75 Years Ago Today, Courage and Horror Washed Over Normandy's Beaches

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

06 June 19

The people who told what stories they could tell are gone, and now the people to whom they told the stories are going.

eventy-five years ago this Thursday was the day that Ernie Pyle turned around on war. Perhaps, with Ida B. Wells, the most underrated American journalist of the 20th Century, Pyle also was the country's most beloved war correspondent, the dogface's friend, filing his copy from trenches and foxholes, filing his copy under deadline and under fire.

In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, David Chrisinger describes what Pyle saw on the beaches of Normandy, and how it darkened and deepened his understanding of what happens when people make war on each other some place or another, and how it affected his journalism like nothing had before. Chrisinger quotes a column that Pyle wrote on June 17, 1944, 11 days after the landings. The writing is rich and full and honest. He does what a British observer said Mathew Brady's photographs of the battlefield at Antietam did; Pyle was bringing the dead of the battlefield to our dooryards and along our streets. Pyle wrote:

“It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach...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...I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. 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.

"As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach. 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."

When I grew up, practically every adult male in my little neighborhood had fought in World War II. My father was a Naval gunnery officer who'd fought in both theaters and ended up as assistant port director in Niigata, in Japan, during the postwar occupation there. My best friend's father was a seaman on an aircraft carrier. Another friend's father had slogged through Europe, hitting Utah Beach on D-Day and not coming off the line until the Germans surrendered, with a short Christmastime side trip to the Ardennes to relieve Bastogne.

They talked among themselves, laughing at ribald stories about liberties in London or Honolulu, and they answered what questions they could from us, the children that, like the GI Bill, were part of what the universe owed them after the horrors they'd seen. When my aunt Mary was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a decade or so after it had killed my father, her longterm memory was bright and sharp, as is usually the case with Alzheimer's patients. One day, Mary told my wife that John, my father, had come home from the war and told her that he wanted to be a teacher because, after what he'd seen, all he wanted to do was to be around children. This was something he'd never told me.

World War II was a living presence in our lives. It lived in the stories our fathers told us, and it lived in the awe we felt when we started studying history and found out that the old fud in the golf shoes had held off the panzers in Belgium, or dodged kamikazes off Okinawa, or walked out of a landing craft into blood and death, relentless fire and merciless iron. Now, we're rounding into our 60s, all of us, the little cosmic rewards that came along for what these people had seen on Guadalcanal, in the Ardennes, or in Normandy, and we're beginning to pass from the scene, too. The people who told what stories they could tell are gone, and now the people to whom they told the stories are going.

It is now 75 years since the unimaginable carnage, horror, and otherworldly courage washed over the sands of the French coast, three-quarters of a century since thousands of soldiers and sailors died to carve just the smallest crack in the edifice of European fascism, exactly the same amount of time passing as passed between Antietam and the establishment of Social Security, the birth of Colin Powell, and the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, the first look the world got at how Nazi Germany would make war on a place.

The men who fought their way ashore and survived have been dying off pretty regularly, and now their children are dying off, too. I was five years old in 1958 when Walter Williams, the last surviving veteran of the Civil War, died in Houston at the age of 117. My children—and certainly my grandchildren—will live to see the death of the last veteran of World War II. That will be a very sad day. I hope someone will be around to write about it. I hope someone will care enough to seek out and find the few surviving children of the men and women who saved the world. They will have some stories to tell.