During the second World War, Ernie Pyle was an American journalist who served as a war correspondent. He covered many stories of American involvement in Europe and North Africa. Prior to the war, Pyle was already an established journalist; he’d written for many magazines in the states before. During the war, Pyle covered news from all troops, but focused mostly on infantrymen, whom he believed were the most courageous and resolute of all American troops.
On June 6th, 1944, the Allied forces invaded Normandy Beach, signifying the beginning of the ending of the war. The shore and the countryside were secured by Allied powers, but the first day of the invasion – which later came to be known as D-Day – was one of the bloodiest days of the war. As a report, Ernie Pyle went to Normandy Beach following the first day of the Allied invasion to write about the success of the operation as well as reflect upon its casualties. Both the tactical success of the beach and the staggering loss of soldiers served as the exigence to Ernie’s reflections on WWII and D-Day. His thoughts culminate in a series of three D-Day columns.
In his piece, Pyle touches upon both the emotional and factual aspects of the war. He describes the carnage before him in a rather detached and desensitized way; he simply lists what he sees and offers little emotional narrative other than a few choice words such as “vast,” “startling,” and “lonesome.” When describing Normandy Beach, Pyle simply lists the things and the wreckage on the beach. He uses variations of the phrase ‘there were’ to list the things scattered on the beach. He says that “there were… trucks… there were tanks… there were jeeps… there were big derricks… there were LCTs… there were boats;” this anaphora emphasizes both the vastness of the wreckage and the clinical way that Pyle approaches the situation.
Additionally, Pyle completely avoids describing gore. Instead, he refers to the lost men as parts of machinery, “expended and sufficient,” as if they were just tools to be used and pieces to be discarded. Pyle lists the soldier’s personal paraphernalia but does so in the same clinical, factual way. He sees “the socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades,” but fails to add any emotional insight to his objective point of view. Moreover, Pyle repeatedly uses the phrase “I don’t know” and “I have no idea,” adding to his desensitized tone and lack of emotion.
To his audience, Pyle’s underrepresentation of gore and emotion must have been a relief from the stream of media and news covering the war. To readers at home, news of the war was constantly saturated with pathos and lurid violence, startling images of death and destruction.
And yet, Pyle’s seemingly emotionless piece evokes as much emotion as the other news pieces provide – if not more. After seeing so many graphic depictions of the war, people in the States became desensitized. The same arguments and the same appeals to emotion over and over again became trite. Pyle’s detached tone and his numbness – his lack of feelings – towards the scene on Normandy Beach understate the gravity and the emotional weight of the situation. But this lack of emotion is the very thing that forces his audience to realize that there is emotion in this situation. The invasion of Normandy Beach – D-Day in particular – remains one of the most graphic and emotive moments out of the entire war; and yet, many people stateside back then – and even now, after seeing so many graphic renditions of the infamous operation on television and in movies – couldn’t truly understand the weight of the situation.
By using a clinical and objective tone, Pyle evokes a very complicated response from his audience. He describes things that would normally be used as props in an appeal to pathos – things like personal photos, religion, innocent animals – in an objective way to evoke emotion from the audience, instead of forcing emotion onto the audience. Pyle’s readers will come to terms with their own emotions when faced with the stark reality of the situation; Pyle only gives his readers a skeleton of what really happened, but he focuses in on specific details – “bloody, abandoned shoes,” “a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it,” “a banjo,” “bank abandoned pages [meant for] writing… letters.” Given this, his readers bring their own emotions to the situation, extrapolating from what Pyle gives to them.
In a previous post about the contradictions in America, I mentioned that there comes a sense of desensitization that follows an overexposure to something. There is a multitude of psychological and biological studies that prove and disprove this idea, but often times, I see that I, myself become desensitized to these things. And yet, as I read more and more, I recognize when my own emotions and thoughts have become numb due to overstimulation; identifying the problem is half of the solution, and now I can work to push these barriers and acknowledge serious problems as they are.
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