OCR Text |
Show Ernie Pyle's Slant on the War: low War Is Conducted From Forward Command Post Informal and Unexcited Officers and Men Carry On Under Heavy Fire By Ernie Pyle (Fditor't Note): Vyle retells some of his experiences while he teas with the CIs during the Tunisian campuign. He is note taking a long-needed rest in Ncio Mexico. AT THE FRONT LINE IN TUNISIA. We drove our jeep under a tree, camouflaged it by covering it with limbs, and then walked up the side of a hill for about 500 yards. Half a mile to the south of us the . sattlc for Ousseltia Pass in central Tunisia was going on. We stopped in what is known as i forward command post, from which a battle is Wlm directed. This one fXtV.V'i consisted of a I V ' Vi tent 2 0 feet J .yA' v'J square, well hid-pi't' hid-pi't' 'J wl en un(er a lree-I lree-I Sip However, the '? whole tent had Y v f .J been dropped )v f down and simply f ?V-M'f 1 Iax Uke a tar- LLiuJJ pauiin covering Ernie Pyle the officers' bedrolls bed-rolls and bags. MI the work was being done around two field telephones lying in their leather cases on the ground ten feet from the tent. The rocky hillside was covered vith little bushes and small fir trees. The sun was out and the day was rather warm. There were no papers pa-pers or desks or anything just three )r four officers standing and sitting sn a hillside near two telephones on 'Jie ground. One officer had a large nap case. That's all the paraphernalia parapher-nalia there was for directing the battle. Our troops were on top of a ridge about a quarter of a mile above us. The enemy was In the valley beyond, and on a parallel ridge a mile farther on. Wc could walk up and look over, but wc couldn't see anything. Both sides were well hidden In the brush. Every minute or- two our nearby artillery would fire, and then half a minute or so later we could hear faintly the explosion of the shells Tar away. "Nobody's doing much damage right now," an officer said, "but at least we're getting in ten shots to ;heir one." Now and then a louder and much nearer blast interrupted us. When asked what size gun this was, an officer said it wasn't a gun it was snemy mortar shells exploding. I supposed they were three or four miles away, but he said they were ailing only 800 yards from us. Once in a while we could hear machine gun fire in the distance. k young second lieutenant stood near the phones and did all the talking talk-ing over them. In fact he appeared to be making all the decisions. And be impressed rne as knowing his business remarkably well. Lieutenant Gives Orders. The highest officer around was a lieutenant colonel, but he seemed to leave everything to the lieutenant, and at every signal of approaching planes he ran to a nearby foxhole and stayed there till the planes had gone. The phone rang every few minutes. min-utes. Other command posts would be calling in to -report or to ask Instructions. Now and then the chief post, some 15 miles back, would call and ask how things were going. Officers and enlisted men kept appearing ap-pearing from down below or over the hill asking about things. One sergeant came to inquire where a certain post was, saying he had two jeep tires and a tire for an antitank anti-tank gun that he was supposed to deliver Another sergeant, wearing an overcoat, came up the hill, saluted formally, and reported that a certain cer-tain battery setup was ready to fire. They told him to go ahead. A phone rang. The captain of an ack-ack battery said the enemy ene-my had his range and asked permission per-mission to move. He was told to go ahead. . All the conversation was informal and unexcited. A phone rang again. An officer at another command post was asking ask-ing for a decision on whether to move forward. The young lieutenant, lieuten-ant, apparently not wishing to give direct orders to a higher officer, solved the problem by putting his words in the form of advice, sprinkling sprin-kling two or three "sirs" in every sentence. I thought he handled it beautifully. Now and then the lieutenant would phone seme other post. All the posts have code terms such as "hat-rack" "hat-rack" and "Monsoon" and "Chicago." "Chica-go." I've just made those up as ex- S amples, since naturally I can't print the real code names. Once the lieutenant phoned to a rear command post and told them to send some trucks to a town where two tanks had been disabled that morning. Several times he phoned other posts to check up on a colonel who was wandering around the battle bat-tle area in a jeep. You could tell they were very fond of the colonel, and that he apparently paid little attention at-tention to danger. There were no planes in the sky when we arrived, but that morning the Germans had been over and bombed and strafed our troops badly. bad-ly. The command post had called for air support, but somebody at the other end said the planes were busy on other missions and "You'll just have to grin and bear it." The men around our post spoke cynically about that remark all afternoon. aft-ernoon. "Grin and bear it, eh?" they would say. "Well, we'll bear it but we won't guarantee to grin." But in the late afternoon our planes did come. First we didn't know they were ours, so wc all took to the foxholes. Finally, after they had flown overhead a couple of times without doing anything, somebody yelled:, "They are definitely ours!" So we came out. The planes circled cir-cled for about ten minutes hunting for the correct spot in the bush-covered mountainside. They seemed to ' take their time at it, to mar sure, and then finally they started peeling off one at a time and came diving down at a hillside a mile away. They'd dive and then wheel back high into the sky and dive again. Apparently there was no enemy attack, for there were no black puffs around the planes. We could hear their machine guns, and their cannon can-non shells bursting. They kept on diving and shooting for about 15 minutes. Pretty soon an officer came running up the hill and said: "Do you see that? Those damned Germans are mixed up and strafing hell out of the Italians!" , When we told him they were our planes he said "Oh!" and went backdown back-down the hill. The afternoon sun went over the hill and the evening chill began tc come down. We were sitting on a bushy hillside just a small bunch of American officers forming what is called a forward command post. Officers who had been in the battle bat-tle for Ousseltia Pass all day began wandering in through the brush on foot, to report. " They were dirty, and tired. But the day had gone well, and they were cheerful in a quiet and unexpressed way. Hit Red Cross Truck. A medical corps major came up the hill and said: "Those blankcty-blanks! They have knocked out two of my ambulances am-bulances that were trying to get the wounded back. A hell of I a lot a red cross means to I them!" Nobody said auything. He I went back down the hill, as mad as a hornet. j The officers kept talking aboul three fellow officers who had been killed during the day, and a fourth one who was missing. One of the lead men apparently had been a special favorite. An officer whe had been beside him when it happened hap-pened came up with blood on his clothes. "We hit the ground together," he said. "But when I got up, he couldn't. It took him right in the head. He felt no pain." "Raise up that tent and pack his stuff," an officer told an enlisted man. Another one said: 'The hell of it is his wife's due to have a baby any time now." Just then a sergeant walked up. He had left the post that morning with the officer who was now missing. miss-ing. "Where's Captain So . and - so?" they all asked. |