A Memorable Encounter in a Small Indiana Town
The memory of this "encounter" is fresh and nurturing now, eighteen months later. I was traveling through Indiana in my RV, hauling a motor cycle. I had just spent a week at a campground near Bloomington, where I had grown up more than half a century before. As I was driving along I was thinking of my father and especially of a man named Ernie Pyle whom he introduced to me and my brother. Pyle was an Indiana University graduate and the greatest journalist of the Second World War. He had died in the war before we learned about him, but in my father's memory his reports from the front still lived.
Driving through forests and fields and small towns along Route 36, in the late afternoon. I particularly remembered Dad reading Ernie Pyle's immortal account of "The Death of Captain Waskow." Pyle wrote the article "At The Front Lines in Italy" on January 10, 1944. Here are passages from Pyle's report:
Driving through forests and fields and small towns along Route 36, in the late afternoon. I particularly remembered Dad reading Ernie Pyle's immortal account of "The Death of Captain Waskow." Pyle wrote the article "At The Front Lines in Italy" on January 10, 1944. Here are passages from Pyle's report:
In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.
Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.
"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.
"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time."
"I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
Pyle goes on to describe the parade of mules that came down the trail with the bodies of dead soldiers. Then the body of the beloved Capt. Waskow was laid on the ground. One-by-one men came forward and paid their respects. "God damn it," said one. "I sure am sorry, Sir," said another. The most eloquent tribute came from a soldier who said nothing at all:
[He] squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
I remember the emotion welling up in my father's voice as he told the story of Capt. Waskow, especially the account of the soldier holding the dead captain's hand. He wanted his children to be fully aware of just how powerful Ernie Pyle's account was. "Just imagine being loved that much," Dad said.
All color photos in this posting are by Bill Youngs.
Ernie Pyle and Capt. Waskow and my father were in my mind as I was driving through Indiana corn fields when I saw in the distance a solitary gas station. I was slowing down to fill up when I spotted an electronic sign in front of the station.
Now I have a theory that we historians have our own Greek god, Clio, who still appears once in a while to enrich our lives and profit our work. I sensed that force a few years ago in New York City when I felt the presence of the newsboys who gathered on the street outside the elder Theodore Roosevelt's home on the night that he died of cancer; and I felt it again last Spring while attending a slavery conference in Barbados when school children sang a wonderful new song about their ancestors coming from Africa. In my very limited experience, Clio appears in those moments when (1) we are deeply engaged in a project, and (2) we may need some information or insight that is not immediately evident. Clio may have been on duty that afternoon outside the town of Dana, Indiana, where it turns out, Ernie Pyle was born. At any rate, here was a sign, beckoning me.
Now I have a theory that we historians have our own Greek god, Clio, who still appears once in a while to enrich our lives and profit our work. I sensed that force a few years ago in New York City when I felt the presence of the newsboys who gathered on the street outside the elder Theodore Roosevelt's home on the night that he died of cancer; and I felt it again last Spring while attending a slavery conference in Barbados when school children sang a wonderful new song about their ancestors coming from Africa. In my very limited experience, Clio appears in those moments when (1) we are deeply engaged in a project, and (2) we may need some information or insight that is not immediately evident. Clio may have been on duty that afternoon outside the town of Dana, Indiana, where it turns out, Ernie Pyle was born. At any rate, here was a sign, beckoning me.
What was an "Ernie Pyle Festival" I wondered, and so after gassing up I followed Indiana 71 a short distance off the main road to the little town of Dana. From what I could tell everyone had gathered at the town center for a street fair.
There must be thousands of these town festivals across the country in any year complete with corn dogs and amusement rides. Dana offered these attractions, and much more: the main event turned out to be an auction to raise funds for the local Ernie Pyle World War II Museum:
I joined the crowd.
I was impressed by the community spirit: the affection in the audience for Ernie PYLE was palpable. I decided to make a contribution to the museum -- and to my own collection of historical artifacts by bidding on a first-day envelop with an Ernie Pyle image and stamps.
Evening was coming on, and I needed to get back to my RV and seek a camp ground. But on the way out of town, I paused at the Ernie Pyle house and museum. They were closed because, presumably, anyone connected with the displays was at the street fair and auction. Here is the house with the museum in a Quonset House in the background.
Outside the museum was a plaque with another of Ernie Pyle's famous statements about the soldiers in the war. A few months later I was at West Point giving a talk on "The Army and the National Parks" and visiting with a friend, Major Ryan Shaw, a Military Academy instructor and veteran of the Iraq War. I wanted to mention the Ernie Pyle memorial, and I asked Maj. Shaw to read the lines that follow for use in my talk. I like the recording so much that I am including it here, confident that Ernie Pyle would have been pleased. Click below for the reading by Ryan Shaw. The image follows.
A few minutes later I was on the road again, driving west on Route 36, deeply moved and profoundly inspired by the little festival in the little town celebrating the life of the great man.
• For the full text of Ernie Pyle's article on Capt. Waskow, click here.
• To visit the web site for the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum, click here.
• Indiana University hosts a wonderful web site on Ernie Pyle including a a selection of his articles in print version and also as readings by Owen Johnson. Click here.
• To visit the web site for the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum, click here.
• Indiana University hosts a wonderful web site on Ernie Pyle including a a selection of his articles in print version and also as readings by Owen Johnson. Click here.
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