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Show With Ernie Pyle at the Front Pillboxes and Tanks Wrecked in Street Fighting Yanks Take Another City With Only Snipers and One Pillbox Left By Ernie Pyle IN NORMANDY. On up the street a block there seemed to be fighting. I say seemed to be, because actually you can't always tell. Street fighting is just as confusing as field fighting. fight-ing. One side will bang away for a while, then the other side. Between these sallies there are long lulls, with only stray and isolated shots. Just an occasional soldier is sneaking about, and you don't see anything of the enemy at all. You can't tell half the time just what the situation is. About a block beyond the hospital entrance two American tanks were sitting in the middle of the street, one about 50 yards ahead of the other. I walked PWyM toward them. Our lifiSfl Infantrymen were i Vjt'yfZ i in doorways along f VT'"V; If 01,2 street. I''i ti I Sot within tl! out 50 feet of l4yfM when " let its 75 - millimeter . feMillll gun. The blast Kaii.rv, fcla was terrific there Ernie Tyle n the narrow street. Glass came tinkling down from nearby windows, smoke puffed around the tank, and the empty street was shaking and trembling with the concussion. con-cussion. As the tank continued to shoot I ducked into a doorway, because be-cause I figured the Germans would shoot back. Inside the doorway there was a sort of street-level cellar, dirt-floored. Apparently there was a wine Bhop above, for the cellar was stacked with wire crates for holding wine bottles on their sides. There were lots of bottles, but they were all empty. I went back to the doorway and stood peeking out at the tank. It started backing up. Then suddenly a yellow flame pierced the bottom of the tank and there was a crash of such intensity that I automatically blinked my eyes. The tank, hardly 50 feet from where I was standing, had been hit by an enemy shelL A second shot ripped the pavement pave-ment at the side of the tank. There was smoke all around, but the tank didn't catch fire. In a moment the crew came boiling out of the turret. Grim as it was, I almost had to laugh as they ran toward us. I have ' never seen men run so violently. They ran all over, with arms and heads going up and down and with' marathon-race grimaces. They plunged into my doorway. I spent the next excited hour with them. We changed to another doorway door-way and sat on boxes in the empty hallway. The floor and steps were thick with blood where a soldier had been treated within the hour. What had happened to the tank was this: They had been firing away at a pillbox ahead when their 75 backfired, filling the tank with smoke and blinding them. They decided to back up in order to get their bearings, but after backing back-ing a few yards the driver was so blinded that he stopped. Unfortunately Unfor-tunately he stopped exactly at the foot of a side street. More unfortunately unfor-tunately there was another German pillbox up the side street. All the Germans had to do was take easy aim and let go at the sitting duck. The first shot bit a tread, so the tank couldn't move. That was when the boys got out. I don't know why the Germans didn't fire at them as they poured out The escaped tankers naturally were excited, but they were aa jubilant as June-bugs and ready or more. They had never been In combat before the Invasion of Normandy, yet In three weeks their tank bad been shot up three times. Each time It was repaired and put back in action. And it can be repaired again this time. The name of their tank, appropriately, is "Be Back Soon." The main worry of these boys was the fact that they had left the engine running. We could hear it chugging away. It's bad for a tank motor to idle very long. But now they were afraid to go back and turn the motor off, for the tank was still right In line with the hidden German gun-Also, gun-Also, they had come out wearing their leather crash helmets. Their steel helmets were still inside the tank, and so were their rifles. "We'll be a lot of good without helmets or "rifles! " one of them said. p . The crew consisted of Corp. Martin Mar-tin Kennelly of Chicago, the tank commander; Sgt. L. Wortham, Leeds, Ala., driver; Pvt. Ralph Ogren of Minneapolis, assistant driver; Corp. Albin Stoops. Mar-shalltown, Mar-shalltown, Del., gunner, and Pvt. Charles Rains of Kansas City, the loader. Private Rains was the oldest of the bunch, and the only married one. He used to work as a guard at the Scars, Roebuck plant in Kansas City. "I was M. P. to 1,500 women," he said with a grin, "and how I'd like to be back doing that!" The other tankers all expressed loud approval of this sentiment. Tank Cmdr. Martin Kennelly of Chicago wanted to show me just where his tank had been hit. As a matter of fact he hadn't seen it for himself yet, for he came running up the street the moment he jumped out of the tank. So when the firing died down a little we sneaked up the street until we were almost even with the disabled tank. But we were careful not to get our heads around the corner of the side street, for that was where the Germans had fired from. The first shell had hit the heavy steel brace that the tread runs on, and then plunged on through the side of the tank, very low. "Say!" Kennelly said in amazement. amaze-ment. "It went right through our lower ammunition storage box! I don't know what kept the ammunition ammuni-tion from going off. We'd have been a mess if it had. Boy, it sure would have got hot in there in a hurry!" The street was still empty. Beyond Be-yond the tank about two blocks was a German truck, sitting all alone in the middle of the street. It had been blown up, and its tires had burned off. This truck was the only thing you could see. There wasn't a human being in sight anywhere. On the corner just across the street from where we were standing stand-ing was a smashed pillbox. It was in a cut-away corner like the entrances en-trances to some of our corner drugstores drug-stores at home, except that instead of there being a door there was a pillbox of reinforced concrete, with gun slits. The tank boys had shot it to extinction ex-tinction and then moved their tank up even with it to get the range oi the next pillbox. That one was about a block ahead, set in a niche in the wall of a building. That's what the boys had been shooting at when their tank was hit. They knocked it out, however, before being knocked out themselves. For an hour there was a lull in the fighting. Nobody did anything any-thing about a third pillbox, around the corner. Our second sec-ond tank pulled back a little and just waited. Infantrymen worked their way up to second-story windows and fired their rifles up the side street without actually seeing anything to shoot at. . Now. and then blasts from a 20-mm. gun would splatter the buildings build-ings around us. Then our second tank would blast back in that general gen-eral direction, over the low roofs, with Its machine gun. There was a lot of dangerous-sounding noise, but I don't think anybody on either side got hit I didn't stay to see how the remaining re-maining pillbox was knocked out. But I suppose our second tank eventually even-tually pulled up to the corner, turned and let the pillbox have it After that the area would be clear of everything but snipers. The infantry, who up till then had been forced to keep in doorways, would now continue up the street and poke into the side streets and into the houses until everything was clear. That's how a strong point in a city is taken. At least that's how ours was taken. You don't always have tanks to help, and you don't always do it with so little shedding of blood. - |
