World War II Chronicle: December 16, 1943
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The front page reports that there are now more than 131,000 American casualties in World War II. Meanwhile, the Army has decided that they will promote all enlisted soldiers serving in the infantry in recognition of the hazards these grunts face… Page six reports that Lt. Gen. George Patton will not be promoted to the permanent grade of major general any time soon, in light of allegations that he mistreated recuperating soldiers in Europe…
Page seven features an interview with top Army Air Force ace, Capt. Richard Bong, on air combat in the Southwest Pacific… The North American A-36 — an attack version of the P-51 Mustang — is discussed on page nine… Sports on page 16, featuring the NFL’s 1943 All-Pro team… Lt. Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold is pictured on page 18 with his son, U.S. Army Maj. Henry H. Arnold Jr. Henry Jr. graduated from West Point in 1940 and was commissioned as an artillery officer, and has been serving as aide-de-camp to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, Dec. 16 — We will call it “Battery E” that I’ve been living with. Within the limits of accuracy I’ll try to tell you in these next few columns how we work, live and play so you can have some idea of how American artillery operate in this war.
Our artillery has played a huge part all through the Mediterranean fighting. It was good even last spring, and it has grown better all the time. The Germans fear it almost than anything we have.
We’ve got plenty of it, and plenty of ammunition too. The artillery is usually a few miles back of the front-line infantry, although there have been cases right here in Italy where artillerymen have actually been under machine-gun fire.
In 99 cases out of 100 an artilleryman never sees what he’s shooting at, and in 9 cases out of 10 he never knows what he’s shooting at. Somebody just gives him a set of figures over his telephone. He sets his gun by those figures, rams in a shell, pulls the lanyard and gets ready for the next one.
He usually shoots over a hill, and here in Italy the men say they’re getting sick of going around one hill and always finding another one just like it ahead of them. They sure wish they could get out in the open country and shoot at something just once that didn’t have a hill in front of it.
This country where we are fighting now is fertile in the valleys and is farmed up on the lower slopes of the hills, but is wild and rocky on the upper ridges. The valleys are wide, very flat, well populated and well farmed. You never saw more beautiful country. I had no idea southern Italy was so beautiful.
It rains almost constantly and everything is vivid green. When you look out across our valley rimmed all around in the distance by cloud-born mountains, all so green in the center and lovely, even the least imaginative soldier is struck by the uncommon beauty of the scene. Little stores, farmhouses and sheds dot the valley and the hillsides.
Refugee Italians return to their homes as soon as the fightin moves on beyond them, and resume their normal business right under the noses of the big guns. Women drive huge gray hogs past the gun pits, and the crews have to yell at them when they are about to fire.
Small herds of gray cows that look like Brahmans, except that they have no humps, wander up and down the trails. Little children stand in line at the battery kitchen with tin pails to get what’s left over.
Italian men in old ragged uniforms mosey through the arbors. Now and then we stop one and question him, but mostly they just come and go and nobody pays any attention.
Like the Arabs, they seem unconscious and unafraid of the warfare about them. That is, all except the planes. When German planes come over they run and hide and quiver with absolute terror. It was that way in Sicily too. They remember what our bombers did.
These lovely valleys and mountains are filled throughout the day and night with the roar of heavy shooting. Sometimes there are uncanny silent spells of an hour or more. Then it starts up again across the country with violent fury.
On my first night at the front I slept only fitfully — never very wide awake, never deeply asleep. It seemed almost impossible to make the transition from a place like America to the depth of war-strewn Italy. All night long the valley beside us, and the mountains and the valleys over the hill, were dotted and punctured with the great blasts of the guns.
You could hear the shells chase each other through the sky across the mountains ahead, making a sound like cold wind through the leaves on a winter night. Then the concussion of the blasts of a dozen guns firing at once would strike the far mountains across the valley and rebound in a great mass sound that was prolonged with the immensity and the fury of an approaching sandstorm.
Then the nearer guns would fire and the ground under your bedroll would tremble and you could feel the awful breath of the blast push the tent walls and nudge your whole body over so slightly. And through the darkened hodgepodge of noise you could occasionally pick out, through experience, the slightly different tone of German shells bursting in our valley.
It really didn’t seem true. Three weeks ago I was in Miami, eating fried chicken, sleeping in deep beds and white sheets, taking hot baths and hearing no sound more vicious than the laughing ocean waves and the laughter of friends. One world was a beautiful dream and the other a horrible nightmare, and I was still a little bit in each one of them.
As I lay on the straw in the darkness they became mixed up, and I was confused and not quite sure which was which.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 16 December 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-12-16/ed-1/