Posted on 02/03/2008 12:12:39 PM PST by Islander7
“The greatest among you shall be the servant of all.” - Jesus Christ
Ernie Pyle was such.
The enemy shot Pyle.
Today’s enemy would never shoot Rather, Carville, Brokaw, Olberman, Clinton, Obama. . . .
You are only off 50. Read post 28 this thread
I stand, ashamedly, corrected.
It still moves me to tears to read what he wrote about Normandy.
*** future locater ***
Nam Vet
During a stay with friends in France in 1983, my wife and I rented a car and visited Normandy. We saw the beach, the cemetery, and the museum. We even stayed overnight at a bed-and-breakfast in St. Lo. I felt like I shouldn’t talk above a whisper. I wish I had read Ernie Pyle’s stories prior to that trip.
Thanks for the ping, Lancey. He was a great writer and a great American, a shame their aren’t patriots in the media like him now.
I was also impressed by his articles from Africa where the US forces took a hell of a beating at first. The country wasn’t used to that and his explanations and analysis of how we were becoming battlefield tested like the Germans really buoyed up the morale of soldiers and the home front alike.
The way the photgraph is taken (from near the ground) is also very dramatic. I suppose the unit’s camera man (or did Pyle have his own?) took the photo. I imagine they had a strong relationship as they were both covering the war.
The peaceful position, and the soft cap (a Pyle trademark?) and the positioning of the camera makes me thing the photographer wanted this to be a fitting and long-lasting tribute to Pyle.
Glad I got to see it. Now will need to learn more about him!
A time when the media was respected.
There are two threads on this so I’ll post this in both. Some of Pyle’s writings:
Italy, Jan. 10, 1944. Pyle’s most famous column concerned the death of infantry Capt. Henry Waskow, who was exceptionally popular with his men. His body was brought down a mountainside by mule, and laid next to four others:
“The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave ... one soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, ‘God damn it.’ That’s all he said and then he walked away ...
“Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: ‘I sure am sorry, sir.’
“Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand in his own, he sat there for a full five minutes ... looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
“And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”
++++++++++++
Normandy, June, 1944. Pyle didn’t get ashore at Omaha Beach until the day after D-Day. But then he took a walk down what he called “the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France,” and found both “wrecked machines of war” and human litter:
“It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach ... here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out — one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
“Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes ... torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
“In every invasion you’ll find at least one solder hitting the beach at H-hour with a banjo slung over his shoulder. The most ironic piece of equipment making our beach — this beach of first despair, then victory — is a tennis racket. It lies lonesomely on the sand, clamped in its rack, not a string broken.”
++++++++++
1945. Pyle explained why he focused on the GI’s war rather than grand strategy:
“I haven’t written about the Big Picture because I don’t know anything about it ... our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents ... and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.”
++++++++++
Ernie Pyle left Europe in late 1944 to cover the war in the Pacific. He landed with Marines on Okinawa on April 1, 1945, and was killed 17 days later. His pocket contained notes for a last column about where he had been, and the imminent victory over Germany:
“And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run it course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last. ...
“In the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be millstones of gloom around our necks. But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered across the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production — in one country after another — month after month and year after year...
“To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France ... we saw him, by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference ...”
Burgess Meredith? Wasn't he a real leftist?
I don't know. I do know that at least most of Hollywood back in those days supported and loved America.
60+ years after the fact is not sensationalism, it is historical.
And history should not be forgotten.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.