I don’t know what it is exactly — maybe just the cycle of generations — that nothing seems quite so quaint to us at the moment as the commendable-but-simple psyche of ‘The Greatest Generation’ and it would be almost hard to come up with an American writer who’s further from the jaded-and-anxious sensibility of our era than Ernie Pyle, the GI’s spokesman, who went to war carrying only a shovel (so that he could dig a foxhole at any given moment) and who espoused the virtues of the small town, the average American, and the way that the war served as a crucible for a new national sensibility.
And yet — to a degree that startled me — Pyle is a great writer and there is much to be learned from him regardless of how much a style like his would seem to have fallen out of taste.
Part of what seems to limit Pyle is the medium he was writing for. He was a syndicated columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. The dispatches he sent from the front throughout World War II were understood to be part of the war effort — educating the American public on the realities of “their war.” There is very little that is subversive about them in the way that, say, Michael Herr’s Dispatches is subversive and which came to be de rigueur for war correspondents. The pieces are full of sweet plugs for soldiers Pyle met who wanted to have their name in the newspaper or to send a message home (“I didn’t like to use names without having some little anecdote to go with them,” Pyle informs one disappointed soldier who has trouble thinking of an anecdote). Tonally, they often feel like an outgrowth of boys’ adventure magazines or the roadtrip-around-America column that Pyle was writing before the war’s outbreak. That attitude is never so apparent as in this passage in which Pyle extols the experience of the war from the perspective of healthy living:
The outstanding thing about life at the front was its magnificent simplicity. It was a life consisting only of the essentials — food, sleep, transportation, and what little warmth and safety a man would manage to wangle out of it by personal ingenuity….There were no appointments to keep, nobody cared how anybody looked, red tape was at a minimum. There were no desks, no designated hours, no washing of hands before eating, or afterward either. It would have been a heaven for small boys with dirty ears.
If that seems really Saturday Evening Post-ish, it was that homeliness of spirit that allowed Pyle to write one of the more moving descriptions I’ve ever come across — a searing illustration of the adage that war breaks out the best, as well as the worst, in humans. Pyle was at an aerodrome in Algeria in 1943 reporting on a squadron of Flying Fortresses. The daily sortie returned with one Fortress missing — which then reappeared a couple of hours later. As James Tobin, in his book on Pyle put it, “any competent newsman could have woven the story of the plane’s adventures” — flying with two engines down, nearly out of fuel, harassed by German fighters — “into a readable tale of skill, courage, and luck, but Pyle’s version accomplished something larger.” Instead of leading his story with the plane, he focused on the ground crew, which had long since given the plane up for lost when it miraculously materialized on the horizon:
It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.
I was a layman and no longer of the fraternity that flies but I could feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.
All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With all our nerves we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came — so slowly that it was cruel to watch.
It reached the far end of the aerodrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out — it seemed to us — for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?
They cleared the last plane, they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down the runway the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.
That’s sort of the essence of Pyle’s writing. It’s a completely egalitarian sensibility. At one point, in a profile of Omar Bradley, he graciously concedes that “democracy includes the big as well as the small,” but, really, he was concerned about the small — about the “millions of us, moving in machinelike precision through long nights, who should have been comfortably asleep in our warm beds at home. War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.” And he seemed intent on illuminating the experiences of as many of those millions as humanly possible. As Rick Atkinson puts it, he was really ubiquitous — in his book on the North African campaign alone, he wrote about merchant seamen, fighter pilots, bomber pilots, ground crews, cooks, the signal corps, correspondents, nurses, medics, and, of course, tankers and infantrymen. And then he went on from there to Italy, France (coming ashore on D-Day), and, finally, the Pacific Campaign. It’s one of these unendurably poignant details that he died from a stray bullet in Okinawa — in one of the last land battles of the war that was so closely associated with him.
One of the things that he didn’t live to see (but he played his part in documenting its development) was the new, national, middle-class mentality that emerged with the war. There’s an episode early in Here Is Your War, in which he comes across a deadpan Arkansan telling war stories. The soldiers surrounding the Arkansan howl with laughter every time the Arkansan speaks. For a while, Pyle can’t figure out what’s funny and then eventually he catches on: the Arkansan is a sleepy small-town boy who “never cracks a smile and never changes his expression” no matter how dramatic the story that he’s telling, and to the city slickers surrounding him this “dead pan Arkansas wit” is the funniest thing in the world. In other words, Pyle was coming across different parts of America that were, for the first time, talking to one another and were amused and, with time, thrilled at what they encountering. A new national mythology was coming into place — in the “doughboy” and “the GI,” in a figure like Bradley the “GI general,” in a sensibility that combined egalitarian bonhomie with self-confidence and sureness of purpose. At a low point in the war, Pyle sought to reassure the American people by writing, “As for our soldiers themselves, you need not have any shame or concern about their ability. I saw them in battle and afterward and there was nothing wrong with the American soldier. His fighting spirit was good. His morale was okay. The deeper he got into a fight the more of a fighting man he became.” It’s the plain-spoken, pure-hearted ethos that started to unravel with Vietnam and, now, barely exists in the national register, but, with Pyle, it’s possible to glimpse the moment where it welded together.
If all of that sounds a bit Ken Burns-y, there’s something else about Pyle that makes him worth returning to and reflecting on, which is that, in his low-key way, he caught a truth about the nature of war and how it warps the soul. If Pyle’s general take on the war is that it was a form of honest labor, with nothing romantic whatsoever about it — “it isn’t dramatic to me either, it’s just hard work and when it’s finished all I want to do is go back home” — he was forced every so often to admit that he found “an exhilaration in it: an inner excitement that built up into a buoyant tenseness,” and that that exhilaration was linked to its cruelty. In the later stages of the North African campaign, after the stinging defeat of Kasserine Pass, Pyle noticed a shift among his friends on the front line. In a passage all the more searing for how understated it is, he wrote:
The most vivid change was the casual and workshop manner in which they talked about killing. They had made the psychological transition from their normal belief that taking human life was a sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing was a craft….In that one respect the front-line soldier differed from all the rest of us. All the rest of us — you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa — we wanted terribly yet only academically for the war to be over. The front-line soldier wanted it to be terminated by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He was truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we worked, were not.
But that mindset, too, was gradually seeping out of the front lines and reaching more and more of the national psyche. “Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to be wholly at war,” Pyle wrote, “but if I am at all correct we have about changed our character and become a war nation.”
It all seems very far away —the North Africa campaign, the GIs, the roving correspondent with his shovel, the welding together of the middle class — but the somewhat-stultifying nimbus surround the ‘Greatest Generation’ shouldn’t distract us from the home truths it uncovered. One of them, incidentally, was the power of the sort of clear-eyed, plain-spoken mode of expression that Pyle perfected. It wasn’t necessary to be ironic or critical or sophisticated. It was possible to create remarkable aesthetic effects, and hit deep layers of the psyche, just by taking in one’s surroundings and writing down the experience as simply and directly as possible.
Sam Kahn writes the Substack Castalia.
Wow...this was one of the best essays / articles I've ever read. I loved everything about it. In Albuquerque is the "Ernie Pyle Public Library", it's way on the other side of town, but I might have to go to do some deep reading. Great article and very powerful.
"... the somewhat-stultifying nimbus surround the ‘Greatest Generation’ shouldn’t distract us from the home truths it uncovered. One of them, incidentally, was the power of the sort of clear-eyed, plain-spoken mode of expression that Pyle perfected. It wasn’t necessary to be ironic or critical or sophisticated. It was possible to create remarkable aesthetic effects, and hit deep layers of the psyche, just by taking in one’s surroundings and writing down the experience as simply and directly as possible."
Curious, Sam, if you see this simple talk -- which incidentally is at the heart of Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (my subject for next week) -- as linked to the journalism profession more broadly? People like Pyle could make a decent living writing for a newspaper and honing exactly this voice. Audience was part of that, too -- the plainspoken people that Pyle was imagining successfully as his readers. Willa Cather came of age as a journalist and brought a similar sensibility to her work. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, too. Now you're making me wonder about the stew of intersecting influences on emerging writers today -- what their venues might be, whether they are really on their own as solo-preneurs in the creator economy, hoping to fish a readership out of oblivion, or whether some of them have the chance that Pyle and others did to hone their craft in conversation with editors, who also laid a heavy thumb on the aesthetic scales during this period.
Strangely, I can't help but think of Pyle's comment on simplicity of wartime living in conjunction with the show ALONE, which I'm obsessed with in spite of (or maybe because of) its incoherent conceptual core.