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Quote of the Day: ‘He Deserves the Gratitude of All His Countrymen’
Thus spoke President Harry Truman of Ernest Taylor Pyle.
Ernie Pyle was born 122 years ago Wednesday, on August 3, 1900, in Dana, Indiana. He died not quite 45 years later, on April 18, 1945, in the Iejima Okinawa Prefecture of the Empire of Japan, killed in action while doing what he loved.
Having missed out on his first ambition–to serve in World War I–he undertook the study of journalism at Indiana University, and eventually found a career at Scripps-Howard, where his “everyman” story-telling style became his trademark for the next twenty years.
Eventually, Pyle found himself in London covering the Battle of Britain and subsequently spent time in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy. He then spent some time recovering from “combat stress,” before traveling to the Pacific Theater in 1945 where he was–while covering the Okinawa invasion–killed in action. From the contemporary New York Times article. (Forget the source. That was then. It’s a good read. Trust me):
Ernie Pyle died today on Ie Island, just west of Okinawa, like so many of the doughboys he had written about. The nationally known war correspondent was killed instantly by Japanese machine-gun fire.
The slight, graying newspaper man, chronicler of the average American soldier’s daily round, in and out of foxholes in many war theatres, had gone forward early this morning to observe the advance of a well-known division of the Twenty-fourth Army Corps.
…The commanding general of the troops on the island reported the death to headquarters as follows:
“I regret to report that War Correspondent Ernie Pyle, who made such a great contribution to the morale of our foot soldier, was killed in the battle of Ie Shima today.”
Some quotes from Ernie Pyle:
All the rest of us—you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa—we wanted terribly yet only academically for the war to be over. The front-line soldier wanted it to be terminated by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He was truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we worked, were not. Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.
and
They were young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion made them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they passed was no hatred, no excitement, no despair, no tonic of their victory—there was just the simple expression of being there as if they had been there doing that forever, and nothing else.
and
Our soldiers are still just as roughly good-humored as they always were, and they laugh easily, although there isn’t as much to laugh about as there used to be.
and
The most vivid change was the casual and workshop manner in which they talked about killing. They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking human life was sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft. No longer was there anything morally wrong about killing. In fact, it was an admirable thing.
and
Our men can’t make this change from normal civilians into warriors and remain the same people. Even if they were away from you this long under normal circumstances, the mere process of maturing would change them, and they would not come home just as you knew them. Add to that the abnormal world they have been plunged into, the new philosophies they have had to assume or perish inwardly, the horrors and delights and strange wonderful things they have experienced, and they are bound to be different people from those you sent away.
and
A soldier who has been a long time in the line does have a ‘look’ in his eyes that anyone who knows about it can discern. It’s a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without conveying any image to the mind. It’s a look that is the display room for what lies behind it—exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do. It’s a look I dread to see on men.
and
They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. … And even though they weren’t warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.
I think Harry Truman was right. Ernie Pyle deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen for telling the truth. And for exposing the price of war on the young men who fought it.
What say you?
PS: The photo accompanying this post is a public domain image of Ernie Pyle with the US Army’s 191st Tank Battalion, at Anzio.
Published in Group Writing
As Wikipedia says:
My mother lives off the Ernie Pyle Memorial Highway. I have driven over it often.
Pyle’s words are as powerful in conveying what he saw and knew as words could ever be. Reading them makes me understand better that I don’t and can’t understand what they went through.
I hear you. Nevertheless.
I can’t help thinking that throwing one’s hands up and saying “I don’t and can’t understand what they went through,” is–in a sense–minimizing at the best, and disrespecting at the worst, Ernie Pyle’s life’s work.
I think his life’s work was dedicated exactly to insisting that we understand what they went through.
So when he says:
I don’t think I “can’t understand” that at all. In fact, I think I understand it completely. Because he expresses it so well.
Ironically, I just last weekend at a used book store picked up a book that’s a collection of articles from Yank magazine. When I opened it to look through it at the store, one of the first things I saw was a first person account written by one of the guys who went to recover Ernie Pyle’s body after he was killed.
Ironic. Just started a Jasper Cole sniper story. Second book. Attack on Pearl Harbor starts it. Who is in Chapter 3 but Ernie Pyle. This is going to be good.
I’m reading those quotes and can’t help thinking of the video clips I see of soldiers in Ukraine.
He had done enough with the Army. Too bad he volunteered to go to the Pacific. He had already done great work.
If she lives near Rockville I may have ridden my bicycle near her house, then. I checked my maps and see that three years ago I rode along the north edge of Dana. If I had known it was the birthplace of Ernie Pyle I would have ridden in to see it. (My main objective was photographing places where parts of the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line (from the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne) have left visible marks on the landscape.)
Yep.
Another beautifully written, wrenchingly moving post by She! Many thanks…how lucky Ricochet is to have you!
It seems that I have miscommunicated badly: (a) I failed to convey what I meant, and (b) I succeeded in conveying what I did not mean.
In cases where the idea that was incorrectly attributed to me is morally repugnant, and intellectually lame-brained, I used to be eager to clarify what I wrote.
I’ve found that that never works, so let’s drop it.
Whenever he was able, Pyle mentioned the name, hometown, and often even the street address of the men he wrote about. I’m sure it was a big morale booster for the men to see their name in print and also for the folks back home. I was reading Brave Men, the complete collection of his dispatches, a few years ago and was surprised to see that one of the men lived near me, about 3/4 of a mile away. I immediately leashed up the dog and walked over there. It was an ordinary house, nothing special. But a guy who had talked to Ernie Pyle used to live there before WWII. He probably grew up there. I still sometimes walk past the house. It’s my connection to two great men.
This one:
puts me in mind of the men in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old movie. Almost all British soldiers in that case, but I think it expresses a fundamental truth about war and the men–either literally or figuratively–in the trenches who fight it, that isn’t specific to a particular war or a particular time or place.