Ernie Pyle was THE war correspondent of World War II.  He was a foxhole correspondent and told the story of the soldiers and sailors he lived with to their families back home.  Pyle was killed-in-action by Japanese small arms fire in the Pacific in 1945.  This article is about an Ordnance Repair Company at Normandy.   Pyle's story shows us how many of our M1's earned their parts mix and their ‘character'.  Division histories of D-Day Infantry Divisions - the 1st, 4th and 29th, show   casualties of 205%, 252% and 204% of authorized strength during the course of the European campaigns - quite a turnover in men as well as weapons.  Lest we forget!

"Every infantry or armored division has an ordnance company with it all the time.  This company does quick repair jobs.  What it hasn't time or facilities for doing, it hands back to the next echelon in the rear. Daily to the small-arms section of the company there came trucks with the picked-up, rusting rifles of men killed or wounded, and rifles broken in ordinary service.  The outfit turned back around a hundred rifles a day to its division, all shiny and oiled and ready to shoot again.  They operated on the simple salvage system of taking good parts off one gun and placing them on another.  To do this they worked like a small assembly plant.   The first few hours of the morning were devoted to taking broken rifles apart.   They didn't try to keep the parts of each gun together.  All parts were standard and transferable, hence they threw each type into a big steel pan full of similar parts.  At the end of the job they had a dozen or so pans, each filled with the same kind of part.  Then the whole gang shifted over and scrubbed the parts.  They scrubbed in gasoline, using sandpaper for guns in bad condition after lying out in the rain and mud.  When everything was clean, they took the good parts and started putting them together and making guns out of them again.  After all the pans were empty, they had a stack of rifle - good rifles, ready to be taken to the front.  Of the parts left over, some were thrown away, quite beyond repair.  But others were repairable and went into the section's shop truck for working on with lathes and welding torches.  Thus the division got a hundred reclaimed rifles a day, in addition to the brand- new ones issued to it.

And, believe me, during the first few days of our invasion men at the front needed those rifles desperately. Repairmen told me how our paratroopers and infantrymen would straggle back, dirty and hazy-eyed with fatigue, and plead like children for a new rifle immediately so they could get back to the front. One paratrooper brought in a German horse he had captured and offered to trade it for a new rifle, he needed it so badly.  During those days the men in our little repair shop worked all hours trying to fill the need.

I sat around on the grass and chatted with the rifle repairmen most of one forenoon.  They weren't working so frenziedly then, for the urgency was not so dire, but kept steadily at it as we talked.  The head of the section was Sergeant Edward Welch of Watts, Oklahoma.  He used to work in the oil fields. Shortly after the invasion, he had invented a gadget that cleaned rust out of a rifle barrel in a few seconds whereas it used to take a man about twenty minutes.  Sergeant Welch did it merely by rigging up a swivel shaft on the end of an electric drill and attaching a cylindrical wire brush to the end.  He just stuck the brush into the gun barrel and pressed the button on the drill; away she would whirl and in a few seconds all the rust was ground out.  The idea was turned over to other ordnance companies.

A stack of muddy, rusted rifles is a touching sight.  As gun after gun came off the stack, I looked to see what was the matter with it - rifle butt split by fragments; barrel dented by bullet; trigger knocked off; whole barrel splattered with shrapnel marks; guns gray from the slime of weeks in swamp mud; faint dark splotches of blood still showing.  I wondered what had become of each owner.  I pretty well knew.

Ernest Taylor Pyle was "the sort of fellow you'd never notice in a crowd"--a nondescript little man, 5-foot-8 and skinny. He had humble beginnings, born on a farm in Dana, Ind. His father was a carpenter who farmed, and his mother was a strong-willed woman who reportedly wore the pants in the family.

Pyle was restless as a teenager, and he stayed restless all his life. Halfway through his senior year at Indiana University, he quit school to take a newspaper job. In 1928, while writing a column for the Washington Daily News on aviation, Pyle began to develop his trademark folksy writing style as well as the major theme of his subsequent work--the heroism of "little men" transcending the circumstances of everyday life.

In 1935 Pyle's editor-in-chief, George Parker, agreed to an experiment that would let Pyle become a roving reporter, free to go where he wished and write about what he chose--"a tramp with an expense account," as Tobin puts it. Pyle's travel column ran in 24 Scripps - Howard papers and by 1939 had been picked up by several others.

In late 1940 Pyle went to London to cover the blitz. He had been ambivalent about becoming a war correspondent, but once committed he became a man with a mission. In November 1942 he followed the Operation Torch landings into North Africa, arriving in Oran after American paratroopers had seized the airfields in a fight against the Vichy French. He filed his first reports from an air base in Biskra, then joined the U.S. Army's II Corps as it headed east.

Pyle was with the 1st Armored Division outside the village of Sidi Bou Zid when the largest tank battle of the war up to that time was fought. He then joined the American retreat through the Kasserine Pass. "Awful nights of fleeing," he wrote of the experience, "crawling and hiding from death." In April he returned east, advancing with the 1st Division into combat as the Allies launched their assault on Tunisia and broke through to the Mediterranean ports in early May.

Pyle then left North Africa and hooked up with General George Patton's Seventh Army near Palermo, Sicily. He followed the American advance toward Messina until he fell ill with what was diagnosed as "battlefield fever." He stayed in a medical clearing station less than a week, then joined the men of the II Corps as they slugged their way through mountainous terrain to Troina. When Sicily fell, Pyle took a five-week leave in the United States, where he was lionized—invited to tea by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and courted by Hollywood studios that wanted to turn his first book, Here Is Your War, into a movie.

By the beginning of 1944, Pyle was back in Italy, in the mountains north of Naples with the 34^th Infantry Division. In February, he arrived at the Anzio beachhead, where he remained for four weeks. Pyle occupied a room in a villa that, on March 17, was nearly destroyed when a 500-pound bomb exploded nearby. Somehow he survived without injury.

A week later Pyle left Anzio and returned to London to await the June 6 Allied invasion of Normandy. While waiting, he received word that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

On June 7, Pyle rode an LST (landing ship, tank) to Omaha Beach in Normandy. After returning to his ship that night, he wrote one of the most moving columns of the war. "I took a walk," he began, "it was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead....

"The strong swirling tides of the Normandy coastline...carry soldiers' bodies out to sea, and later return them. They cover the corpses of heroes with sand, and then in their whims they uncover them."

After Operation Cobra, the attack that broke the German line west of St. Lô, Pyle followed the 9th Division into liberated Paris. His European war was over. "I've been immersed in it too long, "he wrote in his column, "the hurt has become too great."

\In September 1944, he returned to the United States, but he did not stay long. By January 1945, he was in Guam en route to the Pacific Theater. He feared returning to war, he wrote, but felt that he had to "stick with the boys." He traveled from Guam with Task Force 58, headed for the waters off Okinawa.

From aboard ship, Pyle wrote a friend that he would "not give 2¢ for the likelihood of being alive a year from now." He went ashore on the island of Ie Shima, off the West Coast of Okinawa's Motobu Peninsula, into an area thought to be secure. The jeep he was riding in on April 18 came under machine-gun fire, and Ernie dove out of the vehicle and into a roadside ditch. When he lifted his head the machine gun fired again and Pyle was hit in the left temple. He died instantly.