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.