Ernie Pyle (Remembered Again)

  Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the United States and for that reason a column by George Will is dedicated to the war correspondent, Ernie Pyle. Over five years ago I did a long piece about Pyle on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. For that reason I will not say more about him here, but simply display some of the material from Will's article. There is more to be found in my post and, more importantly, there are in it some links to Indiana University where Pyle's letters and columns are stored. You can read many of them and you can actually hear them as well. For example, the portion from "The Death of Captain Waskow", that Will provides, can be listened to be clicking here. The post in MM is linked here.
   Will's title: "Ernie Pyle, Capt. Waskow and the Common Soldiers Who Died for America: This Memorial Day, Spare a Thought for the Nation’s Fallen in Overseas Military Cemeteries," Washington Post, May 23, 2025.
   "Most journalism is, at most, the “first rough draft of history.” Occasionally, however, there is some journalism — even of the most perishable kind: a column — that attains an immortality because of its simple sufficiency. It leaves nothing to be said, the words having perfectly suited a moment. One such was the most famous piece by a columnist who soared from obscurity to a place in the nation’s consciousness unmatched before or since. On this Memorial Day, take a moment for Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow,” a man in his mid-20s from Belton, Texas. The dispatch was datelined “AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944.”....
“I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.“Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.”
   Here is a bit more from Will: 
"Pyle’s language was spare. His sentences were almost without cadences, like tired men not marching, just walking. You could call his style Hemingwayesque. Except Ernest Hemingway, also in the European theater, cultivated a watch-me-transform-literature antistyle: ostentatious simplicity.
Pyle would have scoffed at the notion that he had a style. His granular reporting, replete with the names and street addresses of the GIs he talked to, appeared in 400 daily newspapers and another 300 weekly publications. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He avoided the insult of fancy writing about the gray, grim everydayness of the infantryman’s war."

   Pyle died in action on an island in the Pacific in 1945, “It all happened so quickly. … An indiscriminate fragment of shell, red hot and sharp as a scalpel, had sliced a hole in his chest, killing him instantly.” Considering the hundreds of young Americans killed fighting for this unremembered spot, “the death of one ordinary man on a lonely mountainside was, for Ernie, an example of war on a miniature, intimate scale.”

Sources: 
   That last quotation from the Will article is from this book: The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II, by David Chrisinger (unfortunately a copy is not available in the libraries in London.)
   The photograph is from a picture I took of the picture in, An Ernie Pyle Album, by Lee G. Miller, p.151. I have a copy if you would like to borrow it.
   If you are more interested in peace than war, have a look at the columns Pyle wrote about traveling across America (including Canada) before the war. 
More information about them is found in Ernie Pyle.