Passages: 'HERE IS YOUR WAR' (2) by Ernie Pyle

From the Final Chapter

Drawing by Carol Johnson, found in HERE IS YOUR WAR, pg. 301

The drawing bears no title. I call it "Flowers for you! Flowers!"

In HERE IS YOUR WAR U.S. war correspondent Ernie Pyle reports thoroughly on the progress of American forces against Axis armies in North Africa beginning in November, 1942 and ending in June, 1943. In the early chapters he made my day by mentioning the landings at Oran and Arzeu, places where about 100 - 200 Canadians in RCNVR and Combined Operations plied their trade, i.e., they manned landing crafts filled with U.S. troops and their supplies for about two weeks.

In 'Aftermath,' the final chapter of Pyle's Pulitzer prize-winning book, we read much about the end of the war in Tunisia, how the ordinary man was affected, and "that transition back to normal days."

Though the contents relate to a time period during which many Canadian sailors were being transported around Africa in preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, they are of great value to all readers.

About "that transition back to normal days." Would there ever be such a thing for any soldier, sailor, pilot, or any officer, any participant who had left a litter of white crosses behind them?

Aftermath

     And then finally

the Tunisian campaign was over, 

spectacularly collapsed after the bitterest fighting

we had known in our theater.

It was only in those last days that

I came to know what war really is.

I don't know how any of the men who went through

the thick of that hill-by-hill butchery

could ever be the same again.

     The end of the Tunisian war

brought an exhilaration, then a letdown,

and later a restlessness from anticlimax

that I can see multiplied a thousand times

when the last surrender comes.

That transition back to normal days will be

as difficult for many as was the change into war,

and some will never be able to accomplish it.

     Now we are in a lull

and many of us are having a short rest period.

I tried the city and couldn't stand it.

Two days drove me back to the country,

where everything seemed cleaner

and more decent.

     I am in my tent,

sitting on a newly acquired cot,

writing on a German folding table we picked up

the day of the big surrender.

     The days here

are so peaceful and perfect

they almost give us a sense of infidelity

to those we left behind

beneath the Tunisian crosses,

those whose final awareness was

a bedlam of fire and noise and uproar.

Page 323

* * * * *

Pyle felt the "peaceful and perfect" days - following victory on the field - brought with them "a sense of infidelity" connected to those who had died in their midst. Would that sense of being unfaithful to one's mates linger for a day, a week, a month, then disappear when the weather changed? Or would that feeling of infidelity return at times or often in future years, therefore making "that transition back to normal days" one of great difficulty?

I would say there would be more than a few reactions to leaving mates and comrades beneath white crosses on foreign soil, and behind infidelity might come survivor guilt, depression, a deep sense of loss and anger... and more.

Editor's collection; found in a shoe box at a shop in Victoria, B.C. 

Canadians lost at Dieppe.

My father expressed his anger associated with the Dieppe Raid in his memoirs:

The next one (raid, after Operation Rutter) on August 19, 1942 should have been aborted too. I wasn’t there because I was on leave but came back early (because, though I didn’t know where, I knew there was a raid coming) and was in position to see the Duke of Wellington carrying barges, my oppo (work mate) and other buddies to Dieppe and certain death for the soldiers. There was a mishap before they even got to sea, i.e., soldiers were readying hand grenades and one somehow exploded and four were killed and many injured. It was an ill omen.

Lt. McRae became a POW at Dieppe, 1942.

Photo - St. Nazaire to Singapore: Vol. 1, Pg. 64

Much has been written about Dieppe so I will not enlarge upon it too much. My opinion is - it was a senseless waste of blood. The Germans were ready because we (i.e., the Allies) ran into a German convoy in the channel. The element of surprise was lost. The times of arrival at beaches were to be during the night, but some turned out to land in full daylight up against cliffs unable in any way to be scaled. No softening up of defences by bombing was ever carried out. I will make it short and say I will remember it as a complete, useless waste of good Canadian blood and no one - even those who say we learned a valuable lesson there - will ever change my mind. No mock raids were held, as for St. Nazaire against home defences. It was simply a mess.

I lost my first comrades at Dieppe. Others were wounded. O/S R. Cavanaugh - killed. O/S Jack McKenna - killed. A/B Lloyd Campbell, London, Ontario died of wounds after his legs were nearly cut off by machine gun fire. Imagine Higgins boats made of 3/4 inch plywood going in on a beach like that.

Lieutenent McRae, our commander, Stoker Brown, and others I can’t recall were taken prisoner. And lots of people don’t even know Canada’s navy was represented at Dieppe. (The only other comrade I lost was Coxswain Owens, the man who left me stranded that night in Irvine. He was killed in North Africa, our next safari).

I was on leave at Calshot Camp in Southampton at the time, but was asked to go and clean up ALCs as they struggled back from Dieppe. I absolutely refused. I was so incensed I also refused to go to church there. I went to the door but never went in.

"DAD, WELL DONE" Pages 20 - 21

Though my father writes many angry words, I have found two others that stand out - in my opinion - under a certain story in one of his books. 

Volumes 1 and 2, Compiled by David and Catherine Lewis

On pages 60 - 66 of Volume 1 we read Combined Ops veterans' stories about the Dieppe raid, about Cliff Wallace, Canada’s 1st casualty. One story is by Lt. Robert McRae (POW), another by David Lewis, editor of St. Nazaire to Singapore, Vol. 1.

Lewis writes:

When I was later told of Cliff’s death I felt distressed because Cliff had been put in my place in LC42 and I was transferred to a Beachmaster job on Yellow Beach 2. LC42, steered by a Commando, went to Yellow 1 and landed her troops. This was after most of her crew had been killed by the gun fire. The craft caught fire and sank in a burning state. Almost all the Commandos she carried were killed or imprisoned.

On the other hand, no one was lost or seriously wounded or taken prisoner aboard my new placement LC14, and my reactions had turned into, “Why not me?” a case of survival guilt.

About survival guilt, Lewis writes:

In a way you’re glad to be alive, but there is a feeling you don’t have a right to be around now. The other has gone and it was in some way, you don’t understand, your fault? You don’t get the impact from it right away, but then it hits. After all, I didn’t have to volunteer to be an Assistant Beachmaster. I had worked for ten days with those men in LC42. Now they were all gone. It hurts.

Photo - As found in St. Nazaire to Singapore, Vol. 1, page 60

Mr. Lewis continues:

Cliff turned out to be the only child of an elderly couple. He had completed studies in engineering at McGill. There was an opportunity to do my best to console Cliff’s parents when on leave in 1943.

I felt empty - their only son was gone and it was 15 months later, when I’m on leave, that they find out. I didn’t even have something of his possessions to pass on to them.

* * * * * 

Ernie Pyle is described as "the most famous American war correspondent of the Second World War" on the back cover flyleaf of his book "HERE IS YOUR WAR."

I found his writing to be very straight-forward, very informative, most of the time. He stuck to the facts when describing what he saw and loved to mention full names and addresses of G.I.s and officers so some folks back home received a big surprise when reading his articles. I really liked that about him.

I also liked the fact that there were times - in my humble opinion - when particular paragraphs were so thoughtful that time slowed down, I'd read them twice, and feel I was more than informed, I was right beside him in the jeep or tent or army camp. I call such passages 'Pyle's Poignant Prose.'  

I found two such paragraphs in his last two pages, and the first may have been written when back from the city of Tunisia, and while sitting alone in his humble tent:

I want the war to be over

     An occasional black beetle

strolls innocently across the sandy floor.

For two hours I've been watching one of them

struggling with a cigarette butt on the ground,

trying to move it...

     It may be that

war has changed me, along with the rest.

It is hard for anyone to analyze himself.

I know that I find more and more

that I wish to be alone,

and yet contradictorily

I believe I have a new patience with

humanity that I've never had before.

     When you've lived

with the unnatural mass cruelty that

mankind is capable of inflicting upon itself,  

you find yourself dispossessed of the faculty

for blaming one poor man

for the triviality of his faults.

I don't see how any survivor of war can

ever be cruel to anything, ever again.

     Yes, I want the war to be over, just as

keenly as any soldier in North Africa wants it.

This little interlude of passive contentment here

on the Mediterranean shore  is a mean temptation.

It is a beckoning into somnolence.

This is the kind of day I think I want

my life to be composed of endlessly.

But pretty soon we shall strike our tents and

traipse again after the clanking tanks, sleep again

to the incessant lullaby of the big rolling guns.

It has to be that way, and wishing

doesn't change it.

Page 324

Ernie Pyle loved to yap with the G.I.s

Our worm's-eye view

     On the day of final peace,

the last stroke of what we call

the "Big Picture" will be drawn.

I haven't written anything about the "Big Picture,"

because I don't know anything about it.

I only know what we see from our worm's-eye view,

and our segment of the picture consists only of

tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die;

of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night;

of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle;

of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks

and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells;

of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations

and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and

hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing;

and of laughter too, and anger and wine

and lovely flowers and constant cussing.

All of these it is composed of;

and of graves and graves and graves.

     That is our war,

and we will carry it with us

as we go on from one battlefield 

to another until it is all over,

leaving some of us behind on every beach,

in every field.

Page 325

* * * * *

Pyle writes he knew nothing about the "Big Picture" but only "what we see from our worm's-eye view."

And the aforementioned Lt. Robert McRae, one of my father's officers taken prisoner of war at Dieppe, wrote these words about his own end of the battle:

     Finally we were mustered out on the road

to be marched toward the town of Dieppe in order to join

the other prisoners being collected

in the grounds of the hospital.

We had only begun to march when a bomb was dropped

in the place where only minutes before

we'd been idly standing around...

     So ended my war, my recollections of Dieppe,

based only on a worm's-eye view. Not until much later

in the POW camp did I form any general picture,

but when all's said and done, this ignorance

was after all an essential part of the experience.

McRae's position in the photograph is not provided

St. Nazaire to Singapore, Vol. 1, Page 65

* * * * *

Postscript:

After reporting from London on the Battle of Britain, Ernie Pyle accompanied G.I.s into combat in Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and in Normandy during the D-Day invasion. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. A year later, he was killed in a machine gun ambush on the island of Ie Shima as the Pacific War entered its final stage.

Back cover flyleaf of HERE IS YOUR WAR 

Please link to Passages: "HERE IS YOUR WAR" (1) by Ernie Pyle

Unattributed Photos GH