Monday, July 05, 2010
"A Pure Miracle" - Ernie Pyle
When we celebrate our freedom, I wonder if we really know what it took to get it and keep it.
Freedom is easy to live with, but it has never come easily.
Is this age of high-tech everything, including war, I doubt we can imagine how it used to be...
Freedom is easy to live with, but it has never come easily.
Is this age of high-tech everything, including war, I doubt we can imagine how it used to be...
Indiana University archives the reporting of Ernie Pyle, a World War II war correspondent. It's quite revealing. Here's part of one:
"Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot, until fills had been made."
