D-day views by Ernie Pyle, a 43-year-old journalist from rural Indiana,

[Mr Quatro]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...AiG?li=BBnb7Kz

Pyle’s first column about the D-Day landings, published on June 12, 1944, gave his readers an honest accounting of how daunting the invasion had been — and what a miracle it was that the Allies had taken the beaches at all. “The advantages were all theirs,” Pyle said of the German defenders: concrete gun emplacements and hidden machine-gun nests “with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach,” immense V-shaped ditches, buried mines, barbed wire, “whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats” and “four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.” “And yet,” Pyle concluded, “we got on.”

[Sailor Steve]

Excellent find! I remember reading about Ernie Pyle as a kid, but only that he was a war correspondent, a photographer, and that he was killed in action. This story brings out the man himself, especially his obsession with the dead and his feelings toward the people he photographed.

Thanks for posting this.

[em2nought]

Thanks for posting this!


https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/s...837185/photo/1

[HW3]

Steve, Ernie wrote 4 books during the war, Ernie Pyle In England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), Brave Men(1944), and Last Chapter(1949). He was known for going out with the front line troops and getting the average joe's thoughts.

[Jimbuna]

WOW! just WOW!

That brings back a few memories of some of the stories my late father told me when I was a kid. He was at Juno (Courseulles-sur-Mer) with the Canadians and believe me, some of his experiences were quite shocking.

Thanks for sharing.

[Commander Wallace]

Awesome article Quatro. I will be rereading this a few more times. Thanks everyone else for listing the other books by HW3 and everyone else.


Thanks for posting this article.

[Mr Quatro]

I liked this part from the article ...

In May 1944, Pyle was notified that he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches.

On D-Day, as the invasion force fought for the beach, Pyle was trapped just offshore, on a ship transporting tanks. He had

boarded with a kit bag heavy with liquor bottles,

some good-luck talismans and a Remington portable typewriter.

Being a civilian Pyle was allowed to drink and probably had to after witnessing Normandy.

[August]

I have one of his books. "Brave Men". It's a very good read.

[Platapus]

The whole logistics of the D-day operation is amazing. I still can't get my head around all that had to take place to support the landing and the operations after the landing. It was a massive operation

[August]

Yep, even more amazing is that they did it while also conducting similarly sized operations half a world away against the Japanese, not to mention continuing a grinding advance up the Italian peninsula.