Remembering Ernie Pyle, best combat correspondent of WWII

In honor of approaching Independence Day, Michael Yon posts a link to a blog entry on Ernie Pyle's Home, now a museum in Indiana threatened with closing due to state budget cuts.

Yon is undoubtedly the best combat correspondent since Pyle, the pre-eminent reporter of World War II.

Pyle was killed by a Jap sniper off Okinawa after surviving the war in Europe and moving on to the Pacific war.

One commenter on Facebook said:

Pyle was a good journalist. What is shocking, if you see a full-face photo of the man without a hat, is that he looks closer to 70 than being 45. I wonder if his proximity to the front-lines aged him prematurely. I cannot help but think though, that his was a good death. I don't want the man to die young, but he died a hero in my book.

Here's a blurb from Pyle's reporting.

IN THE FRONT LINES BEFORE MATEUR, NORTHERN TUNISIA, MAY 2, 1943

Now to the infantry – the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves.

I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.

I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.

A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.

All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.

They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men.

There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

And this brief report on the D-Day invasion of France.

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, JUNE 1944

The strong, swirling tides of the Normandy coastline shift the contours of the sandy beach as they move in and out. They carry soldiers’ bodies out to sea, and later they return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them.

As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood.

They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.

Yon carries on in the spirit of Pyle, living with our troops at war and reporting honestly on their troubles and travails. As Hebrews 11 says, this world is not worthy of men of honor and courage such as these,