithmetic, history, and English in the Tyrone High School before going into the Army. He is a bachelor.

Barr has a degree from Muskingum College at New Concord, Ohio, and has been working on his master’s at Penn State. You’d think it would be pretty devastating on a fellow of Barr’s background to swing into the rough-and-tumble life of the Army. But he says he’s had no trouble adjusting himself. He actually enjoys his work in the Medical Corps, even though some of it is pretty menial. He says he’d rather be here than in any other branch of the Army. He even goes so far as to say you meet a lot of interesting people.

One advantage of being sick is that people keep bringing you things. Sgt. Chuck Conick, from Pittsburgh, took an airplane trip to a neighboring country and brought me back bananas, grapefruit, and lemons. Maj. Raleigh Edgar, of Columbus, Ohio, barged in one evening with two cans of American oyster stew. And Maj. James V. Smith gave forth with a big slice of old-fashioned fruitcake, direct from Mrs. Smith’s personal oven in Greenville, Mississippi.

The Red Cross sent me books to read. The sentries downstairs sneaked up with cups of hot coffee late at night, coffee which I didn’t want at all but which I drank hungrily out of deep gratitude for their thoughtfulness. Even a general wandered in one night and sat on my bed and talked a while, thinking he was in somebody else’s room, I presume.

One afternoon Lt. Duncan Clark of Chicago, one of the press censors, came past to help cheer me up, and since I was busy killing flies with a folded-up French newspaper, he contributed a little item on fly-killing technique. Lt. Clark said he had discovered, in some earlier research, that flies always take off backwards. Consequently, if you’ll aim about two inches behind them, you’ll always get your fly on the rise. So, for the next few days I murdered flies under this scientific system. And I must say that I never missed a fly as long as I aimed behind it.

The African flies, incidentally, are worth a little essay of their own. They look just like American flies, but there are two differences. One, while eating they raise high up on their legs and flutter their wings, like a chicken stretching. And, two, they are the most indestructible damn flies I’ve ever seen.

It is almost impossible to kill an African fly outright. It simply cannot be done with one swat. You stun him with the first blow, and then you have to beat him to death.

The blow with the Sunday New York Times would merely knock an African fly off his pins. It would require the Sears Roebuck catalog to bludgeon one into insensibility. And if you insisted upon execution at one stroke, I know od no instrument carrying sufficient weight and power short of the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary.

Thus ends one phase of my North African campaign.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 7)
It is a long jump from teaching grade school in Indiana to leaping out of an airplane 11,000 feet over some African mountains, but Tom Thayer made it. He hopes his next jump will be right back to an Indiana farm, and there he’ll stay.

Tom Thayer is “the hope of Hoosierdom," as the boys call him. He is from Hope, Indiana. Tom is 27, weighed 200 pounds, taught the fifth and sixth grades for five years at Clifford, Indiana, and is now the navigator of a Flying Fortress. They say he is the best celestial navigator in his squadron.

Not long ago, a bunch of Fortresses started a bombing trip to Bizerte. Over the mountains they ran into stormy, freezing weather. The ship Tom was navigating iced up and went out of control. The captain gave the order over the intercom for the crew to put their parachutes on and get ready to jump. A minute later he gave the order to jump. Lt. Thayer was first on the list. He opened the escape hatch, and out he went.

Now, in the next few seconds some things happened. The other men didn’t jump immediately, because they couldn’t get the ball-turret gunner out of his turret. While they were pulling and tugging at him, the captain got some control over the plane. Then he ordered the bombs salvoed – which means dropped so they won’t explode – and that gave him still more control. Then he countermanded the order to jump. But poor Tom was already halfway to earth. The plane returned safely to base in less than an hour. It took Tom four days.

After his parachute opened, Tom says, he could still see the plane but it seemed to be below him instead of above. He thought he must be falling up. He hasn’t figure it out yet.

He dropped through several thousand feet of clouds, still holding his pulled ripcord, for he knew if he saved it, he would become a member of some club, although he couldn’t remember its name – the Caterpillar Club. Anyhow his hand finally got so cold he threw the ripcord away.

The mountains where he landed were very rocky. His head struck as he came down, and he bled a good deal. He was conscious, but couldn’t get up for about five minutes.

He says the mountains were full of Arabs, working in the fields. He walked a short way and spoke to one, but not knowing the language, he didn’t get very far. So the Arab took him to a village and they went to a stone house, apparently the home of the village chief. The whole village clustered around to stare at him.

The chief was friendly and brought Tom a mattress, and also gave him an Arab nightgown to keep him warm. It was only 4:30 in the afternoon, but Tom lay down and went to sleep. Pretty soon the Arab brought in what Tom supposed was tea, though he wasn’t sure. Then he went to sleep again. About 8:30, the Arab came in with dinner – goat meat. It wasn’t too good.

Four other Arabs slept on the floor in the same room with Tom that night. Their snoring kept him awake. So did the fleas – he’s still got the welts. A sheep slept in the same room too. Tom didn’t sleep a wink all night.

Next morning, they fed him three fried eggs and some fried potatoes, and wound a turban around his injured head. Then they went out and killed the sheep that had slept in the same room. They butchered it and cooked its heart in the same coals where the Arabs had been warming their feet. They gave the heart to Tom, and he figured then that he was safe for sure.

After all this they got six donkeys, lashed the sheep’s carcass on top of one of them, put Tom on another, and started out. The donkeys over here are very small, and Tom is very big. When they would ride along the edge of a chasm, on a little shelf just wide, enough for a donkey, Tom could feel his long legs itching for the ground.

He finally arrived at a French garrison. He tried to pay them for taking care of him, but they wouldn’t take any money. However, some photographs from his wallet fascinated them, and they indicated a desire for some of them. So, Miss Mary Scott of Shelbyville, Indiana, will be interested to know that her photograph now reposes on a French soldier’s mantle.

At any rate, Tom says he’s going to marry Mary the day he gets home and then start farming and never stop.

For a while Tom was pretty sore about the others not jumping too, but he was all over it by the time he got back to the airdrome. They say he’s the best-natured guy in the outfit. Nobody had ever seen him really mad, so they decided to rib him. One man rushed up and shook hands and said:

Tom, you made a mistake. The captain didn’t say “Bail out.” He said, “Look, hail out.”

They had him fooled for a minute.

Tom’s dad used to be county auditor back home. He had one term and then got defeated last fall for by only 133 votes. The boys kid Tom and say that if he’d only had the gumption to make his spectacular jump a couple of months earlier, his father could no doubt have been re-elected on the strength of it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontline in Tunisia – (Feb. 9)
We drive our jeep in under a tree, camouflaged it by covering it with limbs, and then walked up the side of a hill for about 500 yards. Half a mile to the south of us, the battle for Ousseltia Pass in central Tunisia was going on.

We stopped in what is known as a forward command post, from which a battle is directed. This one consisted of a tent 20 feet square, well hidden under a tree. However, the whole tent had been dropped down and simply lay like a tarpaulin covering the officers’ bedrolls and bags. All the work was being done around two field telephones lying in their leather cases on the ground ten feet from the tent.

The rocky hillside was covered with little bushes and small fir trees. The sun was out and the day was rather warm. There were no papers or desks or anything – just three or four officers standing and sitting on a hillside near two telephones on the ground. One officer had a large map case. That’s all the paraphernalia there was for directing the battle.

Our troops were on top of a ridge about a quarter of a mile above us. The enemy was in the valley beyond, and on a parallel ridge a mile farther on. We could walk up and look over, but we couldn’t see anything. Both sides were well hidden in the brush. Every minute or two our nearby artillery would fire, and then half a minute or so later we could hear faintly the explosion of the shells far away. An officer said:

Nobody’s doing much damage right now, but at least we’re getting in ten shots to their one.

Now and then a louder and much nearer blast interrupted us. When I asked what size gun this was, an officer said it wasn’t a gun – it was enemy mortar shells exploding. I supposed they were three or four miles away, but he said they were falling only 800 yards from us.

Once in a while we could hear machine-gun fire in the distance. A young second lieutenant stood near the phones and did all the talking over them. In fact, he appeared to be making all the decisions. And he impressed me as knowing his business remarkably well.

The highest officer around was a lieutenant colonel, but he seemed to leave everything to his lieutenant, and at every signal of approaching planes, he ran to a nearby foxhole and stayed there till the planes had gone. Other officers commented about him in terms not meant for mixed company, but the young lieutenant said nothing.

The phone rang every few minutes. Other command posts would be calling in to report or to ask instructions. Now and then the chief post, some 15 miles back, would call and ask how things were going. Officers and enlisted men kept appearing from down below or over the hill, asking about things. One sergeant came to inquire where a certain post was, saying he had two jeep tires and a tire for an antitank gun that he was supposed to deliver.

Another sergeant, wearing an overcoat, came up the hill, saluted formally, and reported that a certain battery setup was ready to fire. They told him to go ahead. A phone rang. The captain of an ack-ack battery said the enemy had his range and asked permission to move. He was told to go ahead. All the conversation was informal and unexcited.

A phone rang again. An officer at another command post was asking for a decision on whether to move forward. The young lieutenant, apparently not wishing to give direct orders to a higher officer, solved the problem by putting his words in the form of advice, sprinkling two or three “sirs” in every sentence. I thought he handled it beautifully.

Now and then the lieutenant would phone some other post. All the posts have code terms such as “Hatrack” and “Monsoon” and “Chicago.” I’ve just made those up as examples, since naturally I can’t print the real codenames.

Once the lieutenant phoned to a rear command post and told them to send more trucks to a town where two trucks had been disabled that morning. Several times he phoned other posts to check up on a colonel who was wandering around the battle area in a jeep. You could tell they were very fond of the colonel, and that he apparently paid little attention to danger.

There were no planes in the sky when we arrived, but that morning the Germans had been over and bombed and strafed our troops badly. The command post had called for air support, but somebody at the other end said the planes were busy on other missions and:

You’ll just have to grin and bear it.

The men around our post spoke cynically about that remark all afternoon. They would say:

Grin and bear it, eh? Well, we’ll bear it but we won’t guarantee to grin.

But in the late afternoon, our planes did come. First, we didn’t know they were ours, so we all took to the foxholes. Finally, after they had flown overhead a couple of times without doing anything, somebody yelled:

They’re definitely ours!

So, we came out. The planes circled for about 10 minutes hunting for the correct spot in the bush-covered mountainside. They seemed to take their time at it, to make sure, and then finally they started peeling off one at a time and came diving down at a hillside a mile away.

They’d dive and then wheel back high into the sky and dive against. Apparently, there was no enemy attack, for there were no black puffs around the planes. We could hear their machine guns, and their cannon shells bursting.

They kept on diving and shooting for about 15 minutes. Pretty soon an officer came running up the hill and said:

Do you see that? Those damned Germans are mixed up and strafing hell out of the Italians!

When we told him they were our planes, he said “Oh!” and went back down the hill.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the frontline in Tunisia – (Feb. 9)
The afternoon sun went over the hill and the evening chill began to come down. We were sitting on a busy hillside – just a small bunch of American officers forming what is called a forward command post.

Officers who had been in the battle for Ousseltia Pass all day started wandering in through the brush on foot, to report. They were dirty and tired but the day had gone well, and they were cheerful in a quiet and unexpressed way.

A Medical Corps major came up the hill and said:

Those blankety-blanks! They’ve knocked out two of my ambulances that were trying to get the wounded back. A hell of a lot a Red Cross means to them!

Nobody said anything. He went back down the hill, as mad as a hornet.

The officers kept talking about three fellow officers who had been killed during the day, and a fourth one who was missing. One of the dead men apparently had been a special favorite. An officer who had been beside him when it happened came up with blood on his clothes. He said:

We hit the ground together. But when I got up, he couldn’t. It took him right in the head. He felt no pain.

An officer told an enlisted man:

Raise up that tent and pack his stuff.

Another one said:

The hell of it is his wife’s due to have a baby anytime now.

Just then a sergeant walked up. He had left the post that morning with the officer who was now missing. They all asked:

Where’s Captain So-and-so?

The sergeant said he didn’t know. Then he said he himself had been captured. “Captured?” the officers asked.

He said:

Yes. The Italians captured me and then turned me loose.

The sergeant was Vernon Gery, 305 West Navarre St., South Bend, Indiana. He is a married man, and was a lawyer before the war. He is a young and husky fellow. He didn’t appear to be very much shaken by his experience, but he said he never was so scared in his life.

Sitting there on the ground he told me his experience. He and the missing captain and a jeep driver had gone forward at 9:30 in the morning to hunt for the body of a popular officer who had been killed. They parked the jeep, and the captain told them to stay there till he returned. They covered the jeep with brush and then hid in the bushes to wait while the captain went on alone. As they were lying there the driver yelled to Sgt. Gery:

Look, they’re retreating!

He saw eight soldiers coming toward them. He thought they were French, but actually they were an Italian patrol. The driver’s shout attracted their attention and they began shooting. The two Americans fired back. The jeep driver was hit and killed instantly. Gery said the driver yelled just once when he was hit. He said:

I’ll be hearing that yell for a long time.

In a moment the Italians had Gery. Apparently, they were on a definite mission, for seven of them went on, leaving one guard to watch Gery. They had taken his rifle, searched him, and given back his identification cards, but they kept his cigarettes, pipe, tobacco, chewing gum, and message book.

I asked:

Did they take your money?

Gery said:

I didn’t have any. I haven’t been paid in three months. I haven’t had a cent in my pocket for weeks.

For an hour the Italian sat 10 feet from Gery with his rifle pointed at him. Gery says the Italian must have been well-acquainted with the American rifle, for he passed the time taking it apart and putting it together, and did it rapidly and correctly. The Italian didn’t try to talk to Gery.

Suddenly our artillery began dropping shells close to where they sat. That was too much for the Italian. He just got up and disappeared into the bushes. And Gery started home.

As Gery finished his story, the commanding colonel came back from his afternoon’s tour. He sat down on the ground, and the officers gathered around to hear his reports and get their instructions for the night. There was still gunfire around. The colonel, a tall, middle-aged man, wore glasses and had a schoolteacherly look. But he cussed a blue streak and made his decisions crisply. You could tell he was loved and respected. He called all his men by their first names. He wore a brown canvas cap, without any insignia at all. Officers at the front tried to look as little like officers as possible, for the enemy liked to pick them off first.

Somebody asked if the colonel would like a cup of tea. He said he would. Somebody yelled, and out of the bushes came a Chinese boy in uniform and helmet, carrying a teapot covered with a rag.

Planes came over again, and several officers ran to foxholes, but the colonel acted as if he didn’t see them. The rest of us stayed and continued the conversation. The officers told him about the three members of his staff who had been killed.

He said:

Christ! Well, we’re in a war. We’ve got to expect it. We must try not to feel too bad about it.

And then he went on:

Here’s the way it is. We are being relieved at 11:30 tonight. Jim, you start taking up your phone wire, but nothing else moves a foot before daylight. Joe, you keep on firing up to leaving time, so they won’t know we are pulling out. We’ve got ‘em on the run, and I wish we could stay, but we’ve got our orders.

Then everybody left to carry out his new duties, and we went back down the hill to our jeep.

That is the way war looks from a forward command post.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 10)
It is hard for a layman to understand the fine points of aerial combat as practiced at the moment in North Africa. It is hard even for the pilots themselves to keep up, for there are changes in tactics from week to week.

We will have some new idea and surprise the Germans with it. Then they’ll come across with a surprise maneuver, and we will have to change everything to counteract it. But basically, at the moment, you can say that everything depends on teamwork. The lone dashing hero in this war is certain to be a dead hero within a week. Sticking with the team and playing it all together is the only guarantee of safety for everybody.

Our fighters go in groups with the bombers, ranging the sky above them, flying back and forth, watching for anything that might appear. But if they see some Germans in the distance nobody goes after them. That would be playing into the enemy’s hands. So, they stick to their formation above the bombers, making an umbrella.

The German has two choices – to dive down through them, or to wait until somebody is hit by flak and has to drop back. Then they are on him in a flash. 'When that happens, the fighters attack but still in formation. Keeping that formation always and forever tight is what the flight leaders constantly drilled into the boys’ heads. It is a great temptation to dash out and take a shot at some fellow, but by now they’ve seen too many cases of the tragedy of such actions.

One group leader told me:

If everything went according to schedule, we’d never shoot down a German plane. We’d cover our bombers and keep ourselves covered and everybody would come home safe.

The fighter pilots seem a little different from the bomber men. Usually, they are younger. Many of them were still in school when they joined up. Ordinarily they might be inclined to be more harum-scarum, but their work is so deadly and the sobering dark cloud of personal tragedy is over them so constantly that it seems to have humbled them. In fact, I think it makes them nicer people than if they were cocky.

They have to get up early. Often, I’ve gone to the room of my special friends at 9:30 in the evening and found them all asleep. They fly so frequently they can’t do much drinking. One night recently, when one of the most popular fighter pilots had been killed right on the home field, in an accident, some of the boys assuaged their grief with gin. They said:

Somehow you feel it more when it happens right here than when a fellow just doesn’t come back.

When they first came over here, you’d frequently hear pilots say they didn’t hate the Germans, but you don’t hear that anymore. They have lost too many friends, too many roommates. Now it is killing that animates them.

The highest spirits I’ve seen in that room were displayed one evening after they came back from a strafing mission. That’s what they like to do best, but they get little of it. It’s a great holiday from escorting bombers, which they hate. Going out free-lancing to shoot up whatever they could see, and going in enough force to be pretty sure they’ll be superior to the enemy – that’s utopia.

That’s what they had done that day. And they really had a field day. Them ran onto a German truck convoy and blew it to pieces. They’d laugh and get excited as they told about it. The trucks were all full of men, and “they’d fly out like firecrackers.” Motorcyclists would get hit and dive 40 feet before they stopped skidding. Two Messerschmitt 109s made the mistake of coming after our planes. They never had a chance. After firing a couple of wild bursts, they went down smoking, and one of them seemed to blow up.

The boys were full of laughter when they told about it as they sat there on their cots in the dimly lighted room. I couldn’t help having a funny feeling about them. They were all so young, so genuine, so enthusiastic. And they were so casual about everything – not casual in a hard, knowing way, but they talked about their flights and killing and being killed exactly as they would discuss girls or their school lessons.

Maybe they won’t talk at all when they finally get home. If they don’t, it will be because they know this is a world apart and nobody else could ever understand.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 12, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 10)
Lt. Jack Ilfrey is the leading American ace in North Africa at the moment. However, that’s not my reason for writing about him.

In the first place, the theory over here is not to become an individual fighter and shoot down a lot of planes, so being an ace doesn’t mean so much. In the second place, somebody else might be ahead of Ilfrey by this evening, with fate pulling the strings the way she does.

So, I’m writing about him largely because he is a fine person and more or less typical of all boys who fly our deadly fighters.

Jack Ilfrey is from Houston. His father is cashier of the First National Bank. His family home is at 3122 Robinhood Street. Jack is only 22. He has two younger sisters. He went to Texas A&M for two years, and then to the University of Houston, working at the same time for the Hughes Tool Company. He will soon have been in the Army two years.

It is hard to conceive of his ever having killed anybody. For he looks even younger than his 22 years. His face is good-humored. His darkish hair is childishly uncontrollable and pops up into a little curlicue at the front of his head. He talks fast, but his voice is soft and he has a very slight hesitation in his speech that somehow seems to make him a gentle and harmless person.

There is not the least trace of the smart aleck or wise guy about him. He is wholly thoughtful and sincere. Yet he mows ‘em down.

Here in Africa, Ilfrey has been through the mill. He got two Focke-Wulf 190s one day, two Messerschmitt 109s another day. His fifth victory was over a twin-motored Messerschmitt 110, which carries three men. And he has another kill that has not yet been confirmed.

He hasn’t had all smooth sailing by any means. In fact, he’s very lucky to be here at all. He got caught in a trap one day and came home with 268 bullet holes in his plane. His armor plate stopped at least a dozen that would have killed him.

Jack’s closest shave, however, wasn’t from being shot at. It happened one day when he saw a German fighter duck into a cloud. Jack figured the German would emerge at the far end of the cloud, so he scooted along below to where he thought the German would pop out, and pop out he did – right smack into him, almost.

They both kicked rudder violently, and they missed practically by inches. Neither man fired a shot, they were so busy getting out of each other’s way. Jack says he was weak for an hour afterward.

There is nothing “heroic” about Lt. Ilfrey. He isn’t afraid to run when that is the only thing to do.

He was telling about getting caught all alone one day at a low altitude. Two Germans got on his tail.

He says:

I just had two chances. Either stay and fight, and almost surely get shot down, or pour on everything I had and try to get away. I ran a chance of burning up my engine and having to land in enemy territory, but I got away. Luckily the engine stood up.

Ilfrey, like all the others here, has little in the way of entertainment and personal pleasure. I walked into his room late one afternoon, after he had come back from a mission, and found him sitting there at a table, all alone, killing flies with a folded newspaper.

And yet they say being an ace is romantic.