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.