Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 17, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

With U.S. forces in North Africa – (Feb. 16)
Four good soldiers, who have already done more than their share in the war have been down in these parts lately. They are Kay Francis, Martha Raye, Mitzi Mayfair and Carole Landis.

Some people may take lightly the contributions of Hollywood folks to the war effort, but I don’t. These gals work themselves to a frazzle. They travel dangerously. They live and work under mighty unpleasant conditions. They don’t get a dime. They are losing a lot and they have nothing to gain – nothing material, that is. But surely, they are going home with a warm inner satisfaction, knowing that they have performed far beyond the ordinary call of duty.

The quartet of stars has been away from America since October. They flew the Atlantic by Clipper, toured the camps in Northern Ireland and England, and came to Africa by Flying Fortress. They have heard bombs fall, and they know about Army stew. They’ve averaged four hours’ sleep a night. Each of them has had a bout with the flu. They have done all their own washing, because there’s no other way to get it done. Yet they could all be in California lying on the sand.

When they came out to our far desert airdrome, they put on their performance on the flat bed of a big wrecking truck out in the midafternoon sun, surrounded by soldiers sitting on the ground. They spoke the first English from a woman’s mouth these soldiers had heard in months. To say they were appreciated is putting it mildly.

Half the fun and half the good, I suppose, of such a performance is the opportunity it gives the soldiers in the audience to imagine themselves as great lovers, and the inspiration it provides for the soldiers’ own brand of humor.

Kay Francis starts it off by saying they’d rather be here than any place in the world. That brings a thunderous cascade of boos. Then she says:

The reason is there’s no place else we could be the only women among several thousand men.

That brings the laugh. Then she says:

And I know every one of you would protect me, wouldn’t you?

That brings the “Oh yeahs!” and yells and whistles of appreciation.

When Carole Landis comes out, something like a great sigh goes over the crowd. Carole, as you know, is rather voluptuous. As she finishes her song and holds out her arms, a pathetic, wracked voice comes from the far edge of the audience, a lonely guy screaming to the world his comical misery:

I can’t stand it!

Mitzi Mayfair wears a skimpy green spangly thing and does her famous dances. A couple of dozen soldiers are perched on the truck’s big steel boom above her, and every time Mitzi kicks, they pretend to swoon and fall off. Mitzi ends her act by calling for jitterbug volunteers. The boys are bashful, but finally a private is pulled down off the boom. He is no slouch as a jitterbug, but she almost dances him off his feet. She winds up by throwing the exhausted soldier over her shoulder and carrying him off the stage.

Sometimes Mitzi gets herself in a pickle with this stunt. One night in England she had to carry off a guy who weighed 225 pounds. Another time she sprained a shoulder. And in her second performance at this airdrome, she almost met her Waterloo.

This show was for flying officers, the ones who actually do the bombing and fighting, and there’s nothing bashful about them. When Mitzi called for volunteers, up rose Capt. Tex Dallas, a Fortress pilot who doesn’t give a damn about anything. Tex took off his coat, folded it neatly, and walked challengingly onto the stage. Mitzi whispered instructions to him, but Tex doesn’t follow instructions very well. Instead of pretending to be exhausted, he had Mitzi on the ropes within a minute. After chasing her around the stage he finally had her hiding behind the piano. The audience went wild.

Eventually, after poor Mitzi had given herself up for lost, Tex relented and let her carry him off the stage.

I’ve seen Mitzi dance in New York musical comedies, and now I’ve seen her dance in dust-covered slacks on the African desert. She has already given a strenuous year and a half of her life to the war and she’s in it for the duration, and all I can say is, she’s a honey.

Martha Raye is really the star of the troupe. The soldiers have gone for her crazy brand of slapstick. The program winds up practically in a riot when all four girls sing the French, British and American national anthems.

The girls are pretty sore about one thing. It seems one of the American broadcasters in Algiers broadcast back to America that they wouldn’t go to the Tunisian front because they were afraid. He asked why they were any better than anybody else.

Actually, the girls begged to go to Tunisia but were turned down. The generals wouldn’t let them go because it would be dangerous for troops to be concentrated to see the show. Those girls were not afraid. Carole Landis even wanted to go on a bombing mission.

Personally, I think they will deserve medals.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 18, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 17)
A big military convoy moving at night across the mountains and deserts of Tunisia is something that nobody who has been in one can ever forget.

Recently I have been living with a frontline outfit. Late one afternoon, it received sudden orders to move that night, bag and baggage. It had to pull out of its battle positions, time the departures of its various units to fit into the flow of traffic at the first control point on the highway, and then drive all night and go into action on another front.

All the big convoys in the war area moved at night. German planes would spot a daytime convoy and play havoc with it. It is extremely difficult and dangerous, this moving at night in total blackness over strange and rough roads. But it has to be done.

Our convoy was an immense one. There were hundreds of vehicles and thousands of men. It took seven and a half hours to pass one point. The convoy started moving at 5:30 in the evening, just before dusk. The last vehicle didn’t clear till 1 o’clock the next morning.

I rode in a jeep with Capt. Pat Riddleberger, of Woodstock, Virginia, and Pvt. John Coughlin, Manchester, New Hampshire. Ahead of us was a small covered truck which belonged to Riddleberger’s tank-destroyer section. We were a little two-vehicle convoy within ourselves. We were to fall in near the tail end, so we had half the night to kill before starting. We stood around the truck, parked in a barn lot, for an hour or two, just talking in the dark. Then we went into the kitchen of the farmhouse which had been used as a command post and which was empty now. There was an electric light, and we built a fire in the kitchen fireplace out of boxes. But the chimney wouldn’t draw, and we almost choked from the smoke.

Some officers had left a stack of copies of the New York Times for October and November lying on the floor, so we read those for an hour or so. We looked at the book sections and the movie ads. None of us had ever heard of the new books or the current movies. It made us feel keenly how long we had been away and how cut off we were from home. One of the boys said:

They could make money just showing all the movies over again for a year after we get back.

We finished the papers and there were still three hours to kill, so we got blankets out of the truck and lay down on the concrete floor. We were sleeping soundly when Capt. Riddleberger awakened us at 1:00 a.m. and said we were off.

The moon was just coming out. The sky was crystal-clear, the night bitter cold. The jeep’s top was down. We all put on all the clothes we had. In addition to my usual polar-bear wardrobe, which includes heavy underwear and two sweaters, that night I wore a pair of coveralls, a heavy combat suit that a tank man lent me, a pair of overshoes, two caps – one on top of the other – and over them a pair of goggles. The three of us in the jeep wrapped up in blankets. In spite of all that, we almost froze before the night was over.

We moved out of the barn lot, and half a mile away we swung onto the main road, at the direction of motorcyclists who stood there guiding the traffic. Gradually our eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, and it wasn’t hard to follow the road. We had orders to drive in very close formation, so we kept within 50 feet of each other.

After a few miles we had to cross a mountain range. There were steep grades and switchback turns, and some of the trucks had to back and fill to make the sharper turns. There was considerable delay on the mountain. French trucks and buses would pass and tie up traffic, swinging in and out. And right in the center of these tortuous mountains we met a huge American hospital unit, in dozens of trucks, moving up to the front. They were on the outside of the road, and at times their wheels seemed about to slide off into the chasm.

We had long waits while traffic jams ahead were cleared. We shut off our motors and the night would be deathly silent except for a subdued undertone of grinding motors far ahead. At times we could hear great trucks groaning in low gear on steep grades far below, or the angry clanking of tanks as they took sharp turns behind us.

Finally, the road straightened out on a high plateau. There we met a big contingent of French troops moving silently toward the front we had just vacated. The marching soldiers seemed like dark ghosts in the night. Hundreds of horses were canning their artillery, ammunition and supplies.

I couldn’t help feeling the immensity of the catastrophe that had put men all over the world, millions of us, to moving in machine-like precision throughout long foreign nights – men who should have been comfortably asleep in their warm beds at home. War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 19, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 18)
The jeep in which I was riding was almost at the tail end of our immense armored convoy when we started, but before many hours and passed we had overtaken so many slow-moving vehicles that we worked our way well up into the convoy. As we droned along through the night it was hard to realize that we were part of such a fabulously long string of war machines. Vehicles stretched ahead of us for scores of miles, but of course we couldn’t see them, and our only companionship was five or six red taillights ahead of us. We all drove without headlights, but did have taillights so we could see when the fellow ahead was stopping.

Occasionally we would smoke, and I would light cigarettes for the others. We didn’t try to hide the flare of the match, for it was only a flash and then quickly gone. Once in a while we would overtake a truck with a dead engine, or a big wrecker towing a half-track. But our American machines are good ones, and of the hundreds of vehicles in that great convoy, only a handful had trouble during the long journey.

Our convoy was as complete as a circus. There were ammunition trucks, kitchens, repair shops, trucks carrying telephone switchboards and generators for camp lighting, trucks carrying bombs. There were jeeps carrying generals, and there were great wreckers capable of picking up a whole tank. It was quite a contrast to the Arabs we’d pass in the night, with their heavily loaded camels and burros.

The moon gave us enough light to drive by, but how the bulk of the convoy, which started long before the moon came up, ever got over the mountain range is beyond me. They had to drive in total blackness. Guides would go ahead to study the road. They spotted all the sharp turns and steep banks, and they would indicate the direction of traffic with their hooded flashlights.

About every hour and a half, we would stop for the truck driver’s traditional stretch. At one of these stops the drivers checked their mileage. We had been on the road three hours and come exactly 27 miles. Snaking a huge convoy over a mountain range in the dead of night is slow business.

But open country was ahead, and when we reached that we stepped up to 35 and 40 miles an hour. The night wind cut more cruelly now. We didn’t talk much, for it was too cold. My goggles kept steaming inside, and I would have to lift them off and wipe them. Finally, all of us except the drivers pulled blankets over our heads and dozed a little. But not much, for holes in the gravel roads were hard to see and often the jeep would do a backbreaking hurdle.

At the stops, the soldiers would get out and run up and down the road, or stand in one spot jitterbugging in an effort to warm their feet. The ones I felt sorriest for were the infantrymen, packed like sardines in open trucks with no protection from the bitter cold. It seems as if the infantry always gets it in the neck.

Several hours after midnight the convoy got itself into a ridiculous snarl. During a rest stop apparently some driver far ahead had gone to sleep and forgotten to start on again. We waited for half an hour. Then impatient drivers pulled out and started passing. That was fatal. The first thing we knew two lines of traffic choked the road. At every gully and every turn they would snarl up and one line would have to stop. Eventually it got just like those awful holiday jams at home where you move a few feet at a time.

I said to Capt. Riddleberger:

I’m amazed that such a thing could be allowed to happen. This strikes me as being the perfect way not to win the war.

He agreed, but I was sorry for my remarks later, for in an hour or so, everything straightened itself out. We were clear of the mountains now. We passed through silent little Arab villages, and drove across treeless prairies.

About 4 a.m., Riddleberger and I changed places with two soldiers riding in the back end of the truck ahead. We lay down on barracks bags and pulled blankets over us, thinking we’d snatch a little sleep. Pretty soon Riddleberger said:

These blankets smell so bad I can’t sleep.

Mine didn’t smell exactly like perfume either.

The captain said:

Well, hell. The poor guys never have a chance to take a bath.

Apparently, it didn’t occur to him that he and I never took baths either, I wonder how we smell to others.

My feet were so cold and achy that at last I took off my overshoes and shoes and held my cold toes in my hands, trying to warm them. After half an hour or so they quit hurting. Eventually I went to sleep. When I came to there was a faint light in the sky. It was just 7 o’clock. I had been dead to the world for two hours. It was hard to believe, for the truck had been jolting and bouncing and stopping and starting all that time. Weariness is a great cure for insomnia, or maybe I had been anesthetized by those blankets, who knows?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 20, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the front in Tunisia – (Feb. 19)
This is the last of a series about an armored convoy trip in which a whole great section of an Army moved by night across half of Tunisia, from one fighting front to another. I have written so much about it because soldiers at the front are moving constantly and the battle areas of the world writhe with these vast convoys stealing dangerously across country, hidden in the darkness.

You hear little about them, but this one I’ve just ridden with is typical of hundreds that are moving somewhere this very night.

The head of our convoy started just at dusk and reached its destination at 4 in the morning. The tail end didn’t start till 1 a.m., and it was nearly noon before it reached journey’s end and safety. We were near that tail end.

Just after daylight the members of our little party changed places again. Capt. Pat Riddleberger got behind the wheel of the truck on which we had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep. I went back to relieve one of the half-frozen soldiers in our jeep. When we started again, we were all wide awake and vividly alert, for the hour of danger was upon us. We still had hours to go in daylight, and it was a magnificent chance for the Germans to destroy us by the hundreds with strafing planes.

The sun came up slowly over the bare mountain ridges. The country was flat and desert-like. There was not a tree as far as we could see. It looked like West Texas. We passed Arabs, blue with cold, shepherding their flocks or walking the roads. There was hoarfrost on the ground, and sometimes we saw thin ice in the ditches.

At daylight our vehicles, acting on orders and through long experience, began to spread out. Now we were running about 200 yards apart. As far as we could see across the desert, ahead and behind, the road was filled with drab brown vehicles.

Sgt. James Bernett, 1541 Cheyenne St., Tulsa, Oklahoma, was driving our jeep. I rode up front with him. Pvt. John Coughlin sat in the back. He unsheathed a machine gun and mounted it on a stanchion between us. We kept a careful lookout for planes. After a while we saw trucks ahead stopping and soldiers piling out like ants, but I was in such a daze from cold and fatigue that I didn’t sense at first what that meant. Neither did the others.

Then all of a sudden Coughlin yelled:

Watch it! Watch it!

And we both knew what he meant. By now all the men ahead were running out across the desert as fast as they could go. Bernett slammed on the brakes – and you can stop a jeep almost instantly. I was so entangled in blankets that it took a few seconds to get loose. Coughlin couldn’t wait. He went out right over my head before the jeep had stopped. He caught a foot as he went, and it threw him headlong. He hit the road, flat, and skidded on his stomach in the gravel. He hurt one knee, but he limped the fastest limp I’ve ever seen.

We beat it out across the desert until we found a little gully a hundred feet from the road. We didn’t get into the gully, but stopped and took our bearings. None of us could see or hear anything. We waited about five minutes. Soldiers were strung out over the desert on both sides of the road. Everybody gradually decided it was a false alarm. And so, cussing but immensely relieved, we straggled back to the road.

We were all so cold we were brittle. One tall soldier came limping back saying:

My feet are so damn cold that when I hit the ground my toes broke right off.

That remark seemed to set us off, and suddenly the whole thing got funny. One soldier yelled at Coughlin:

My grandma’s awkward too. But then she’s old.

It wasn’t funny to Coughlin. He was angry and dead serious about his tumble. Sgt. Bernett and I got the giggles. You can do that sometimes when you’re pitifully cold and also wonderfully relieved. We couldn’t keep from laughing at Coughlin’s comical misery and rage, and laughed till we could hardly breathe. Bernett said:

Well, there’s one thing about the Army. It’s good for a laugh a minute.

I can still see us out there on the African desert at dawn, snickering, with death iti the sky. It wasn’t till later that we learned the alarm was real and that far ahead of us, out of sight and sound, the convoy had been strafed and men wounded.

The rest of the trip was like any trip. The road grew dusty and the wind colder, it seemed, than ever. But the danger of attack was always with us, and we stopped and hit the ditch a couple of times before realizing that the planes we saw were our own.

We pulled into our new station a little before 11 in the morning, camouflaged the tanks and trucks, and then broke out some canned rations. We cooked sausages on a gasoline stove on the hood of the jeep. And a half hour later we went to a kitchen truck and ate a big lunch.

Then, while others worked at digging themselves in and cleaning a jumble of gear, I spread my bedroll on the ground and slept in utter unconsciousness, for three hours, with the bright sun benevolently baking my dirty face.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 22, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (Feb. 21)
It must be hard for you folks at home to conceive how oru troops right at the front actually live. In fact, it is hard to describe it to you even when I’m among them, living in somewhat the same way they are.

You can scarcely credit the fact that human beings – the same people you’ve known all your life – could adjust themselves so acceptably to a type of living that is only slightly above the caveman stage.

Some of our troops came directly to the Tunisian front after the original occupation of North and West Africa, and have been here ever since. They have not slept in a bed for months. They’ve lived through this vicious winter sleeping outdoors on the ground.

They haven’t been paid in three months. They have been on British rations most of the time, and British rations, though good, get mighty tiresome. They never take off their clothes at night, except their shoes. They don’t get a bath oftener than once a month. One small detachment acquired lice and had to be fumigated, but all the rest have escaped so far. They move so frequently they don’t attempt to put in any home touches, as the men do at the more permanent camps toward the rear. Very few of the frontline troops have ever had any leave. They never go to town for an evening’s fun. They work all the time.

Nobody keeps track of the days or weeks. I’ll wager that 90% of our frontline troops never know when Sunday comes.

Furthermore, the old traditional differences between day and night have almost ceased to exist. Nighttime no longer necessarily means rest, nor daytime work. Often, it’s just reversed. The bulk of our convoying of supplies and shifting of troops is done at night. The soldiers are accustomed to traveling all night, sometimes three or four nights in a row. Irregularity of sleep becomes normal. On soldier told me he once went three days and nights without sleep.

You see men sleeping anywhere anytime. The other day I saw a soldier asleep in blankets under an olive tree at 2 in the afternoon. A few feet away a full colonel was sleeping soundly on the ground. In battle you just go on until you drop.

It isn’t always possible to get enough food up to the fighting soldiers. I have just been with one artillery outfit in the mountains who were getting only one cold meal a day.

Nurses tell me that when the more seriously wounded reach the hospital, they are often so exhausted they fall asleep without drugs, despite their pain.

The war coarsens most people. You live rough and talk rough, and if you didn’t toughen up inside you simply wouldn’t be able to take it. An officer friend of mine, Lt. Leonard Bessman of Milwaukee, told me two incidents of a battle that touched him deeply.

One evening he and another officer came up to a tiny farmhouse, which was apparently empty. To be on the safe side he called out, “Who’s there?” before going in. The answer came back:

Capt. Blank, and who the hell wants to know?

They went in and found the captain, his clothes covered with blood, heating a can of rations over a gasoline flame. They asked if they could stay all night with him. He said he didn’t give a damn. They started to throw their blankets down, and the captain said:

Look out for that man over there.

There was a dead soldier lying in a corner.

The captain was cooking his supper and preparing to stay all night alone in that same room. The blood and fury of death about him that day had left him utterly indifferent both to the companionship of the living and the presence of the dead.

The other incident was just the opposite. Another captain happened to be standing beside Bessman. It was just at dusk and they were on the desert. The night chill was coming down. The captain looked to the far horizon and said, sort of to himself:

You fight all day here in the desert and what’s the end of it all? Night just closes down over you and chokes you.

A little later Bessman got out a partly filled bottle of gin he had with him and asked this same sensitive captain if he’d like a drink. The captain didn’t even reach out his hand. He simply asked:

Have you got enough for my men too?

He wouldn’t take a drink himself unless the enlisted men under him could have some.

All officers are not like that, but the battlefield does produce a brotherhood. The common bond of death draws human beings toward each other over the artificial barrier of rank.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (Feb. 22)
After a few weeks of frontline living, your whole perspective on the niceties and necessities of life change.

You used to be sore when you couldn’t get a taxi. Now you’ve struck gold when you find a spot where you can lie down out of the wind.

Even my own perspective has changed, and as a correspondent I’ve had only the barest taste of the rough going. For a lifetime I have bathed with becoming regularity, and I thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. Now I have just had my first bath in a month, and I go two weeks at a time without even taking off my socks. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

The other day, I had to laugh at myself over a little emotion I experienced. We had arrived one evening at a new frontline headquarters. It was centered around a Tunisian farmhouse, as practically all command posts were. Soldiers and officers alike were sleeping just anywhere they could – in trucks, under trees, in the barn and chicken houses. It was cold and damp, as usual.

Nobody tells a correspondent where to sleep or what to do when he is gypsying around the front. He shifts for himself. So I nosed around and found a place to sleep. It was under a big French grain wagon sitting in the barn lot. Some soldiers had found several strips of corrugated tin roofing and set them around three sides of the wagon, making walls. The wagon bed formed a roof overhead. They had brought straw from a nearby stack and put it on the ground under the wagon. There we threw our bedding rolls.

It was the coziest place I’d slept in for a week. It had two magnificent features – the ground was dry, and the wind was cut off. I was so pleased at finding such a wonderful place that I could feel my general spirits go up like an elevator. When the detachment got orders to move the next day, I felt a genuine regret at leaving this little haven. And to think after all it was only some pitiful straw on the hard ground under a wagon.

As we were going to bed that night, Hal Boyle of the Associated Press, who was sleeping next to me, said:

I believe that in wartime your physical discomfort becomes a more dominant thing in life than the danger you’re in.

And I believe that’s true. The danger comes in spurts; discomfort is perpetual. You’re always cold and almost always dirty. Outside of food and cigarettes, you have absolutely none of the little things that made life normal back home. You don’t have chairs, lights, floors, or tables. You don’t have any places to set anything, or any store to buy things from. There are no newspapers, milk, beds, sheets, radiators, beer, ice cream or hot water. You just sort of exist, either standing up working or lying down asleep. There is no pleasant in-between. The velvet is all gone from living.

It doesn’t get much below freezing here in central Tunisia, but you must believe me when I say we all suffer agonies from the cold. Any soldier will back me up.

The days are sunshiny, and often really warm, but the nights are almost inhuman. Everybody wears heavy underwear and all the sweaters he can find, plus overcoat and gloves and knitted cap. And still he’s cold. We have snow on the mountains here.

The soldiers somehow resent the fact that so many of you folks at home just think because we’re in Africa that we’re passing out with the heat. Any number of soldiers have showed me letters from their families full of sympathy because of the heat prostrations they must be suffering.

Soldiers ask me for Heaven’s sake to get over to the folks at home that Africa in winter is frigid. I’ll tell you, in one little incident, just how cold it is. And also how little money means compared to bodily necessities.

When not traveling around the fronts, I’m living in a small igloo tent among fir trees at a certain forward camp. There I hole up for days at a time to write these columns. The tent is fine except that there’s no heat in it and no way to get any heat.

So the other day, along the road, I ran into a soldier in a half-truck who had a kerosene stove – the old-fashioned kind they used to heat the school with, you know, I offered him $50 for it – back home it would be worth about $3.

He didn’t hesitate a second. He just said, “No sir,” and that was the end of that.

It would have been just the same if I’d offered him $500. He couldn’t use the money, and without the stove he’d be miserable.

Now do you see how things are different over here with us?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 24, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

At the Tunisian front – (Feb. 23, by wireless)
You folks at home must be disappointed at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia. So are we over here.

Our predicament is damned humiliating, as Gen. Joe Stilwell said about our getting kicked out of Burma a year ago. We’ve lost a great deal of equipment, many American lives, and valuable time and territory – to say nothing of face. Yet no one over here has the slightest doubt that the Germans would be thrown out of Tunisia. It is simply in the cards.

It is even possible that our defeat may not even delay Rommel’s exodus, for actually our troops formed only a small part of the total Allied forces in Tunisia. Estimates among men at the front run anywhere from two to six months for finishing the Tunisian campaign.

One thing you folks at home must realize is that this Tunisian business is mainly a British show. Our part in it is small. Consequently, our defeat is not so disastrous to the whole picture as it would have been if we had been bearing the major portion of the task.

When the time comes

We Americans did the North African landings and got all the credit, although the British did help us. The British are doing the Tunisia job and will get the credit, though we are giving them a hand. That’s the way it has been planned all the time. That’s the way it will be carried out. When the time comes, the British 1st Army will squeeze on the north, the British 8th Army will squeeze on the south, and we will hole in the middle. And it will really be the British who will run Rommel out of Tunisia.

The fundamental cause of our trouble over here lies in two things: we had too little to work with, as usual, and we underestimated Rommel’s strength and especially his audacity.

Both military men and correspondents knew we were too thinly spread in our sector to hold if the Germans were really to launch a big-scale attack. Where everybody was wrong was in believing they didn’t have the stuff to do it with.

Can’t tell all – new

Correspondents are not now permitted to write anything critical concerning the Tunisian situation, or to tell what we think was wrong. The powers that be feel that this would be bad for “home morale.” So, you just have to trust that our forces are learning to do better next time.

Personally, I feel that some such setback as that – tragic though it is for many Americans, for whom it is now too late – is not entirely a bad thing for us. It is all right to have a good opinion of ourselves, but we Americans are so smug with our cockiness. We somehow feel that just because we’re Americans we can whip our weight in wildcats. And we have got it into our heads that production alone will win the war.

There are two things we must learn and we may be learning them right now – we must spread ourselves thicker, on the frontlines, and we must streamline our commands for quick and positive action in emergencies.

Another tank, please

As for our soldiers themselves, you need feel no shame nor concern about their ability. I have seen them in battle and afterwards, and there is nothing wrong with the common American soldier. His fighting spirit is good. His morale is okay. The deeper he gets into a fight, the more of a fighting man he becomes.

I’ve seen crews that have had two tanks shot out from under them but whose only thought was to get a third tank and “have another crack at those blankety-blanks.”

One can’t whip two

It is true they are not such seasoned battle veterans as the British and Germans. But they had had some battle experience before this last encounter, and I don’t believe their so-called greenness was the cause of our defeat. One good man simply can’t whip two good men. That’s about the only way I know to put it. Everywhere on every front we simply have got to have more stuff before we start going forward instead of backward.

I happened to be in on the battle of Sbeitla, where we fought the German breakthrough for four days before withdrawing. In the next few days, I shall try to describe to you what it was like.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 25, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (Feb. 24, by wireless)
On the morning the big German push started against the American troops in Tunisia, our forward command post in that area was hidden in a patch of cactus about a mile from the town of Sidi Bouzid.

It had been there more than a week and I had visited there myself only three days previously. I had spent a lot of time with our forward troops in the hills, and I knew most of the officers.

A command post is really the headquarters of a unit. In this case a brigadier general was in command. His staff included intelligence and planning officers, unit commanders, a medical detachment, kitchens, and various odds and ends.

A command post of that size has several score vehicles and two or three hundred men. Its work is all done in trucks, half-tracks or tents. It is always prepared to move, when at the front. And it does move every few days, so the enemy won’t spot it. This special command post was about ten miles back from the nearest known enemy position. Our artillery and infantry and some tanks were between it and the enemy.

Almost too late

I am describing all this because I will use the men of this command post as characters in our story as I try to picture the tragedy of that first day’s surprise push.

That Sunday morning hordes of German tanks and troops came swarming out from behind the mountains around Faid Pass. We didn’t know so many tanks were back there, and we didn’t know so many Germans were either, for our patrols had been bringing in mostly Italian prisoners from their raids.

The attack was so sudden nobody could believe it was in full force. Our forward troops were overrun before they knew what was happening. The command post itself didn’t start moving back till after lunch. By then it was too late – or almost too late.

Command cars, half-tracks and jeeps started west across the fields of semi-cultivated desert, for by then the good road to the north was already cut off. The column had moved about eight miles when German tanks came charging in on the helpless vehicles from both sides.

A headquarters command post is not heavily armed. It has little to fight with. All that these men and cars could do was duck and dodge and run like hell. There was no such thing as a fighting line. Everything was mixed up over an area of ten miles or more.

Bad gas stops them

It was a complete melee. Every jeep was on its own. The accompanying tanks fought until knocked out, and their crews then got out and moved along on foot. One tank commander, whose whole crew escaped after the tank caught fire, said that at least die Germans didn’t machine-gun them.

Practically every vehicle reported gasoline trouble that afternoon. Apparently, there was water in the gas, yet nobody felt that it was sabotage. They say there had been similar trouble before, but never so bad.

A friend of mine. Maj. Ronald Elkins, of College Station, Texas, had his half-track hit three times by German shells. They were standing still, cleaning a carburetor filter, when the third shell hit. It set them afire. Some of the crew eventually got back safely, but others are still missing. Maj. Elkins said they could have got clear back with the car “if the damned engine had only kept running."

Back to the cactus patch

The Germans just overran our troops that afternoon. They used tanks, artillery, infantry, and planes dive-bombing our troops continuously. Our artillery was run over in the first rush. We were swamped, scattered, consumed, by the German surprise.

Twilight found our men and machines straggling over an area extending some ten miles back of Sidi Bouzid. Darkness saved those that were saved. During the night the command post assembled what was left of itself in another cactus patch about 15 miles behind its first position. Throughout the night, and for days afterward, tired men came straggling in afoot from the desert.

That night the Germans withdrew from the area they’d taken, and next morning we sent trucks back to bury the dead and tow out what damaged vehicles they could. But by next afternoon the battle was on again.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 26, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (Feb. 25)
On the morning of the Germans’ surprise breakthrough out of Faid Pass, I was up in the Ousseltia Valley with another contingent of our troops.

Word came to us about noon that the Germans were advancing upon Sbeitla from Faid. So, I packed into my jeep and started alone on the familiar 85-mile drive south to Sbeitla. It was a bright day and everything seemed peaceful. I expected to see German planes as I neared Sbeitla, but there was none, and I drove into my cactus-patch destination about an hour before sundown.

I hadn’t been there 15 minutes when the dive bombers came, but that’s another story, which will come later.

I checked in at the intelligence tent to see what was going on, and found that things were dying down with the coming of dusk. So, I pitched my tent and went to bed right after supper.

Back to the cactus

Next morning, I got up before daylight and caught a ride, just after sunrise, with two officers going up to the new position of our forward command post. We drove very slowly, and all kept a keen eye on the sky. I didn’t have a gun, as correspondents are not supposed to carry arms. Occasionally we stopped the jeep and got far off the road behind some cactus hedges, but the German dive bombers were interested only in our troop concentrations far ahead.

Finally, we spotted a small cactus patch about half a mile off the road. We figured this was the new home of the forward command post, and it was. They had straggled in during the night and were still straggling in.

Along a one-way road

The cactus patch covered about two acres. In it were hidden half a dozen half-tracks, a couple of jeeps, three light tanks, and a couple of motorcycles – all that was left of the impressive array of the traveling headquarters that had fled Sidi Bouzid 18 hours before.

The commanding general had already gone forward again, in a tank, to participate in the day’s coming battle. The others of the command post were just sitting around on the ground. Half their comrades were missing. There was nothing left for them to work with, nothing to do.

When I came into this cactus patch the officers that I knew, and had left only four days before, jumped up and shook hands as though we hadn’t seen each other in years. Enlisted men did the same thing. I thought this was odd, at first, but now I know how they felt. They had been away – far along on the road that doesn’t come back – and now that they were still miraculously alive it was like returning from a voyage of many years, and naturally we shook hands.

A familiar pattern

During the next few hours there in the cactus patch I listened to dozens of personal escape stories. Every time I would get within earshot of another officer or enlisted man, he’d begin telling what had happened to him the day before. Talk about having to pull stories out of people – you couldn’t keep these guys from talking. There was something pathetic and terribly touching about it. Not one of them had ever thought he’d see the dawn, and now that he had seen it, his emotions had to pour out. And since I was the only newcomer to show up since their escape, I made a perfect sounding board.

The minute a man started talking he’d begin drawing lines on the ground with his shoe or a stick, to show the roads and how he came. I’ll bet I had that battleground scratched in the sand for me 50 times during the forenoon. It got so I could hardly keep from laughing at the consistency of their patterns.

Soothed by the sun

By all rights, that morning should have been a newspaperman’s dream. There were fantastic stories of escape, intimate recountings of fear and elation. Any one of them would have made a first-page feature story in any newspaper. Yet I was defeated by the flood of experiences. I listened until the stories finally became merged, overlapping and paralleling and contradicting, until the whole adventure became a composite, and today it is in my mind as in theirs a sort of generalized blur.

The sun came out warmly as though to soothe their jagged feelings, and one by one the men in the cactus patch stretched on the ground and fell wearily asleep at midday. And I, satiated with the adventures of the day, lay down and slept too, waiting for the new day’s battle to begin.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (February 27, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (Feb. 26, by wireless)
Capt. Jed Dailey of Sharon, Massachusetts, got back safely in his jeep after the German breakthrough out of Faid Pass, but he had a horrible time. He was beating it to the rear across the desert, along with the rest of the command post’s personnel, when suddenly he saw a Mark IV tank staring him in the face not a hundred yards away. The tank was stopped, the crew had the turret door open, and a German was just standing there, looking at Capt. Dailey as cold as ice. It was enough to give you the creeps.

Jed swung the jeep around – and there was another Mark IV staring at him. He kept turning and dodging, but everywhere he could go he was looking smack at the front end of a Mark IV. They just seemed to appear from nowhere, and there they’d be suddenly, until he felt like a mouse trying to get out of a roomful of silent cats.

And they didn’t shoot

Finally, Jed did the only thing left to do. He took his heart in his hand and drove right between two German tanks, with their crews sitting there at the guns and looking at him as he passed 50 yards away. They didn’t shoot, and to this day he doesn’t know why they didn’t.

Then he stepped on that jeep and went soaring across the desert, flying over irrigation ditches you’d normally cross in low gear. German artillery got after him. They dropped an 88 on his right, and then one on his left, and then one in front of him. They had him pocketed. When artillery does that, the next shot always gets you. But they never fired a fourth shell. He had no idea why. It was just kind of like a miracle.

Now he hates Germans

Things like that went on all afternoon. Finally, it got dark, and a sort of safety came. But it wasn’t complete safety, for German patrols were out scouring the desert for stragglers. Jed finally got away by driving the jeep straight up over the top of a mountain and down the other side. He just missed driving over several sheer cliffs. From now on, he hates Germans.

Most of the men who survived the Germans’ surprise breakthrough on that first day of the Sbeitla battle lost everything they had. Maj. ''Satch” Elkins of College Station, Texas, came out with only the clothes on his back. But he resented most losing 300 razor blades to the Germans.

Capt. Dailey swears he will get the German who is now sleeping in his bedroll. One soldier was sore as a hornet because the day before he gathered up his inertia and accomplished the nasty job of writing six long overdue letters home. Now the Germans have them, and he has that writing job to do all over.

Men’s souls are tried

Again, Jed Dailey lost his camera and a dozen rolls of film he had been taking for months. One of them was a foolish picture, such as the soberest of adults sometimes indulges in. He had picked some desert flowers, stuck them behind his ears, and posed for the camera making a silly face.

He says:

The Germans will develop those films for what information they can get. And when they come to the one of an American officer with flowers behind his ears, they’ll probably tell Goebbels to put it out on the radio that Americans are sissies.

One soldier told me his most vivid impression of the afternoon was seeing ten brand-new tires burning up on the wheels of a huge American truck. He said:

With rubber so short at home, and tires rationed, it seemed awful to see those brand-new ones burning.

Another soldier said:

You damn fools, here’s the sky full of planes, and the country full of tanks, and 88s dropping all around you, and you’re worrying about tires!

Saved by a compass

Lt. Col. George Sutherlin of Shreveport, Louisiana, and Lt. Robert Simons Jr. of Columbus, Ohio, walked 29 miles across the desert that night. They had a compass, and it saved them. We had been talking about them while they were missing. One officer said:

George will show up. I’ll bet any amount of money on it. Hell, the Germans will turn him loose after two days, to get rid of him before he talks them to death.

And show up he did. He and Junior Simons say they consider the compass the most valuable piece of equipment the Army issues. They had one horrible experience that night. An Arab they encountered in the desert ran them almost into the hands of a German patrol. They escaped only by lying deathly still, hardly breathing, for an hour, while the Germans hunted within a few yards of them. But another Arab balanced the account by getting out of bed to give them drinking water.

Arabs are 99% true

Most men who walked to safety through the desert that night and the following night were helped by Arabs. I’ve heard of only two cases where Arabs refused to help Americans. One put “Satch” Elkins into a ditch, and covered him with a long rope from a well, and another Arab walked 25 miles leading some enlisted men to safety.

Many soldiers traded their overcoats for Arab burnooses to disguise themselves. There has been much discussion of the Arabs among our men, and the average soldier seems to have a feeling that an Arab can’t be trusted as far as you could throw him by the tail of his burnoose. But figures don’t lie, and the statistics of those awful nights of fleeing, crawling and hiding from death show that Arabs were 99% with us. Many hundreds of grateful Americans wouldn’t be alive today if the Arabs hadn’t helped them.

[dan.harnden]

Ernie Pyle is such a good writer. I would think he was vital to the war effort by making civilians feel more involved.

Notice how fast he got news out of the battle too. Censorship is definitely there but it doesn’t delay people finding out what is happening good and bad.

This leads me to a question for you. Do you get the impression that the press is tied into death notices in their reporting? I never thought they were and that is a huge difference from later wars.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 1, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front –
This and the next few columns will be an attempt to describe what a tank battle looks like.

Words will be poor instruments for it. Neither can isolated camera shots tell you the story. Probably only Hollywood with its machinery of many dimensions is capable of transferring to your sense a clear impression of a tank battle.

The fight in question was the American counterattack on the second day of the battle at Sidi Bouzid which eventually resulted in our withdrawal.

It was the biggest tank battle fought so far in this part of the world. On that morning I had a talk with the commanding general some 10 miles behind the frontlines before starting for the battle scene.

He took me into his tent and showed me just what the battle plan was for the day. He picked out a point close to the expected battle area and said that would be a good place for me to watch from.

The only danger, he said, would be one of being encircled and cut off if the battle should go against us.

He said:

But it won’t, for we are going to kick hell out of them today and we’ve got the stuff to do it with.

Unfortunately, we didn’t kick hell out of them. In fact, the boot was on the other foot.

Americans in desert ‘pie’

I spent the forenoon in the newly picked, badly shattered forward command post. All morning I tried to get on up where the tanks were but there was no transportation left around the post and their communications were cut off at noontime.

We sat on the ground and ate some British crackers with jam and drank some hot tea. The day was bright and mellow. Shortly after lunch a young lieutenant dug up a spare jeep and said he’d take me on up to the front.

We drove a couple of miles east along a highway to a crossroads which was the very heart center of our troops’ bivouacs. German airmen had been after this crossroads all morning. They had hit it again just a few minutes before we got there. In the road was a large crater and a few yards away a tank was off to one side, burning.

The roads at that point were high and we could see a long way. In every direction was a huge semi-irrigated desert valley. It looked very much like the valley at Phoenix, Arizona – no trees but patches of wild growth, shoulder-high cactus of the prickly-pear variety. In other parts of the valley were spotted cultivated fields and the tiny square stucco houses of Arab farmers. The whole vast scene was treeless, with slightly rolling big mountains in the distance.

As far as you could see out across the rolling desert, in all four sections of the “pie” formed by the intersecting roads, was American equipment – tanks, half-tracks, artillery, infantry – hundreds, yes, thousands of vehicles extending miles and miles and everything standing still. We were in time; the battle had not yet started.

We put our jeep in super low gear and drove out across the sands among the tanks. Ten miles or so east and southeast were the Germans but there was no activity anywhere, no smoke on the horizon, no planes in the sky.

It all had the appearance of an after-lunch siesta, but no one was asleep.

Tanks charge forward

As we drove past tank after tank we found each one’s crew at its post inside – the driver at his control, the commander standing with head sticking out of the open turret door, standing there silent and motionless, just looking ahead like the Indian on the calendars.

We stopped and inquired of several what they were doing. They said they didn’t know what the plan was – they were merely ready in place and waiting for orders. Somehow it seemed like the cars lined up at Indianapolis just before the race starts – their weeks of training over, everything mechanically perfect, just a few quiet minutes of immobility before the great struggle for which they had waited so long.

Suddenly out of this siesta-like doze the order came. We didn’t hear it for it came to the tanks over their radios but we knew it quickly for all over the desert tanks began roaring and pouring out blue smoke from the cylinders. Then they started off, kicking up dust and clanking in that peculiar “tank sound” we have all come to know so well.

They poured around us, charging forward. They weren’t close together – probably a couple of hundred yards apart. There weren’t lines or any specific formation. They were just everywhere. They covered the desert to the right and left, ahead and behind as far as we could see, trailing their eager dust tails behind. It was almost as though some official starter had fired his blank pistol. The battle was on.

[NormanStewart]

@dan.harnden

Do you get the impression that the press is tied into death notices in their reporting? I never thought they were and that is a huge difference from later wars.

Not too often, though I must point out that if a local soldier had become a casualty, there’s a report on that. And at the moment, papers are being gradually more open regarding the reporting of wartime casualties overall.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 2, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (March 1, by wireless)
We were in the midst of the forward-rushing tanks, but didn’t know what the score was. So, I pulled the jeep to the side, gradually easing a way out. We decided to get to a high spot and take a look at what was happening, before we got caught. We bounced over gullies and ditches, up the side of a rocky hill.

There – in a hidden gully – we found the commanding colonel, standing beside a radio half-track. We stood close enough to the radio to hear the voice of the battalion commander, who was leading the tank attack. At the same time, through binoculars, we watched the fantastic surge of caterpillar metal move forward amidst its own dust.

Far across the desert, in front of us, lay the town of Sidi Bouzid. Through the glasses we could see it only as a great oasis, whose green trees stood out against the bare brown of the desert. On beyond were high hills, where some of our troops were still trapped after the surprise attack of the day before.

Whole desert in gigantic movement

Behind our tanks, leading the attack, other armored vehicles puffed blue smoke. New formations began to move forward swiftly. The artillery went first, followed by armored infantry in half-tracks and even in jeeps. The entire desert was surging in, one gigantic movement.

Over the radio came the voice of the battalion commander:

We’re in the edge of Sidi Bouzid, and have struck no opposition yet.

This peaceful report from our tank charge brought no comment from anyone around the command truck. Faces were grave: it wasn’t right – this business of no opposition at all; there must be a trick in it somewhere…

Little streaks of dust – Germans

Suddenly, brown geysers of earth and smoke began to spout. We watched through our glasses. Then, from far off, came the sound of explosions. Again the voice from the radio:

We’re getting shelled, but can’t make out where it’s coming from.

Then a long silence, while the geysers continued to burst…

I’m not sure, but I think it’s artillery along the road north of town… Now there is some from the south.

We looked, and could see through our glasses the enemy advancing. They were far away, perhaps 10 miles – narrow little streaks of dust, like plumes, speeding down the low sloping plain from the mountain base toward the oasis of Sidi Bouzid. We could not see the German tanks, only dust plumes extending and pushing forward.

Just then I realized we were standing on the very hill the general had picked out for me on his map that morning. It was not good enough. I said to the young lieutenant:

Let’s get on up there.

He replied:

I’m ready.

So, we got into the jeep, and went leaping and bounding up toward what was – but we didn’t know it then – the most ghastly armored melee that had occurred so far in Tunisia.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 3, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (March 2, by wireless)
It was odd, the way we went up into the thick of the battle in our jeep. We didn’t attach ourselves to anybody. We didn’t ask anybody if we could go. We just started the motor and went. Vehicles ahead of us had worn a sort of track across the desert and through irrigated fields. We followed that awhile, keeping our place in the forward-moving procession. We were just a jeep with two brown-clad figures in it, indistinguishable from anyone else.

The line was moving cautiously. Every now and then the procession would stop. few times we stopped too. We shut off our motor to listen for planes. But finally, we tired of the slow progress. We dashed out across the sand and the Arabs’ plowed fields, skirting cactus fences and small farmyards. As we did this, a sensation of anxiety – which had not touched me before – came over me. It was fear of mines in the freshly dug earth; one touch of a wheel – we could so easily be blown into little bits. I spoke of this to the lieutenant, but he said he didn’t think they had had time to plant mines. I thought to myself:

Hell, it doesn’t take all night to plant a mine.

We did not – it is obvious to report – hit any mines.

The battlefield was an incongruous thing. Always there is some ridiculous impingement of normalcy on a field of battle.

Arabs continue plowing

Here on this day were the Arabs. They were herding their camels, just as usual. Some of them continued to plow their fields. Children walked along, driving their little sack-laden burros, as tanks and guns clanked past them. The sky was filled with planes and smoke burst from screaming shells.

As we smashed along over a field of new grain, which pushed its small shoots just a few inches above earth, the asinine thought popped into my head:

I wonder if the Army got permission to use this land before starting the attack.

Both sides had crossed and recrossed those farms in the past 24 hours. The fields were riddled by deep ruts and by wide spooky tracks of the almost mythical Mark VI tanks. Evidence of the previous day’s battle was still strewn across the desert. We passed charred half-tracks. We stopped to look into a burned-out tank, named Temes, from which a lieutenant colonel friend of mine and his crew had demolished four German tanks before being put out of commission themselves.

We passed a trailer still full of American ammunition, which had been abandoned. The young lieutenant wanted to hook our own jeep to it as a tow when we returned, but I talked him out of it. I feared the Germans had boobytrapped it during the night.

We moved on closer to the actual tank battle ahead, but never went right into it – for in a jeep that would have been a fantastic form of suicide. We stopped, I should judge, about a mile behind the foremost tanks.

Behind us the desert was still alive with men and machines moving up. Later we learned that some German tanks had maneuvered in behind us, and were shooting up our half-tracks and jeeps. But fortunately, we didn’t know that at the time.

Light American tanks came up from the rear and stopped near us. They were to be held there in reserve, in case they had to be called into the game in this league which was much too heavy and hot for them. Their crews jumped out the moment they stopped, and began digging foxholes against the inevitable arrival of the dive bombers.

Soon the dive bombers came. They set fires behind us. American and German tanks were burning ahead of us. Our planes came over, too, strafing and bombing the enemy.

War sounds are unforgettable

One of our half-tracks, full of ammunition, was livid red, with flames leaping and swaying. Every few seconds one of its shells would go off, and the projectile would tear into the sky with a weird whang-zing sort of noise. Field artillery had stopped just on our right. They began shelling the German artillery beyond our tanks. It didn’t take long for the Germans to answer.

The scream of an approaching shell is an, appalling thing. We could hear them coming (you sort of duck inside yourself, without actually ducking at all). Then we could see the dust kick up a couple of hundred yards away. The shells hit the ground and ricocheted like armor-piercing shells, which do not explode but skip along the ground until they finally lose momentum or hit something.

War has its own peculiar sounds. They are not really very much different from sounds in the world of peace. But they clothe themselves in an unforgettable fierceness, just because they are born in danger and death. The clank of a starting tank, the scream of a shell through the air, the ever-rising whine of fiendishness as a bomber dives – these sounds have their counterparts in normal life, and a person would be hard put to distinguish them in a blindfold test. But, once heard in war, they are never forgotten.

Their nervous memories come back in a thousand ways – in the grind of a truck starting in low gear, in high wind around the eaves, in somebody merely whistling a tune. Even the sound of a shoe, dropping to the floor in a hotel room above you, becomes indistinguishable from the faint boom of a big gun far away. A mere rustling curtain can paralyze a man with memories.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 4, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The following dispatch was written before the turn of the tide in Africa. U.S. troops have since recaptured the territory lost around Sbeitla.

The Tunisian front – (March 3, by wireless, delayed)
The night after our tank defeat at Sidi Bouzid, I drove back to our cactus patch near Sbeitla. There I pitched my shelter tent at the same hole where I had dug in a couple of nights before. Things were tense around the command post. Nobody quite knew what the day’s score was, for full reports hadn’t come in. It seemed that we would try to stand on a new line around Sbeitla. Our cactus patch was two miles west.

There was artillery fire east of Sbeitla when I went to bed. I didn’t expect we would get much sleep, and we didn’t. At 1:00 a.m. in the morning Cpl. William Nikolin shook my bedroll aside, and aroused the whole camp. He said I should get my jeep packed, ready to go. A guy is awfully sleepy in the middle of a cold night, even in wartime. I peeked out and saw that the headquarters commandant’s tent was not down yet. I knew I could get my little tent down and packed faster than he could, so I rolled over and just lay there – too dopey to have sense enough to be excited.

In about ten minutes, when Cpl. Nikolin came back, he said just five words:

German tanks are in Sbeitla.

Gasoline dump set on fire

Brother, I had that tent down and my jeep packed in world-record time. But still the final order to move didn’t come. Everybody was ready, so we just stood around in the darkness, waiting.

The cactus patch, and the empty holes where the tents had been, looked strange in the dim moonlight. Then, suddenly, a giant flame scorched up into the dark eastern sky. We had set off our gasoline dump. In a minute, red flares began to shoot out from the glow – that was the ammunition dump.

We knew then it was all over at Sbeitla. All that ammunition that had traveled so far, at such expense and so much human toil – there it was, shooting off impotently into the sky, like a Fourth of July celebration. Shells exploded continuously. It sounded like a terrific battle. We watched, talking little, walking around to keep warm.

After a couple of hours, the evacuation order still hadn’t come. So, I pulled my bedroll off the jeep, unrolled it on the ground beside the front wheels, crawled in and pulled the mackinaw over my head to keep the accumulating frost off my face. I never slept sounder in my life than during the next three hours.

Retreat gets underway

When I awakened, it was just dawn. Trucks were rolling past the edge of our cactus patch. The continuous line headed out toward the highway. It seemed that we had started the withdrawal. Such things as kitchen trucks and supply trains went first.

Our combat teams were holding this side of Sbeitla, so there really was plenty of time. But we expected a terrific battle to develop right under our chins during the forenoon. The outlook seemed dark. A major I knew came past. He said:

Why don’t you and I go to the toilet right now? We won’t have another chance today.

So, we went.

With full daylight came the planes, just as we expected. But they were our planes this time. They kept coming all forenoon, and all day. We had the sky that day.

Finally, it became obvious that our withdrawal was going to be accomplished without too much opposition from the Germans. The major and I would see another sunset after all.

Then word came that hard fighting was going on at Fériana, 45 miles west. So I started the jeep, waved a last goodbye down valley at Sbeitla, and slipped into the slow stream of vehicles headed west. The day was miserably dark and cold. Just as I started it began to hail.

Yes, hail in Africa – even the skies pelting us in our retreat.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 5, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The following dispatch was written before the turn of the tide in Africa. U.S. troops have since recaptured the territory lost around Sbeitla.

The Tunisian front – (March 4, by wireless, delayed)
The withdrawal of our American forces from the vast Sbeitla Valley, back through Kasserine Pass, was a majestic thing in a way. It started before dawn one morning, and continued without a break for 24 hours. It had no earmarks whatever of a retreat, it was carried out so calmly and methodically. It differed in no way, except size, from the normal daily convoys of troops and supplies.

I left Sbeitla in the middle of it. Vehicles were so well-spaced that it was not difficult to pass them on the wide gravel road. And, since I was not required to keep line, I could go forward and back to get a good view of the entire movement.

Our planes were in the air almost constantly that day.

So far as I have heard, the Germans did not do a single road-strafing job on our withdrawing columns. They missed a magnificent opportunity. Why they didn’t try is still a mystery to me.

If you had been an Arab, standing beside the road, our great brown vehicles would have rumbled past you – one about every 30 seconds — for 24 hours. First, before daylight, came the kitchen trucks and engineers to prepare things ahead. Then came rolling guns, and some infantry to set up protection along the roads. Then the great vast bulk of long supply trains, field hospitals, command posts, ammunition wagons, infantry, artillery, and finally – when night came again – the tanks started and moved on until the next dawn.

Retreat completely motorized

The whole thing was completely motorized. Nobody was walking.

It was hard to realize, when you were part of it, that this was a retreat – that American forces in large numbers were retreating in foreign battle, one of the few times in our history. We couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of humiliation. Yet, while it was happening, that humiliation was somewhat overcome by our pride in the orderliness of the accomplishment.

It simply could not have been done better. Military police patrolled the road with jeeps and motorcycles to see that there was no passing, no traffic jamming, no loitering. Not many of our American trucks broke down; and those that did were immediately taken in tow. There were almost no accidents.

The withdrawal from Fériana and Thelepte Airdrome was separate, and smaller than ours. They were evacuated in the dawn hours. Ammunition dumps were set off, and all gasoline that could not be moved was set ablaze. Planes that took off that morning on dawn missions did not return to the field but landed elsewhere. All planes that could not get off the ground, because of minor damage or needed repair, were burned.

There never was anything built above ground at Thelepte, because the field had to take too much bombing. Everything was underground – offices, sleeping quarters, and the rest Nothing showed above ground, except the planes themselves and the little knee-high mounds that were dugout roofs.

One officer, just as he left, tacked on his dugout door a big newspaper map of the latest Russian line, so the Germans could see it when they came.

French troops slow traffic

There were French civilian refugees on our road, but not enough to hinder traffic. Most of them walked, carrying brown suitcases and bundles. I noticed they did not carry much, so they apparently had faith in our coming back. There were few Arabs among them. The Arabs are permanent. They get along, whoever comes to take charge of their country.

French artillery and infantry also were withdrawing. They did hinder traffic, after we were safely back at Kasserine Pass and the road grew narrow and poor. Across the soft sand French horses and horse-drawn ammunition carts by thousands lined the roads. We well knew the French were among the best fighters in the world. Bu this delaying stream of high-wheeled carts, toiling along so century-like, seemed symbolic of France’s whole disaster. The big fine French hospital just outside Kasserine was evacuated too, and the French supervisor gave away everything he had to American soldiers.

I chatted with one soldier – Sgt. Donald Schiavone, 666 4th Ave., Brooklyn – who had just been given an alarm clock, a silver letter opener, a basket of eggs, three dozen olives, and a bottle of peach brandy. A truckful of soldiers passed as we were talking. Seeing the bottle, they began yelling at Schiavone, who apparently had no hoarder’s blood in his veins. He ran after the truck and gave his bottle to the other soldiers.

That little everyday episode is an example of how unflustered, how unretreat-like our retreat was.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 6, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (March 5, by wireless)
Late one afternoon, I drove my jeep to the cactus patch which contained headquarters, I had often stayed there, and felt like a member of the family.

Without reporting in or anything, I just picked out a little open spot among the bushes, got out my shovel and started digging a hole to sink my pup tent into. I had the hole about four inches deep and only half long enough, when I heard a shout:

Here they come.

Immediately all over the cactus patch guns started firing. Dive bombers had comer out if the sun, and were on us almost before we knew it. My hole in the sand was still not large enough to harbor a man even as slight as myself. But, I assure you, its inadequacy did not deter me from diving into it forthwith.

As always in an air raid, I was torn between getting under cover and staying out to see what was going on. My policy seems to be the reverse of the ostrich – I stuck my rear in the sand and leave my head out, thinking I’m safe.

So, I lay there in the shallow depression, but proposed one elbow to get a good view.

Right now, I want to say that anybody who can tell, after a dive-bombing attack, just exactly what happened is a genius. It is all so fast and confusing.

Details hard to remember

Your senses seem to play hooky on you. After that raid, I could not tell you how many bombs dropped, how many planes took part, what kind they were, whether any stated smoking, or what direction they went when they left.

They came down one at a time, seemingly from everywhere. As soon as one finishes its dive, you start looking for the next one. You lose sight of the one which just passed, and don’t know what happened to him.

You see others in the sky in addition to the one now making its dive. They seem to be going in all directions. The air is full of tracer bullets and black ack-ack puffs. You get these spots confused with planes.

I remember feeling a wonderful elation when I saw one tracer tear right smack into its target – only to realize a moment later it had entered a puff of smoke instead of an enemy plane. You hear the scream of diving planes and the clatter of shooting around. You hear explosions of ack-ack and shells and bombs going off, and truly can’t tell which is which. At least, I can’t.

You sense, more than actually see, bombs falling around you – and duck after you hear the explosion, which obviously would be too late if it were really close.

They dive-bombed us twice that evening. Before I got my sandpit finished, men were killed within 200 yards of me. Yet a bomb that far away isn’t even considered in your neighborhood. It must be within 50 feet before you start telling big stories about your escape.

One of the most vivid remembrances I have of the raid is of a flight of little birds roosting in the cactus patch. That horrible melee and shooting scares the wits out of them. They start flying hysterically in all directions.

Birds don’t like bombs either

Time and again I duck instinctively from flying bomb fragments – only to realize later that it is the little silver birds, darting frantically back and forth amidst the cactus bushes.

I went through another dive-bombing attack during the Sidi Bouzid battle. That part of the desert is flat as a polished tabletop, with not a hole or ditch anywhere. So, I psychopathically lay down behind an old dead bush about 12 inches high.

I remember only two things during the few minutes they were over us. One was getting my breath in little short jerks – almost panting – though lying flat on my back, looking up at the planes, and not exerting myself on any way. The other was my feeling of indignation and frustration that dozens of enemy planes could fly smack overhead, not more than 500 feet, with the sky around them absolutely speckled with tracer bullets and not a single plane be brought down.

Our Air Corps contends that dive bombing is relatively harmless and that, as soon as our troops get seasoned, we will be knocking them off so fast they will stop it. True, dive bombing does not kill as many people as you would think. But the great damage is psychological. The sound and sight of a dive bomber peeling off from formation, and heading right down at you, is one of the most nerve-shattering episodes of war.

It takes guts, and plenty, not to run or not to turn your head at the last moment. Maybe our troops eventually will get hardened to it.

As for me, I’m too old to change my ways, and my way is just to lie there scared stiff.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 8, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (March 7, by wireless)
Little cameos of war:

Most of the preliminary battles between Axis and American troops in Tunisia during the past two months have been for possession of mountain passes leading to eastern Tunisia. In one of these battles, our men had worked their way up to the mouth of a pass on one side and the Italians had done the same on the other side. There they lay, well dug in, not more than 200 yards apart. They were separated by previously laid minefields over which neither dared to pass. So, they just stayed there, each side waiting for the other to act.

The Italians began sending over notes to the Americans. I’ve heard many stories of such happenings in the last war, but it is rare in this one. The Italians would send over a note telling the Americans they were badly outnumbered and didn’t have a chance and had better surrender right now. The Americans sent back a note saying:

Go to hell, you lousy spaghetti eaters. We’ll tear your ears off before this is over.

The reason I’m telling this story is that these notes, with perfect incongruousness, were carried back and forth through the mine fields by a small Arab boy who happened to wander past and took on the job for a few francs!

The other day we drove past a big bivouac of supply trucks on the desert a few minutes after some German planes had dive-bombed and strafed them. The soldiers all took to foxholes and nobody was hurt, but three trucks were set afire. The soldiers got two fires out immediately, but the third was hopeless, for it was a big truck loaded with scores of five-gallon tins of gasoline. These would explode and scatter flaming debris.

Tin can’s war journey

Then, suddenly, there was a bigger explosion and one lone gasoline tin went shooting straight up into the air. That can rose majestically to a height of about four hundred feet, gradually slowed down until it seemed to pause motionless for a moment in the sky, then came plunging straight down. Its explosive flight had been so straight up and down that when it fell it grazed the side of the truck not five feet from where it had started.

Some little thing like that – the uncanny straightness of a tin can’s war journey – often stays in your mind for ages after the memory of horror or bravery has dimmed and passed.

Another time, Don Coe of the United Press and I stayed all night at a forward command post a few miles back from a pass where fighting was going on.

We were in a big farmyard. Trucks and jeeps were parked around the edge of the lot under trees. We picked out a vacant spot and threw our bedrolls on the ground. We rolled our jeep in front of us to keep trucks from running over us in the blackout while we slept.

There is something good about sleeping outdoors. For a long time, we lay back, rolled tight in our blankets, looking straight up into the sky. There were millions of stars, and every few seconds one of them would fall. A couple of times stars went shooting horizontally across the heavens. The sky at night is a majestic and inspiring thing, yet we had to come to far-off Africa and sleep on the ground in order to see and feel it.

The general calls early

After a while, we went to sleep. The next thing I knew a gruff voice was saying:

What the hell is this jeep doing out here in the open like this?

I peeked one eye out and saw that it was just daylight, and the voice was no less than that of the general, out on an early-morning inspection prowl. Whereupon I shut my eye and let Don handle the situation.

The general made a few more choice remarks before Don got his sleepy head out of the blankets. Then, all of a sudden, the general said:

Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you. Forget it. Everything’s all right.

I lay very still, pretending to be asleep, and chuckling to myself. Later in the day, the general apologized to me too, but I was sorry he did and told him so, for we had done something very thoughtless which endangered other people as well as ourselves. And the fact that we were correspondents instead of soldiers didn’t excuse us.

But at least we learned our lesson. We won’t leave jeeps showing after daylight again.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 9, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

The Tunisian front – (March 8, by wireless)
After living with our troops at the Tunisian front for some weeks, I have come to the conclusion that the two dominant things in their minds are hatred of the cold and fear of attack from the air. I have already written a great deal about the cold. You can sympathize there, for you all know what it feels like to be cold. But you don’t know – can never know, without experiencing it – the awful feeling of being shot at by speeding enemy planes.

If our soldiers are meticulous about any one thing, it is about watching the sky. Nobody has to tell them to be cautious. After just one attack, caution becomes a sort of reflex action. You never let a plane pass without giving it a good looking over. The sound of a motor in the sky is a sign to stop whatever you are doing long enough to make sure.

Of course, aerial attack is at its worst in actual battle, when Stukas are diving on our troops; that is a nightmare. But it’s not only in battle that they get it. They get it also in bivouacs, and on the roads. They are subject to it all the time – not in great or blanket amounts, to be sure, but the danger is always there, like a snake hidden somewhere along your path.

As a result, camouflage becomes second nature to you. Near the front you never park a jeep without putting it under a tree. If there are no trees, you leave it on the shady side of a building or wall. If there is no cover at all you throw your camouflage net over it.

‘German pilots sneak up’

As you near the front you fold your windshield down over the hood and slip a canvas cover over it so it won’t glint and attract a pilot’s eye.

German pilots liked to sneak up from behind, and it’s incredible how difficult it was to spot a hostile plane. Once some Army friends of mine never knew there was a plane within miles until one swooped overhead and 20-millimeter shells splattered on all sides of them.

Every day somebody got strafed on the roads, yet it was really the tiniest fraction of one per cent of our men that ever saw a German plane when on a trip. I drove hundreds of miles over central Tunisian roads in convoy but saw relatively few strafings and they occurred far up the road.

Hate strafing planes

It’s the stealthiness of the thing, the knowledge that this sudden peril is always possible, that gets you. There are thousands of Americans over here who are calm under ground fire but hate strafing planes. Soldiers in camp lost no time in hitting their slit trenches and soldiers on the road flow out of their vehicles like water every time a plane is seen. Nine times out of ten it turns out to be one of our planes, but if you waited to make sure, you might be too late. More than once I’ve quickly slowed down and then realized the approaching plane was only a soaring bird.

As you drive along roads in the frontal area you meet hundreds of vehicles, from jeeps to great wrecker trucks, and every one of the hundreds of soldiers in them will be scanning the sky as though they were lookouts on a ship at sea.

The other day, a friend and I were coming back from the frontlines in our jeep and met a great convoy of supply trucks making a suffocating cloud of dust. Our first intimation of danger was the sound of ack-ack shells exploding in the sky behind us. We stopped in nothing flat, and piled out. I remember looking back and saying:

There’s two dozen of them coming right at us!

We ran out across the fields about 50 yards to a small ditch, and stopped there to look again. My two dozen enemy planes were actually just the black puffs of our ack-ack shells. We couldn’t see the planes at all. That shows how deceptive your senses are when you get excited.

Collapsible foxholes

You learn to hate absolutely flat country where there are no ditches to jump into or humps to hide behind. We even make jokes about carrying collapsible foxholes for such country.

In camp I’ve seen soldiers sitting in their slit trenches, completely oblivious of the presence of anyone around them, and cuss the German planes and root for our ack-ack to get one, just as though they were at a football game.

The commandant of one outfit which has been at the front for two months told me they had been strafed and dive-bombed so much they couldn’t hear a motor anymore without jumping. I know one American outfit that was attacked by Stukas 23 times in one day. A little of that stuff goes a long way.

If we have ack-ack to shoot back, it lessens the soldiers’ fear greatly; and if our own fighters are in the sky, then the men feel almost no uneasiness at all.

Yes, the cold and the Stukas are the bugaboos of the average guy over here. Before long now, the cold will disappear, and we all hope the Stukas would take the hint also.