Copyright 2014, Susan DeLay
There’s a small irony in the history of Dana, Indiana, population 608. Located in 75 miles due west of Indianapolis and within walking distance of the Illinois/Indiana border, the tiny farming community filed its city charter in 1874 and was named for Charles Dana. Charles made his money in the booming (at the time) railroad business, and here’s the irony—the real passion of the town’s namesake was in newspapers. Roughly 25 years after it sprang to life, Dana became the birthplace of Ernie Pyle.
Farming wasn’t in Ernie’s blood; stories were. So Ernie left his tenant-famer life in Dana and enrolled in Indiana University in 1919. He claimed to have signed up for a journalism class because it was a “cinch course and offered an escape from farm life and farm animals.” I don’t know about the farm part, but those words are usually spoken by story tellers with a good grasp on grammar.
A student until 1923, Ernie jumped ship a few months shy of graduation to take a job with the LaPorte (Indiana) Herald. Some say a break-up with a girlfriend drove him away; others claim he had a serious disagreement with the IU journalism department. While we may never know if it was love disconnection or a love of conjunctions, we do know Ernie left his BMOC status to connect with his destiny as the finest war correspondent in history. (And one who wasn’t afraid to start sentences with conjunctions in days when English teachers red-inked you for breaking that sacred grammatical rule.)
Ernie eventually became the globe-trotting newspaper journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his roving reporter-style of writing during World War II. While most embedded journalists during wartime report on military statistics and tactics, Pyle took a different approach. He saw things through the eyes of the little guy—the G.I. who would never have a page on Wikipedia or whose uniform would never be weighted down with ribbons, stars, and bars. His syndicated columns were carried in the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain that landed on the doorsteps of his 13 million readers. And his stories were devoured by families of servicemen who couldn’t enter a Google hangout, and describe their battlefield experiences to loved ones in real time.
Because of an adjustment in his “travel” itinerary, Ernie wasn’t among the 156,000 Allies who stormed the 50-mile stretch of beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He landed 24 hours later and wrote about the day after D-Day in a three-column series. In “The Horrible Waste of War,” Americans saw through his eyes what Utah and Omaha Beaches looked like after the fighting ended. Strolling along the seashore on a summer day, he didn’t summarize casualties with numbers, but told of “men sleeping on the sand…floating in the water…dead.” He described the “tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water–swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.”
After describing the carnage, he leapt into the eyes of recently captured German soldiers guarded by “doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.” Looking out to sea, survivors among the Allies saw destruction and loss of life; those German prisoners saw things differently. “They didn’t say a word to each other,” wrote Pyle. “They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.”
This week we observe the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the largest amphibious invasion in history.
Hitler and his generals knew it was coming—they just didn’t know when…or where. So when 13,000 Allied paratroopers left England in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, Hitler was asleep. Desperate phone calls to Berlin were answered by his servants who were too afraid to wake him. Instead, they took messages. Big mistake. What happened in the hours that followed, secured the doom Ernie Pyle saw in the eyes of those captured German soldiers.
A generation or two later, we have seen glimpses of D-Day in movies like The Longest Day, Band of Brothers, and Saving Private Ryan. But before John Wayne, Damian Lewis, and Tom Hanks gave us visuals, Ernie Pyle made it real—in real time–with his word pictures.
Susan DeLay 