In this book, Library of America collects stories from the front. This volume includes the work of Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, E. B. White, William L. Shirer, John Steinbeck, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward R. Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, James Agee, John Hersey, and many more.
"It changed everything," Stephen Ambrose writes in the "Preface." War was portrayed in painful detail. People around the world were able to read the events of World War II in a way that had never been done before. The stories were told in graphic detail, but the reports also provided the reader with something more... the power to imagine what it was like to really be there.
The book is, as Ambrose explains, "an account of people caught in the maelstrom." They are "ordinary people from all walks of life," who got caught up in a series of events that changed the world. And they would never be the same.
How could they be the same? How could anyone be anything but changed by war? Emotions are changed; bodies are changed; the whole conception of what the world is and what one human being can do to another... is changed.
In "Fall of Poland," Oto Tolischus writes about the way the bodies seem to change in his mind's eye. As he looks at the bodies lying on the ground, the dead men begin to look like "inanimate objects," and then as the darkness comes, the bodies look like mummies. He says, "If war robs death of its majesty, nature compensates by covering up some of the gruesomeness, enabling active men to keep sane."
The book is, as Ambrose explains, "an account of people caught in the maelstrom." They are "ordinary people from all walks of life," who got caught up in a series of events that changed the world. And they would never be the same.
How could they be the same? How could anyone be anything but changed by war? Emotions are changed; bodies are changed; the whole conception of what the world is and what one human being can do to another... is changed.
In "Fall of Poland," Oto Tolischus writes about the way the bodies seem to change in his mind's eye. As he looks at the bodies lying on the ground, the dead men begin to look like "inanimate objects," and then as the darkness comes, the bodies look like mummies. He says, "If war robs death of its majesty, nature compensates by covering up some of the gruesomeness, enabling active men to keep sane."
In "Search for Battle," Walter Bernstein writes, "there is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God." There is no escape.
Only the wreckage is left behind. Bodies are strewn on the beaches, and across the landscape. As Pyle writes: "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."
In the end, Pyle too was expendable. He was killed by a sniper on the little offshore island of Ie Shima. His death shocked his readers, but a piece of writing was found in his pocket. In the "Introduction," Stephen Hynes explains that "It is not as much a dispatch as a meditation on the end of the war and the monstrous infinity of the dead, addressed to his readers at home who will never have to witness such sights."
Only the wreckage is left behind. Bodies are strewn on the beaches, and across the landscape. As Pyle writes: "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."
In the end, Pyle too was expendable. He was killed by a sniper on the little offshore island of Ie Shima. His death shocked his readers, but a piece of writing was found in his pocket. In the "Introduction," Stephen Hynes explains that "It is not as much a dispatch as a meditation on the end of the war and the monstrous infinity of the dead, addressed to his readers at home who will never have to witness such sights."
