← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Mack
Thread ID: 12140 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-02-04
2004-02-04 04:55 | User Profile
Ernie Pyle was perhaps the most well known, and well liked, war correspondent of the Second World War. His plain spoken stories about Americans at war in Europe were read by tens of millions and his accounts of commen men fighting for their lives were so enlivened with everyday behavior like bullshitting, eating, sleeping, washing, marching and almost every other activity people take part in during wartime that his stories, written to be read and then disgarded with the daily newspaper, are timeless records of humanity. He is an American Homer.
His insight, based on his bravery and an understanding of both his subjects and readers, are are just as plain today as they were many years ago. He stood at the elbows of good decent people from all over this country as they were under fire, maimed, disfigured and killed and recorded their words.
In the book "Brave Men", a 1943 compilation of his reports up to that time, there are two reports that I want to bring to your attention because they present an awareness that we seem to have lost in our forest of television, movies and pop culture music.
An awareness that served to protect and educate common people about the world and it's residents that no book or movie or philosopher can, or ever will, it seems to me, because truth is stronger when it is called a lie.
First, an account from Sicily on the first day of the invasion, (Page 31).
"civilians on the roads and in the towns smiled and waved. Kids saluted. Many gave their version of the V sign by holding up both their arms. Over and over they told us they didn't want to fight. Our soldiers weren't very responsive to the Sicilians' greetings. They were too busy getting equipment ashore, rounding up the real enemies and establishing a foothold, to indulge in any hand-waving monkey business. After all we were still at war and these people, though absurd and pathetic, were enemies and caused us the misery of coming a long way to whip them."
"On the whole the natives seemed a pretty third-rate lot. They were poorly dressed and looked as if they always had been. Few of their faces had much expression, and they kept getting in the way of traffic, just like the Arabs. By nightfall most of our invading soldiers summed up their impressions of their newly acquired soil and its inhabitents by saying, " Hell, this is just as bad as Africa"
Now page 416, from the invasion of Normandy, a French province.
"Normandy is certainly a land of children. I saw even more than in Italy. And I'll have to break down and admit that they were the the most beautiful children I have ever seen. It was an exception to see a child who wasn't strikingly good-looking. One thing about the Normans is in contrast with the temperament we knew so long in the Mediterraneran. The people are hard workers. Some of the American camps and city offices hired teen-age French boys for kitchen and office work, and I noticed that they went to work like the wind."
After several decades working all over America in the company of practically every sort of man it seems to me that Ernie Pyle got it right. Would that I had listened to the words of others as a young man when they spoke to me of such matters instead of just turning away because they sounded old fashioned. It's not a scandel when we hear from another concerned man of our own people about racial differences, it's a kind of miracle. Its something we need to learn.