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Show I With Ernie Pyle in the Pacific: I Strange Sounds of War j Fill Night on Okinawa Intermittent Gunfire Breaks Eerie Silence Below Star -Bedecked Sky By Ernie Pyle Editor's Note: Ernie Pyle was several dispatches ahead when he met death. ron a Jap machine gun on le island. This newspaper will continue to print these for a Jew weeks. OKINAWA (by navy radio) . Our first night on Okinawa was uncanny and full of old familiar sounds the exciting, , sad, weary little sounds of war. It had been six months since I'd slept on the ground, or heard a rifle shot. With the marines it was about the same. C I was tagging along with a headquarters head-quarters company of a regiment. We were on a pretty, grassy country. coun-try. The front lines were about a thousand yards ahead. Other troops were bivouacked all around us. There were still a few snipers hiding hid-ing around. An officer was brought In just before dark, shot through the arm. So we were on our toes. Just at dusk three planes flew slowly overhead in the direction of the beach. We paid no attention, for we thought they were ours. But they weren't In a moment all hell cut loose from the beach. Our entire fleet and the guns ashore started throwing throw-ing stuff into the sky I've never seen a thicker batch of ack-ack. As one of the marines said, there were more bullets than there was sky. Those Jap pilots must have thought the world was coming to an end to fly into a lead storm like that only 10 hours after we had landed land-ed on Okinawa. All three were shot down. As deep darkness came on we got into our foxholes and settled down for the night. The countryside became be-came as silent as a graveyard silent, si-lent, that is, between shots. The only sounds were war sounds. There were no country sounds at all. The sky was a riot of stars. Capt. Tom Brown was in the foxhole fox-hole next to me. As we lay there on our backs, looking up into the starry sky, he said: "There's the Big Dipper. That's the first time I've seen that since I've been in the Pacific." For, you see, marines of this division have done all their fighting under the Southern Cross, where our Big Dipper doesn't show. As full darkness came, flares be gan lighting the country ahead of us over the front lines They were shot in shells from our battleships, timed to burst above our lines, and float down on parachutes. That was to keep the country lighted up so we could see the Japs if they tried to infiltrate, which is one of their favorite tricks. The flares were shot up several per minute from dusk until the moon came out full. It was very bright after that and the flares were not needed. But all night long two or three ships kept up a slow shelling of the far hills where the Japs were supposed sup-posed to be. It wasn't a bombardment; bom-bardment; just two or three shells over us and I found that passing shells have the same ghostly "window "win-dow shade rustle" on this side of the world as on the other. My foxhole was only about 20 feet from where two field telephones and two field radios were lying on the ground. All night, officers sat on the r ground at these four pieces of com munications and directed our troops. As I lay there listening in the dark, the conversation was startling-ly startling-ly familiar the words and the thoughts and the actions exactly as I'd known them for so long in the infantry. All night I could hear these low voices over the phones voices in the darkness, voices of men running the war at the front. Not long after dark the rifle shots started. There would be a little flurry far ahead, maybe a dozen shots. Then silence for many minutes. min-utes. Then there would be another flurry, flur-ry, way to the left. Then silence. Then the blurt of a machine gun closer, and a few scattered single shots sort of framing it. Then a long silence. . Spooky. All night it went like that Flares in the sky ahead, the crack of big guns behind us, then of passing shells, a few dark figures coming and going in the night, muted voices at the telephones, the rifle shots, the mosquitoes, the stars, the feel of the . ' damp night air under the wide sky back again at the kind of life I had known so long. The old familiar pattern, unchanged un-changed by distance or time from war on the other side of the world. A pattern so imbedded In my soul that, coming back into it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I'd never known anything else in my life. And there are millions of us. Spends Night in Gypsy Hideout The company commander. Capt. Julian Dusenbury, said I could have my choice of two places to spend the first night with his company. One was with him in his command post. The command post was a big. round Japanese gun emplacement, made of sandbags. The Japs had never occupied it, but they had stuck a log out of it, pointing toward the sea and making it look' like a gun to aerial reconnaissance. Captain Dusenbury and a couple of his officers had spread ponchos on the ground inside the emplacement emplace-ment and had hung their telephone on a nearby tree and were ready for business. There was no roof on the emplacement. It was right on top of a hill and cold and very windy. My other choice was with a couple cou-ple of enlisted men who had room for me in a little Gypsy-like hideout they'd made. It was a tiny, level place about halfway down the hillside, away from the sea. They'd made a roof over it by tying ponchos to trees and had dug up some Japanese straw mats out of a farmhouse to lay on the ground. I chose the second of these two places,' partly because it was warmer, warm-er, and also because I wanted to be with the men anyhow. My two "roommates" were Cpl. Martin Clayton Jr. of Dallas, Texas, Tex-as, and Pfc. William Gross of Lansing, Lan-sing, Mich. Clayton is nicknamed "Bird Dog" and nobody ever calls him anything else. He is tall, thin and dark, almost al-most Latin-looking. He sports a puny little mustache he's been trying try-ing to grow for weeks and he makes fun of it' Gross is simply called Gross. He is very quiet, but thoughtful of little things and they both sort of looked after me for several days. These two boys have become very close friends, and after the war they intend in-tend to go to UCLA together and finish their education. The boys said we could all three sleep side by side in the same "bed." So I got out my contribution contribu-tion to the night's beauty rest And it was a very much appreciated contribution, con-tribution, too. For I had carried a blanket as well as a poncho. These marines had been sleeping every night on the ground with no cover, except their cold, rubberized ponchos, and they had almost frozen to death. Their packs were so heavy they hadn't been able to bring 1 blankets ashore with them. Our next door neighbors were about three feet away in a similar level spot on the hillside, and they had roofed it similarly with ponchos. These two men were Sgt Neil Anderson An-derson of Coronado, Calif., and Sgt George Valido of Tampa, Fla. So we chummed up and the five of us cooked supper under a tree just in front of our "house." The boys made a fire out of sticks and we put canteen cups and K rations right on the fire. Other little groups of marines hat-similar hat-similar little fires going all over the hillside. As we were eating, another an-other marine came past and gave Bird Dog a big piece of fresh roasted roast-ed pig they had just cooked, and Bird Dog gave me some. It sure was good after days of K rations. Several of the boys found their K rations moldy, and mine was too. H was the old-fashioned kind and we finally realized they were 1942 rations and had been stored, probably prob-ably in Australia, all this time. Suddenly downhill a few yards, we heard somebody yell and start cussing and then there was a lot of laughter. What had happened was that one marine had heated a K ration can and, because it was pressure packed, it exploded when he pried it open and there were hot egg yolks over him. Usually the boys open a can a little first, and release the pressure before heating, so the can won't explode. |