World War II Chronicle: April 28, 1943
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Maj. Gen. Robert Olds, whom we have written about extensively in the Chronicle, has suddenly passed away. Olds was the chief of the Army Air Force’s Ferry Command, a member of the “Bomber Mafia.” Story begins on today’s front page… George Fielding Eliot column on page 10… Sports begins on page 16… Chapter 17 of “Torpedo 8” continues on page 27.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
NORTHERN TUNISIA — (By Wireless) — We moved one afternoon to a new position just a few miles behind the invisible line of armor that separates us from the Germans in Northern Tunisia. Nothing happened that first night that was spectacular, yet somehow the whole night became obsessed with a spookiness that leaves it standing like a landmark in my memory
We had been at the new camp about an hour and were still setting up our tents when German planes appeared overhead. We stopped work to watch them. It was the usual display of darting planes, with the conglomerate sounds of ack-ack on the ground and in the sky.
Suddenly we realized that one plane was diving straight at us, and we made a mad scramble for fox holes. Two officer friends of mine had dug a three foot hole and set their tent over it. So they made for their tent, and I was tramping on their heels. The tent flap wouldn’t come open, and we wound up in a silly heap. Finally it did open, and we all dived through the narrow opening all at once.
We lay there in the hole, face down, as the plane came smack overhead with a terrible roar. We were all drawn up inside, waiting for the blow. Explosions around us were shatteringly loud, and yet when it was all over we couldn’t find any bomb holes or anybody hurt.
But you could find a lot of nervous people.
Dusk came on, and with dusk began the steady boom of big guns in the mountains ahead of us. They weren’t near enough for the sound to be crashing. Rather it was like the lonely roll of an approaching thunderstorm — around which since childhood has always made me sad with a kind of portent of inevitable doom.
We went to bed in our tents. A nearby farmyard was full of dogs and they began a howling that lasted all night. The roll of artillery was constant. It never stopped once in 24 hours. Once in a while there were nearer shots which might have been German patrols or might not.
We lay uneasily in our cots. Sleep wouldn’t come. We turned and turned. I snapped on a flashlight.
“What time is it?” asked Chris Cunningham from the next cot.
“Quarter to one,” I answered. “Haven’t you been asleep?”
He hadn’t.
A plane droned faintly in the distance and came nearer and nearer until it was overhead.
“Is that a Jerry or a Beaufighter,” Chris asked out of the darkness.
“It hasn’t got that throb-throb to it,” I said, so it must be a Beaufighter. But hell, I never can tell really. Don’t know what it is.”
The plane passed on, out of hearing. The artillery rolled and rolled. A nearer shot went off uncannily somewhere in the darkness. Some guinea hens set up a terrible cackling.
I remembered that just before dusk a soldier had shot at a snake in our new camp, and they thought it was a cobra. We’d just heard our first stories of scorpions, too. I began to feel creepy and wondered if our tent flaps were tight.
Another plane throbbed in the sky, and we lay listening with an awful anticipation. One of the dogs suddenly broke into a frenzied barking and went tearing through our little camp as though chasing a demon.
My mind seemed to lose all sense of proportion, and I was jumpy and mad at myself.
Concussion ghosts, traveling in waves, touched our tent walls and made them quiver. Ghosts were shaking the ground ever so lightly. Ghosts were stirring the dogs to hysteria. Ghosts were wandering in the sky peering for us in our cringing hideout. Ghosts were everywhere, and their hordes were multiplying as every hour added its production of new battlefield dead.
You like and think of the graveyards and the dirty men and the shocking blast of the big guns, and you can’t sleep.
“What time is it?” comes out of darkness from the next cot. I snap on the flashlight.
“Half past 4, and for God’s sake go to sleep!”
Finally just before dawn you do sleep, in spite of everything.
Next morning we spoke around among ourselves and found one by one that all of us had tossed away all nigh. It was an unexplainable thing. For all of us had been through dangers greater than this. On another night the roll of the guns would have lulled us to sleep.
It’s just that on some nights the air becomes sick and there is an unspoken contagion of spiritual dread, and you are little boys again, lost in the dark.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 28 April 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-04-28/ed-1/