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Show Ernie Pyle's Slant on the War: Air Crew Invited Jerrys To Make Daily Mail Stop Fighter Pilots Are Forgotten Men Despite Their Brilliant Work By Ernie Pyle (Editor's Note): This dispatch was written and first published when Pyle was with the GIs during the air battles in French North Africa. He is currently taking a much needed rest in New Mexico. A FORWARD AIRDROME IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA. While bad weather stymies the ground fighting in Tunisia, the air war on both sides has been daily increasing in intensity until it has reached a really violent tempo. Not a day passes without heavy bombing of Axis ports, vicious straf--me of cities and I Ernie Pyle airdromes, losses on both sides and constant watchful patrolling. Here, at one of our airdromes, all of us can assure as-sure you that being be-ing bombed is no fun. Yet these tired, hard-working Americans jokingly decided to send a telegram to Allied headquarters head-quarters asking them to arrange for the Jerrys to stop there each evening eve-ning and pick up our mail. I am living at this airdrome for a while. It can't be named, although the Germans obviously know where it is, since they call on us frequently. frequent-ly. Furthermore, they announced quite a while ago by radio that they would destroy the place within three days. I hadn't been here three hours till the Germans came. They arrived just at dusk. And they came arrogantly, arro-gantly, flying low. Some of them must have regretted their audacity,, tor they never got home. The fireworks fire-works that met them were beauti- - ful from the ground, but must have been hideous up where they were. They dropped bombs on several parts of the field, but their aim was marred at the last minute. There were no direct hits on anything. Not a man was scratched, though the stories of near misses multiplied into the hundreds by the next day. One soldier who had found a bottle bot-tle of wine was lying in a pup tent drinking. He never got up during the raid just lay there cussing at the Germans. When the raid was over he was untouched, but the tent a foot above him was riddled with shrapnel. Another soldier made a practice of keeping a canteen hanging just above his head. That night when he went to take a drink the canteen was empty. Investigation revealed a shrapnel hole, through which the water had run out. Another soldier had the front sight of his rifle shot off by a German ! machine-gun bullet. Some of the soldiers were ac- tually picking tiny bits of shrap nel out of their coats all the next day. Yet, as I said, not a drop of American blood was shed. When this airdrome was first set up the soldiers dug slit trenches just deep enough to lie down in during dur-ing a raid, but after each new bombing bomb-ing the trenches get deeper. GIs Outdig WPA. Everybody makes fun of himself but keeps on digging. Today some of these trenches are more than eight feet deep. I'll bet there has been more whole-hearted digging here in two weeks than WPA did in two years. The officers don't have to hound their men. They dig with a will of their own, and with a vengeance. If we stay here long enough we'll prob-; prob-; ably have to install elevators to get to the bottom of the trenches. After supper you see officers i as well as men out digging. Each little group has its own trench design. Some are just ; square holes. Some form an L. Some are regulation zigzag. The ground here is dry, and the trenches don't fill up with water as I they do in the coastal and mountain camps. The earth is as hard as concrete. You have to use an ax J as well as a pick and shovel. You'd love our air-raid alarm sys- j tern. ' It consists ,of a dinner bell hanging from a date palm tree out-j out-j side headquarters. When the radio I watchers give the order the dinner bell is rung. Then the warning is carried to the far ends of the vast airdrome by sentries shooting revolvers re-volvers and rifles into the air. At night it sounds like a small battle. When the alarm goes the soldiers get excited and mad, too. When the Germans come over the anti-aircraft guns throw up a fantastic Fourth of July torrcn ot red tracer bullets. But to the soldiers on the ground that isn't enough, so they let loose with everything from Colt .45s up to Tommy guns. It happens that my best flying friends in this war have been bomber bomb-er men, but I wish somebody would sing a song, and a glorious one. for our fighter pilots. They are the forgotten for-gotten men of our aerial war. Not until I came up close to the African front did I realize what our fighter pilots have been through and what they are doing. Somehow or other you don't hear much about them, but they are the sponge that is absorbing the fury of the Luftwaffe Luft-waffe over here. They are taking it and taking it and taking it. An everlasting credit should be theirs. In England, the fighters of the RAF got the glory because of the great Battle of Britain in 1940. But in America our attention atten-tion has been centered on the bombers. The spectacular success suc-cess of the Flying Fortresses when they went into action made the public more bomber-conscious. There is still rivalry between the fighters and the bombers, as there always has been. That in itself is probably a good thing. But of late it has sort of slipped out of the category of rivalry it has developed devel-oped into a feeling on the part of the fighter pilots that they are neglected neg-lected and unappreciated and taking tak-ing a little more than their share on the nose. Their ratio of losses is higher than that of the bombers, and their ratio of credit is lower. Bombers Need Fighters. There have been exaggerations in the claims that the Fortresses can take care of themselves without fighter escort. Almost any bomber pilot will tell you that he is deeply grateful for the fighter cover he has in Africa, and that if he had to go without it he would feel like a very naked man on his way to work. Our heavy bombers now are always al-ways escorted by Lockheed Lightnings Light-nings (P-38s). It is their job to keep off German fighters and to absorb ab-sorb whatever deadliness the Nazis deal out. It means longer trips than fighters ever made before. Sometimes they have to carry extra gas tanks, which they drop when the fight starts. They mix it with the enemy when they are already tired from long flying at high altitudes. And then if they get crippled they have to navigate alone all the way home. The P-38 is a marvelous airplane, and every pilot who flies it loves it. But the very thing that makes the Lightning capable of these long trips its size unfits it for the type of combat it faces when it gets there. If two Lightnings and two Messer-schmitt Messer-schmitt 109s get in a fight the Americans Amer-icans are almost bound to come out the little end of the horn, because the Lightnings are heavier and less maneuverable. The ideal work of the P-38 is as an interceptor, ground strafer, or light hit-and-run bomber. It would be a perfect weapon in the hands of the Germans to knock down our daylight bombers. Thank goodness they haven't got it. Convoying bombers is monotonous monoto-nous work for the fighter pilot who lives on dash f and vim. These boys sometimes have to sit cramped in their little seat for six hours. In a bomber you can move around, but not in a fighter. The bomber has a big crew to do different things, but the fighter pilot is everything in one. He is his own navigator, his own radio operator, opera-tor, his own gunner. When you hear the pilots tell all the things they have to do during a flight it is amazing that they ever have time to keep a danger eye out for Germans. Ger-mans. Although our fighters in North Africa Af-rica have accounted for many more German planes than we have lost, still our fighter losses are high. I have been chumming with a roomful room-ful of five fighter pilots for the past week. Tonight two of those five are gone. |