Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 26, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Let’s go to what the Ordnance branch calls one of its “mobile maintenance companies.”

This type company repairs jeeps, light trucks, small arms and light artillery. It does not take tanks, heavy trucks or big guns.

The company is bivouacked around the hedgerows of a large, grassy L-shaped pasture. There are no trees in the pasture. There is nothing in the center except some grazing horses. No man or vehicle walks or drives across the pasture. Always they stick to the tree-high hedgerows.

It is hard to conceive that here in the thin, invisible line around the edges of this empty pasture there is a great machine shop with nearly 200 men working with wrenches and welding torches, that six teams of auto mechanics are busy, that the buzz of urgent labor goes on through all the daylight hours.

Actually, there is little need for such perfect camouflages for this company is perhaps 10 miles behind the lines, and German planes never appear in the daytime. But it’s a good policy to keep in practice on camouflage.

This is a proud company. It was the first one to land in France – first, that is, behind the companies actually attached to divisions. It landed on D+2 and lost three men killed and seven wounded when a shell hit their ship as they were unloading.

Proud record in two years

For five days it was the only Ordnance company of its type ashore. Its small complement whose job in theory is to back up only one division in medium repair work carried all repair work for four divisions until help arrived.

The company had a proud record in the last war, being in nine major engagements. And it has a sentimental little coincidence in its history, too. In 1917 and in 1943, it left America for France on the same date, Dec. 12.

In one corner of the pasture is the command post tent where two sergeants and two officers work at folding tables and keep the records so necessary in ordnance.

A first lieutenant is in command of the company, assisted by five other lieutenants. Their standby is Warrant Officer Ernest Pike of Savoy, Texas, who has been in the Army 15 years, 13 of them with this very company. What he doesn’t know about practical ordnance you could put in a dead German’s eye.

In another corner of the pasture is a mess truck with its field kitchens under some trees. Here the men of the company line up for meals with mess kits, officers as well as men, and eat sitting on the grass.

The officers lounge on the grass in a little group apart and when they finish eating, they light cigarettes and play a while with some cute little French puppies they found in German strongpoints, or traded soap and cigarettes for. The officers know the men intimately and if they are in a hurry and have left their mess kits behind, they just borrow one from some soldier who has finished eating.

Unit is highly mobile

A company of this kind is highly mobile. It can pack up and be underway in probably less than an hour.

Yet ordnance figures as a basic policy that its companies must not move oftener than every six days if they are to work successfully. They figure one day for moving, one for settling down and four days of fulltime work, then move forward again.

If at any time the fighting army ahead of them gets rolling faster than this rate, the Ordnance companies begin leapfrogging each other, one working while another of the same type moves around it and sets up.

Once set up the men sleep on the ground in pup tents along the hedge with foxholes dug deep and handy. But usually, their greatest enemy is the hordes of mosquitoes that infest the hedgerows at night.

The more skilled men work at their benches and instruments inside the shop trucks. The bulk of the work outside is done under dark green canvas canopies stretched outward from the hedgerows and held taut on upright poles, their walls formed of camouflage nets.

Nothing but a vague blur is visible from a couple of hundred yards away. you have to make a long tour clear around the big pasture, nosing in under the hedge and camouflage nets to realize anything is going on at all.

In the far distance, you can hear a faint rumble of big guns, and overhead all day our own planes roar comfortingly.

But outside those fringes of war, it is as peaceful in this Normandy field as it would be in a pasture in Ohio. Why even the three liberated horses graze contentedly on the ankle-high grass, quite indifferent to the fact that this peaceful field is a part of a great war machine that will destroy their recent masters.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 27, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
At the edge of a pasture, sitting cross-legged on the grass or on low boxes as though they were at a picnic, are 13 men in greasy soldiers’ coveralls.

Near them on one side is a shop truck with a canvas canopy stretched out from it, making a sort of patio alongside the truck. And under this canopy and all over the ground are rifles – rusty and muddy and broken rifles.

This is the small arms section of our medium ordnance company. To this company comes daily in trucks the picked up, rusting rifles of men killed or wounded, and rifles broken in ordinary service. There are dozens of such companies.

This company turns back around a hundred rifles a day to its division, all shiny and oily and ready to shoot again.

They work on the simple salvage system of taking good parts off one gun and placing them on another. To do this, they work like a small assembly plant.

The first few hours of the morning are given to taking broken rifles apart. They don’t try to keep the parts of each gun together. All parts are alike and transferable, hence they throe each type into a big steel pan full of similar parts. At the end of the job, they have a dozen or so pans, each filled with the same kind of part.

Scrub parts in gasoline

Then the whole gang shifts over and scrubs the parts. They scrub in gasoline, using sandpaper for guns in bad condition after lying out in the rain and mud.

When everything is clean, they take the good parts and start putting them back together and making guns out of them again.

When all the pans are empty, they have a stack of rifles – good rifles, all ready to be taken back to the front.

Of the parts left over some are thrown away, quite beyond repair. But others are repairable and go into the section’s shop truck for working on with lathes and welding torches. Thus, the division gets 100 reclaimed rifles a day, in addition to the brand-new ones issued to it.

And believe me, during the first few days of our invasion, men at the front needed these rifles with desperation. Repairmen tell you how our paratroopers and infantrymen would straggle back, dirty and hazy-eyed with fatigue, and plead like a child for a new rifle immediately so they could get back to the front and “get at them so-and-sos.”

Sergeant invents gadget

I sat around on the grass and talked to these rifle repairmen most of one afternoon. They weren’t working so frenziedly then for the urgency was not so dire. But they kept steadily at it as we talked.

The head of the section is Sgt. Edward Welch of Watts, Oklahoma, who used to work in the oil fields. Just since the invasion he’s invented a gadget that cleans rust out of a rifle barrel in a few seconds whereas it used to take a man about 20 minutes.

Sgt. Welch did it merely by rigging up a swivel shaft on the end of an electric drill and attaching a cylindrical wire brush to the end. So now you just stick the brush in the gun barrel and press the button on the drill. It whirls and, in a few seconds, all rust is ground out. The idea has been turned over to other ordnance companies.

The soldiers do a lot of kidding as they sit around taking rusted guns apart. Like soldiers everywhere, they razz each other constantly about their home states. A couple were from Arkansas, and of course they took a lot of hillbilly razzing about not wearing shoes till they got in the Army and so on.

One of them was Cpl. Herschel Grimsley of Springdale, Arkansas. He jokingly asked if I’d put his name in the paper. So, I took a chance and joked back. “Sure,” I said, “except I didn’t know anybody in Arkansas could read.”

Everybody laughed loudly at this scintillating wit, most of all Cpl. Grimsley who can stand anything.

Later Grimsley was telling me how paratroopers used to come in and just beg for another rifle. And he expressed the sincere feeling of the men throughout ordnance, the balance weighing in favor of their own fairly safe job, when he said:

Them old boys at the front have sure got my sympathy. Least we can do is work our fingers off to give them the stuff.

Rifles are touching sight

The original stack of muddy, rusted rifles is a touching pile. As gun after gun comes off the stack, you look to see what is the matter with it–

Rifle butt split by fragments; barrel dented by bullet; trigger knocked off; whole barrel splattered with shrapnel marks; guns gray from the slime of weeks in swamp mud; faint dark splotches of blood still showing.

You wonder what became of each owner; you pretty well know.

Infantrymen, like soldiers everywhere, like to put names on their equipment. Just as a driver paints a name on his truck so does a doughboy carve his name or initials on his rifle butt.

The boys said the most heartbreaking rifle they’d found was one of a soldier who had carved a hole about silver dollar size and put his wife’s or girl’s picture in it, and sealed it over with a crystal of Plexiglas.

They don’t, of course, know who he was or what happened to him. They only know the rifle was repaired and somebody else is carrying it now, picture and all.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Then I moved over to an ordnance evacuation company.

These men handle the gigantic trucks, the long low trailers and the heavy wreckers that go out to haul back crippled tanks and wrecked anti-tank guns from the battlefield.

The ordnance branch’s policy on these wrecking companies is that if they don’t have a casualty now and then, or collect a few shrapnel marks on their vehicles, then they’re not doing their job efficiently.

The job of an ordnance evacuation company is often frightening, although this company’s casualties have been amazingly low. In fact, they’ve had only four and it’s still a mystery what happened to them.

The four left one day in a jeep, just on a normal trip. They didn’t come back. No trace could be found. Three weeks later, two of them came in – just discharged from a hospital. On the same day a letter came from the third – from a hospital in England. Nothing yet has been heard from the fourth.

Can’t remember what happened

And the strange part is that neither the two who returned nor the one who write from England can remember a thing about it. They were just riding along in their jeep and the next thing they woke up in a hospital. All three were wounded, but how they didn’t know. Friends suppose it was a shell hit.

At any rate, a sergeant in charge of one section of the mammoth movers, known as M19s, took me around to see some of his crewmen. They all go by the name of “the Diesel Boys.”

Their vehicle is simply a gigantic truck with a long, skeletonized trailer behind.

Like all our Army over here they were strung out around the hedgerows of the field under camouflage nets, with the middle grassy fields completely empty.

My friend was Sgt. Milton Radcliff of Newark, Ohio. He used to be a furnace operator for the Owen Corning Fiberglass Company there. He and all the other former employees still get a letter every two weeks from the company, assuring them their jobs will still be there when they return. And Radcliff, for one, is going to take his when he gets back.

Sgt. Vann Jones of Birmingham, Alabama, crawled out of his tent and sat Indian fashion on the ground with us. On the other side of our pasture lay the silver remains of a transport plane that had come to a mangled despair on the morning of D-Day.

A funny country, France

It was a peaceful and sunny evening, quite in contrast to most of our days, and we sat on the grass and watched the sun go down in the east, which we all agreed was a hell of a place for the sun to be going down. Either we were turned around or France is a funny country.

The other boys told me later that Sgt. Jones used to be the company cook, but he wanted to see more action so he transferred to the big wreckers and is now in command of one.

There are long lulls when the retriever boys don’t have anything to do besides work on their vehicles. They hate these periods and get restless. Some of them spend their time fixing up their tents homelike, even though they may have to move the next day.

One driver even had a feather bed he had picked up from a French family. The average soldier can’t carry a feather bed around with him, but the driver of an M19 could carry 10,000 feather beds and never know the difference.

Proud of their company

The boys are all pretty proud of their company. They said they did such good work in the early days of the invasion that they were about to be put up for a presidential citation. But one day they got in a bomb crater and started shooting captured German guns at the opposite bank just for fun, which is against the rules, so the proposal was torn up. They just laugh about it – which is about all a fellow can do.

Cpl. Grover Anderson of Anniston, Alabama, is one of the drivers. He swears by his colossal machine but cusses it, too. You see the French roads are narrow for heavy two-way military traffic and an M19 is big and awkward and slow.

Anderson says:

You get so damn mad at it because convoys piled up behind you and can’t get around and you know everybody’s hating you and that makes you madder. They’re aggravating, but if you let me leave the trailer off, I can pull anything out of anywhere with it.

Cpl. Anderson has grown a red goatee which he is not going to shave off till the war is won. He used to be a taxi driver; that’s another reason he finds an M19 so “aggravating.”

“Because it hasn’t got a meter on it?” I asked.

“Or maybe because you don’t have any female passengers,” another driver said.

To which Brother Anderson had a wholly satisfactory G.I. reply. He said, … [REMAINDER OF COLUMN VOLUNTARILY CENSORED]

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy – (by wireless)
It was just beginning dusk when the order came. A soldier came running up the pasture and said there was a call for our ordnance evacuation company to pull out some crippled tanks.

We had been sitting on the grass and we jumped up and ran down the slope. Waiting at the gate stood an M19 truck and behind it a big wrecker with a crane.

The day had been warm but dusk was bringing a chill, as always. One of the soldiers loaned me his mackinaw.

Soldiers stood atop their big machine with a stance of impatience, like firemen waiting to start. We pulled out through the hedgerow gate onto the main macadam highway. It was about 10 miles to the frontlines.

“We should make it before full darkness,” one of the officers said.

We went through shattered Carentan and on beyond for miles. Then we turned off at an angle in the road. “This is Purple Heart Corner,” the officer said.

With an increasing tempo, the big guns crashed around us. Hedges began to make weird shadows. You peered closely at sentries in every open hedge gate just out of nervous alertness.

No dignity in death

The smell of death washed past us in waves as we drove on. There is nothing worse in war than the foul odor of death. There is no last vestige of dignity in it.

We turned up a gravel lane, and drove slowly. The dusk was deepening. A gray stone farmhouse sat dimly off the road. A little yard and driveway semicircled in front of it. Against the front of the house stood five German soldiers, facing inward, their hands above their heads. An American doughboy stood in the driveway with a Tommy gun pointed at them. We drove on for about 50 yards and stopped. The drivers shut off their Diesel motors.

One officer went into an orchard to try to find where the tanks were. In wartime, nobody ever knows where anything is. The rest of us waited along the road beside an old stone barn. The dusk was deeper now.

Out of the orchards around us roared and thundered our own artillery. An officer hit a cigarette. A sergeant with a rifle slung on his shoulder walked up and said, “You better put that out, sir. There’s snipers all around and they’ll shoot at a cigarette.”

The officer crushed the cigarette in his fingers, not waiting to drop it on the ground, and said, “Thanks.”

“It’s for your own good,” the sergeant said, apologetically.

Somehow as darkness comes down in a land of great danger you want things hushed. People begin to talk in low voices and feet on jeep throttles tread less heavily.

An early German plane droned overhead, passed, turned, dived – and his white tracers came slanting down out of the sky. We crouched behind a stone wall. He was half a mile away, but the night is big and bullets can go anywhere and you are nervous.

On ahead there were single rifle shots and the give and take of machine gun rattles – one fast and one slow, one German and one American. You wondered after each blast if somebody who was whole a moment ago, some utter stranger, was now lying in sudden new anguish up there ahead in the illimitable darkness.

That old familiar wail

A shell whined that old familiar wail and hit in the orchard ahead with a crash. I moved quickly around behind the barn.

“You don’t like that?” inquired a soldier out of the dusk.

I said, “No, do you?”

And he replied as honestly, “I sure as hell don’t.”

A sergeant came up the road and said:

You can stay here if you want to, but they shell this barn every hour on the hour. They’re zeroed in on it.

We looked at our watches. It was five minutes till midnight. Some of our soldiers stood boldly out in the middle of the road talking. But you could sense some of us, who were less composed, being close to the stone wall, even close to the motherhood of the big silent trucks. Then an officer came out of the orchard. He had the directions. We all gathered around and listened. We had to back up, cross two pastures, turn down another lane and go forward from there.

We were to drag back two German tanks for fear the Germans might retrieve them during the night. We backed ponderously up the road, our powerful exhaust blowing up dust as we moved.

As we passed the gray stone farmhouse we could see five silhouettes, very faintly through the now almost complete night – five Germans still facing the gray farmhouse.

We came to a lane, and pulled forward into the orchard very slowly for you could barely see now. Even in the lightning flashes of the big guns, you could barely see.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (July 31, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
We drove slowly across the two pastures in the big M19 retriever truck with which our ordnance evacuation company was to pick up two crippled German tanks. The wrecker truck followed us. It was just after midnight.

We came to a lane at the far side of the pasture. Nobody was there to direct us. The officers had gone on ahead. We asked a sentry if he knew where the German tanks were, he had never heard of them. We shut off the motors and waited.

I think everybody was a little on edge. We certainly had American troops ahead of us, but we didn’t know how far. When things are tense like that, you get impatient of monkeying around. You want to get the job done and get the hell out of there.

We waited about 10 minutes, and finally a sergeant came back and said for us to drive on up the road about half a mile. He climbed on to direct us. Finally, we came to a barnyard and then very slowly backed on up the road toward the enemy lines. I stood on the steel platform behind the driver so I could see.

It was very dark and you could only make out vague shapes. Finally, one huge black shape took form at one side of the road. It was the first of the German tanks.

Anxious to get finished

Being tense and anxious to get finished, I hope our trick would take the first tank. But no. We passed by, of course, and went backing on up the road.

When you’re nervous you feel even 12 inches closer to the front is too much and the noise of your motor sounds like all the clanging of Hell, directing the Germans to you.

I knew it was foolish to be nervous. I knew there was plenty of protection ahead. And yet there are times when you don’t feel good to start with, you’re uncomposed and the framework of your character is off balance, and you are weak inside. That’s the way I was that night. Fortunately, I’m not always that way.

Finally, the dark shape of the second tank loomed up. Our officers and some men were standing in the road beside it.

A laymen would think all you have to do is to hook a chain to the tank and pull it out of the ditch. But we were there half an hour. It seemed like all night to me.

First it had to be gone over for booby traps. I couldn’t help but admire our mechanics. They knew these foreign tanks as well as our own.

One of them climbed down the hatch into the driver’s seat and there in the dark, completely by feel, investigated the intricate gadgets of the cockpit and found just what shape it was in and told us the trouble. It seemed that two levers at the driver’s seat had been left in gear and they were so bent there was not room to shift them out of gear. After some delay a crowbar finally did the trick.

Meanwhile, we stood in a group around the tank, about a dozen of us, just talking. Shells still roamed the dark sky but they weren’t coming as near as before.

Loud noises bother Ernie

There would be lulls of many minutes when there was hardly a sound but our own voices. Most everybody talked in low tones, yet in any group there’s always somebody who can’t bear to speak in anything less than foghorn proportions.

And now and then when they’d have to hammer on the tank it sounded as though a boiler factory had collapsed. I tried to counteract this by not talking at all. Finally, we started.

Slowly we ground back down the road in low gear with our great, black, massive load rolling behind us. We’d planned to pull it a long way back. Actually, we pulled it only about half a mile, then decided to put it in a field for the night.

When we pulled into a likely pasture the sentry at the hedgerow gate wanted to know what we were doing and we told him, “Leaving a German tank for the night.”

And the sentry, in a horrified voice, said, “Good God, don’t leave it here. They might come after it.” But leave it there we did, and damn glad to get rid of it, I assure you.

We drove home in the blackout, watching the tall hedgerows against the lighter sky for guidance. For miles the roads were as empty and silent as the farthest corner of a desert. The crash of the guns grew welcomely dimmer and dimmer until finally everything was nearly silent and it seemed there could be only peace in Normandy.

At last, we came to our own hedgerow gate. As we drove in the sentry said, “Coffee’s waiting at the mess tent.” They feed 24 hours a day in these outfits that work like firemen.

But my sleeping bag lay unrolled and waiting on the ground in a nearby tent. It was 3:00 a.m. With an almost childish gratitude at being there at all, I went right to bed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 1, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
I know of nothing in civilian life at home by which you can even remotely compare the contribution to his country made by the infantry soldier with his life of bestiality, suffering and death.

But I’ve just been with an outfit whose war work is similar enough to yours that I believe you can see the difference between life overseas and in America.

This is the heavy ordnance company which repairs shot-up tanks, wrecked artillery, and heavy trucks.

These men are not in much danger. They work at shop benches with tools. Compared with the infantry, their life is velvet and they know it and appreciate it. But compared with them your life is velvet. That’s what I’d like for you to appreciate.

These men are mostly skilled craftsmen. Many are about military age. Back home, they made big money. Their jobs here are fundamentally the same as those of you at home who work in war plants. It’s only the environment that is different.

These men don’t work seven, eight, or nine hours a day. They work from 7:00 in the morning until darkness comes at night. They work from 12 to 16 hours a day.

Haven’t sat in chair in weeks

You have beds and bathrooms. These men sleep on the ground, and dig a trench for their toilets.

You have meals at the table. These men eat from mess kits, sitting on the grass. You have pajamas, and places to go on Sunday. These men sleep in their underwear, and they don’t even know when Sunday comes. They have not sat in a chair for weeks. They live always outdoors, rain and shine.

In the World War, their life is not bad. By peacetime standards, it is outrageous. But they don’t complain – because they are close enough to the front to see and appreciate the desperate need of the men they are trying to help. They work with an eagerness and an intensity that is thrilling to see.

This company works under a half-acre grove of trees and along the hedgerows of a couple of adjoining pastures. Their shops are in the trucks, or out in the open under camouflage nets.

Most of their work seems unspectacular to describe. It just consists of welding steel plates in the sides of tanks, of changing the front end of a truck blown up by a mine, or repairing the barrel of a big gun hit by a bazooka, of rewinding the coils of a radio, of welding new teeth in a gear.

It’s the sincere way they go at it, and their appreciation of its need that impressed me.

Cpl. Richard Kelso is in this company. His home is in Chicago.

He is an Irishman from the old sod. He apprenticed in Belfast as a machinist nearly 30 years ago. He went to America when he was 25, and now he is 45.

Improvisation wins wars

He still has folks in Ireland, but he didn’t have a chance to get over there when he was stationed in England. He is thin and a little stooped, and the others call him Pop. He is quiet and intent and very courteous. He never did get married.

Kelso operates the milling machine in a shop truck. His truck is covered deep with extra strips of steel, for these boys pick up and hoard steel as some people might hoard money.

When I stopped to chat, Kelso had his machine grinding away on the rough tooth of the gearwheel of a tank.

The part that did the cutting was one he had improvised himself. In this business of war, so much is unforeseen, so much is missing at the right moment that were it not for improvisation, wars would be lost.

Take these gearwheels, for instance. Suppose a tank strips three teeth off a fear. The entire tank is helpless and out of action. They have no replacement wheels in stock. They have to repair the broken one.

So, they take it to their outdoor foundry, make a form, heat up some steel till it is molten, pour it into the form and mold a rough gear tooth which is then welded onto the stub of the broken-off tooth.

Now this rough tooth has to be ground down to the fine dimensions of the other teeth and that is an exacting job. At first, they didn’t have the tools to do it with.

But that didn’t stop them. They hacked those teeth down with cold chisels and hand files. They put back into action 20 tanks by this primitive method. Then Kelso and Warrant Officer Henry Moser of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, created a part for their milling machine that would do the job faster and better.

That one little improvisation may have saved 50 Americans’ lives, may have cost the Germans a hundred men, may even have turned the tide of a battle.

10 miles away, they’re real

And it’s being done by a man 45 years old, wearing corporal stripes who doesn’t have to be over here at all, and who could be making big money back home.

He too sleeps on the ground and works 16 hours a day, and is happy to do it – for boys who are dying are not 3,000 miles away and abstract; they are 10 miles away and very, very real.

He sees them when they come back, pleading like children for another tank, another gun. He knows how terribly they need the things that are within his power to give.