The Big One

I cover New England -- a region that has not seen war for 220 years -- for The Washington Post. It is a far cry from Margaret Bourke-White's adventures spotting artillery from a Piper Cub over Italy, or Ernie Pyle's description of "the fantastic surge of caterpillar metal" in a tank battle in Northern Africa, or Homer Bigart's peerless account of the Battle of San Pietro, in which he wrote:

Outstanding among Frazior's men was Lieutenant Rufus J. Cleghorn, of Waco, Tex., a barrel-chested football player from Baylor University. Exulting in battle, Cleghorn clambered to the highest rock of Samurco's pinnacle and howled insults at the Germans, pausing now and then to toss grenades. For variety, Cleghorn occasionally put his weight against a huge boulder and sent it rolling down the slope. He roared with laughter as Germans attempted to dodge the hurtling boulders.

Talk about material! You couldn't top a name like Rufus Cleghorn if you tried to make it up, and you certainly couldn't top the word-picture Bigart made.

So it is with a mixture of emotions that I meet -- or, in some cases, get reacquainted with -- the writers collected in Reporting World War II. Here are all the great pieces with those now-legendary bylines -- the warnings about Hitler from William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow, the gustatory adventures of A.J. Liebling, the narratives of the great battles, a gently bemused E.B. White piece about a visit by Dorothy Lamour to a bond rally in Maine, Janet Flanner's letters from Paris, John Hersey's account of Hiroshima, plus dozens more pieces by Martha Gellhorn, Bigart, the whole gang. They wrote marvelous pieces, and I notice that they did it all without briefings, without flaks or pre-packaged soundbites, without laptops and cell phones and all the rest. They wrote these pieces working against censors and scarce cable time and mud and danger and death. They humped all over the world, lugging their portable typewriters, their smokes, and their dry socks through mud and snow and sand and brought back great stories.

Boy, did they have access. I notice in reading an account of the Battle of Midway, the greatest naval engagement in history, that the writer Foster Hailey was right there on the deck:

The Japanese bombers were paying little attention to the cruisers or destroyers. One, however, after dropping his bomb, turned toward the Astoria and gave us one squirt from his machine gun. It was his last one. As he flew past the cruiser at bridge level, the 20-millimeter guns went to work on him. His gunner was already slumped over as he flew past the ship and as he passed the bridge, only fifty feet above the water, he too was hit and sagged down against the side of his cockpit. His plane never came out of its shallow glide, but plunged into the water astern.

And Hailey was not alone. Vincent Tubbs, for example, writing in the Baltimore Afro-American, described the bravery of a black unit patrolling the jungles of an island in the Southwest Pacific, hunting "Japs."

Pinned down in the brush beside the trail, Pvt. Gilliam of Cincinnati, firing a Browning automatic rifle, knocked off six, blasting one out of a tree and almost cutting him in half with the rapid fire. Pfc. James Cofer of Washington, Ga., held the gun in position by its hot barrel with his bare hands, then, firing a Buck Rogers machine gun, crawled forward to cover Pfc. Ed Bradford of Hodge, La., whose machine gun jammed, while Bradford sought cover.

When I read this piece I can't help wondering what ever happened to Pfc. Cofer. Did he make it? Did he ruin his hands? Where is he now?

The war correspondents also did a great job at explanatory journalism. Here, for instance, is A.J. Liebling, on the anatomy of a landing craft, which he rode to the beach at Normandy on D-Day:

The LCIL [Landing Craft, Infantry, Large] has a flat bottom and draws only five feet of water, so she can go right up on a beach. Her hull is a box for carrying men. . . . An LCIL has a stern anchor which she drops just before she goes aground and two forward ramps which she runs out as she touches bottom. As troops go down the ramps, the ship naturally lightens, and she rises a few inches in the water; she then winches herself off by the stern anchor, in much the same way a monkey pulls himself back on a limb by his tail.

That monkey tail is pure Liebling, but the imagery has much in common with the rest of the war writing. As a group, these writers emerge as the masters of a certain kind of American prose, the plain style. With legions of simple declarative sentences, they take readers onto beaches, out to sea, and into the air. Their works are amazingly free of puffery and bombast and sentimentality, which may be the reason they stand up so well. At the same time, though, many of these writers managed to anticipate much of the vaunted "New Journalism" that was to follow -- in their use of the full array of narrative techniques and in their attempts to get inside the heads of their subjects.

Sometimes, of course, the writers got too close to the action and never came back. Chief among them was Ernie Pyle, the poet of the foot soldier, the author of piece after piece about slogging through Italy, France, and the Pacific. With headlines like "Brave Men. Brave Men!" and "The God-Damned Infantry," Pyle brought the war home to a pre-television America. In March 1944, covering the Italian campaign for Scripps-Howard, he captured life in the foxhole:

When a man is wounded, he just has to lie there and suffer till dark. Occasionally, when one is wounded badly, he'll call out and the word is passed back and the medics will make a dash for him. But usually he just has to treat himself and wait until dark. For more than a week these boys lay in water in their foxholes, able to move or stretch themselves only at night. In addition to water seeping up from below, it rained from above all the time. It was cold, too, and of a morning new snow would glisten on the hills ahead.

Pyle slogged on until the next April, when he was killed by a Japanese machine-gunner on a tiny island off Okinawa.

I have no wish to see combat myself, but I do admire the war correspondents' bravery and I envy them in other ways. I envy all the little things -- their trenchcoats and their English suits, the burgundy and bordeaux, their pipes and their Camels. Facing death, they could drink and smoke and the hell with tomorrow. I think of A.J. Liebling, perhaps the greatest gourmand of his generation, noshing and chomping his way from Normandy to Paris, awash in wine, cheese, and cholesterol.

More than that, I wonder what it would be like to share the deeper satisfactions I imagine they enjoyed. So many of them, for example, wrote in the first-person plural. They said "We took this hill . . ." or "the Germans gave us heavy fire" or the like. I don't think I have ever used the first-person plural, for the good reason that the journalistic stance has changed since 1945. There is no single national purpose to identify with, and if there were, there's a good chance that journalists would stand aside. All of which may be necessary and even wise, but I still envy Pyle and Bigart and the others their solidarity with the troops.

On an even deeper level, I also feel envious of them as writers for the material they had. Not to belittle for a moment the horror of war, but they certainly had a great story line. Not only did they have an overall theme of "good guys and bad guys," but they had the pleasure of describing pure action, a job we are losing every day to CNN and our other camera-toting colleagues. The fact is, editors rarely send us to the beaches to describe what happened. Or if they do, we go knowing that no one will read it. We go to second-guess the generals, or to write world-weary pieces about the media overkill we are part of.

I realize that the war correspondents did not create their times, any more than I do mine. But they certainly rose to the occasion. As a journalist, I have to admire the greatness of their themes, the beauty and power of their words. So to those writers who covered the Big One, I offer, across half a century, a salute.

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