Ernie Pyle wrote columns from the front lines. He told how it felt to be pinned down in a muddy ditch, knowing that if you stuck your head up you would get it blown off. It would be classic Pyle to read about the sailor on a gun mount desperately trying to nail a kamikaze plane before it got to him. And he would paint the picture of the same soldier or sailor, when there was a lull, plopping down, taking a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and with a stub of a pencil writing a letter home. Pyle's characters often didn't know how the big war was going, maybe not even how his own battle was progressing, but he knew the job he had to do and he did it. Pyle was right there on the front lines with him to cover the war, and that was where he was when he was killed.
Bill Mauldin was just as incisive in his reporting about the front-line soldiers in Europe, but as a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes Mauldin always had a wry touch of humor. I don't know how civilians felt about it, but one of the favorites for people in the military showed a scruffy Staff Sergeant talking to some soldiers sitting in the rubble of a town, and he is saying to them: "I need a couple of guys what don't owe me no money for a little routine patrol."
And now, the collected wartime columns of Ernie Pyle and cartoons of Bill Mauldin are coming out in a special two-volume, leather bound edition of a book. Good. Now people will be able to see World War II as the average military man saw it.
This is Gordon Sawyer, from a window on historic Green Street.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2002/1/199527