Surviving D-Day, to One War Journalist, Was "A Pure Miracle"
D-Day In The Eyes of a Legendary Wartime Journalist from the Archives at IU Bloomington
June 6th will mark the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of Normandy, France also known as D-Day.
It was the bloodiest and most consequential battle of World War II. This battle built adversity to those few soldiers proud to have fought under the roughest of conditions.
The soldiers that are alive today have already changed the course of history for my future at every step even as the nation is not embracing America’s core and common values of dignity and respect.
2024 compared to 1944 or even 2004 are three completely different periods for the world especially here in the United States.
Wars, drugs, crime rates shooting high, underfunded human resources, and so forth are happening in a world many soldiers around the world tried to fight and save in the battlefields during the world’s most grueling war in human history.
Now the mission is to protect and save what made America great, and no we didn’t just repeat this statement from two former U.S. Presidents, we are quoting that times are now changing more than ever and we need to protect what America felt like to a now dying generation holding on to what was left of their time on Earth.
KSHB Channel 41 News in Kansas City reported that there are 119,000 World War II veterans alive today with about 191 veterans dying each day.
In terms of veterans who are living after surviving the battle of D-Day, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs reported that less than one percent of D-Day soldiers are still living today.
In other words, these 119,000 soldiers from across the globe are hanging by a thread for a shared memory, songs, letters, and even newspaper articles depicting that time in history.
Our history teachers in middle and high school couldn’t stress enough about how we should hold on to this history to not repeat those mistakes leaders made before our time.
Ernie Pyle, though lost in time and space by the rest of the public, hold his name locked and key at The Ernie Pyle Media School on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.
Having a building named after you is one thing, but being the boots on the grounds of war and covering men with grace is another.
War journalists are held to a higher responsibility with many of them dying in Israel and Palestine every day with 37,000 journalists killed in the ongoing war gripping college campuses just like IU. Who experienced their line of protests this spring.
And with the departure of IU professor and professional artist, Samia Halaby, by President Pamela Whitten's administration, the skies are looking darker on a university that once prided itself on being the next pillar of historical curiosity.
IU was once a school where learning and honing history was not just a goal, it was required you know who Ernie Pyle was as much as it is to correctly capitalize the name of the Indiana Memorial Union (that’s a tid bit of advice for the future Indiana Daily Student newspaper writers out there, capitalize every name on every building on campus).
When I walk around campus as a fifth-year student finishing up class and graduating this December with my class, I don’t see anyone give a damn about the history of IU’s great alumni unless its Trayce Jackson-Davis or Mark Cuban for instance.
I feel as if the identity of IU and it’s fabric are gone thanks to crooked leadership, and when we get rid of artists, scholars, and even journalists who walked through the same doors as us to receive a top-tier education and better our planet, the administration is worsening our futures to learn and grow.
However, through thick and thin, Ernie Pyle is the last historical piece that President Whitten and her administration have dared not to touch and scrutinize.
Not. Even. Once.
His uniforms, articles, hats, and even his world-famous typewriter sit on the bottom floor of Franklin Hall also known as The IU Media School which dawns his name fittingly for the work he displayed during the war.
If you search “Ernie Pyle” on Google, IU curated his messages from paper and audio stories stored in cassettes and paper and digitalized his work around 2016 to become open for anyone in the public to look at anytime, anywhere.
That degree of effort to help share Pyle’s passion for covering people is why the school bears his name so that anybody can learn the ethics of Pyle and grow as a journalist and as a person.
Pyle was such a fixture in his days covering World War II, he became a national hero for not only covering the war but being on the front lines and battling with the soldiers he so followed every day.
On June 6, 1944, Pyle was supposed to write a column for every newspaper across the country, but instead, the battle happened, and he didn’t write another article again until six days after the battle on June 12, 1944, due to battling in the war.
This work with his in-depth stories on life during war, won him a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting before subsequently passing away in Japan a year later, but this article from June 12, just days after D-Day, proved to be one of the best works he had ever published.
That article stood out to me when my 8th-grade English teacher in middle school played the audio of his interactions with the soldiers fighting to the nurses helping the soldiers get better again for battle.
I was struck by this one article years later, which is why I copied and pasted the whole thing with all rights going back to Indiana University and to the family for educational purposes.
This article serves as a great reminder of what IU is missing right now. Hope.
Hope that we can see a future of bright-minded students follow his messages and curate them somehow in their lives so we don’t just walk past his statue and think about our past like it’s a toy doll we haven’t played with for years because that is not history.
Through tension and violence in our world today, may this article from Ernie Pyle live on in your mind as a reminder to encourage the next generations to grow and become something greater as we hope to keep learning lessons from the one percent of soldiers living today. Along with the millions more from around the world who lost their lives in the war.
This article was featured on David Nichols Ernie Pyle tribute novel, Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches on page 42-44.
“NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.
By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach, where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained, also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore. Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had floating mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after the first men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the speed called for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to land at H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had, incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach. They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault, including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. "We’ve done it again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.”