With Ernie Pyle at the Front Ack-Ack Crews Do a Good Job Covering YankLandings Crews Sleepless, Fight On Night After Night Clearing Air of Axis By Ernie Pyle NORMANDY. One of the most vital responsibilities during these opening weeks of our war on the Continent of Europe has been the protection of our unloading beaches and ports. For over and through them must pass, without interruption, and in great masses, our buildup of men and material in sufficient masses to roll the Germans clear back out of France. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with that unloading. Everything Every-thing we can lay our hands on is thrown into the guarding of those beaches and ports. Allied ground troops police them from the land side. Our two navies protect them from5 sneak attacks by sea. Our great air supremacy makes daytime air assaults as-saults rare and costly. It is only at night that the Germans Ger-mans have a chance. They do keep pecking away at us with night bombers, bomb-ers, but their main success in this so far has been keeping us awake and making us dig our foxholes deeper. Here on the beachhead the falling flak becomes a real menace one of the few times I've known that to happen in this war. Every night for weeks, pieces of exploded shells have come whizzing whiz-zing to earth within with-in 50 yards of my tent. Once an un-exploded un-exploded ack-ack shell buried itself low clouds catch the crack of these many guns and scramble them all into one gigantic roar which rolls and thunders like the blood-curdling approach of a hurricane. If you're sleeping in a foxhole, little clouds of dirt come rolling down upon you. When the planes are really close and the guns are pounding out a mania of sound, you put on your steel helmet in bed and sometimes you drop off to sleep with it on and wake up with it on in the morning and feel very foolish. American antiaircraft gunners began be-gan playing their important part in the Battle of Normandy right on D-Day and shortly after H-Hour. Ordinarily you wouldn't think of the antiaircraft coming ashore with the infantry, but a little bit of everything every-thing came ashore on that memorable mem-orable day from riflemen to press censors, from combat engineers to chaplains and everybody had a hand in it. The ack-ack was given a place in the very early waves because the general in command felt that the Germans would throw what air strength they had onto the beaches that day and he wanted his men there to repel it. As it turned out, the Germans didn't use their planes at all and the ack-ack wasn't needed to protect the landings from air attack. So, like many other units, they turned themselves them-selves into infantry or artillery and helped win the battle of the beaches. They took infantrylike casualties, too. One unit lost half of its men and guns. When I started rounding up material ma-terial for this ack-ack series I ran onto the story of one crew of ack-ackers ack-ackers who had knocked out a German Ger-man 88 deeply ensconced in a thick concrete emplacement and did it with a tiny 37-mm. gun, which is somewhat akin to David slaying Goliath. Go-liath. So I hunted up this crew to see how they did it. By that time they had moved several miles inland. I found them at the edge of a small open field far out in the country. Their gun had been dug into the ground. Two men sat constantly in their bucket seats behind the gun, keeping watch on the sky even in the daytime. The others slept in their pup tents under the bushes, or just loafed around and brewed an occasional cup of coffee. The commander of this gun is Sergt. Hyman Haas of Brooklyn. Ernie Pyle half a stone's throw from my tent A good portion of our army on the beachhead now sleeps all night in foxholes, and some of the troops have swung over to the Araio beachhead beach-head custom of building dugouts in order to be safe from falling flak. For a long time I have intended doing a series about the antiaircraft gunners. I'm glad I never got around to it before, for here on the Normandy beachhead our ack-ack seems to have reached its peak. Figures are not permissible but I can say that right now we have many, many ack-ack soldiers on the beachhead and that by the time everything ev-erything has arrived the number will be much larger. ' And that is speaking only of ack-ack ack-ack men who do nothing else. In addition there are thousands of gunners gun-ners attached to divisions and other units who double in brass when planes come over and shoot at anything any-thing that passes low. Our ack-ack is commanded by a general officer, which indicates how important it is. His hundreds of gun batteries even intercept planes before be-fore they near the beaches. The gun positions are plotted on a big wall map in his command tent, just as the battle lines are plotted by infantry units. A daily score is kept of the planes shot down confirmed ones and .probables. Just as an example ex-ample of the effectiveness of our ack-ack, one four-gun battery alone shot down 15 planes in the first two weeks. , Sergeant Haas is an enthusiastic and flattering young man who was practically beside himself with delight de-light when I showed up at their remote re-mote position, for he had read this column back in New York but hadn't supposed our trails would ever cross in an arrny this big. When I told him I wanted to write a little about his crew he beamed and said: "Oh boy! Wait till Flatbush avenue ave-nue hears about this!" Their story is this They came ashore behind the first wave of infantry. A narrow valley leading away from the beach at that point was blocked by the German 88. which stopped everything in front of it. So Driver Bill Hendrix from Shreveport, La., turned their halftrack half-track around and drove the front end back into the water so the gun would be pointing in the right direction. direc-tion. Then the boys poured 23 rounds into the pillbox. Some of their shells hit the small gun slits and went inside. At the end of their firing, what Germans were left came out with their hands up. The boys were very proud of their achievement, but I was kind of amused at their modesty. One of them said: "The credit should go to Lieutenant Lieuten-ant Gibbs. because he gave us the order to fire." The lieutenant is Wallace Gibbs of Charlotte, N. C. The other members mem-bers of the crew are Corp. John Jourdain of New Orleans; Private Frank Bartolomeo of Ulevi, Pa.; Private Joseph Sharpe of Clover, S. C; Pfc. Frank Furey of Brooklyn; Corp. Austin Laurent Jr. of New Orleans; Or-leans; and Private Raymond Bu-lock Bu-lock of Coello, 111. Up to the time this is written the Germans don't seem to have made up their minds exactly what they are trying to do in the air. They wander around all night long, usually usual-ly in singles but sometimes in numbers, num-bers, but they don't do a great deal , of bombing. Most of them turn away at the first near burst from one of our 90-mm. guns. Our ack-ack ack-ack men say they think the German pilots are yellow, but having seen the quality of German fighting for nearly two years now that is hard for me to believe. Often they will drop flares that will light up the whole beach area, and then fail to follow through and bomb by the light of their flares. The ack-ack men say that not more than two out of ten planes that approach ap-proach the beachhead ever make their bomb runs over our shipping. You are liable to get a bomb anywhere any-where along the coastal area, for many of the Germans apparently just salvo their bombs and hightail home. It is indeed a spectacle to watch the antiaircraft fire when the Germans Ger-mans actually get over the beach area. All the machine guns on the ships lying off the beaches cut loose with their red tracer bullets, and those on shore do too. Their bullets arch in all directions arid fuse into a sky-filling pattern. The lines of tracers bend and wave and seem like streams of red water from hoses. The whole thing becomes a gigantic, animated fountain of red In the black sky. And above all this are the split-second golden flashes of big-gun shells as they explode ex-plode high up toward the stars. The noise is terrific. Sometimes