This recounting of a the newspaper reporter who relayed the news back home has stuck with me.
What is the value of the "arithmetic of victories and losses?
The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day by David Chrisinger
"And so they went. Anyone who has ever traversed this stretch of Normandy, the coast as it winds its way from Omaha Beach west toward Cherbourg, and understood the topography—the cliffs and the precious few routes inland meant the Allies couldn’t bomb heavily without risking being stranded on the beach—anyone who has ever set foot here comes away with two questions: How did these men pull this off? And what would have happened if they hadn’t?"
This article tells the a fascinating story of the newspaper journalist who was responsible for communicating the tragedy in words: a long but very worthwhile read.
Puffing on cigarettes and probably drinking a fair amount, Pyle spent the following days pecking away on his typewriter. His readers needed his words to make sense of what “our boys” were enduring in France. After he had written enough material for a few columns, he wondered if his plain-spoken prose would be enough to help anyone back home understand what it was to be contaminated with so much death.
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.” [...]
Pyle’s second report from the Normandy beaches, published 10 days after D-Day, was markedly different from anything he had ever previously filed. “It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore,” he wrote, reeling the reader in with a cheerful opening. “Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.” Pyle cataloged the vast wreckage of military matériel, the “scores of tanks and trucks and boats” resting at the bottom of the Channel, jeeps “burned to a dull gray” and halftracks blasted “into a shambles by a single shell hit.” Some reassurances followed to soften the unvarnished fact — the losses were an acceptable price for the victory, Pyle said — but he hadn’t shied away from showing his readers the corpses and “the awful waste and destruction of war.” [...]
The next day, June 17, newspapers across the country published Pyle’s third column describing the D-Day beachhead. By allowing the objects he saw in the sand to tell an eloquent story of loss, Pyle showed his readers the true cost of the fighting, without explicitly describing the blood and mangled bodies. “It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach,” Pyle wrote about the detritus of the battle. “Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home. . . . Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers and bloody, abandoned shoes.”
Pyle often included himself in his stories, addressing his readers directly and letting them see him in the scene, a reassuring presence who was keeping his eye on things for them, reducing sprawling events to their digestible essentials. But here Pyle depicted himself as stunned and confused — a dazed witness to gambles and losses on a scale that nobody could comprehend. “I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket,” he wrote. “I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.”
By the end of the column, Pyle’s readers were confronted with outright horror: “As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach,” Pyle wrote, “I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren’t driftwood. They were a soldier’s two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his G.I. shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.” [...]
Less than two weeks after witnessing the jubilant liberation of Paris, Pyle wrote his final column from Europe. “I’m leaving,” he told his readers. “ ‘I’ve had it,’ as they say in the Army. I have had all I can take for a while.” After spending 29 months overseas, writing around 700,000 words about the war and surviving nearly a year at the front lines, Pyle confided that his spirit was faltering and confused. “I do hate terribly to leave right now, but I have given out,” he wrote. “I’ve been immersed in it too long. The hurt has finally become too great.”
Pyle returned home to New Mexico. After a few months back in the United States, overwhelmed by mountains of mail, invasions of his privacy and his wife’s attempted suicide, Pyle’s dread of war was outweighed by his unease in civilian life. Life on the front line was simpler. Pyle missed it. Shortly before Christmas 1944, he began making final preparations to report to the Pacific, where American forces were “island hopping” their way toward Japan.
The grim view of the war that overtook Pyle in Normandy — the sense that perhaps the losses were simply beyond bearing — seemed to follow Pyle to the Pacific, but it showed up differently in his reporting there. Interviewing bomber pilots on islands far from the fighting and sailors on Navy ships who seemed safe and comfortable compared with infantrymen on the front lines, Pyle felt that he was seeing a softer, easier war, and he let it show. “The days are warm and on our established island bases the food is good and the mail service is fast and there’s little danger from the enemy,” he wrote in a column titled “Europe This Is Not.” [...]
Before Pyle’s body was buried under a crude marker in the 77th Division’s cemetery, a draft of a column he was writing was discovered in his pocket. It was not so much a dispatch as it was a meditation on the end of the war. “Last summer,” Pyle said, “I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead.” That was a relief that he knew was simply unavailable to many and a forgetting that shouldn’t be allowed to any.
The draft went on: “There are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches. . . . Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”
Before Pyle’s body was buried under a crude marker in the 77th Division’s cemetery, a draft of a column he was writing was discovered in his pocket. It was not so much a dispatch as it was a meditation on the end of the war. “Last summer,” Pyle said, “I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead.” That was a relief that he knew was simply unavailable to many and a forgetting that shouldn’t be allowed to any.
The draft went on: “There are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches. . . . Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”
We accept that our wars are different now — more scattered, seemingly never-ending, against a more diffuse and elusive enemy — but those wars are still presented with the promise that we are fighting for our way of life or the survival of our values, and that we’ll enjoy greater peace and security when those wars are won. War reporting has become more honest and unsparing about tallying the death toll — at least on our side — but politicians making the case for deployments and invasions still don’t invite the public in advance to decide whether the promised benefits will be worth the losses.
Seeing and reporting the vast losses on the beach at Normandy and watching war’s meat grinder in action in the vicious battles that followed, Pyle was evidently forced to recalculate the arithmetic of victories and losses. By the time he was killed, 10 months later and on the opposite side of the world, the lesson seemed to have solidified for him. Not even the war ending, not even victory — which his previous reporting usually kept in sight as the great goal of the war — would be able to bring back all the people killed or counteract the damage done to the survivors. Pyle had written about battles and war in a way that promised hope. By the time victory was actually in sight, he had come to feel that there was no way the war could be a story with a happy ending.
via {ny times}
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