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.

"Napalm Girl" (Again)

     Back in 2022 there were many stories about the photograph of a naked girl running down a road in Vietnam. It had been taken fifty years before and it appeared on the front pages of many newspapers in the summer of 1972. You will be spared from seeing the photo here, but if you want to view it, see the post I did about the "Napalm Girl" and the 50th anniversary of that photo. 
  Prurience or sensationalism were certainly not the motivators behind that post, nor are they now.  I chose the subject because the "Napalm Girl" is Kim Phuc, who is living in Ontario and wants her story to be known. She and here husband were actively involved in promoting peace and supporting refugees. See Napalm Girl for all the details. 
  The picture is very much in the news again, which is why I am posting about it, yet again. I will summarize the current publicity about the picture and provide the sources you need to read about the issue involved.
   There is no dispute about the authenticity of the photograph, but a controversy has developed about who took it. A documentary appearing at the Sundance Festival with the title, "The Stringer", claims that a stringer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took the picture, not the AP staff photographer, Nick Ut, who won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Details about how the film was attributed are apparently outlined in the documentary and are discussed elsewhere, including in a 23 page report by the AP (provided below.) The AP stands by the photo as does Ut and Kim Phuc: 
  "In a statement to CBC, Kim Phuc said she doesn't have a clear memory of the day where she was burned, but rejected claims raised in The Stringer. She said she clearly remembered Ut as the only journalist willing to stop shooting to take her to a nearby burn unit, saving her life. That combined with memories from her family and other eyewitnesses, she wrote, convinced her of Ut's role." 
The source for that statement and others are included at the end of this post.

Another Photo
   Since the authenticity of the photograph of the "Napalm Girl" is not questioned, I will turn briefly to another picture from Viet Nam which was also widely displayed. It was taken on Feb.1,1968 and on its 50th anniversary there were also many stories about it.  Although it was taken four years before "Napalm Girl" and both photos were important, the Vietnam War continued for many more years and that leads one to question somewhat, the title of this article: "A Photo That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War," Maggie Astor, New York Times, Feb.1, 2018.
   "Fifty years ago today, the national police chief of South Vietnam calmly approached a prisoner in the middle of a Saigon street and fired a bullet into his head. A few feet away stood Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, eye to his viewfinder. On a little piece of black-and-white film, he captured the exact moment of the gunshot.... By morning, this last instant of his life would be immortalized on the front pages of newspapers nationwide, including The New York Times. Along with NBC film footage, the image gave Americans a stark glimpse of the brutality of the Vietnam War and helped fuel a decisive shift in public opinion. “It hit people in the gut in a way that only a visual text can do,” said Michelle Nickerson, an associate professor of history at Loyola University Chicago who has studied the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era. “The photo translated the news of Tet in a way that you can’t quantify in terms of how many people were, at that moment, turned against the war.... A police chief had fired a bullet, point-blank, into the head of a handcuffed man, in likely violation of the Geneva Conventions. And the official was not a Communist, but a member of South Vietnam’s government, the ally of the United States.
“You can talk about ‘the execution photograph from the Vietnam War,’ and not just the generation who lived through it but multiple generations can call that image to mind,” said Susan D. Moeller, the author of “Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat,” and a professor of media and international affairs at the University of Maryland. “It was immediately understood to be an icon.”

Sources: 
  The AP Report has the photograph on its cover: "Investigating Claims Around 'The Terror of War' Photograph," Jan. 15, 2025.
["The Napalm Girl" photograph is also known as "The Terror of War" photograph.]
   “For the past six months, aware that a film challenging this historical record was in production, the AP has conducted its own painstaking research, which supports the historical account that Ut was the photographer. In the absence of new, convincing evidence to the contrary, the AP has no reason to believe anyone other than Ut took the photo.”
   "Sundance Doc, 'The Stringer' Challenges Who Took Napalm Girl Photgraph," Lindsey Bahr, AP, Jan.27, 2025
   "Controversial Doc, 'The Stringer' Investigates Famous Vietnam War Photo,Jada Yuan, Washington Post, Jan.27, 2025.
   " 'Napalm Girl' Photographer Nick Ut, Responds to Claim That He Didn't Take Famous Photo: 'A Slap in the Face', Tracy Brown, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 12, 2025.

Armed Services Editions

 Books For The Troops

   During World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime in the U.S. established a non-profit program to get books into the hands and pockets of the troops scattered throughout the world. The books produced were very small paper ones, but they were complete not abridged. About 123 million copies of around 1300 titles were published and distributed.
   As the image indicates, the books could be classic or popular ones, fictional or non-fictional and serious or humorous. They were useful for bored soldiers in remote outposts, for sailors on long voyages and for both when convalescing in hospitals. They also promoted reading and ended up contributing to the paperback revolution for civilians.

   Much has been written about the ASE and the major sources for information are provided below for those interested in books and for those  interested in collecting them.

The Grolier Club Exhibition
  Titled, "The Best Read Army In the World" and curated by Molly Guptill Manning, this exhibition and the Wikipedia entry will be enough for many of you. For an article about it see: "A New Exhibition Tells the Story of the Armed Services Editions, Pocket-size Paperback Weapons in the Fight For Democracy," Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, Oct. 6, 2023.

Related Books by Manning
   The Best-Read Army in the World, Molly Guptill Manning and Brian Anderson, The University of Chicago Press, 2020
"In late 1943, small packages bound in sturdy brown paper began to arrive at American military outposts, each containing a set of ingenious pocket-sized books called the Armed Services Editions. Titled the “Victory Book Campaign,” this initiative was led by librarians, who garnered the support of individuals, businesses, civic organizations, and Eleanor Roosevelt. For war-weary, homesick men, these books—fiction, biographies, classics, sports tales, history books, poetry, compilations of short stories, books of humor—represented the greatest gift the military could give them. This annotated catalogue includes posters, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other contemporary documents that provide valuable context for how the written word not only increased morale during wartime but ultimately transformed American education and changed the book industry forever."

   When Books Went To War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. Molly Guptill Manning, HarperCollins, 2014
"When America entered World War II in 1941, [it] faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations. In 1943, the War Department and the publishing industry stepped in with an extraordinary program: 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war. Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were beloved by the troops and are still fondly remembered today. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. When Books Went to War is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike."--Publisher's website. Chronicles the joint effort of the U.S. government, the publishing industry, and the nation's librarians to boost troop morale during World War II by shipping more than one hundred million books to the front lines for soldiers to read during what little downtime they had.
  For a review see: "Marching Off to War, With Books," Janet Maslin, NYT, Dec. 24, 2014.
  Manning has a new book out: The War of Words: How America's GI Journalists Battled Censorship and Propaganda to Help Win World War II, Blackstone, 2023.

Library Collections
  Small paperback books, such as the ASE ones would not have been routinely collected, but interest in having them developed later.

The Library of Congress has a full set, of course, and published this on the 40th anniversary of the ASE: Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions, by John Y. Cole, 1984. (This can be accessed online, but it may take a while to load.)

The Huntington Library
  "Fighting A War With Books," Natalie Russell, Verso: The Blog of the Huntington Library, May 22, 2019.

University of Alabama: The W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library
  The ASE collection here is almost complete and was lacking only five titles when this was written in 2015: “Armed Services Editions: A Quest For A Complete Collection,” Allyson Holliday, UofA Blog, Feb 16, 2015.

University of South Carolina - The Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections Blog
"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas..." Michael Weisenburg, Sept. 4, 2020
"The Irvin Department is pleased to announce that it has recently acquired the three final titles needed to complete its collection of the Armed Services Editions series of books. The books, Peter Field’s Fight for Powder Valley, William Colt MacDonald’s Master of the Mesa, and Clarence E. Mulford’s Hopalog Cassidy’s Protégé, are part of a series produced by the Council on Books in Wartime, from 1943 to 1947."

The University of Virginia
  "Books Enlist." This provides an exhibit of the ASE held in 1996.

Blogs

  This is worth a look: "Books For Victory: The Armed Services Editions of WWII," Andrew Brozyna, April 28, 2013.

  For Collectors: The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America.

Another Attempt In This Century - 2002
  See:" Literature Re-enlists In the Military; Pilot Project Is Sending Books to American Ships And Troops Abroad," by Mel Gussow, NYT, Nov. 7, 2002

   "During World War II soldiers carried Armed Services Editions of pocket-size books and read them avidly whenever they had time. These were literary classics, popular novels, plays and nonfiction issued free to troops around the world. The books, increasingly dog-eared, were a cultural oasis as well as entertainment. Some soldiers took them into battle. Copies were handed out as troops left England for the Normandy invasion....
   Andrew Carroll, an author and archivist, described the program as ''the biggest giveaway of books in our history'' with the possible exception of Gideon Bibles. It is, he said, ''a great forgotten story'' of World War II. After the war the editions were at least partly responsible for the proliferation of paperbacks in the United States.

   This month, in a pilot project created by Mr. Carroll, the Armed Services Editions are returning with 100,000 copies of new versions of four books being printed in the same wide, brightly colored ''cargo pocket'' format: Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' ''The Art of War'' (Sun Tzu's classic 500 B.C. study of military strategies) and two recent best sellers, ''Medal of Honor: Profiles of America's Military Heroes From the Civil War to the Present'' by Allen Mikaelian, with commentary by Mike Wallace, and ''War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence From American Wars,'' edited by Mr. Carroll....

   Clarence Strowbridge, president of Dover, which is publishing ''Henry V'' and ''The Art of War,'' said that the original editions ''inspired a whole generation of servicemen and women to become lifelong readers, and I have no doubt these books will do the same.'' After the war Dover became a leader in the paperback revolution....

   Mr. Carroll first became aware of the editions four or five years ago when he found a Steinbeck novel in an antiquarian bookstore in California. He soon began his own collection, which includes a rare copy of ''Superman,'' a novel, not a comic book.

Echoing his predecessors during World War II, Mr. Carroll said he wanted ''to promote the love of reading.'' He was adamant about using the original format as an act of nostalgia and ''a tip of the hat to this great project.'

CANCON
   Three books by Stephen Leacock are found listed by the ASE: 1) Laugh With Leacock #197; 2) Happy Stories Just to Laugh #344 and 3) My Remarkable Uncle: and Other Stories #976.

   One reason I became aware of the ASE is through the research I did for my book about Hulbert Footner who was born in Hamilton, Ontario. His book, The Murder That Had Everything was chosen for the ASE. I could find no pictures of the ASE version and that edition of the novel is  probably rare. One likely exists in the collection held in the Calvert County Historical Collection in Prince Frederick, Maryland. Here are two reviews of it:

The Murder That Had Everything

Here is a review from The Observer, by Maurice Richardson, Sept. 17, 1939.

“The Crime Ration”

The Murder That Has Everything has an extremely New York setting. Chief victim is a gigolo on the eve of his marriage to one of the richest and silliest girls in the world. Suspects include the husbands of several women who have been visiting him in his love nest. Lee Mappin and his beautiful secretaries do the detecting. The plot becomes trickier and muddier with every page; there is some interesting characterisation and strong satire at the expense of New York smarties and gossip writers. In fact it has everything to make you go on reading.

A Canadian review is found in the Vancouver Sun, Sept. 2, 1939.

“Mystery Fiction”

Park Avenue society, familiar to New York haunts and true-to-life habitues combine to make Hulbert Footner’s new mystery, The Murder That Has Everything (Musson), an A1 Thriller. Here’s the story of a cunning crime syndicate that plies among the daughters of millionaires. 

Ernie Pyle

War Correspondent

     Although there are newspapermen with richer sounding names (Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, Quentin Reynolds) the skinny Hoosier, Ernie Pyle, was the most celebrated and popular correspondent during the 30s and 40s in the U.S.  Even before he started covering the war, his columns were widely syndicated.

     It is because of the the 75th D-Day anniversary back in early June that he is being considered here. Since that time I have read much of what he wrote. There is no need for me to attempt to write an essay about him; the Wikipedia article is first-rate. I simply want to encourage you to learn more about Pyle and read some of his columns. I will provide some below which you can either read or listen to. 

    The piece that led me to Pyle is this one: "The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day, By David Chrisinger," New York Times, June 5, 2019. He writes: "It wasn’t until Pyle’s first dispatch was published that many Americans started to get a sense of the vast scale and devastating costs of the D-Day invasion, chronicled for them by a reporter who had already won their trust and affection." He also notes that Pyle underwent "a sort of journalistic conversion", after which his columns became "more stark and honest." 

    He had already volunteered to cover the bombing in England and it is clear from his letters and his columns that he had seen enough. Still, he later chose to cover the war in the Pacific. He was killed on the island of Ie Shima by a Japanese machine-gunner in April, 1945.

     To learn more about Pyle, start with the website at Indiana University. From there you can read or listen to some of his WARTIME COLUMNS.  For a famous one that appeared on the front pages of many papers see: "The Death of Captain Waskow", Jan. 10, 1944. Indiana University is also the repository for Pyle's letters and columns - Archives Online at Indiana University. See also the website of the Indiana Historical Society. 

    Pyle was adopted by Albuquerque where he had a home which he was rarely in. See: "America's Most Loved Reporter: Ernie Pyle".

Roving Reporter

     If you would rather not read about war, have a look at the columns he wrote about various towns, villages, and people scattered throughout the U.S. and Canada. For over five years in the 1930s he and his wife travelled back and forth and up and down the continent writing six columns a week. They are typically about unimportant things, people and events and they are always enjoyable and usually funny. If you remember and liked Charles Kuralt, you will not regret picking up a copy of Home Country. A new edition was published as: Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930s Travel Dispatches. 

     They visited some places in Canada and you can find the related columns by using the index in Home Country. There is an amusing one about Dr. Mahlon Locke from Williamsburg, Ontario (here is a link to the Williamsburg plaque about Locke). Although I was not able to see a copy of Ernie's America..., apparently Canadian material was not included. ( I learned that from a good review of the book by Ken Cuthbertson, "Nomad in a Dead End,"  in the Kingston Whig-Standard, Dec. 30, 1989.)

Some additional sources: 

   For biographical material see the biography by his editor, Lee Miller,  The Story of Ernie Pyle. For reasons I don't recall I have a copy of An Ernie Pyle Album by Miller which contains all of the photos he couldn't put in his biography. 

   

    Pyle's war reporting is collected in: Brave Men; Here Is Your War and Last Chapter.  They are also conveniently collected in this book which contains a good biographical sketch: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, David Nichols. 

   If you are interested in The Blitz, Ernie Pyle In England is very good. And if you are really interested read also the book by his fellow American, Quentin Reynolds - London Diary. 

And for a movie see:

"The Story of G.I. Joe (United Artists) is

an attempt to picture the infantryman's

war as the late Ernie Pyle saw it. Pyle

himself (played in the film by Burgess

Meredith) and nine fellow correspondents

supervised and vouched for the movie's

hard-bitten authenticity. The result is far

& away the least glamorous war picture

ever made. It is a movie without a single

false note. It is not "entertainment" in the

usual sense, but General Eisenhower called

it "the greatest war picture I've ever seen." 

TIME Magazine. 6/18/1945, Vol. 45 Issue 25, p64.