I hope to look up a description of Ernie Pyle from a bio on him. The Life article seem to be a contemporary description that may have changed some.
Ernie was a native of Indiana and his papers are archived at the Indiana University School of Journalism-- http://www.journalism.indiana.edu/news/erniepyle/ .
Here is an excerpt from one of Ernie Pyles' articles about Engineers. There are several of his articles at the above link.
SOMEWHERE IN SICILY, September 2, 1943 - You may never have seen it mentioned, but a map is as common a piece of equipment among front-line officers as a steel helmet. A combat officer would be perfectly useless without his map.
It is the job of the engineers to handle the maps for each division. Just as soon as a division advances to the edge of the territory covered by its maps, the map officer has to dig into his portable warehouse and fish out thousands of new maps.
The immensity of the map program would amaze you. When it came from America, the 45th Division brought with it eighty-three tons of Sicilian maps! I forgot to ask how many individual maps that would be, but it would surely run close to half a million.
The 45th's maps were far superior to any we'd been using and here's the reason: Our maps were based fundamentally on old Italian maps. Then for months ahead of the invasion our reconnaissance planes flew over Sicily taking photographs. These photos immediately were flown across the Atlantic to Washington. There, if anything new was discovered in the photographs, it was superimposed on the maps.
They kept this process of correction open right up to the last minute. The 45th sailed from America only a short time before we invaded Sicily, and in the last week before it sailed the Map Section in Washington printed, placed in waterproofed cases, and delivered to the boats those eighty-three tons of maps, hot off the presses.
It then mentions the 120th Engineers and introduces us to an Italian-American bull-dozer driver.
Our troops along the coast occasionally got a chance to bathe in the Mediterranean. As an incidental statistic, the engineers during the campaign cleared mines off a total of seven miles of beaches just so the soldiers could get down to the water to swim.
Up in the mountains you'd see hundreds of soldiers, stark naked, bathing in Sicilian horse troughs, or out of their steel helmets. The American soldier has a fundamental phobia about bodily cleanliness that is considered all nonsense by philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.
Pyle(center) on Anzio beach in Italy.
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Close call at Nettuno
A shell struck just on the other side of a wall of the building where he was sitting.
WITH THE ALLIED BEACHHEAD FORCES IN ITALY, March 28, 1944 - When you get to Anzio you waste no time getting off the boat, for you have been feeling pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. But after a few hours in Anzio you wish you were back on the boat, for you could hardly describe being ashore as any haven of peacefulness.
As we came into the harbor, shells skipped the water within a hundred yards of us.
In our first day ashore, a bomb exploded so close to the place where I was sitting that it almost knocked us down with fright. It smacked into the trees a short distance away.
And on the third day ashore, an 88 went off within twenty yards of us.
I wished I was in New York.
Steve