Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[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.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 10, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward airdrome in North Africa – (March 9)
Once more I’m with the House of Jackson – the bomber crew I wrote about in England and again elsewhere in Africa. We follow each other around so much that our reunions are getting to be commonplace.

They were out on a mission when I arrived at their remote airdrome. So, I went out to their plane’s parking place, and was waiting when they came back. The first man to drop out of the plane was Lt. Malcolm Andresen, of Hixton, Wisconsin, the navigator. We are good friends, and I hadn’t seen him for weeks, but he just grinned and said, “Hi, Ernie,” and didn’t even shake hands, as though I’d been there all the time.

The House of Jackson is still perking, but the inevitable perils and shiftings of war are starting to whittle her down. Her skipper was Capt. Jack Taylor, of Wollaston, Massachusetts. Now he has been promoted to ground work in an operations job, and takes the faithful old plane on its mission only once in a while.

He hates office work; just isn’t the type. But when I asked him if he didn’t chafe at being on the ground so much, he said:

Hell no. If I never go on another mission, it’ll suit me all right.

But later I noticed he was begging the squadron leader to let him go on one.

The bombardier is temporarily out of the crew too. He got a piece of flak in his left hand, and now goes around proudly with his arm in a sling. He is Lt. Joe Wolff, of Omaha. He’ll be flying again in a few days, but the boys kid him about maybe he’ll get a ticket home, now that he’s wounded. Joe laughes too, but he wishes they weren’t just kidding.

One man of crew killed

There is no laughter about the ball-turret gunner. For he is dead. He is the one who loved his ball turret so much he even wanted to be in it while the plane took off; loved it so much he wouldn’t let anybody else get inside it.

His death was a brave one. When the Germans came over the airdrome one night, this gunner jumped from the trench, where he was safe, and dashed to the nearest Fortress and began shooting at the enemy planes from the upper turret. A bomb landed nearby, and a small fragment tore through the side of the plane and went through his heart.

I was on the field that night, and the rest of the crew were asking their officers if they could take up a collection and send his body home. It is impossible, but they will mark his grave well, and maybe after the war his body can be arranged.

That night, Lt. Andresen asked me if I could say something in the column about how wonderful the ball-turret gunner had been, and how he had died, so his folks could read it. But I had to tell him it was impossible, because I can’t give his name.

There is a censorship rule which forbids us mentioning the name of a casualty until after his family has been notified by the War Department. The rule is good, I think, but there’s no way for us over here ever to know when the War Department has sent its telegram. Consequently, the rule really forbids us even mentioning casualties at all.

So, all I can do is tell the little incident, and someday the other members of the crew will write to this brave gunner’s family and tell them how he died.

The gunner was Sgt. John D. Wadkins, of Coolidge, Arizona. Ernie Pyle gave his name is a confidential postscript to this dispatch, for use of the War Department confirmed that the next of kin has been notified. This the department has done.

Fliers have ‘special’ language

The Air Forces have a language all their own. One old Air Force expression has increased in popularity over here until now it substitutes for about 50% of ordinary verbs. The expression is ‘'sweating out.” You “sweat out” a mission, or you “sweat out” the weather, or you “sweat out” a promotion. It means you wait, or you fight, or you do anything hard that takes some time.

Another much used expression is “rugged.” When you’ve been living in mud, that was “rugged.” When the flak over Bizerte has been especially bad, that was a “rugged” trip. Anything extraordinarily tough is “rugged.”

In the village near our airdrome, there is a terribly crippled Arab kid, about 10 or 12 years old, I’d judge. He can’t walk, and crawls on his stomach all over town through the dirt and filth.

And what have our soldiers done? Why, they’ve taken the wheels off a battery carrier at the airdrome, and made a little wheeled platform for the kid to lie on, so he can roll along the streets instead of crawl.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 11, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle and “That Girl” remarried yesterday, by proxy – all the way from Africa to New Mexico.

On the central Tunisian front – (March 10)
The other night I was sitting in the room of Lt. Col. Sam Gormly, a Flying Fortress commander from Los Angeles. We were looking over a six-weeks-old copy of an American picture magazine, the latest to reach us. It was full of photos and stories of the war; dramatic tales from the Solomons, from Russia, and right from our own African front. The magazine fascinated me and, when I had finished, I felt an animation about the war I hadn’t felt in weeks.

For in the magazine the war seemed romantic and exciting, full of heroics and vitality. I know it really is, and yet I don’t seem capable of feeling it. Only in the magazine from America can I catch the real spirit of the war over here.

One of the pictures was of the long concrete quay where we landed in Africa. It gave me a little tingle to look at it. For some perverse reason it was more thrilling to look at the picture, than it was to march along the dock itself that first day. I said:

I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Here we are right at the front, and yet the war isn’t dramatic to me at all.

It’s just hard work

When I said that, Maj. Quint Quick of Bellingham, Washington, rose up from his bed onto his elbow. Quick is a bomber squadron leader and has been in as many fights as any bomber pilot over here. He is admired and respected for what he’s been through. He said:

It isn’t to me either. I know it should be, but it isn’t. It’s just hard work, and all I want is to finish it and get back home.

So, I don’t know. Is war dramatic, or isn’t it? Certainly, there are great tragedies, unbelievable heroics, even a constant undertone of comedy. It is the job of us writers to transfer all that drama back to you folks at home. Most of the other correspondents have the ability to do it. But when I sit down to write, here is what I see instead: Men at the front suffering and wishing they were somewhere else, men in routine jobs just behind the lines bellyaching because they can’t get to the front, all of them desperately hungry for somebody to talk to besides themselves, no women to be heroes in front of, damned little wine to drink, precious little song, cold and fairly dirty, just toiling from day to day in a world full of insecurity, discomfort, homesickness, and a dulled sense of danger.

The drama and romance are here, of course, but they’re like the famous falling tree in the forest – they’re no good unless there’s somebody around to hear. I know of only twice that the war will be romantic to the men over here. Once when they see the Statue of Liberty, again on their first day back in the hometown with the folks.

And speaking of drama, I’ve just passed up my only opportunity of being dramatic in this war. It was a tough decision either way.

Too old for heroics

As you’ve seen, correspondents at last are allowed to go along on bombing missions. I am with a bomber group that I’d known both in England and elsewhere in Africa, and many of them are personal friends by now. They asked if I cared to go along on a mission over the hot spot of Bizerte.

I knew the day of that invitation would come, and I dreaded it. Not to go, brands you as a coward. To go might make him a slight hero, or a dead duck. Actually, I never knew what I’d say until the moment came. When it did come, I said this:

No, I don’t see any sense in my going. Other correspondents have already gone, so I couldn’t be the first anyhow. I’d be in the way, and if I got killed my death would have contributed nothing. I’m running chances just being here without sticking my neck out and asking for it. No, I think I won’t go. I’m too old to be a hero.

Fliers agree with him

The reaction of the fliers astounded me. I expected them to be politely contemptuous of anyone who declined to do just once what they did every day. But their attitude was exactly the opposite, and you could tell they were sincere and not just being nice.

One of them said:

Anybody who goes, when he doesn’t have to, is a plain damned fool.

Another pilot said:

If I were in your shoes, I’d never go on another mission.

A bombardier with his arm in a sling from flak said:

You’re right. A correspondent went with us. It wasn’t any good. He shouldn’t have done it.

To hell with vanity

A lieutenant colonel, who had just got back from a mission, said:

There are only two reasons on earth why anybody should go. Either because he has to, or to show other people he isn’t afraid. Some of us have to show we’re not afraid. You don’t have to. You decided light.

I put this all down with such blunt immodesty because some of you may have wondered when I’m going along to describe a bombing mission for you, and if not, why not. I’m not going, and the reason is that I’ve rationalized myself into believing that for one in my position, my sole purpose in going would be to perpetuate my vanity. And I’ve decided to hell with vanity.

[NormanStewart]

Ernie Pyle and ‘That Girl’ are rewed by proxy

He’s in Africa; she’s in New Mexico as ceremony is performed

“That Girl” and Ernie Pyle were remarried yesterday in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The marriage was by proxy.

Ernie was at the front with U.S. forces in Africa when the ceremony occurred. His former (and now his present) wife, was in Albuquerque.

Ernie – roaming reporter for the Pittsburgh Press and many other newspapers – has been writing from Africa dispatches which have attracted worldwide attention.

Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, his former wife has been working for the government.

Traveled world together

For many years they had traveled around the country and the world, and in Ernie’s columns she had often been mentioned as “That Girl.” Then came a divorce.

The Pyles had a home in Albuquerque. You may remember Ernie’s columns about how it was built, and how he took time off to build a fence around the yard. It was the only home the Pyles had had for years – because Ernie’s job was to travel, and they never lit long enough to have a regular address.

Divorced last April

Ernie and his wife, Geraldine Siebolds Pyle, were divorced last April.

The marriage was performed by Judge Neil McNerney, E. H. Shaffer, editor of the Albuquerque Tribune and close friend of Mr. Pyle, acted as Mr. Pyle’s agent through authority granted by the judge advocate of the Army in North Africa.

And hundreds of newspapermen who know Ernie and Gerrie – including a whole host of our paper – offer congratulations. And are happy.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 12, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward Tunisian airdrome – (March 11)
Everything around a fighter-bomber airdrome is important, but I know of nothing more important than the repair section. It’s vastly different from airplane shops or garages back home, where nothing more than a little inconvenience resulted from the long layup of a plane or car. Out here there are just so many planes. With us and Germany teeter-tottering for air superiority over Africa, every single one is as precious as though it were made of gold. Every plane out of action is temporarily the same as a plane destroyed.

It is the job of the repair section to take the shot-up planes and get them back into the air a little faster than is humanly possible. And that is what they are doing.

At our desert airdrome this section is in charge of Maj. Charles E. Coverley, of Palo Alto, California. His nickname is “Erk,” and he was one of my fellow travelers from England.

His right arm is a quiet mechanical genius named Walter Goodwin, of Grove City, Pennsylvania – a Regular Army sergeant, just promoted on the field to warrant officer. The men worship him and every officer on the field accepts his judgment on plane damage as final.

It’s a crazy idea, but it works

The repair section operates under a theory that seems outlandish after coming from the peacetime business world. Its motto is to give away everything it can. Instead of hoarding their supplies and yelling that they’re snowed-under with work, they go around the field accepting every job imaginable, fulfilling every pilot’s request, donating from their precious small stock of spare parts to any line mechanic that asks for something. For only by doing it that way do planes get back into the air a few hours sooner.

In the repair section are 250 master craftsmen. They are happy and sincere and proud. I’ve never seen greater willingness to work beyond all requirements than these men show.

Let me give you an example of how the section works. After a recent little to-do with the enemy, 14 of our planes were found to be damaged. Some needed only skin patches; others had washtub holes through the wings and were almost rebuilding jobs. Maj. Coverley and the squadron engineers surveyed the situation all morning, driving in a jeep from one plane to another. I rode with them, and when noon came and not a plane had been moved over to the repair area, I thought to myself this is a mighty slow way to win a war. But I changed my mind a little later.

It takes that long to estimate all the damage, plan out your program, distribute your men and machines over the huge field, and get things rolling. But once rolling…

Two months’ work in 3 days

Two days later I checked on their progress. Five of those wrecked planes were ready for missions that first evening. Three more were delivered the following day. On the third day four more were just about finished. That made 12. The other two had been turned into salvage, for spare parts.

Under peacetime conditions at home, it would have taken perhaps two months even in the finest shops to get all those planes back into the air. But here they were fighting again within three days. You can do the impossible when you have to.

This field operates with a dearth of spare parts, as probably do all our fields at the far ends of the earth. So, the field provides its own spare parts by scrapping the most badly damaged planes, and using the good parts that are left. This happens to about one of every 15 planes that are shot up. These condemned planes are towed to the engineering section, and there they gradually disappear. Finally, they are skeletons – immobile, pathetic, skeletons, picked bare by the scavenging mechanics.

They hope inspectors never come

These salvage planes are nicknamed “hangar queens.” Five of them are sitting on the line now. As you know, every bomber has a name painted on its nose. One of these hangar queens is called Fertile Myrtle. Another is Special Delivery. And a third is Little Eva, which happens also to be the nickname of a friend of mine in Albuquerque.

The Little Eva of Albuquerque spends her life raising flowers and being nice to other people; the Little Eva of Africa has given her life that other planes may fly on to help end the war.

You’d be touched by the sight of the repair shops here. All plane work is done right outdoors.

The only shops are tents where small machine work is done. The tents are three-sided, with one end open. The floor is sand. When the wind blows the men have to wear goggles. Beside every tent, almost within one-jump distance, is a deep slit trench to dive into when the enemy bombers come. Theirs is real war work, and you can’t say they’re much safer than the airmen themselves, for they are subject to frequent bombing.

They say their main hope is that no experts from the factories back home show up to look things over. The experts would tell them a broken wing can’t be fixed this way; a shattered landing gear can’t be fixed that way. But these birds know damned well it can be, for they’re doing it.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (March 13, 1943)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

A forward Tunisian airdrome – (March 12)
You may remember my writing last summer about a bunch of American fighter pilots training in Ireland. They were the first fliers to arrive in Ireland, and their comment on the Irish weather was:

When you can see the hills, it’s going to rain; when you can’t see the hills, it’s raining.

Well, I’ve just smacked into this same bunch down here in Africa. They’ve sure been through the mill in the past six months. Already one squadron is veteran enough that some are due to go home soon, and they’ve all been moved back to take a rest.

For five weeks, they lived and fought in a special kind of hell on the Tunisian front. Their field was bombed on an average of every two hours. The pilots took to the air at a moment’s notice, several times a day. They averaged between four and five hors in the air daily, and practically all of it was fighting time.

They started with 21 planes and 22 pilots. They lost six planes and three pilots. But on their scoreboard, they are credited with 11 victories, two probables, and 14 damaged.

Plane is junk; pilot unhurt

They had enough thriller-diller experiences to fill a book. Lt. Ed Boughton of New York had a typical one. His plane was shot all to pieces and the glass canopy that shuts him into the seat was damaged so he couldn’t get it open. Consequently, he couldn’t jump, and simply had to land the plane or die.

Miraculously, he got it back to the field and crash-landed it. The plane was nothing but junk – Lt. Boughton wasn’t hurt. When they finally got him out, they discovered that the jammed canopy had probably saved his life. For his parachutes was shot half away, and if he’d jumped, he would have fallen like a plummet.

The squadron commander is Maj. James S. Coward of Erwin, Tennessee. Lt. Col. Graham West of Portland, Oregon, is the executive officer of the whole group, but spent the entire time at the front with this one squadron. He is still with them, seeing that they rest as hard as they fought.

West’s nickname is “Windy.” He and Jim Coward are typical of the Air forces. They are both young, both extremely pleasant to be around, both high in rank for their age. When I saw “Windy” West last July in Ireland he was a captain. A few moments out to denote the passage of time, and he shows up in Africa as a lieutenant colonel.

West is a black-haired, black-mustached fellow who could easily be called “dashing,” although he’d no doubt resent it. His clothes are always spick-and-span, and so is his mustache. He plays good poker and is always hurrying somewhere. He has been in the Army eight years, and if the Army hadn’t got him, the theater should have.

I went into his room one morning. He was standing in the middle of the floor, drinking a cup of coffee he had brewed on his own little French burner. He was fully dressed on the upper half – shirt, tie, flying jacket and everything.

A Capt. Kidd of the air

But on the lower half he had nothing but shorts and leather boots. Jaunty flying boots that flared at the top. He was a picture of Capt. Kidd – a modern Capt. Kidd of the air.

When they were at the front everybody had to live out in the open. It was wet and cold at the start, wet and cold at the end.

The ground crew of 85 men really went through hell. For they were bombed by day, miserably wet and cold by night, and constantly overworked. When the pilots flew their Spitfires back to a desert airdrome for their much-deserved rest, their main concern was for their ground crews, who had been left up front to care for the replacement squadron.

I heard at least a half a dozen pilots say:

We’re all right. We can use the rest, but we’re not in bad shape. It’s those ground men that really need it and deserve it.

So “Windy” West went to work, and a few days later six big transports flying in formation landed at our field, and out of them climbed the 85 weary ground men. Replacements had arrived for them. They have begun their rest. And all’s well that ends well.

[Chewbacca]

@NormanStewart

They had enough thriller-diller experiences to fill a book. Lt. Ed Boughton of New York had a typical one. His plane was shot all to pieces and the glass canopy that shuts him into the seat was damaged so he couldn’t get it open. Consequently, he couldn’t jump, and simply had to land the plane or die.

Miraculously, he got it back to the field and crash-landed it. The plane was nothing but junk – Lt. Boughton wasn’t hurt. When they finally got him out, they discovered that the jammed canopy had probably saved his life. For his parachutes was shot half away, and if he’d jumped, he would have fallen like a plummet.

Cool story, plane is junk, Pilot walks away is the survivor mindset. Never sacrifice yourself to rescue a plane