Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Everything seems odd in Normandy.

The hedgerows are thick and ancient. The stone walls are sometimes so mounded over with earth that you don’t know there’s a wall beneath. The trees in the apple orchards are mellow with moss so thick that it seems like a coat of green velvet.

The towns and cities are just as old and worn-looking. I have yet to see a building in Normandy that appeared to have been built within the last three generations.

The tone is not one of decadence, but just of great and contented age. Even Cherbourg was a surprise. All of its buildings were old and worn.

It was a contrast to other war cities we have passed through – Algiers and Palermo and even Naples – where much building and remodeling have been done in this country, and the new homes are shiny and modernistic, and the street fronts look almost American.

A street scene in Cherbourg looks so much like the Hollywood sets of old European cities that you get your perspective reversed and feel that Cherbourg has just been copied from a movie set.

It’s the same way with the Norman architecture. The houses aren’t so smooth and regular and nice as California homes of Norman design. When you look at them you feel, before catching yourself, that they have copied our California Norman homes and not done too good a job.

Everything is of stone. Even the barns and cowsheds are stone – and in exactly the same design and usually the same size as the houses. They are grouped closely together around a square, so that a farmer’s home makes a compact little settlement of buildings that resembles a country estate at a distance.

Have more butter than they can use

Normandy is dairy country. Right now, the people have more butter on their hands than they know what to do with. It is a stupid soldier indeed who can’t get himself all the butter he wants. But even though it is a glut on the market, the French still ask 60 cents a pound for it.

When the Germans were here, they bought all the Norman butter, and at fancy prices too. German soldiers would ship it home to their families.

And although their new order is strict and full of promises of an ordered world, the Germans themselves created and fostered the Paris black market, according to the local people. Much of the butter bought in Normandy by German officers went to Paris for resale at unheard-of prices.

To be honest about it, we can’t sense that Normandy suffered too much under the German occupation. That is no doubt less because of German beneficence than because of the nature of the country. For in any throttled country thew farm people always come out best.

Normandy is rich agriculturally. The people can sustain themselves. It is in the cities that occupation hurts worst. I suspect that when we get to Paris, we will hear an entirely different story from the people.

Good-looking children the rule

Normandy is certainly a land of children. It seems to me there are more children here even than in Italy. And I’ll have to break down and admit one thing – they are the most beautiful children I have ever seen.

It is an exception when you see a child who isn’t exceptionally good-looking. Apparently, they grow out of this, however, for on the whole the Norman adults look like people anywhere – both good and bad.

One thing about the Normans is in contrast with the temperament we have known so long in the Mediterranean. The people here are hard workers. Some of the American camps and city offices hire teenage French boys for kitchen and office work, and I’ve noticed that they go at their work eagerly and like the wind.

The story of the French underground, when the day comes for it to be written, will be one of the most fascinating things in all history.

On the Cherbourg Peninsula the underground was made up of cells, five people to a cell. Those five people knew each other, but none of them knew any other members of the underground anywhere.

It was fun to see the Frenchmen on the day the underground began coming out into the open. They identified themselves by special armbands that they had kept in hiding. One underground man would look at a neighbor wearing an armband and exclaim in amazement: “What! You too?”

In one village, we asked some people who were not in the movement if they had ever known who the underground members in their town were. They said they could pretty well guess, just from the character of the people, but never actually knew for sure.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 20, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Capt. John Jackson is an unusual fellow with an unusual job. It has fallen to his lot to be the guy who goes in and brings out German generals who think maybe they would like to surrender.

This happens because he speaks German, and because he is on the staff of the 9th Division, which captured the German generals commanding the Cherbourg area.

Capt. Jackson goes by the nickname “Brinck.” He is a bachelor, 32 years old. It is quite a coincidence that he was born in the town of Dinard. About 30 miles from Cherbourg. But he is straight American, for generations back. His folks just happened to be traveling over here at the time he showed up.

Capt. Jackson’s mother lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, but he likes to think of New Mexico as home. For several years he has been a rancher out there and he loves it. His place is near Wagon Mound and Clines Corners, about 40 miles east of Santa Fe. The war has played hob with his business. Both he and his partner are overseas, and there’s nobody left to look after the business. They lost money last year for the first time.

Looks more like Russian soldier

Capt. Jackson is a short, dark man with a thin face. He wears a long trench coat with pack harness, and his helmet comes down over his ears, giving him the appearance of a Russian soldier rather than an American.

He speaks perfect French, but he says his German is only so-so. He says it is actually better in his job not to speak flawless German, for then the German officers would think he was a German turned American and would be so contemptuous they wouldn’t talk to him.

Another remarkable character is Pvt. Ivan Sanders.

Sanders is the “Mister Fixit” of the 9th Division. His actual job is that of electrician, but his native knack for fixing things has led him into a sort of haloed status that keeps him working like a dog 24 hours a day, doing things for other people.

No matter what gets out of fix, Sanders can fix it. Without previous experience he now repairs fountain pens, radios, electric razors, typewriters, broke knives, stoves and watches. He has become an institution. Everybody from the commanding general on down depends on him and yells for him whenever anything goes wrong.

There is just one thing about Sanders. Nobody can get him to clean up. He is a sight to behold. Even the commanding general just threw up his hands about a year ago and gave up. When distinguished visitors come, they try to hide Sanders.

Just never give him time to wash

But the funny part about Sanders’ deplorable condition is that he is eager to be clean. They just never give them to wash. They keep him too busy fixing things.

In civil life, Sanders was an auto mechanic. He comes for Vinton, Iowa. After the war, he guesses he will set up another auto repair shop. He figures there will be enough veterans with cars to keep him busy.

Another unusual thing about Sanders is that he doesn’t have to be over here at all. He is 43, and he has had three chances to go home. And do you know why he turned them down? It’s because he’s so conscientious he figures they couldn’t get anybody else to do his work properly!

Small-world stuff:

On evening I dropped past an ack-ack battery I know, and a Red Cross man who served in this brigade came over and introduced himself.

He did look vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t have told you who he was. And no wonder – it had been 21 years since I’d seen him.

His name was Byron Wallace. He was a freshman at Indiana University when I was a senior. He belonged to the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, and lived just across the alley from us. His home then was at Washington, Indiana.

Ever since college, he has been in recreational and physical-education work – in New York’s Bowery, in Los Angeles, in Pittsburgh. And now in Normandy. He came ashore on D+1. Her thinks he’s going to like it here all right.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
When the now-famous Gen. Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben was captured, I happened to be at the 9th Division command post to which he was first brought.

Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy, division commander, had a long interview with him in his trailer. When he was about finished and ready to send the captured general on to higher headquarters, Gen. Eddy sent word that the photographers could come and take pictures.

So, they stood in a group in an orchard while the photographer snapped away. Von Schlieben was obviously sourpuss about being captured, and even more sourpuss at having his picture taken. He made no effort to look other than sullenly displeased.

Gen. Eddy was trying to be decent about it. He had an interpreter tell the prisoner that this was the price of being a general. Von Schlieben just snorted. And then Gen. Eddy said to the interpreter:

Tell the general that our country is a democracy and therefore I don’t have authority to forbid these photographers to take pictures.

Von Schlieben snorted again. And we chuckled behind our beards at one of the slickest examples of working democracy we had ever seen. And Gen. Eddy had the appearance of the traditional cat that swallowed something wonderful.

Normandy land of rabbits

Normandy is a land of rabbits. You see them in the fields and around the farmyards. Most of them are semi-tame. Apparently, the people eat a great deal of rabbit.

When we first moved in and began capturing permanent German bivouac areas, we found that nearly every little group of German soldiers had its own rabbit warren. They raised them for food.

One day my friend Pvt. William Bates Wescott of Culver City, California, found a mother rabbit that had been killed in the shelling, and nearby, in a nest near the hedge, he found six baby rabbits, only a few days old.

Wescott took them to his pup tent, got a ration box to put them in and spent the afternoon feeding them condensed cream through an eyedropper. They went for it like little babies. Next morning, five of them were dead.

The soldier said the concussion of bombs falling nearby during the night had killed them. I said undiluted condensed milk had killed them. At any rate, the sixth one thrived and became cute and gay.

He followed Westcott around everywhere, and if the distance got too far, he would go hopping back to the pup tent and snuggle up in Westcott’s blankets. He was quite a little rabbit. Everybody was crazy about him. Then, after about a week, we found him dead out on the grass one morning.

Which is a lousy way to end the story, but that’s all there was to it.

The town of Montebourg on the Cherbourg Peninsula is one of the worst wrecked of the towns that were fought over and shelled by both sides.

We stopped at Montebourg one day after it was all over. On one side of the city square, there was a large collection of rusted farm implements – all kinds of plows, planters, mowers and things.

On one wrecked mowing machine was the familiar name “McCormick.” And near the machine was stretched out in pathetic death a big white rabbit.

Sergeant cooks on electric iron

One night I crawled down into an ack-ack battery command post, in a dugout. It was about 2:00 a.m.

Only two people were there – a lieutenant, giving orders to the guns by telephone, and a sergeant, getting ready to fix some hot chocolate. He asked if I would have some, and following the old Army custom of never refusing anything, I said sure.

He was Sgt. Leopold Lamparty, the first sergeant of this battery, from 916 Franklin Street, Youngstown, Ohio. He used to be a bartender, and already in France he has picked up several little antique whisky glasses of old and beautiful design.

But the reason I’m writing about Lamparty is his electric iron. He made the hot chocolate on an electric iron turned upside down. Each ack-ack battery has a portable generator, so Lamparty just plugs it in.

His sister sent him the iron two years ago when he was in camp near Chicago, and he has carried it ever since. There was a long time ago when he pressed his pants with it, but a guy with pressed pants over here probably would be shot as a spy, so now Lamparty cooks with his iron.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in France – (by wireless)
I’m sending this column for some rainy day when the regular piece doesn’t get through on time.

This one contains a few odds and ends which I didn’t get down before about our invasion voyage across the Channel to France.

I came on a Navy LST which was a veteran of Sicily and Italy. She went up to England during the winter and had just been lying around since then.

She has a very fine crew, from the captain on down. Most of the crew have been through other amphibious campaigns, but there is a new batch of gunners who have been in the Navy only since December and who had never been shot at before our crossing.

The skipper is Lt. John D. Walker Jr. of Houlton, Maine. He is a gentle, courteous bachelor of 35, fine-looking, fine-minded, and beloved by his whole crew. Morale is high on this ship. A sailor will get you aside and tell you what a fine ship it has been since Walker took command.

Walker ran a Chevrolet and Cadillac agency in his hometown, but he is not the high-powered-salesman type at all. Aboard ship his discipline is the kindly rather than the Simon Legree variety.

Not grouchy, just worried

For example, there was a little exchange that I witnessed between him and the table waiter in the wardroom.

We had so many Army officers aboard that they practically crowded the Navy staff out of its own ship. At mealtime, the few Navy colored boys were hard put to keep the tables waited on.

One of these was a little sailor nicknamed Peewee, who hasn’t been out in the big world very much. At first, you think he is sullen, but later you learn it is just a facial expression and he means all right. One day he went to Capt. Walker and said: “Captain, I guess you think I’m grouchy, but it ain’t that. It’s just that I’m worrying all the time.”

Capt. Walker had been trying to teach Peewee some nice dining room manners. Trying to teach him to put things before his guests delicately, and not to jostle the guests or throw things at them.

One day I was eating next to the captain, and an Army colonel was at the same table. Peewee wanted the colonel to get up and make room for somebody else, so he just reached over the colonel’s shoulder ad started mopping the table with a wet cloth, sort of pushing the colonel out of the way as he did so.

The colonel took the hint and got up and left. The captain saw it, and was a little embarrassed. So, he said to Peewee, in a very kindly voice: “Peewee, you kind of bruised the colonel, didn’t you?”

And Peewee, not getting the subtle hint, and taking the captain literally, replied: “No, sir, I didn’t push him hard enough to hurt him.”

The captain, just shook his head in despair and went on eating.

Gets bulldozer, plus 100 men

Among the Army personnel aboard our ship was Capt. Warren Pershing, son of Gen. Pershing. The captain who is not a professional soldier at all, started out as a private in this war. He is in the engineers.

He is a tall, blond, regular fellow and everybody likes him. He leans over backward not to trade on his father’s name. He doesn’t speak of the general unless you ask him.

I asked if the general was still at Walter Reed Hospital. He said yes and that his father was very excited because they had just built him a penthouse on the hospital roof.

I have been told that despite his age and poor health, Gen. Pershing is very close to this war, and that some of our general staff call on him almost daily for advice and counsel.

On the way across the Channel, Capt. Pershing’s commanding officer gave him a mission to perform the moment we hit the beach. His mission was to steal a bulldozer at a certain spot, right away.

I checked up a couple of days later to see if he had succeeded. He not only showed up with the bulldozer but with a hundred men as well. He even got the bulldozer without stealing it. Just talked somebody out of it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The cook of LST 392, on which I came to France, was a beefy, good-natured fellow named Edward Strucker of Barberton, Ohio, which is near Akron.

Cooking on these transport ships is a terrible job, for you suddenly have to turn out twice as much food as normally. But Eddie is not the worrying type, and he takes it all in his stride.

Eddie has a brother named Charles in the Army Engineers, and in the past year has been lucky enough to run into him four times – once in Africa, once in Sicily, and twice in Italy.

One of those small-world experiences happened to me, too, while on that ship. We lay at anchor in a certain harbor a couple of days before sailing for France. On the second day I was in the washroom shaving when a sailor came in and said there was a Cdr. Greene who wanted to see me in the captain’s cabin.

The only Greene I could think of who might be a commander in the Navy was Lt. Terry Greene, whom I had known in my Greenwich Village days. You didn’t know I ever had any Greenwich Village days? Well, don’t get excited, because they weren’t very lurid anyhow.

The same Terry Greene

At any rate I went to the captain’s cabin, and sure enough it was the same Terry Greene all right. By some strange coincidence, we had both got 17 years older in the meantime.

Greene held a very important position in the convoy. He was tickled to death with his assignment, for he had been in the States almost the whole war and was about to go nuts for some action.

I haven’t seen him on this side of the Channel to discuss it, but I’m afraid our trip over wasn’t as exciting as he would have liked. But you can’t please everybody, and it was just tame enough to suit me fine.

In your travels around the world, if you ever happen to be sailing on LST 392, you might climb a ladder to a high platform astern which holds a big gun, and look at the breech of the gun.

There, written on each side of the barrel, you’ll find my name. the boys in the gun crew asked if I would come up and write my name as big as I could on the gun, and then they would trace it over in red paint. Which they did. I’ll be very much embarrassed now if the gun blows up on them. To say nothing of how they’ll feel.

One of the gun crew is Seaman John Lepperd of Hershey, Pennsylvania. He is about the oldest man in the crew. He is 34, and has three daughters – 17, 15 and 13 – and yet he got drafted last November and here he is sailing across the English Channel and helping shoot down German planes. It still seems a little odd to him. It is quite a contrast to the building game, which he had been in.

Ernie meets a hometowner

Also on this ship I ran into one of my hometowners from Albuquerque, Electrician’s Mate Harold Lampton. His home is actually in Farmington, New Mexico, but he worked for the telephone company at Albuquerque, installing new phones. Now he is the electrician for this ship. He has been in the Navy for two years and overseas for more than a year.

He is a tall, dark, quiet fellow who knows a great deal more about the Southwest than I do. he said he has driven past our house many times, and we had long nostalgic talks about the desert and Indian jewelry and sunsets. We are both tired of being where we are and we wish we were back on the Rio Grande.

Every LST in our convoy carried two or three barrage balloons. With each balloon was a soldier.

Among the soldiers I talked to on the LST were Cpl. Loyce Gilbert of Spring Hill, Louisiana; Pvt. Oscar Davis of Troy, North Carolina, and Pvt. Floyd Woodville of Baltimore. They didn’t seem especially apprehensive going to war. I talked to them quite a while but never got much out of them except yes and no. Which was all right with me. I feel that way myself sometimes. Especially right now.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 25, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One of the things the layman doesn’t hear much about is the Ordnance Department. In fact, it is one of the branches that even the average soldier is little aware of except in a vague way.

And yet the war couldn’t keep going without it. For Ordnance repairs all the vehicles of an army and furnishes all the ammunition for its guns.

Today there are more vehicles in the American sector of our beachhead than in the average-sized American city. And our big guns on an average heavy day are shooting up more than $10 million worth of ammunition. You see Ordnance has a man-sized job.

Ordnance personnel is usually about six or seven percent of the total men of an army. That means we have many thousands of ordnance men in Normandy. Their insignia is a flame coming out of a retort – nicknamed in the Army “The Flaming Onion.”

Ordnance operates the ammunition dumps we have scattered about the beachhead. But much bigger than its ammunition mission is Ordnance’s job of repair. Ordnance has 275,000 items in its catalog of parts, and the mere catalog itself covers a 20-foot shelf.

In a central headquarters here on the beachhead, a modern filing system housed in big tents keeps records on the number and condition of 500 major items in actual use on the beachhead, from tanks to pistols.

Able to repair anything

We have scores and scores of separate Ordnance companies at work on the beachhead – each of them a complete firm within itself, able to repair anything the Army uses.

Ordnance can lift a 30-ton tank as easily as it can a bicycle. It can repair a blown-up jeep or the intricate breech of a mammoth gun.

Some of its highly specialized repair companies are made up largely of men who were craftsmen in the same line in civil life. In these companies you will find the average age is much above the Army average. You will find craftsmen in their late 40s, you’ll find men with their own established businesses who were making $30,000 to $40,000 a year back home and who are now wearing sergeant’s stripes. You’ll find great soberness and sincerity, plus the normal satisfaction that comes from making things whole again instead of destroying them.

You will find an IQ far above the average for the Army. It has to be that way or the work would not get done.

You’ll find mechanical work being done under a tree that would be housed in a $50,000 shop back in America. You’ll find men working 16 hours a day, then sleeping on the ground, who because of their age, don’t even have to be here at all.

Ordnance is one of the undramatic branches of the Army. They are the mechanics and the craftsmen, the fixers and the suppliers. But their job is vital. Ordinarily they are not in a great deal of danger. there are times on newly won and congested beachheads when their casualty rate is high, but once the war settles down and there is room for movement and dispersal it is not necessary or desirable for them to do their basic work within gun range.

Ordnance casualties light

Our Ordnance branch in Normandy has had casualties. It has two small branches which will continue to have casualties – its bomb-disposal squads and its retriever companies that go up to pull out crippled tanks under fire.

But outside of those two sections, if your son or husband is in Ordnance in France you can feel fairly easy about his returning to you. I don’t say that to belittle Ordnance in any way but to ease your worries if you have someone in this branch of the service overseas.

Ordnance is set up in a vast structure of organization the same as any other Army command. The farther back you go, the bigger become the outfits and the more elaborately equipped and more capable of doing heavy, long-term work.

Every infantry or armored division has an Ordnance Company with it all the time. This company does quick repair jobs. What it hasn’t time or facilities for doing it hands on back to the next echelon in the rear.

The division Ordnance companies hit the beach on D-Day. The next echelon back began coming on D+4. The great heavy outfits arrived somewhat later.

Today wreckage of seven weeks of war is all in hand. And in one great depot after another it is being worked out – repair or rebuilt or sent back for salvage until everything possible is made available again to our men who do the fighting. In later columns, I’ll take you along to some of these repair companies that do the vital work.