Summary

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ERNIE PYLE

FOUR COLUMNS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF WORLD WAR II

For many journalists, Ernest Taylor Pyle, an Indiana native better known as "Ernie," continues to be an icon of

excellence decades after his death at the hands of a Japanese machine-gunner in World War II. For the last 10

years of his life, he wrote feature columns six times a week, primarily for Scripps-Howard newspapers. As his

fame increased during the war, other newspapers, including weekly ones, published Pyle’s work. In 1944 Ernie

Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about the ordinary soldiers fighting in World War II. On these pages is a

selection of his wartime columns in both written and spoken versions. We welcome your comments about the

site and stories you might have to tell about meeting Pyle or

reading Pyle’s columns.

Killing is All That Matters

WITH THE AMERICAN FORCES IN ALGIERS, December 1,

1942 – From now onward, stretching for months and

months into the future, life is completely changed for

thousands of American boys on this side of the earth. For at

last they are in there fighting.

The jump from camp life into front-line living is just as great

as the original jump from civilian life into the Army. Only

those who served in the last war can conceive of the makeshift, deadly urgent, always-moving-onward

complexion of front-line existence. And existence is exactly the word: it is nothing more.

The last of the comforts are gone. From now on you sleep in bedrolls under little tents. You wash whenever and

wherever you can. You carry your food on your back when you are fighting.

Pyle with Maj. General Lucian K. Truscot

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You dig ditches for protection from bullets and from the chill north wind off the Mediterranean. There are no

more hot-water taps. There are no post exchanges where you can buy cigarettes. There are no movies.

When you speak to a civilian you have to wrestle with a foreign language. You carry just enough clothing to

cover you, and no more. You don’t lug any knickknacks at all.

When our troops made their first landings in North Africa they went four days without even blankets, just

catching a few hours sleep on the ground.

Everybody either lost or chucked aside some of his equipment. Like most troops going into battle for the first

time, they all carried too much at first. Gradually they shed it. The boys tossed out personal gear from their

musette bags and filled them with ammunition. The countryside for twenty miles around Oran was strewn with

overcoats, field jackets and mess kits as the soldiers moved on the city.

Arabs will be going around for a whole generation clad in odd pieces of American Army uniforms.

*

At the moment our troops are bivouacked for miles around each of three large centers of occupation –

Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. They are consolidating, fitting in replacements, making repairs – spending a few

days taking a deep breath before moving on to other theaters of action.

They are camped in every conceivable way. In the city of Oran some are billeted in office buildings, hotels and

garages. Some are camping in parks and big vacant lots on the edge of town. Some are miles away, out in the

country, living on treeless stretches of prairie. They are in tiny groups and in huge batches.

Some of the officers live in tents and sleep on the ground. Others have been lucky enough to commandeer a

farmhouse or a barn, sometimes even a modern villa.

The tent camps look odd. The little low tents hold two men apiece and stretch as far as you can see.

There are Negro camps as well as white.

You see men washing mess kits and clothing in five-gallon gasoline cans, heated over an open fire made from

sticks and pieces of packing cases. They strip naked and take sponge baths in the heat of the day. In the quick

cold of night they cuddle up in their bedrolls.

You see Negroes playing baseball under the bright African sun during their spare hours of an afternoon.

*The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only

three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a

light here and there with a storage battery. They have gathered boards and made floors and sideboards for their

tents to keep out the wind and sand. They have hung out their washing, and painted their names over the tent

flaps. You even see a soldier sitting on his "front step" of an evening playing a violin.

They’ve been here only three days and they know they’re unlikely to be here three days more, but they patch up

some kind of home nevertheless.

Even in this short waiting period life is far from static. Motor convoys roar along the highways. Everything is on a

basis of "not a minute to spare." There is a new spirit among the troops – a spirit of haste.

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Planes pass constantly, eastbound. New detachments of troops wait for orders to move on. Old detachments

tell you the stories of their first battle, and conjecture about the next one. People you’ve only recently met hand

you slips of paper with their home addresses and say, "You know, in case something happens, would you mind

writing…"

At last we are in it up to our necks, and everything is changed, even your outlook on life.

Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now. The town as a whole has been turned back to the

French, but the Army keeps a hand raised and there will be no miscues.

Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 58-60. Picture

courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

The Death of Captain Waskow

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a

lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But

never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T.

Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led

his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in

his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that

made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.

"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every

time."

"I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.

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.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that

night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do

it himself, and ask others to help.

Photo of a Dean Cornwell

painting depicting Ernie Pyle at a

grave.

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The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a

moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there,

leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive,

and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans

or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We

talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the

road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The

soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall.

Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road.

You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes

after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They

stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much

to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked

away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and

then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were

bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him,

as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man."

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, and he sat there for a full five

minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and 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 his uniform around the wound. And then he got up

and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the

shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

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Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 195-97.

Picture courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

A Pure Miracle

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on

the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.

By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All

that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine

geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.

Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal

belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with

blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still

sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the

vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves

out to sea.

*

Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was

easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my

whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.

In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can

know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs,

the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months,

although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the

beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to

the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the

beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.

Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach.

These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without

exposing themselves.

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Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an

immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been

made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls.

These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.

Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans

made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire

entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.

This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even

got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to

catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and

cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these

mines every day and is knocked out of commission.

The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high,

just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the

sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.

In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and

more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for

every three men we had approaching the shore.

And yet we got on.

*

Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for

everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the

right moment.

As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland,

and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun

positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.

I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to

land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to

land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the

worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.

Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman

wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they

could begin working inland.

You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks

that form parts of the beach.

Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing

craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down.

Some men were drowned.

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The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which

knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and

had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.

When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-

gun nests and taking them from the rear.

As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only

way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all.

They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.

Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach

and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on

ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got

on at all or were able to stay on.

Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go.

They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much

easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a

fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.

And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on

inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.

Their tails are up. "We’ve done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at all. Which

proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and

eventually wars.

Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 277-80.

Liberating the City of Light

PARIS, August 28, 1944 – I had thought that for me there could never again be any elation in war. But I had

reckoned without the liberation of Paris – I had reckoned without remembering that I might be a part of this

richly historic day.

We are in Paris – on the first day – one of the great days of all time. This is being written, as other

correspondents are writing their pieces, under an emotional tension, a pent-up semi-delirium.

Our approach to Paris was hectic. We had waited for three days in a nearby town while hourly our reports on

what was going on in Paris changed and contradicted themselves. Of a morning it would look as though we were

about to break through the German ring around Paris and come to the aid of the brave French Forces of the

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Interior who were holding parts of the city. By afternoon it would seem the enemy had reinforced until another

Stalingrad was developing. We could not bear to think of the destruction of Paris, and yet at times it seemed

desperately inevitable.

That was the situation this morning when we left Rambouillet and decided to feel our way timidly toward the

very outskirts of Paris. And then, when we were within about eight miles, rumors began to circulate that the

French 2nd Armored Division was in the city. We argued for half an hour at a crossroads with a French captain

who was holding us up, and finally he freed us and waved us on.

For fifteen minutes we drove through a flat gardenlike country under a magnificent bright sun and amidst

greenery, with distant banks of smoke pillaring the horizon ahead and to our left. And then we came gradually

into the suburbs, and soon into Paris itself and a pandemonium of surely the greatest mass joy that has ever

happened.

*

The streets were lined as by Fourth of July parade crowds at home, only this crowd was almost hysterical. The

streets of Paris are very wide, and they were packed on each side. The women were all brightly dressed in white

or red blouses and colorful peasant skirts, with flowers in their hair and big flashy earrings. Everybody was

throwing flowers, and even serpentine.

As our jeep eased through the crowds, thousands of people crowded up, leaving only a narrow corridor, and

frantic men, women and children grabbed us and kissed us and shook our hands and beat on our shoulders and

slapped our backs and shouted their joy as we passed.

I was in a jeep with Henry Gorrell of the United Press, Capt. Carl Pergler of Washington, D.C., and Corp.

Alexander Belon of Amherst, Massachusetts. We all got kissed until we were literally red in face, and I must say

we enjoyed it.

Once when the jeep was simply swamped in human traffic and had to stop, we were swarmed over and hugged

and kissed and torn at. Everybody, even beautiful girls, insisted on kissing you on both cheeks. Somehow I got

started kissing babies that were held up by their parents, and for a while I looked like a baby-kissing politician

going down the street. The fact that I hadn’t shaved for days, and was gray-bearded as well as bald-headed,

made no difference. Once when we came to a stop, some Frenchman told us there were still snipers shooting,

so we put our steel helmets back on.

The people certainly looked well fed and well dressed. The streets were lined with green trees and modern

buildings. All the stores were closed in holiday. Bicycles were so thick I have an idea there have been plenty of

accidents today, with tanks and jeeps overrunning the populace.

We entered Paris via Rue Aristide Briand and Rue d’Orléans. We were slightly apprehensive, but decided it was

all right to keep going as long as there were crowds. But finally we were stymied by the people in the streets,

and then above the din we heard some not-too-distant explosions – the Germans trying to destroy bridges

across the Seine. And then the rattling of machine guns up the street, and that old battlefield whine of high-

velocity shells just overhead. Some of us veterans ducked, but the Parisians just laughed and continued to carry

on.

There came running over to our jeep a tall, thin, happy woman in a light brown dress, who spoke perfect

American.

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She was Mrs. Helen Cardon, who lived in Paris for twenty-one years and has not been home to America since

1935. Her husband is an officer in French Army headquarters and home now after two and a half years as a

German prisoner. He was with her, in civilian clothes.

Mrs. Cardon has a sister, Mrs. George Swikart, of New York, and I can say here to her relatives in America that

she is well and happy. Incidentally, her two children, Edgar and Peter, are the only two American children, she

says, who have been in Paris throughout the entire war.

*

We entered Paris from due south and the Germans were still battling in the heart of the city along the Seine

when we arrived, but they were doomed. There was a full French armored division in the city, plus American

troops entering constantly.

The farthest we got in our first hour in Paris was near the Senate building, where some Germans were holed up

and firing desperately. So we took a hotel room nearby and decided to write while the others fought. By the

time you read this I’m sure Paris will once again be free for Frenchmen, and I’ll be out all over town getting my

bald head kissed. Of all the days of national joy I’ve ever witnessed this is the biggest.

Source: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 351-54.