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.”
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