One of my favorite Bing Crosby songs: 
The Pittsburgh Press (January 30, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 29)
There is nothing lighthearted about the imminence of death at the moment it is upon a man, but the next morning it can be very funny. It is worth a small fortune to be around an American camp on the morning after an aerial attack. Soldier comics have fertile ground then, and they go to work in the old vaudeville fashion of getting a laugh by making fun of yourself.
The other morning, I sat in a tent with a dozen airplane mechanics and heard Sgt. Claude Coggey of Richmond, Virginia, speak. The sergeant said:
I hear there’s one man who says he was not scared last night. I want to meet that man and shake his hand. Then I’ll knock him down for being a damned liar.
Me, I was never so scared in my life. As soon as those bombs started dropping, I started hunting a chaplain. Boy, I needed some morale-building. A big one came whistling down. I dived into the nearest trench and landed right on top of a chaplain. Pretty soon I had an idea. I said, “Chaplain, are you with me?” He said, “Brother, I’m ahead of you.” So, we went whisht out of the ditch and took off for the mountains.
Anybody who says a scared man can’t make 50 miles an hour uphill doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Me and the chaplain can prove it. Now and then we’d slow down to about 30 miles an hour and listen for a plane, and then speed up again. But in the moonlight the Jerries picked us out and came down shooting. I dived into an irrigation ditch full of water and went right to the bottom. After a while I said “Chaplain, you still with me?” And he said, “With you, hell, I’m under you.”
It never occurred to me till this morning what damned fools we were to get out of that ditch and run in the moonlight. It won’t happen again. After this, from 6 p.m. on, my address will be the top of that farthest mountain peak.
The reactions of the American soldiers to their first bad bombings have been exactly what you would expect of them. They take it in a way to make you proud. The following figures aren’t literal for any certain camp or particular bombing, but just my own generalization, which I believe a real survey would authenticate. Say you’ve got a camp of 5,000 men, and they go through a dive-bombing and machine-gun strafing. One man out of that 5,000 will break completely and go berserk. He may never recover. Perhaps 25 will momentarily lose their heads and start dashing around foolishly. A couple of hundred will decide to change trenches when the bombs seem too close, forgetting that the safest place is the hole where you are. The 4,774 others will stay right in their trenches, thoroughly scared, but in full possession of themselves. They’ll do exactly the right thing. The moment it’s over they’ll be out with shovels and tools helping to put out fires, working just as calmly as they would in the safety of broad daylight.
Our bombings here have proved that deep trenches are fully satisfactory as shelters. I’ve just seen a crater you could put a Ford car in, within 40 feet of an open trench full of men. An uprooted palm tree fell across the trench, and the men were covered with flying dirt, but not one was scratched. Their tents were mangled. One boy had just received a two-pound tin box of candy from his girl. Shrapnel slashed it wide open.
During the melee some running soldiers found one guy dead drunk in a ditch. He was sound asleep and snoring away. It was so funny they paused in their flight to laugh and envy him. Some men didn’t hear the alert and had to dive into trenches in their underwear and bare feet. One boy showed me his steel helmet with bullet holes front and back. I foolishly asked:
Did you have it on?
Obviously, he hadn’t.
Where German machine-gun bullets hit the ground around their tents, soldiers described the result as looking like snake holes. At first the boys would search for pieces of shrapnel as souvenirs to take home, but within a few days, shrapnel was so common they didn’t bother to pick it up.
To top it all off, every morning at sunrise you can see the dirt flying and the trenches going a little deeper.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 1, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Jan. 31)
The American soldier is a born housewife, I’ve become convinced. I’ll bet there’s not another army in the world that fixes itself a “home away from home” as quickly as ours does. I’ve seen the little home touches created by our soldiers in their barns and castles and barracks and tents all over America, Ireland, England and Africa. But nowhere has this sort of thing given such a play as here at one of our desert airdromes.
The reason is twofold: First, the climate here is so dry you can fix up something with a fair certainty that it won’t be washed away in the morning. Second, because of the constant danger of a German bashing, the boys have dug into the ground to make their homes, and the things they can do with a cave were endless, as every farm boy knows.
The basic shelter here is a pup tent, but the soldiers have dug holes and set their tents over these. And the accessories inside provide one of the greatest shows on earth. Wandering among them is better than going to a state fair. The variations are infinite.
There are a few fantastically elaborate two- and three-room apartments underground. One officer has dug his deep slit trench right inside his tent, at the foot of his bed. He has even lined the trench with blankets so he can lie six feet below ground under canvas and sleep during a raid. The finest homes are made by those who are lucky enough to get or borrow the covered-wagon ribs and canvas from a truck. They dug a hole and plant the canopy over the top.
Some of them have places fixed like sheiks’ palaces. On the dirt floors are mats bought from Arabs in a nearby village. Some have electric lights hooked to batteries. One man bought a two-burner gasoline stove from some Frenchman for $3.20. On it he and his buddies heat water for washing and fry an occasional egg. Furthermore, they have rigged up a shield from a gasoline tin and fitted it over the stove so that it channels the heat sideways and warms the tent at night.
An officer whose bedroll lies flat on the ground dug a hole two feet deep beside this ‘‘bed” so he can let his legs hang over the side normally when he sits on the bed. Many dugouts have pictures of girls back home hanging on the walls. A few boys have papered their bare walls with Arab straw mats.
One evening I stuck my nose into the dugout of Sgt. Ray Aalto, 4732 Oakton Street, Skokie, Illinois. He is an ordnance man now, caring for the guns on airplanes, but before the war he was a steam-boiler man. Aalto has one thing nobody else in camp has. He has built a fireplace inside his dugout. He has tunneled into one end of the dugout, lined the hole with gasoline tins, and made a double-jointed chimney so that no sparks nor light can show. He wishes his wife could see him now.
The deepest and most comfortable dugout I’ve seen was built by four boys in the ground crew of a fighter squadron. It is five feet deep, and on each side, they left a ledge wide enough for two bedding rolls, making two double beds. You enter by a long L-shaped trench, with steps leading down the first part of the L. At the door is a double set of blackout curtains. Inside they have rigged up candles and flashlights with blackout hoods.
Most of the soldiers go to bed an hour or so after dark, because the camp is blacked out and there’s nothing else to do. Only those with blackout lights in their dugouts can stay up and read or play cards or talk. These four boys have dug a square hole in the wall of their dugout and fitted into it a gasoline tin with a door lock, making a perfect wall safe for cigarettes, chocolates, etc. Their dugout is so deep they can stay in it during a raid. In fact, they don’t even get out of bed.
It took the four of them three days, working every minute of their spare time, to dig their hole and fix it up. The four are Pvt. Neil Chamblee of Zebulon, North Carolina, Pvt. W. T. Minges of Gastonia, North Carolina, Sgt. Robert Cook of Montpelier, Indiana, and Sgt. Richard Hughes of Weiner, Arkansas. Sgt. Hughes was especially pleased that I came around, because his mother had written him that I was in Africa and that she hoped our paths would cross, but he never supposed they would.
I believe a character analyst could walk around this camp and learn more than you could by having the boys fill out a thousand questionnaires. Hundreds of boys have done nothing at all to their tents, but I believe at least half of them have added some home touch. A fellow doesn’t think of these things and work his head off on his own time creating them unless he’s got a real lively ingenuity in him.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 2, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in Algeria – (Feb. 1)
I don’t know whether much has been written at home about or African booklet or not. It’s on the same principle as the booklet about England that was issued to our troops there.
The African booklet is a neat little blue-backed affair of 16 pages. It was written before we came here, and consequently is prefaced by the admission that “our welcome by the inhabitants is not known at this time.” I might add that after several months of studying the situation I still don’t know what our welcome is.
The booklet describes briefly the history and geology of the North African countries. Since it always makes a good impression for a writer to pick out flaws, I’ll take the liberty of pointing out a few small errors in our booklet. For instance, it says “little rainfall is experienced along the coast.” Some Californian must have written that. If that stuff that comes down day after day along the Algerian coast in a piercing, chill, England-like downpour isn’t rain, then I must be shell-shocked.
When you’re wet to the skin for three days at a time and shivering with cold in mud halfway to their knees. I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time convincing several hundred thousand soldiers that it hasn’t been raining.
The booklet also says that:
Mirage is of fairly frequent occurrence. It generally occurs early in the morning.
It may be there are mirages in summertime, I don’t know. But the only mirage anybody has seen around here this winter would be one induced by approximately four bottles of cheap wine.
The booklet explains the new issue of American money given us. It adds that there will be little to buy over here (and they are right) and advises soldiers to allot at least 75% of their pay home. There is so little to spend money on over here that everybody has more than he knows what to do with. Officer-friends of mine say they have never saved so much money in their lives. As for me, I’m spending a total of about $5 a week (My employers will probably try to keep me here forever when they read this).
Being a financial ignoramus from way back, it’s all Greek to me why we issued this American money to begin with. For the French money still exists – both currencies are acceptable – and now that the newness has worn off, the Army is paying off in francs anyhow. The British issued a special money for their troops too. It’s all too deep for me.
The most interesting part of the book is its “Do’s and Don’ts." It warns us never to enter mosques, and never to loiter, smoke, or spit in front of a mosque.
It says that bread is holy to the Moslems, and never to cut it but always break it with the fingers, and not to let any drop on the ground. It says further that you must always eat with your right hand, even if you are a southpaw. I asked a French Algerian about this, and he says he never heard of it before. So, I’ve continued to eat left-handed and nothing has happened.
The booklet warns us not to give Moslems alcoholic drinks, not to take dogs into a house, and not to kill snakes or birds, since the Arabs believe that the souls of departed chieftains reside in them.
Finally, the book says:
Talk Arabic if you can to the people. No matter how badly you do it, they like it.
This is good advice but how any American is to go about trying to talk Arabic is more than I know. Most of us can’t even learn enough French to get by, and Arabic is an almost impossible language to learn.
The Army has put out a few little booklets giving some Arabic words and phrases. I’ll give you a few examples of how easy it is to speak Arabic. For instance, if an Arab asks you what that thing is hanging from your belt, you reply “bundikeeya sughayzara” – which means pistol. After you’d talked an hour or two along that line and were ready to call it a day, you’d say to the Arab:
Lailtak syeeda ataimsik behair.
…which means “good night.”
The book ends by saying that some Arabic sounds are almost impossible for Americans to learn. For example, it says that “kh” resembles the sound made when clearing the throat, and that “gh” is a deep gurgling noise.
If you were to sneeze, cough, whistle, choke and hiccup all at once, that would mean:
I love you, baby, meet me in front of Walgreens right after supper, and leave your veil at home.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Another forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 2)
It happens that my best flying friends in this war have been bomber men, but I wish somebody would sing a song, and a glorious one, for our fighter pilots. They are the forgotten men of our aerial war.
Not until I came up close to the African front did I realize what our fighter pilots have been through and what they are doing. Somehow or other you don’t hear much about them, but they are the sponge that is absorbing the fury of the Luftwaffe over here. They are taking it and taking it and taking it. An everlasting credit should be theirs.
In England, the fighters of the RAF got the glory because of the great Battle of Britain in 1940. But in America, our attention has been centered on the bombers. The spectacular success of the Flying Fortresses when they went into action made the public more bomber-conscious.
There is still rivalry between the fighters and the bombers, as there always has been. That in itself is probably a good thing. But of late, it has sort of slipped out of the category of rivalry – it has developed into a feeling on the part of the fighter pilots that they are neglected and unappreciated and taking a little more than their share on the nose. Their ratio of losses is higher than that of the bombers, and their ratio of credit is lower.
There have been exaggerations in the claims that the Fortresses can take care of themselves without fighter escort. Almost any bomber pilot will tell you that he is deeply grateful for the fighter cover he has in Africa, and that if he had to go without it, he would feel like a very naked man on his way to work.
Our heavy bombers now are always escorted by Lockheed Lightnings (P-38s). It is their job to keep off German fighters and to absorb whatever deadliness the Nazis deal out. It means longer trips than fighters ever made before. Sometimes they have to carry extra gas tanks, which they drop when the fight starts. They mix it with the enemy when they are already tired from long flying at high altitudes. And then if they get crippled, they have to navigate alone all the way home.
The P-38 is a marvelous airplane, and every pilot who flies it loves it. But the very thing that makes the Lightning capable of these long trips – its size – unfits it for the type of combat it faces when it gets there.
If two Lightnings and two Messerschmitt 109s got into a fight, the Americans are almost bound to come out the little end of the horn, because the Lightnings are heavier and less maneuverable.
The ideal work of the P-38 is as an interceptor, ground strafer, or light hit-and-run bomber. It would be a perfect weapon in the hands of the Germans to knock down our daylight bombers. Thank goodness they haven’t got it.
Convoying bombers is monotonous work for the fighter pilot who lives on dash and vim. These boys sometimes have to sit cramped in their little seat for six hours. In a bomber you can move around, but not in a fighter. The bomber has a big crew to do different things, but the fighter pilot is everything in one. He is his own navigator, his own radio operator, his own gunner. When you hear the pilots tell of all the things they have to do during a flight, it is amazing that they ever have the time to keep a danger eye out for Germans.
Although our fighters in North Africa have accounted for many more German planes than we have lost, still our fighter losses are high. I have been chumming with a roomful of five fighter pilots for the past week. Tonight, two of those five are gone.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Algeria – (Feb. 3, delayed)
Some people collect stamps for a hobby. Some people carve battleships out of matchsticks. Some send themselves postcards from all the foreign cities they visit. But I have a hobby that is much more interesting and ambitious than any of these.
It took shape in my mind many years ago when I was lying, wretched and miserable, with dengue fever in Mexico. Since I was a traveler anyhow, my new hobby fitted right in with my work. Great goal that formed in my head was to be sick in every country on the face of the earth, before finally cashing in my checks on home soil.
I’ve made gratifying progress in the past half-dozen years. I’ve been sick in Panama, Peru, Chile, French Guiana and the Bahama Islands.
I damn near died once in Alaska, Hawaii and Guatemala have heard my moans of anguish. Portugal contributed its aches and pains. Ireland blessed me with a high fever and violent chills. Even dear old England made me sick at times.
And then I came to Africa. For a while, it looked as though things might bog down here. I felt perfectly fine. I felt alarmingly good. It began to worry me. What would people say?
But my worries are all over now. Africa is under my belt. I’m just arising from ten days of the African flu. I burned, chilled, coughed, ached and cried out in agony. It was first-rate, grade-A, all-wool misery. In fact, one of the most satisfactory illnesses I’ve ever had. Vive l’Afrique!
My illness was what is known colloquially among us boys as the “african pip.” It is really nothing more than old-fashioned Chicago influenza. But upon this is superimposed a special type of some throat native to these parts – a sore throat so outstanding in its violence that it was awarded the Medaille Sorum Throatus d’honneur at the Paris Exposition of 1896, against sore throats from all over the world.
If the Army never does anything else for me, I’ll always contend that the Army saved my neck. They gave me better than I’d have got if I’d been paying for it. In fact, among all my touring illnesses I’ve never had better treatment than here in darkest Africa.
I lay in a perfectly good bed in a perfectly nice room in an old hotel taken over by the Army. The Army doctor who attended me happened to live in adjoining room, as all I had to do to call him was throw a glass or an ashtray against the opposite wall and he would come dashing in with stethoscope swinging.
My meals were served at bedside by white-coated Army waiters right from the general’s own mess. Several times a day, Medical Corpsmen from the Army dispensary came with little pens and hoods and alcohol burners, and gave me inhalation treatments from their boiling fumes. Army friends were continually dropping in to bring me three-month-old mail that had just arrived, or to bring me tangerines, or my cigarette rations, or the latest news or rumors of news.
It was a sulfa drug that put me on the road to health again. I wish they’d start selling sulfa drugs in grocery-store packages. So, I could write a testimonial about them. For I’m becoming quite an exhibit of the benefits of sulfa-this and sulfa-that.
In previous foreign countries, I’ve had sulfanilamide and sulfathiazole. This time, they gave me sulfadiazine. The doctor said it would probably make me sick at the stomach, but it didn’t it merely made me keenly aware of the most remarkable people all around the room, saying the most remarkable things. After a day or two, these people all packed their bags and left, and then I was a well man once more, albeit a weak one.
General weakness, general laziness, and the general’s fine food kept me glued to my room for five days after I wasn’t sick at all any longer. Finally, the colonel said if I didn’t get up and walk out for me meals, he was going to exercise the Army regulations which provide for the court-martial of correspondents.
So, I’m in circulation, the vacation is over, the record is complete, and now I might as well pick up my bedroll and move on to India or someplace, for there’s no use hanging around here and maybe being sick twice in the same place. That would be known as wasted effort.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 5, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Algeria – (Feb. 4)
I’ve dwelt all I intend to upon my recent bout with the African flu, and I must tell you
about the aggregation of plumbers, professors, horse doctors, and traveling salesmen who were delegated by the Army to pull me back to life.
First there was Pvt. Henry R. Riley, who walked in one day with his arms full of laboratory apparatus, and said he was ready to give me the inhalation treatments necessary to clear my throat and chest of its awful load. Pvt. Riley is a jockey by trade! Pvt. Riley is one of those good old boys from Oklahoma, good-natured and slow-talking. He was born in Pawhuska, and has been riding horses ever since he could remember.
His nickname is “Beans.” He says he was Leading Rider of America in 1930, booting home 187 winners that year. He rode for Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney’s Greentree Stables. Beans had to give up racing in 1933 when his weight got up to 132 pounds and he couldn’t do anything with it. He weighs 145 pounds now, is 30 years old, and feels wonderful.
After he quit riding, Beans went into the medical end of racehorse training. He says he worked under the finest veterinarians in the business. He was still making the racetrack circuits with the training stables right up to wartime. He has a wife and stepson.
I thought it necessary to make a little joke about a horse doctor being put into the Army Medical Corps and set to doctoring people, but Beans saw no inconsistency in it at all. He’s as happy as a bug in his work, and says he’d rather be in the Medical Corps than any other branch of the Army, even the cavalry.
Beans says very seriously:
Doctoring people and doctoring horses is exactly the same except you give a horse from 12 to 16 times as much. There’s a difference of opinion. Some say 12, some say 16. I always hold to 12 myself, to be on the safe side.”
Beans’ treatment worked all right with me. But from this day onward I shall never be able to look upon myself as anything more than one-twelfth of a horse.
Next on my list is the young man who brought my meals – a redheaded, nice-looking fellow perpetually ready to break out into a grin. He is Pvt. Thomas Doyle, 1422 Woodward Ave., Lakewood, Ohio. He goes either by Tom or Red, so I called him Red to remind me of the days when I had hair and it was red.
On the second meal Red came beaming in behind his tray and said:
I know now. I thought at noon I ought to know your face and I’ve been thinking ever since and finally I’ve got it. We read your column all the time at home in Cleveland.
From then on Red would bring my meals and then sit down and light a cigarette and hold conversation throughout the time I was eating. Red used to be an asbestos worker. He said:
What on earth is an asbestos worker? We put asbestos around pipes.
Red belongs to a union – Local No. 3 of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers. He laughs at the name, as he does at nearly everything else. But he sure likes his union.
Every year they give away Christmas turkeys to the members. This year, they obviously couldn’t ship turkeys all over the world, so they sent a money order for $10 to each member serving overseas.
Red grins:
Wonder what Westbrook Pegler would think of that?
Red got his $10 just a few days before Christmas. He’s trying to find something especially Algerian to buy and send home to his wife.
Yes, he got married a couple of months before going into the Army, even though he’s just a kid. His wife is a secretary at Thompson Aircraft. He married a schooldays sweetheart. He says:
I didn’t make any mistake either. I’m sure glad I did it.
Like the other boys, Red doesn’t mind being in the Army. At first, he was an infantryman, and then in England they made a fireman out of him, on the grounds that he was so asbestos-like, I suppose. And then when he got to Africa, they converted him into a waiter on tables. Red’s colonel is a pretty tough egg, not much given to compliments. But on the third day of Red’s dining-room career, the colonel complimented him on his prowess.
Red said:
That was pretty nice, but I had to laugh at getting complimented on being a waiter when I don’t want to be a waiter. Oh, it’s all right, but I’m going to try to get transferred, because I’d hate to have to say I fought the whole war with a serving tray.
One of the saddest parts about getting well was the end of the nice mealtime conversations with Red Doyle, the Asbestos Kid. But I’ve still got some more of the Army to tell you about tomorrow.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 6, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Algeria – (Feb. 5)
The sawbones who aided me to victory in my recent battle with North African flu was a young Boston doctor named Lt. Albert Deschenes. He and I had happened to be on a couple of trips together before I fell ill, consequently we already knew each other by our first names. Thus, the doctor’s bedside manner was all that the most plaintive patient could ask. Furthermore, I was the first of my breed that he had ever seen, and he felt it would be a bad omen to lose his first correspondent. So, Dr. Deschenes leveled his full professional skill in my direction and thus preserved one more lousy newspaperman for posterity.
The Army takes no pay for medical services rendered, of course, so my only hope is to keep on surviving all and sundry foreign germs for the duration, and wind up in Boston some beautiful day in 1944 and buy Dr. Al Deschenes a drink. He’ll need it by then.
Another of the Medical Corpsmen who came to render services at my bedside was Cpl. William C. Barr – a high-school teacher by profession. Barr lives at 1314 Logan Ave., Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and he taught arithmetic, history, and English in the Tyrone High School before going into the Army. He is a bachelor.
Barr has a degree from Muskingum College at New Concord, Ohio, and has been working on his master’s at Penn State. You’d think it would be pretty devastating on a fellow of Barr’s background to swing into the rough-and-tumble life of the Army. But he says he’s had no trouble adjusting himself. He actually enjoys his work in the Medical Corps, even though some of it is pretty menial. He says he’d rather be here than in any other branch of the Army. He even goes so far as to say you meet a lot of interesting people.
One advantage of being sick is that people keep bringing you things. Sgt. Chuck Conick, from Pittsburgh, took an airplane trip to a neighboring country and brought me back bananas, grapefruit, and lemons. Maj. Raleigh Edgar, of Columbus, Ohio, barged in one evening with two cans of American oyster stew. And Maj. James V. Smith gave forth with a big slice of old-fashioned fruitcake, direct from Mrs. Smith’s personal oven in Greenville, Mississippi.
The Red Cross sent me books to read. The sentries downstairs sneaked up with cups of hot coffee late at night, coffee which I didn’t want at all but which I drank hungrily out of deep gratitude for their thoughtfulness. Even a general wandered in one night and sat on my bed and talked a while, thinking he was in somebody else’s room, I presume.
One afternoon Lt. Duncan Clark of Chicago, one of the press censors, came past to help cheer me up, and since I was busy killing flies with a folded-up French newspaper, he contributed a little item on fly-killing technique. Lt. Clark said he had discovered, in some earlier research, that flies always take off backwards. Consequently, if you’ll aim about two inches behind them, you’ll always get your fly on the rise. So, for the next few days I murdered flies under this scientific system. And I must say that I never missed a fly as long as I aimed behind it.
The African flies, incidentally, are worth a little essay of their own. They look just like American flies, but there are two differences. One, while eating they raise high up on their legs and flutter their wings, like a chicken stretching. And, two, they are the most indestructible damn flies I’ve ever seen.
It is almost impossible to kill an African fly outright. It simply cannot be done with one swat. You stun him with the first blow, and then you have to beat him to death.
The blow with the Sunday New York Times would merely knock an African fly off his pins. It would require the Sears Roebuck catalog to bludgeon one into insensibility. And if you insisted upon execution at one stroke, I know od no instrument carrying sufficient weight and power short of the unabridged Webster’s Dictionary.
Thus ends one phase of my North African campaign.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 8, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 7)
It is a long jump from teaching grade school in Indiana to leaping out of an airplane 11,000 feet over some African mountains, but Tom Thayer made it. He hopes his next jump will be right back to an Indiana farm, and there he’ll stay.
Tom Thayer is “the hope of Hoosierdom," as the boys call him. He is from Hope, Indiana. Tom is 27, weighed 200 pounds, taught the fifth and sixth grades for five years at Clifford, Indiana, and is now the navigator of a Flying Fortress. They say he is the best celestial navigator in his squadron.
Not long ago, a bunch of Fortresses started a bombing trip to Bizerte. Over the mountains they ran into stormy, freezing weather. The ship Tom was navigating iced up and went out of control. The captain gave the order over the intercom for the crew to put their parachutes on and get ready to jump. A minute later he gave the order to jump. Lt. Thayer was first on the list. He opened the escape hatch, and out he went.
Now, in the next few seconds some things happened. The other men didn’t jump immediately, because they couldn’t get the ball-turret gunner out of his turret. While they were pulling and tugging at him, the captain got some control over the plane. Then he ordered the bombs salvoed – which means dropped so they won’t explode – and that gave him still more control. Then he countermanded the order to jump. But poor Tom was already halfway to earth. The plane returned safely to base in less than an hour. It took Tom four days.
After his parachute opened, Tom says, he could still see the plane but it seemed to be below him instead of above. He thought he must be falling up. He hasn’t figure it out yet.
He dropped through several thousand feet of clouds, still holding his pulled ripcord, for he knew if he saved it, he would become a member of some club, although he couldn’t remember its name – the Caterpillar Club. Anyhow his hand finally got so cold he threw the ripcord away.
The mountains where he landed were very rocky. His head struck as he came down, and he bled a good deal. He was conscious, but couldn’t get up for about five minutes.
He says the mountains were full of Arabs, working in the fields. He walked a short way and spoke to one, but not knowing the language, he didn’t get very far. So the Arab took him to a village and they went to a stone house, apparently the home of the village chief. The whole village clustered around to stare at him.
The chief was friendly and brought Tom a mattress, and also gave him an Arab nightgown to keep him warm. It was only 4:30 in the afternoon, but Tom lay down and went to sleep. Pretty soon the Arab brought in what Tom supposed was tea, though he wasn’t sure. Then he went to sleep again. About 8:30, the Arab came in with dinner – goat meat. It wasn’t too good.
Four other Arabs slept on the floor in the same room with Tom that night. Their snoring kept him awake. So did the fleas – he’s still got the welts. A sheep slept in the same room too. Tom didn’t sleep a wink all night.
Next morning, they fed him three fried eggs and some fried potatoes, and wound a turban around his injured head. Then they went out and killed the sheep that had slept in the same room. They butchered it and cooked its heart in the same coals where the Arabs had been warming their feet. They gave the heart to Tom, and he figured then that he was safe for sure.
After all this they got six donkeys, lashed the sheep’s carcass on top of one of them, put Tom on another, and started out. The donkeys over here are very small, and Tom is very big. When they would ride along the edge of a chasm, on a little shelf just wide, enough for a donkey, Tom could feel his long legs itching for the ground.
He finally arrived at a French garrison. He tried to pay them for taking care of him, but they wouldn’t take any money. However, some photographs from his wallet fascinated them, and they indicated a desire for some of them. So, Miss Mary Scott of Shelbyville, Indiana, will be interested to know that her photograph now reposes on a French soldier’s mantle.
At any rate, Tom says he’s going to marry Mary the day he gets home and then start farming and never stop.
For a while Tom was pretty sore about the others not jumping too, but he was all over it by the time he got back to the airdrome. They say he’s the best-natured guy in the outfit. Nobody had ever seen him really mad, so they decided to rib him. One man rushed up and shook hands and said:
Tom, you made a mistake. The captain didn’t say “Bail out.” He said, “Look, hail out.”
They had him fooled for a minute.
Tom’s dad used to be county auditor back home. He had one term and then got defeated last fall for by only 133 votes. The boys kid Tom and say that if he’d only had the gumption to make his spectacular jump a couple of months earlier, his father could no doubt have been re-elected on the strength of it.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 9, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontline in Tunisia – (Feb. 9)
We drive our jeep in under a tree, camouflaged it by covering it with limbs, and then walked up the side of a hill for about 500 yards. Half a mile to the south of us, the battle for Ousseltia Pass in central Tunisia was going on.
We stopped in what is known as a forward command post, from which a battle is directed. This one consisted of a tent 20 feet square, well hidden under a tree. However, the whole tent had been dropped down and simply lay like a tarpaulin covering the officers’ bedrolls and bags. All the work was being done around two field telephones lying in their leather cases on the ground ten feet from the tent.
The rocky hillside was covered with little bushes and small fir trees. The sun was out and the day was rather warm. There were no papers or desks or anything – just three or four officers standing and sitting on a hillside near two telephones on the ground. One officer had a large map case. That’s all the paraphernalia there was for directing the battle.
Our troops were on top of a ridge about a quarter of a mile above us. The enemy was in the valley beyond, and on a parallel ridge a mile farther on. We could walk up and look over, but we couldn’t see anything. Both sides were well hidden in the brush. Every minute or two our nearby artillery would fire, and then half a minute or so later we could hear faintly the explosion of the shells far away. An officer said:
Nobody’s doing much damage right now, but at least we’re getting in ten shots to their one.
Now and then a louder and much nearer blast interrupted us. When I asked what size gun this was, an officer said it wasn’t a gun – it was enemy mortar shells exploding. I supposed they were three or four miles away, but he said they were falling only 800 yards from us.
Once in a while we could hear machine-gun fire in the distance. A young second lieutenant stood near the phones and did all the talking over them. In fact, he appeared to be making all the decisions. And he impressed me as knowing his business remarkably well.
The highest officer around was a lieutenant colonel, but he seemed to leave everything to his lieutenant, and at every signal of approaching planes, he ran to a nearby foxhole and stayed there till the planes had gone. Other officers commented about him in terms not meant for mixed company, but the young lieutenant said nothing.
The phone rang every few minutes. Other command posts would be calling in to report or to ask instructions. Now and then the chief post, some 15 miles back, would call and ask how things were going. Officers and enlisted men kept appearing from down below or over the hill, asking about things. One sergeant came to inquire where a certain post was, saying he had two jeep tires and a tire for an antitank gun that he was supposed to deliver.
Another sergeant, wearing an overcoat, came up the hill, saluted formally, and reported that a certain battery setup was ready to fire. They told him to go ahead. A phone rang. The captain of an ack-ack battery said the enemy had his range and asked permission to move. He was told to go ahead. All the conversation was informal and unexcited.
A phone rang again. An officer at another command post was asking for a decision on whether to move forward. The young lieutenant, apparently not wishing to give direct orders to a higher officer, solved the problem by putting his words in the form of advice, sprinkling two or three “sirs” in every sentence. I thought he handled it beautifully.
Now and then the lieutenant would phone some other post. All the posts have code terms such as “Hatrack” and “Monsoon” and “Chicago.” I’ve just made those up as examples, since naturally I can’t print the real codenames.
Once the lieutenant phoned to a rear command post and told them to send more trucks to a town where two trucks had been disabled that morning. Several times he phoned other posts to check up on a colonel who was wandering around the battle area in a jeep. You could tell they were very fond of the colonel, and that he apparently paid little attention to danger.
There were no planes in the sky when we arrived, but that morning the Germans had been over and bombed and strafed our troops badly. The command post had called for air support, but somebody at the other end said the planes were busy on other missions and:
You’ll just have to grin and bear it.
The men around our post spoke cynically about that remark all afternoon. They would say:
Grin and bear it, eh? Well, we’ll bear it but we won’t guarantee to grin.
But in the late afternoon, our planes did come. First, we didn’t know they were ours, so we all took to the foxholes. Finally, after they had flown overhead a couple of times without doing anything, somebody yelled:
They’re definitely ours!
So, we came out. The planes circled for about 10 minutes hunting for the correct spot in the bush-covered mountainside. They seemed to take their time at it, to make sure, and then finally they started peeling off one at a time and came diving down at a hillside a mile away.
They’d dive and then wheel back high into the sky and dive against. Apparently, there was no enemy attack, for there were no black puffs around the planes. We could hear their machine guns, and their cannon shells bursting.
They kept on diving and shooting for about 15 minutes. Pretty soon an officer came running up the hill and said:
Do you see that? Those damned Germans are mixed up and strafing hell out of the Italians!
When we told him they were our planes, he said “Oh!” and went back down the hill.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 10, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the frontline in Tunisia – (Feb. 9)
The afternoon sun went over the hill and the evening chill began to come down. We were sitting on a busy hillside – just a small bunch of American officers forming what is called a forward command post.
Officers who had been in the battle for Ousseltia Pass all day started wandering in through the brush on foot, to report. They were dirty and tired but the day had gone well, and they were cheerful in a quiet and unexpressed way.
A Medical Corps major came up the hill and said:
Those blankety-blanks! They’ve knocked out two of my ambulances that were trying to get the wounded back. A hell of a lot a Red Cross means to them!
Nobody said anything. He went back down the hill, as mad as a hornet.
The officers kept talking about three fellow officers who had been killed during the day, and a fourth one who was missing. One of the dead men apparently had been a special favorite. An officer who had been beside him when it happened came up with blood on his clothes. He said:
We hit the ground together. But when I got up, he couldn’t. It took him right in the head. He felt no pain.
An officer told an enlisted man:
Raise up that tent and pack his stuff.
Another one said:
The hell of it is his wife’s due to have a baby anytime now.
Just then a sergeant walked up. He had left the post that morning with the officer who was now missing. They all asked:
Where’s Captain So-and-so?
The sergeant said he didn’t know. Then he said he himself had been captured. “Captured?” the officers asked.
He said:
Yes. The Italians captured me and then turned me loose.
The sergeant was Vernon Gery, 305 West Navarre St., South Bend, Indiana. He is a married man, and was a lawyer before the war. He is a young and husky fellow. He didn’t appear to be very much shaken by his experience, but he said he never was so scared in his life.
Sitting there on the ground he told me his experience. He and the missing captain and a jeep driver had gone forward at 9:30 in the morning to hunt for the body of a popular officer who had been killed. They parked the jeep, and the captain told them to stay there till he returned. They covered the jeep with brush and then hid in the bushes to wait while the captain went on alone. As they were lying there the driver yelled to Sgt. Gery:
Look, they’re retreating!
He saw eight soldiers coming toward them. He thought they were French, but actually they were an Italian patrol. The driver’s shout attracted their attention and they began shooting. The two Americans fired back. The jeep driver was hit and killed instantly. Gery said the driver yelled just once when he was hit. He said:
I’ll be hearing that yell for a long time.
In a moment the Italians had Gery. Apparently, they were on a definite mission, for seven of them went on, leaving one guard to watch Gery. They had taken his rifle, searched him, and given back his identification cards, but they kept his cigarettes, pipe, tobacco, chewing gum, and message book.
I asked:
Did they take your money?
Gery said:
I didn’t have any. I haven’t been paid in three months. I haven’t had a cent in my pocket for weeks.
For an hour the Italian sat 10 feet from Gery with his rifle pointed at him. Gery says the Italian must have been well-acquainted with the American rifle, for he passed the time taking it apart and putting it together, and did it rapidly and correctly. The Italian didn’t try to talk to Gery.
Suddenly our artillery began dropping shells close to where they sat. That was too much for the Italian. He just got up and disappeared into the bushes. And Gery started home.
As Gery finished his story, the commanding colonel came back from his afternoon’s tour. He sat down on the ground, and the officers gathered around to hear his reports and get their instructions for the night. There was still gunfire around. The colonel, a tall, middle-aged man, wore glasses and had a schoolteacherly look. But he cussed a blue streak and made his decisions crisply. You could tell he was loved and respected. He called all his men by their first names. He wore a brown canvas cap, without any insignia at all. Officers at the front tried to look as little like officers as possible, for the enemy liked to pick them off first.
Somebody asked if the colonel would like a cup of tea. He said he would. Somebody yelled, and out of the bushes came a Chinese boy in uniform and helmet, carrying a teapot covered with a rag.
Planes came over again, and several officers ran to foxholes, but the colonel acted as if he didn’t see them. The rest of us stayed and continued the conversation. The officers told him about the three members of his staff who had been killed.
He said:
Christ! Well, we’re in a war. We’ve got to expect it. We must try not to feel too bad about it.
And then he went on:
Here’s the way it is. We are being relieved at 11:30 tonight. Jim, you start taking up your phone wire, but nothing else moves a foot before daylight. Joe, you keep on firing up to leaving time, so they won’t know we are pulling out. We’ve got ‘em on the run, and I wish we could stay, but we’ve got our orders.
Then everybody left to carry out his new duties, and we went back down the hill to our jeep.
That is the way war looks from a forward command post.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 11, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 10)
It is hard for a layman to understand the fine points of aerial combat as practiced at the moment in North Africa. It is hard even for the pilots themselves to keep up, for there are changes in tactics from week to week.
We will have some new idea and surprise the Germans with it. Then they’ll come across with a surprise maneuver, and we will have to change everything to counteract it. But basically, at the moment, you can say that everything depends on teamwork. The lone dashing hero in this war is certain to be a dead hero within a week. Sticking with the team and playing it all together is the only guarantee of safety for everybody.
Our fighters go in groups with the bombers, ranging the sky above them, flying back and forth, watching for anything that might appear. But if they see some Germans in the distance nobody goes after them. That would be playing into the enemy’s hands. So, they stick to their formation above the bombers, making an umbrella.
The German has two choices – to dive down through them, or to wait until somebody is hit by flak and has to drop back. Then they are on him in a flash. 'When that happens, the fighters attack but still in formation. Keeping that formation always and forever tight is what the flight leaders constantly drilled into the boys’ heads. It is a great temptation to dash out and take a shot at some fellow, but by now they’ve seen too many cases of the tragedy of such actions.
One group leader told me:
If everything went according to schedule, we’d never shoot down a German plane. We’d cover our bombers and keep ourselves covered and everybody would come home safe.
The fighter pilots seem a little different from the bomber men. Usually, they are younger. Many of them were still in school when they joined up. Ordinarily they might be inclined to be more harum-scarum, but their work is so deadly and the sobering dark cloud of personal tragedy is over them so constantly that it seems to have humbled them. In fact, I think it makes them nicer people than if they were cocky.
They have to get up early. Often, I’ve gone to the room of my special friends at 9:30 in the evening and found them all asleep. They fly so frequently they can’t do much drinking. One night recently, when one of the most popular fighter pilots had been killed right on the home field, in an accident, some of the boys assuaged their grief with gin. They said:
Somehow you feel it more when it happens right here than when a fellow just doesn’t come back.
When they first came over here, you’d frequently hear pilots say they didn’t hate the Germans, but you don’t hear that anymore. They have lost too many friends, too many roommates. Now it is killing that animates them.
The highest spirits I’ve seen in that room were displayed one evening after they came back from a strafing mission. That’s what they like to do best, but they get little of it. It’s a great holiday from escorting bombers, which they hate. Going out free-lancing to shoot up whatever they could see, and going in enough force to be pretty sure they’ll be superior to the enemy – that’s utopia.
That’s what they had done that day. And they really had a field day. Them ran onto a German truck convoy and blew it to pieces. They’d laugh and get excited as they told about it. The trucks were all full of men, and “they’d fly out like firecrackers.” Motorcyclists would get hit and dive 40 feet before they stopped skidding. Two Messerschmitt 109s made the mistake of coming after our planes. They never had a chance. After firing a couple of wild bursts, they went down smoking, and one of them seemed to blow up.
The boys were full of laughter when they told about it as they sat there on their cots in the dimly lighted room. I couldn’t help having a funny feeling about them. They were all so young, so genuine, so enthusiastic. And they were so casual about everything – not casual in a hard, knowing way, but they talked about their flights and killing and being killed exactly as they would discuss girls or their school lessons.
Maybe they won’t talk at all when they finally get home. If they don’t, it will be because they know this is a world apart and nobody else could ever understand.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 12, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 10)
Lt. Jack Ilfrey is the leading American ace in North Africa at the moment. However, that’s not my reason for writing about him.
In the first place, the theory over here is not to become an individual fighter and shoot down a lot of planes, so being an ace doesn’t mean so much. In the second place, somebody else might be ahead of Ilfrey by this evening, with fate pulling the strings the way she does.
So, I’m writing about him largely because he is a fine person and more or less typical of all boys who fly our deadly fighters.
Jack Ilfrey is from Houston. His father is cashier of the First National Bank. His family home is at 3122 Robinhood Street. Jack is only 22. He has two younger sisters. He went to Texas A&M for two years, and then to the University of Houston, working at the same time for the Hughes Tool Company. He will soon have been in the Army two years.
It is hard to conceive of his ever having killed anybody. For he looks even younger than his 22 years. His face is good-humored. His darkish hair is childishly uncontrollable and pops up into a little curlicue at the front of his head. He talks fast, but his voice is soft and he has a very slight hesitation in his speech that somehow seems to make him a gentle and harmless person.
There is not the least trace of the smart aleck or wise guy about him. He is wholly thoughtful and sincere. Yet he mows ‘em down.
Here in Africa, Ilfrey has been through the mill. He got two Focke-Wulf 190s one day, two Messerschmitt 109s another day. His fifth victory was over a twin-motored Messerschmitt 110, which carries three men. And he has another kill that has not yet been confirmed.
He hasn’t had all smooth sailing by any means. In fact, he’s very lucky to be here at all. He got caught in a trap one day and came home with 268 bullet holes in his plane. His armor plate stopped at least a dozen that would have killed him.
Jack’s closest shave, however, wasn’t from being shot at. It happened one day when he saw a German fighter duck into a cloud. Jack figured the German would emerge at the far end of the cloud, so he scooted along below to where he thought the German would pop out, and pop out he did – right smack into him, almost.
They both kicked rudder violently, and they missed practically by inches. Neither man fired a shot, they were so busy getting out of each other’s way. Jack says he was weak for an hour afterward.
There is nothing “heroic” about Lt. Ilfrey. He isn’t afraid to run when that is the only thing to do.
He was telling about getting caught all alone one day at a low altitude. Two Germans got on his tail.
He says:
I just had two chances. Either stay and fight, and almost surely get shot down, or pour on everything I had and try to get away. I ran a chance of burning up my engine and having to land in enemy territory, but I got away. Luckily the engine stood up.
Ilfrey, like all the others here, has little in the way of entertainment and personal pleasure. I walked into his room late one afternoon, after he had come back from a mission, and found him sitting there at a table, all alone, killing flies with a folded newspaper.
And yet they say being an ace is romantic.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 13, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
A forward airdrome in French North Africa – (Feb. 12, by wireless)
Although our fighter pilots are shooting down more German planes than we are losing, still they have a deep and healthy respect for the German airmen.
One of the boys said:
They apparently brought their very best men to Africa because the newcomers sure know their business. There are no green hands among them.
American fliers who have been captured, and then escaped, report that there seems to be a sort of camaraderie among airmen – not in the air, but on the ground. There is no camaraderie at all in the air – it’s fight to the death and nothing else.
The other night the boys were recalling stories from the last war. They had read how Allied and German fighters would shoot up all their ammunition and then fly alongside each other and salute before starting home. There is none of that stuff in North Africa.
Our pilots really lead lonesome lives over here. There is nothing on earth for them to do but talk to each other. In two weeks, you’ve talked a guy out, and after that it’s just the same old conversation day after day.
The boys hang around the field part of the day, when they’re not flying; then go to their rooms and lie in their bunks. They’ve read themselves and talked themselves out. There are no movies, no dances, no parties, no women – nothing. They just lie on their cots.
One of them said:
We’ve got so damn lazy we hardly bother to go to the toilet. We’re no damn good for anything on earth anymore except flying.
Flying a fighter plane is not comfortable. There is so much to do, and you’re so cramped, and you strain so constantly watching for the enemy. Also, fighter cockpits are not heated. The pilots get terribly cold at 25,000 and 30,000 feet. They don’t wear electrically heated suits. In fact, they can’t even wear too heavy flying clothes, for their bulk would have made it impossible to twist around in the cockpit. They wear only their ordinary uniforms with coveralls on top of those, plus flying boots and gloves. And they can’t even wear really heavy flying gloves.
One of them said:
Our bodies don’t get so cold, it’s our hands and feet. Sometimes they get so cold they’re numb.
Said another:
It’s funny, but you’re never cold when you’re in a fight. You actually get to sweating, and when it’s over your underwear is all wet in back. Of course, that makes you get all the colder afterwards.
It’s interesting to sit in with a bunch of pilots in the evening after they’ve returned from their first mission. They’re so excited they are practically unintelligible. Their eyes are bloodshot, they are red-faced with excitement, and they are so terrifically stimulated they can’t quiet down. Life has never been more wonderful. They tell the same story of their day’s adventure over and over two dozen times before bedtime. The other night one boy couldn’t eat his supper. Another one couldn’t go to sleep.
The older boys listen patiently. They were that way not so long ago themselves. They know that battle maturity will come quickly. Just drop in a few weeks from now.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 17, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With U.S. forces in North Africa – (Feb. 16)
Four good soldiers, who have already done more than their share in the war have been down in these parts lately. They are Kay Francis, Martha Raye, Mitzi Mayfair and Carole Landis.
Some people may take lightly the contributions of Hollywood folks to the war effort, but I don’t. These gals work themselves to a frazzle. They travel dangerously. They live and work under mighty unpleasant conditions. They don’t get a dime. They are losing a lot and they have nothing to gain – nothing material, that is. But surely, they are going home with a warm inner satisfaction, knowing that they have performed far beyond the ordinary call of duty.
The quartet of stars has been away from America since October. They flew the Atlantic by Clipper, toured the camps in Northern Ireland and England, and came to Africa by Flying Fortress. They have heard bombs fall, and they know about Army stew. They’ve averaged four hours’ sleep a night. Each of them has had a bout with the flu. They have done all their own washing, because there’s no other way to get it done. Yet they could all be in California lying on the sand.
When they came out to our far desert airdrome, they put on their performance on the flat bed of a big wrecking truck out in the midafternoon sun, surrounded by soldiers sitting on the ground. They spoke the first English from a woman’s mouth these soldiers had heard in months. To say they were appreciated is putting it mildly.
Half the fun and half the good, I suppose, of such a performance is the opportunity it gives the soldiers in the audience to imagine themselves as great lovers, and the inspiration it provides for the soldiers’ own brand of humor.
Kay Francis starts it off by saying they’d rather be here than any place in the world. That brings a thunderous cascade of boos. Then she says:
The reason is there’s no place else we could be the only women among several thousand men.
That brings the laugh. Then she says:
And I know every one of you would protect me, wouldn’t you?
That brings the “Oh yeahs!” and yells and whistles of appreciation.
When Carole Landis comes out, something like a great sigh goes over the crowd. Carole, as you know, is rather voluptuous. As she finishes her song and holds out her arms, a pathetic, wracked voice comes from the far edge of the audience, a lonely guy screaming to the world his comical misery:
I can’t stand it!
Mitzi Mayfair wears a skimpy green spangly thing and does her famous dances. A couple of dozen soldiers are perched on the truck’s big steel boom above her, and every time Mitzi kicks, they pretend to swoon and fall off. Mitzi ends her act by calling for jitterbug volunteers. The boys are bashful, but finally a private is pulled down off the boom. He is no slouch as a jitterbug, but she almost dances him off his feet. She winds up by throwing the exhausted soldier over her shoulder and carrying him off the stage.
Sometimes Mitzi gets herself in a pickle with this stunt. One night in England she had to carry off a guy who weighed 225 pounds. Another time she sprained a shoulder. And in her second performance at this airdrome, she almost met her Waterloo.
This show was for flying officers, the ones who actually do the bombing and fighting, and there’s nothing bashful about them. When Mitzi called for volunteers, up rose Capt. Tex Dallas, a Fortress pilot who doesn’t give a damn about anything. Tex took off his coat, folded it neatly, and walked challengingly onto the stage. Mitzi whispered instructions to him, but Tex doesn’t follow instructions very well. Instead of pretending to be exhausted, he had Mitzi on the ropes within a minute. After chasing her around the stage he finally had her hiding behind the piano. The audience went wild.
Eventually, after poor Mitzi had given herself up for lost, Tex relented and let her carry him off the stage.
I’ve seen Mitzi dance in New York musical comedies, and now I’ve seen her dance in dust-covered slacks on the African desert. She has already given a strenuous year and a half of her life to the war and she’s in it for the duration, and all I can say is, she’s a honey.
Martha Raye is really the star of the troupe. The soldiers have gone for her crazy brand of slapstick. The program winds up practically in a riot when all four girls sing the French, British and American national anthems.
The girls are pretty sore about one thing. It seems one of the American broadcasters in Algiers broadcast back to America that they wouldn’t go to the Tunisian front because they were afraid. He asked why they were any better than anybody else.
Actually, the girls begged to go to Tunisia but were turned down. The generals wouldn’t let them go because it would be dangerous for troops to be concentrated to see the show. Those girls were not afraid. Carole Landis even wanted to go on a bombing mission.
Personally, I think they will deserve medals.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 17)
A big military convoy moving at night across the mountains and deserts of Tunisia is something that nobody who has been in one can ever forget.
Recently I have been living with a frontline outfit. Late one afternoon, it received sudden orders to move that night, bag and baggage. It had to pull out of its battle positions, time the departures of its various units to fit into the flow of traffic at the first control point on the highway, and then drive all night and go into action on another front.
All the big convoys in the war area moved at night. German planes would spot a daytime convoy and play havoc with it. It is extremely difficult and dangerous, this moving at night in total blackness over strange and rough roads. But it has to be done.
Our convoy was an immense one. There were hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men. It took seven and a half hours to pass one point. The convoy started moving at 5:30 in the evening, just before dusk. The last vehicle didn’t clear till 1 o’clock the next morning.
I rode in a jeep with Capt. Pat Riddleberger, of Woodstock, Virginia, and Pvt. John Coughlin, Manchester, New Hampshire. Ahead of us was a small covered truck which belonged to Riddleberger’s tank-destroyer section. We were a little two-vehicle convoy within ourselves. We were to fall in near the tail end, so we had half the night to kill before starting. We stood around the truck, parked in a barn lot, for an hour or two, just talking in the dark. Then we went into the kitchen of the farmhouse which had been used as a command post and which was empty now. There was an electric light, and we built a fire in the kitchen fireplace out of boxes. But the chimney wouldn’t draw, and we almost choked from the smoke.
Some officers had left a stack of copies of the New York Times for October and November lying on the floor, so we read those for an hour or so. We looked at the book sections and the movie ads. None of us had ever heard of the new books or the current movies. It made us feel keenly how long we had been away and how cut off we were from home. One of the boys said:
They could make money just showing all the movies over again for a year after we get back.
We finished the papers and there were still three hours to kill, so we got blankets out of the truck and lay down on the concrete floor. We were sleeping soundly when Capt. Riddleberger awakened us at 1:00 a.m. and said we were off.
The moon was just coming out. The sky was crystal-clear, the night bitter cold. The jeep’s top was down. We all put on all the clothes we had. In addition to my usual polar-bear wardrobe, which includes heavy underwear and two sweaters, that night I wore a pair of coveralls, a heavy combat suit that a tank man lent me, a pair of overshoes, two caps – one on top of the other – and over them a pair of goggles. The three of us in the jeep wrapped up in blankets. In spite of all that, we almost froze before the night was over.
We moved out of the barn lot, and half a mile away we swung onto the main road, at the direction of motorcyclists who stood there guiding the traffic. Gradually our eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, and it wasn’t hard to follow the road. We had orders to drive in very close formation, so we kept within 50 feet of each other.
After a few miles we had to cross a mountain range. There were steep grades and switchback turns, and some of the trucks had to back and fill to make the sharper turns. There was considerable delay on the mountain. French trucks and buses would pass and tie up traffic, swinging in and out. And right in the center of these tortuous mountains we met a huge American hospital unit, in dozens of trucks, moving up to the front. They were on the outside of the road, and at times their wheels seemed about to slide off into the chasm.
We had long waits while traffic jams ahead were cleared. We shut off our motors and the night would be deathly silent except for a subdued undertone of grinding motors far ahead. At times we could hear great trucks groaning in low gear on steep grades far below, or the angry clanking of tanks as they took sharp turns behind us.
Finally, the road straightened out on a high plateau. There we met a big contingent of French troops moving silently toward the front we had just vacated. The marching soldiers seemed like dark ghosts in the night. Hundreds of horses were canning their artillery, ammunition and supplies.
I couldn’t help feeling the immensity of the catastrophe that had put men all over the world, millions of us, to moving in machine-like precision throughout long foreign nights – men who should have been comfortably asleep in their warm beds at home. War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 18)
The jeep in which I was riding was almost at the tail end of our immense armored convoy when we started, but before many hours and passed we had overtaken so many slow-moving vehicles that we worked our way well up into the convoy. As we droned along through the night it was hard to realize that we were part of such a fabulously long string of war machines. Vehicles stretched ahead of us for scores of miles, but of course we couldn’t see them, and our only companionship was five or six red taillights ahead of us. We all drove without headlights, but did have taillights so we could see when the fellow ahead was stopping.
Occasionally we would smoke, and I would light cigarettes for the others. We didn’t try to hide the flare of the match, for it was only a flash and then quickly gone. Once in a while we would overtake a truck with a dead engine, or a big wrecker towing a half-track. But our American machines are good ones, and of the hundreds of vehicles in that great convoy, only a handful had trouble during the long journey.
Our convoy was as complete as a circus. There were ammunition trucks, kitchens, repair shops, trucks carrying telephone switchboards and generators for camp lighting, trucks carrying bombs. There were jeeps carrying generals, and there were great wreckers capable of picking up a whole tank. It was quite a contrast to the Arabs we’d pass in the night, with their heavily loaded camels and burros.
The moon gave us enough light to drive by, but how the bulk of the convoy, which started long before the moon came up, ever got over the mountain range is beyond me. They had to drive in total blackness. Guides would go ahead to study the road. They spotted all the sharp turns and steep banks, and they would indicate the direction of traffic with their hooded flashlights.
About every hour and a half, we would stop for the truck driver’s traditional stretch. At one of these stops the drivers checked their mileage. We had been on the road three hours and come exactly 27 miles. Snaking a huge convoy over a mountain range in the dead of night is slow business.
But open country was ahead, and when we reached that we stepped up to 35 and 40 miles an hour. The night wind cut more cruelly now. We didn’t talk much, for it was too cold. My goggles kept steaming inside, and I would have to lift them off and wipe them. Finally, all of us except the drivers pulled blankets over our heads and dozed a little. But not much, for holes in the gravel roads were hard to see and often the jeep would do a backbreaking hurdle.
At the stops, the soldiers would get out and run up and down the road, or stand in one spot jitterbugging in an effort to warm their feet. The ones I felt sorriest for were the infantrymen, packed like sardines in open trucks with no protection from the bitter cold. It seems as if the infantry always gets it in the neck.
Several hours after midnight the convoy got itself into a ridiculous snarl. During a rest stop apparently some driver far ahead had gone to sleep and forgotten to start on again. We waited for half an hour. Then impatient drivers pulled out and started passing. That was fatal. The first thing we knew two lines of traffic choked the road. At every gully and every turn they would snarl up and one line would have to stop. Eventually it got just like those awful holiday jams at home where you move a few feet at a time.
I said to Capt. Riddleberger:
I’m amazed that such a thing could be allowed to happen. This strikes me as being the perfect way not to win the war.
He agreed, but I was sorry for my remarks later, for in an hour or so, everything straightened itself out. We were clear of the mountains now. We passed through silent little Arab villages, and drove across treeless prairies.
About 4 a.m., Riddleberger and I changed places with two soldiers riding in the back end of the truck ahead. We lay down on barracks bags and pulled blankets over us, thinking we’d snatch a little sleep. Pretty soon Riddleberger said:
These blankets smell so bad I can’t sleep.
Mine didn’t smell exactly like perfume either.
The captain said:
Well, hell. The poor guys never have a chance to take a bath.
Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that he and I never took baths either, I wonder how we smell to others.
My feet were so cold and achy that at last I took off my overshoes and shoes and held my cold toes in my hands, trying to warm them. After half an hour or so they quit hurting. Eventually I went to sleep. When I came to there was a faint light in the sky. It was just 7 o’clock. I had been dead to the world for two hours. It was hard to believe, for the truck had been jolting and bouncing and stopping and starting all that time. Weariness is a great cure for insomnia, or maybe I had been anesthetized by those blankets, who knows?
The Pittsburgh Press (February 20, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 19)
This is the last of a series about an armored convoy trip in which a whole great section of an Army moved by night across half of Tunisia, from one fighting front to another. I have written so much about it because soldiers at the front are moving constantly and the battle areas of the world writhe with these vast convoys stealing dangerously across country, hidden in the darkness.
You hear little about them, but this one I’ve just ridden with is typical of hundreds that are moving somewhere this very night.
The head of our convoy started just at dusk and reached its destination at 4 in the morning. The tail end didn’t start till 1 a.m., and it was nearly noon before it reached journey’s end and safety. We were near that tail end.
Just after daylight the members of our little party changed places again. Capt. Pat Riddleberger got behind the wheel of the truck on which we had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep. I went back to relieve one of the half-frozen soldiers in our jeep. When we started again, we were all wide awake and vividly alert, for the hour of danger was upon us. We still had hours to go in daylight, and it was a magnificent chance for the Germans to destroy us by the hundreds with strafing planes.
The sun came up slowly over the bare mountain ridges. The country was flat and desert-like. There was not a tree as far as we could see. It looked like West Texas. We passed Arabs, blue with cold, shepherding their flocks or walking the roads. There was hoarfrost on the ground, and sometimes we saw thin ice in the ditches.
At daylight our vehicles, acting on orders and through long experience, began to spread out. Now we were running about 200 yards apart. As far as we could see across the desert, ahead and behind, the road was filled with drab brown vehicles.
Sgt. James Bernett, 1541 Cheyenne St., Tulsa, Oklahoma, was driving our jeep. I rode up front with him. Pvt. John Coughlin sat in the back. He unsheathed a machine gun and mounted it on a stanchion between us. We kept a careful lookout for planes. After a while we saw trucks ahead stopping and soldiers piling out like ants, but I was in such a daze from cold and fatigue that I didn’t sense at first what that meant. Neither did the others.
Then all of a sudden Coughlin yelled:
Watch it! Watch it!
And we both knew what he meant. By now all the men ahead were running out across the desert as fast as they could go. Bernett slammed on the brakes – and you can stop a jeep almost instantly. I was so entangled in blankets that it took a few seconds to get loose. Coughlin couldn’t wait. He went out right over my head before the jeep had stopped. He caught a foot as he went, and it threw him headlong. He hit the road, flat, and skidded on his stomach in the gravel. He hurt one knee, but he limped the fastest limp I’ve ever seen.
We beat it out across the desert until we found a little gully a hundred feet from the road. We didn’t get into the gully, but stopped and took our bearings. None of us could see or hear anything. We waited about five minutes. Soldiers were strung out over the desert on both sides of the road. Everybody gradually decided it was a false alarm. And so, cussing but immensely relieved, we straggled back to the road.
We were all so cold we were brittle. One tall soldier came limping back saying:
My feet are so damn cold that when I hit the ground my toes broke right off.
That remark seemed to set us off, and suddenly the whole thing got funny. One soldier yelled at Coughlin:
My grandma’s awkward too. But then she’s old.
It wasn’t funny to Coughlin. He was angry and dead serious about his tumble. Sgt. Bernett and I got the giggles. You can do that sometimes when you’re pitifully cold and also wonderfully relieved. We couldn’t keep from laughing at Coughlin’s comical misery and rage, and laughed till we could hardly breathe. Bernett said:
Well, there’s one thing about the Army. It’s good for a laugh a minute.
I can still see us out there on the African desert at dawn, snickering, with death iti the sky. It wasn’t till later that we learned the alarm was real and that far ahead of us, out of sight and sound, the convoy had been strafed and men wounded.
The rest of the trip was like any trip. The road grew dusty and the wind colder, it seemed, than ever. But the danger of attack was always with us, and we stopped and hit the ditch a couple of times before realizing that the planes we saw were our own.
We pulled into our new station a little before 11 in the morning, camouflaged the tanks and trucks, and then broke out some canned rations. We cooked sausages on a gasoline stove on the hood of the jeep. And a half hour later we went to a kitchen truck and ate a big lunch.
Then, while others worked at digging themselves in and cleaning a jumble of gear, I spread my bedroll on the ground and slept in utter unconsciousness, for three hours, with the bright sun benevolently baking my dirty face.
The Pittsburgh Press (February 22, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
The Tunisian front – (Feb. 21)
It must be hard for you folks at home to conceive how oru troops right at the front actually live. In fact, it is hard to describe it to you even when I’m among them, living in somewhat the same way they are.
You can scarcely credit the fact that human beings – the same people you’ve known all your life – could adjust themselves so acceptably to a type of living that is only slightly above the caveman stage.
Some of our troops came directly to the Tunisian front after the original occupation of North and West Africa, and have been here ever since. They have not slept in a bed for months. They’ve lived through this vicious winter sleeping outdoors on the ground.
They haven’t been paid in three months. They have been on British rations most of the time, and British rations, though good, get mighty tiresome. They never take off their clothes at night, except their shoes. They don’t get a bath oftener than once a month. One small detachment acquired lice and had to be fumigated, but all the rest have escaped so far. They move so frequently they don’t attempt to put in any home touches, as the men do at the more permanent camps toward the rear. Very few of the frontline troops have ever had any leave. They never go to town for an evening’s fun. They work all the time.
Nobody keeps track of the days or weeks. I’ll wager that 90% of our frontline troops never know when Sunday comes.
Furthermore, the old traditional differences between day and night have almost ceased to exist. Nighttime no longer necessarily means rest, nor daytime work. Often, it’s just reversed. The bulk of our convoying of supplies and shifting of troops is done at night. The soldiers are accustomed to traveling all night, sometimes three or four nights in a row. Irregularity of sleep becomes normal. On soldier told me he once went three days and nights without sleep.
You see men sleeping anywhere anytime. The other day I saw a soldier asleep in blankets under an olive tree at 2 in the afternoon. A few feet away a full colonel was sleeping soundly on the ground. In battle you just go on until you drop.
It isn’t always possible to get enough food up to the fighting soldiers. I have just been with one artillery outfit in the mountains who were getting only one cold meal a day.
Nurses tell me that when the more seriously wounded reach the hospital, they are often so exhausted they fall asleep without drugs, despite their pain.
The war coarsens most people. You live rough and talk rough, and if you didn’t toughen up inside you simply wouldn’t be able to take it. An officer friend of mine, Lt. Leonard Bessman of Milwaukee, told me two incidents of a battle that touched him deeply.
One evening he and another officer came up to a tiny farmhouse, which was apparently empty. To be on the safe side he called out, “Who’s there?” before going in. The answer came back:
Capt. Blank, and who the hell wants to know?
They went in and found the captain, his clothes covered with blood, heating a can of rations over a gasoline flame. They asked if they could stay all night with him. He said he didn’t give a damn. They started to throw their blankets down, and the captain said:
Look out for that man over there.
There was a dead soldier lying in a corner.
The captain was cooking his supper and preparing to stay all night alone in that same room. The blood and fury of death about him that day had left him utterly indifferent both to the companionship of the living and the presence of the dead.
The other incident was just the opposite. Another captain happened to be standing beside Bessman. It was just at dusk and they were on the desert. The night chill was coming down. The captain looked to the far horizon and said, sort of to himself:
You fight all day here in the desert and what’s the end of it all? Night just closes down over you and chokes you.
A little later Bessman got out a partly filled bottle of gin he had with him and asked this same sensitive captain if he’d like a drink. The captain didn’t even reach out his hand. He simply asked:
Have you got enough for my men too?
He wouldn’t take a drink himself unless the enlisted men under him could have some.
All officers are not like that, but the battlefield does produce a brotherhood. The common bond of death draws human beings toward each other over the artificial barrier of rank.
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The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1943)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
The Tunisian front – (Feb. 22)
After a few weeks of frontline living, your whole perspective on the niceties and necessities of life change.
You used to be sore when you couldn’t get a taxi. Now you’ve struck gold when you find a spot where you can lie down out of the wind.
Even my own perspective has changed, and as a correspondent I’ve had only the barest taste of the rough going. For a lifetime I have bathed with becoming regularity, and I thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. Now I have just had my first bath in a month, and I go two weeks at a time without even taking off my socks. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to make much difference.
The other day, I had to laugh at myself over a little emotion I experienced. We had arrived one evening at a new frontline headquarters. It was centered around a Tunisian farmhouse, as practically all command posts were. Soldiers and officers alike were sleeping just anywhere they could – in trucks, under trees, in the barn and chicken houses. It was cold and damp, as usual.
Nobody tells a correspondent where to sleep or what to do when he is gypsying around the front. He shifts for himself. So I nosed around and found a place to sleep. It was under a big French grain wagon sitting in the barn lot. Some soldiers had found several strips of corrugated tin roofing and set them around three sides of the wagon, making walls. The wagon bed formed a roof overhead. They had brought straw from a nearby stack and put it on the ground under the wagon. There we threw our bedding rolls.
It was the coziest place I’d slept in for a week. It had two magnificent features – the ground was dry, and the wind was cut off. I was so pleased at finding such a wonderful place that I could feel my general spirits go up like an elevator. When the detachment got orders to move the next day, I felt a genuine regret at leaving this little haven. And to think after all it was only some pitiful straw on the hard ground under a wagon.
As we were going to bed that night, Hal Boyle of the Associated Press, who was sleeping next to me, said:
I believe that in wartime your physical discomfort becomes a more dominant thing in life than the danger you’re in.
And I believe that’s true. The danger comes in spurts; discomfort is perpetual. You’re always cold and almost always dirty. Outside of food and cigarettes, you have absolutely none of the little things that made life normal back home. You don’t have chairs, lights, floors, or tables. You don’t have any places to set anything, or any store to buy things from. There are no newspapers, milk, beds, sheets, radiators, beer, ice cream or hot water. You just sort of exist, either standing up working or lying down asleep. There is no pleasant in-between. The velvet is all gone from living.
It doesn’t get much below freezing here in central Tunisia, but you must believe me when I say we all suffer agonies from the cold. Any soldier will back me up.
The days are sunshiny, and often really warm, but the nights are almost inhuman. Everybody wears heavy underwear and all the sweaters he can find, plus overcoat and gloves and knitted cap. And still he’s cold. We have snow on the mountains here.
The soldiers somehow resent the fact that so many of you folks at home just think because we’re in Africa that we’re passing out with the heat. Any number of soldiers have showed me letters from their families full of sympathy because of the heat prostrations they must be suffering.
Soldiers ask me for Heaven’s sake to get over to the folks at home that Africa in winter is frigid. I’ll tell you, in one little incident, just how cold it is. And also how little money means compared to bodily necessities.
When not traveling around the fronts, I’m living in a small igloo tent among fir trees at a certain forward camp. There I hole up for days at a time to write these columns. The tent is fine except that there’s no heat in it and no way to get any heat.
So the other day, along the road, I ran into a soldier in a half-truck who had a kerosene stove – the old-fashioned kind they used to heat the school with, you know, I offered him $50 for it – back home it would be worth about $3.
He didn’t hesitate a second. He just said, “No sir,” and that was the end of that.
It would have been just the same if I’d offered him $500. He couldn’t use the money, and without the stove he’d be miserable.
Now do you see how things are different over here with us?