A Death in San Pietro Read online

  This was the sort of sensibility that Pyle admired. This is what he recorded and sent back to his readers in the States. This is what they responded to in numbers that were making him the most widely read correspondent in North Africa. He didn’t sugar coat the war for the folks. He painted it as rough, hard work, carried out mainly by young men who would rather be anywhere else. Nor did he focus on its horrors: the terrible wounds and gruesome deaths went undescribed as they did with every other journalist covering the war in its early days.

  His readers responded to these stories in a remarkable fashion. When he left for North Africa in November 1942, Pyle’s column for Scripps-Howard appeared in 42 newspapers. In just one month’s time that number jumped to 65; by the end of March, the total was 82, and one month after that, 122 newspapers were carrying his stories with a total circulation near 9 million. By the time Pyle ended up, back at headquarters in Algiers that spring, 3 book publishers were vying to collect his columns into a book.10 It was a pretty meteoric rise for a journalist who had been relatively obscure less than a year before and had never covered a war.

  LONDON WAS, in a sense, a practice run for his subsequent work in North Africa that would take place nearly two years later. Pyle arrived there in early December 1940, after leaving Jerry behind to oversee the construction of their home in Albuquerque. Scripps-Howard had blessed his mission and off he flew to England. Once there, he explored the city for a few days, but in truth, he couldn’t find much to write about. The great Battle of Britain that fall had temporarily abated and he worried to editor Lee Miller that his columns were having no emotional impact.11

  Then on December 29, one of the great raids of the war erupted over the darkened skies of London. Pyle rushed to a balcony in the Hotel Savoy, where he was staying, and watched in awe as wave after wave of German bombers dropped their load on the city lighting 2,000 separate fires, including a massive blaze at the Cathedral of St. Paul.

  Pyle’s reaction was recorded in one of his most memorable columns: “Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges,” he wrote.

  “And standing there, I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.

  “For on that night this old, old city—even though I must bite my tongue in shame for saying it—was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

  “It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire . . .”12

  In vivid detail and great sympathy for the city, he described the awesome destruction visiting the streets below, all the time staying true to the promise he’d always made to his readers: to report, first of all, how he felt about what he was seeing. That meant admitting that as awful as this sight might be, there was a beauty in it, “a dreadful masterpiece,” he called it. A “monstrous loveliness…London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all. These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.”

  The prose was beautiful and haunting; the column’s contradictions made it feel true and meaningful to his readers. This was war in the modern age and it jumped off the page, as did subsequent stories that January, describing the British response to the Blitz: the quiet pluck and grit of the people; a city far more resilient than Adolph Hitler could imagine or appreciate.

  Time magazine picked up his story on the London raid and reprinted it with a note describing Pyle as “an inconspicuous little man . . . not celebrated as a straight news reporter [until he wrote this column].” The head of Scripps-Howard sent Pyle a wire saying his columns were the “talk of New York”; and Pyle would soon be contacted by a publisher about the possibility of collecting his stories into a small book.13

  But there were two more months in England, and subsequent columns lost some of the snap and emotion of the first few. Early in March, he learned that his mother had suffered a stroke and died in Indiana. Upon hearing the news, he returned to his room at the Savoy and conjured images of her life “attending neighborhood square dances, playing the violin, aiding sick animals, driving the family automobile in the local Fourth of July parade, and crying as he left to report for service with the naval reserves in World War I.”14

  The death was debilitating to his work and psyche. Pyle’s brush with journalistic stardom wound quickly down, and by the end of March, he returned the States, trying to settle in with Jerry in their new home in Albuquerque. By summer, she suffered another relapse and refused to go to a sanitarium. Pyle was once again ensconced in a joint misery that continued into the fall.

  Depression set in, and Pyle took a leave of absence from the column. He traveled to Indiana to visit his father and entered into a couple of unsatisfying affairs. They were unsatisfying for reasons beyond his guilt. Pyle suffered from sexual impotence, an ongoing condition that had begun in his relationship with Jerry several years earlier and had been unaided by his own heavy drinking and depressive nature.

  To jar himself out of his melancholy and escape Jerry, Pyle made plans to take a long trip to Asia to report on conditions there. A flight to Honolulu, the first leg on his journey, scheduled for early December was postponed. The Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor on December 7.

  Feeling restless and caged, Pyle fled to the West Coast to report on the helter-skelter activity and intense fear that the attack prompted up and down the coast, but according to Pyle biographer James Tobin, he spent most of his time, “struggling to write lackluster columns, drinking heavily and feeling a ‘tight, swollen up feeling in my face and head . . . and a general all around debilitation and disinterest in everything.’”15 By the spring of 1942, Pyle was deep in the trough of a serious depression.

  He and Jerry entered a confused and mutually destructive dance of co-dependency. They could not live with one another; they could not live without one another. He suggested divorce; she suggested they try to conceive a child; he pointed out that neither of them was in a condition to bring children into the world; she continued to drink. In April, now at Jerry’s request, they decided to divorce. “As an experiment,” Pyle wrote to Miller, “on the gamble that that it might shock her into a realization that she had to face life like other people.”16

  Both of them seemed to finally understand that she needed to work at getting herself well, and that his presence was not helping matters. The marriage was officially dissolved in mid April, yet Pyle continued to stay in the house with her in Albuquerque. He also remained restless and itching to do something to get away. Pyle made an attempt to enlist in the service but at 110 pounds and 42 years old, he was not exactly fighting material.

  Scripps-Howard stepped in and encouraged its columnist to return to what he did best, suggesting that he make a six-month tour of Army bases in Ireland and England, to report on the impending action in Europe. Still doubtful about his interest in writing, Pyle nonetheless decided to go after Jerry agreed to another trip to the sanitarium, and seemed to be getting somewhat better.

  In late summer, Pyle shipped to Great Britain, where he spent the next five months gradually restoring his spirit as he donned the uniform of the war correspondent and got acquainted with the young men who were preparing to go to war with Hitler’s Germany.

  In September 1942, Pyle heard through the grapevine that the first action in the European Theater would be taking place in North Africa soon. He made plans to follow the invasion. Now on the brink of a new stage in his career and life, Pyle had little idea of the whirlwind that was about to engulf him. Not only was he about to learn a lot more about the “monstrous lovel
iness” of war, but he would also know something about fame. In less than a year, his name would be as familiar to the people of the United States as Ernest Hemingway or George Patton. It wasn’t just the soldiers to whom he sidled up as he was shipping to North Africa who would know “this inconspicuous little man”: the name Ernie Pyle would mean something to every G.I. in the theater.

  For now, things felt right; they felt somewhat controlled. Jerry continued on the mend back in Albuquerque and Pyle could day-dream about one day, perhaps, rejoining her in their bungalow and leading a quiet and peaceful existence. In the meantime, he was once again energized about writing, about doing what he did best, which was making the people back home see what he saw.

  So hopeful was Pyle that one of the first things that he did after arriving in North Africa was to consult with an army lawyer about the possibility of once again marrying Jerry. Could he send a legal proxy to Jerry back in New Mexico? he asked the lawyer. It would be a written offer and legally binding agreement to remarry her, when and if she were willing. He was told, yes, he could do that and Pyle signed a document to that effect, drawn up by the lawyer, and sent it home to Jerry.

  In the Spring of 1943, just before the climactic battles in the war for North Africa, Pyle learned from Jerry that she had signed the proxy. In the strange and convoluted world that was his domestic life, he and Jerry were once again, man and wife.

  PYLE JOINED the 1st Infantry Division as the war headed north from central Tunisia toward Bizerte on the Mediterranean. As they neared the sea, the fighting grew more intense and difficult. The distances between the armies narrowed as Rommel and the Germans started to run out of room on the continent, and the Allies kept pushing.

  The landscape was hilly and treeless. “It was walking and climbing and crawling country,” Pyle wrote. “The mountains weren’t big, but they were constant.”

  At each set of rolling hills, American soldiers would approach and let the artillery have first crack at the Germans, who would be ensconced on the reverse side of the slopes, digging in and under to escape the shelling. When the big guns on the Allied side had done their softening of the German lines, the troops of the 1st Division would sweep out wide of the army before them, in an attempt to take the Germans from the flank.

  The repetition of the work, the consistency with which the young infantry men would rise each time they were ordered, and head toward each hill along the way to make their deadly progress into the German guns—to Pyle, these were feats of amazing young men. Night after night, day after day, death after death, working on half-starved stomachs, with little or no sleep, they marched, with no warmth or comforts, no dreams but to make it over the next hill safely

  “I wish you could have seen just one of the unforgettable sights I saw,” he wrote of that trek north toward Bizerte. “I was sitting among clumps of sword grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we had just taken, looking out over a vast and rolling country to the rear. A narrow path wound 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 that ribbon there was a thin line of men. For four days and nights they had fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights had been violent with attack, fright, butchery, their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.”17

  Yet they kept on walking toward the hill, dispersed for safety reasons at about fifty feet per soldier. They came toward Pyle all day long, moving slowly, deliberately, dead tired and weighted down with ammunition, weapons, and what field gear they could manage.

  By the first week of May, the British had pinched the Germans toward Tunis, while the American 2nd Corps, including the 1st Infantry Division, had forced the Axis troops against the sea at Bizerte. With the U.S. and British Navies at the their backs, preventing resupply and evacuation, German and Italian forces were trapped. Ultimately, somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 prisoners were taken by the Allies.

  The U.S. army had taken some hard knocks, particularly at Kasserine, but they had learned and could now consider themselves veteran troops. North Africa had been a good testing ground for the green Americans. It was not vital ground to the Germans, not fought tooth-and-nail as other territory would soon be. And of course the veteran British troops had been there for years, parrying with Rommel, and taking the brunt of fighting on the eastern front. “Tunisia was a good warm-up field for our armies,” Pyle wrote. “We would take an increasingly big part in the battles ahead.”

  Pyle offered a cautionary note to his readers in the States. He wanted his readers to know that a change had come to the now veteran troops that he’d followed through Tunisia. He recalled the thinking of the soldiers he’d met over the past several months, their consistent curiosity about two questions in particular: when do you think the war will be over and when do you think we’ll get to go home?

  Everyone still wanted to go home as soon as possible, homesickness remained deep and aching in the hearts of the troops; but they now knew it was pointless to ask when the war would be over. Pyle saw something deeper in their attitude: “It isn’t any theatrical proclamation that the enemy must be destroyed in the name of freedom; it’s just a vague but growing individual acceptance of the bitter fact that we must win the war or else, and that it can’t be won by running excursion boats back and forth across the Atlantic carrying homesick vacationers.”18

  They felt a weary obligation to finish a necessary job. “Home gradually grows less vivid,” Pyle wrote, “the separation from it less agonizing.” Their eyes were less set on getting home to see the Statue of Liberty than to march into Paris or “down the streets of Berlin.”19

  A price was being paid for this change in the people at the frontlines, Pyle warned his readers back home. Their sons would not be coming back quite the same people they’d been before. “They are rougher than you knew them. Killing is a rough business. Their basic language has changed from mere profanity to obscenity.”

  He wrote of their longing for women, “their need for female companionship and the gentling effect of femininity.” He warned that, “Our men have less regard for property than you raised them to have. Money value means nothing to them, either personally or in the aggregate.” Pyle wrote that one of the most striking things he witnessed about the war was how wasteful it was. The necessities of war made soldiers “easily abandon equipment they can’t take with them”; the urgency of war “prohibits normal caution in the handling of vehicles and supplies.”20 There wasn’t time in war to be economical and there wasn’t time for red tape. If a unit needed some piece of equipment and it was there for the taking, soldiers felt free to “requisition” what could help them survive. “The stress of war puts old virtues in a changed light,” he wrote.

  They were visitors in foreign lands, and war at times made them impatient and resentful of the strangers they were meeting in these strange lands. They were not yet internationalists, but Pyle foresaw a time when they would “brag about how they learned a little Arabic, and how swell the girls were in England, and how pretty the hills of Germany were.”

  Pyle recorded his thoughts a few weeks after the finish of the campaign as he rested on the shores of the Mediterranean, with the surf “caress[ing] the beach not a hundred yards away.” The sky was cloudless; the water a deep blue.21 He was finishing up a collection of stories that would soon be published back in the U.S. as Here Is Your War. The book would quickly rise up the bestseller charts, further adding to the fame that had come to him as he jeeped around North Africa in search of stories.

  A hard-fought campaign just ended, and another one on its way. In a little more than seven-months time, Pyle had morphed, like those he was writing about, from a newcomer to a veteran. He was tired and feeling his age, but he was, by means of his book advance, getting wealthier than he’d ever been before. A part of him wanted to stay on this beach for a long time to come, but a part of him couldn’t “deny that war is vastly exhilarating.”22<
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  It was that part of him that placed Pyle on the deck of the U.S.S. Biscayne the night before Allied troops set foot on the shores of Sicily. It was that part of him that would keep him close to the war effort all the way to the bitter end.

  4

  Morocco

  THE 36TH DIVISION consisted of three infantry regiments (141st, 142nd, 143rd); the 111 Engineering Battalion; the 111th Medical Battalion; four artillery battalions and a division band. The distinctive shoulder patch worn by 36th members, the T-Patch, was actually a blue arrowhead pointed down the arm, with a green T in the middle. The arrowhead honored the Oklahoma units in the division and was meant to symbolize the state—originally the Indian Territory—from which they had come. The T, of course, stood for Texas.

  The 36th was organized in October 1917 at Camp Bowie to help fight the World War I, and included both Texas and Oklahoma units from the start. Shipped to France in July 1918, the four infantry regiments in the 36th (there was a 144th in World War I and would be another one before this war was through) fought with distinction, particularly at the second battle of the Meuse -Argonne in October 1918, just before the end of the war. The division was put on reserve after the Armistice and shipped home in July 1919. Between the wars the regiments of the 36th participated in some disaster relief and a handful of training exercises. It was recalled to active duty in November 1940.

  A number of companies had proud roots that stretched back to the founding of Texas. The 141st carried regimental colors honoring “The Republic of Texas,” “The Alamo,” and “San Jacinto.” It had the longest lineage of the three infantry regiments in the 36th and was thus designated, the Texas 1st.