Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 14, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – Now I’ve had my first experience as a saltwater doughboy. I’ll try to tell you about it in a few thousand well-chosen paragraphs.

This series will be about life aboard an airplane carrier. My carrier was part of that first strike on the Tokyo area, and we helped out at Iwo Jima, too.

We’ll start right at the beginning, and within the limits of naval security, I’ll try to tell you what living on an aircraft carrier is like, and how a big task force works when it goes out after the enemy.

First, we boarded a plane and flew for a long time, and landed on a tiny coral island, white and glaring im the tropic sun. Tall slanting palm trees waved their green fronds from their topknots.

The island was framed in a wide circle of bright green water. And that was bordered by a thin line of snow-white surf, where the rolling waves beat themselves to a froth over the submerged reef at the edge of the water. And on beyond that, everywhere as far as the eye could see, was the heavy dark blue of the deep, deep ocean.

And out there on that dark blue water, lay the United States Fleet. Hundreds and hundreds of ships. The Navy says officially that it was the greatest concentration of fighting ships ever assembled in the history of the world. It was something to take your breath away.

The world’s mightiest

True, I have seen bigger fleets. Both in our invasions of Sicily and Normandy we had more ships. But they were not predominantly warships. Mainly they were landing craft and troop-carrying vessels.

But these here were fighting ships – the world’s mightiest. Battleships and cruisers and carriers and uncountable destroyers. And all of the swarm of escorts and tugs and oilers and repair ships that go with them.

And this wasn’t the only fleet. Others started from other anchorages scattered out over the Pacific, hundreds and thousands of miles from us. They started on a time-table schedule, so that they would all converge in the Upper Pacific at the same time.

If you had felt lonely and afraid in anticipation of the ordeal upon which you were setting out, it disappeared when you made yourself a cell in this mighty armada.

Plenty of company

For when we bore down upon the waters of Japan and Iwo Jima, we were nearly a thousand ships and we were beyond a half a million men!

Whatever happened to you, you would sure have a hell of a lot of company.

A small fast motorboat, its forepart covered with canvas like a prairie schooner, took me from the island to the carrier to which I had been assigned. It was a long way out, and we were half an hour bobbing up and down through the spray.

Ships were so thick we had to weave in and out around them. The water was speckled with small boats running from ship to ship, and back and forth to the island. The weather was hot, and sometimes you stood up and took the spray, because it felt good.

I had asked to be put on a small carrier, rather than a big one. The reasons were many. For one thing, the large ones are so immense and carry such a huge crew that it would be like living in the Grand Central Station. I felt I could get the “feel” of a carrier more quickly, could become more intimately a member of the family, if I were to go on a smaller one.

Also, the smaller carriers have had very little credit and almost no glory, and I’ve always had a sort of yen for poor little ships that have been neglected.

And also again (although this of course had nothing to do with my choice, of course, of course) there was an old wives’ superstition to the effect that the Japs always went for the big carriers first, and ignored the little ones.

Further investigation revealed this to be pure fiction, but what you don’t know at the time doesn’t hurt you, and I didn’t know this at the time. So gaily I climbed aboard my new home – curious, but admittedly uneager for my first taste of naval warfare in the Pacific.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 15, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – An aircraft carrier is a noble thing. It lacks almost everything that seems to denote nobility, yet deep nobility is there.

A carrier has no poise. It has no grace. It is top-heavy and lopsided. It has the lines of a well-fed cow.

It doesn’t cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn’t dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. You feel it should be carrying a hod, rather than wearing a red sash.

Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown its nobility. I believe that today every Navy in the world has as its No. 1 priority the destruction of enemy carriers. That’s a precarious honor, but it’s a proud one.

My carrier is a proud one. She’s small, and you have never heard of her unless you have a son or husband on her, but still she’s proud, and deservedly so.

She has been at sea, without returning home, longer than any other carrier in the Pacific, with one exception. She left home in November 1943.

She is a little thing, yet her planes have shot 238 of the enemy out of the sky in air battles, and her guns have knocked down five Jap planes in defending herself.

Has sunk 29 big ships

She is too proud to keep track of little ships she destroys, but she has sent to the bottom 29 big Japanese ships. Her bombs and aerial torpedoes have smashed into everything from the greatest Jap battleships to the tiniest coastal schooners.

She has weathered five typhoons. Her men have not set foot on any soil bigger than a farm-sized uninhabited atoll for a solid year. They have not seen a woman, white or otherwise, for nearly ten months. In a year and a quarter out of America, she has steamed a total of 149,000 miles!

Four different air squadrons have used her as their flying field, flown their allotted missions, and returned to America. But the ship’s crew stays on – and on, and on.

She is known in the fleet as “The Iron Woman,” because she has fought in every battle in the Pacific in the years 1944 and 1945.

Her battle record sounds like a train-caller on the Lackawanna Railroad. Listen – Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Palau, Hollandia, Saipan, Chichi Jima, Mindanao, Luzon, Formosa, Nansei Shoto, Hong Kong, Iwo Jima, Tokyo… and many others.

She has known disaster. Her fliers who have perished could not be counted on both hands, yet the ratio is about as it always is – about one American lost for every 10 of the Exalted Race sent to the Exalted Heaven.

She has been hit twice by Jap bombs. She has had mass burials at sea… with her dry-eyed crew sewing 40-mm shells to the corpses of their friends, as weights to take them to the bottom of the sea.

Yet she has never even returned to Pearl Harbor to patch her wounds. She slaps on some patches on the run, and is ready for the next battle. The crew in semi-jocularity cuss her chief engineer for keeping her in such good shape they have no excuse to go back to Honolulu or America for overhaul.

Like a small city

My carrier, even though classed as “light,” is still a very large ship. More than 1,000 men dwell upon her. She is more than 700 feet long.

She has all the facilities of a small city. And all the gossip and small talk too. Latest news and rumors have reached the farthest cranny of the ship a few minutes after the captain himself knows about them. All she lacks is a hitching rack and a town pump with a handle.

She has five barbers, a laundry, a general store. Deep in her belly she carries tons of bombs. She has a daily newspaper. She carries firefighting equipment that a city of 50,000 back in America would be proud of.

She has a preacher, she has three doctors and two dentists, she has two libraries, and movies every night, except when they’re in battle. And still she is a tiny thing, as the big carriers go. She is a “baby flattop.” She is little. And she is proud.

She has been out so long that her men put their ship above their captain. They have seen captains come and go, but they and the ship stay on forever.

They aren’t romantic about their long stay out here. They hate it, and their gripes are long and loud. They yearn pathetically to go home. But down beneath, they are proud – proud of their ship and proud of themselves. And you would be too.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 16, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – There was nothing dramatic about our start for Japan.

We simply pulled anchor about 8 one morning and got underway. The whole thing seemed peacetime and routine.

Our ships were so spread out they didn’t seem they actually were. It wasn’t like the swarming, pulsing mass of ships that literally blanketed the water when we started to Sicily and to Normandy.

Once at sea our force broke up into several pre-arranged units and each put some distance between itself and the next.

Each was self-sufficient. Each could protect itself. Each had battleships, carriers, cruisers and destroyers. Each was complete unto itself.

The eye easily could encompass the entire formation in which you were sailing. And very dimly, far off on the horizon, you could see the silhouettes of the bigger ships on each side of you, although they seemed remote, and not like neighbors.

Mitscher in command

The formations were commanded by admirals and above them all was Adm. Marc Mitscher.

All day and all night the air was full of conversation between our ships. Messages were transmitted in many ways – by signal flag, by light blinker, by destroyers bringing written messages, even by planes flying slowly over and dropping messages on the deck.

The admiral commanding our unit was a fine, friendly man whom I’d met before we sailed. On the third day out, he sent a message over to our captain which said: “How is Ernie getting along? Does he wish he was back in a foxhole?”

We messaged back that I was happy, hadn’y been seasick yet, and that I hoped all my future foxholes could be as plush as this one.

We had a long way to go from our starting point, and our route was a devious one to boot. We steamed for several days before we were at our destination off Japan. We sailed long enough to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean – if we had been in the Atlantic.

But those days were busy ones. Our planes began operating as soon as we were underway. Three fighters that had been based on the island, flew out and landed aboard an hour after we started, to fill our complement of planes.

We were up before dawn every morning, and our planes were in the air before sunup. We kept a constant aerial patrol over our ships. Some flew at great height, completely out of sight. Others took the medium altitude. And still others roamed in great circles only a few hundred feet above us.

And out on the perimeter our little destroyers plowed the ocean, always alert for subs or airplanes. You really couldn’t help but feel safe with such a guard around you.

Comfortable living

Living was very comfortable aboard our carrier. I shared a cabin with Lt. Cmdr. Al Masters from Terre Haute, Indiana, just a few miles from where I was born and raised.

In our cabin we had metal closets and writing desks and a lavatory with hot and cold water. We had a telephone, and a boy to clean up the room. Our bunks were double-decked, with good mattresses. I was in the upper one.

Our food was wonderful, and you could buy a whole carton of cigarettes a day if you wanted to (doesn’t that make you jealous?). We saw a movie every night except when in battle. The first four nights our movies were New York Town, The Major and the Minor, Swing Fever and Claudia. I don’t know enough about movies to know whether they were old or not, but it doesn’t make any difference to a sailor who hasn’t been home.

I came aboard with a lot of dirty clothes, for I’d had nothing washed since leaving San Francisco about a month before.

Our cabin boy took my clothes to the laundry about 9:30 one morning. When I came back to the cabin an hour and a half later, here was my washing all clean and dry and ironed, lying on the bed. What a ship!

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 17, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – It’s easy to get acquainted aboard a naval vessel.

The sailors are just as friendly as the soldiers I’d known on the other side. Furthermore, they’re so delighted to see a stranger and have somebody new to talk to that they aren’t a bit standoffish.

They’re all sick to death of the isolation and monotony of the vast Pacific. I believe they talk more about wanting to go home than even the soldiers in Europe.

Their lives really are empty lives. They have their work, and their movies, and their mail, and that’s just about all they do have. And nothing to look forward to.

They never see anybody but themselves, and that gets mighty old. They sail and sail, and never arrive anywhere. They’ve not even seen a native village for a year.

Three times they’ve been to remote, lifeless sandbars in the Pacific, and have been allowed to g0 ashore for a few hours and sit under palm trees and drink three cans of beer. That’s all.

They live well

Yet they do live well. Their food is the best I’ve run onto in this war. They have steaks and ice cream – they probably eat better than they would at home.

The boys ask you a thousand times how this compares with the other side. I can only answer that this is much better. They seem to expect you to say that, but they are a little disappointed too.

They say “but it’s tough to be away from home for more than a year, and never see anything but water and an occasional atoll.” And I say yes, I know it is, but there are boys who have been in Europe more than three years, and have slept on the ground a good part of that time. And they say yes, they guess in contrast their lives are pretty good.

Seaman Paul Begley looks at his wartime life philosophically. He is a farm boy from Rogersville, Tennessee. He talks a lot in a soft voice that is Southern clear through. He’s one of the plane pushers on the flight deck.

He says:

I can stand this monotony all right. The point with us is that we’ve got a pretty good chance of living through this. Think of the Marines who have to take the beaches, and the infantry in Germany. I can stand a lot of monotony if I know my chances are pretty good for coming out of it alive.

But others yell their heads off about their lot, and feel they’re being persecuted by being kept out of America a year. I’ve heard some boys say “I’d trade this for a foxhole any day.” You just have to keep your mouth shut to remarks like that.

At least 50 percent of the sailors’ conversation, when talking to a newcomer like myself, is about three things:

The terrible typhoon they went through off the Philippines; the times they were hit by Jap bombs; and their desire to get back to America.

Very few of the boys have developed any real love for the sea – the kind that will draw them back to it for a lifetime. Some of course will come back if things get tough after the war. But mostly they are temporary sailors, and the sea is not in their blood.

Proud of the ship

Taking it all in all, they’re good boys who do what is asked of them, and do it well. They are very sincere and genuine, and they are almost unanimously proud of their ship.

I think I’ve been asked a hundred times how I happened to come on this ship, with so many to choose from. It is always said in that hopeful tone of wondering if I chose it because it has such a noble reputation.

So, I tell them that I asked to be put on a light carrier like this, rather than a big one. But that being a newcomer to the Pacific I didn’t know one ship from another, so this was the ship the Navy put me on.

But that satisfies them just as well, for then they assume that the Navy itself considers their ship a superior one – which I’m sure it does.

[jacktyunmen]

What navy vessel specifically was he located when he wrote this?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – The men aboard an aircraft carrier could be divided, for purposes of clarity, into three groups.

There are the fliers, both officer-pilots and enlisted radiomen and gunners, who actually fly in combat they do nothing but fly, and study, and prepare to fly.

The there are the men who maintain the fliers, the air officers, and the mechanics and the myriad plane handlers who shift and pish and manhandle the planes a dozen times a day around the deck.

These men are ordinarily known as “Airedales,” but the term isn’t much used on our ship. Usually they just call themselves “plane-pushers.”

And third is the ship’s crew – the deck hands, engineers, signalmen, cooks, plumbers and barbers. They run the ship, just as though it were any ship in the navy.

The fliers aren’t looked upon as gods by the rest of the crew, but they are respected. Hardly a man on the crew would trade places with them. they’ve seen enough crash landings on deck to know what the fliers go through.

But there is a feeling – a slight one – between the ship’s regular crew and the air maintenance crew. The feeling is on the part of the ship’s crew. They feel that the plane-handlers think they’re prima donnas.

They say to you “Them Airedales is the ones that gets all the glory, nobody ever hears about us. All we do is keep the damn ship going.”

But as far as I can see, the Airedales haven’t had an awful lot of glory. And their job is often a miserable one. Their hours are ungodly, and in the pinches they work like fiends. I think the Airedale deserves what little credit he gets.

Like flower garden

It is these “plane-pushers” who make the flight deck of an aircraft carrier look as gay and wildly colorful as a Walt Disney cartoon. For they dress in bright colors.

They wear cloth helmets and sweaters that are blue, green, red, yellow, white or brown. They make the flight deck look like a flower garden in June.

This colorful gear isn’t just a whim. Each color identifies a special type of workman, so they can be picked out quickly and sent on hurried tasks.

Red is the gasoline and firefighting detail. Blue is for the guys who just push the planes around. Brown is for plane captains and mechanics. White stands for radiomen and the engineering bosses. Yellow is for the plane directors.

Yellow is what a pilot looks for the moment he gets on deck. For the plane directors guide him as though they were leading a blind man. they use a sign language with their hands that is the same all over the Navy, and by obeying their signs explicitly, the pilot can taxi his plane within two inches of another one without ever looking at it.

No more hammocks

All the pilots and ship’s officers live in “officers’ country” in the forward part of the ship, they live in comfortable cabins, housing from one to four men.

The crew lives in compartments. They are of all shapes and sizes. Some hold as little as half a dozen men. Others are big and house a hundred men.

The Navy doesn’t use hammocks anymore. Every man has a bed. It is called a “rack.” It’s merely a tubular framework, with wire springs stretched across it. It is attached to the wall by hinges, and is folded up against the wall in the daytime.

The “racks” aren’t let down till about 7 in the evening (except for men standing regular watch who must sleep in the daytime). Hence a sailor has no regular place to sit or lie down during the day if he does nap a few spare minutes.

A light carrier, such as mine, has only about a third as many planes as the big carriers, and less than half the crew, but it does exactly the same kind of work.

Of the three types of carriers in the Navy, ours has the narrowest flight deck of all. It’s so narrow that when planes take off, they use the left side of the deck, in order that their right wingtip won’t come too close to the “island” as they pass.

Our pilots and crew are quite proud that we have the narrowest flight deck in existence. They’re proud they can even hit the thing. They enjoy telling this story, as an illustration:

One day one of our planes had engine trouble or something and couldn’t make it back to our ship, and had to land on the nearest carrier, which happened to be a big one.

The pilot circled around it and radioed in, asking permission to land. When the permission came back, he sent another message facetiously inquiring: “Which runway?”

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 20, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – We were launching our midmorning patrol flight. The sun was out bright, and the day warmly magnificent. Everything was serene.

I already had become acquainted with some of the pilots, and before each flight I would go to the “ready room” and find out from the blackboard the numbers of planes my friends were flying, so I could identify them as they went past.

Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet is one of the pilots I know best. We got acquainted because we have a mutual friend – war correspondent Chris Cunningham, with whom I shared a tent and sometimes worse through Tunisia and Italy. Jimmy and Chris are from the same hometown – Findlay, Ohio.

We knew the very moment he started that Jimmy was in trouble. His plane veered sharply to the right, and a big puff of white smoke spurted from his right brake band. Then slowly the plane turned and angled to the left as it gained speed.

Sensed trouble

The air officer up in the “island” sensed catastrophe, and put his hand on the warning squawker. All the sailors standing on the catwalk, with their heads sticking up over the edge of the flight deck, quickly ducked down. Yet such is the rigidity of excitement, I never even heard the squawker.

It was obvious Jimmy couldn’t stop his plane from going to the left. He had his right wheel locked, and the tire was leaving burned rubber on the deck, yet it wouldn’t turn the plane. And it was too late for him to stop now.

His wheels raked the anti-aircraft guns as he went over, his propeller missed men’s heads by inches, his left wing dropped, and in a flash, he disappeared over the side.

When the plane again came into view, only the tail was sticking out of the water. And then Jimmy bobbed up beside it. he had gotten out in a few seconds.

When he got back to us, Jimmy told me what happened from there on. He said that when the plane went in the water, it went so deep that it got dark in the cockpit. Jimmy wasn’t hurt by the crash, outside of a small cut on his forehead.

He pulled his various buckles, opening his hatch cover and releasing himself from his seat harness. But as he did so he fell forward (the plane was riding nose down in the water, of course) and in a moment was standing on his head, under water, and in a hell of a fix.

Cut radio cord

But somehow, he got himself upright, and then he couldn’t get out because his radio cord, attached to his helmet, was still plugged into its socket back of his seat.

So, he took his big sheath knife out of its holder, cut the radio cord, and then carefully put the knife back. He says he doesn’t know why he put it back. All this happened under water, and in mere seconds.

Some part of Jimmy’s clothing caught as he was getting out, and he gave a big yank to free himself. Thus, he tore his Mae West wide open, both compartments of it, and he had no buoyancy at all. But he is an excellent swimmer, so he stayed up.

Lucky again

When Jimmy went over the side, a destroyer was running about a mile to our left. Here Jimmy was lucky again. For that wasn’t the destroyer’s normal position; it just happened to be cutting across the convoy to deliver some mail on the other side.

Jimmy had hardly hit the water when we saw the destroyer heel over in a swath-cutting turn. They had been watching the takeoffs through their glasses, and had seen him go over. Our own ship, of course, had to keep right on going straight ahead. And our next plane took off without the slightest wait, as though nothing had happened.

The destroyer had Jimmy aboard in just seven seconds. They didn’t put over a boat for him, but instead sent a swimmer out after him, with a line tied around his waist.

He got to Jimmy just in time. Jimmy passed out in his arms. With no lifebelt, he had taken too much salt water aboard.

In the meantime, the destroyer had let down a metal stretcher, and another swimmer was there to help get Jimmy into it. it took a while for them to get him on, for he was dead weight, and the stretcher kept going up and down with the waves.

But finally they managed it. Jimmy was safe and alive, although a very water-laden and passed out young man from Ohio.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 21, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – Destroyers love to pick up airplane pilots out of the ocean. When they rescued our Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet, of Findlay, Ohio, after his plane had plunged over the side, it was pilot-rescue No. 15 for them.

They keep a box score on it, just as carriers keep score of the planes they shoot down. They even keep records of their speed, and try to break records. They fished out Jimmy seven minutes after he went over. Their record rescue is three minutes.

On the destroyer they put Jimmy to bed, got the water out of him and some morphine into him, and sewed up the gash on his head. The doctor joked as he sewed, telling Jimmy he was sorry he couldn’t find a bigger needle so it would hurt more.

Jimmy was nightmarish all night. He didn’t get sick at his stomach until next morning, when he tried to get some breakfast down. He had a headache next day, but after that he was all right.

Destroyers treat rescued pilots as though they were kings. They put Jimmy up in the skipper’s private cabin, since the skipper was on the bridge day and night anyhow.

Jimmy wore the skipper’s bathrobe and house slippers and underwear. The skipper came in a couple of times to take a bath, and actually apologized for intruding.

Fishing out pilots is such a frequent occurrence that the skipper even keeps a bundle of brand-new toothbrushes in his medicine cabinet for such sudden guests.

Scroll prepared for pilots

By the time Jimmy came to, the laundry had washed and pressed his clothes. He didn’t have his wallet with him, so his pictures and private papers were spared a dunking.

This certain destroyer has fished out so many pilots that they have a scroll already printed for such cases, and all they have to do is fill in the name. It’s a picturesque certificate like you get when you cross the Equator.

Across the top of Jimmy’s scroll was engraved the words, “The Blank’s Home for Dripping Aviators.”

And beneath it was this:

Know ye that Lt. James Van Fleet on such and such a date abruptly appeared into our happy home, and due to the peculiarities of his arrival has been found worthy of being honored as a Blank’s Dripping Aviator.

Engraved over the scroll was a huge arm reaching out from a destroyer, hauling a wet flier out of the ocean by the seat of his pants.

Ice cream for the destroyer

They returned Jimmy to us three days later, when they were delivering messages and mail from the flagship. They sent him over in a boson’s chair, pulled across on a heavy line strung between the two ships.

We got Jimmy aboard, and then we sent something back across in the chair to the destroyer. You’d never guess what it was. It was 20 gallons of ice cream!

Our carrier always does that when a destroyer rescues one of our pilots. Apparently, all carriers don’t, for the destroyer sent back a scribbled note saying, “Thanks a lot. That is the nicest thing that has ever happened to us.”

After they told me the whole story, we sent a signal back to the destroyer asking for the names of the two men who rescued him. The destroyer came right back–

The swimmer was Seaman Franklin Calloway of Philadelphia, and the one who helped was Petty Officer Melvin Collins, of Ottumwa, Iowa.

They’re smart on that destroyer. Because a few hours later here came another message saying, “If that information is for the press, might add that both men received Bronze Stars for similar rescue work during operations off Leyte last fall!”

Former schoolteacher

Jimmy Van Fleet is 25, and incongruous as it seems, was a schoolteacher before he became a fighter pilot in the Navy. He has a son seven months old whom he has never seen.

Jimmy asked me if I had ever been in Vienna. He said that was his dad’s “dream city.” His father was a Pfc. in the last war, and spent three years in a hospital in Vienna, and always has wanted to go back.

These columns are probably the first news Jimmy’s folks have had of his little midocean escapade. It is glorious news alongside the last grave message they had.

For Jimmy’s only brother, Ens. Donald Van Fleet, also a carrier pilot, was killed off Formosa just a few months ago. He had got two Jap planes in the two weeks before he himself was shot down. We are grateful that the sea gave Jimmy back.

[rit_upy]

@NormanStewart

It was 20 gallons of ice cream

How has it not melted? 75 litres of ice cream for the destroyer? That is torture. No one is gonna get enough.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 22, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – One of the first friends I made aboard our aircraft carrier was a tall, well-built, mustached sailor named Jerry Ryan.

He wears dungarees, smokes a pipe sometimes, and always wears his sleeves rolled up, He’s from Davenport, Iowa, but his wife is living in Indianapolis. He is a boilermaker first class.

Jerry had served one hitch in the Navy before the war. He knows all the little ins and outs of how to get along. Everybody likes him. He isn’t especially talkative, yet it’s safe to say he knows more people than anybody else on the ship.

Ryan is what is known in be the Navy as “a good man.” He’s skilled in his work, he’s dependable, and he’s very smart. Hed die before he’d curry favor with anybody.

He’s the kind an officer can depend on utterly – if that officer plays square with Ryan. But he gets a pretender so quickly it would make your head swim.

Ryan’s concept of right and wrong is very sharply drawn, and the Irish in him doesn’t hesitate when a crisis comes. The other boys were telling me of an incident–

It was one of the days when Jap bombs hit this ship, off the Philippines. A great hole was torn in the deck. Several men were killed, and many wounded. Bodies of their comrades were still lying mangled on the deck.

A sailor came up to look at the damage, and said almost exultingly, “Oh boy, this’s great. Now at last they’ll have to send us back to America for repairs.”

Without saying a word, Ryan turned and knocked him down.

Oil shack is a social center

Ryan runs what is known as the “oil shack.” From this little domain the condensers are regulated. He has dials and gauges and a phone and a clipboard on which are kept hourly records of oil pressures and water levels and all that stuff.

The “shack” is a little room about the size of an apartment kitchenette, with a metal workbench and drawers full of tools, and one folding canvas stool.

Ryan’s oil shack is a social center. There is always somebody hanging around. You can get a cup of coffee there, look at sea shell collections, see card tricks, or find out the latest rumors that started on the bridge five minutes ago.

Jerry brews coffee for his guests in a nickel-plated pot over an electric grill. The pot has a red hash mark for a hitch of service in the Navy. And soon he is going to award it the Purple Heart. It got dented in the Philippines typhoon.

Some nights we pop corn in the “oil shack.” The boys’ folks send them corn in cans, and they beg butter from the galley, and pop ‘er up in a skillet on the grill.

Lucky Ryan good friend of cook

One of Ryan’s, friends who comes to eat popcorn is a Negro – a tall, athletic fellow from his hometown of Davenport. They were on the ship together for a year before they found out they were from the same place.

The colored boy’s name is Wesley Cooper. He is a cook. He was a star athlete back home. He’s the best basketball player in the whole crew. When he gets done with the war, he has a scholarship waiting for him at the University of Iowa.

Wesley comes down to the shack almost every night after supper. He smokes a curved stem pipe, and holds one hand up to it, and listens and grins and doesn’t say much.

We were popping corn one night. One of the boys said, “Wes, how about getting us some more butter?” And another one said, “Wes, bring some salt, will you?” And a third said, “And bring me a sandwich when you come down, will you, Wes?”

And Wes grins and his white teeth flash and he said, “I suppose you’d like for me to go up and cook you a whole meal?” And he never made a move.

Ups and downs of war

Another of my best friends is Howard Wilson, a bosn’s mate second class. Like Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet, the fighter pilot we wrote about, he is from Findlay, Ohio. In fact they are good friends.

Wilson is a low-spoken, handsome and highly intelligent man of 35. He has a beautiful home and a good business back in Findlay. He is part owner and general manager of three movie theaters. His wife is running them while he is away.

In those bygone years back in the old hometown, Jimmy Van Fleet used to go to Howard Wilson and borrow money when he got hard up. Now the younger Jimmy dwells in the comparative luxury of officers’ quarters, and the older Howard lives the lowlier life of a sailor, sleeping on a rack in a crowded compartment, and wearing dungarees.

That’s the way things go in wartime. Howard is old and wise enough that it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. He accepts the war and his own lot calmly.

The other pilots know of this friendship, and ask Jimmy if he’s keeping on the good side of Howard to insure he’ll have a job when the war is over. He says he is.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 23, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC – The second day I was aboard our carrier, the chief steward came up to my cabin and happily announced that he had a cake for me, but it was so big he didn’t know how to handle it.

For a while I couldn’t get what he was driving at, but finally he made it clear.

It seemed the night bakers had baked a huge cake for me, and it was to be served at dinner that evening. The steward was worried because the cake was so big they didn’t have a board big enough to put it on, and therefore couldn’t put it on the table where everybody could see it.

But that evening when we went down to dinner, here was the cake in front of my chair, right in the middle of the table, almost filling it up. They had solved the problem by getting the carpenters to make a board.

Written in pink icing on top of the white cake were the words “Welcome Aboard, Mr. Pyle,” and as somebody suggested, I was so taken aback at being called “Mr. Pyle” that I didn’t recognize it at first.

I was very pleased and embarrassed by this first official cake of my lifetime, and of course I had to take a lot of ribbing from my friends. They said they’d been slaving on that ship for a year and nobody ever baked a special cake for them.

Misses roundup

After supper I groped my way through the labyrinth of passages below, and finally tracked down the thoughtful person who had baked the cake.

He was Ray Conner, baker second class from LeGrande, Oregon. LeGrande is in Eastern Oregon not far from Pendleton, and Ray was moaning that he hadn’t seen the famous Pendleton roundup now for three years.

I asked him how he happened to bake a cake for me, and he said well he had got through his regular baking a little early the night before, and hadn’t anything else to do, and just thought it was a good idea.

Ray’s father is a schoolteacher, and Ray was studying to be one, but now after all this business, he kind of doubts he’ll want to teach school.

If I had to be in the Navy, I think I’d about as soon be a baker as anything else. The bakeshop is always clean as a whistle, and it always smells good. And you are almost your own boss.

Ray is quite satisfied with his lot in the Navy, mainly because a bakery is so wonderfully clean. “I can’t stand to work in filth,” he said.

Another cake!

I was feeling pretty stuck-up about my cake, and then next evening when we went down to supper, here was a big cake on the adjoining table. Did I see red!

I made a few discreet inquiries to see who had the gall to have a cake in front of him so soon after my triumph. And I learned it was for the pilot who, the day before, had made the 8000th landing on our carrier. It seems that’s a tradition, for every thousandth landing.

So after the meal I went around and introduced myself to this cad. He was Lt. Edward Van Vranken of Stockton, California.

I said, “I’m pretty sore. I thought I was the only one around here who rated a cake.”

And he said, “Well, I’m jealous. You had photographers taking pictures of your cake. But could I get a photographer? No.”

So I said, “Well, that’s better. So you made the 8000th landing? Was it a good one?”

Old stuff to him

And he grinned and said, “Well, I got aboard.” And then he said, “As a matter of fact, it was a pretty good landing. And if you’re ever in California after the war, come to Stockton and we’ll have something better than cake.”

Lt. Van Vranken is no neophyte at landing on carriers. He was flying from one when we invaded Morocco in 1942, and he was there.

He had made around 120 carrier landings before he came on this ship, and now his total is up around 200. A guy who makes that many landings on a carrier and is still making them, didn’t learn it in correspondence school.

Eight thousand landings is small stuff for the big carriers. For some of them are lots older, and too they have three times as many planes to land every day.

I think the record in our oldest carriers is something up around 80,000. But we like 8,000 on our ship. And anyhow we haven’t got enough flour for 80 cakes.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 24, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – The first time you see a plane land on a carrier you almost die. At the end of the first day my muscles were sore just from being all tensed up while watching the planes come in.

It is all so fast, timing is so split-second, space is so small – well, somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn’t be any of them left alive.

Planes don’t approach a carrier as they would on land – from way back and in a long glide. Instead, they almost seem to be sneaking up as if to surprise it. They’re in such an awkward position and flying at such a crazy angle you don’t see how they can ever land on anything.

But it’s been worked out by years of experience, and it’s the best way. Everything is straightened out in the last few seconds of flying. That is – if it works.

Anything can happen in those last few seconds. Once in a great while the plane loses its speed and spins into the water just behind the ship. And planes have been known to ram right into the stern of the ship,

The air currents are always bad. The ship’s “island” distorts the currents, and makes the air rough. Even the wake of the ship – the waters churned up by the propellers – have an effect on the air through which the planes must pass.

If half a dozen planes come in successively without one getting a “wave off” from the signalman, you’re doing pretty well. For landing on the deck of a small carrier in a rough sea is just about like landing on half a block of Main Street while a combined hurricane and earthquake is going on.

Few are perfect

You would call it a perfect landing if a plane came in and hit on both wheels at the same time, in the center of the deck headed straight forward, and caught about the third one of the cables stretched across the deck.

But very few of them are perfect. They come in a thousand different ways. If their approach is too bad, the signalman waves them around again.

They’ll come in too close to the edge of the deck, and sometimes go right on over the catwalk. They’ll come in so high they’ll miss all the arresting gear and slam into the high cables stretched across mid-decks, called “the barrier.”

Some do somersaults

Sometimes they do a somersault over the barrier, and land on their backs. Sometimes they bounce all around and hit the “island.” Sometimes they bounce 50 feet in the air and still get down all right. Sometimes they catch fire.

During the Tokyo strike, one of the big carriers running near us lost three planes in 10 minutes. One was shot up and had to “ditch” in the water alongside the ship.

The next one slammed into the “island,” and was so wrecked they just heaved the wreckage over the side. The next one to come in crashed the “barrier” and burned up.

And on the other hand. you’ll land planes for weeks without a bad crackup. We wrecked three planes our first three days out in crashes – and not a single one after that.

The first time I watched our boys land. They were pretty bad. They hadn’t flown for about two weeks, and were a little rusty.

Carrier stance

As I was watching the first flight come in one by one, my roommate, Lt. Cmdr. Al Masters, came up behind me and said: “Well, I see you’ve got the carrier stance already. I noticed you leaning way over to help pull them around into position.”

When all the planes were back, I walked over to Cmdr. Al Gurney, the air officer, and said “If I’m going to watch this for the whole trip, you’ll have to provide me with some heart-failure medicine.”

And he replied: “Well, think of me. I had to watch 2,000 of them. It’ll drive you nuts.”

The previous skipper of this ship finally got so he refused to watch when the planes were coming in. He just stood on the bridge and kept looking forward.

But as the trip wore on the boys improved and my own nerves hardened, and between us we managed to get all our planes down for the rest of the trip without a single casualty either to them or to me.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 26, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – There are moments when a voyage to war has much of the calm and repose of a pleasure cruise in peacetime.

For day after day, we sailed in seas that were smooth and warm, under benign skies. There was no air of urgency about us. True, we kept air patrols in the sky, but it was really a practice gesture, for we were far away from any enemy.

Sailors at work wore no shirts. Little bunches of flying fish skimmed the blue water. You needed dark glasses on deck. Pilots took sun baths on the forecastle.

Up on the broad flight deck, clad only in shorts, the chaplain and executive officer were playing deck tennis. And in the afternoon the forward elevator was let down, the officers and men played basketball.

Every night we had movies after supper. It was hard to keep it in your mind that we were a ship of war, headed for war.

Then ever so gradually the weather changed, as we plowed northward. Yesterday and all the days behind it had been tropically hot. Today was surprisingly and comfortably cool. Tomorrow would be cold. We were nearing the great hunting grounds off Japan.

On the last day you could sense the imminence of it all over the ship. Not by anything big, but by the little things. Our weeks of monotony and waiting were at an end.

The daily briefings of the pilots became more detailed. There was less playboyishness among the crew. Ordinary ship’s rules were changed to battle rules.

What is known as the “extended action bill” went into effect. Sailors could let down their racks in the daytime, and get a little extra rest.

Captain stays on bridge

Meal hours, instead of being at 12 and 6 o’clock sharp, were changed to run from 11 till 1, and from 4:30 and 6:30, so that men on watch could trade off and dash in for a bite. The captain never left the bridge, either to eat or sleep.

When you came into your cabin, you found your bunk had been made up with a “flash sheet” around it. That is a black rubberized sheet, to protect you from bomb burns.

Everybody was issued “flash gear.” That consists of several items – a thin grey hood that covers your head and hangs down over your shoulders; a white cloth on an elastic band to cover your nose and mouth; isinglass goggles for your eyes; and long gray cloth gloves with a high gauntlet.

All of this to save your hands and face from the searing, flamethrowing blast of a big shell or bomb when it explodes. On some ships the men paint their faces with an anti-flash grease, making them look like circus clowns, but we didn’t on our ship.

On the lower decks, every compartment door was closed. This was done so that if a torpedo should hit, it would flood only the compartment where it struck. All the rest of the ship would be sealed off from it.

The ship’s hospital was shut off, and the medics set up business in the many prearranged and stations scattered on higher decks about the ship. They could even perform operations at any one of a dozen temporary spots set up in mess halls or cabins.

Long underwear comes out

Also, we broke out cold weather gear for the bone-chilling days ahead. An extra blanket was put on our bunks. Blue Navy sweaters came out for the first time. And blue stocking caps, and several kinds of rain capes with a parka, and you even saw a few pea jackets.

And yes, believe it or not, we even had long underwear too. It had never been used before, and goodness knows how long it had been baled up in shipboard stockrooms.

Some of it was moldy. In fact, the suit they got out for the captain – well, they had to wash and dry it hurriedly before giving it to him, because it smelled so badly from mold.

After supper on the night before our strike, we saw the movie The Magnificent Dope. I guess it’s old, but it was good and awfully funny.

At least we thought so, for everybody laughed hilariously. When tension builds up in a man before a period of great danger, the tension is usually inner, and not often visible. That’s the way it was at the movie that night.

Except I noticed there were only half as many people at the movie as usual. And not long after it was over, everybody had gone to bed. For they knew there would be no rest tomorrow.