World War II Chronicle: January 22, 1944
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The past few days Ernie Pyle has been embedded with an A-36 dive-bombing squadron, and on today’s front page we learn that the Invaders struck a Nazi headquarters in what had been a no-fly zone due to its proximity to Vatican facilities… On page three, Lucille Ball is among the list of stars coming to Washington to celebrate Pres. Roosevelt’s birthday. Ball is currently known as “Queen of the B’s” (as in queen of the B-list movies) but in 1951 she becomes a household name along with her Cuban-born husband Desi Arnaz when the two star in I Love Lucy…
Sgt. John Basilone is already a household name after earning the Medal of Honor in Guadalcanal, and page three reports that the Marine is headed to Camp Pendleton, the first leg of his journey back to combat… George Fielding Eliot’s column is on page six… Sports is on page 10.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
IN ITALY — If you hang around a fighter or dive-bomber aerodrome for a while, you will constantly hear about low-flying missions.
That means jobs on which you fly so low you are practically on ground. Often you are so low you would hit a man standing on the ground.
On such a mission a pilot goes out “looking for things.” He will shoot at practically anything he sees. He’ll come whipping up over a slight rise, then zip down the other side, and in his gunsights there may be a gun, a truck, a train, a whole line of German soldiers, a supply dump. Whatever he finds he shoots up.
The squadron of A-36 Invader dive bombers that I’m with has had some freakish happenings on these missions.
For example, Lieut. Miles C. Wood of Dade City, Fla., almost shot himself down the other day. He was strafing, and he flew so low that his bullets kicked rocks up and he flew into the rocks. They dented his propeller and punched holes in his wings. he was lucky to get home at all. Even a hunk of mud will dent a wing at that speed.
Another pilot flew right through an eight-strand steel cable the Germans had stretched on poles above some treetops. This is one of their many tricks, and this one almost worked. The pilot landed at his home field with the cable still trailing from his wing.
My friend Maj. Ed Bland, the squadron leader, was so interested in his strafing one day that he didn’t notice a high-tension line just ahead. When he did see it, it was too late to pull over it. So he flew under it — at about 300 miles an hour.
And since I’ve been on this field one of the pilots was diving on a truck and got so interested in what he was doing that he ran into a tree. The plane somehow stayed in the air, although the leading edge of the wing was pushed up about eight inches and was crumpled like an accordion.
He got the plane back over our lines, but finally it went into a spin and he had to bail out. He broke his leg getting out of the cockpit, hit his head on the tail as he went past, and then smashed his leg further when he hit the ground.
He is the luckiest man the squadron has had yet. Everybody was concerned about him, and grateful that he lived . Yet when his squadron commander went to see him in the hospital, the first thing the injured pilot did was to start apologizing for losing the plane.
Dive-bomber pilots fly so low that they even have German tracer bullets coming down at them, from the hillsides, instead of coming up as they usually do. They fly so low that Italians behind the German lines come running to their doors and wave, while now and then some dirty guy who has different sentiments will run out and take a shot at them.
As I have said, the Germans are full of tricks. They send up all kinds of weird things from their ack-ack guns. They have one shell that looks, when it explodes, as if you’d emptied a wastebasket full of turpentine. They shoot all kinds of wire and link “daisy chains” into the air to snag our propellers.
But the weirdest one I’ve heard of was described by a pilot who was on the tail of a Messerschmitt. one day. Just as he was pulling the trigger, the fleeing German released out of the tail of his plane a parachute with a long steel cable attached to it. The American pilot by fast maneuvering got out of its way, but he did lose his German.
On a low-flying mission you’re justified in shooting at anything. One day one of our pilots, after a boring mission in which he saw nothing worth destroying, decided to set a haystack afire. He came diving down on it, pouring in bullets, when suddenly he saw his tracers ricocheting off the haystack. Now you know bullets don’t ricochet off ordinary haystacks, so our pilot gave it the works — and thus destroyed a brand-new pillbox.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 22 January 1944. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1944-01-22/ed-1/