The day AFTER D-Day

[Bob Of Burleson]

A pure miracle

Editor’s note: Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day. To mark the occasion, the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana, and the Scripps Howard Foundation made available this column written by war correspondent Ernie Pyle immediately after the Normandy invasion. For more on Pyle and the museum, visit erniepyle.org. Find two additional Pyle columns online at sj-r.com/opinions.

By Ernie Pyle
SJ-R.com

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit the shore.

By the time we got here the beaches had been taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.

Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn all over these bitter sands.

That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.

That plus an intense, grim determination of work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships standing in droves out to sea.

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