Ernest Taylor Pyle was a 40-year-old journalist at the time World War II began. Pyle had built his reputation on writing human interest stories about ordinary Americans during five years that he and his wife roamed America’s Great Depression hinterlands. He went to London in 1940 to cover the Battle Of Britain.
The United States and England invaded North Africa on November 8, 1942. Ernie Pyle arrived in Algiers two weeks later. He began sending dispatches back to the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance.
In his introduction to Ernie’s War, David Nicholes wrote: “Only rarely did he write about the so-called ‘big picture.’ Rather, Pyle focused on individual combatants—how he lived, endured by turns battle and boredom, and sometimes how he died, far from home in a war whose origins he only vaguely understood.”
On December 1, Pyle reported: “At last we are in it up to our necks, and everything is changed, even your outlook on life. “Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now.”
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Audie Leon Murphy was born on June 20, 1924, near Greenville, Texas. His parents were sharecroppers. He enlisted as a private in the Army in 1942. During the next three years, Murphy would become, in the words of Richard L. Rodgers, “one of the best fighting combat soldiers of this or any other century.”
Murphy was nothing like what you might picture as a World War II “Rambo.” He was slight of build, only 20 years old and looked more like a boy than a combat hardened soldier, the day he earned a “battle field” 2nd Lieutenant commission.
During Murphy’s combat career, he was wounded three times. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor and 33 other awards and decorations for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.”
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World War II infantrymen Willie and Joe were creations of soldier cartoonist William Henry “Bill” Mauldin. To most GIs Willie and Joe, much to the discomfort of Army generals, reflected life in the trenches and spoke their true feelings about war and military life.
“Sgt. Bill Mauldin appears to us over here,” wrote Ernie Pyle, “to be the finest cartoonist the war has produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are also grim and real.”
Bill Mauldin was born in 1921 on a farm near Mountain Home, New Mexico. “An early case of rickets,” said Mauldin in his autobiography, “left me with an oversized skull on a scrawny, pot-bellied frame.”
At age 13, Mauldin subscribed to a cartoon correspondence course. He also began taking lessons from a professional cartoonist in a nearby town. Mauldin’s first paying job, ten dollars, was designing a postcard for a pottery company.
In high school Mauldin concentrated on art and journalism and joined the ROTC. He later attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for a year. At 18 he enlisted in the Arizona National Guard. A few days later the Guard was “federalized” and Mauldin went to the Army’s 45th Division at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
By the time the 45th got to Sicily, Mauldin was on the staff of the 45th Division News, and his cartoons often appeared in the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Many of his cartoons soon were published in a book, Up Front. In 1945 Mauldin’s work earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
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Ernie Pyle knew Mauldin. “His work is so mature that I pictured him as a man approaching middle age,” wrote Pyle. “Yet he is only twenty-two, and he looks even younger.” He also noted that Sgt. Mauldin had earned a purple heart after being wounded during the Italian campaign.
I don’t know if Pyle ever met Audie Murphy.
Pyle, as were Murphy and Mauldin, had been born on a farm. He shared with them a kind of up-country respect and sympathy for the everyday soldier. He mourned “the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.”
Of the three men it was Pyle, the noncombatant, the war correspondent, who would become a combat casualty.
Before the war ended in Europe, Pyle was assigned to the Pacific Theater. On April 18,1945, on the island of Ie Shima, a Japanese sniper’s bullet struck him in the head.
Mauldin and Murphy came home at war’s end. Each hailed as a hero. By some whimsical twist of fate Hollywood recruited them for the feature rolls in Stephen Crane’s haunting tale of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage.
Murphy made several more movies; Mauldin became a political cartoonist and received another Pulitzer prize. Murphy died in a plane crash in 1971. Mauldin, also, is no longer with us. Willie and Joe have achieved immortality in the archives of World War. II and in the hearts of war veterans.
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