From Diana Vance

Monroe

To the editor:

When Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the weather on June 6, 1944 he decided to engage the enemy, Germany, in the greatest invasion in military history. Soldiers prepared to fight on the beaches of Normandy France. Before the early morning Eisenhower said to his men “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade….the eyes of the world are upon you.”

In one of those ships was Ernie Pyle. He was a war correspondent who loved the men he wrote hundreds of thousands of words about. He lived with and accompanied the soldiers all across the war. The soldiers felt better when they saw him. He was on the beach the day after D-Day against his wishes to go with the men on D-Day. Ernie Pyle’s stories before Normandy were soothing for the readers back home. “It was Tell the truth, but give reassurances too.”

But after Normandy his second story told of the men who did not live through D-Day but it contained reassurances that were different from anything he had ever filed. He was working up to writing the kind of story he had never done before. 

On the third day he told what he felt on the beach. Without describing the blood and mangled bodies, but they were there, thousands of them, he wrote about the true cost of battle. He wrote about their simple but needy possessions, found in their packs — letters from home, toothbrushes and razors, diaries, extra trousers, Bibles and bloody abandoned shoes. Seeing these items made him a dazed human being. He was seeing the battle cost of Normandy first hand. He was witness to losses on a scale that nobody could comprehend.

This was a different Ernie Pyle than Americans knew before. He was writing the unvarnished truth about the battles and the men on the beaches of Normandy. He wrote about the pill boxes hiding Germans with machine guns firing. He wrote about it all. Newspapers, Life magazine and radio all picked it up. Americans now had a front row seat to the human side of war.

The soldiers loved Ernie Pyle and when the war ended in Europe, Ernie went to the Pacific to continue as a war correspondent. It ended in Okinawa when a bullet hit his temple. He had won the Pulitzer Prize for his writings.

 Nobody forgets Ernie Pyle.