Brave Men

A friend, knowing my interest in World Warll history, bought an original "Brave Men" 1944 copywright Henry Holt & Co edition at a used bookstore fo[$$$]. My great luck to have such good friends and I get to read such a wonderful book. Any serious WWll history reader must read this book. Ernie Pyle's work is an American treasue. He wrote about the lives of the common soldier, sailor, airman. These are the "Brave Men". The guy that just does his job as best he can while trying to survive and get home in one piece. My father, a combat rifle platoon leader with the 9th division in France and Germany in 1944, once told me that he was no hero, and he wasn't brave, but he saw a lot of guys that were. Funny how they all say that. Ernie's book is about guys like my dad and a million other anonymous guys like him that did the dirty work of war. They're my heros.

Brave Men is a message in a bottle from a world that no longer exists. The world of 1944 was at war and terrible things were happening on the battlefields of that world to perfectly average people. How they coped with it, overcame the ironic battlefield alternatives of horror and boredom, and marched on to victory is best recounted in the writings of Ernie Pyle. No one spans that range of experience with greater mastery than unassuming Pyle. There's no showing off here. He has one goal and one goal only: putting you right there with the American forces slogging through Italy and Normandy. His vivid dispatches preserves their fears and aspirations in a casual, offhand prose that charms you one minute and tears your heart out the next. No one loved the common soldier better nor observed his daily life with greater insight than Ernie Pyle. He recounts the whole of war, neglecting neither its horror nor its humor, neither the frontline nor the rear echelon. With deft care he selects the incidents that hit home, setting them against a background of individual soldiers going about their daily jobs. In doing so, Pyle conveys a sense of the scale of the great WWII military enterprise: from the lone soldiers huddling in foxholes to the great and complex machinery laboring behind the scenes to support them.

Ernie Pyle was one of the most effective and well known battlefield correspondents of World War II. Pyle's on-the-spot reporting gave the American public a firsthand view of what war was like for their boys on the front lines he followed American service men into the trenches, battlefield combats, field hospitals, and war ravaged cities of Europe. What he witnessed he was able to vividly record and describe with clarity, sympathy, and grit to give his readership an immediate and accurate sense of the foot soldier's experience. Brave Men is a collection of Pyle's wartime newspaper columns detailing the 1943-44 fighting in Europe and endures as a fitting monument to both one correspondent's courage and journalistic expertise and the battlefield experiences of a generation of young American soldiers in the European theater. Tragically, when Pyle went to the South Pacific to continue his wartime reportage, a sniper's bullet took his life in 1945. Brave Men is an essential title for any personal, academic, or community library World War II collection.