As I said last week, I’m taking the next several months off to finish my Kalamazoo paper, attend a conference, sing in two concerts, and many, many other things that qualify as “being an adult, not a footloose and fancy free child.”
Normally, that would have been it, and this space would be blank each Saturday night. However, my dear Youffraita just recently returned to DKos and all but begged me to post something, anything, no matter how silly or trivial, in this space. “It’ll all be new to me,” Youff said, and I couldn’t really argue with that.
So tonight you’re getting the first Hiatus Rewind diary of 2018. I’m picking this basically at random, no overall scheme or anything else beyond trying to find something relatively light and entertaining. God knows we all need that, and if these little diaries from days past can help, it’s all worthwhile.
Tonight we’re starting with one from 2016 about how the military kept the soldiers sane during World War II. Enjoy!
What Did You Read in the War, Daddy?
I’ve been reading Ernie Pyle lately.
Pyle, born in Indiana and a proud Hoosier to the end, isn’t exactly a household name these days. But if any journalist of the time just before and during World War II deserves to be lauded it’s Ernest Taylor Pyle, born in Indiana in 1900 and died on a Japanese island not quite 45 years later.
Ernie, a quiet, small man, was the child of tenant farmers. He served a hitch in the Navy during World War I, then attended Indiana University, where he edited the school newspaper. He left school one semester before completing his degree to take a job at a paper in LaPorte, Indiana. Barely three months later he quit, moved to Washington, and took over as editor of the Washington Daily News, where he remained until 1926.
Along the way he married Geraldine "Jerry" Siebolds. They loved each other well enough, but mental illness and alcoholism made life with her difficult. Perhaps it was this that made him give up his editorship in 1926 and set out on a two year road trip with Jerry; seeing the country and being away from people might help her health and their relationship.
It’s not clear if traveling helped — Jerry was never particularly stable, or sober — and two years later Ernie returned to the News. Now he served as a columnist, first covering the exciting new world of aviation, then eventually becoming the paper’s roving reporter, traveling throughout America and sharing what he learned with his readers. Jerry traveled with him for much for this period, which led to a popular syndicated column that ran from the mid-1930’s until 1942.
These columns, which were collected in Ernie Pyle’s America, are as good as anything ever written by an American journalist. Lucid, spare, and sensitive, they bring their subjects to life as vividly as when first published eighty years ago. An account of a steel mill in Pittsburgh is particularly striking – Pyle, farm boy though he was, nailed not only the physical work in a blast furnace but the mindset of the people who worked there – but there isn’t a bad or false note in the entire collection. If Ernie Pyle had never written another word, his work as the 1930’s equivalent of Charles Kuralt would be enough to secure his place in American letters.
Of course that didn’t happen. Ernie, like so many others, was horrified by the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Soon he’d gotten credentialed as a war correspondent, and by 1942 he was what he’d now call an embedded reporter with the infantry in the European Theater of Operations. The unit varied – he stayed with supply platoons, transport ships, artillery battalions, even a company of muleskinners in the Italian mountains – but Ernie soon knew the ordinary soldiers, the doughboys and dog faces, better than any other American journalist. And like any good journalist, he made sure that the folks at home did, too.
He didn’t tell his readers everything, of course. The soldiers he profiled, the privates and sergeants and officers, didn’t swear even though the air was all but blue with words that would get you banned in Boston. There was no talk of the ghastly stench of a battlefield, that indescribable mixture of blood and decay, smoke and rank sweat and piss and human waste. Deaths were described with a tenderness that elided over what a fatal wound actually looked like. A bombing attack on Ernie’s billet at the Anzio beachhead came across as more of a lark than anything else, even though he’d barely left his cot in time to avoid being crushed by a falling ceiling.
These may seem like flaws to a generation raised on the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and the war reporting of Sebastian Junger, but to the homefront in the 1940’s they were perfect. Ernie Pyle was writing in a different time, for a country where everyone knew someone or loved someone who was fighting not for oil or territory but against a regime so vile that it seemed the very existence of democracy and freedom was at stake. The men and women reading Ernie Pyle in their morning paper needed hope, just like the soldiers in Normandy and Tunisia and Sicily, and maybe a little bit of humor. Ernie, quiet, intense, and always on the side of the infantry, made sure they got it.
That’s not to say that Ernie candy coated what he saw. “And Somehow You Are Terribly Moved,” a column from 1943 describing the terrible weariness of a unit that had fought continuously for four days, and how a single day’s rest revived their spirits and bodies enough for them to continue, is heartbreaking in its quiet account of these ordinary men who become extraordinary simply by doing their jobs. “The Night They Brought Captain Waskow Down” is equally painful as it relates how an infantry company honors their fallen leader by carrying his body down from the mountains to wait for the burial detail.
And then there’s “A Lovely Day for Strolling,” Ernie’s account of the aftermath of June 6, 1944, as he walked along the beaches that had been won with so much blood and pain:
“I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.”
So it begins, and so it continues, this short, brilliant, painfully beautiful elegy to the men who landed at Omaha Beach. Their possessions washed in the surf – Bibles, comic books, cigarettes, mirrors, combs, pictures – their bodies buried in the sand – clothing and machines, weapons and sea creatures, even a boy sleeping on the beach, clutching a small rock for reasons only he could say – it’s a haunting portrait of what remains after the shooting stops, and a reminder of what is it to come.
It’s wonderful work, almost too good to read, and it’s not hard to see why Ernie became so popular, both with the folks in America and with his beloved infantry. He got it, got the danger and the camaraderie and the courage that comes with holding on one moment longer, in a way that other, more famous reporters simply didn’t. Physically frail, prone to depression and self-doubt, Ernie Pyle may spent his time in uniform on a ship, but he was infantry to the core.
That love for the infantry brought him fame – a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 – and royalties – several bestsellers, including This is Your War and Brave Men - but it also brought him influence. The soldiers constantly complained that their lives were every bit as dangerous as the pilots’, but the pilots got an extra $10 a month to compensate while the men in the foxholes got base pay and nothing else. It wasn’t fair, and Ernie wrote a column laying out just how unfair it was. Congress, realizing that stiffing the men who were doing the bulk of fighting was not a good idea in an election year, promptly passed what became known as “the Ernie Pyle law,” and from then on the ordinary fighting men got the same danger bonus as the dashing fly boys.
Is it any wonder that the soldiers loved Ernie Pyle? Or that when he was felled by a Japanese sniper in late April 1945, their grief for him was almost as terrible as their grief for President Roosevelt? Or that no one thought it inappropriate when he was laid to rest in the national military cemetery in Hawaii, resting forever among the soldiers he loved so much and had represented so well in his writings?
It’s also little wonder that Ernie Pyle’s books were included among the little paperbacks that accompanied American servicemen to the front: the legendary Armed Services Editions, or ASE’s.