Text and Photos
By Rod King
Guest Writer
NORMANDY 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 a stroll along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, 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 of 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.”
Those were the opening paragraphs of Ernie Pyle’s newspaper dispatch the day after the Allies stormed the Normandy beach in World War II. The story, which went to hundreds of newspapers in the U.S., was entitled “The Horrible Waste of War.”
This article and many others, along with the stories behind them, are on display at the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in his hometown of Dana. The house in which he was born in 1900 sits next door to the museum and is also open to the public. The Friends of Ernie Pyle are dedicated both to preserving the memory of America’s most beloved WWII civilian newspaper correspondent and the GI’s whom he admired and wrote about in his daily column.
Inside the first of two Quonset huts that comprise the museum is a 10-minute video presentation of Pyle’s life as a roving reporter and then as a war correspondent starting in England, slogging through France, Italy and Sicily and finally in the Pacific Theater. Pyle never dealt with the statistics of the war, but had a way of relating what was going on to the folks back home through the eyes of the everyday soldier.
The hands-on museum features vignettes of the war from a sandbag dugout in Italy similar to one where he wrote many of his columns, and a room-long diorama of the Normandy beach head to a scene of a GI encampment with a Jeep and the final display, which is a sign that reads, “At this spot, the 77th Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April, 1945.”
That’s when Pyle was killed by an enemy machine gunner on Shima, an island near Okinawa. He was 44 years old.
Throughout are enlargements of articles like the rather humorous one he wrote about the work horse of the infantry, the Jeep, and another about how the night Capt. Waskow was brought down the mountain on the back of a mule and the reaction of his men to his death. Pick up a field phone and hear the voice of well-known actor William Windom of “Murder She Wrote” fame relating the stories behind the scene in front of you.
For a microcosm of World War II and Pyle’s view of the action, plan to visit the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana. Head over to Interstate 69 and take it south to Interstate 465 at Indianapolis and go west to US 36 (Rockville Road). Then drive west for about an hour and 20 minutes through the towns of Rockville and Montezuma to IN 71N (County Road 300W) and turn right (north). Just a couple minutes up the road is Dana. Cross the railroad tracks and you’ll see the house and museum on the left.
It is open May 3 through Veterans Day, Nov. 11. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. No admission fee.
