A classic book from my dad by an award winning journalist.

Ernie Pyle take on WWII

Account of the invasion of Sicily, Italy, Anzio, and Normandy. Pyle later died covering the invasion of Okinawa.

Although you run across his name in almost any WWII history that covers the American army, I’d never read anything by Ernie Pyle. Brave Men starts with the invasion of Sicily, jumps to the Anzio beachhead, then to England waiting for D-Day, then moves through France, ending with the liberation of Paris.


Pyle was an “embedded” war correspondent (I’m of the impression they all were until Vietnam). He didn’t stay with a particular unit, mingling with construction engineers, combat infantry, tank destroyers, artillery, dive bombers, stevedores, and ordnance repair units. Although he paints flattering portraits of a few generals (notably Omar Bradley) most of his reportage covers ordinary enlisted soldiers. Pyle frequently, almost obsessively, mentions soldier’s names and home towns; since he had been a travel correspondent before the war he knew a lot of places and could often mention a familiar spot to soldiers he was interviewing.


His writing is straightforward and “folksy”; the only case where he lets himself get emotional is while wandering amid the debris on the D-Day beaches and finding scattered bodies in the sand. He’s generally polite to the Germans, commenting (for example) about a scared young German soldier he saw in a field hospital; he never interviews any, though. He’s often close enough to the fighting to get near misses and mentions self-deprecatingly how scared he is (and, of course, he eventually bought a bullet that didn’t miss).


Brave Men doesn’t really add anything to the grand history of the war; Pyle avoided officer briefings and rear area command posts so he never really reported the “big picture” (to be fair, censorship probably wouldn’t have allowed it). But it does remind you that the war on the American side was fought by perfectly ordinary people in extraordinary situations – like all wars are fought, I suppose. ( )