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.
