Along with all those who fought or resisted Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the American soldiers who served in the Second World War helped preserve for us a world in which human decency and liberty are possible. In “Brave Men,” Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent embedded with our forces in North Africa, Italy and France, helps us understand, eighty years on, what they did and endured. An account of the war can serve no higher purpose than to inspire our abiding gratitude to those soldiers, and in this “Brave Men” succeeds magnificently.
A well-known human-interest columnist during his early career in journalism, Ernie Pyle became truly famous during World War II. His columns were read by millions of Americans, appearing in 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies, and many were republished in the Army newspaper “Stars and Stripes.” He was one of 28 correspondents selected to accompany the first wave of soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. After surviving that honor, he was caught in the disastrous bombing of our own troops near Saint-Lô during the massive American operation to break out of the Normandy beachhead. One comes away from “Brave Men” realizing that the prime requisite for surviving combat was repetitive good luck recurring beyond any reasonable likelihood.
In his columns, and in “Brave Men,” Pyle did not write of grand strategy, but of the experience of the common soldier. He wrote with knowledge derived from facing the same hardships and dangers. He, like they, had slept in wet clothes on hard, wet ground. He knew the soreness of muscles that had tightened with fear all through the night before a major operation. He had felt the same desperate hope that an ordered period of rest before resuming pursuit of the enemy might go on for another 15 minutes. He knew that grief over a friend’s death must yield almost immediately to the continuing demands of war.
The rare occasions when there was time for reflection could be even harder. On the day after the D-Day landings, Ernie Pyle took a walk along the beach and wrote of what he saw:
"Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home . . . . Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are the pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers and bloody, abandoned shoes . . . .
"I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it down again."
The respect – indeed the love – Pyle felt for the American GI shines through on just about every page. They came from every town and hamlet in America, frequently from places of which one had never heard, and did an infinite variety of things in civilian life. Yet somehow they seemed to possess, collectively, every skill necessary or useful in fighting the greatest war humanity had ever known. Plucked from ordinary and unheroic life, and without verbalizing grandiose patriotic sentiments, they knew what had to be done and they did it.
Ernie Pyle wrote about individuals with names, home towns and often street addresses. He gave the folks back home a real picture of what their loved ones and friends were experiencing. If he loved our soldiers, he was loved in return.
In addition to showing us the magnificence of our GIS, our officers and our top commanders (with whom Pyle was also on very friendly terms), one of the great things about “Brave Men” is the appreciation one gets of the immensity of our war effort. It took so much of so many different things; one wonders how it all could possibly have been organized, just as one wonders where we found the millions of brave men who did the fighting. Of Normandy, Pyle wrote:
"One could not help but be moved by the colossus of our invasion. It was a bold and might thing, one of the epics of all history. In the emergency of war our nation’s powers are unbelievable . . . . But we rise above our normal powers only in times of destruction. "
Sad but true. Still, it is the times of destruction that I most worry about. A reading of history makes it hard confidently to believe that humanity has seen the last of the likes of Hitler and Stalin. If faced with such powerful evil again, could our nation still manage what we did in World War II? I don’t know.
By September 1944, Ernie Pyle had hit the wall. With sheepish apologies to his readers, he returned home.
“For me,” he wrote, “war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and exhaustion of the spirit."
Yet after a rest, he returned to join our forces in the Pacific. He was killed during the battle of Okinawa.
President Truman paid tribute to Ernie Pyle, saying: “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen." And General Eisenhower surely spoke for all the men who regarded Pyle more as a buddy than a reporter when he said “The GIs in Europe––and that means all of us––have lost one of our best and most understanding friends."
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