World War II Chronicle: May 10, 1943
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On today’s front page: the P-47 Thunderbolt — the fastest single-engine plane in the world — is pictured above the fold (story on page seven), and hundreds of American prisoners have been liberated in Tunisia as their former guards become prisoners themselves…
Page 10 reports that 2nd Lt. Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, the college football superstar you may never have heard of before, has been lost on a training mission over Saginaw Bay. Sidat-Singh starred for Syracuse’s football and basketball teams — when the black athlete was permitted to play. People believed he was Indian based on his last name, but both his parents were black. When his dad passed away, Wilmeth’s mother married an Indian medical student who adopted him and changed his last name.
Were it not for unofficial bans on black athletes in professional football and basketball, Sidat-Singh could have turned pro in either sport. Instead he did some barnstorming basketball before joining the District of Columbia’s police force. Then he became one of the Tuskegee Airmen…
Sports section on page 12, where we learn that former Chicago Bears superstar George McAfee is one of six brothers serving in the Armed Forces. Wes McAfee played one season for the Eagles before becoming an Army officer.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
NORTHERN TUNISIA — A few weeks ago I said in one of these columns that the part the Americans would play in the final phase of the Tunisian war would be comparatively small. That was true, if you look at it from the big angle.
But when you look at it from the worm’s-eye view that has been mine in the front lines during a big portion of the fight, it is hard to see anything from the big angle, and I feel constrained to eat my words.
Our part has seemed mighty large to me at times. For our American troops had a brutal fight in the mountain phase of this campaign.
It was war of such intensity as Americans on this side of the ocean had not known before. It was a battle without letup. It was a war of drenching artillery and hidden mines and walls of machine-gun fire and even of the barbaric bayonet.
It was an exhausting, cruel, last-ditch kind of war, and those who went through it would seriously doubt that war could be any worse than those two weeks of mountain fighting.
The Germans battled savagely and desperately from hill to hill until the big break came. There were times when we had to thrown battalion after battalion onto an already pulverized hill before we could finally take it. Our casualties will surely run high.
No one will care to underrate the American contribution to the end of Rommel in North Africa.
My time at the front was spent with a certain unit of the First Infantry Division. This division has now been through four big battles in North Africa and has made a good name for itself in every one of them. But it has paid dearly for its victoreies.
Apparently there have been some intimations in print back home that the First Division did not fight so well in its earlier battles. The men of the division are all as sore as hornets about it. If such a thing was printed it was somebody’s unfortunate mistake. For the First Division has always fought well.
It is natural to be loyal to your friends, and I feel a loyalty to the First Division, for I have lived with it off and on for six months. But it is a sad thing to become loyal to the men of a division in wartime. It is sad because the men go, and new ones come until at last only the famous number is life. Finally it is only a numbered mechanism through which men pass. The First Division will exist forever, but my friends of today may not.
For you at home who think this African war has been small stuff, let me tell you just this one thing — the First Division has already done more fighting than it did throughout the last war.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 10 May 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-05-10/ed-1/