- Pyle, Ernie.
Brave Men.
Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, [1944] 2001.
ISBN 0-8032-8768-2.
-
Ernie Pyle is perhaps the most celebrated war correspondent of all time,
and this volume amply illustrates why. A collection of his columns for
the Scripps-Howard newspapers edited into book form, it covers World War
II from the invasion of Sicily in 1943 through the Normandy landings and
the liberation of Paris in 1944. This is the first volume of
three collections of his wartime reportage: the second and third,
Here is Your War and Ernie Pyle in England,
are out of print, but used copies are readily available at a reasonable
price.
While most readers today know Pyle only from his battle dispatches, he
was, in fact, a renowned columnist even before the United States
entered the war—in the 1930s he roamed the nation, filing
columns about Americana and Americans which became as beloved as
the very similar television reportage decades later by
Charles Kuralt who,
in fact, won an Ernie Pyle Award for his reporting.
Pyle's first love and enduring sympathy was with the infantry, and few
writers have expressed so eloquently the experience of being “in
the line” beyond what most would consider the human limits of
exhaustion, exertion, and fear. But in this book he also shows the
breadth of the Allied effort, profiling Navy troop transport and landing
craft, field hospitals, engineering troops, air corps dive and
light bombers, artillery, ordnance depots, quartermaster corps,
and anti-aircraft guns (describing the “scientific magic”
of radar guidance without disclosing how it worked).
Apart from the prose, which is simultaneously unaffected and elegant,
the thing that strikes a reader today is that in this entire book,
written by a superstar columnist for the mainstream media of his
day, there is not a single suggestion that the war effort, whatever
the horrible costs he so candidly documents, is misguided, or that
there is any alternative or plausible outcome other than victory.
How much things have changed…. If you're looking for this kind
of with the troops on the ground reporting today, you won't find it in
the legacy dead tree or narrowband one-to-many media, but rather in reader-supported
front-line journalists such as
Michael Yon—if you like
what he's writing, hit the tip jar and keep him at the front; think of it
like buying the paper with Ernie Pyle's column.
Above, I've linked to a contemporary reprint edition of this work.
Actually, I read a hardbound sixth printing of the 1944 first edition
which I found in a used
bookstore in Marquette, Michigan (USA) for less than half the
price of the paperback reprint; visit your local bookshop—there
are wonderful things there to be discovered.
July 2007 