A4
East Oregonian
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
ANDREW CUTLER
Editor
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
JADE McDOWELL
Hermiston Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OTHER VIEWS
Remembering D-Day: A pure miracle
Editor’s note: When correspondent
Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese
machine gun bullet in 1945, his columns
were being delivered to more than 14 mil-
lion homes. He wrote about war from a sol-
dier’s perspective. This is his first dispatch
after the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
MORE INFO
To learn more about the Ernie Pyle World War II
Museum, go to erniepyle.org
N
ORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June
12, 1944 — Due to a last-minute
alteration in the arrangements, I
didn’t arrive on the beachhead until the
morning after D-day, after our first wave
of assault troops had hit the shore.
By the time we got here the beaches
had been taken and the fighting had
moved a couple of miles inland. All that
remained on the beach
was some sniping and
artillery fire, and the
occasional startling
blast of a mine geyser-
ing brown sand into the
air. That plus a gigan-
tic and pitiful litter of
wreckage along miles
E rniE
of shoreline.
P ylE
Submerged tanks
COMMENT
and overturned boats
and burned trucks and
shell-shattered jeeps and sad little per-
sonal belongings were strewn all over
these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of
soldiers lying in rows covered with blan-
kets, the toes of their shoes sticking up
in a line as though on drill. And other
bodies, uncollected, still sprawling gro-
tesquely in the sand or half hidden by the
high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determina-
tion of work-weary men to get this chaotic
beach organized and get all the vital sup-
plies and the reinforcements moving more
rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships
standing in droves out to sea.
• • •
Now that it is over it seems to me a
pure miracle that we ever took the beach
at all. For some of our units it was easy,
but in this special sector where I am now
our troops faced such odds that our get-
ting ashore was like my whipping Joe
Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what
the opening of the second front in this one
sector entailed, so that you can know and
appreciate and forever be humbly grate-
ful to those both dead and alive who did it
for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy
troops than we had in our assault waves.
The advantages were all theirs, the disad-
vantages all ours. The Germans were dug
into positions that they had been working
on for months, although these were not
yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff
a couple of hundred yards back from the
beach had great concrete gun emplace-
ments built right into the hilltop. These
opened to the sides instead of to the front,
thus making it very hard for naval fire
Pool Photo via AP/Louis Weintraub, File
Members of an American landing unit help their comrades ashore during the Normandy in-
vasion. The men reached the zone code-named Utah Beach, near Sainte-Mere-Eglise, on a
life raft after their landing craft was hit and sunk by German coastal defenses.
from the sea to reach them. They could
shoot parallel with the beach and cover
every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun
nests on the forward slopes, with cross-
fire taking in every inch of the beach.
These nests were connected by networks
of trenches, so that the German gun-
ners could move about without exposing
themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach,
running zigzag a couple of hundred yards
back from the shoreline, was an immense
V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing
could cross it, not even men on foot, until
fills had been made. And in other places at
the far end of the beach, where the ground
is flatter, they had great concrete walls.
These were blasted by our naval gunfire
or by explosives set by hand after we got
ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were
several swales or valleys, each about one
hundred yards wide. The Germans made
the most of these funnel-like traps, sow-
ing them with buried mines. They con-
tained, also, barbed-wire entanglements
with mines attached, hidden ditches, and
machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But
our men had to go through a maze nearly
as deadly as this before they even got
ashore. Underwater obstacles were ter-
rific. The Germans had whole fields of evil
devices under the water to catch our boats.
Even now, several days after the landing,
we have cleared only channels through
them and cannot yet approach the whole
length of the beach with our ships. Even
now some ship or boat hits one of these
mines every day and is knocked out of
commission.
The Germans had masses of those great
six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron
and standing shoulder-high, just beneath
the surface of the water for our landing
craft to run into. They also had huge logs
buried in the sand, pointing upward and
outward, their tops just below the water.
Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had
floating mines offshore, land mines buried
in the sand of the beach, and more mines
in checkerboard rows in the tall grass
beyond the sand. And the enemy had four
men on shore for every three men we had
approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
• • •
Beach landings are planned to a sched-
ule that is set far ahead of time. They all
have to be timed, in order for everything
to mesh and for the following waves of
troops to be standing off the beach and
ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some ele-
ments of the assault force are to break
through quickly, push on inland, and
attack the most obvious enemy strong
points. It is usually the plan for units to
be inland, attacking gun positions from
behind, within a matter of minutes after
the first men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the
speed called for in these plans. You’ll have
schedules calling for engineers to land
at H-hour plus two minutes, and service
troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and
even for press censors to land at H-hour
plus seventy-five minutes. But in the
attack on this special portion of the beach
where I am — the worst we had, inciden-
tally — the schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the
beach. They were pinned down right on
the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of
fire from the bluff. Our first waves were
on that beach for hours, instead of a few
minutes, before they could begin working
inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug
at the very edge of the water, in the sand
and the small, jumbled rocks that form
parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the
wounded as best they could. Men were
killed as they stepped out of landing
craft. An officer whom I knew got a bul-
let through the head just as the door of his
landing craft was let down. Some men
were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses
was finally accomplished by terrific and
wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked
out the big emplacements. They tell epic
stories of destroyers that ran right up
into shallow water and had it out point-
blank with the big guns in those concrete
emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our
men were organized by their officers and
pushed on inland, circling machine-gun
nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take
a beach is to face it and keep going. It is
costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the
men are pinned down on the beach, dug in
and out of action, they might as well not be
there at all. They hold up the waves behind
them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a
while, but finally they stood up and went
through, and so we took that beach and
accomplished our landing. We did it with
every advantage on the enemy’s side and
every disadvantage on ours. In the light
of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit
and talk and call it a miracle that our men
ever got on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to
name the units that did it. Then you will
know to whom this glory should go. They
suffered casualties. And yet if you take the
entire beachhead assault, including other
units that had a much easier time, our
total casualties in driving this wedge into
the continent of Europe were remarkably
low — only a fraction, in fact, of what our
commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered
and went through such hell are still, right
at this moment, pushing on inland with-
out rest, their spirits high, their egotism in
victory almost reaching the smart-alecky
stage.
Their tails are up. “We’ve done it
again,” they say. They figure that the rest
of the army isn’t needed at all. Which
proves that, while their judgment in this
regard is bad, they certainly have the spirit
that wins battles and eventually wars.
OUR VIEW
Front page ‘holes’ make for troubling weekend
uring my stint in the U.S.
advertisement and a photo with the
Army, I picked up a lot of
story “Road rage case ends with
life lessons. One of those
$26.5M verdict” should have been
examples was from an officer I
placed and were in the page that
knew who once told me that as a
were proofed throughout the eve-
ning, but did not make it to the final
leader you are responsible for all
product. I could tell you all about
that your men and women do and
the technical reasons the ad and
what they don’t do. The message,
photo, which accompanies this col-
of course, was simple and harkens
A ndrEw
C utlEr
umn, did not make it to the press.
back to President Harry S. Tru-
COMMENT
man’s “the buck stops here.”
And while they are all valid and
The buck at the East Oregonian
concerns that we have addressed
doesn’t necessarily stop with me —
inside the newsroom and other
I work for our publisher — but the triumphs
departments here at the paper, at the end of
and defeats of the newsroom are a direct
the day they don’t matter.
reflection upon me as the editor. When we
What does matter is that this was a seri-
ous error and I take full responsibility.
do something extraordinary, it is my job —
I take the responsibility not only because
as a leader — to spread the praise among
it is the right thing to do, but because it is
those who I lead. However, when a news-
room mistake happens, I am accountable
essential that we immediately admit errors
because, in the end, I am the editor.
or miscues as quickly as we can. That’s
Last weekend, we made an obvious and
because our creditability is at stake, and,
serious mistake on our front page. Subscrib-
in the end, the only thing we really have as
ers — and anyone else who purchased our
journalists is that credibility. The mistake
weekend edition — saw two large “holes”
was acute in another way — it made us look
or white spaces on our front page. The two
unprofessional.
wide-open spaces represented where an
Two large empty spaces on the front
D
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of
the East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
page of the East Oregonian should have
been obvious mistakes picked up some-
where by someone, but they were not. The
failure on our end also took away from the
story, which was done to honor the memory
of Sara Allison, who was killed in a 2017
head-on collision near Burns. While the
story itself told the amazing story, accom-
panying visuals distracted from the final
product, and that is unacceptable to Sara’s
memory.
What you need to know, dear reader, is
simple. We understand we made a mistake.
I, as editor, take responsibility for it and I
will institute even more internal safeguards
to ensure something like that doesn’t hap-
pen again.
We could easily just move forward, not
call attention to the miscue and pretend it
didn’t happen. That isn’t how I work as an
editor. Stepping forward to take responsibil-
ity is easy when accolades pile up, but when
something goes wrong it can be a difficult
endeavor. I believe, though, that we must
always stand ready to take credit where it is
due — but, more importantly, stand up and
be accountable when something goes awry.
Contributed photo
Matthew and Sara Allison beam in a pho-
to taken in front of Crater Lake, their last
bit of Oregon sightseeing, before leaving
to return home to Boise in June 2017. Sara
was behind the wheel of their Ford Focus so
Matthew could rest during the drive on nar-
row Highway 20 east of Burns when James
Decou of Clearfield, Utah, drove his flat-bed
hauling semi head-on into the couple’s car.
Sara was killed in the crash. He was 27, she
was 30, and they were married five years.
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