Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 7, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
The great attack, when we broke out of the Normandy beachhead, began in the bright light of midday, not at the zero hour of a bleak and mysterious dawn as attacks are supposed to start in books.

The attack had been delayed from day to day because of poor flying weather, and on the final day we hadn’t known for sure till after breakfast whether it was on or off again.

When the word came that it was on, the various battalion staffs of our regiment were called in from their command posts for a final review of the battle plan.

Each one was given a mimeographed sketch of the frontline area, showing exactly where and when each type bomber was to hammer the German lines ahead of them. Another mimeographed page was filled with specific orders for the grand attack to follow.

Officers stood or squatted in a circle in a little apple orchard behind a ramshackle stone farmhouse of a poor French family who had left before us. The stonewall in the front yard had been knocked down by shelling, and through the orchards there were shell craters and tree limbs knocked off and trunks sliced by bullets. Some enlisted men sleeping the night before in the attic of the house get the shock of their lives when the thin floor collapsed and they fell down into the cowshed below.

Chickens and tame rabbits still scampered around the farmyard. Dead cows lay all around in the fields.

The regimental colonel stood in the center of the officers and went over the orders in detail. Battalion commanders took down notes in little books.

The colonel said, “Ernie Pyle is with the regiment for this attack and will be with one of the battalions, so you’ll be seeing him.” The officers looked at me and smiled and I felt embarrassed.

Then Maj. Gen. Raymond O. Barton, 4th Division commander, arrived. The colonel called, “Attention-” and everybody stood rigid until the general gave them, “Carry on.”

An enlisted man ran to the mess truck and got a folding canvas stool for the general to sit on. He sat listening intently while the colonel wound up his instructions.

Then the general stepped into the center of the circle. He stood at a slouch on one foot with the other leg far up like a brace. He looked all around him as he talked. He didn’t talk long. He said something like this:

This is one of the finest regiments in the American Army. It was the last regiment out of France in the last war. It was the first regiment into France in this war. It has spearheaded every one of the division’s attacks in Normandy. It will spearhead this one. For many years this was my regiment and I feel very close to you, and very proud.

The general’s lined face was a study in emotion. Sincerity and deep sentiment were in every contour and they shone from his eyes. Gen. Barton is a man of deep affections. The tragedy of war, both personal and impersonal, hurts him. At the end, his voice almost broke, and I for one had a lump in my throat. He ended: “That’s all. God bless you and good luck.”

Then we broke up and I went with one of the battalion commanders. Word was passed down by field phone, radio and liaison men to the very smallest unit of troops that the attack was on.

There was still an hour before the bombers, and three houses before the infantry were to move. There was nothing for the infantry to do but dig a little deeper and wait. A cessation of motion seemed to come over the countryside and all its brown-clad inhabitants sense of last-minute sitting in silence before the holocaust.

The first planes of the mass onslaught came over a little before 10:00 a.m. They were the fighters and dive bombers. The main road running crosswise in front of us was their bomb line. They were to bomb only on the far side of that road.

Our kickoff infantry had been pulled back a few hundred yards this side of the road. Everyone in the area had been given the strictest orders to be in foxholes, for high-level bombers can, and do quite excusably, make mistakes.

We were still in country so level and with hedgerows so tall there simply was no high spot – either hill or building – from where you could get a grandstand view of the bombing as we used to in Sicily and Italy. So, one place was as good as another unless you went right up and sat on the bomb line.

Having been caught too close to these things before, I compromised and picked a farmyard about 800 yards back of the kickoff line.

And before the next two hours had passed, I would have given every penny, every desire, every hope I’ve ever had to have been just another 800 yards further back.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 8, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
Our frontlines were marked by long strips of colored cloth laid on the ground, and with colored smoke to guide our airmen during the mass bombing that preceded our breakout from the German ring that held us to the Normandy beachhead.

Dive bombers hit it just right. We stood in the barnyard of a French farm and watched them barrel nearly straight down out of the sky. They were bombing about a half a mile ahead of where we stood.

They came in groups, diving from every direction, perfectly timed, one right after another. Everywhere you looked separate groups of planes were on the way down, or on the way back up, or slanting over for a dive, or circling, circling, circling over our heads, waiting for their turn.

The air was full of sharp and distinct sounds of cracking bombs and the heavy rips of the planes’ machine guns and the splitting screams of diving wings. It was all fast and furious, but yet distinct as in a musical show in which you could distinguish throaty tunes and words.

And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears, a sound deep and all-encompassing with not noes in it – just a gigantic faraway surge of doom-like sound. It was the heavies. They came from directly behind us. At first, they were the merest dots in the sky. You could see clots of them against the far heavens, too tiny to count individually. They came on with a terrible slowness.

They came in flights of 12, three flights to a group and in groups stretched out across the sky. They came in “families” of about 70 planes each.

Maybe these gigantic waves were two miles apart, maybe they were 10 miles, I don’t know. But I do know they came in a constant procession and I thought it would never end. What the Germans must have thought is beyond comprehension.

Their march across the sky was slow and studied. I’ve never known a storm, or a machine, or any resolve of man that had about it the aura of such a ghastly relentlessness. You had the feeling that even had God appeared beseechingly before them in the sky with palms outward to persuade them back they would not have had within them the power to turn from their irresistible course.

I stood with a little group of men ranging from colonels to privates, back of the stone farmhouse. Slit trenches were all around the edges of the farmyard and a dugout with a tin roof was nearby. But we were so fascinated by the spectacle overhead that it never occurred to us that we might need the foxholes

The first huge flight passed directly over our farmyard and others followed. We spread our feel and leaned far back trying to look straight up, until our steel helmets fell off. We’d cup our fingers around our eyes like field glasses for a clearer view.

And then the bombs came. They began ahead of us as the crackle of popcorn and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise that seemed surely to destroy all the world ahead of us, From then on for an hour and a half that had in it the agonies of centuries, the bombs came down, A wall of smoke and dust erected by them grew high in the sky. It filtered along the ground back through our own orchards. It sifted around us and into our noses. The bright day grew slowly dark from it.

By now everything was an indescribable cauldron of sounds. Individual noises did not exist. The thundering of the motors in the sky and the roar of bombs ahead filled all the space for noise on earth. Our own heavy artillery was crashing all around us, yet we could hardly hear it.

The Germans began to shoot heavy, high ack-ack. Great black puffs of it by the score speckled the sky until it was hard to distinguish smoke puffs from planes. And then someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched straight for a mile behind one of them.

And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz.

Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward. steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth – a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation – and it disappeared behind the treetops.

But before it was done there were more cries of, “There’s another one smoking and there’s a third one now.”

Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.

And all that time the great flat ceiling of the sky was roofed by all the others that didn’t go down, plowing their way forward as if there were no turmoil in the world.

Nothing deviated them by the slightest. They stalked on, slowly and with a dreadful pall of sound, as though they were seeing only something at a great distance and nothing existed in between. God, how you admired those men up there and sickened for the ones who fell.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 9, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
It is possible to become so enthralled by some of the spectacles of war that you are momentarily captivated away from your own danger.

That’s what happened to our little group of soldiers as we stood in a French farmyard, watching the mighty bombing of the German lines just before our breakthrough.

But that benign state didn’t last long. As we watched, there crept into our consciousness a realization that windrows of exploding bombs were easing back toward us flight by flight, instead of gradually forward, as the plan called for.

Then we were horrified by the suspicion that those machines, high in the sky and completely detached from us, were aiming their bombs at the smoke line on the ground – and a gentle breeze was drifting the smoke line back over us!

An indescribable kind of panic comes over you at such times. We stood tensed in muscle and frozen in intellect, watching each flight approach and pass over us, feeling trapped and completely helpless.

And then all of an instant the universe became filled with a gigantic rattling as of huge, dry seeds in a mammoth dry gourd. I doubt that any of us had ever heard that sound before, but instinct told us what it was. It was bombs by the hundred, hurtling down through the air above us.

Many times I’ve heard bombs whistle or swish or rustle, but never before had I heard bombs rattle. I still don’t know the explanation of it. But it is an awful sound.

We dived. Some got in a dugout. Others made foxholes and ditches and some got behind a garden wall – although which side would be “behind” was anybody’s guess.

Too late for the dugout

I was too late for the dugout. The nearest place was a wagon shed which formed one end of the stone house. The rattle was right down upon us. I remember hitting the ground flat, all spread out like the cartoons of people flattened by steamrollers, and then of squirming like an eel to get under one of the heavy wagons in the shed.

An officer whom I didn’t know was wriggling beside me. We stopped at the same time, simultaneously feeling it w a s hopeless to move farther. The bombs were already crashing around us.

We lay with our heads slightly up – like two snakes staring at each other. I know it was in both our minds and in our eyes, asking each other what to do. Neither of us knew. We said nothing. We just lay sprawled, gaping at each other in a futile appeal, our faces about a foot apart, until it was over.

There is no description of the sound and fury of those bombs except to say it was chaos, and a waiting for darkness. The feeling of the blast was sensational. The air struck you in hundreds of continuing flutters. Your ears drummed and rang. You could feel quick little waves of concussions on your chest and in your eyes.

At last, the sound died down and we looked at each other in disbelief. Gradually we left the foxholes and sprawling places, and came out to see what the sky had in store for us. As far as we could see other waves were approach from behind.

When a wave would pass a little to the side of us we were garrulously grateful, for most of them flew directly overhead. Time and again the rattle came down over us. Bombs struck in the orchard to our left. They struck in orchards ahead of us. They struck as far as half a mile behind us. Everything about us was shaken, but our group came through unhurt.

Inhuman tenseness

I can’t record what any of us actually felt or thought during those horrible climaxes. I believe a person’s feelings at such times are kaleidoscopic and uncatalogable. You just wait, that’s all, You do remember an inhuman tenseness of muscle and nerves.

An hour or so later, I began to get sore all over, and by midafternoon my back and shoulders ached as though I’d been beaten with a club. It was simply the result of muscles tensing themselves too tight for too long against anticipated shock. And I remember worrying about war correspondent Ken Crawford, a friend from back in the old Washington days, who I knew was several hundred yards ahead of me.

As far as I knew, he and I were the only two correspondents with the 4th Division. I didn’t know who might be with the divisions on either side – which also were being hit, as we could see.

Three days later, back at camp, I learned that AP photographer Bede Irvin had been killed in the bombing and that Ken was safe.

We came out of our ignominious sprawling and stood up again to watch. We could sense that by now the error had been caught and checked. The bombs again were falling where they were intended, a mile or so ahead.

Even at a mile away, a thousand bombs hitting within a few seconds can shake the earth and shatter the air where you are standing. There was still a dread in our hearts, but it gradually eased as the tumult and destruction moved slowly forward.

[adamsano]

Ernie’s description is almost unbelievable and the horror of friendly fire is something we find hard to grasp given the detailed plans that were supposed to protect US soldiers not kill them.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 10, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
With our own personal danger past our historic air bombardment of the German lines holding us in the Normandy beachhead again became a captivating spectacle to watch.

By now, it was definite that the great waves of four-motored planes were dropping their deadly loads exactly in the right place.

And by now two Mustang fighters flying like a pair of doves patrolled back and forth, back and forth, just in front of each oncoming wave of bombers, as if to shout to them by their mere presence that here was not the place to drop – wait a few seconds, wait a few more seconds.

And then we could see a flare come out of the belly of one plane in each flight, just after they had passed over our heads.

The flare shot forward, leaving smoke behind it in a vivid line, and then began a graceful, downward curve that was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

It was like an invisible crayon drawing a rapid line across the canvas of the sky, saying in a gesture for all to see: “Here! Here is where to drop. Follow me.”

And each succeeding flight of oncoming bombers obeyed, and in turn dropped its own hurtling marker across the illimitable heaven to guide those behind.

Long before now the German ack-ack guns had gone out of existence. We had counted three of our big planes down in spectacular flames, and I believe that was all. The German ack-ack gunners either took to their holes or were annihilated.

How many waves of heavy bombers we put over I have no idea. I had counted well beyond 400 planes when my personal distraction obliterated any capacity or desire to count.

I only know that 400 was just the beginning. There were supposed to be 1,800 planes that day, and I believe it was announced later that there were more than 3,000.

It seemed incredible to me that any German could come out of that bombardment with his sanity. When it was over, even I was grateful in a chastened way I had never experienced before, for just being alive.

I thought an attack by our troops was impossible now, for it was an unnerving thing to be bombed by your own planes.

During the bad part, a colonel I had known a long time was walking up and down behind the farmhouse, snapping his fingers and saying over and over to himself, “–dammit, –dammit!”

As he passed me once he stopped and started and said, “–dammit!”

And I said, “there can’t be any attack now, can there?” And he said “No,” and began walking again, snapping his fingers and tossing his arm as though he was throwing rocks at the ground.

The leading company of our battalion was to spearhead the attack 40 minutes after our heavy bombing ceased. The company had been hit directly by our bombs. Their casualties, including casualties in shock, were heavy. Men went to pieces and had to be sent back. The company was shattered and shaken.

And yet Company B attacked – and on time, to the minute! They attacked, and within an hour they sent word back that they had advanced 800 yards through German territory and were still going. Around our farmyard men with stars on their shoulders almost wept when the word came over the portable radio. The American soldier can be majestic when he needs to be.

There is one more thing I want to say before we follow the ground troops on deeper into France in the great push you’ve been reading about now for days.

I’m sure that back in England that night other men – bomber crews – almost wept, and maybe they did really, in the awful knowledge that they had killed our own American troops. But I want to say this to them. The chaos and the bitterness there in the orchards and between the hedgerows that afternoon have passed. After the bitterness came the sober remembrance that the Air Corps is the strong right arm in front of us. Not only at the beginning, but ceaselessly and everlastingly, every moment of the faintest daylight, the Air Corps is up there banging away ahead of us.

Anybody makes mistakes. The enemy makes them just the same as we do. The smoke and confusion of battle bewilder us all on the ground as well as in the air. And in this case the percentage of error was really very small compared with the colossal storm of bombs that fell upon the enemy. The Air Corps has been wonderful throughout this invasion, and the men on the ground appreciate it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 11, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
I know that all of us correspondents have tried time and again to describe to you what this weird hedgerow fighting in northwestern France has been like.

But I’m going to go over it once more, for we’ve been in it two months and some of us feel that this is the two months that broke the German Army in the west.

This type of fighting is always in small groups, so let’s take as an example one company of men. Let’s say they are working forward on both sides of a country lane, and this company is responsible for clearing the two fields on either side of the road as it advances.

That means you have only about one platoon to a field. And with the company’s understrength from casualties, you might have no more than 25 or 30 men in field.

Over here the fields are usually not more than 50 yards across and a couple of hundred yards long. They may have grain in them, or apple trees, but mostly they are just pastures of green grass, full of beautiful cows.

The fields are surrounded on all sides by Immense hedgerows which consist of an ancient earthen bank, waist high, all matted with roots, and out of which grow weeds, bushes, and trees up to 20 feet high.

The Germans have used these barriers well. They put snipers in the trees. They dig deep trenches behind the hedgerows and cover them with timber, so that it is almost impossible for artillery to get at them.

Sometimes they will prop up machine guns with strings attached, so they can fire over the hedge without getting out of their holes. They even cut out a section of the hedgerow and hide a big gun or a tank in it, covering it, with brush.

Also they tunnel under the hedgerows from the back and make the opening on the forward side just large enough to stick a machine gun through.

But mostly the hedgerow pattern is this: a heavy machine gun hidden at each end of the field and infantrymen hidden all along the hedgerow with rifles and machine pistols.

It’s a slow and cautious business

Now it’s up to us to dig them out of there. It’s a slow and cautious business, and there is nothing very dashing about it. Our men don’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges such as you see in the movies. They did at first, but they learned better.

They go in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They creep a few yards, squat, wait, then creep again.

If you could be right up there between the Germans and the Americans you wouldn’t see very many men at any one time – just a few here and there, always trying to keep hidden. But you would hear an awful lot of noise.

Our men were taught in training not to fire until they saw something to fire at. But that hasn’t worked in this country, because, you see so little. So, the alternative is to keep shooting constantly at the hedgerows. That pins the Germans in their holes while we sneak up on them.

The attacking squads sneak up the side of the hedgerows while the rest of the platoon stay back in their own hedgerow and keep the forward hedge saturated with bullets. They shoot rifle grenades too, and a mortar squad a little farther back keeps lobbing mortar shells over onto the Germans.

The little advance groups get up to the far ends of the hedgerows at the corners of the field. They first try to knock out the machine guns at each corner. They do this with hand grenades, rifle grenades and machine guns.

Fighting is very close

Usually, when the pressure gets on, the German defenders of the hedgerow start pulling back. They’ll take their heavier guns and most of the men back a couple of fields and start digging in for a new line.

They leave about two machine guns and a few riflemen scattered through the hedge, to do a lot of shooting and hold up the Americans as long as they can.

Our men now sneak along the front side of the hedgerow, throwing grenades over onto the other side and spraying the hedges with their guns. The fighting is very close – only a few yards apart – but it is seldom actual hand-to-hand stuff.

Sometimes the remaining Germans come out of their holes with their hands up. Sometimes they try to run for it and are mowed down. Sometimes they won’t come out at all, and a hand grenade thrown into their hole, finishes them off.

And so, we’ve taken another hedgerow and are ready to start on the one beyond.

This hedgerow business is a series of little skirmishes like that clear across the front, thousands and thousands of little skirmishes. No single one of them is very big. But add them all up over the days and weeks and you’ve got a man-sized war, with thousands on both sides being killed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 12, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
What we gave you yesterday in trying to describe hedgerow fighting was the general pattern.

If you were to come over here and pick out some hedge-enclosed field at random, the fighting there probably wouldn’t be following the general pattern at all. For each one is a little separate war, fought under different circumstances.

For instance, you’ll come to a woods instead of an open field. The Germans will be dug in all over the woods, in little groups, and it’s really tough to get them out. Often in cases like that we will just go around the woods and keep going and let later units take care of those surrounded and doomed fellows.

Or we’ll go through the woods and clean it out, and another company, coming through a couple of hours later, will find it full of Germans again. In a war like this one everything is in such confusion I don’t see how either side ever gets anywhere.

Sometimes you don’t know where the enemy is and don’t know where your own troops are. As somebody said the other day, no battalion commander can give you the exact location of his various units five minutes after they’ve jumped off.

We will bypass whole pockets of Germans, and they will be there fighting our following waves when our attacking companies are a couple of miles on beyond. Gradually the front gets all mixed up. There will be Germans behind you and at the side. They’ll be shooting at you from behind and from your flank.

Sometimes a unit will get so far out ahead of those on either side that it has to swing around and fight to its rear. Sometimes we fire on your own troops, thinking we are in German territory. You can’t see anything, and you can’t even tell from the sounds, for each side uses some of the other’s captured weapons.

Foot soldier hates to be near tank

The tanks and the infantry had to work in the closest cooperation in breaking through the German ring, that tried to pin us down in the beachhead area. Neither could have done it alone.

The troops are of two minds about having tanks around them. If you’re a foot soldier, you hate to be near a tank, for it always draws fire. On the other hand, if the going gets tough you pray for a tank to come up and start blasting with its guns.

In our breakthrough each infantry unit had tanks attached to it. It was the tanks and the infantry that broke through that ring and punched a hole for the armored divisions to go through.

The armored divisions practically ran amuck, racing long distances and playing hob, once they got behind the German lines, but it was the infantry and their attached tanks that opened the gate for them.

Tanks shuttled back and forth, from one field to another, throughout our breakthrough battle, receiving their orders by radio. Bulldozers punched holes through the hedgerows for them, and then the tanks would come up and blast out the bad spots of the opposition.

It has been necessary for us to wreck almost every farmhouse and little village in our path. The Germans used them for strongpoints, or put artillery observers in them, and they just had to be blasted out.

Most of the French farmers evacuate ahead of the fighting and filter back after it has passed. It is pitiful to see them come back to their demolished homes and towns. Yet it’s wonderful to see the grand way they take it.

Four hours rest in three days

In a long drive, an infantry company may go for a couple of days without letting up. Ammunition is carried up to it by hand, and occasionally by jeep. The soldiers sometimes eat only one K ration a day. They may run clear out of water. Their strength is gradually whittled down by wounds, exhaustion cases and straggling.

Finally, they will get an order to sit where they are and dig in. Then another company will pass through, or around them, and go on with the fighting. The relieved company may get to rest as much as a day or two. But in a big push such as the one that broke us out of the beachhead, a few hours is about all they can expect.

The company I was with got its orders to rest about 5:00 one afternoon. They dug foxholes along the hedgerows, or commandeered German ones already dug. Regardless of how tired you may be, you always dig in the first thing.

Then they sent some men with cans looking for water. They got more K rations up by jeep, and sat on the ground eating them.

They hoped they would stay there all night, but they weren’t counting on it too much. Shortly after supper a lieutenant came out of a farmhouse and told the sergeants to pass the word to be ready to move in 10 minutes. They bundled on their packs and started just before dark.

Within half an hour, they had run into a new fight that lasted all night: They had had less than four hours’ rest in three solid days of fighting. That’s the way life is in the infantry.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 14, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
The afternoon was tense, and full of caution and dire little might-have-beens.

I was wandering up a dirt lane where the infantrymen were squatting alongside in a ditch, waiting their turn to advance. They always squat like that when they’re close to the front.

Suddenly German shells started banging around us. I jumped into a ditch between a couple of soldiers and squatted. Shells were clipping the hedge tops right over our heads and crashing into the next pasture.

Then suddenly one exploded, not with a crash, but with a ring as though you’d struck a high-toned bell. The debris of burned wadding and dirt came showering down over us. My head rang, and my right ear couldn’t hear anything.

The shell had struck behind us, 20 feet away. We had been saved by the earthen bank of the hedgerow. It was the next day before my ear returned to normal.

A minute later a soldier crouching next in line, a couple of feet away, turned to me and asked, “Are you a war correspondent?”

I said I was, and he said, “I want to shake your hand.” And he reached around the bush and we shook hands.

That’s all either of us said. It didn’t occur to me until later that it was a sort of unusual experience. And I was so addled by the close explosions that I forgot to put down his name.

A blessed five minutes

A few minutes later a friend of mine, Lt. Col. Oma Bates of Gloster, Mississippi, came past and said he was hunting our new battalion command post. It was supposed to be in a farmhouse about a hundred yards from us, so I got up and went with him.

We couldn’t find it at first. We lost about five minutes, walking around in orchards looking for it. That was a blessed five minutes. For when we got within 50 yards of the house it got a direct shell hit which killed one officer and wounded several men.

The Germans now rained shells around our little area. You couldn’t walk 10 feet without hitting the ground. They came past our heads so quickly you didn’t take time to fall forward – I found the quickest way down was to flop back and sideways.

In a little while the seat of my pants was plastered thick with wet red clay, and my hands were scratched from hitting rocks and briars to break quick falls.

Nobody ever fastens the chinstrap on his helmet in the frontlines, for the blasts from nearby bursts have been known to catch helmets and break people’s necks. Consequently, when you squat quickly you descend faster than your helmet and you leave it in mid-air above you. Of course, in a fraction of a second it follows you down and hits you on the head, and settles sideways over your ear and down over your eyes. It makes you feel silly.

Once more shells drove me into a roadside ditch. I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys as far up and down the ditch as you could see.

It was really frightening. Our own shells were whanging overhead and hitting just beyond. The German shells tore through the orchards around us. There was machine-gunning all around, and bullets zipped through the trees above us.

I could tell by their shoulder patches that the soldiers near me were from a division to our right, and I wondered what they were doing there. Then I heard one of them say:

This is a fine foul-up for you! I knew that lieutenant was getting lost. Hell, we’re service troops, and here we are right in the front lines.

Grim as the moment was, I had to laugh to myself at their pitiful plight.

I left a command post in a farmhouse and started to another about 10 minutes away. When I got there, they said the one I had just left had been hit while I was on the way.

A solid armor-piercing shell had gone right through a window and a man I knew had his leg cut off. That evening the other officers took a big steel slug over to the hospital so he would have a souvenir.

Depends on your number

When I got to another battalion command post, later in the day, they were just ready to move. A sergeant had been forward about half a mile in a jeep and picked out a farmhouse. He said it was the cleanest, nicest one he had been in for a long time.

So, we piled into several jeeps and drove up there. It had been only 20 minutes since the sergeant had left. But when we got to the new house, it wasn’t there.

A shell had hit it. in the last 20 minutes and set it afire, and it had burned to the ground. So we drove up the road a little farther and picked out another one. We had been there about half an hour when a shell struck in an orchard 50 yards in front of us.

In a few minutes our litter bearers came past, carrying a captain. He was the surgeon of our adjoining battalion, and he had been looking in the orchard for a likely place to move his first-aid station. A shell hit right beside him.

That’s the way war is on an afternoon that is tense and full of might-have-beens for some of us, and awful realities for others.

It just depends on what your number is. I don’t believe in that number business at all, but in war you sort of let your belief hover around it, for it’s about all you have left.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 15, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
One afternoon I went with our battalion medics to pick up wounded men who had been carried back to some shattered houses just behind our lines, and to gather some others right off the battlefield.

The battalion surgeon was Capt. Lucien Strawn, from Morgantown, West Virginia. He drives his jeep himself and goes right into the lines with his aid men.

We drove forward about a mile in out two jeeps, so loaded with litter bearers they were even riding on the hood. Finally, we had to stop and wait until a bulldozer filled a new shell crater in the middle of the road. We had gone about a hundred yards beyond the crater when we ran into some infantry. They stopped us and said: “Be careful where you’re going. The Germans are only 200 yards up the road.”

Capt. Strawn said he couldn’t get to the wounded men that way, so he turned around to try another way. A side road led off at an angle from a shattered village we had just passed through. He decided to try to get up that road.

But when we got there the road had a house blown across it, and it was blocked. We went forward a little on foot and found two deep bomb craters, also impassable.

So, Capt. Strawn walked back to the bulldozer, and asked the driver if he would go ahead of us and clear the road. The first thing the driver asked was, “How close to the front is it?”

The doctor said, “Well, at least it isn’t any closer than you are right now.” So the dozer driver agreed to clear the road ahead of us.

While we were waiting a soldier came over and showed us two eggs he had just found in the backyard of a jumbled house. There wasn’t an untouched house left standing in the town, and some of the houses were still smoking inside.

Also, while we were waiting, two shock cases came staggering down the road toward us. They were not wounded but were completely broken the kind that stabs into your heart.

They were shaking all over, and had to hold onto each other like little girls when they walked. The doctor stopped them. They could barely talk, barely understand. He told them to wait down at the next corner until we came back, and then they could ride.

When they turned away from the jeep, they turned slowly and unsteadily, a step at a time, like men who were awfully drunk. Their mouths hung open and their eyes stared, and they still held onto each other. They were just like idiots. They had found more war than the human spirit can endure.

At the far edge of the town, we came to a partly wrecked farmhouse that had two Germans in it – one was wounded and the other was just staying with him: We ran our jeeps into the yard and the litter bearers went on across the field to where the aid men had been told some of our wounded were lying behind a hedge.

The doctor sent the able German soldier along with our litter bearers to help carry. He was very willing to help. I stayed at the house with the doctor while he looked at the wounded German, lying in the midst of the scattered debris of what had been a kitchen floor.

The German didn’t seem to be badly wounded, but he was sure full of misery. He looked middle-aged, and he was pale, partly bald, had a big nose and his face was yellow. He kept moaning and twisting. The doctor said he thought morphine was making him sick.

The doctor took his scissors and began cutting his clothes open to see if he was wounded anywhere except in the arm. He wasn’t. But he had been sick at his stomach and then rolled over. He was sure a superman sad sack.

Pretty soon the litter bearers came back. They had two wounded Germans and one American on their litters. Also they had two walking cases – one hearty fellow with a slight leg wound, and one youngster whose hands were trembling from nervous tension.

The doctor asked him what was the matter and he said nothing was, except that he couldn’t stop shaking. He said he felt that his nerves were all right, but he just couldn’t keep his hands from trembling.

Just a shade of disappointment passed over the boy’s face, but he was game.

“That’s what I told the lieutenant,” he said. “I think I’m all right to go back.”

I could tell the doctor liked his attitude. There was nothing yellow about the kid.

The doctor said:

I’ll tell you. You get on this jeep and go back to the aid station. We will give you some sleeping stuff, and you can just lie around there on the ground for a day or two and you’ll be all right.

And with that compromise, the kid – relieved at even a two-day respite – got into the jeep with the wounded men and went back down the road.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 16, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
The other soldier had a white bandage around the calf of his left leg. He had loosely laced his legging back over the bandage.

He said the wound “didn’t amount to a damn” and he wished they hadn’t sent him back from the lines. He said he had gone through Africa and Sicily without getting wounded, and now he’d got nicked. He was disgusted.

You could sense that this guy was a fine soldier. He looked old, but probably wasn’t. I took him to be a farmer. He talked like a hillbilly, and beneath his whiskers you could tell he had a big, droll face.

He had found some long, crooked, raggedy French cigars, and he kept lighting these funny-looking things and putting them about three inches into his mouth. He wasn’t nervous in the least.

Capt. Lucien Strawn, the battalion surgeon, started to put him in a jeep to go back to the aid station, but the soldier said:

Now wait. I know where there’s two more men wounded pretty bad. One of them is a lieutenant who just got back from the hospital this morning from his other wound.

The soldier said they were right up where the bullets were flying, but that if the aidmen would go, he could walk well enough to guide them up there. So, the doctor named off half a dozen men to go with him.

Shells start hitting again

The doctor also told the unwounded German to go along and help carry. But one of the aidmen said:

We better not have him with us. Our own men are liable to start shooting at us.

“That’s right,” the doctor said, “Leave him here.” And he named off one other American to go. After they had left the doctor said, “that’s the truth, and I never even thought of it.”

The doctor and I sat a while on the stairway inside the farmhouse, for shells had started hitting just outside again. But in a little bit the doctor got up and said he was going to see how the stretcher party was getting along. I said I’d like to go with him. He said OK.

We struck out across a sloping wheatfield. It was full of huge craters left by our bombings. There was a lull in the shelling as we crossed the field, but the trouble with lulls is that you never know when they will suddenly come to an end.

As we picked our way among the craters, I thought I heard, very faintly, somebody call “Help!” It’s odd how things strike you in wartime. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, pooh, that would be too dramatic – just like a book. You’re just imagining it.”

But the doctor had stopped, and he said, “Did you hear somebody yelling?”

So we listened again, and this time we could hear it plainly. It seemed to come from a far corner of the field, so we picked our way over in that direction.

Finally, we saw him, a soldier lying on his back near a hedge row, still yelling “Help!” as we approached. The aidmen who had started ahead of us had got down in a bomb crater when the shelling started, so the doctor now waved them to come on.

Making an awful fuss

The wounded soldier was making an awful fuss. He was twisting and squirming, and moaning “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” He had a bandage on his right hand and there was blood on his left leg.

The doctor took his scissors and cut the legging off, then cut the laces on the shoe, and then peeled off a bloody sock and cut the pants leg up so he could see the wound. The soldier kept his eyes shut and kept squirming and moaning.

When the doctor would try to talk to him, he would just groan and say, “Oh, my God!” Finally, the doctor got out of him that he had had a small wound in his hand, and his sergeant had bandaged it and told him to start to the rear. Then, coming across the field, a shell fragment had got him in the leg.

The doctor looked him. over thoroughly. There were two small holes just above the ankle. The doctor said they hadn’t touched the bone. I think the doctor was disgusted.

He said, “He’s making a hell of a fuss over nothing.” Then to one of the aidmen he said, “Better give him a shot of morphine to quiet him.”

Whereupon the soldier squirmed and moaned, “Oh, no, no, no! Oh, my God!” But the doctor said go ahead, and the aidman cut his sleeve up to the shoulder, stuck the needle in and squeezed the vial.

The aidman, trying to be sympathetic, said to the soldier, “It’s the same old needle, ain’t it?” But the soldier just groaned again and said, “Oh, my God!”

Our hillbilly soldier lit another skinny cigar, as though he were at a national convention instead of a battlefield. Then one set of the litter-bearers started back with our new man, and the rest of us went on with the soldier to hunt for other wounded.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 17, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western front, France – (by wireless)
The commander of the particular regiment of the 4th Infantry Division that we have been with is one of my favorites.

That’s partly because he flatters me by calling me “General,” partly because just looking at him makes me chuckle to myself, and partly because I think he’s a very fine soldier.

Security forbids my giving his name. He is a Regular Army colonel and he was overseas in the last war. His division commander says the only trouble with him is that he’s too bold, and if he isn’t careful, he’s liable to get clipped one of these days.

He is rather unusual looking. There is something almost Mongolian about his face. When cleaned up he could be a Cossack. When tired and dirty he could be a movie gangster. But either way, his eyes always twinkle.

He has a facility for direct thought that is unusual. He is impatient of thinking that gets off onto byways.

He has a little habit of good-naturedly reprimanding people by cocking his head over to one side, getting his face below yours and saying something sharp, and then looking up at you with a quizzical smirk like a laughing cat.

Jacket fits like a sack

The colonel goes constantly from one battalion to another during battle, from early light till darkness. He wears a new-type field jacket that fits him like a sack, and he carries a long stick that Teddy Roosevelt gave him. He keeps constantly prodding his commanders to push hard, not to let up, to keep driving and driving.

He is impatient with commanders who lose the main point of the war by getting involved in details the main point, of course, being to kill Germans. His philosophy of war is expressed in the simple formula of “shoot the sonsabitches.”

Once I was at a battalion command post when we got word that 60 Germans were coming down the road in a counterattack. Everybody got excited. They called the colonel on a field phone, gave him the details and asked him what to do. He had the solution in a nutshell.

He just said, “Shoot the sonsabitches,” and hung up.

Another of my favorites is a sergeant who runs the colonel’s regimental mess. He cooks some himself, but mostly he bosses the cooking.

His name is Charles J. Murphy and his home is at Trenton, New Jersey. Murph is redheaded, but has his head nearly shaved like practicably all the Western Front soldiers – officers as well as men. Murph is funny, but he seldom smiles.

When I asked him what he did in civilian life, he thought a moment and then said:

Well, I was a shyster. Guess you’d call me a kind of promoter. I always had the kind of job where you made $50 a week salary and $1,500 on the side.

How’s that for an honest man?

Murph and I got to talking about newspapermen one day. Murph said his grandfather was a newspaper man. He retired in old age and lived in Murph’s house.

‘Went nuts reading newspapers’

Murph said:

My grandfather went nuts reading newspapers. It was a phobia with him. Every day he’d buy $1.50 worth of 3-cent newspapers and then read them all night.

He wouldn’t read the ads. He would just read the stories, looking for something to criticize. He’d get fuming mad.

Lots of times when I was a kid, he’d get me out of bed at 2 or 3 in the morning and point to some story in the paper and rave about reporters who didn’t have sense enough to put a period at the end of a sentence.

Murph and I agreed that it was fortunate his grandfather passed on before he got reading my stuff, or he would doubtless have run amuck.

Murph never smoked cigarettes until he landed in France on D-Day, but now he smokes one after another. He is about the tenth soldier who has told me that same thing. A guy in war has to have some outlet for his nerves, and I guess smoking is as good as anything.

All kinds of incongruous things happen during a battle. For instance, during one lull I got my portrait painted in watercolor. The artist sat cross legged on the grass and it took about an hour.

The painter was Pfc. Leon Wall, from Wyoming, Pennsylvania. He went to the National Academy of Design in New York for six years, did research for the Metropolitan Museum and lectured on art at the New York World’s Fair.

Artist Wall is now, of all things, a cook and KP in an infantry regiment mess. He hasn’t done any war paintings at all since the invasion. I asked him why not. He said: “Well, at first I was too scared, and since then I’ve been too busy.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 18, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
Soldiers are made out of the strangest people.

I’ve recently made a new friend – just a plain old Hoosier – who is so quiet and humble you would hardly know he was around. Yet in our few weeks of invasion, he has killed four of the enemy, and he has learned war’s wise little ways of destroying life and preserving your own.

He hasn’t become the “killer” type that war makes of some soldiers; he has merely become adjusted to an obligatory new profession.

His name is George Thomas Clayton. Back home he is known as Tommy. In the Army he is sometimes called George, but usually just Clayton. He is from Evansville, where he lived with his sister. He is a frontline infantryman of rifle company in the 29th Division.

By the time this is printed he will be back in the lines. Right now he is out of combat for a brief rest. He spent a few days in an “Exhaustion Camp,” then was assigned briefly to the camp where I work from – a camp for correspondents. That’s how we got acquainted.

Clayton is a private first class. He operates a Browning automatic rifle. He has turned down two chances to become a buck sergeant and squad leader, simply because he would rather keep his powerful BAR than have stripes and less personal protection.

He landed in Normandy on D-Day, on the toughest of the beaches, and was in the line for 37 days without rest. He has had innumerable narrow escapes.

Twice, 88s hit within a couple of arms’ lengths of him. But both times the funnel of the concussion was away from him and he didn’t get a scratch though the explosions covered him and his rifle with dirt.

Then a third one hit about 10 feet away, and made him deaf in his right ear. He had always had trouble with that ear anyway – ear aches and things as a child. Even in the Army back in America he had to beg the doctors to waive the ear defect in order to come overseas. He is still a little hard of hearing in that ear from the shell burst, but it’s gradually coming back.

When Tommy finally left the lines, he was pretty well done up and his sergeant wanted to send him to a hospital, but he begged not to go for fear he wouldn’t get back to his old company, so they let him go to a rest camp instead.

And now after a couple of weeks with us (provided the correspondents don’t drive him frantic), he will return to the lines with his old outfit.

Clayton has worked at all kings of things back in that other world of civilian life. He has been a farm hand, a cook and a bartender. Just before he joined the Army, he was a gauge-honer in the Chrysler Ordnance Plant at Evansville.

When the war is over, he wants to go into business for himself for the first time in his life. He’ll probably set up a small restaurant in Evansville. He said his brother-in-law would back him.

Tommy was shipped overseas after only two months in the Army, and now has been out of America for 18 months. He is medium-sized, dark-haired, has a little mustache and the funniest-looking head of hair you ever saw this side of Buffalo Bill’s show.

While his division was killing time in the first few days before leaving England, he and three others decided to have their hair cut Indian fashion. They had their heads clipped down to the skin all except a two-inch ridge starting at the forehead and running clear to the back of the neck. It makes them look more comical than ferocious as they had intended. Two of the four have been wounded and evacuated to England.

I chatted off and on with Clayton for several days before he told me how old he was. I was amazed; so much so that I asked several other people to guess at his age and they all guessed about the same as I did – about 26.

Actually, he is 37, and that’s pretty well along in years to be a frontline infantryman. It’s harder on a man at that age.

As Clayton himself says, “When you pass that 30 mark you begin to slow up a little.”

It’s harder for you to take the hard ground and the rain and the sleeplessness and the unending wracking of it all. Yet at 37, he elected to go back.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 19, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
The ways of an invasion turned out to be all very new to Pfc. Tommy Clayton, the 29th Division infantryman we were writing about yesterday.

It was new to thousands of others also, for they hadn’t been trained in hedgerow fighting. So they had to learn it the way a dog learns to swim. They learned.

As we said yesterday, this Tommy Clayton, the mildest of men, has killed four of the enemy for sure, and probably dozens of unseen ones. He wears an Expert Rifleman’s badge and soon will have the proud badge of Combat Infantryman, worn only by those who have been through the mill.

Three of his four victims he got in one long blast of his Browning automatic rifle. He was stationed in the bushes at a bend in a gravel road, covering a crossroads about 80 yards ahead of him.

Suddenly three German soldiers came out a side road and foolishly stopped to talk right in the middle of the crossroads. The BAR has 20 bullets in a clip. Clayton held her down for the whole clip. The three Germans went down, never to get up.

His fourth one, he thought was a Jap when he killed him. In the early days of the invasion, lots of soldiers thought they were fighting Japs, scattered in with the German troops. They were actually Mongolian Russians, with strong Oriental features, who resembled Japs to the untraveled Americans.

On this fourth killing, Clayton was covering an infantry squad as it worked forward along a hedgerow. There were snipers in the trees in front. Clayton spotted one and sprayed the tree with his automatic rifle, and out tumbled this man he thought was a Jap.

To show how little anyone who hasn’t been through war can know about it – do you want to know how Clayton located his sniper? Here’s how…

When a bullet passes smack over your head, it doesn’t zing; it pops the same as a rifle when it goes off. That’s because the bullet’s rapid passage creates a vacuum behind it, and the air rushes back with such force to fill this vacuum that it collides with itself, and makes a resounding “pop.” Clayton didn’t know what caused this, and I tried to explain.

“You know what a vacuum is,” I said. “We learned that in high school.”

And Tommy said, “Ernie, I never went past the third grade.”

But Tommy is intelligent and his sensitivities are fine. You don’t have to know the reasons in war, you only have to know what things indicate when they happen.

Well, Clayton had learned that the pop of a bullet over his head preceded the actual rifle report by a fraction of a second, because the sound of the rifle explosion had to travel some distance before hitting his ear. So, the “pop” became his warning signal to listen for the crack of a sniper’s rifle a moment later.

Through much practice he had learned to gauge the direction of the sound almost exactly. And so out of this animal-like system of hunting, he had the knowledge to shoot into the right tree and out tumbled his “Jap” sniper.

Clayton’s weirdest experience would be funny if it weren’t so flooded with pathos. He was returning with a patrol one moonlit night when the enemy opened upon them. Tommy leaped right through a hedge and, spotting a foxhole, plunged into it.

To his amazement and fright, there was a German in the foxhole, sitting pretty, holding a machine pistol in his hands. Clayton shot him three times in the chest before you could say scat. The German hardly moved. And then Tommy realized the man had been killed earlier. He had been shooting a corpse.

All these experiences seem to have left no effect on this mild soldier from Indiana, unless to make him even quieter than before.

The worst experience of all is just the accumulated blur, and the hurting vagueness of too long in the lines, the everlasting alertness, the noise and fear, the cell-by-cell exhaustion, the thinning of the ranks around you as day follows nameless day. And the constant march into eternity of your own small quota of chances for survival.

Those are the things that hurt and destroy. And soldiers like Tommy Clayton go back to them, because they are good soldiers and they have a duty they cannot define.

When you’re wandering around our very far-flung frontlines – the lines that in our present rapid war are known as “fluid” – you can always tell how recently the battle has swept on ahead of you.

You can sense it from the little things even more than the big things–

From the scattered green leaves and the fresh branches of trees still lying in the middle of the road.

From the wisps and coils of telephone wire, hanging brokenly from high poles and entwining across the roads.

From the gray, buried powder rims of the shell craters in the gravel roads, their edges not yet smoothed by the pounding of military traffic.

From the little pools of blood on the roadside, blood that has only begun to congeal and turn black, and the punctured steel helmets lying nearby.

From the square blocks of building stone still scattered in the village streets, and from the sharp-edged rocks in the roads, still uncrushed by traffic.

From the burned-out tanks and broken carts still unremoved from the road. From the cows in the fields, lying grotesquely with their feet to the sky, so newly dead they have not begun to bloat or smell.

From the scattered heaps of personal debris around a gun. I don’t know why it is, but the Germans always seem to take off their coats before they flee or die.

From all these things you can tell that the battle has been recent – from these and from the men dead so recently that they seem to be merely asleep.

And also from the inhuman quiet. Usually, battles are noisy for miles around. But in this recent fast warfare a battle sometimes leaves a complete vacuum behind it.

The Germans will stand and fight it out until they see there is no hope. Then some give up, and the rest pull and run for miles. Shooting stops. Our fighters move on after the enemy, and those who do not fight, but move in the wake of the battles, will not catch up for hours.

There is nothing left behind but the remains – the lifeless debris, the sunshine and the flowers, and utter silence.

An amateur who wanders in this vacuum at the rear of a battle has a terrible sense of loneliness. Everything is dead – the men, the machines, the animals – and you alone are left alive.

One afternoon we drove in our jeep into a country like that. The little rural villages of gray stone were demolished – heartbreaking heaps of still smoking rubble.

We drove into the tiny town of La Detinais, a sweet old stone village at the “T” of two gravel roads a rural village in rolling country, a village of not more than 50 buildings. There was not a whole building left.

Rubble and broken wires still littered the streets. Blackish gray stone walls with no roofs still smoldered inside. Dead men still lay in the street, helmets and broken rifles askew around them. There was not a soul nor a sound in town; the village was lifeless.

We stopped and pondered our way, and with trepidation we drove on out of town. We drove for a quarter of a mile or so. The ditches were full of dead men. We drove around one without a head or arms or legs. We stared, and couldn’t say anything about it to each other. We asked the driver to go very slowly, for there was an uncertainty in all the silence. There was no live human, no sign of movement anywhere.

Seeing no one, hearing nothing, I became fearful of going on into the unknown. So, we stopped. Just a few feet ahead of us was a brick-red American tank, still smoking, and with its turret knocked off near it was a German horse-drawn ammunition cart, upside down. In the road beside them was a shell crater.

To our left lay two smashed airplanes in adjoining fields. Neither of them was more than 30 yards from the road. The hedge was low and we could see over. They were both British fighter planes. One lay right side up, the other lay on its back.

We were just ready to turn around and go back, when I spied a lone soldier at the far side of the field. He was standing there looking across the field at us like an Indian in a picture. I waved and he waved back. We walked toward each other.

He turned out to be a 2nd Lt. Ed Sasson of Los Angeles. He is a graves registration officer for his armored division, and he was out scouring the fields, locating the bodies of dead Americans.

He was glad to see somebody, for it is a lonely job catering to the dead.

As we stood there talking in the lonely field a soldier in coveralls, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, ran up breathlessly, and almost shouted: “Hey, there’s a man alive in one of those planes across the road! He’s been trapped there for days!”

We stopped right in the middle of a sentence and began to run. We hopped the hedgerow, and ducked under the wing of the upside-down plane. And there, in the next hour, came the climax to what certainly was one of the really great demonstrations of courage in this war.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 21, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
We ran to the wrecked British plane, lying there upside down, and dropped on our hands and knees and peeked through a tiny hole in the side.

A man lay on his back in the small space of the upside cockpit. His feet disappeared somewhere in the jumble of dial and rubber pedals above him. His shirt was open and his chest was bare to the waist. He was smoking a cigarette.

He turned his eyes toward me when I peeked in, and he said in a typical British manner of offhand friendliness, “Oh, hello.”

“Are you alright?” I asked stupidly.

He answered, “Yes, quite. Now that you chaps are here.”

I asked him how long he had been trapped in the wrecked plane. He said he didn’t know for sure as he had got mixed up about the passage of time. But he did know the date of the month he was shot down. He told me the date. And I said, out loud, “Good God!”

For wounded and trapped, he had been lying there for eight days.

His left leg was broken and punctured by an ack-ack burst. His back was terribly burned by raw gasoline that had spilled. The fool of his injured leg was pinned rigidly under the rudder bar.

His space was so small he couldn’t squirm around to relieve his own weight from his paining back. He couldn’t straighten out his legs, which were bent above him. He couldn’t see out of his little prison. He had not had a bite to eat or a drop of water. All this for eight days and nights.

Yet when we found him, his physical condition was strong, and his mind was as calm and rational as though he were sitting in a London club. He was in agony, yet in his correct Oxford accent he even apologized for taking up our time to get him out.

The American soldiers of our rescue party cussed as they worked, cussed with open admiration for this British flier’s greatness of heart which had kept him alive and sane through his lonely and gradually hope-dimming ordeal.

One of them said, “God, but these limeys have got guts!”

It took us almost an hour to get him out. We don’t know whether he will live or not, but he has a chance. During the hour we were ripping the plane open to make a hole, he talked to us. And here, in the best nutshell I can devise from the conversation of a brave man whom you didn’t want to badger with trivial questions, is what happened…

He was an RAF flight lieutenant, piloting a night fighter. Over a certain area the Germans began letting him have it from the ground with machine-gun fire.

The first hit knocked out his motor. He was too low to jump, so – foolishly, he said – he turned on his lights to try a crash landing. Then they really poured it on him. The second hit got him in the leg. And a third bullet cut right across the balls of his right-hand forefingers, clipping every one of them to the bone.

He left his heels up, and the plane’s belly hit the ground going uphill on a slight slope. We could see the groove it had dug for about 50 yards. Then it flopped, tail over nose, onto its back. The pilot was absolutely sealed into the upside-down cockpit.

“That’s all I remember for a while,” he told us. “When I came to, they were shelling all around me.”

Thus began the eight days. He had crashed right between the Germans and Americans in a sort of pastoral no-man’s-land.

For days afterwards the field in which he lay surged back and forth between German hands and ours.

His pasture was pocked with hundreds of shell craters. Many of them were only yards away. One was right at the end of his wing. The metal sides of the plane were speckled with hundreds of shrapnel holes.

He lay there, trapped in the midst of this inferno of explosions. The fields around him gradually became littered with dead. At last American strength pushed the Germans back, and silence came. But no help. Because, you see, it was in that vacuum behind the battle, and only a few people were left.

The days passed. He thirsted terribly. He slept some; part of the time he was unconscious; part of the time he undoubtedly was delirious. But he never gave up hope.

After we had finally got him out, he said as he lay on the stretcher under a wing, “Is it possible that I’ve been out of this plane since I crashed?”

Everybody chuckled. The doctor who had arrived said:

Not the remotest possibility. You were sealed in there and it took men with tools half an hour to make an opening. And your leg was broken and your foot was pinned there. No, you haven’t been out.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” the pilot said, “and yet it seems in my mind that I was out once and back in again.”

That little memory of delirium was the only word said by that remarkable man in the whole hour of his rescue that wasn’t as dispassionate and matter-of-fact as though he had been sitting comfortably at the end of the day in front of his own fireplace.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 22, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
I would like to tell you in detail the remarkable story of the wounded RAF pilot whom we released after he had lain unnoticed in the wreckage of his plane for eight days on a battlefield.

Several American soldiers sprung out of somewhere a few moments after we arrived. They grasped the situation instantly, and began tearing at the sides of the plane with pliers and wire clippers. They worked as though seconds had suddenly become jewels.

The tough metal came off in strips no bigger than your fingers, and only after terrific pulling and yanking. It seemed as if it would take hours to make a hole big enough to get the pilot out.

The ripping and pounding against the metal sides of the hollow plane made a thunderous noise. I peered inside and asked the pilot: “Does the noise bother you?”

He said:

No, I can stand it. But tell them to be careful when they break through on the other side – my leg is broken, you know.

But the American boys worked faster than we believed possible. They tore their fingers on the jagged edges of the metal; they broke strong aluminum ribs with one small crowbar and a lot of human strength. Soon they had a hole big enough so that I could get my head and shoulders inside the cockpit.

Somebody handed me a canteen of water and I shoved it through the hole to the pilot. He drank avidly. When he put the canteen down, he set it on his bare chest and held it with both hands.

“By God, I could drink a river dry,” he said.

Somebody outside said not to let him drink anymore right now. The pilot said, “Would you pour some on my head?”

I soaked my dirty handkerchief, and rubbed his forehead with it. His hair was nut brown in color and very long. His whiskers were reddish and scraggly and he had a little mustache. His face seemed long and thin, and yet you could tell by his tremendous chest that he was a big man and powerful.

His eyes were not glassy, but I was fascinated by his eyeballs. They didn’t protrude; it was just that they were so big. When he turned them toward you, it was as though he was slowly turning two big brown tennis balls.

He had complete command of his thoughts. The half-delirium you would expect of a man trapped for eight days without food or water, just did not exist in him. He was

His face was dirty from much sweating, but the skin of his body was white and clean. There was a small scab on his forehead and there were some light bruises on his arms.

Inside the plane, the stench was shocking. My first thought was that there must be another man in the plane who had been dead for days. I said to the pilot: “Is there someone else in the plane?”

And he answered, “No this is a single seater, old boy.”

What I had smelled was the pilot himself. We couldn’t see the lower part of his left leg, but we judged it must be gangrenous and in a horrible shape.

“I can move my right leg,” he said, “it’s all right. In fact, I’ve had it out from here several times and moved it around for exercise. But the left one I can’t move.” I asked, “Where did you get the cigarette you were smoking when we got here?”

He said:

Your chap gave it to me. The one who came first. He lighted it for me and stuck it in through the hole, and went searching for the rest of you.

I was wondering if it wasn’t dangerous for him to be smoking inside the wrecked plane. I mentioned something about his being lucky that the plane hadn’t caught fire when he crashed. And he said:

I’ll tell you about that. Do you see that woods a little way north of us?

There were several small woods but I said, “Yes.”

He said:

Well, that first night they set fire to that woods. I could tell it by the glow in the cockpit. And here the plane was soaked with hundred-octane gasoline. I thought the fire would spread right across the field. But it didn’t.

Actually, what he had thought was the woods afire was the little town of La Detinais, which had been set afire by shelling. I didn’t bother to tell him, for he was alive, and after all what could the technicalities matter?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 23, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
You may have wondered how that British pilot happened to be found after lying for eight days unnoticed, trapped in his wrecked plane.

Well, as I told you, a bullet had clipped the balls of his right-hand forefingers, clear to the bone. He had put his cream-colored handkerchief over them to stop the bleeding. As the wound dried, the handkerchief stuck to his fingers, and to pull it off would have been painful. It still stuck to his fingers all through the ordeal of getting him out; It was still elapsed in his hand as the ambulance jeep drove away with him.

To go back, through the days of his waiting he had that handkerchiefed right hand stuck through a little hole in the plane’s side, moving it slowly back and forth.

Just after I had stopped that day to talk to Lt. Ed Sasson in the field, two mechanics from an armored division came down the road in a jeep. They were looking at the wrecked plane as they drove along, and suddenly they saw this slight movement. They stopped and went over to make sure, and they found inside there one of the brave men of this war. That’s when they came running for us.

The two boys to whom this British flight lieutenant owes his life are Sgt. Milton Van Sickel of Brainard, Minnesota, and Cpl. William Schinke of Gresham, Nebraska.

At last, we had the pilot out of the plane and on a stretcher under a wing. The doctor took some scissors and started cutting away his clothes. It must be hot in those cockpits in flight, for the pilot wore nothing but short trousers and a blue shirt.

The doctor cut off the pants and then the shirt. The pilot lay there naked. He was a man of magnificent physique.

The calves of his legs were large and athletic. In the calf of the left leg was a round hole as big as an apple. But to our astonishment, there was no deterioration of flesh around it. The wound was already healing perfectly. The leg wasn’t even burned, as he had told us. What then could it have been that we smelled in the plane?

We turned him over and then we saw. His back was burned by spilled gasoline, from his shoulders to the end of his spine. It was raw and red.

He had been forced to lie on it all the time, unable to move. At last festering had started, and then gangrene. We could see the little blue-green moldy splotches. That was what we had smelled. He didn’t know about that. The odor had developed inside his little cubbyhole so gradually that he hadn’t been aware of it. He was shocked by the smell of fresh air, but he still didn’t know about the other. He had been worried only about his leg.

I don’t know what the doctor really thought. The pilot was obviously in wonderful physical shape, considering such an ordeal. The doctor told him so. But he looked a long time at that gangrenous back, and then they temporarily bandaged it.

As they were working on him, the doctor asked if the pilot had a wallet or any papers. He said yes, his had been in his hip pocket. The doctor lifted the blood-smeared pants and cut the wallet out with a pair of scissors. From the other pocket he cut a silver cigarette case.

“That’s good, old boy,” the pilot said. "I’m grateful that you found that.”

We asked him if he had a wrist watch. He said yes, but it had fallen off and was probably in the debris where he had been lying. But we couldn’t find it, and finally gave it up.

As he lay on his stomach on the stretcher, they tied a metal splint around his wounded leg. While they were doing this, I bathed his head again in water from a canteen.

A soldier lit another cigarette and gave it to him. It dropped through his fingers onto the wet grass, and became soaked. I lit another one and put it in his fingers.

He took a long, deep drag, and put his head down on the litter and closed his eyes. The morphine finally was making him groggy, but it never did put him out.

The cigarette burned up almost to his fingers. An officer said, “It’s going to burn him,” and started to pull it from between his fingers. But the pilot heard and lazily opened his eyes, took another puff, and with his thumb pushed the cigarette farther out in his fingers. Then he closed his eyes again. He lay there for a few minutes like that.

Then again, he rolled those great eyes up and said to me:

“What date did you say this was?” I told him.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “My wedding anniversary is just three days away. I guess I’ll be back in England for it yet.”

The medics were all through. They covered the naked pilot with a blanket and carried him to the road. Everybody in our little crowd loved the man who had the heart to be so wonderful.

As they put the stretcher down in the gravel road, waiting for the jeep to turn around, one of the armored division soldiers leaned over the stretcher and said with rough emotion:

If you’d been a damn German, you’da been dead five days ago. Christ, but you British have go guts!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 24, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
We had sent one soldier to the nearest aid station as soon as we discovered the wounded British pilot, trapped for eight days in his plane. He had to drive about six miles.

Just a few minutes after the other soldiers finished tearing two holes in the sides of the plane, a medical captain and three aid men popped through the hedge and came running.

The doctor knelt down and sized up everything in a few seconds. He asked an aid man for morphine. The pilot willingly held out his right arm. and the doctor stuck a needle into the bend of the elbow. The pilot never flinched, but looked on almost approvingly.

The doctor said to him:

You’re in good condition. This is just to make it easier for you when we start to pull you out. We’ll wait a few minutes for it to take hold.

While we were sitting there on the ground beside the plane, waiting for the morphine to take effect, the pilot said: “I am delaying you from your work. I’m frightfully sorry about it.”

One of the soldiers, touched by the remark, blurted:

Good God, lieutenant, you aren’t delaying us. This is what we’re here for. We’re just sorry we’ve been so long getting you out.

The pilot momentarily closed his eyes and put his hand on his forehead. And then, as if in resignation at his own rudeness in bothering us, he said: “Well, I don’t know what I should do without you.”

Morphine never put him out

So incredibly strong was that pilot’s constitution that the morphine never put him out.

They waited about 10 minutes. Then two soldiers took off their web belts and looped them around the pilot’s armpits. The medics on the other side said they had hold of his trapped foot and could gradually free it.

The pilot said:

It’s my back that’s weak. All the strength seems to be gone from the small of my back. You’ll have to help me there.

They pulled. The pilot, although without food for eight days, was tremendously strong, and he reached above his head to the plane’s framework and helped lift himself.

The belts slipped, and the soldiers took them off. They knelt and lifted his shoulders with their hands. They had padded the jagged edges of the torn aluminum, over which they would have to slide him, with the heavy rubber of his collapsible lifeboat.

The doctor said, “We’ll be as easy as we can. Tell us when to quit.”

And the brave man said, “Go ahead. I’ll stand it as long as I can.”

They pulled again. The pilot made a face and exerted himself to help them. They slid him slowly a few inches through the hole, until he suddenly called: “Whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa! My back! It’s stuck to the ground. We’ll have to break it loose slowly.”

Pilot offers suggestion

They surveyed the possibilities a while, trying to figure a less painful way of getting him out. There wasn’t any. He said: “I can’t raise my behind at all. If you could slide something under me to carry the weight.”

A soldier went running to the next field, looking for a board. We waited. In a few minutes he came back with a short, thick board.

The pilot reached up with his strong arms, made a1 face, and lifted himself a little from the ground, and the doctor slid the board underneath him. Then the doctor, still kneeling, lifted one end of the board.

Gradually the pilot came out. Twice he had to stop them while they rearranged his injured leg. He said it was twisted. But apparently it was largely the agony of suddenly straightening out a cramped knee that had lain bent for eight days.

At last, in a sort of final surge, he came clear of the plane. They crawled backwards with him, on hands and knees, struggling to hold his back off the ground. You could see that he was steeling himself fiercely.

“Quick! Slide that litter under him,” the doctor called. The pilot said, “My God, that air! That fresh air!” Three times in the next five minutes he mentioned the fresh air.

When they finally laid him tenderly onto the canvas litter and straightened his left leg, you could see the tendons relax and his facial muscles subside, and he gave a long half-groan, half-sigh of relief.

And that was the one single sound of normal human weakness uttered by that man of great courage in the hour of his liberation.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 28, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Paris, France – (by wireless, delayed)
I had thought that for me there could never again be any elation in war. But I had reckoned without the liberation of Paris – I had reckoned without remembering that I might be a part of this richly historic day.

We are in Paris – on the first day – one of the great days of all time. This is being written, as other correspondents are writing their pieces, under an emotional tension, a pent-up semi-delirium.

Our approach to Paris was hectic. We had waited for three days in a nearby town while hourly our reports on what was going on in Paris changed and contradicted themselves. Of a morning it would look as though we were about to break through the German ring around Paris and come to the aid of the brave French Forces of the Interior who were holding parts of the city.

By afternoon it would seem the enemy had reinforced until another Stalingrad was developing. We could not bear to think of the destruction of Paris, and yet at times it seemed desperately inevitable.

That was the situation this morning when we left Rambouillet and decided to feel our way timidly toward the very outskirts of Paris. And then, when we were within about eight miles, rumors began to circulate that the French 2nd Armored Division was in the city. We argued for half an hour at a crossroads with a French captain who was holding us up, and finally le freed us and waved us on.

For 15 minutes we drove through i flat gardenlike country under a magnificent bright sun and amidst greenery, with distant banks of smoke pillaring the horizon ahead and to our left. And then we came gradually into the suburbs, and soon into Paris itself and a pandemonium of surely the greatest mass joy that has ever happened.

Crowd almost hysterical

The streets were lined as by Fourth of July parade crowds at home, only this crowd was almost hysterical. The streets of Paris are very wide, and they were packed mi each side. The women were all brightly dressed in white or red blouses and colorful peasant skirts, with flowers in their hair and big flashy earrings. Everybody was growing flowers, and even serpentine.

As our jeep eased through the crowds, thousands of people crowded up, leaving only a narrow corridor, and frantic men, women and children grabbed us and kissed us and shook our hands and beat on our shoulders and slapped our backs and shouted their joy as we passed.

I was in a jeep with Henry Gorrell of the United Press, Capt. Carl Pergler of Washington, DC, and Cpl. Alexander Belon of Amherst, Massachusetts. We all got kissed until we were literally red in face, and I must say we enjoyed it.

Once when the jeep was simply swamped in human traffic and had to stop, we were swarmed over and hugged and kissed and torn at. Everybody, even beautiful girls, insisted on kissing you on both cheeks. Somehow, I got started kissing babies that were held up by their parents, and for a while, I looked like a baby-kissing politician going down the street. The fact that I hadn’t shaved for days, and was gray-bearded as well as baldheaded, made no difference. Once when we came to a stop some Frenchman told us there were still snipers shooting, so we put our steel helmets back on.

People well fed, well dressed

The people certainly looked well fed and well dressed. The streets were lined with green trees and modern buildings. All the stores were closed in holiday. Bicycles were so thick I have an idea there have been plenty accidents today, with tanks and jeeps overrunning the populace.

We entered Paris via Rue Aristide Briand and Rue d’Orleans. We were slightly apprehensive, but decided it was all right to keep going as long as there were crowds. But finally we were stymied by the people in the streets, and then above the din we heard some not-to-distant explosions – the Germans trying to destroy bridges across the Seine. And then the rattling of machine guns up the street, and that old battlefield whine of high-velocity shells just overhead. Some of us veterans ducked, but the Parisians just laughed and continued to carry on.

There came running over to our jeep a tall, thin, happy woman in a light brown dress, who spoke perfect American.

She was Mrs. Helen Cardon, who lived in Paris for 21 years and has not been home to America since 1935. Her husband is an officer in French Army headquarters and home now after two and a half years as a German prisoner. He was with her, in civilian clothes.

Mrs. Cardon has a sister, Mrs. George Swikart of 201 W 72nd Sts., New York, and I can say here to her relatives in America that she is well and happy. Incidentally, her two children, Edgar and Peter, are the only two American children, she says, who have been in Paris throughout the entire war.

We entered Paris from due south and the Germans were still battling in the heart of the city along the Seine when we arrived, but they were doomed. There was a full French armored division in the city, plus American troops entering constantly.

The farthest we got in our first hour in Paris was near the Senate building, where some Germans were holed up and firing desperately. So, we took a hotel room nearby and decided to write while the others fought. By the time you read this I’m sure Paris will once again be free for Frenchmen, and I’ll be out all over town getting my bald head kissed. Of all the days of national joy I’ve ever witnessed, this is the biggest.

[adamsano]

Wow, if one wants to be somewhere on any given day, this is the day to be in Paris. What a day!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (August 29, 1944)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Paris, France – (by wireless)
The other correspondents have written so thoroughly and so well about the fantastic eruption of mass joy when Paris was liberated that I shall not dwell on it much longer.

But there are some little things I have to get out of my system, so we’ll have at least this one more column on it.

Actually, the thing has floored most of us. I know that I have felt totally incapable of reporting it to you. It was so big I felt in adequate to touch it. I didn’t know where to start or what to say. The words you put down about it sound feeble to the point of asininity.

I’m not alone in this feeling, for I’ve heard a dozen other correspondents say the same thing. A good many of us feel we have failed in properly presenting the loveliest, brightest story of our time. It could be that this is because we have been so unused, for so long, to anything bright.

At any rate let’s go back to the demonstration. From 2 o’clock in the afternoon until darkness around 10:00, we few Americans in Paris on that first day were kissed and hauled and mauled by friendly mobs until we hardly knew where we were.

Waving arms finally give out

Everybody kissed you – little children, old women, grown-up men, beautiful girls. They jumped and squealed and pushed in a literal frenzy.

They pinned bright little flags and badges all over you. Amateur cameramen took pictures. They tossed flowers and friendly tomatoes into your jeep. One little girl even threw a bottle of cider into ours.

As you drove along, gigantic masses of waving and screaming humanity clapped their hands as though applauding a fine performance in a theater. We in the jeeps smiled back until we had set grins on our faces. We waved until our arms gave out, and then we just waggled our fingers. We shook hands until our hands were bruised and scratched. If the jeep stopped you were swamped instantly. Those who couldn’t reach you threw kisses at you, and we threw kisses back.

They sang songs. They sang wonderful French songs we had never heard. And they sang “Tipperary” and “Madelon” and “Over There” and the “Marseillaise.”

French policemen saluted formally but smilingly as we passed. The French tanks that went in ahead of us pulled over to the sidewalks and were immediately swarmed over.

And then some weird cell in the mystic human makeup caused people to start wanting autographs. It began the first evening and by the next day had grown to unbelievable proportions. Everybody wanted every soldier’s autograph.

They showed notebooks and papers at you to sign. It was just like Hollywood. One woman, on the second day, had a stack of neat little white slips, surely 300 of them, for people to sign.

Perfect day, perfect occasion

That first afternoon only the main streets into the city were open and used, and they were packed with humanity. The side streets were roped off and deserted, because the Germans had feeble fortifications and some snipers there.

The weather was marvelous for liberation day, and for the next day too. For two days previously it had been gloomy and raining. But on the big day the sky was pure blue, the sun was bright and warm – a perfect day for a perfect occasion.

Paris seems to have all the beautiful girls we have always heard it had. The women have an art of getting themselves up fascinatingly. Their hair is done crazily, their clothes are worn imaginatively. They dress in riotous colors in this lovely warm season, and when the flag-draped holiday streets are packed with Parisians the color makes everything else in the world seem gray.

As one soldier remarked, the biggest thrill in getting to Paris is to see people in bright summer clothes again.

Like any city, Paris has its quota of dirty and ugly people. But dirty and ugly people have emotions too, and Hank Gorrell got roundly kissed by one of the dirtiest and ugliest women I have ever seen. I must add that since he’s a handsome creature, he also got more than his share of embraces from the beautiful young things.

There was one funny little old woman, so short she couldn’t reach up to kiss men in military vehicles, who appeared on the second day carrying a stepladder. Whenever a car stopped, she would climb her stepladder and let the boys have it with hugs, laughs and kisses.

‘Thank you for coming’

The second day was a little different from the first. You could sense that during those first few hours of liberation the people were almost animal-like in their panic of joy and relief and gratitude. They were actually crying as they kissed you and screamed, “Thank you, oh thank you, for coming!”

But on the second day it was a deliberate holiday. It was a festival prepared for and gone into on purpose. You could tell that the women had prettied up especially. The old men had on their old medals, and the children were scrubbed and Sunday-dressed until they hurt.

And then everybody came downtown. By 2:00 in the afternoon the kissing and shouting and autographing and applauding were almost deafening. The pandemonium of a free and lovable Paris reigned again. It was wonderful to be here.