A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  Of course, all of this was history by the time of Patton’s visit to Cape Cod. And Patton was Walker’s superior. Plus he offered the possibility, no matter how skeptically Walker might view his visit, of getting the 36th into action. Walker granted Patton’s request to address his troops and subsequently listened as “Georgie” gave a rousing speech in his surprisingly high-pitched voice to an assembly of officers from the 36th from the back of a jeep at Camp Edwards. “I watched the faces of my officers during his ‘oratory,’” Walker recorded. “They showed surprise, bewilderment, and disgust.” According to Walker, the Texas boys “were not favorably impressed” with Patton’s habitual use of profanity and vulgarity.

  Perhaps the memory of being nearly run over in Louisiana also affected his reception with the officers of the 36th. Whether or not their lack of interest in Patton was felt by him and influenced his decision is unrecorded; but, in fact, the Texas Division was not chosen to be a part of the Western Task Force of the Allied invasion of North Africa, and instead remained in Cape Cod for the next several months. It proceeded to invade Martha’s Vineyard, not Morocco, not once, but twice (October and December 1942) before it settled in for the winter on the Cape.

  The 36th stayed long enough at Camp Edwards, near Falmouth, to become favorites of the locals. After the many months in training, a number of Texas Division troops grew tired of life without their spouses and so they brought them up to Massachusetts, where quite a few Texan women and a handful of children occupied seasonal housing after the tourists left Cape Cod at the end of summer. If nightclub bands in the area didn’t have the “Eyes of Texas” in their repertoires before the arrival of the 36th, they soon learned it or risked trouble from the crowd. Meanwhile the Texans acquired a taste for New England lobster and blueberry pie, continued with their endless drills, and, along with every recruit in the U.S. Army, watched a new training film produced by Hollywood director Frank Capra that November called Prelude to War. No reviews of the documentary were recorded among the members of the 36th.

  The amphibious landings practiced by the division, sailing from Falmouth to the sands of Martha’s Vineyard under live fire conditions, was in keeping with a long tradition within the U.S. military. John Glover’s Marblehead seaman had practiced the same sort of military maneuvers on Martha’s Vineyards before rowing George Washington and his troops across the Delaware on Christmas Eve nearly 170 years before Walker and the 36th made the same practice voyages.

  The division remained on the Cape through the tragic post-Thanksgiving fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston, which killed 492 revelers in the deadliest such conflagration in the nation’s history. They endured ten degree-below-zero temperatures during the week of Christmas. On December 30, Walker got word that one of his three infantry regiments would be soon shipped overseas; but just two and a half weeks later that departure was cancelled.

  Walker dealt with a variety of discipline problems associated with troops stuck in the middle of a long New England winter: absenteeism, desertion, stealing food from company kitchens. Soldiers from the camp entertained the locals in New Bedford at the Empire Theater stage with a variety revue dubbed “The Khaki Parade.” There were musicians, comedians, magicians, and a soldier in drag doing a Carmen Miranda number to the delight of the audience. In February, Lieutenant Joel Westbrook, the 1st Battalion operations officer, married a local girl named Elaine Summers at The Chapel of the 143rd in Camp Edwards. Westbrook was a recent grad of the University of Texas Law School and the son of an ally of Texas Senator Coke Stevenson, Lawrence Westbrook, who’d run the W.P.A. program in Texas.

  Still the 36th didn’t get the call to duty. In early March, Walker made a stop in Washington to find out what was going on and learned that the problems were more bureaucratic than anything else. There were simply too many inexperienced officers in too many offices trying to manage a rapidly expanding army, most of which was training in camps remote from Washington, such as Edwards up on Cape Cod, to effectively coordinate troop movements with U.S. Navy shipping.

  He was advised that things would soon be sorted out, and they were. By the third week of March, it appeared the division was being prepared to ship out. Railroad cars began arriving in Massachusetts to carry troops and supplies away from Edwards, and packing began in earnest. Walker visited the Army Port of Embarkation in Brooklyn to check on preliminary arrangements. Five ships, the Brazil, the Argentina, the Gibbons, the Barry, and the Hawaiian Shipper were to take the entire division to North Africa.

  Walker sailed on the Brazil with about 5,000 of his men, bunked in tiers four high. The Argentina had similar accommodations. Most of the division’s equipment fit on the five transports, with the exception of a tank destroyer battalion and its twenty-four anti-tank vehicles, which were shipped in a vessel especially designed for the assignment. For entertainment purposes, Walker placed a regimental band on four of the five transports, with an orchestra on the fifth.

  On April 1, the troop trains began pulling into the pier in Brooklyn at 6:30 in the morning, and the last unit, a battalion of the 143rd, climbed aboard its transport at 10 p.m. that night. The next morning the division sailed for North Africa.

  It took two weeks for the 36th to land in Oran, Algeria, on the northern coast of Africa. On board the Brazil, General Walker caught up with some reading: the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants was his choice for the cruise.4

  Elsewhere on the Brazil, a mimeographed division newspaper called the T-Patch, born soon after leaving New York harbor, provided lighter reading for the troops. Along with war news gleaned from the ship’s radio, the paper provided Major League Baseball scores and the results of shipboard boxing matches and basketball games. The T-Patch also contained a bevy of drawings of scantily-clad women, sketched in full pin-up style with dreamy cut-lines suggesting that these buxom women might actually await them in North Africa: there was “Gertie from Bizerte,” for instance, and “Cassie from Maknassy with the classy chassis.” One woman drawn in diaphanous veil and stretched out on pillows, was described as “a cute kid from Sidi Bou Zid.”

  The Brazil disembarked at Oran on the evening of April 13, and the T-Patchers soon took a train to Magenta, 80 miles south, where the division made themselves at home in a countryside that reminded some of California.

  Just after Easter, Walker left his division to fly from Oran to Rabat and then on to Casablanca, the area at the heart of the action of Patton’s Western taskforce during the Operation Torch invasion of Morocco the previous November. At Rabat, Walker attended a meeting at Patton’s headquarters that brought together much of the North African command, including Patton himself. Here and at subsequent meetings through the rest of April to mid-May, Walker learned that the tug-of-war over where the 36th would be assigned remained ongoing. The division was a wishbone being yanked on one hand by Patton, who would command the U.S. Seventh Army in the next Allied operation after North Africa; and by Clark, who hoped to command the operation himself.

  By the middle of May, and back at Magenta, Walker learned that the T-Patchers would not be accompanying Patton to Sicily, the next Allied target. Instead, with the exception of a battalion from the 141st, which ironically would be training some of Patton’s forces for amphibious assault, the 36th was heading for a camp in the Marmora Forest of cork trees, between Port Lyautey and Rabat in northeastern Morocco.

  Walker enjoyed his stay in Morocco, learning the ways and means of Moroccan society, both native and French colonial. He found the countryside stunning and was curious about Arab agriculture and military customs. He also had to deal with accidents and discipline problems. Three members of the 1st Division, from the group being trained by his 141st, were drowned in exercises off the Moroccan coast; members of 143rd were charged by local farmers, both Arab and French, with stealing watermelons (“Texas soldiers just can’t resist watermelons,” Walker noted in his diary); a forest fire eighteen miles from his headquarters needed to be put out,
and the 143rd, sent to extinguish the flames, found a crashed B-25 there, the source of the flames, containing three charred American bodies.

  But then came the 4th of July parade in Rabat, followed by the news from Mark Clark that the 36th would be joining him that fall for the next Allied action against the Axis. That post-parade confidence between the generals was quickly followed by the news that the Allies, including Patton and his Seventh Army, had invaded Sicily on July 10.

  Two weeks later Walker and the 36th learned that they were headed back north to Arzew on the Mediterranean, where once again they would be practicing amphibious landings in preparation for whatever assault would follow.

  It was practice that Walker knew his division did not need, but after all these months he thought he could say with some certainty that his division would soon be fighting.

  3

  Tunisia

  BEING A WORLD WAR II war correspondent was still a relatively novel position in spring 1943—just twenty-six had landed with the troops during Operation Torch in November. By the time Pyle wound up on the U.S.S. Biscayne seven months later, he could count at least seventy-five American and British reporters in the Mediterranean theater.1

  Correspondents were aided—and censored—by an Army department known to the journalists as INC, for Information and Censorship. Correspondents would cover what was happening in the field during the course of a typical day, and take turns getting jeep rides back to headquarters in Algiers from INC officers, in order to file prior to a 9 p.m. deadline. In the early weeks of the campaign, rules prohibited transmissions to just 200 words a day. By spring, that number had jumped to 450 words.2

  Just what a war correspondent was supposed to do—and be—in this war was an evolving problem when Pyle arrived in North Africa in late November 1942. The dependence on the military for transportation, information, and access to personnel left World War II correspondents with little room for reporting any contradictions in the war, or stories that might cast military efforts in anything but a diligent and brave light. Then again, early in the war, there was little sense of urgency among the journalists to report anything but the positive. Almost to a man, they felt as if they were enemies of the Axis powers, too.

  Eventually, there would be those who hung out at headquarters and covered the war from the point of view of its planners; and those who braved the frontlines and told what progress was being made from the ground up. There were romantic types, too, whose experiences, were fed by politics, and in some cases, by past associations with the cause and romance of the Spanish Civil War. These reporters might carry guns and rush toward the action, half hoping they would become a part of it (later in the war, Ernest Hemingway would actually claim to have raced ahead of Allied troops and “taken” a French town).3

  Pyle, of course, had never been a “hard news” reporter and he wasn’t going to change stripes in North Africa. Because he was writing a column, Pyle had no pressures to be absolutely up to date in his reporting. He could write about incidents well after they happened, so he wasn’t a part of the wire service and daily news contingent who were constantly shuttling back-and-forth between frontlines and headquarters to send news back to the States.

  After landing at Oran and spending his first few weeks in proximity to Allied headquarters, he began to venture out to various units spread across the North African war zone, essentially pursuing stories in the same fashion that he and Jerry had done when he was authoring his “Hoosier Vagabond” columns. His first stories were about the convoy that brought him to Algeria, about the landscape and the Arab people, about a unit of Rangers with whom he hooked up, about a signal corps unit.

  Pyle did one exposé on Allied use of French fascists for assistance in the war effort, but it was atypical of his reporting and he quickly returned to his usual “beat.” He wrote about a medical unit and camp life—the daily needs of the average GI, which were, according to Pyle: “(1) good mail service; (2) movies, radios, and phonographs; (3) cigarettes and candy.”4

  Pyle traveled light: just the clothes on his back, his typewriter, and a pouch of Bull Durham tobacco. He did what he had been doing for years now: sidled up to people who looked like they had something to say, and made himself easy to talk to.

  Always careful to get the right spelling, full name, rank, and home address of his interviewees, he depicted camp life: the boxing tournaments, games of touch football, even badminton contests.

  Pyle painted a picture of the North African countryside: he described the roads as macadamized and surprisingly good, said the landscape was similar to the American southwest, and told how the farming was done by beautiful Arabian horses.

  The Arab people did a lot of waving at passing troops and their children offered “V for Victory” signs, but the populace was generally hard to get to know.

  He did a story on Hollywood entertainers Martha Ray, Kay Francis, Mitzi Mayfair, and Carole Landis, traveling through North Africa’s Allied airbases on one of the war’s earliest entertainment tours. “Four good soldiers,” Pyle called them.5

  A column from an aerodrome in the desert was the first spine-tingling war story that he told. In quiet detail it outlined the tale of a wounded plane coming in hours late from a bombing mission over Bizerte. Pyle related how the clock ticked away on the chances of its return as a beautiful desert sunset painted the sky in stunning oranges and pinks and blues. Men at the base ate supper in silence, thinking of the crew. Everyone was aware of how much gasoline it carried and how much air time that would usually afford a bomber. Everyone knew that it had long since exceeded that standard equivalency, and as a consequence the ten lives on board—ten men, who a few hours earlier had been doing the ordinary things that young fliers did in preparation for a mission: the nervous chatter back and forth; the checking of gauges and mechanisms; the zipping of jackets and search for gloves—those smiling, laughing, youthful lives were now in jeopardy or lost.

  “And then an electric thing happened,” Pyle wrote. “Far off in the dusk a red flare shot into the sky. It made an arc against the dark background of the mountains and fell to the earth. It couldn’t be anything else. It had to be. The ten dead men were coming home.”6

  His work started to get noticed. Miller wrote to Pyle that more newspapers were picking up his column: Keep up the good work. Do what you’re doing.

  For Pyle that meant living close to the soldiers he reported on. He got to know their habits and lifestyles, sat through their talks, small and deep. He heard their confessions, understood their fears and their dreams. Pyle was with them at quiet moments and moments of exploration—a trip to the headquarters of the French Foreign Legion at Sidi-bel-Abbès in the Algerian desert, for instance, was an otherworldly experience for Pyle and the five Army officers. These were, after all, young men—a dentist from Dallas, a brick salesman from Chicago, a lawyer in Milwaukee—who had never ventured far from home. Now they found themselves at the North African home of the fabled Legionnaires, where instead of a sand blown old fort, they wound up admiring, among other amenities, a magnificent new swimming pool, which rivaled “anything in Hollywood.”7

  He was hardly touring the countryside, however. Pyle spent weeks and weeks on the shifting frontlines in Tunisia. He came to like the infantry guys more than all others, primarily because theirs was the hardest and most thankless job in the war. He stuck with them as they moved at a snail’s pace in endless nighttime convoys toward the frontlines. And he stayed with them through battle, including the German push at Sidi Bou Said in mid-February 1943, and the pell-mell exit from the Kasserine Pass a few days later.

  Despite his experiences near the frontlines, Pyle was the first to admit that he was not particularly brave. In fact, he wrote of it in a column about a bomber crew that he’d first met in England. One day soon after a proscription that prevented journalists from flying on bombing missions had been lifted, Pyle was asked by this crew if he was interested in tagging along on a run over Bizerte.

 
; He had dreaded the moment when he would have to answer this question. On the one hand, Pyle knew that there was not one practical function that he could serve and he would simply be dead weight on the flight.

  On the other hand, he wondered if it wasn’t cowardly to tell the stories about these brave men and not partake in the daily dangers that they were facing. After all, other journalists had flown. Could he truly understand their circumstances without himself going into the air?

  When his answer finally came, it was a no, “I’m too old to be a hero,” he told the crew. Their reaction was an immediate surprise. They not only understood; they were supportive.8

  “Anybody who goes when he doesn’t have to is a plain damned fool,” one of the bombers said.

  The soldiers’ pragmatism was evident a few days earlier, when Pyle had been looking at photos printed in an American magazine. Pyle and the bomber crew pored over these war reports, full of dramatic and vivid images from around the globe. Pyle realized that one of the pictures was a photo of the long concrete pier in Oran, at which his ship had docked when he first arrived in Africa. This was the same quay that he had stepped onto a few months earlier with absolutely no sense of romance. It was just a bustling, loading zone. Now in this magazine, the Oran pier looked as exotic as an oasis rising on the edge of the desert.

  To the men in the group, Pyle made his confession: though he was in the middle of a world war, it didn’t seem at all dramatic to him.

  One of the flyers in the group, a bomber squadron leader, admired and respected by all the others, agreed with Pyle. “It isn’t to me either,” said Major Quint Quick. “I know it should be, but it isn’t. It’s just hard work, and all I want is to finish it and get back home.”9