Here Is Your War collects, in the full-length form in which they were individually filed, Ernie Pyle's legendary 1942 news columns about fighting on the North African front, the American army's first big campaign of World War II. Concentrating on the common soldier, Pyle's dispatches appeared in three hundred newspapers back home and became an essential link between the nation and its sons, brothers, and husbands in battle.



This is what John Steinbeck had to say about Here Is Your War:



"There are really two wars and they haven't much to do with each other. There is a war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions and regiments—and that is General Marshall's war.

"Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, . . . and lug themselves and their spirit through as dirty a business as the world has even seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle's war. He knows it as well as any one and writes it better than anyone."



Ernie Pyle (1900-1945) was the most famous American war correspondent of the Second World War. After reporting from London on the Battle of Britain, he accompanied American G. I.'s into combat in Africa, Sicily, Italy, and in Normandy during the D-Day invasion. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1944. A year later, he was killed in a machine gun ambush on the island of Ie Shima as the Pacific War entered its final stage.



"To anyone who has never been near a battlefront, this book will give a vivid picture; and in the future it will be one of the books to which historians will turn to explain the character of the men who fought this war, and the conditions under which they carried out the day by day fighting which led us to victory."

—Eleanor Roosevelt



"Ernie Pyle . . . stands above the rest because he most fully incarnated what a reporter ought to be."

—Murray Kempton



"A full-length, deeply human portrait . . ."

—The New York Times



"Ernie Pyle showed everybody else the way. He was a hell of a reporter."

—Charles Kuralt



"No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told."

—President Harry S. Truman

Categories:

• History
  
  
  • Military
    • World War II