World War II Chronicle: February 9, 1943
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Headlines: Japanese abandoning Guadalcanal … Captured German generals blame Hitler for failure at Stalingrad … French leaders can’t stop fighting each other …
Meanwhile on page seven, Japan states that their forces accomplished the mission at Guadalcanal and are being redeployed along with their Buna forces… George Fielding Eliot column on page eight… Sports on page 11…
The man who claims to be the famous Casey from the baseball poem “Casey at the Bat” has passed away. Originally Dan Casey said his brother Dennis was the inspiration, but later said he was “mighty Casey” of the Mudville Nine. Known more for his pitching than his hitting, Dan belted his only home run in 1887, the year he won 28 games for the Philadelphia Quakers (who also went by the nickname Phillies). He did come to bat that year with two outs in the ninth with runners on second and third and down by one to the New York Giants, and was struck out by Tim Keefe. Ernest L. Thayer wrote the poem in 1888, but admitted that “Casey” was a composite character.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
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 battle for Ousseltia Pass in Central Tunisia was going on.
We stopped in what is known as a forward command post, from which a battle is directed. This one consisted of a tent 20 feet square, well hidden under a tree. However the whole tent had been dropped down and simply lay like a tarpaulin covering the officers’ bedrolls and bags. All 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 with little bushes and small fir trees. The sun was out and the day was rather warm. There were no papers or desks or anything — just three or four officers standing and sitting on a hillside near two telephones on the ground. One officer had a large map case. That’s all the paraphernalia 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. We could walk up and look over, but we couldn’t see anything. Both sides were well hidden in the brush.
Every minute of two our nearby artillery would fire, and then half a minute or so later we could hear faintly the explosion of the shells far away.
“Nobody’s doing much damage right now,” an officer said, “but at least we’re getting in ten shots to their one.”
Now and then a louder and much nearer blast interrupted us. When I asked what size gun this was, an officer said it wasn’t a gun — it was enemy mortar shells exploding. I supposed they were three or four miles away, but he said they were falling only 800 yards from us.
Once in a while we could hear machine gun fire in the distance. A young Second Lieutenant stood near the phones and did all the talking over them. In fact he appeared to be making all the decisions. And he impressed me as knowing his business remarkably well.
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. Other officers commented about him in terms not meant for mixed company, but the young Lieutenant said nothing.
The phone rang every few minutes. Other command posts would be calling in to report 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 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 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 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 had his range and asked permission 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 for a decision on whether to move forward. The young Lieutenant, apparently not wishing to give direct orders to a higher officer, solved the problem by putting his words in the form of advice, sprinkling two or three “sirs” in every sentence. I thought he handled it beautifully.
Now and then the Lieutenant would phone some other post. All the posts have code terms such as “Hatrack” and “Monsoon” and “Chicago.” I’ve just made those up as examples, 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 trucks had been disabled that morning. Several times he phoned other posts to check up on a Colonel who was wandering around the battle area in a jeep. You could tell they were very fond of the Colonel, and that he apparently paid little attention 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. 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.
“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 we all took to the foxholes. Finally after they had flown overhead a couple of times without doing anything, somebody yelled: “They’re definitely ours!”
So we came out. The planes circled for about ten minutes hunting for the correct spot in the bush-covered mountainside. They seemed to take their time at it, to make 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 three were no black puffs around the planes. We could hear their machine guns, and their cannon 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 the hell out of the Italians!”
When we told him they were our planes he said “Oh!” and went back down the hill.
(More Tomorrow)
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 9 February 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-02-09/ed-1/