Word Celebrity Blog

Buck Eversole: One of the Great Men of the War

by Ernie Pyle

IN ITALY, February 21, 1944 – The company commander said to me, "Every man in this company deserves the Silver Star."

We walked around in the olive grove where the men of the company were sitting on the edges of their foxholes, talking or cleaning their gear.

"Let’s go over here," he said. "I want to introduce you to my personal hero."

I figured that the lieutenant’s own "personal hero," out of a whole company of men who deserved the Silver Star, must be a real soldier indeed.

Then the company commander introduced me to Sgt. Frank Eversole, who shook hands sort of timidly and said, "Pleased to meet you," and then didn’t say any more.

I could tell by his eyes and by his slow and courteous speech when he did talk that he was a Westerner. Conversation with him was sort of hard, but I didn’t mind his reticence for I know how Westerners like to size people up first.

The sergeant wore a brown stocking cap on the back of his head. His eyes were the piercing kind. I noticed his hands – they were outdoor hands, strong and rough.

Later in the afternoon I came past his foxhole again, and we sat and talked a little while alone. We didn’t talk about the war, but mainly about our West, and just sat and made figures on the ground with sticks as we talked.

We got started that way, and in the days that followed I came to know him well. He is to me, and to all those with whom he serves, one of the great men of the war.


























Frank Eversole’s nickname is "Buck." The other boys in the company sometimes call him "Buck Overshoes," simply because Eversole sounds a bit like "overshoes."

Buck was a cowboy before the war. He was born in the little town of Missouri Valley, Iowa, and his mother still lives there. But Buck went West on his own before he was sixteen, and ever since has worked as a ranch hand. He is twenty-eight, and unmarried.

He worked a long time around Twin Falls, Idaho, and then later down in Nevada. Like so many cowboys, he made the rodeos in season. He was never a star or anything. Usually he just rode the broncs out of the chute for pay – seven-fifty a ride. Once he did win a fine saddle. He has ridden at Cheyenne and the other big rodeos.

Like any cowboy, he loves animals. Here in Italy one afternoon Buck and some other boys were pinned down inside a one-room stone shed by terrific German shellfire. As they sat there, a frightened mule came charging through the door. There simply wasn’t room inside for men and mule both, so Buck got up and shooed him out the door. Thirty feet from the door a direct hit killed the mule. Buck has always felt guilty about it.

Another time Buck ran onto a mule that was down and crying in pain from a bad shell wound. Buck took his .45 and put a bullet through its head. "I wouldn’t have shot him except he was hurtin’ so," Buck says.


















Buck Eversole has the Purple Heart and two Silver Stars for bravery. He is cold and deliberate in battle. His commanders depend more on him than on any other man. He has been wounded once, and had countless narrow escapes. He has killed many Germans.

He is the kind of man you instinctively feel safer with than with other people. He is not helpless like most of us. He is practical. He can improvise, patch things, fix things.

His grammar is the unschooled grammar of the plains and the soil. He uses profanity, but never violently. Even in the familiarity of his own group his voice is always low. He is such a confirmed soldier by now that he always says "sir" to any stranger. It is impossible to conceive of his doing anything dishonest.

After the war Buck will go back West to the land he loves. He wants to get a little place and feed a few head of cattle, and be independent.

"I don’t want to be just a ranch hand no more," he says. "It’s all right and I like it all right, but it’s a rough life and it don’t get you nowhere. When you get a little older you kinda like a place of your own."

Buck Eversole has no hatred for Germans. He kills because he’s trying to keep alive himself. The years roll over him and the war becomes his only world, and battle his only profession. He armors himself with a philosophy of acceptance of what may happen.

"I’m mighty sick of it all," he says very quietly, "but there ain’t no use to complain. I just figured it this way, that I’ve been given a job to do and I’ve got to do it. And if I don’t live through it, there’s nothing I can do about it."




























Part II of Ernie Pyle on Sgt. Frank "Buck" Eversole

In Italy - February 22, 1944 - Buck Eversole is a platoon sergeant in an infantry company, That means he has charge of about 40 front-line fighting men. He has been at the front for more than a year. War is old to him and he has become almost a master of it. He is a senior partner now in the institution of death. His platoon has turned over many times as battle whittles down the old ones and the replacement system brings up new ones. Only a handful now are veterans.

"It gets so it kinda gets you, seein' these new kids come up," Buck told me one night in his slow, barely audible Western voice, so full of honesty and sincerity. "Some of them have just got fuzz on their faces, and don't know what it's all about, and they're scared to death. No matter what, some of them are bound to get killed."

We talked about some of the other old-time non-coms who could take battles themselves, but had gradually grown morose under the responsibility of leading green boys to their slaughter. Buck spoke of one sergeant especially, a brave and hardened man, who went to his captain and asked to be reduced to a private in the lines.




















"I know it ain't my fault that they get killed," Buck finally said. "And I do the best I can for them, but I've got so I feel like it's me killin' 'em instead of a German. I've got so I feel like a murderer. I hate to look at them when the new ones come in."

Buck himself has been fortunate. Once he was shot through the arm. His own skill and wisdom has saved him many times, but luck has saved him countless other times. One time Buck and an officer took refuge from shelling in a two room Italian stone house. As they sat there, a shell came through the wall of the far room, crossed the room and buried itself in the middle of the wall with its nose pointing upward. It didn't go off.

Another time Buck was leading his platoon on a night attack. They were walking Indian file. Suddenly a mine went off, and killed the entire squad following Buck. He himself had miraculously walked through the mine field without hitting a one.






















One day Buck went stalking a German officer in close combat, and wound up with the officer on one side of a farmhouse and Buck on the other. They kept throwing grenades over the house at each other without sucess. Finally Buck stepped around the corner of the house, and came face to face with the German, who'd had the same idea.

Buck was ready and pulled the trigger first. His slug hit the German just above the heart. The German had a wonderful pair of binoculars slung over his shoulders, and the bullet smashed them to bits. Buck had wanted some German binoculars for a long time.

The ties that grow up between men who live savagely and die relentlessly together are ties of great strength. There is a sense of fidelity to each other among little corps of men who have endured so long and whose hope in the end can be but so small.

One afternoon while I was with the company Sergt. Buck Eversole's turn came to go back to rest camp for five days. The company was due to attack that night. Buck went to his company commander and said, "Lieutenant, I don't think I better go. I'll stay if you need me."

The lieutenant said. "Of course I need you, Buck, I always need you. But it's your turn and I want you to go. In fact, you're ordered to go."

The truck taking the few boys away to rest camp left just at dusk. it was drizzling and the valleys were swathed in a dismal mist. Artillery of both sides flashed and rumbled around the horizon. The enchroaching darkness was heavy and forboding.

Buck came to the little group of old-timers in the company with whom I was standing, to say goodbye. You'd have thought e was leaving forever. he shook hands all around, and his smile seemed sick and vulnerable. He was a man stalling off his departure.

He said, "Well, good luck to you all." And then he said, "I'll be back in just five days." he said goodbye all around and slowly started away. But he stopped and said goodbye all around again, and he said, "Well, good luck to you all."

I walked with him toward the truck in the dusk. He kept his eyes on the ground, and I think he would have cried if he knew how, and he said to me very quietly:

"This is the first battle I've ever missed that this battalion has been in. Even when I was in the hospital with my arm the were in bivouac. This will be the first one I've ever missed. I sure hope they have good luck."

And then he said: "I feel like a deserter."

He climbed in, and the truck dissolved into the blackness. I went back and lay down on the ground among my other friends, waiting for the night orders to march. I lay there in the darkness thinking - terribly touched by the great simple devotion of this soldier who was a cowboy - and thinking of the millions far away at home who must remain forever unaware of the powerful fraternalism in the ghastly brotherhood of war.

Ernie Pyle

I've Had It

by Ernie Pyle

Feb. 4, 1944

Dear Lee -

Stars & Stripes this morning carried a two-column piece about Ray Clapper being killed. I’m just floored by it. Somehow it had never occurred to me that anything would ever happen to him. What a waste of intelligence and character – as the whole war is. It gives me the creeps.

The whole thing is getting pretty badly under my skin, Lee. I’ve got so I brood about it, about the whole thing, I mean, and I have a personal reluctance to die that is always in my mind, like a weight. Instead of growing stronger and hard as good veterans do, I’ve become weaker and more frightened. I’m allright when I’m actually at the front, but it’s when I pull back and start thinking and visualizing that it almost overwhelms me. I’ve even got so I don’t sleep well, and have half-awake hideous dreams about the war.






















I’ve really been sick with this cold, but I think I might have kept the columns going anyhow except I was just so low in spirit, I didn’t have the will to struggle against them when my deadline was so close and I felt so lousy. I’m writing again now, with much difficulty, and will start sending them again in a day or two.

I’ve almost reached the point where "I’ve had it," as soldiers and fliers say when they can’t take it any longer. I’d quit it and come home for good except I don’t suppose I could live with myself if I did, and would gradually go nuts. If I can just see the European war out I think I might feel justified in quitting the war. It was only by a miracle that some correspondents on the beachhead landing weren’t killed.

That front-page play The News gave the Capt. Waskow piece was the damndest thing I ever saw. I’m enclosing an original copy of the piece, in case you should ever be reprinting it, as there were a few words garbled in transmission.


























It looks now as though I might not leave for England up to as late as March 10. I’d counted on more or less wasting two weeks getting there, but it looks now as if I could probably get through in four or five days, which will allow me to stay here that much longer. Figure I might as well stay here as long as I can, for the weather should soon turn nice here, and there’ll be more action here until the invasion actually starts. I’m more or less committed to do a couple of weeks with the heavy bombers here, although I find the Air Corps colorless and anti-climactic after the infantry.

…. Guess that’s all there is just now. Probably I’ll be feeling more chipper in a few days.



























Italy – March 30

Dear Papa & Auntie -

I’m afraid I’ve let quite a bit of time slip by this time without writing. But I had thought I’d be in England before now, and kept putting off writing until after the trip. But I can’t ever seem to get finished with certain pieces of writing I’ve planned, so have just delayed going from day to day. The way it looks now, I’ll probably leave in four or five days, as I still have about that much work to do here.

I’m back from the beachhead now. As you’ve doubtless read, I had some pretty narrow escapes up there, and I hope it didn’t worry you too much when you saw it in the paper. Our worst one was when they bombed our house. We got two 500-pounders right alongside the house. I was sleeping in a room alone, and it blew two of my walls in. I had just jumped up to look out the window, and had been out of bed about two seconds when the whole wall blew in and covered my bed with about a thousand pounds of brick and stone. I was very lucky.

A couple of other times I had "88" artillery shells hit within a few feet of me, but fortunately the ground was muddy and the mud absorbed the fragments. When I went to the beachhead I had only planned to stay about five days, but I found it so interesting (despite the danger) that I wound up by staying three and a half weeks.

My anemia is much better. The Army continued giving me shots while I was at the beachhead, and they ran a blood count up there, and found it almost back up to normal. And I’ve been feeling much better too.

I haven’t heard from you for quite a while, since I expect you are sending the letters to England now….


























Had a long letter today from Lester Cowan, who is making the movie of my book. He says they have already started shooting on the outdoor scenes. They won’t have the script completely written till about May 15. Then he wants Lee Miller and Lowell Mellett to come out to Hollywood and go over it with him. Also he will fly a copy to me in England, so I can approve or change it. I don’t expect the picture will be ready for release until fall. I understand Jimmy Gleason is to play my part.

Lee writes that they have already sold 225,000 copies of the book, and the column is running in about 270 papers now. I get quite a lot of mail from readers – it has been running about 100 letters a week, I guess. Of course I can’t take the time to answer them, but it’s nice to get them anyway.

Guess that’s about all there is to write. Are you still using your walker, Papa? I’m glad that spring will soon be with you. I’ll write again just as soon as I get to England….

Ernie Pyle

With the Air Force

by Ernie Powell

IN ITALY, January 18, 1944 – It has been more than a year since I last spent any time with our Air Forces overseas. So now for a little while I’ll try to tell you what a gigantic thing our "air" has become in this theater.

In the past year I have written so much about the ground forces that they have become an obsession with me. They live and die so miserably and they do it with such determined acceptance that your admiration for them blinds you to the rest of the war.

To any individual the war is seldom any bigger than the space of a few hundred yards on each side of him. All the war in the world is concentrated down into his own personal fight. To me all the war of the world has seemed to be borne by the few thousand front-line soldiers here, destined merely by chance to suffer and die for the rest of us.

All over the world other millions are fighting too, many of them under conditions as wretched as our infantry faces in Italy. But it is easy to forget them in your intentness upon your own hundred yards.






















But now, remembering once again, this column will do its stuff with the Air Forces. We may break it up with a short nostalgic jump back to the infantry now and then, but on the whole for the next few weeks we’ll be learning about the flying men.

**********

You have to make some psychological adjustments when you switch from the infantry to the Air Forces. The association with death is on a different basis. You approach death rather decently in the Air Forces.




















You die well-fed and clean-shaven, if that’s any comfort. You’re at the front only a few hours of the day, instead of day and night for months on end. In the evening you come back to something approximating a home and fireside.

In the Air Forces you still have some semblance of an orderly life, even though you may be living in tents. But in the infantry you must become half beast in order to survive.

Here is the subtle difference between the two: when I’m with the infantry I never shave, for anyone clean-shaven is an obvious outsider and apt to be abused. But in the Air Forces if you go for three days without shaving you get to feeling self-conscious, like a bum among nice people, so you shave in order to conform.




















I’m now with a dive-bomber squadron of the 12th Air Force Command. There are about fifty officers and two hundred fifty enlisted men in a squadron.

They all live, officers and men too, in a big apartment house that the Italian government built to house war workers and their families. It looks like one of our own government housing projects.

It is out in the country at the edge of a small town. The Germans demolished the big nearby factories beyond, but left the homes intact. When our squadron moved into this building it was their first time under a roof in six months of combat.





























Now our airmen have wood stoves in their rooms, they sleep in sleeping bags on folding cots, they have shelves to put their things on, they have electric light, they eat at tables, sitting on stools, and have an Italian boy to clear the dishes away.

They have an Italian barber, and their clothes are clean and pressed. They have a small recreation room with soldier-drawn murals on the walls. They can go to a nearby town of an evening and see American movies, in theaters taken over by the Army. They can have dates with nurses. They can play cards. They can read by good light in a warm room.

Don’t get the wrong impression. Their life is not luxurious. At home we wouldn’t consider it adequate. It has the security of walls and doors, but it is a dog’s life at that.

The toilets don’t work, so you have to flush them with a tin hat full of water dipped out of an always filled bathtub. The lights go out frequently and you have to use candles.

It’s tough getting up two hours before daylight for a dawn mission. The floors are cold, hard tile. There are no rugs. Some of the windows are still blown out.



























And yet, as the airmen unblushingly admit, their life is paradise compared with the infantry. They are fully appreciative of what the infantry goes through. There has recently been a program of sending pilots up to the front as liaison officers for a few days at a time. They come back and tell the others, so that the whole Air Corps may know the ground problem and how their brothers are living up there in the mud.

It has resulted in an eagerness to help out those ground kids that is actually touching. On days when the squadron dive-bombs the Germans just ahead of our own lines it isn’t as academic to them as it used to be. Now the pilots are thinking of how much that special bomb may help the American boys down below them.

It is teamwork with a soul in it, and we’re fighting better than ever before.

Ernie Pyle

This is undoubtedly the most famous and most widely-reprinted column by Ernie Pyle.  A solemn and weary parade of men serving under Captain Waskowpay heartfelt tribute to the man who commanded


The Death of Captain Waskow

by Ernie Pyle






















At the Front Lines in Italy, January 10th, 1944 . . .

In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.


























Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.

"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He'd go to bat for us every time."

"I've never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.


















Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed to the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden packsaddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side. bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside the dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.






















I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don't ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay in the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead men lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.






















Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don't cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow's body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I sure am sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then he reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Ernie Pyle


**********


Henry T. Waskow's Last Letter Home


























Greetings;

If you get to read this, I will have died in defense of my country and all that it stands for -- the most honorable and distinguished death a man can die. It was not because I was willing to die for my country, however -- I wanted to live for it -- just as any other person wants to do. It is foolish and foolhardy to want to die for one’s country, but to live for it is something else.

To live for one’s country is, to my mind, to live a life of service; to -- in a small way -- help a fellow man occasionally along the way, and generally to be useful and to serve. It also means to me to rise up in all our wrath and with overwhelming power to crush any oppressor of human rights.

That is our job -- all of us -- as I write this, and I pray God we are wholly successful.

Yes, I would have liked to have lived -- to live and share the many blessings and good fortunes that my grandparents bestowed upon me -- a fellow never had a better family than mine; but since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along. I was not afraid to die; you can be assured of that. All along, I prayed that I and others could do our share to keep you safe until we returned. I pray again that you are safe, even though some of us do not return.

I made my choice, dear ones. I volunteered in the Armed Forces because I thought that I might be able to help this great country of ours in it’s hours of darkness and need -- the country that means more to me than life itself -- if I have done that, then I can rest in peace, for I will have done my share to make the world a better place in which to live. Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again.

Through good fortune and the grace of God, I was chosen a leader -- an honor that meant more to me than any of you will ever know. If I failed as a leader, and I pray to God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try. God alone knows how I worked and slaved to make myself a worthy leader of these magnificent men, and I feel assured that my work has paid dividends -- in personal satisfaction, if nothing else.

As I said a couple of times in my letters home “when you remember me in your prayers, remember to pray that I be given strength, character and courage to lead these magnificent Americans.” I said that in all sincerity and I hope I have proved worthy of their faith, trust and confidence.

I guess I have always appeared as pretty much of a queer cuss to all of you. If I seemed strange at times, it was because I had weighty responsibilities that preyed on my mind and wouldn’t let me slack up to be human -- like I so wanted to be. I felt so unworthy, at times, of the great trust my country had put in me, that I simply had to keep plugging to satisfy my own self that I was worthy of that trust. I have not, at the time of writing this, done that, and I suppose I never will.

I do not try to set myself on a pedestal as a martyr. Every Joe Doe who shouldered a rifle made a similar sacrifice -- but I do want to point out that the uppermost thought in my mind all along was service to the cause, and I hope you all felt the same way about it.

When you remember me, remember me as a fond admirer of all of you, for I thought so much of you and loved you with all my heart. My wish for all of you is that you get along well together and prosper -- not in money -- but in happiness, for happiness is something that all the money in the world can’t buy.

Try to live a life of service -- to help someone where you are or whatever you may be -- take it from me; you can get happiness out of that, more than anything in life.

Henry T. Waskow

(This Text is copied from the official Will and Testament of Henry T. Waskow)

Fed Up and Bogged Down

by Ernie Pyle


















WASHINGTON, September 11, 1943 – How should a war correspondent who has been away a long time begin his first column after he returns to his homeland?

Frankly, I don’t know. I can’t truthfully say, "My, it’s wonderful to be back," because I haven’t had a moment to sense whether it’s wonderful or not. In my first forty-eight hours in America I got two hours’ sleep, said "no" three hundred twenty-four times, lost my pocketbook and caught a bad cold.

That pocketbook business, incidentally, is sort of disheartening to a guy who returns full of eagerness for his own people. The wallet contained about a hundred dollars and all my War Department credentials and private papers. It had my name and address in it at least a dozen times, but it has not yet been returned.

Whoever got it, if he had a crumb of decency, could certainly send back the papers even if he kept the money. Anybody who wouldn’t do that, it seems to me, would make a fine client for some oil-boilers. This thing happened in New York on my first day home. And here I’ve been ranting for a year about the lowly Arab!




















Perhaps you who read this column wonder why I came home just at this special time, when events are boiling over in Italy.

Well, I might as well tell you truthfully. I knew, of course, that the Italian invasion was coming up, but I chose to skip it. I made that decision because I realized, in the middle of Sicily, that I had been too close to the war for too long.

I was fed up, and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too, and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you’re very apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired.



























I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any logical proportion. I couldn’t find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the little things that you at home want to know about the soldiers.

When we fought through Sicily, it was to many of us like seeing the same movie for the fourth time. Battles differ from one another only in their physical environment – the emotions of fear and exhaustion and exaltation and hatred are about the same in all of them. Through repetition, I had worn clear down to the nub my ability to weight and describe. You can’t do a painting when your oils have turned to water.

There is, in the months and years ahead, still a lot of war to be written about. So I decided, all of a sudden one day in Sicily, that you who read and I who write would both benefit in the long run if I came home to refreshen my sagging brain and drooping frame. To put it bluntly, I just got too tired in the head. So here I am.






















It has been fifteen months since I left America. Things at home have changed a lot in that time, I’m sure. But at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much change.

When I rode in from the airport in New York, and checked into the hotel, everything was so perfectly natural that it truly seemed as though I had never been away at all. It was all so normal, so exactly like what it had been on other returns, that I couldn’t realize that now I was going through that beautiful hour that millions of our men overseas spend a good part of their waking hours yearning for and dreaming about. I do hope that when their hour comes, they’ll find themselves more capable of enthrallment by it.


















On the whole, the few little things that struck me the most were normal things that I had thought would be gone by now. I was surprised to find sugar bowls on the table. We have plenty of sugar in the Army overseas, but we had figured you were very short over here.

And I was astonished at finding the store windows of New York looking so full and so beautiful. I’d like to take a pocketful of money and just go on a spree, buying everything that was smart and pretty whether I really wanted it or not.

We’ve had nothing to spend money on for so long, over on the other side. The countries we’ve been in were so denuded; why, England was shorter of everything after one year of war than we are after nearly two.

The decline of traffic on the streets was noticeable; and how much nicer it is too, isn’t it? In fact, it’s too nice, and I propose to recreate some of our old congestion by getting out my own jalopy and dashing nonessentially around the streets for a month or so.

Well, anyway, on second thought, it’s wonderful to be home.

Ernie Pyle

Mapping and Engineering the War

by Ernie Pyle


SOMEWHERE IN SICILY, September 2, 1943 – You may never have seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among front-line officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be perfectly useless without his map.

It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps.

The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When it came from America, the 45th Division brought with it eighty-three tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that would be, but it would surely run close to half a million.

The 45th’s maps were far superior to any we’d been using and here’s the reason: Our maps were based fundamentally on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos immediately were flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.

As Proficient as a Circus

by Ernie Pyle


SOMEWHERE IN SICILY, August 11, 1943 – Probably it isn’t clear to you just how the Army’s setup for the care of the sick and wounded works on a battlefront. So I’ll try to picture it for you.

Let’s take the medical structure for a whole division, such as the 45th, which I have been with recently. A division runs roughly fifteen thousand men. And almost a thousand of that number are medical men.






















To begin right at the front, three enlisted medical-aid men go along with every company. They give what first aid they can on the battlefield. Then litter-bearers carry the wounded back to a battalion aid station.



























Sometimes a wounded man is taken back right away. Other times he may be pinned down by fire so that the aid men can’t get to him, and he will have to lie out there for hours before help comes. Right there in the beginning is the biggest obstacle, and the weakest feature of the army’s medical setup.





















Once a soldier is removed from the battlefield his treatment is superb. The battalion aid station is his first of many stops as he is worked to the rear and finally to a hospital. An aid station is merely where the battalion surgeon and his assistant happen to be. It isn’t a tent or anything like that – it’s just the surgeon’s medical chest and a few stretchers under a tree. Each station is staffed by two doctors and thirty-six enlisted men. They are very frequently under fire.






















At an aid station a wounded man gets what is immediately necessary, depending on the severity of his wounds. The idea all along is to do as little actual surgical work as possible, but at each stop merely to keep a man in good enough condition to stand the trip on back to the hospital, where they have full facilities for any kind of work. Hence if a soldier’s stomach is ripped open they do an emergency operation right at the front but leave further operating to be done at a hospital. If his leg is shattered by shrapnel they bind it up in a metal rack, but the operating and setting isn’t done till he gets back to the hospital. They use morphine and blood plasma copiously at the forward stations to keep sinking men going.



















From the battalion aid station the wounded are taken by ambulance, jeep, truck or any other means back to a collecting station. This is a few tents run by five doctors and a hundred enlisted men, anywhere from a quarter of a mile to several miles behind the lines. There is one collecting station for each regiment, making three to a division.

Here they have facilities for doing things the aid station can’t do. If the need is urgent they redress the wounds and give the men more morphine, and they perform quite a lot of operations. Then the men are sent by ambulance on back to a clearing station.

















The 45th Division has two clearing stations. Only one works at a time. While one works, the other takes a few hours’ rest, then leapfrogs ahead of the other one, sets up its tents and begins taking the patients. In emergencies both clearing stations work at once, temporarily abandoning their rest-and-leapfrog routine.

All these various crews – the company aid men, the battalion aid station, the collecting station and the clearing station – are all part of the division. They move with it, fight when it does, and rest when it does.

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Then back to the clearing stations the hospitals begin. The first hospitals are usually forty miles or more back of the fighting. The hospitals are separate things. They belong to no division, but take patients from everywhere.


















They get bigger as you go back, and in the case of Sicily patients are evacuated from the hospitals right onto hospital ships and taken back to still bigger hospitals in Africa.

The main underlying motive of all front-line stations is to get patients evacuated quickly and keep the decks clear so they will always have room for any sudden catastrophic run of battle casualties.

A clearing station such as the one I was in is really a small hospital. It consists of five doctors, one dentist, one chaplain, and sixty enlisted men. It is contained in six big tents and a few little ones for the fluroscope room, the office, and so forth. Everybody sleeps outdoors on the ground, including the commanding officer. The mess is outdoors under a tree.

The station can knock down, move, and set up again in an incredibly short time. They are as proficient as a circus. Once, during a rapid advance, my station moved three times in one day.

Ernie Pyle

An Easy Landing

by Earnie Pyle


SOUTHERN SICILY, July 17, 1943 – At the end of the first day of our invasion of Sicily we Americans looked about us with awe and unbelief and not a little alarm.

It had all been so easy it gave you a jumpy, insecure feeling of something dreadfully wrong somewhere. We had expected a terrific slaughter on the beaches and there was none.

Instead of thousands of casualties along the 14-mile front of our special sector we added up a total that was astonishingly small.

By sunset of the first day the Army had taken everything we had hoped to get during the first five days.
























Even by midafternoon the country for miles inland was so saturated with American troops and vehicles it looked like Tunisia after months of our habitation instead of a hostile land just attacked that morning.

And the Navy which had the job of bringing the vast invading force to Sicily was three days ahead of its schedule of unloading ships.

Convoys had started back to Africa for new loads before the first day was over.

The invading fleet had escaped without losses other than normal, mechanical breakdowns. Reports from the other two sectors of the American assault front indicated they had much the same surprising welcome we got.

It was wonderful and yet it all was so illogical. Even if the Italians did want to quit, why did the Germans let them? What had happened? What did the enemy have up its sleeve?






















As this is written on the morning of the second day, we don’t yet know. Nobody is under any illusion that the battle of Sicily is over. Strong counter-attacks are inevitable. Already German dive-bombings are coming at the scale of two per hour but whatever happens we’ve got a head start that is all in our favor.

For this invasion I was accredited to the Navy. I intended writing mainly about the seaborne aspect of the invasion and had not intended to go ashore at all for several days, but the way things went I couldn’t resist the chance to see what it was like over there on land, so I hopped an assault barge and spent all the first day ashore.

When we got our first look at Sicily we were all disappointed. I for one had always romanticized it in my mind as a lush green, picturesque island. I guess I must have been thinking of the Isle of Capri.

Instead, at any rate, the south coast of Sicily is a drab, lightbrown country. There aren’t many trees. The fields of grain had been harvested and they were dry and naked and dusty. The villages are pale gray and indistinguishable at a distance from the rest of the country. Water is extremely scarce.

Good-sized hills rise a half mile or so back of the beach and on the hillsides grass fires started by the shells of our gunboats burn smokily by day and flamingly by night.

It is cooler than North Africa; in fact it would be delightful were it not for the violent wind that rises in the afternoon and blows so fiercely you can hardly talk in the open. This wind, whipping our barges about in the shallow water delayed us more than the Italian soldiers did.






















The people of Sicily on that first day seemed relieved and friendly. They seemed like people who had just been liberated rather than conquered. Prisoners came in grinning, calling greetings to their captors. Civilians on the roads and in the towns smiled and waved. Kids saluted. Many gave their version of the V sign by holding up both arms. The people told us they didn’t want to fight.

Our soldiers weren’t very responsive to the Sicilians’ greetings. They were too busy getting all possible equipment ashore, rounding up the real enemies and establishing a foothold, to indulge in the hand-waving monkey business.






















‘We’re Still at War’

After all, we are still at war and these people though absurd and pathetic are enemies and caused us misery coming all this way to whip them.

On the whole the people were a pretty third-rate-looking lot. They were poorly dressed and looked like they always had been. Most of them hadn’t much expression at all and they kept getting in the way of traffic just like the Arabs. Most of our invading soldiers, at the end of the first day in Sicily, summed up their impressions of their newly acquired soil and its inhabitants by saying: "Hell, this is just as bad as Africa."

Ernie Pyle

German Supermen Up Close

by Ernie Pyle


NORTHERN TUNISIA, May 8, 1943 – Before the first day of the great surrender on the Bizerte-Tunis front was over, I believe half the Americans in the area had German souvenirs of some sort.

There was very little of what one would call looting of German supply dumps. The Germans gave away helmets, goggles and map cases, which they will not be needing anymore. The spoils of war which the average doughboy has on him are legitimate, and little enough recompense for his fighting.

Practically every American truck has a German or Italian helmet fastened to its radiator. Our motorcycles are decorated like a carnival, with French flags and the colorful little black-and-yellow death’s-head pennants the Germans use for marking their own mine fields.



















Many soldiers have new Lugers in their holsters. Lots of our men clowningly wear German field caps. German goggles are frequently seen on American heads. I got in on the souvenirs, too. I got one memento that is a little gem. It’s an automobile – yep, a real automobile that runs.

I drove back to camp that first evening in my German "Volkswagen," the bantam car the Nazis use as we use our jeep. It is a topless two-seater with a rear motor, camouflaged a dirty brown.

Mine was given me by our 1st Armored Division for – as they said – "sweating it out with us at Fa•d Pass all winter." As I drove back from the lines, Americans in the rear would stare, startled-like and belligerent; then, seeing an American at the wheel they would laugh and wave. I have owned half a dozen autos in my life, but I’ve never been so proud of one as of my clattering little Volkswagen.



















On that first day of surrender the Germans sat in groups of hundreds in the fields, just waiting. They lay on their overcoats, resting. They took off their shirts to sun themselves. They took off their shoes to rest their feet.

They were a tired army but not a nondescript one. All were extremely well equipped. Their uniforms were good. They had plenty in the way of little personal things, money, cigarets, and food. Their equipment was of the best materials.

One English-appearing soldier had a Gem nail-clipper. He said he paid twenty-five cents for it in New York in 1939.

Some were cleanly shaven, some had three- or four-day beards, just like our soldiers. Lots of them had red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep.


























As a whole, they seemed younger than our men, and I was surprised that on the average they didn’t seem as big. But they did appear well fed and in excellent health.

They think Americans are fine fighters. They express only good-natured contempt for their allies, the Italians. As one of them said:

"It isn’t just that Italians don’t fight well. It’s simply that Germans don’t like Italians very much in the first place.

Wherever any American correspondents stopped. prisoners immediately gathered around. They all seemed in good spirits. Even those who couldn’t speak a word of English would try hard to tell you something.


















The main impression I got, seeing German prisoners, was that they were human like anybody else, fundamentally friendly, a little vain. Certainly they are not supermen. Whenever a group of them would form, some American soldier would pop up with a camera to get a souvenir picture. And every time, all the prisoners in the vicinity would crowd into the picture like kids.

One German boy had found a broken armchair leaning against a barn, and was sitting in it. When I passed he grinned, pointed to his feet and then to the chair arms, and put back his head in the international sign language for "Boy, does this chair feel good!"

This colossal German surrender has done more for American morale here than anything that could possibly have happened. Winning in battle is like winning at poker or catching lots of fish – it’s damned pleasant and it sets a man up. As a result, the hundreds of thousands of Americans in North Africa now are happy men, laughing and working with new spirits that bubble.

Ernie Pyle