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Loading... Brave Men (original 1944; edition 1944)by Pyle Ernie
Work InformationBrave Men by Ernie Pyle (1944)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A classic book from my dad by an award winning journalist. 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. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesArmed Services Edition (P-30) Has the adaptationDistinctions
History.
Military.
Nonfiction.
HTML: Europe was in the throes of World War II, and when America joined the fighting, Ernie Pyle went along. Long before television beamed daily images of combat into our living rooms, Pyle's on-the-spot reporting gave the American public a firsthand view of what war was like for the boys on the front. Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches, battlefields, field hospitals, and beleaguered cities of Europe. What he witnessed he described with a clarity, sympathy, and grit that gave the public back home an immediate sense of the foot soldier's experience. There were really two wars, John Steinbeck wrote in Time magazine: one of maps and logistics, campaigns, ballistics, divisions, and regiments and the other a "war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courageâ??and that is Ernie Pyle's war." This collection of Pyle's columns detailing the fighting in Europe in 1943â??44 brings that warâ??and the living, and dying, moments of historyâ??home to us once No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.542History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War II Campaigns and battles by theatreLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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