Brave Men [Illustrated Edition]
About this ebook
Europe was in the throes of World War II, and when America joined the fighting, Ernie Pyle went along. Long before television beamed daily images of combat into our living rooms, Pyle’s on-the-spot reporting gave the American public a firsthand view of what war was like for the boys on the front. Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches, battlefields, field hospitals, and beleaguered cities of Europe. What he witnessed he described with a clarity, sympathy, and grit that gave the public back home an immediate sense of the foot soldier’s experience.
There were really two wars, John Steinbeck wrote in Time magazine: one of maps and logistics, campaigns, ballistics, divisions, and regiments and the other a “war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle’s war.” This collection of Pyle’s columns detailing the fighting in Europe in 1943-44 brings that war—and the living, and dying, moments of history—home to us once again.-Print ed.
“This angle of reporting brought the front-line war back to the families of those serving in the armed forces and endeared Pyle to the troops. An essential piece of Americana for all collections.”—Library Journal
“[A] classic of modern journalism.”—Kirkus Reviews
About the author
Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 - April 18, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. As a roving correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, he earned wide acclaim for his accounts of ordinary people in rural America, and later, of ordinary American soldiers during World War II. His syndicated column ran in more than 300 newspapers nationwide.
Pyle was born near Dana, Indiana and, after attending local schools, he joined the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War I at age 17. He served three months of active duty and was discharged with the rank of Petty Officer Third Class.
After the war Pyle attended Indiana University, editing the Indiana Daily Student newspaper and traveling to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. With only a semester left he quit to accept a job at a newspaper in LaPorte, Indiana.
He worked there for three months before moving to Washington, D.C., where he served as a reporter for the tabloid newspaper, The Washington Daily News. In 1932, Pyle was named managing editor and served in the post for three years.
From 1935 through 1941 he traveled throughout the United States, writing about rural towns and their inhabitants. After the U.S. entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style to his wartime reports, first from the home front, and later from the European and Pacific theatres. On April 18, 1945, he was killed by enemy fire on Iejima during the Battle of Okinawa.
At the time of his death he was among the best-known American war correspondents. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his spare, poignant accounts of “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told”, wrote Harry Truman. “He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”
