Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANA ISLANDS (delayed) – After you take off from one of the island stops crossing the Pacific, your plane climbs noisily and laboriously for about half an hour, then it levels off into steady and less labored flight.

Gradually the intense tropical heat of the ground fades away, and a chill comes over a cabin. Then the flight orderly turns on the heater, and adjusts it until you are comfortable in your light clothes, even without a jacket.

It was after midnight when we took off from the little island of Kwajalein, in the Marshalls, and we were not to stop again until we reached the Marianas.

Passengers are not allowed to smoke until the plane has stopped climbing and leveled off. Then the flight orderly stands at the head of the cabin and shouts in good Navy language “the smoking lamps lit,” and then brings around paper cups for you to use as ashtrays.

About every three hours the flight orderly would wake us up to feed us. Gond food too, and served on trays Just as on the regular airlines.

Frequent feedings

It got to be a joke among the passengers the way they poured food into us. They fed us at every stop, and about every three hours in the air. They nearly fed us to death.

The flight orderly is a sailor who does the same job as a steward on the airlines. We had two crews and two flight orderlies during our long trip, since the same crew stops off halfway for a day’s rest, and a new crew comes on.

Both our flight orderlies were swell boys. There were 16 passengers of us – 12 Navy and Army officers (one a Marine Corps general) three enlisted men, and myself, the only civilian aboard. The orderlies took good care of us, were friendly and willing, treated us all alike, and they weren’t a bit scared of the high rank aboard.

They wore plain blue Navy dungarees and blue shirts, and worked with their sleeves rolled up. Our first one was Seaman Howard Liner of Lubbock, Texas. He used to sell “Dr. Pepper” before he joined the Navy.

36 Pacific trips

Howard has made 36 of these trips across the Pacific, and enjoys it. He gets back to San Francisco frequently, and on his next trip his wife is coming up from Lubbock to see him. Howard always has a little brown pencil stuck behind his ear.

The other flight orderly was Seaman Don Jacobi of San Gabriel, California. He wore a plaited leather belt, and hung from it was a big bunch of keys and a hunting knife in a scabbard. This was his seventh trip.

He seemed quite mature, yet I found he is only 18, and had quit nigh school to join the Navy. His one ambition is to finish school after the war, and go on to college.

It’s mighty tiresome sitting in the same seat on an airplane for nearly 24 hours, even when the seats are reclining ones, as ours were.

The worst part is trying to sleep. You doze for a while and then you start squirming, because you can’t stretch your legs out and your knees start to hurt. Consequently, those who have traveled a lot by air try to find someplace to he down. The floor is good, but a stack of mail sacks is better.

Small size helpful

They had mail piled in the rear four seats, so I got my blanket and started fixing myself up on the mail bags. An Army colonel ahead of me said, “I just tried that, but had to give it up. There are too many square boxes inside the sacks and they stick into you.”

But I went ahead, and being smaller than the colonel, discovered I could sort of snake myself in between the hard places in the sacks. And that way I slept most of the journey to the Marianas.

But one funny thing did happen that I’d never experienced before in flying. The plane had quite a bit of vibration, and when my head touched the plane anywhere, the vibration would carry all through my head.

That didn’t bother me, but for some odd physiological reason, this vibration made the tip of my nose itch so badly I had to scratch it all the time. And thus I dozed the night away, really only half asleep because of the constant necessity for scratching my nose.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 20, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANA ISLANDS (Delayed) – Our chief pilot on the last long leg of our flight from Honolulu to the Marianas was Lt. Cmdr. Don Skirvin. He’s from the family that owns big hotels in Oklahoma City and even if you didn’t know, you could tell from his creased hands and neck that he’s either a Texan or an Oklahoman.

Cmdr. Skirvin has never worked at the hotel business, though. He has to have freedom, and gad about the world. He has been flying 18 years – flew for oil companies in South America, went to Spain during the revolution and flew combat there.

Then came our war and he went into the Navy and flew combat in the South Pacific. But he likes big planes best, and now is trans-Pacific skipper on these huge airliners.

Just before daylight Cmdr. Skirvin sent the orderly back to wake me up, and asked me to come forward to the pilot’s compartment. Then he had me sit in the co-pilot’s seat, and from that exalted vantage point on this monster of the air I saw the dawn gradually touch and lighten the cottony acres of clouds out there over the wide Pacific.

Little peaks of grandeur

Flying is mostly monotonous and dull. But there are always little peaks of grandeur in every flight. Seeing this dawn come was one of them. It was an exaltation, and you couldn’t help but be thrilled by it.

Cmdr. Skirvin takes movies as a hobby, and has taken 1,500 feet of color film of just such dawns and sunsets as this one. He said the folks at home wrote that if he saw such things as this often, no wonder he liked to fly.

We came out of the boundless sky and over our island destination just a little after dawn. The island was green and beautiful – and terribly far from home – down there in the fresh dawn.

Do it all the time

It seemed unbelievable that we could have drawn ourselves to it so unerringly out of the vast Pacific spaces. It was like a blind man walking alone across a field, and putting his finger directly on some previously designated barb of a wire fence on the other side. But as I say, they do it all the time. (Thank the Lord!)

Then Cmdr. Skirvin asked me if I would like to stay up front while we landed. Indeed I would, for that is a rare invitation. I stood just behind the two pilots while we circled the field and dropped lower and circled again.

Landing one of these immense planes is like a ritual in school. The co-pilot takes a printed list, encased in plexiglass, from off the instrument board. Then he starts reading aloud, down the list. After each item the pilot calls back “Check.”

Thorough check

It takes five minutes to go through all the complicated adjustments to change the plane from something that will only fly, into something that will also merge successfully with the earth. Always the typed list is read aloud and checked to make sure that no single thing is forgotten.

And then we were ready. It was hot down close to the ground, and sweat was pouring off us. Over his radio the co-pilot asked the ground for permission to land. Cmdr. Skirvin twisted himself more firmly into his seat, took a heavy grip on the control wheel, pushed forward on the stick, and down we went.

When you fly, there is no sense of speed at all. It is as though you were sitting forever in one spot. But when you land, the earth comes up to you with appalling speed. Things go faster and faster. Everybody is tense. The whole field comes up at you almost as in a nightmare. It is the most thrilling thing about flying.

Landed at last

And then you blend into the earth. These planes are so big and stand so high that it seemed to me we were still 50 feet in the air when we felt the wheels touch. The plane stuck to the runway and rushed on forward with shocking speed.

The runway was long, and Cmdr. Skirvin called, “We’ll use all of it, for I don’t believe in tromping on the brakes.”

Then gradually we slowed and when we’d come almost to a stop, a jeep pulled out in front of us. On the back of it was a big blackboard and painted on the board were the words “Follow Me.” The jeep slowly led us to our parking place.

Then the co-pilot read off another list, while the pilot pulled levers and turned switches and called “Check.” It took more than a minute to transform that great metal bird from something animate and miraculous into something that stands lifeless on the ground.

And then the door opened and we stepped down onto the strange soil of the Mariana Islands – close at last to the vast sprawling war of the Pacific.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 21, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ernie Pyle is now on an aircraft carrier and apparently participated in one of the big actions that have been going on in the Pacific. However, no direct reports have come back yet and meanwhile his articles are telling of his trip to the new assignment.

IN THE MARIANA ISLANDS – It is tropical where we are now, wonderfully tropical.

It looks tropical, and best of all, it feels tropical. Just now is the good season, and it is like the pleasantest part of summer at home.

But it is hotter than you think, and you change your whole approach to the weather here.

You get from the Navy a long-billed “baseball” cap to shield your eyes from the sun. your clothes closet has an electric light burning constantly in it, to keep it dry so your clothes won’t mold. You change your leather wristwatch strap to a canvas one, for a leather one would mold on your arm.

You put on heavy high-topped shoes again, for it still rains some and the red mud is sloppy. And instead of light socks for coolness as you’d think, you put on heavy socks to help cushion your feet in the big shoes, and to absorb the moisture.

Officers wear their sunglass cases hooked to their belts. Ties are unknown. There is no glass in the windows. Wide slanting caves jut out fat beyond the windows in all the permanent barracks buildings, fore when it rains here it really pours.

Horizontal rain

And as someone said, it rains “horizontally” here. In the few showers since we arrived, I’ve seen that the rain does come at quite an angle.

Actually, the rainy season is supposed to be over. Consequently, every time it showers during the day, the Californians in camp point out that the weather is “unusual.”

Lt. Cmdr. Max Miller and I are staying briefly in a room of a bachelor officers quarters – or BOQ. Our famous Seabees have put them up all over these various islands since we took over from the Japanese last summer.

They are in the curved form of immense Quonset huts, made of corrugated metal and with concrete floors. Some of them are even two-storied. They have a wide hall down the center, and individual rooms on each side. The walls are cream-colored.

Wonderful beds

The outside wall is almost all window, to let lots of air in. The spaces are screened but have no glass, for it never gets so cold you’d want to shut the window. But it is pleasantly cool at night, and we sleep under one blanket.

Each room has a clothes closet and a washstand and a chest of drawers. And also two beds. These beds are the talk of the Marianas.

They are American beds, with double mattresses, soft and wonderful. As everybody says, they’re finer beds than you’d have at home. I ran into one Army officer who had served in Europe, and he laughed and said, “After the way we roughed it there, I feel self-conscious about sleeping like this over here. But if the Navy wants to send over these beds, I’m sure as hell going to sleep in them.”

The great working camps of the Seabees and the troops are largely of tents, with ordinary cots in them. But on the whole, now that we have been improving the islands for several months, everybody lives pretty comfortably.

Reception committee

Max and I had a reception committee when we walked into our room.

A half dozen Seabees were throwing old lumber into a truck just outside our window. We hadn’t been in the room two seconds until one Seabee called through the window: “Say, aren’t you Ernie Pyle?”

I said right, and he said “whoever thought we’d meet you here? I recognized you from your picture.” And all the others stopped work and gathered outside the window while we talked through the screen.

The Navy furnishes orderlies for these rooms, to keep them clean. Mostly they are colored boys, regular enlisted men. Pretty soon our orderly walked in, and he started staring at me and I at him, for he sure looked familiar.

Together on invasion

He was a great tall fellow, and he grinned and we shook hands, for we had been on the same ship together when we invaded Sicily a year and a half ago.

He was a table waiter then. His name is Elijah Scott, his home is in Detroit, and he’s a steward’s mate second class. He was on the other side of the world nearly a year, spent eight months in America, and now here he is over here, almost as newly arrived as I am.

And that isn’t all. Within half an hour after we arrived, there was a knock on the door and in walked an Army major with a big grin. “Well,” he said, “I see you haven’t got any fatter since the old days in Sicily and Italy.”

He was Maj. Peter Eldred of Tucson, Arizona. A year and a half ago, he was public relations officer for the Seventh Army in Sicily. Now he’s a press censor in the middle of the Western Pacific, sitting on my bed talking about what used to be.

Sometimes the world gets almost ridiculous in being so small after all. I’m expecting my father and Aunt Mary to climb through the window here any minute now.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 22, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – You may wonder why we have American troops at all here in the Marianas Islands, since we are 1,500 miles away from the Philippines, China, or Japan itself.

Well, it’s because in this Pacific war of vast water distances, we have to make gigantic bases of each group of islands we take, in order to build up supplies and preparations for future invasions farther on.

The Marianas happen to be a sort of crossroads in the Western Pacific. Stuff can go either west or north from here. Whoever sits in the Marianas can have his finger on the whole web of the war.

Thus the Marianas are becoming a heart of the Pacific war. Our naval and military leaders make no bones about it, for the Japs know it anyhow, but they’re too far away to do anything about it.

The Marianas are both thrilling and engaging right now. Scores of thousands of troops of all kinds are here. Furious building is going on. Planes arrive on schedule from all directions as though this were Chicago Airport – only they’ve come thousands of miles over water. Convoys unload unbelievable tonnages.

No more placidity

These islands will hum throughout the war and they will never return to their former placid life, for we are building on almost every inch of useable land. Supplies in staggering quantities are being stacked up here for future use. You can take your pick of K-rations or lumber or bombs, and you’d find enough of either to feed a city, build one, or blow it up.

Fleets can base here between engagements. Combat troops train here. Other troops come back to rest. Great hospitals are set up for our future wounded. Pipelines criss-cross the islands. Trucks bumper to bumper dash forward as though they were on the Western Front. Ox-cart trails turn almost overnight into four-lane macadam highways for military traffic.

No blackout

There is no blackout in the islands. If raiders come the lights are turned off, but they seldom come anymore. The Marianas are a pretty safe place now.

Great long macadam airstrips are in operation and others are being laid. The Marianas are the seat of some of our B-29 bomber fleets which will grow and grow and grow.

Thousands of square tents, thousands of curved steel Quonset huts, thousands of huge, permanent warehouses and office buildings dot the islands. Lights burn all night and the roar of planes, the clank of bulldozers, and the clatter of hammers is constant. It is a strange contrast to the stillness that dwelt amidst this greenery for so many centuries.

There are 15 islands in this chain, running due north and south. They string out a total distance of more than 400 miles. We are on the southern end.

Hold three islands

We only hold three islands, but they are the biggest and the only three that count. The other islands are completely “neutralized” by our occupancy of these three.

There are a few Japs living on some of the others, but there’s nothing they can do to harm us. The islands we haven’t bothered with are small and worthless. Most of them have no inhabitants at all.

The islands we took are Guam, Tinian and Saipan. Guam had been ours for many years before Japan took it away from just after Pearl Harbor. Tinian and Saipan had been Japanese since the last war. We took the whole batch last summer.

Guam is the biggest and southernmost. Tinian and Saipan are right together, 120 miles north of Guam. You can fly up there in less than an hour, and our transport planes shuttle back and forth several times daily on regular schedule. They have to make a “dog-leg” around the island of Rota, about halfway up for there are still Japs on it with 50-caliber machine guns, and they’ll shoot at you.

Monotonous paradise

I’ve been on all three of our islands, and I must admit two things – that I like it here, and that you can’t help but be thrilled by what the Americans are doing.

And from all I’ve picked up so far, I think it can be said that most Americans like the Marianas Islands, assuming they have to be away from home at all.

The savage heat and the dread diseases and the awful jungles of the more southern Pacific Islands do not exist here. The climate is good, the islands are pretty, and the native Chamorros are nice people.

Health conditions among our men are excellent. They work in shorts or without shirts and are deeply tanned. The mosquito and fly problem has been licked. There is almost no venereal disease. Food is good. The weather is always warm but not cruelly hot. Almost always a breeze is blowing. Anywhere you look, you have a pretty view.

Yes, the islands are a paradise and life here is fine – except it’s empty and there is no diversion and the monotony eventually gnaws at you.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – There are still Japs on the three islands of the Marianas chain that we have occupied for more than six months now.

The estimate runs into several hundred. They hide in the hills and in caves, and come out at night to forage for food. Actually many of their caves were so well-stocked that they could go for months without getting too hungry.

Our men don’t do anything about the Japs anymore. Oh, troops in training for combat will go out on a Jap-hunt now and then just for practice, and bring in a few. But they are no menace to us, and by and large we just ignore them. A half dozen or so give up every day.

The Japs don’t try to practice any sabotage on our stuff. It would take another Jap to figure out why. The Japanese are thoroughly inconsistent in what they do, and very often illogical. They do the silliest things.

Here’s a few examples. One night, some of our Seabees left a bulldozer and an earth-mover sitting alongside the road up in the hills.

Cute fellows

During the night, the Japs came down. They couldn’t hurt anybody, but they could have put that machinery out of commission for a while. Even with only a rock they could have smashed the spark plugs and ruined the carburetor.

They didn’t do any of these things. They merely spent the night cutting palm fronds off nearby trees and laying them over the big machinery. Next morning when the Seabees arrived, they found their precious equipment completely “hidden.” Isn’t that cute?

On another island, there were many acts of sabotage the Japs could have committed. But all they ever did was to come down at night and move the wooden stakes the engineers had lined up for the next day’s construction of buildings!

Checked up first

There is another story of a Jap who didn’t take to the hills like the rest, but who stayed for weeks right in the most thickly American-populated section of the island right down by the seashore.

He hid in the bushes just a few feet from a path where hundreds of Americans walked daily. They found out later that he even used the officers’ outdoor shower bath after they got through, and raided their kitchens at night.

There was a Jap prison enclosure nearby, and for weeks, peering out of the bushes, he studied the treatment his fellow soldiers were getting, watched how they ate, watched to see if they were dwindling away from malnutrition.

And then one day he came out and gave himself up. He said he had convinced himself they were being treated all right, so he was ready to surrender.

And here’s another one. An American officer was idly sitting in an outbuilding one evening after work, philosophically studying the ground, as men will do.

Suddenly he was startled. Startled is a mild word for it. For in front of him stood a Jap with a rifle.

But before anything could happen, the Jap laid the rifle on the ground in front of him, and began salaaming up and down like a worshiper before an idol.

The Jap later said that he had been hunting for weeks for somebody without a rifle to give himself up to, and had finally figured out that the surest way to find an unarmed prospective captor was to catch one in a toilet!

But don’t let these little aftermath stories mislead you into thinking the Japs are easy after all. For they are a very nasty people while the shootin’s going on.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 24, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle is with the Navy in the Far Pacific. This article was written on his way.

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – Soldiers and Marines have told me stories by the dozen about how tough the Japs are, yet how dumb they are; How illogical and yet how uncannily smart at times; how easy to route when disorganized, yet how brave.

I’ve become more confused with each story. At the end of one evening, I said, “I can’t make head nor tail out of what you’ve told me. I’m trying to learn about the Jap soldiers, but everything you say about them seems to be inconsistent.”

“That’s the answer,” my friends said. “They are inconsistent. They do the damndest things. But they are dangerous fighters just the same.”

They tell one story about a Jap officer and six men who were surrounded on a beach by a small bunch of Marines.

As the Marines approached, they could see the Jap giving emphatic orders to his men, and then all six bent over and the officer went along the line and chopped off their heads with his sword.

Then as the Marines closed in, he stood knee-deep in the surf and beat his bloody sword against the water in a fierce gesture of defiance, just before they shot him.

What code led the officer to kill his own men rather than let them fight to the death is something only another Jap would know.

Other stories

Another little story – a Marine sentry walking up and down before a command post on top of a steep bluff one night heard a noise in the brush on the hillside below.

He called a couple of times, got no answer, then fired an exploratory shot down into the darkness. In a moment there was a loud explosion from below. A solitary Jap hiding down there had put a hand grenade to his chest.

Why he did that, instead of tossing it up over the bluff and getting himself a half-dozen Americans, is beyond an American’s comprehension.

On Saipan, they tell of a Jap plane that appeared overhead one bright noonday, all alone. He obviously wasn’t a photographic plane, and they couldn’t figure out what he was doing.

Then something came out of the plane, and fluttered down. It was a little paper wreath, with a long streamer to it. He had flown it all the way from Japan, and dropped it “in honor of Japan’s glorious dead” on Saipan.

We shot him down in the sea a few minutes later, as he undoubtedly knew we would before he ever left Japan. The gesture is touching – but so what?

I’ve talked with Marines. I’ve begun to get over that creepy feeling that fighting Japs is like fighting snakes or ghosts.

Queer people

They are, indeed, queer, but they are people with certain tactics, and now, by much experience, our men have learned how to fight them.

As far as I can see, our men are no more afraid of the Japs than they are of the Germans. They are afraid of them as a modern soldier is afraid of his foe, but not because they are slippery or rat-like, but simply because they have weapons and fire them like good, tough soldiers. And the Japs are human enough to be afraid of us exactly the same way.

Some of our people over here think that, in the long run, the Japs won’t take the beating the Germans have. Others think they will, and even more.

I’ve not been here long enough really to learn anything of the Jap psychology. But the Pacific War is gradually getting condensed, and consequently tougher and tougher. The closer we go to Japan itself, the harder it will be.

The Japs are dangerous people and they aren’t funny when they’ve got guns in their hands. It would be tragic for us to underestimate their power to do us damage, or their will to do it. To me it looks like soul-trying days for us in the years ahead.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 26, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – Before starting out on my long tours with the Navy, I’ve decided to visit the famous B-29 Superfortress boys who are bombing Japan from here.

This came about largely because I have “kinfolk” flying on the B-29s, and I thought I’d kill two birds by visiting and writing at the same time.

So here I am, sitting on a screened porch in my underwear, comfortable as a cat, with the surf beating on the shore and a lot of bomber pilots swimming out front.

The B-29 boys, from commandant clear down to lowest enlisted men, live well out here. They are all appreciative of their good fortune, and I’ve not heard a dissenting voice. Of course, they would all rather be home, but who wouldn’t?

The man I came to visit is Lt. Jack Bales, another farm boy from down the road near Dana, Indiana. Jack is a sort of nephew of mine. He isn’t exactly a nephew, but it’s too complicated to explain. I used to hold him on my knee and all that sort of thing. Now he’s 26, and starting to get bald like his “uncle.”

Ready for career

Jack’s folks still live just a mile down the road from our farm. But Jack left the farm and went to the University of Illinois and got educated real good, and was just ready to become a famous lawyer when the war came along and he enlisted.

He spent a year as a private and then got a commission and now he’s a first lieutenant and flew over with the B-29s from Nebraska last October.

When I telephoned Jack and said I’d be out in about an hour to stay a few days, he said he would put up an extra cot in his hut for me.

When I got there the cot was up, with blankets and mattress covers laid out on it. Jack had told the other boys he was having a visitor, and on the assumption it was a woman, Jack had six eager volunteers helping him put up the cot. When I showed up, skinny and bald, it was an awful letdown, but they’ve all been decent about it,

Record for missions

Jack lives in a steel Quonset hut with 19 other fliers. Most of them are pilots, but Jack is a radio man. He and another fellow have charge of all his squadron’s radio. He doesn’t have to go on missions except now and then to check up.

But upon arriving I learned, both to my astonishment and pride, that he had been on more missions than anybody in his squadron. In fact, he’s been on so many that his squadron commander has forbidden him to go for a while.

He doesn’t go on so many because he enjoys it. Nobody but a freak likes to go on combat missions. He goes because he has things to learn, and because he can contribute things by going.

Another mission or two and he will have had his quota authorizing him to go back to rest camp for a while. But he seems to show no strain from the ordeal. He’s pretty phlegmatic, and he says that sitting around camp gets so monotonous he sort of welcomes a mission just for a change.

Little chance to peek

During flight Jack sits in a little compartment in the rear of the plane, and can’t see out. In all his missions over Japan he’s seen only one Jap fighter. Not that they didn’t have plenty around, but he’s so busy he seldom gets to a window for a peek. The one time he did, a Jap came slamming under the plane so close it almost took the skin off.

Like all combat crewmen, Jack spends all night and at least half of each day lying on his cot. He holds the record in his hut for “sack time,” which means just lying on your cot doing nothing. He has his work so organized that it doesn’t take much of his time between missions, and since there’s nothing else to do, you just lie around.

Eight out of 10 married

The B-29 fliers sleep on folding canvas cots, with rough white sheets. Sleeping is wonderful here, and along toward morning you usually pull a blanket over you.

Each flier has a dresser of wooden shelves he’s made for himself, and several homemade tables scattered around. The walls are plastered with maps, snapshots and pinup girls – but I noticed that real pinup girls (wives and mothers) dominated over the movie beauties. In fact, eight of the 10 men in the hut are married.

Although the food is good here, most of the boys get packages from home. One kid wrote and told his folks to slow up a little, that he was snowed under with packages.

Jack has had two jars of Indiana fried chicken from my Aunt Mary. She cans it and seals it in mason jars, and it’s wonderful. She sent me some in France, but I’d gone before it got there.

Jack took some of his fried chicken in his lunch over Tokyo one day. We Hoosiers sure do get around, even the chickens.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 27, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS – When you see a headline saying “Superforts Blast Japan Again,” I hope you don’t get the idea that Japan is being blown sky high and that she’ll be bombed out of the war within another week or two,

Because that isn’t the case. We are just barely starting on a program of bombing that will be long and tough. Even with heavy and constant bombings it would take years to reduce Japan by bombing alone. And our bombings are not yet heavy.

Too, we have lots of things to contend with. Distance is the main thing, and Jap fighters and ack-ack and foul weather are other things. The weather over Japan is their best defense. As one pilot jokingly suggested, “The Nips should broadcast us the weather every night, and save both themselves and us a lot of trouble.”

Almost the first thing the B-29 boys asked me was, “Do the people at home think the B-29s are going to win the war?”

I told them the papers played up the raids, and that many wishful thinking people felt the bombings might turn the trick. And the boys said: “That’s what we were afraid of. Naturally we want what credit we deserve, but our raids certainly aren’t going to win the war.”

Out of proportion

The B-29 raids are important, just as every island taken and every ship sunk is important. But in their present strength it would be putting them clear out of proportion if you think they are a dominant factor in our Pacific war.

I say this not to belittle the B-29 boys, because they are wonderful. I say it because they themselves want it understood by the folks at home.

Their lot is a tough one. The worst part is that they’re over water every inch of the way to Japan, every inch of the way back. And brother, it’s a lot of water. The average time for one of their missions is more than 14 hours.

The flak and fighters over Japan are bad enough, but that tense period is fairly short. They are over the empire only from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on their target. Jap fighters follow them only about 15 minutes off the coast.

What gives the boys the “willies” is “sweating out” those six or seven hours of ocean beneath them on the way back. To make it worse, it’s usually at night.

Ditching usually fatal

Some of them are bound to be shot up, and just staggering along. There’s always the danger of running out of gas, from many forms of overconsumption. If you’ve got one engine gone, others are liable to quit.

If anything happens, you go into the ocean. That is known as “ditching.” I suppose around a B-29 base you hear the word “ditching” almost more than any other word.

“Ditching” out here isn’t like “ditching” in the English Channel, where your chances of being picked up are awfully good. “Ditching” out here as usually fatal.

‘Buddy System’ helps

Maybe you’ve heard of the “Buddy System” in the Infantry. They use it in the B-29s, too. For instance, if a plane is in distress on the way back and has to fall behind, somebody drops back with him to keep him company.

They’ve known planes to come clear home accompanied by a “buddy,” and you could go so far as to say some might not have made it were it not for the extra courage given them by having company.

But the big point of the “Buddy System” is that if a plane does have to ditch, the “buddy” can fix his exact position and get surface rescuers on the way.

The other morning after a mission, my friend Maj. Gerald Robertson was lying in his cot resting and reminiscing, and he said:

You feel so helpless when the others get in trouble. The air will be full of radio calls from those guys saying they’ve only got two engines or they’re running short on gas.

I’ve been lucky and there I’ll be sitting with four engines and a thousand gallons extra of gas. I could spare any of them one engine and 500 gallons of gas if I could just get it to them. It makes you feel so helpless.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 28, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – The B-29 squadron that my nephew is with is commanded by Lt. Col. John H. Griffith of Plymouth, Pennsylvania.

He walked into our Quonset hut the first night I was here and grinned sort of knowing-like as we were introduced. I felt our paths had crossed somewhere in the dim past, but I couldn’t recall it.

Finally, he said “remember the Rangitiki?”

“Of course,” I said. The Rangitiki was the ship that took us from England to Africa in the fall of 1942, Col. Griffith was in a nearby can ca that trip and we became well acquainted. But the war is big and time flies, and you do forget.

Col. Griffith flew combat missions both out of England and Africa. And now on this side of the world he has made 11 missions to Japan. But from now on, being an executive, he is restricted to four missions a month.

On one mission Col. Griffith’s bombardier had his leg blown almost off. As Col. Griffith was dragging him back into the pilot’s compartment, he thoughtlessly took off his oxygen mask. In a moment he passed out and fell over. But he freakishly fell with his face right in the mask, and it revived him.

Although still young, Col. Griffith has been in the Army eight years, and will stay in after the war. His wife and baby and dog are waiting for him at LaGrange Park, Illinois.

Illusion of big house

Until recently Col. Griffith lived with the pilots in the same Quonset hut I’m in. But a few days ago, they finished his new house. You should see it.

It’s a skeleton framework of two-by-fours about 30 feet square roofed with canvas and walled only with screen wire, tropical fashion. The roof overhangs about six feet all around to keep out the almost horizontal rain.

Inside, they’ve given it the semblance of a many-roomed house by putting up little nip-high partitions of brown burlap. This makes it seem that you have a living room, bedroom, bath, kitchen and sun porch, although it’s actually just one big room.

Shower too

The place is wonderfully comfortable. It has four desks, two cots and 10 chairs, and yet there’s lots of room left. It has a big clothes closet, and a wash bowl and shower, the water coming from two 50-gallon barrels up the hillside.

It has an icebox, a radio and a field telephone, Incidentally, Col. Griffith still has the same alarm clock he took with him when he went to England three years ago.

If you had this house in America, it would cost you $200 a month rent, yet the whole thing was built of packing boxes and metal bomb crates and army leftovers.

The wooden floor is painted battleship gray. Col. Griffith likes to keep his floor clean. Consequently, he has a big sign on his screen door saying “please remove shoes before entering.”

He isn’t joking either. He even makes his own commanding officer take off his shoes when he comes to visit. He furnishes his guests extra socks is case their feet get cold, which of course they don’t.

Built on stilts

The house is built on stilts and sits amidst laurel and other green shrubbery, wildly native, only 50 feet from the sea. You come down the slope to it over a path cut out of the laurel, and once in the house you are utterly away from everything.

Before you is only the curve of the lagoon, and the pounding of incessant rollers on the reef a hundred yards out, and the white clouds in the far blue sky. Several times a day sudden tropical snowers drench and cool the place.

It’s on Col. Griffith’s porch that I’m writing these columns. My only excuse for them not being better columns is that I can’t seem to keep away from that low deck chair at the far end of the porch. And also I keep looking up the path to see if Sadie Thompson isn’t strolling down with her umbrella.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 1, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – The B-29 is unquestionably a wonderful airplane. Outside of the famous old Douglas DC-3 workhorse, I’ve never heard pilots so unanimous in their praise of an airplane.

I took my first ride in one the other day. No, I didn’t go on a mission to Japan. We’ve been through all that before. I don’t believe in people going on missions unless they have to. And as before, the pilots here all agreed with me.

But I went along on a little practice bombing trip of an hour and a half. The pilot was Maj. Gerald Robinson, who lives in our hut. His wife, incidentally, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the very same street as our White House.

I sat on a box between the pilots, both on the takeoff and for the landing, and as much as I’ve flown, that was still a thrill. These islands are all relatively small, and you’re no sooner off the ground than you’re out over water, and that feels funny.

Odd sensation

If the air is a little rough, it gives you a very odd sensation sitting way up there in the nose. For the B-29 is so big that, instead of bumping or dropping, the nose has a “willowy” motion, sort of like sitting out on the end of a green mb when it’s swaying around.

The B-29 carries a crew of 11. Some of them sit up in the cockpit and the compartment just behind it. Some others sit in a compartment near the tail. The tail gunner sits all alone, way back there in the lonely tail turret.

The body of the B-29 is so taken up with gas tanks and bomb racks that there’s normally no way to get from front to rear compartments. So, the manufacturers solved that by building a tunnel into the plane, right along the rooftop.

The tunnel is round, just big enough to crawl in on your hands and knees, and is padded with blue cloth. It’s more than 30 feet long, and the crew members crawl back and forth through it all the time.

On missions, some of the crew get back in this tunnel and sleep for an hour or so. But a lot of them can’t stand to do that. I’ve heard combat crewmen bring up the subject a half dozen times. They say they get claustrophobia in the tunnel.

A fellow does get sleepy on a 14-hour mission. Most of the pilots take naps in their seats. One pilot I know turned the plane over to his co-pilot and went back to the tunnel for “a little nap,” and didn’t return for six hours, just before they hit the coast of Japan. They laughingly say he goes to sleep before he gets his wheels up.

The B-29 is a very stable plane and hardly anybody ever gets sick even in rough weather. The boys smoke in the plane, and the mess hall gives them a small lunch of sandwiches and oranges and cookies to eat on the way.

Wear regular clothes

The crewmen wear their regular clothes on missions, usually coveralls. They don’t have to wear heavy fleece-lined clothes and all that bulky gear. because the cabin is heated. They do slip on their heavy steel “flak vests” as they approach the target.

They don’t have to wear oxygen masks except when they’re over the target, for the cabin is scaled and “pressurized” – simulating a constant altitude of 8,000 feet.

Once in a great while one of the plexiglass “blisters” where the gunners sit will blow out from the strong pressure inside, and then everybody better grab his oxygen mask in an awful hurry. The crew always wears the oxygen mask over the target, for a shell through the plane “depressurizes” the cabin instantly, and they’d pass out.

The boys speak frequently of the unbelievably high winds they hit at high altitudes over Japan. It’s nothing unusual to have a 150-mile-an-hour wind, and my nephew, Jack Bales, said that one day his plane hit a wind of 250 miles an hour.

Another thing that puzzles and amuses the boys is that often they’ll pick up news on their radios, when still only halfway home, that their bombing mission has been announced in Washington. Thus, all the world knows about it, but they’ve still got a thousand miles of ocean to cross before it’s finished. Science, she is wonderful.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS (delayed) – I’ve always felt the great 500-mile auto race at Indianapolis to be the most intriguing event – in terms of human suspense – that I’ve ever known. The start of a B-29 mission to Tokyo, from the spectator’s standpoint, is almost a duplicate of the Indianapolis race.

On mission day people are out early to see the start. Soldiers in groups sit on favorite high spots around the field – on tops of buildings, on tops of bulldozers along the runway, on mounds that give a better view – and even a few bold souls stand at the very end of the runway to snap amateur pictures as the thundering planes pass just over their heads.

As the planes taxi out, it is just like cars at Indianapolis leaving their pits to line up for the start. You wave farewell to your own special friends and then get as fast as you can to your own favorite spot to watch the spectacle.

My nephew, Lt. Jack Bales, wasn’t on this mission, so we drove in a jeep 10 the far end of the runway. and parked on a raised place alongside it, at a point where the planes better be in the air by that time – or else.

Never a blank spot

Most of the planes would be in the air long before they reached us. But a few either had trouble getting off, or else their pilots were holding them down, for they just barely raised in the last few feet of runway, and the amateur photographers down there hit the dirt so hard we had to laugh.

The planes were staggering just a little as they took off. The spacing between them was perfect. There was never a blank spot, never a delay. When you turned from seeing one safely off the ground, here would be the next one coming down the runway.

These Marianas Islands are so small that any plane taking off is out over the water within a few seconds. It is a goose-fleshy sensation to see a plane clear the bluff by a mere few feet, and then sink out of sight toward the water. This is because the pilots nose down a little to get more flying speed. Pretty soon you see them come up into sight again.

Like burned-out cars

There are no accidents at the start of our mission, but not all the planes did get off. Two were canceled on the ground before starting. Two ran halfway down the airstrip, then cut the power and came rolling off to the side, just like burned-out cars at Indianapolis.

One of them had locked brakes. and was just barely able to pull itself off the airstrip and out of the way. He stayed there alongside the runway as all the others roared past him, seeming, from our position, almost to lock wings with him as they passed.

Finally, they were all in the air, formed into flight, and vanished into the swallowing sky from which some would never return.

I had the same feeling watching the takeoff that I used to have before the start at Indianapolis. Here were a certain number of cars and men. Some of them you knew. They had built and trained for weeks for this day. At last, the time had come.

And in a few hours of desperate living, everything would be changed. You knew that within a few hours some would be glorious in victory, some would be defected in failures, some would be colorless “also rans,” and some – very probably – would be dead.

And that’s the way you feel when the B-29s start out. It is just up to fate. In 15 hours, they will be back – those who are coming back. But you cannot know ahead of time who it will be.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 3, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – No sooner have the B-29 formations disappeared to the north on their long flight to Japan, than single planes begin coming back in.

These are called “aborts,” which is short for “abortives.” It is a much-used word around a bomber base.

The “aborts” come straggling back all day, hours apart. They are planes that had something happen to them which forbade them continuing on the long dangerous trip. Sometimes it happens immediately after takeoff. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until they are almost there.

The first “abort” had a bomb bay door come open, and couldn’t get it closed. The second had part of the cowl flap come unfastened, and a mechanic undoubtedly caught hell for that. A third had a prop run away when he lost an engine.

My friend Maj. Walter Todd of Ogden, Utah, “aborted” on the mission I watched take off. He blew a cylinder head clear off.

He was within sight of Japan when it happened, and he beat the others back home by only half an hour. He flew 13½ hours that day, and didn’t even get credit for a mission. That’s the way it goes.

‘Clock’ progress

Those left on the field will look idly at their watches as the long day wears on, mentally clocking the progress of their comrades.

“They’re about sighting the mainland now,” you’ll hear somebody say.

“They should be over the target by now. I’ll bet they’re catching hell,” comes a little later from somebody.

By late afternoon you look at your watch and know that by now, for good or bad, it is over with. You know they’re far enough off the coast that the last Jap fighter has turned for home, and left our men along with the night and the awful returning distance, and their troubles.

Our planes bomb in formation, and stick together until they’ve left the Japanese coast, and then they break up and each man comes home on his own.

It’s almost spooky the way they can fly through the dark night, up there above all that ocean, for more than six hours, and all arrive here at these little islands almost within a few minutes of each other.

By late afternoon we’ve begun to get radio messages from the returning planes. A flight leader will radio how the weather was, and if anybody went down over the target. It isn’t a complete picture, but we begin to patch together a general idea. We lost planes that day. Some went down over the target. Some just disappeared, and the other boys never knew where they went. Some fought as long as they could to keep crippled planes going, and then had to “ditch” in the ocean.

‘Miraculous’ return

And one tenacious planeload miraculously got back when it wasn’t in the cards for them at all. They had been hit over the target, had to drop down and back alone, and the Jap fighters went for him, as they do for any cripple.

Five fighters just butchered him, and there was nothing our boys could do about it. And yet he kept coming. How, nobody knows. Two of the crew were badly wounded. The horizontal stabilizers were shot away. The plane was riddled with holes. The pilot could control his plane only by using the motors.

Every half hour or so he would radio his fellow planes “am in right spiral and going out of control.” But he would get control again, and fly for an hour so, and then radio again that he was spiraling out of control.

But somehow, he made it home. He had to land without controls. He did wonderfully, but he didn’t quite pull it off.

The plane hit at the end of the runway. The engines came hurtling out, on fire. The wings flew off and the great fuselage broke in two and went careening across the ground. And yet every man came out if alive, even the wounded ones.

Two other crippled planes cracked up that night too, on landing. It was not until late at night that the final tally was made, of known lost, and of missing.

But hardly was the last returning bomber down until a lone plane took off into the night and headed northward, to be in the area by dawn where the “ditchings” were reported. And the others, after their excited stories were told, fell wearily into bed.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 5, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – There are five officers and six enlisted men on the crew of a B-29. All the enlisted men of a crew stay in the same hut, because that’s the way the boys want it. Thus, there are usually three crews of six men each in a Quonset hut.

The enlisted men’s huts are more crowded than the officers’. Outside of that there is no difference. They have a few more duties than the officers when not on missions, but they still have plenty of spare time.

“My” crew is a grand bunch of boys, as I suppose most of them are. They have trouble sleeping the night before a mission, and they’re tense before the takeoff. As one of them laughingly said at the plane just before takeoff one morning, “How do you get rid of that empty feeling in your chest?”

But they relax and expand and practically float away with good feeling once they get back and have another one safely under their belts.

The six enlisted men of “my” crew are Sgts. Joe Corcoran of Woodhaven, Long Island; Fauad Smith of Des Moines, New Mexico; Joe McQuade of Gallup, New Mexico; John Devaney of Columbus, Ohio; Norbert Springman of Wilmont, Minnesota, and Eugene Floric of Chicago.

Sgts. Springman and Floric are radio men, and all the others are gunners.

Sgt. Corcoran is the oldest of the crew. The first time I walked into their hut he called from his cot, “Hi, Eric, the last time I saw you was in the Stork Club.”

“But I’ve never been in the Stork Club in my life,” I said.

Two other guys

So, we puzzled over that a while, and finally decided it must have been two other guys, or else I’m living a double life which I don’t know about.

Sgt. Corcoran was a chiropractor before the war, and still gives the boys treatments. He practiced for three years at Jamaica, Long Island, and had a fine business worked up. I asked him how a chiropractor ever wound up to be a side-gunner on a B-29, but he had no explanation.

It’s unusual to find two men from thinly populated New Mexico on the same crew. Sgt. Smith and Sgt. McQuade never knew each other until they met on this crew, and then it turned out they had joined the Army the very same day. Now they are great buddies.

Sgt. McQuade was a fireman on the Santa Fe, and Sgt. Smith owned a grocery store, but finally had to sell it. They’d just had letters saying it was below zero back home, and they were at least thankful to be away from that.

Experienced combat men

Both the boys have had experiences. Sgt. McQuade made two trips to the Aleutians as a gunner on a ship. And Sgt. Smith is serving his second tour of aerial combat overseas.

Sgt. Smith was in the South Pacific in the early days, and flew 53 missions as gunner on B-17s. He has all his missions painted on the back of his leather flying-jacket – yellow bombs for the South Pacific, and red ones for Japan. He says he’s only got room for 27 more missions on his jacket, and then he’ll just have to quit.

I asked Sgt. Smith if he hated to come back overseas as badly as I did.

“Twice as bad,” he said.

“You couldn’t.”

“Well, as bad then,” he said. “But I haven’t griped so much about it since we got here. It’s not near as bad as I expected. In fact, we’re living as good here as we did in America.”

Experiment with mice

Sgt. Smith’s odd first name – Fauad – is Syrian. He is growing a funny little rectangular goatee, black as coal. I asked him how long he was going to keep it. He said, “probably only until the colonel happens to notice it.”

Sgts. Smith and Corcoran are the only two sergeants on the crew who are married. Both their wives are living temporarily in California.

We were all gathered around Corcoran’s and Smith’s cots one day, when Corky reached under his cot and pulled out a huge rat trap to show me.

It seems they have a mouse in the hut, who eats their candy and soap and is a general nuisance. They couldn’t find a mouse trap, so they set this big rat trap.

But every night Mr. Mouse eats all the cheese, even licks the plunger clean, but the trap is so strong it won’t go off. So now the Sergeant has strung thread through the cheese, hoping the mouse will get his teeth caught in the thread and thus yank the trap off. We’re waiting with bated breath to see how this noble experiment turns out.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 6, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – Maj. Robinson, the airplane commander of “my” crew, has been leading his boys through almost two years of training before they came overseas.

“That means a lot to have been together so long, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“It means everything,” one of the sergeants said. “We’re a team.”

So far, the crew has been lucky. They’re all intact except for the bombardier, who had his leg almost blown off, and is now back in Hawaii in a hospital.

To show how they feel about their being a team, the enlisted men asked especially if I would put the bombardier down as still part of the crew, even though he isn’t here anymore. They’d been together so long, and they liked him so much. He is Lt. Paul O’Brien of Dayton, Ohio.

My crew has a superstition, or rather just a tradition. They all wear the same kind of cap when they start in a mission. It’s a dark blue baseball cap, with the figure “80” on the crown in yellow numbers.

Caps were prize

They got the caps a couple of years ago in Minneapolis when they were there on a weekend trip for winning some kind of merit prize. The “80” was their unit number then, and although it ae long since ceased to exist, they insist on keeping it.

Once in a while Maj. Robinson used to forget his cap, and the enlisted men would send somebody back after it before the mission started.

But they’ve lost two of the caps now. One was Lt. O Brien’s, and he took it with him when he was evacuated. The other was Maj. Robinson’s. His cap got so bloody from Lt. O’Brien’s wound that he had to throw it away.

My crew lost their first plane right on the field when a Jap bomb got it. It was named Battlin’ Betty after Maj. Robinson’s wife, so now he’s changing the name of his newly inherited ship from Small Fry to Battlin’ Betty II.

Post-war project

Maj. Robinson carries a movie camera with him on every mission. He has already taken about 1,500 feet of color movies, but can’t have them developed until he gets back to America. He’s got them sealed up in moisture-proof cloth for safekeeping against the tropical climate.

The other night when he came into the hut after a 14-hour mission over Tokyo, he held up his movie camera for me to see, and said:

Now I’m satisfied to quit. I got the picture today that should end it.

There was a Jap fighter diving at the squadron ahead of us. He apparently didn’t see us at all, for he pulled up and turned his belly to us and just hung there, wide open. Every gun in our squadron let him have it. He just blew all to pieces. And I got the whole thing. So now I’m ready to lay it aside.

Vital member

One of the most vital members of a bomber’s family is the ground crew chief, even though he doesn’t fly. But he’s the guy who sees that the airplane does fly.

A good crew chief is worth his weight in gold. Maj. Robinson says he has the finest crew chief in the Marianas. I could believe it after seeing him.

He is Sgt. Jack Orr of Dallas. He’s a married man, tall and good-looking and modest. He is so conscientious it hurts, and he takes a mission harder than the crew members do themselves.

Maj. Robinson said that on one trip they had some trouble, and were the last ones in, long after the others had landed. It did look kind of bad for a while.

Sgt. Orr was waiting for them at the “hard stand.” Maj. Robinson said that when they got out of the plane, he was all over them, jumping up and down like a puppy dog, shouting and hugging them, and they could hardly get him stopped, he was so happy.

Maj. Robinson says he was sort of embarrassed, but I’ve heard him tell it two or three times, so I know how touched he was. There is indeed a fraternalism in war that is hard for people at home to comprehend.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 7, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – The funniest man in our hut of B-29 pilots is Capt. Bill Gifford, of Buford, South Carolina.

He’s a drawly-talking Southerner, lean, profane and witty. He has a long neck and blond pompadour hair and a wide mouth and he is the salt of the earth.

Before I arrived, Capt. Gifford held the record for being the skinniest man in the B-29 base. The other boys call him “The 97-pound Wonder.” But now they can laugh at me instead of him when we go to take an outdoor shower.

Bill Gifford is an old-timer in aviation much older than his fellow pilots here. He is 36, and has been flying about 17 years. As he says, he’s “too damned old to be in this bombing business.”

He says he gets so seared over Japan he can hardly think, and I imagine that’s true But I noticed he volunteered to go on a certain especially tough mission when it came up.

It turned out that Giff and I had lots of mutual friends in the early airmail days, such as Dick Merrill and Gene Brown and Johnny Kytle, so we become practically bosom pals. The Ghandi Twins, you could call us.

Bill has been around

Bill has been around in this world of aviation. He flew the early night airmail. He flew for Pan American in South America. He was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and made seven trips across the Atlantic, ferrying bombers to England.

It’s worth a theater ticket to hear Giff tell about a mission after he gets back. He uses his hands and his feet and half the room and a great portion of his vocabulary. He gets tickled and then he gets mad.

It seems that everything always goes wrong when Giff is on a mission. He had an experience to prove it while I was here. I’d gone to visit in a neighboring hut for a few minutes and he couldn’t find me, or I would have been with him on it. Thank goodness I always seem to step out at the right moment.

Very annoying

Anyway, it was just a half hour before supper, when Giff got an emergency order to beat it to the airstrip right quick and take a ship up on a half hour’s test hop.

He made the flight all right, but when he got ready to land the wheels wouldn’t come down. That’s very annoying, you know.

Well, Giff radioed the field, and then began working on those wheels. Of course, these big B-29s are so complicatedly automatic that you do everything by little electrical switches and levers, and not by hand.

“Some guys must have spent all day crossing up wires on that airplane,” Giff said in his comical exaggeration when he got back.

Instead of the wheels coming down, the bomb bay doors opened. When I tried to shut them, the upper turret gun started shooting. I hit the light switch by mistake, and the tail skid came down. Just for the hell of it I tried to lower the flaps, and instead the bomb bay doors went shut.

Getting madder ‘n’ madder

By that time, I’d turned it over to the co-pilot and was back in the bomb bay trying to make some sense out of the switchbox and get things working again.

Finally, I just got so disgusted I hauled off and gave the switchbox a good smack with the screwdriver, and started to walk out. And just like that the wheels came down and everything was all right.

Giff looks more like a Texas cowboy than a bomber pilot. He’s a conscientious objector to all forms of exercise. All the pilots sleep all night and half the day, but Giff sleeps more than any of them.

He is probably the most unmilitary man in the outfit. He’s just an old-shoe Southerner, and generous as can be. On his wall are a map of the Pacific and a picture of his wife. He goes around most of the time in nothing but white underdrawers.

The first two fingers of Giff’s right hand are off, clear up to the hand. No, he didn’t lose them from flak or Jap fighters. He shot them off with a shotgun when he was hunting quail many years ago. He writes a beautiful hand by holding the pen between thumb and last two fingers. He holds a beer can the same way.

Giff calls his plane Honshu Hank. He wants to form a new fraternity called “Fujiyama, ‘44.” Its membership would be limited to those who had flown over Japan on bombing missions in 1944. He says if he never goes on another mission in his life, it would suit him fine.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 8, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – In my long career with the United States Army, I’ve made a hobby of cultivating the very best people in it. And for some strange reason, the very best people usually turn out to work in the kitchen. Isn’t that odd?

My latest acquisitions are a Mutt & Jeff team known as Mickey and Bill. They serve the food in our mess hall. They have to work like dogs and they dash around in such intent haste that you think they are mad at everybody all the time.

But they aren’t. That’s just a look of concentration on their faces. Whenever we give them time to relax, they’re the best-natured pair you ever saw.

These two boys are Sgt. Thomas Bill of St. Louis, and Cpl. Mickey Rovinsky of Edwardsville [Luzerne County], Pennsylvania. They’re as different as day and night, but they work together like cogs in a gearwheel.

Sgt. Bill is tall and thin and white-skinned and has curly black hair and a sensitive face, and he doesn’t say much. Mickey is so short he could stand under Bill’s arm, and his skin is dark. His eyes are almost shut and he talks all the time – and such talk.

Mickey is unquotable, because you couldn’t possibly remember things the way he says them. His colloquialisms are not sectional, they’re pure Rovinsky.

Special favorite

The boys’ special favorite among all the fliers is my friend Capt. Bill Gifford. He’s always giving them things, and sits up and talks with them in the mess hall after supper, and as a result they’d stay up all night for him if he merely suggested it.

By good fortune, I fell in with this trio, and every night Giff and I would stay away from supper until everybody else had finished and the two boys had their tables all cleaned up and set for breakfast.

Then we’d wander over through the dark and the four of us would have a banquet – such as steak and French-fried potatoes. The boys would cook it and then we’d all sit down and eat, and the talk would start to fly.

The first Tokyo mission was a highlight in Mickey’s life. The pilots are always tense the night before a mission, and Mickey has his troubles.

Mickey says:

They took off six times for Tokyo. I mean they was scheduled to go every day for six days, and they’d all be short-tempered and wanting things just go at night, and then next morning the mission would be postponed.

It was their first mission up there and they’d heard a rumor there was to be 1,300 Jap fighters lined up across the sky just like a wall, and they was nervous and grumpy.

Like Capt. Gifford here, I can always tell when he’s going the next day. He don’t say much at supper like he usually does. He just wants that sharp attention and keep your mouth shut and leave him the hell alone.

Tense and worried

Well, them pilots was tense and worried and they didn’t drink any beer or anything for five nights and then finally on the sixth night they was up half the night yellin’ around, and then next morning they really did take off. Boy, they didn’t feel good either.

It’s a good thing they finally went or I was gonna mutiny. I got sick and tired of puttin’ grub in them damned airplanes. I was gonna refuse the seventh time. I said I’d take a court-martial before I’d put grub in them planes a seventh time. But they went that time.

Then Capt. Gifford took up.

You should have been here that morning. The mission was called so fast there wasn’t time to warm up the engines a few at a time, so they ran them all up at once all over the field. This whole island shook from the vibration.

When I took off, I had to weave around through bulldozers and between jeeps and across cane patches and I kept thinking about those 1,300 fighters we’d heard about. I sure was put out about ever getting into this business in the first place. But it turned out all right.

“When Capt. Gifford gets back,” Mickey went on, “he’s a changed man. He’s still full of nerves but he wants to talk and he wants me to keep the beer comin’ out of the icebox.”

Sgt. Bill sits and listens and smiles and enjoys it and says almost nothing. He and Mickey are both married men, although they’re only 24 and 23 respectively.

The boys have to get up at 5 a m. and their work isn’t finished till about 9 at night. They don’t even get to go to the movies, for they don’t get through work in time. But they don’t seem to care. They feel they’re pretty lucky to have things as nice as they are.

The day I was to leave, they gave me what Mickey called my “farewell breakfast” – three fried eggs! There’s nothing in this Army like knowing the very best people.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 9, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – “Sack Time” is one of the most-used expressions in the B-29 outfits. It means simply lying on your cot doing nothing.

Combat fliers everywhere have lots of spare time because they are under a terrific nervous strain when they work, and they need much recuperative rest.

But out here there is a double, even a triple incentive for spending practically all your time, both waking and sleeping, in “the sack.” These reasons are:

• A 14-hour mission is an exhausting thing. The boys say the reaction is a delayed one, and they really don’t feel it so keenly until the afternoon of the next day. Then they’re just plumb worn-out. It takes some of them two or three days to get to feeling normal after a mission.

• The climate, warm and enervating, seems to make you sleepy all the tame. I’ve found it doubly hard to write my columns out here, because I just can’t stay awake.

• There’s really nothing else to do except lie on your cot. Combat crews have few duties between missions. And since there’s no amusement or diversion out on these islands, except homemade ones, they Just lie and talk and he some more.

The result of 1t all is that you just get lazier than sin. As one pilot said, “I’ve got so lazy I’ll never be worth a damn the rest of my life.”

One phase of isolation

It’s one of the phases of isolation. It’s what leads to “island neurosis,” or to going “pineapple crazy.” Troop commanders know the importance of keeping their men busy to overcome this, but it’s difficult to do that with combat crewmen.

But new classes have been organized, and the fliers have to go to school part of each day. Those who are especially good are getting further intensive training as “lead crews” and they go to school from morning till night.

Endless talk and arguments go on in every tent and Quonset hut. They can argue about the darnedest things. One afternoon several pilots got into an argument over whether or not you do everything in reverse when you’re flying upside down. They were all veteran filers, and yet they split about 50-50 on whether you do or not.

Another day they got to arguing about what causes planes to leave vapor trails behind them at high altitudes. I had always thought it was the heat from the exhaust stacks condensing the moisture at certain temperatures. But one pilot said no, it was moisture being whirled off the tips of the propellers. That started a long discussion in which nobody won.

Some play solitaire. Some write letters all the time. One flier told me he had written to people he hadn’t thought of in years, not because he wanted letters back, but just to have something to do. Others, with nothing but time on their hands, can’t make themselves write at all.

They read magazines, but very few books. At first, they spent weeks making furniture for themselves out of packing crates. But that’s all finished now.

Afternoon for bathing

Some of them swim daily, and they all take daily showers. The camps are dotted with concrete floored baths, which are roofless. Water comes from a tank set on high stilts nearby. It is not heated, and although the weather is always warm, a cold bath in the morning is pretty nippy. The best time is around 2 in the afternoon when the sun has made the water good and warm.

Every bath unit has a white-porcelained washing machine and wringer in it. The fliers build abonfire of discarded lumber and heat water in big cans, carry it in to the wash machine, and turn her on. Beside every Quonset hut there is always a clothesline full of wash flying in the wind.

Some days they play volleyball, some days they take setting-up exercises, and some days they swim. My friend Capt. Bill Gifford spurns all these things, and just lies in bed. Every day they ask if he isn’t going to “P.T.,” which means physical training, and he says “Hell no, I’m too old to get out there and jump up and down like a Russian ballet dancer.”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 10, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – Over here the Marines have an expression all their own for the Japs. They call them “Japes,” which is a combination of “Jap” and “Ape.”

Now the fliers are taking it up, and there are various versions of it. I notice a lot of people unconsciously pronouncing Japan as “Jaypan,” just as in Africa we always used to say “A-rab” instead of “Arrab,” as we were taught in school.

Further they carry it into multi-syllables, such as saying “We’re going to Jay-pan-man-land tomorrow.”

Another slang word over here is “gear,” which apparently means a big shot. For example:

Every afternoon a soldier brings about 50 letters written by enlisted men, into our hut for the officers to censor. The officers in this hut have a rule of done the letters right now. and getting it over with. They take about six apiece, and they’ve all through in a few minutes.

The boy who brings the letters around is a Spaniard – Pvt. Gustavo Gonzalez of Galveston, Texas. He talks with an accent and is quite a character. The fliers enjoy kidding back and forth with him.

When Pvt. Gonzalez came back for the letters, they were all finished. Apparently, the other huts don’t do so well by him, and he has to wait. For as he left, he turned at the door and said to the officers: “You guys are all right. If I was a gear, I’d promote you all.”

Keep him supplied

One day while I was with the B-29 crews, Sgt. Fauad Smith pulled out a pack of cigarettes and said “How does that look?” He was pointing to the tax stamp on the package. It was the familiar orange-colored stamp of New Mexico.

“The folks keep insisting on sending me cigarettes,” he said. “I write and write and tell them we can get more than we want over here, but they don’t believe me.”

I’ve been amazed at the number of men flying these Tokyo missions in the B-29s who already have served one tour of combat duty in the European Theater.

Of the 10 men in our hut, two are combat veterans, even though they’re very young.

Veterans of Europe

Maj. William Clark of Bayhead, New Jersey, flew his 50 missions out of Africa in B-17s, and so did Capt. Walter Kelly of Philadelphia. In fact, Capt. Kelly and I were together at Biskra Airdrome on the edge of the Sahara Desert just two years ago this month.

They are both heady, wise pilots, who have learned the tropical ways of wearing shorts and spending half their time just lying on their cots. And they don’t seem to mind at all that they’re starting all over again on this side of the world after having done their share on the other side.

One of the things most needed for morale among fliers over here is the setting up of some kind of goal for them – the setting of a definite number of combat missions to be flown, whereupon they would automatically go back to a rest camp.

The way it is now, they are Just flying in the dark, so to speak. They’re just going on and on until fate overtakes them, with nothing else to shoot for.

Of course it’s probably too early yet, and the war on both sides of the world too desperate. to set up a final mission total whereupon a B-29 flier goes home for good.

They’re going to have to go to rest camps and then come back for more missions a couple of times before they finally go home. But no rest-camp goal has yet been set. They say it has to come from Washington, and Washington is slow about it.

It’s no good to create a rest camp out here. The boys would just as soon lie on their own cots as to go to a rest camp. What they want is a change, something far away – lights and girls and companionship and modern things and gaiety. And somebody better hurry!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 12, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – On one of these islands the other day, I finally got around to getting a month-overdue haircut.

My barber was a soldier, barbering in a tent, and I sat in an old-fashioned black leather Japanese barber chair he had dug up on the island.

He had been trained in the conversational school of barbering, and as the snipped gray locks fell about my shoulders, there came forth from him such a tale of woe and unkind fate as I have never heard in this world.

This barber was Pvt. Eades Thomas, from Richmond, Kentucky, near Lexington in the horse country. In fact, Pvt. Thomas was a horse-trainer before the war, and was never a barber at all. He just picked that up on the run somewhere.

Well, Pvt. Thomas has been in the Pacific 33 months. It began to look as though he might as well count on settling down for life, so some months ago he married a Scottish girl in Honolulu. Shortly after that, he was shipped on out there, and he hasn’t seen her since.

Bad memory

The morning of the day that I sat in his barber chair, the Army was sending a few Japanese prisoners back to Hawaii by airplane. They had to have guards for them. So, one of Pvt. Thomas’ officers told him he would put him down for the trip, and thus he could get a couple of days in Hawaii to see his wife.

The officer meant to keep his word, but he had a bad memory for names. So, when he went to write down Pvt. Thomas’ name for the trip, he actually wrote another guy’s name, thinking it was the barber. By the time Thomas found it out, it was too late.

“I could have cried,” he said. And I could have too. I felt so terrible about it I couldn’t get it off my mind, and was telling it to an officer that evening.

“Oh,” he said. “I happen to know about that. I’ll go and tell Pvt. Thomas right away and he won’t feel so bad. We got orders not to send the prisoners after all, so the whole thing was called off. Nobody went.”

Which is the kind of joy you get when you stop hitting yourself on the head with the hammer, but at least it’s better than if you kept on hitting it.

Couple of Hoosiers

On that same island I ran onto a couple of old Hoosier boys, who had followed my inglorious footsteps at Indiana University.

One was Lt. Ed Rose, who was editor of The Daily Student in 1938, just as I was for a while in 1922. Apparently, it doesn’t make any difference what year you were editor of The Student, you still wind up in the Marianas Islands.

The other was Lt. Bill Morris, from Anderson, Indiana, who graduated from our illustrious alma mater in 1942. Both the boys are mail censors out here. Life is kind enough to them, and they haven’t much to kick about.

It’ll be several weeks before I get around to doing some columns on the fabulous Seabees, but I do keep running into them on my meanderings about these islands.

The other day, one of them came in to see me. He was obviously in his forties, and very different and shy, and so polite I couldn’t get him to sit down. He had on the green work clothes the Seabees wear over here.

The reason he came was that he lives in Albuquerque, and just wanted to say hello. His name is John D. Gee, and he had been a postal clerk in Albuquerque for 18 years. Over here he is in charge of the post office for his battalion.

I think he must be typical of the craftsmanship and the sincerity of the Seabees. He is 44 years old, and has a wife and 14-year-old boy back home, and wouldn’t have to be in the war at all. But here he is.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 13, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS (delayed) – One thing that might help you visualize what life is like out here, is to realize that even a little island is lots bigger than you think.

There are many, many thousands of Americans scattered in camps and at airfields and in training centers and harbors over the three islands which we occupy here.

Rarely does a man know many people outside his own special unit. Even though the islands are small by our standards, they’re big enough that the individual doesn’t encompass them by any means. It would be as impossible for one man to see or know everything on one of these islands as it would to know everybody in Indianapolis.

You could live and work in your section, and never visit another section for weeks or months at a time. And that’s exactly what does happen.

For one thing, transportation is short. We are still building furiously here, such fast and fantastic building as you never dreamed of. Everything that runs is being used and there’s little left over just to run around in for fun.

No place to go

And anyhow, there’s no place to go. What towns there were nave been destroyed. There is nothing even resembling a town or city on these islands now. The natives have been set up in improvised camps, but they offer no “city life” attractions.

As we drove around one of the islands on my first day here, we went through one of the Marianas towns that had been destroyed by bombing and shelling. It had been a good-sized place, quite modern too in a tropical way. It had a city plaza and municipal buildings and paved streets, and many of the buildings were of stone or mortar.

In destruction, it looked exactly as destroyed cities all over Europe look. The same jagged half-standing wells, the stacks of rubble, the empty house you could see through the roofless homes, the deep craters in the gardens.

There was just one difference. Out here tropical vegetation is lush. And nature thrusts up her greenery so swiftly through rubble and destruction that the rums now are festooned with vines and green leaves, and it gives them a look of being very old and time-worn ruins, instead of fresh modern ones, which they are.

Get ‘island complex’

An American soldier in Europe, even though the towns may be “off limits” to him or destroyed completely, still has a sense of being near a civilization that, is like his own.

But out here there is nothing like that. You are on an island, the natives are strange people. There’s no city and no place to go. If you had a three-day pass, you’d probably spend it lying on your cot.

Eventually, boredom and the “island complex” start to take hold.

For that reason, the diversions supplied by the Army are even more important out here than in Europe. Before I left America, I heard that one island out here had more than 200 outdoor movies on it. I thought whoever told that must be crazy, for in Europe the average soldier didn’t get a chance to see a movie very often.

233 movies on islands

But the guy wasn’t crazy. These three Marianas Islands have a total of 233 outdoor movies on them. And they show every night. Even if it isn’t a good movie, it kills the time between supper and bedtime.

The theaters are usually on the slope of a hill, forming a natural amphitheater. The men sit on the ground, or bring their own boxes, or in some of them the ends of metal bomb crates are used for chairs.

There is lots of other stuff provided besides movies, too. On one island there are 65 theater stages, where soldiers themselves put on “live” shows, or where USO troupes can perform. Forty pianos have been scattered around at these places.

In Europe it was a lucky bunch of soldiers who got their hands on a radio. Over here in these small islands, the Army has distributed 3,500 radios, and they have a regular station broadcasting all the time, with music, news, shows and everything.

Big sports program

The sports program is big. On one island there are 95 softball diamonds, 35 regular diamonds, 225 volleyball courts and 30 basketball courts. Also, there are 35 boxing arenas. Boxing is very popular. They’ve had as high as 16,000 men watching a boxing match.

In addition to all this program, which is deliberate and supervised, the boys do a lot to amuse themselves. The American is adept at fixing up any old place in the world to look like home, with little picket fences and all kinds of Rube Goldberg contraptions inside to make it more livable. All this uses up time.

Just as an example, the Coral Sea bottom inside the reef around these islands abounds with fantastic miniature marine life, weird and colorful. Soldiers make glass-bottomed boxes for themselves, and wade out and just look at the beautiful sea bottom.

I’ve seen them out there like that for hours, just staring at the sea bottom. At home they wouldn’t have gone to an aquarium if you’d built one in their backyard.

Pleasures are all relative. Joy is proportional. Why don’t I shut up?