The Death of Captain Waskow

In praise of the infantry

War correspondant Ernie Pyle surrounded by a tank crew at Anzio, 1944

‘I don’t believe one of us was afraid of the physical part of dying. That isn’t the way it is. The emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up the future.’

                                    Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, 1944

Captain Henry T. Waskow of the US Army’s 36^th Division was aged 25 in December 1943 when he was killed leading his company in a mountain battle fought midway between Naples and Rome. It took three days to recover his body. The moment when it was brought down by mules to the foot of the mountain was recorded by Ernie Pyle, one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation, resulting in his most famous column.

Pyle wrote that Waskow was an officer almost uniquely ‘loved and respected by the soldiers under him.’ He described how they reacted to seeing the body of their dead captain.

‘One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."’

Another took Waskow’s hand, held it, and then

‘gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

Pyle concluded the column as the living went back to the cowshed which was their temporary home. They left

‘five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

The war would continue, with its bleak routines and heavy toll.

This column’s poignant scene, drawn in simple and affecting language, made an enormous impact when published. Pyle’s columns were syndicated to about 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers in the US. This one got front page treatment and was read out on radio. The Waskow family in Texas was inundated with letters of condolence. In GI Joe - a movie drawn from Pyle’s columns – Robert Mitchum played a character based on Waskow (for which he got his only Oscar nomination).

The story was very much in keeping with Pyle’s approach to war reporting. He had little interest in grand strategy and unlike his fellow correspondents did not rush to get scoops about the latest advances or coming battles. What he wanted to do was talk about ordinary soldiers so that those back home would have some understanding of what they were going through and why they must be supported. None were anonymous or without character. In his columns Pyle gave the soldiers their full names and even their home addresses, including street numbers. The pen portraits were always sympathetic, about where these men came from and their ambitions for after the war, always with the rider that a future could not be assumed.

Pyle made a point of covering the medics and the engineers, the maintenance crews and the logisticians, the airmen and the sailors, explaining their role in the war effort and giving them full credit. Yet his heart was with the infantry. Before the Sicily landings he spent time on a headquarters ship, and rejoiced in the comfy beds, showers, and ice cream, but could not help notice that the sailors were not ‘hardened and toughened’ as much as the soldiers. He described himself as a ‘rabid one-man movement bent on tracking down and stamping out everybody in the world who doesn’t fully appreciate the common front-line soldier’, who

‘lived for months like an animal, and was a veteran in the cruel, filthy world of death. Everything was abnormal and unstable in his life. He was filthy dirty, ate if and when, slept on hard ground without cover.’

Death was never far away in Pyle’s writing. He had some close calls himself and was eventually killed by a machine gun bullet during the battle for Okinawa in April 1945. The constant presence of death let to bouts of depression, a state he was in when he wrote about Captain Waskow, perhaps explaining why this is such a powerful piece of writing.

As is often the case when deaths are being reported in large numbers, humanising a single instance brought home the tragedy and sacrifice. This was not a rant about the futility of war but an attempt to convey what it is to be in situations where the daily possibility of death or injury is inescapable yet the fight is vital and must continue. Pyle did not editorialise and had no interest in patriotic boosterism. He was never, however, a detached critic, and his work was anyway subject to censorship.

His columns were certainly appreciated. Those from the Italian campaign and then the aftermath of the Normandy landing were collected together in a best selling book –Brave Men.  This has just been re-published, with an introduction by David Chrisinger, who is the author of an account of Pyle’s war-time life, The Soldier’s Truth. In one respect Pyle’s columns are historical documents, recording the detail of a particularly gruelling war. But they also feel quite contemporary, because of the directness of the writing, and because one can imagine similar conversations with any group of soldiers taking a break from dodging incoming shells and bullets and firing off their own.

While reading Brave Men I came across a review by Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine who has seen battle at close hand, who also picks up on the timelessness of many of Pyle’s observations. He notes how much the best current war reporting is ‘indebted to Pyle and his concern with the soldiers’ morale and commitment to the cause’, suggesting that exploring this dimension of conflict can reveal more than ‘high-level analyses.’ After all, he argues, making the inevitable comparison, the roots of Ukrainian military successes, not predicted by the experts, lay in the character of its people and their determination to resist Russian occupation.

I was also thinking of Pyle when I read a fine piece of reporting about the battle of Bakhmut by Luke Mogelson in the New Yorker. The 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade had been fighting for over a year but when Mogelson reached them they had very few of the original troops left. Many had been lost in a battle with Wagner troops at the start of the year. The replacements often had little training and were alarmed by the dangers they now faced. Mogelson does not spend much time considering whether or not the Ukrainians were right to make a stand in a city that had little strategic value in itself, especially as it was steadily being reduced to rubble. Because it seemed to matter so much to the Russians it mattered to the Ukrainians. Holding the Russian advance here for so long allowed Ukraine time to build up their own offensive capabilities with incoming Western fighting vehicles and tanks, along with fresh troops. Because of this those Ukrainian troops charged with holding on to Bakhmut had to make do with rudimentary and unreliable equipment, moving around in Soviet-era vehicles and firing Soviet-era artillery and even a vintage Maxim gun. ‘[T]heir mission was straightforward: not to leave and not to die.’

The stark contrast in the allocation of resources was a deliberate strategic choice. Mogelson mentions the interview General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, gave to The Economist last December.

May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me, it’s more important to focus on the accumulation of resources right now for the more protracted and heavier battles that may begin next year. 

As Pyle would have done, Mogelson describes these soldiers in the trenches in vivid terms, identifying them largely by their call signs, illuminating their characters and why and how they kept on fighting.  As Pyle would have done, he uses small details to illuminate their conditions, as they sought to hide from Russian artillery and create places of safety, which involved a lot of digging. Because there was only enough water for drinking, not for washing, ‘the men’s cracked fingernails and thickly calloused palms were so encrusted with dirt that it seemed to have become part of them.’ And, as Pyle would have done, he acknowledges their dark humour, especially when talking about what they might do ‘after the war’.

This war can be followed through numerous videos on social media showing close fights in trenches, tanks hitting mines, drones dropping grenades on individual soldiers, or missiles hitting buildings. It can therefore be experienced vicariously. For those so minded, it is possible to spend time gazing at death in the raw. But not only can this soon turn into voyeurism but the social media posts can also mislead. As they capture the deadliest moments they ignore the less dramatic features of warfare, notably the effort required to keep the troops supplied and their equipment maintained, let alone the time spent digging trenches, hurriedly moving positions, cleaning weapons, watching out for dangers, or grabbing opportunities to eat and relax.

A full picture of how armies are organised and the bonds that hold them together, of the sort that Pyle, Mogelson, and other reporters provide, helps us understand why some perform better than others. Special attention has to be given to the infantry, the most numerous branch of the forces, and the group, according to Pyle’s friend, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, ‘which gives more and gets less than anybody else.’ In the Second World War they took over 70 percent of all US military casualties. Little has changed. It is to the infantry that ordinary men are sent when nations mobilise for war. They then get caught up in events for which they are not personally responsible, and asked to perform tasks for which they have no natural aptitude. They lead unnatural lives, facing death and potentially inflicting death, and do so either as a matter of patriotic duty or because they have little choice in the matter.

The conduct and outcomes of wars depend on them. Great commanders can come up with winning strategies but they need the men (and now often women) on the ground to have sufficient motivation and morale to implement them effectively. So many presentations about future war manage to squeeze the humanity out of combat as if drones guided by computers can do all the heavy lifting. But when it comes to the core business of taking and holding land the infantry will always be there.

In his last will and testament, Captain Henry Waskow wrote:

God alone knows how I worked and slaved to make myself a worthy leader of these magnificent men, and I feel assured that my work has paid dividends—in personal satisfaction, if nothing else.... I felt so unworthy, at times, of the great trust my country had put in me, that I simply had to keep plugging to satisfy my own self that I was worthy of that trust.

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