Читать книгу Brave Men - Ernie Pyle - Страница 9

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I went back to the ship and stayed aboard almost a week before going ashore more or less permanently. It was my hope to do a complete picture of the Navy’s part in such actions as this, and the Navy’s part didn’t end the moment it got the assault troops ashore. In the days that followed the landings our headquarters vessel patrolled back and forth between the American sectors, kept an eye on the shore in case help was needed, directed the fire of other ships, mothered new convoys by wireless, issued orders and advice throughout the area, and from time to time scurried in swift circles when planes appeared in the sky. For despite the enemy’s obvious air weakness, he did manage to sneak over a few planes several times a day. On D-day Plus 1, General Quarters was sounded fifteen times on our ship. Nobody got any rest the clock around. The sailors worked like Trojans.

Whenever I think of our soldiers and sailors in camps back home, I am apt to visualize—and no doubt wrongly—a draftee who is going through his training like a man, but still reluctantly and without intense interest. If I’m right about that, once he goes into action that attitude will vanish, because he’ll be working—working to stay alive and not because somebody tells him to work. When General Quarters was sounded our sailors didn’t get to their stations in the manner of school kids going in when the bell rings. They got there by charging over things and knocking things down. I saw them arrive at gun stations wearing nothing but their drawers. I saw officers upset their dinner and be out of the wardroom by the time the second “beep!” of the alarm signal sounded. I always froze wherever I was for about five minutes, to keep from getting bowled over in the rush.

And the boys on the guns—you could hardly recognize them. Shooting at planes wasn’t a duty for them; it was a completely absorbing thing. I doubt if they ever watched a ball game or gave a girl the eye with the complete intentness which they used to follow a distant plane in the sky. A gun has one blessing in addition to the one of protecting a man: it occupies him.

Having no vital part to play in moments of extreme danger is one of the worst curses of being a correspondent. Busy people aren’t often afraid.

Bombs fell in our vicinity for several days. The raiders went mostly for the beaches, where the barges were unloading. The number of narrow escapes we had must have been very discouraging to the Axis fliers. The Axis radio said our beaches were littered with the wrecked and burned-out hulks of our landing ships. Actually, in our fourteen-mile area they hit very few. But we had our tense moments.

The enemy fliers were brave, I had to admit that. They would come right in through the thickest hail of fire I had ever seen thrown into the sky. Dozens of our ships had escapes that were uncanny. Once two bombs hit the water just a good stone’s throw from the stern of our vessel. And late one afternoon a lone Italian—I really believe he must have gone mad, for what he did was desperate and senseless—dove right down into the midst of a hundred ships. He had no bombs, and was only strafing. He went over our fantail so low we could almost have caught him in a net.

Everything in the vicinity cut loose on him at once. It was like throwing a bucketful of rice against a spot on the wall. He was simply smothered with steel. Yet somehow he pulled out and up to about a thousand feet. He charged at our barrage balloons like an insane bee and shot two of them down afire. And then at last the bullets we had put into him took effect. He burst all aflame and fell in wide circles until he hit the water. No parachute ever came out.

Air raids at night were far more nerve-racking than the daylight ones. The enemy couldn’t be seen, he could only be heard. The ghostly flares were visible, though, and the sickening bomb flashes that accompanied the heavy thunder rolling across the water.

With us it was always a game of hide and seek. Sometimes we would sit on the water as quiet as a mouse. No one spoke loudly. The engines were silent. We could hear the small waves lapping at the sides of our ship. At other times we would start so suddenly that the ship would almost jump out from under us. We would run at full speed and make terrifically sharp turns and churn up an alarmingly bright wake in the phosphorescent water. But we always escaped.

And then after the third day, all of a sudden there was never an enemy plane again. They quit us cold. If they still fought, they fought some other place than our front.

Our first few days aboard ship after the landings were punctuated by many things besides air raids: Wounded soldiers were sometimes brought from shore for our doctors to treat before the hospital ships arrived. Generals came to confer on our ship. Equally exciting, once we had fresh tomatoes and watermelon at the same meal. We took little trips up and down the coast. Repair parties back from the beaches brought souvenir Fascist banners, and stories of how poor the Sicilians were and how glad they were that the war was over for them. The weather remained perfect.

Our waters and beaches were forever changing. I think it was at daylight on the third morning when we awoke to find the Mediterranean absolutely devoid of ships, except for a few scattered naval vessels. The vast convoys that brought us over had unloaded to the last one and slipped out during the night. For a few hours the water was empty, the shore seemed lifeless, and all the airplanes had disappeared. It was hard to believe that we were really at war.

And then after lunch we looked out again, and the sea was once more veritably crawling with new ships—hundreds of them, big and little. Every one was coated at the top with a brown layer like icing on a cake. When we drew closer, the icing turned out to be decks crammed solid with Army vehicles and khaki-clad men.

We kept pouring men and machines into Sicily as though it were a giant hopper. The schedule had all been worked out ahead of time: On D-day Plus 3, Such-and-such Division would arrive. A few hours later another convoy bringing tanks would appear. Ships unloaded and started right back for new cargoes. The whole thing went so fast that I heard of at least one instance in which the Army couldn’t pour its men and equipment into the African embarkation ports as fast as the returning ships arrived.

The Navy sent salvage parties of Seabees ashore right behind the assault troops and began reclaiming the Sicilian harbors and fixing up beaches for unloading. We ran some ships up to the shore, we emptied others at ports, and we would unload big freighters by lightering their cargoes in hundreds of assault barges and amphibious trucks. Great ships filled with tanks sometimes beached and unloaded in the fantastic time of half an hour. Big freighters anchored a mile from shore were emptied into hordes of swarming, clamoring small boats, in a matter of eighteen hours. The same unloading job with all modern facilities at a New York pier would take four days. The number of vehicles that had to be landed to take care of this was almost beyond conception.

The Army worked so smoothly that material never piled up on the beaches but got immediately on its way to the front. We had stevedoring regiments made up of New York professional stevedores. We had naval captains who in civil life ran world-wide ship-salvaging concerns and made enormous salaries. Convoys arrived, discharged, and slipped away for another load. Men worked like slaves on the beaches. Bosses shouted and rushed as no construction boss ever did in peacetime. Speed, speed, speed!

I walked gingerly on big steel pontoon piers, and I couldn’t tell a naval lieutenant commander in coveralls from an Army sergeant in a sun helmet. Sometimes it seemed as if half the men of America were there, all working madly together. Suddenly I realized what all this was. It was America’s long-awaited power of production finally rolling into the far places where it had to go to end the war. It sounds trite when it is put into words, but the might of material can overwhelm everything before it. We saw that in the last days of Tunisia. We saw it again there in Sicily.

The point was that we on the scene knew for sure that we could substitute machines for lives and that if we could plague and smother the enemy with an unbearable weight of machinery in the months to follow, hundreds of thousands of our young men whose expectancy of survival would otherwise have been small could someday walk again through their own front doors.

Fewer than a third of the sailors on our ship were Regular Navy. And most of that third hadn’t been in many years. The crew was chiefly composed of young landlubbers who became sailors only because of the war and who were longing to get back to civil life. Here are a few sketches of some of the men who made the wheels go round:

Joe Raymer, electrician’s mate first class, of 51 South Burgess Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, was a married man with a daughter four years old. Joe had been in the Navy from 1924 to 1928, so he knew his way around ships. Of medium height, he was a pleasant fellow with a little silver in his hair and a cigar in his mouth. I don’t know why, but sailors smoking cigars have always seemed incongruous to me. Before the war Joe was a traveling salesman, and that’s what he intended to go back to. He worked for the Pillsbury flour people—had the central-southern Ohio territory. He was a hot shot and no fooling. The year before he went back to the Navy he sold more pancake flour than anybody else in America, and won himself a $500 bonus.

Warren Ream, of Paradise, California, had worked for several years in the advertising departments of big Los Angeles stores—Bullock’s, Barker Brothers, Robinson’s. He arrived overseas just in time for the invasion. Ream was a storekeeper third class, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he kept store. In fact he did a little bit of everything from sweeping up to passing shells. Actually he thought he wasn’t supposed to be aboard ship at all, but he was glad he didn’t miss it. His Navy life was a great contrast to his personal past. He was the kind of fellow who might well have been made miserable by the rough life of the Navy. But we were standing at the rail one day and he said, “I wonder what’s happened to the old Navy we used to read about. I remember hearing of skippers who could cuss for forty-five minutes without repeating themselves. But from what I’ve seen, skippers today can’t cuss any better than I can. I’m disappointed.”

Harvey Heredeen was a warrant officer, which means he ate in the wardroom and was called “mister.” But a man’s a man by any other name, and Mr. Heredeen looked exactly what he was—a regular old-time chief petty officer. He had had orders to return to the States just before we sailed, but you wouldn’t get an old-timer to miss a show like that. He got permission to postpone the homeward trip until after we had made the invasion. Mr. Heredeen had retired from the Navy in 1935 after seventeen years of it, twelve of them in submarines. He had met a Memphis schoolteacher, married her, and settled down there in a job at the Linde Air Products Company, making oxygen. He went back to the Navy in 1941 when he was forty-five years old. After the invasion he had orders to go back to America and serve as an instructor at a submarine school. His nickname was “Spike,” and his home was at 1200 Tanglewood Street, Memphis. Back home he used to be a deacon in the London Avenue Christian Church. He begged me not to make any wisecracks about his cussing and tobacco-chewing when I wrote him up. Okay, deacon.

Joe Talbot was an aviation ordnanceman first class, and since there was no aviation aboard our ship he was a round peg in a square hole. Of course that wasn’t his fault. What he actually did was a little bit of everything when things were normal. During battle, he was the head of a crew down in a magazine of big shells and upon orders passed more ammunition up to the gun batteries above. Joe was a black-haired, straight-shouldered Southerner from Columbus, Georgia. In civil life he was a photographer on the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer; the last big story he photographed was Eddie Rickenbacker’s crash near Atlanta. Joe had been married four years. His wife worked at Woolworth’s store in Columbus. This was Joe’s second time in the Navy. He had served from 1931 to 1935, and went back again in 1941, but he had no intention of making it a career. His one great postwar ambition—he said he was going to do it in the first six months after he got out—was to buy a cabin cruiser big enough for four, get another couple, and cruise down the Chattahoochee River to the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Suwannee, making color photos of the whole trip.

Tom Temple, or rather Thomas Nicholas Temple, was a seaman second class. His father deliberately put in the middle name so the initials would make TNT. Tom, aged nineteen, was tall and thin, very grave and analytical. He talked so slowly I thought sometimes he was going to stop altogether. After the war he hoped to go to Harvard and then get into the publishing business. Tom told me his mother was a high-school teacher at Far Rockaway, Long Island, and that she wrote on the side. She used to write for the magazine Story under the name Jean Temple. Tom’s father was wounded in the last war, and since then has been in the big veterans’ hospital at Albuquerque, only a short distance from my home. Tom said that when he first went into the Navy the sailors’ profanity shocked him, but before long it rolled off his back like water off a duck. He was very sincere and thoughtful and one of my favorites aboard ship.

Joe Ederer was a lieutenant commander and chief engineer of the ship. He was also my part-time host while I was aboard, since I did all my writing in his cabin. Furthermore, I ate his candy, smoked his cigarettes, used his paper, and would have read his mail if I could have found it. Commander Ederer had been at sea for more than a quarter of a century. He came from the Merchant Service, and he indulged in constant pleasant feuds with his Regular Navy friends. His home was at 2724 Northeast 35th Place, Portland, Oregon. His wife was used to waiting, so perhaps his absence was not as hard on her as it is on many wives. They had a fifteen-year-old boy upon whom the chief engineer doted. There were two pictures of his family on his shelves.

Ederer was one of the few officers who were genuine salts. He was not exactly a Colin Glencannon, but they had many things in common. Ederer spent many years on the Orient run and had a personal hatred for the Japs. He had been with our ship ever since she was commissioned in 1941, and he hoped the invasion would soon be over so he could get to the Pacific. Like all sailors he wanted someday to get five acres, preferably in the Oregon woods, build a cabin and have a creek running past his door. If he ever does he will probably go nuts.

Dick Minogue, bosun’s mate first class, had been in the Navy six years and intended to stay. He came from White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and aboard ship they called him “Minny.” It is men like Minogue who form the backbone of the present-day Navy. He was young and intelligent, yet strong and salty enough for any job. He definitely had the sea about him, but it was modern sea. He wore his bosun’s pipe from a cord around his neck, and a white hat cocked far down over one eye. He said the worst moment he ever had in the Navy was while piping a British admiral over the side. Dick had a chew of tobacco in his mouth, and right in the middle of his refrain the whistle got full of tobacco juice and went gurgly.

Arch Fulton, of 493 East 129th Street, Cleveland, Ohio, was an electrician’s mate second class. Before the war he worked as a lineman for the Cleveland Illuminating Company. Fulton was married and had two children. He was thirty-seven—much older than most of the crew. He was born a Scotsman, and went to America at seventeen. His parents were still living at Kilmarnock, Scotland. He had a brother, a sergeant major in the British Army, and a sister who was a British WREN. Arch had a short pompadour which slanted forward and gave him the look of standing with his back to the wind. He had a dry Scottish humor, and he took the Navy in his stride. Back in Cleveland he used to read my columns, so you can see he was a smart man.

We had eleven Negro boys aboard, all in the stewards’ department. They waited table in the officers’ mess, and ran the wardroom pantry where hot coffee was on tap twenty-four hours a day. They were all quiet, nice boys and a credit to the ship. Three of them were exceedingly tall and three were exceedingly short. They all had music in their souls. Sometimes I had to laugh—when the wardroom radio happened to be playing a hot tune during meals I’d notice them grinning to themselves and dancing ever so slightly as they went about their serving.

One of these boys was George Edward Mallory, of Orange, Virginia. He was thirty-two, and before the war he worked as an unloader at a chain grocery store in his home town. He had been in the Navy for a year and was operated on for appendicitis after arriving in the Mediterranean. He used to get seasick but it didn’t bother him any more. He was tall, quiet, and serious. He had never waited table before but he had become an expert.

Another was Fred Moore, who was little and meek. Fred had a tiny mustache and a perpetually startled look on his good-natured face. He was very quiet and shy. His home was at 1910 Tenth Avenue, South Birmingham, Alabama. He was just twenty-one and had been in the Navy only a few months. He liked it fine, and thought he might stay in after the war. Before joining up he did common labor at Army camps and fruit farms. Fred had a gift. He was a wizard at baking delicate and beautiful pastries. He made all the pastry desserts for the officers’ mess. He had never done any cooking before joining the Navy, except to fry a few hamburgers at a short-order joint. He couldn’t explain his knack for pastry baking. It was just like somebody who can play the piano beautifully without ever taking lessons. The whole ship paid tribute to his streak of special genius. Fred said he had never been seasick nor very homesick, but during some of our close shaves in action he said he sure was scared.

In wartime it is an axiom that the closer you get to the front the less you know about what is going on. During the invasion of Sicily we would often say to each other that we wished we were back in New York so we could find out how we were doing. During the first two days, we in our sector had no word at all about the two American sectors to our right. Even though we were within sight and sound of their gunfire we knew nothing about how they were faring. The people in America knew, but we didn’t. Aboard ship, we were somewhat better off than the troops on land, because we did get some news by radio. But many of the troops inland didn’t know about the bombing of Rome, for instance, till nearly a week later.

The ship’s news came mostly from BBC in London, the German radio in Berlin, and our little daily newspaper assembled from world-wide short-wave broadcasts picked up during the night. Our skipper, Commander Rufus Young, felt that a lack of news was bad for morale, so he did all he could to let the ship’s crew know what was going on. He was the one who asked me to edit the daily mimeographed paper, and he also took one radio operator off his regular watch and gave him his own time just to sit and sample various air channels for news.

This operator was Frank Donohue, radioman second class, of 139-49 87th Avenue, Jamaica, Long Island. He had started in as a child with the Commercial Cable Company and had been a radio operator for eighteen years, though he was still a young man. He was working for Press Wireless when he joined the Navy in 1942. Donohue had so much experience taking down news dispatches that he had a good news sense. He took as much pride in our little paper as I did, and it got so he would sort out the stories by subjects before waking me at 3 a.m. Then while I assembled and rewrote the stuff he would bring us cups of coffee and cut the stencils for the mimeograph. We did our work in a big steel-walled room where about thirty radio operators were taking down code messages by typewriter, so it did seem sort of like a newspaper office. Throughout the invasion period we missed getting out our paper only one day. That was on the morning of our landings.

It was always daylight when we finished, and I would stop on the bridge to talk for a little while with the men of the early-morning watch. Getting up at three every day and not getting any sleep in the daytime almost got me down before it was over, but there was considerable satisfaction in feeling that I was not entirely useless aboard ship. Off Sicily, as everywhere else in the world, dawn is the most perfect part of the day, if you’ve got the nerve to get up and see it.

Every night throughout our invasion, we listened to the Berlin broadcasts and to the special propaganda program directed at American troops. A purported American, Midge (nicknamed Olga by the boys), worked hard at her job. She tried to tell them that their sweethearts would marry somebody else while they were overseas fighting a phony war for the “Jewish” Roosevelt, and that there would be no jobs for them when they got home. The boys listened to her partly to get mad, partly because the program always had excellent music, and partly to get a laugh. The biggest laugh the boys had had since joining the Navy was the night the traitorous Olga was complaining about something horrible President Roosevelt had done. She said it made her almost ashamed to be an American!

Olga had a come-hither voice, and she spoke straight American. Every night I’d hear the boys conjecturing about what she looked like. Some thought she was probably an old hag with a fat face and peroxide hair, but the majority liked to visualize her as looking as gorgeous as she sounded. The most frequently expressed opinion heard aboard ship was that if they ever got to Berlin they’d like first to sock Olga on the chin—and then make love to her.

One member of our regular ship’s crew didn’t make the invasion trip with us. She was the ship’s dog. Her master was a Regular Navy man, a chief petty officer of many years’ service. He was tattooed, wind-burned, a bachelor, and quietly profane. His officers said he was an excellent worker.

It seems that several months before the invasion some sailors from our ship had picked up a German shepherd puppy. She belonged to the whole crew, but the puppy took to our friend and he took to her, and by common consent she became recognized as his. The puppy grew into a beautiful dog, smart, alert and sweet. But when hot weather came along she got the mange. Our friend doctored it with everything he could find, and other sailors helped him with the doctoring, but still the mange got worse. They finally clipped her hair close, so they could get medicine on her skin more thoroughly, but nothing did any good.

When they hit the last port before leaving Africa, my friend went ashore and searched the country for a French or American Army veterinary, but couldn’t find any. The sailors had given up all hope of curing her. Something had to be done. The others left it up to our friend. Whatever he chose to do would have their approval. He told me later that he couldn’t just put her ashore, for she had grown up aboard ship and wouldn’t know how to take care of herself on land.

So our friend solved it in his own way, the morning after I came aboard. He didn’t ask anybody to help him or tell anybody what he was going to do. He just tied a weight around her neck and let her down into the water. That was her end—in the tradition of the sea.

I heard about it a few hours later, and stopped by the rail to tell our friend I was sorry. He couldn’t talk about it. He just said, “Let’s go below and have a cup of coffee.”

A few hours after that, I noticed that he had started having something else. In midafternoon I saw one of the ship’s officers talking to him very seriously. It didn’t look too good. Drinking aboard ship just doesn’t go. The next day our friend was called before the mast and given a light suspension of privileges. At lunch the boys were kidding him about it and he said, well, hell, he wasn’t sore about it, for obviously they had to do something to him.

That evening I happened to be sitting with the officer who had sentenced our friend, and just to make conversation I mentioned that it was sad about the dog being gone.

The officer sat up and said, “What!”

I said yes, the dog was gone.

He said, “My God!” And then, “He’s one of the best men on the ship, and I knew something was wrong, but I tried for half an hour to get it out of him and he wouldn’t tell me.”

The officer sat there looking as though he were sick, and again he said, “So that was it! My God!”

By the end of the first week after the Sicilian invasion there was almost no indication of warfare along our beach front. Every night the German radio told us we were getting bombed, but actually a stultifying peace had settled over us. Hour by hour we could feel the ship slide back into her normal ways. The watches were dropped down to Condition Three, which is almost the peacetime regime. The ship’s laundry reopened for the first time in weeks. Movies were borrowed and shown after supper. The wearing of white hats became optional once more. The men went swimming over the side, and fished with rod and reel from the forecastle head. The captain had time on his hands and played gin rummy with me when I was worn out with writing. Finally liberty parties were let ashore for sightseeing. I knew then that the war, for our ship’s family in that special phase, was over.

So I shouldered my barracks bags and trundled myself ashore in Sicily for good. Those few weeks with the Navy had been grand, and I hated to part from the friends I had made. Too, that taste of civilized living had been a strange delight, and yet in a perverse way I looked forward to going back to the old soldier’s routine of sleeping on the ground, not washing before breakfast, and fighting off fleas.

Man is a funny creature.