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.