World War II Chronicle: February 3, 1944
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On page two: Lt. Gen. Millard F. Harmon has hinted that soldiers fighting in the Southwest Pacific Theater might be able to rotate home after two years of overseas duty. Plus, Harmon states that more than half of air crews shot down in the South Pacific have been rescued by friendly forces… Head for your safe spaces, woke snowflakes: there is an ad for Aunt Jemima’s “appetitin” pancakes on page six. The Aunt Jemima ads not only make me hungry, but give me the warm, fuzzy nostalgia. Now she’s gone…
At the bottom of page six, British general Sir Bernard Montgomery feels that the war in Europe will be over this year… George Fielding Eliot column on page eight… Sports is on page 14…
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
IN ITALY — The British Army recently announced a new system of wound and foreign-service stripes, similar to ours in the last war. I’ve wondered for a long time when we would get around to doing it ourselves, and if you ask me the sooner the better.
The new British insigne is to be a straight up-and-down gold strip an inch and a half long on the left forearm. There will be one for each wound. Similar stripes of red will be granted for each year of service in the war.
Ours in the last war was a golden “V” on the right sleeve for each wound, and the same on the left sleeve for six months of service abroad.
A little thing like a stripe can do wonders for morale. And certainly it’s pointless to wait till everybody gets home, for the average soldier will get into civvies the moment he gets his discharge. Over here and right now is when wound and service stripes would give a guy a chance to get a little kick out of wearing his record on his sleeve.
In fact I wouldn’t mind parading a few stripes myself. Very shortly I’ll have a total of two years overseas service since World War II began, and since I’m now at the age where hardening of the arteries may whisk me off at any moment, I’d like somebody to see my stripes before it’s too late.
A thing I’ve always feared in ware zones has at last happened — my typewriter has broken down.
A certain metal bracket has crashed right in two, and you can no longer turn the cylinder and make a new line by hitting the little lever on the side.
Fortunately you can still turn the cylinder the old-fashioned way, but that’s like a soldier with a machine-gun who has to stop and load every bullet separately. It will be possible to get the little gadget welded the next time I get to an air field, but jumping around as we do that may be weeks away.
Still, all in all, the breakdown could be much worse, and I don’t know that a broken typewriter makes so much difference anyhow to a correspondent who is unable to think of anything better than his broken typewriter to write about.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that the boys in a certain artillery battery were betting on whether Schlitz beer ever came in green bottles or not.
Well, R. Ray Parsons, of Indianapolis, writes that the Schlitz bottle was brown for many years but that because of the wartime bottle shortage it is now often put in green bottles. That settles the argument but the best part is yet to come.
Mr. Parsons was a private in the A.E.F. in the last war and he is a Schlitz salesman. He has now been so carried away with his war memories and his enthusiasm for the ripe quality of his own suds, that he offers to buy the two artillerymen all the beer they can drink in a week after they get back to America. If they’ll write him, he’ll make the date.
That would be fine but, Mr. Parsons, what the artillerymen and everybody else want is beer over here right now. Everybody but me, of course.
All America seems to be worrying about whether the soldiers are going to get to vote. It sounds as though Congress is practically in fist fights about it.
Well, if you’ll let me have the platform a moment, I think I can tell you how it is. I can’t answer for the Army, which is either in training or in behind-the-lines routine jobs, but I think I can answer for the front-line combat soldier, and the answer is this:
Sure he wants to vote. If you ask him he’ll say yes. But he actually thinks little about it, and if there’s going to be any red tape about it he’ll say nuts to it.
The average combat soldier is so consumed with the job of merely keeping alive, and with contributing what bare little he can to his own miserable existence, that he has little room in him for thinking about the ballot. If you offered him his choice between voting in November and finding a dirty cowshed to lie down in out of the rain tonight, the cowshed would win.
If the Army could set up the machinery and someday all of a sudden tell every soldier in the combat zone to step up and mark his “X” if he wanted to, then 99 per cent of the front-line troops would vote.
But if soldiers have to fill out long questionnaires from their home states, sign affidavits, and fuss around with reading and writing out complicated lists, then I think 99 per cent of those same front line troops would say:
“To hell with it, we’d rather have a cigar ration at suppertime instead.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Ernie Pyle’s columns will be suspended for a week or so while he is recovering from a cold).
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 3 February 1944. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1944-02-03/ed-1/