The Soldier's Truth

ALSO BY DAVID CHRISINGERStories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing about TraumaPublic Policy Writing That Matters PENGUIN PRESSAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by David ChrisingerPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.Excerpts from Ernie Pyle’s dispatches courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATANames: Chrisinger, David, 1986– author.Title: The soldier’s truth : Ernie Pyle and the story of World War II /David Chrisinger.Other titles: Ernie Pyle and the story of World War IIDescription: New York : Penguin, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2022041989 (print) | LCCN 2022041990 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984881311 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984881328 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH: Pyle, Ernie, 1900–1945. | World War, 1939–1945—Journalists—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Europe. |World War, 1939–1945—Pacific Area. | War correspondents—United States—Biography.Classification: LCC D799.U6 P953 2023 (print) | LCC D799.U6 (ebook) | DDC 940.54/8173092 [B]—dc23/eng/20230103LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041989LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041990Cover design: Darren HaggarCover photograph: Bettmann / Getty ImagesBook design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigenpid_prh_6.0_143667515_c0_r0 To Ashley, George, Henry, and Stella To a foot-soldier, war is almost entirely physical. That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems a betrayal of physical life and a betrayal of those who have experienced it absolutely—the dead.LOUIS SIMPSON, AIR WITH ARMED MEN AUTHOR’S NOTEThe following pages include details of suicide attempts and may upset some readers.If you find yourself in distress, call the 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, and if you fear that you may hurt yourself, please seek help from a medical or mental health professional. You can also text HOME to 741741 to speak with a trained listener and receive emotional support through the Crisis Text Line. CONTENTSAUTHOR’S NOTE1. Warhorsing Around2. At Last They Are in the Fighting3. Disappointing the Folks at Home4. Drifting with the War5. A Long Winter of Misery6. The Ghastly Brotherhood of War7. The Bitchhead at Anzio8. Walking the Long Thin Line of Personal Anguish9. Winning Their Battles10. Nothing Left to Do11. An End to All That WanderingACKNOWLEDGMENTSNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHYINDEX_143667515_ CHAPTER 1WARHORSING AROUNDThis is the last of these columns from Europe. By the time you read this, the old man will be on his way back to America. After that will come a long, long rest. And after the rest—well, you never can tell.ERNIE PYLE, “FAREWELL TO EUROPE,” SEPTEMBER 5, 1944[1]1A warm summer rain soaked the men as they mounted muddy tanks and stuffed themselves into half-tracks or jeeps pointed east.[2] The smell of soggy gear and idling engines overpowered the sweet scent of the honeysuckle that climbed the gray siding of a nearby three-story inn.[3] In a darkened shed out behind the inn, a forty-three-year-old pipe cleaner of a man sat hunched over his portable typewriter, ankle deep in straw, his back curved like a cashew. “This morning we are sort of stymied as far as moving is concerned,” he pecked out with his index fingers to his wife back home in New Mexico, “so in order not to waste the day I dug up a white metal table out of a nearby garden.” [4]After nearly three months of hellish fighting through the hedgerow country of France, the Americans and their allies were thirty miles from the center of Nazi-occupied Paris.[5] Capturing Paris had never been part of the Allies’ plan,[6] which involved a strike through to the Low Countries, across the industrial heartland of Germany, and straight to the heart of Berlin.[7] The supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had grave concerns that if he marched his men into Paris, they would likely bog themselves down in brutal street-by-street combat with seasoned enemy troops and reduce one of the world’s most magnificent cities to a charred graveyard.[8] Not even an impassioned plea from the French commander, General Charles de Gaulle, had been able to dissuade him.On August 22, 1944, the French Resistance’s chief of staff, Roger Gallois, slipped through German lines on the outskirts of Paris and found his way to General George S. Patton’s headquarters. The situation on the ground was not what the Americans thought, Gallois told General Omar Bradley’s chief intelligence officer.[9] The Resistance movement in the capital city had infiltrated the police force, and the week before, fifteen thousand Parisian policemen had gone on strike.[10] More than that, the tens of thousands of Resistance fighters had risen up to attack and harass their Nazi occupiers, even though they were armed with not much more than antique rifles and Molotov cocktails.[11] In the days following the police strike, many more Parisians of all ages and abilities dug up paving stones, collected piles of furniture and other odds and ends, and felled trees to construct an elaborate network of more than four hundred street blockades.[12] Even though they were outnumbered and now outmaneuvered, the Germans were nowhere near outgunned and would eventually crush the insurrection and inflict untold amounts of suffering and destruction as they retreated east—unless the Allies came to the rescue. This new intelligence quickly reached Eisenhower, who dispatched the Free French forces under his command to liberate their capital with American and British backup while the rest of his forces pushed east and north toward the Belgian border.[13]On August 25, 1944—Liberation Day—after a brilliant sun burned away the morning mist, Ernest Taylor Pyle, better known as Ernie to his millions of readers back home in America, stuffed his typewriter into its case, slung his musette bag over his shoulder, and hopped into a jeep with a couple of fellow combat newspapermen.[14] Through most of the early part of the day, they felt