This Is The Way It Was

By Gordon Hopkins This column would have been more appropriate yesterday but, alas, yesterday was Thursday and this paper comes out on Fridays. Yesterday was June 6, marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day.Even today, the Normandy landing remains the largest seaborne invasion in history. I only recently learned the official code name for D-Day was not D-Day at all but Operation Neptune, which was the assault phase of Operation Overlord. This is one of those days that I remember other people, mostly family. That is the whole point of anniversaries, after all. Mostly, I think of my father and his three brothers, all of whom served during World War II. This, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, none were actually anywhere near Normandy during that famous battle. My father was somewhere in the South Pacific. More accurately, he was somewhere under the South Pacific, since he was serving on a sub at the time. Meanwhile, my Uncle Benny, known as Hoppy, as all men named Hopkins inevitably are, was a prisoner of the Japanese. I do find myself also thinking about someone else. Not a relative. Not someone I ever met. Nevertheless, someone who has proven important to my life: Ernie Pyle. In the 1930's, Pyle wrote a hugely popular national travel column for Scripps-Howard News Service, published in about 200 newspapers. But it was his work as a war correspondent for which he was and is best known. I've never set foot on a battlefield. At least, not until long after the battle was over. Sometimes, I feel a bit guilty using the same career titles as a man like Ernie Pyle. Journalist. Columnist. Yes, technically speaking, I am these things, too. Technically speaking, the Taj Mahal and an outhouse are both buildings. Robert De Niro and Paris Hilton are both actors. While there were a great many war correspondents reporting on the war, it was Ernie Pyle's columns that readers most looked forward to. He didn't report on hills captured and strategies and the amounts of land gained and lost in battles. He wrote the personal stories of the men on the front lines. That is what the folks back home wanted to read. So, it must have been incredibly frustrating for readers when Pyle's account of the most famous battle of the war didn’t show up. Pyle didn't even make it to Omaha Beach until June 7, well after the bloodiest part of the fighting was done, although the gut-churning aftermath was still very much in evidence. Pyle's first post-invasion columns didn't hit American newspapers until June 12. “Owing 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…After it was over it seemed to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all…” wrote Pyle. “The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages all ours. The Germans were dug into positions they had been working on for months… They could shoot parallel with the shore 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…”On June 16 of that fateful year, The Washington Daily News ran Pyle's column on the front page. The headline read, “This Is The Way It Was…By Ernie Pyle.”

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