Fort Worth Business Press, June 2, 2014 Vol. 26, No. 21 | Page 37

opinion

fwbusinesspress.com | June 2 - 8, 2014

Walking on the beach
amid the waste of war
n By Ernie Pyle

N

ORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June
16, 1944 – I took a walk along
the historic coast of Normandy
in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along
the seashore. Men were sleeping on the
sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men
were floating in the water, but they didn’t
know they were in the water, for they were
dead.
The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions
of them. In the center each of them had a
green design exactly like a four-leaf clover.
The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the
water’s edge of our many-miled invasion
beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the
detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling.
The awful waste and destruction of war,
even aside from the loss of human life,
has always been one of its outstanding
features to those who are in it. Anything
and everything is expendable. And we did
expend on our beachhead in Normandy
during those first few hours.
For a mile out from the beach there
were scores of tanks and trucks and
boats that you could no longer see, for
they were at the bottom of the water –
swamped by overloading, or hit by shells,
or sunk by mines. Most of their crews
were lost.
You could see trucks tipped half over
and swamped. You could see partly
sunken barges, and the angled-up corners
of jeeps, and small landing craft half
submerged. And at low tide you could still
see those vicious six-pronged iron snares
that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach itself, high and dry, were
all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were
tanks that had only just made the beach
before being knocked out. There were
jeeps that had been burned to a dull
gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There
were half-tracks carrying office equipment
that had been made into a shambles by a
single shell hit, their interiors still holding
their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were LCT’s turned completely
upside down, and lying on their backs,
and how they got that way I don’t know.
There were boats stacked on top of each
other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage
there were abandoned rolls of barbed
wire and smashed bulldozers and big
stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles
of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts
and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and
mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of tele-

Photo taken on D+2, after relief forces reached the
Rangers at Point Du Hoe. Some German prisoners are
being moved in after capture by the relieving forces.

phone wire and big rolls of steel matting
and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach lay, expended, sufficient
men and mechanism for a small war.
They were gone forever now. And yet we
could afford it.
We could afford it because we were
on, we had our toehold, and behind us
there were such enormous replacements
for this wreckage on the beach that you
could hardly conceive of their sum total.
Men and equipment were flowing from
England in such a gigantic stream that it
made the waste on the beachhead seem
like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
A few hundred yards back on the beach
is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent
hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for
prisoners of war. From up there you could
see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing out there on the water
beyond all this wreckage was the greatest
armada man has ever seen. You simply
could not believe the gigantic collection of
ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and
clear to the far horizon of the sea and
beyond, and it spread out to the sid \