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Informationen zum Autor David Chrisinger is the executive director of the Public Policy Writing Workshop at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy and the director of writing seminars for The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting on the human impact of military service. He is the author of several books, including Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor's Guide to Writing about Trauma , and the recipient ofthe 2022 National Council of Teachers of English George Orwell Award. Klappentext "The Soldier's Truth brings to life Ernie Pyle's years as a combat journalist in World War II. With a background in helping veterans and other survivors of trauma come to terms with their experiences through storytelling, the author brings empathy and insight to bear on Pyle's experiences. A tribute to an ordinary American hero whose impact on the war is still little understood, as well as a reckoning with that war's impact and how it is remembered, this book contributes to our understanding of war and how we make sense of it"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 Warhorsing Around This is the last of these columns from Europe. By the time you read this, the old man will be on his way back to America. After that will come a long, long rest. And after the rest-well, you never can tell. Ernie Pyle, "Farewell to Europe," September 5, 1944 1 A warm summer rain soaked the men as they mounted muddy tanks and stuffed themselves into half-tracks or jeeps pointed east. The smell of soggy gear and idling engines overpowered the sweet scent of the honeysuckle that climbed the gray siding of a nearby three-story inn. In a darkened shed out behind the inn, a forty-three-year-old pipe cleaner of a man sat hunched over his portable typewriter, ankle deep in straw, his back curved like a cashew. "This morning we are sort of stymied as far as moving is concerned," he pecked out with his index fingers to his wife back home in New Mexico, "so in order not to waste the day I dug up a white metal table out of a nearby garden." After nearly three months of hellish fighting through the hedgerow country of France, the Americans and their allies were thirty miles from the center of Nazi-occupied Paris. Capturing Paris had never been part of the Allies' plan, which involved a strike through to the Low Countries, across the industrial heartland of Germany, and straight to the heart of Berlin. The supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, had grave concerns that if he marched his men into Paris, they would likely bog themselves down in brutal street-by-street combat with seasoned enemy troops and reduce one of the world's most magnificent cities to a charred graveyard. Not even an impassioned plea from the French commander, General Charles de Gaulle, had been able to dissuade him. On August 22, 1944, the French Resistance's chief of staff, Roger Gallois, slipped through German lines on the outskirts of Paris and found his way to General George S. Patton's headquarters. The situation on the ground was not what the Americans thought, Gallois told General Omar Bradley's chief intelligence officer. The Resistance movement in the capital city had infiltrated the police force, and the week before, fifteen thousand Parisian policemen had gone on strike. More than that, the tens of thousands of Resistance fighters had risen up to attack and harass their Nazi occupiers, even though they were armed with not much more than antique rifles and Molotov cocktails. In the days following the police strike, many more Parisians of all ages and abilities dug up paving stones, collected piles of furniture and other odds and ends, and felled trees to construct an elaborate network of more than four hundred street blockades. Even though they were outnumbered and now outmaneuvered, the Germans were nowhere near ou...
