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Show Ernie Pyle With the Navy: Little Islands in Pacific Prove to Be Pretty Big Yanks Rarely Make the Rounds; Recreation Relieves Monotony By Ernie Pyle IN THE MARIANAS ISLANDS. One thing that might help you visualize what life is like out here is to realize that even a little island is lots bigger than you think. There are many, many thousands of Americans scattered in camps and at airfields and in training centers and harbors over the three islands which we occupy here. Rarely does a man know many people outside his own special unit. Even though the islands are small "'".. :-by :-by our standards. : they're big enough i . l;'::C. ! that the individ- I . " ": ual doesn't en- , -compass them by . - " ' I f 1 any means. It !y J;::;J!;?f ;. would be as im- possible for one - , man to see or ;;; 4 know everybody on one of these Ernie Pyle islands as it would be to know everybody in Indianapolis. You could live and work in your section, and never visit another section sec-tion for weeks or months at a time. And that's exactly what does happen. hap-pen. For one thing, transportation is short. We are still building furiously here, such fast and fantastic building build-ing as you never dreamed of. Everything that runs is being used, and there's little left over just to run around in for fun. And anyhow, there's no place to go. What towns there were have been destroyed. There is nothing even resembling a town or, city on these islands now. The natives have been set up in improvised camps, but they offer no "city life" attractions. attrac-tions. As we drove around one of the islands on my first day here, we went through one of the Marianas towns that had been destroyed by bombing and shelling. It had been a good-sized place, quite modern too in a tropical way. It had a city plaza and municipal buildings and paved streets, and many of the buildings were of stone or mortar. In destruction, it looked exactly as destroyed cities all over Europe look. The same jagged half-standing walls, the stacks of rubble, the empty houses you could see through, i the Toofless homes, the deep craters in the gardens. There was just one difference. Out here tropical vegetation is lush. And nature thrusts up her greenery green-ery so swiftly through rubble and destruction that the ruins now are festooned with vines and green leaves, and it gives them a look of being very old and time-worn ruins, instead of fresh modern ones, which 4 they are. I ... Finds Marianas Abound With Movies An American soldier in Europe, even though the towns may be "off limits" to him or destroyed completely, com-pletely, still has a sense of being near a civilization that is like his own. But out here there is nothing like that. You are on an island, the natives na-tives are strange people, there's no city and no place to go. If you had a three-day pass you'd probably spend it lying on your cot. Eventually, Eventual-ly, boredom and the "island complex" com-plex" starts to take hold. For that reason the diversions sup- I plied by the army are even more important out here than in Europe. Before I left America I heard that one island out here had more than ! 200 outdoor movies jan it. I thought whoever told that must be crazy, for in Europe the .average soldier didn't get a chance to see a movie very often. But the guy wasn't crazy. These three Marianas islands have a total of 233 outdoor movies on them. And they show every night. Even if it ( isn't a good movie, it kills the time between supper and bedtime. The theaters are usually on the slope of a hill, forming a natural amphitheater. The men sit on the J ground, or bring their own boxes, or in some of them the ends of metal bomb crates are used for chairs. You can drive along and sometimes some-times you'll pass three movies not more than 300 yards apart. That's mainly because there is not enough transportation to haul the men any distance, so the movie has to come to them. There is lots of other stuff provided pro-vided besides movies, too. On one island there are 65 theater stages, where soldiers themselves put on '"live" shows, or where USO troupes can perform. Forty pianos have been scattered around at these places. In Europe it was a lucky bunch of soldiers who got their hands on a radio. Over here in these small islands, the army has distributed 3,500 radios, and they have a regular regu-lar station broadcasting all the time, with music, news, shows and everything. The sports program is big. On one island there are 95 Softball diamonds, dia-monds, 35 regular diamonds, 225 volleyball courts and 30 basketball courts. Also there are 35 boxing arenas. Boxing is very popular. They've had as high as 18,000 men watching a boxing match. Talkative Barber Tells of Woe On one of these islands the other day, I finally got around to getting a month-overdue haircut. My barber was a soldier, bar-bering bar-bering in a tent, and I sat in,, an old-fashioned black leather Japanese Japa-nese barber chair he had dug up on the island. He had been trained in the conversational con-versational school of barbering, and as the snipped gray locks fell about my shoulders, there came forth from him such a tale of woe and unkind fate as I have never heard in this world. This barber was Pfc. Eades Thomas from Richmond, Ky., near Lexington in the horse country. In fact Thomas-was a horse-trainer before be-fore the war, and was never a barber bar-ber at all. He just picked that up on the run somewhere. Well, Thomas has been in the Pacific 33 months. It began to look as though he might as well count on settling down for life, so some months ago he married a Scottish girl in Honolulu. Shortly after that he was shipped on out here, and he hasn't seen her since. The morning of the day that I sat in Thomas' barber chair, the army was sending a few Japanese prisoners prison-ers back to Hawaii by airplane. They had to have guards for them. So one of Thomas' officers told him he would put him down for the trip and thus he could get a couple of days in Hawaii to see his wife. The officer meant to keep his word, but he had a bad memory for names. So when he went to write down Thomas' name for the trip, he actually wrote another guy's name, thinking it was Thomas. By the time Thomas found it out, it was too late. "I could have cried," he said. And I could have too. I felt so terrible ter-rible about it I couldn't get it off my mind, and was telling it to an officer that evening. "Oh," he said. "I happen to know about that. I'll go and tell Thomas right away and he won't feel so bad. We got orders not to send the prisoners pris-oners after all, so the whole thing was called off. Nobody went." Which is the kind of joy you get when you stop hitting yourself on the head with the hammer. On that same island I ran onto a couple of old Hoosier boys, who had followed in my inglorious footsteps foot-steps at Indiana university. One was Lt. Ed Rose, who was editor of "The Daily Student" in 1938, just as I was for a while in 1922.' Apparently it doesn't make any difference what year you were editor of "The Student," you still wind up in the Marianas islands. The other was Lt. Bill Morris from Anderson, Ind., who graduated from our illustrious alma mater in 1942. Both the boys are mail censors cen-sors out here. Life is kind enough to them, and they haven't much to kick about. Just as I was leaving, they came and thrust a package into my hands, and said would I accept a little gift from the two of them? It was a dark poisonous liquid with which you're probably not familiar, but one which is much sought after out here. A fellow does feel like a heel accepting ac-cepting bountiful gifts from strangers. stran-gers. But I figure I've been a heel for a long time and it's too late to reform now, so I grabbed the gift and fled before they could change their minds. Thanks again, boys. |