Melançon Enterprises > Maurice Institute Library > Book reviews and excerpts > Ernie Pyle, Here is your War

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Carol Johnson; jeep thievery

One day out on a Tunisian hillside I sat on a box and got a shave and haircut from a soldier-barber.  While I was getting clipped, Carol Johnson, who has been over here doing pen-and-ink battle sketches for NEA service, came along and snapped my picture.  The last time I had a barbershop picture taken was over six years before, up on the coast of the Bering Sea, when I got shaved by the only woman barber in Alaska.  I was sitting on a box that time too.  I don’t seem to make any progress in the world.

[. . . . . . .]

[Their jeep was stolen while they traveled,] but the M.P.s picked it up after twelve hours.  That was a stroke of luck, for stolen jeeps were usually gone forever.  Since they all looked alike, it was very hard for the M.P.s to identify a particular one.  Ours was easy, however, because the glass was gone from the windshield on the right-hand side, and we knew the thieves couldn’t do anything about that, for we had tried to get it fixed ourselves and there was no glass in that whole area.

Jeep thievery was practiced on such a scale that it became practically legitimate.  I never heard of a jeep being stolen right out from under the driver, leaving him riding along in mid-air, but I heard of cases almost as bad.  Some friends of mine were standing on a sidewalk and actually saw their jeep driven away by thieves.  In one city, soldiers stole a jeep with “Military Police” painted all over it.  And to top it off, an unthinking private stole Major General Jimmy Doolittle’s car.

Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1943).  Pages 292 and 294.
Scanned in and typed in.

In the military!  Oh, and Carol Johnson did all the illustrations in the book, ink sketches of soldiers doing mostly ordinary things— a good complement to Pyle.


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