Ernie Pyle and Captain Waskow

In December 1943 war correspondent Ernie Pyle, columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, returned to the safety of the rear lines after several days at the front in Italy. He had been with the men of the Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division as they had battled German troops on the advance to capture Rome. While with the American GIs, Pyle had gathered material about the fighting on Mount Sammucro, also called Hill 2105.

The action had been intense. The mountain’s slopes had been so steep that soldiers had to use mules to carry supplies up the hill and dead and wounded men down. Pyle would have plenty to tell the readers of his nationally known column about the soldiers he loved best—the infantry, those he once described as the “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys,” who, in the end, were the “guys wars can’t be won without.”

Safe at the headquarters of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army at Caserta, located north of Naples, Pyle shared a room with two other civilian correspondents, Reynolds Packard of United Press and Clark Lee of the International News Service. There Pyle tried to write about the tough fighting being waged on the Italian front.

The Mediterranean country’s hilly terrain, mixed with the cold, wet winter weather, had made conditions very difficult for American soldiers. “The country was shockingly beautiful,” Pyle told his readers, “and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy.” The Germans held on stubbornly to their positions and American forces gained only a yard or foot at a time. The opposing armies were so close together that they sometimes threw rocks at each other. The bloodshed he had witnessed, in addition to the frigid temperatures he endured, had depressed Pyle. He wrote his wife Jerry that he had seen “too many dead men, and wounded and exhausted ones, for the good of the soul.”

Pyle’s bad mood may have contributed to a crisis in confidence about his writing. Don Whitehead, an Associated Press reporter who had known Pyle since North Africa, remembered coming back from the front one evening to find his friend worried about three columns he had recently finished, but not yet sent to his editor, Lee Miller, at Scripps-Howard. “I’ve lost the touch,” Whitehead quoted Pyle as saying. “This stuff stinks. I feel stale and just can’t seem to get going again.”

Pyle tossed Whitehead the columns and asked him to read them and offer his opinion. The first column Whitehead picked up involved the death of a Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas. Waskow had served as commander of Company B of the 143rd Infantry Regiment, Thirty-sixth Infantry Division. He had been killed near San Pietro on December 14, 1943, while battling against German forces in the mountains outside of Rome.

The men under his command had nothing but praise for the officer who led them into combat. His troops considered Waskow a fair man, and some looked up to him as though he were their father. “He always looked after us,” said one of his men. “He’d go to bat for us every time.” His concern for his men might have cost Waskow his life. Hearing the approach of an incoming German shell, the captain had pushed his messenger, Private Riley Tidwell, to the ground. Fragments from the shell hit Waskow in the chest, killing him.

Pyle stood at the foot of the mule trail when Waskow’s body came down from the mountain. “Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules,” he wrote. As Waskow’s body lay in the road alongside four other soldiers who had been killed, his men began to move closer to his body. “Not so much to look, I think,” said Pyle, “as to say something in finality to him and to themselves.”

As Pyle stood close by to the side, he could hear the various reactions of the men as they paid their respects. Some of the soldiers were so upset all they could do was curse. Others spoke directly to Waskow and said how sorry they were about his death. Another man held the officer’s hand for five minutes without saying a word. Finally, the soldier “reached over and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound,” Pyle wrote, “and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”

Whitehead had tears in his eyes when he finished reading the column. “If this is a sample from a guy who has lost his touch,” he said to Pyle, “then the rest of us had better go home.” He showed the column to other war correspondents who agreed it stood as one of the finest Pyle had ever done. “This was the kind of writing all of us were striving for,” Whitehead noted, “the picture we were trying to paint in words for the people at home.”

Pyle’s column, “The Death of Captain Waskow,” did not appear in the United States until January 10, 1944, after the soldier’s family had been notified of his death. The reporter’s sincere description of the effect that the loss of a comrade had on a group of GIs touched readers everywhere. The soldier responsible for reading Pyle’s column over short-wave radio from Italy to the United States so it could be published was so moved that he had to fight back tears as he read the words into the microphone.

Miller wrote Pyle on January 14 that the Waskow column had “knocked everybody for a loop.” The Washington Daily News devoted its entire front page to the story, printing it five columns wide with no headline. The issue nearly sold out, with only thirty-nine copies returned to the paper from newsstands. Most of the newspapers in the Scripps-Howard chain had printed the column on their front pages, and a number of other papers across the country had also given the article page-one treatment. “In short,” said Miller, “nice going, bub.”