In late May 2023 the Wall Street Journal published a book review of David Chrisinger's The Soldier's Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II. I knew that Ernie Pyle was a famous war correspondent, but I didn't realize he walked up and down Normandy Beach on 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day. The review included several quotes from Pyle's book Brave Men, originally published in 1944 and reissued in 2001 and 2023.[1]
I wanted to read Pyle's Normandy experiences for myself, so I created an account at the Internet Archive's Open Library and found and "checked out" an online copy of his book.[2]. On page 390 he wrote:
I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, for they were dead. ...
I walked for a mile and a half along the water's edge of our many miled invasion beach. I walked slowly, for the detail of that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
It was a lovely day on 4 June 1979 when I took this photograph on Omaha Beach near the village of Vierville-sur-Mer. I probably strolled on the same patch of sand as Pyle did 35 years earlier, but thankfully I didn't see any signs of a great battle, save for destroyed inland bunkers and the remains of Czech hedgehogs that were barely visible at low tide.
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