Rename Fort Benning to honor war correspondents

The Defense Department Naming Commission is considering the renaming of 10 military bases. The name of one base should honor the war correspondents who have brought to the American people news about their fighting men and women. Call it Fort Ernie Pyle.

Built on what was once Native American land, Fort Benning is the “Home of the Infantry.” In addition to basic training, it hosts infantry officer training, the Ranger school and the Airborne School. Since early in this century, it has served as the center of tank training. It also includes smaller units from other branches of the Army.

Fort Benning was named in 1909 for Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning. Before the Civil War, Benning was a Georgia Supreme Court justice, where he wrote an opinion arguing that the Georgia court should not be bound by rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. For more than a decade before the war, he championed secession and opposed the abolition of slavery. It’s time to change Fort Benning to Fort Ernie Pyle to honor all U.S. war correspondents, past and present.

Ernie Pyle was a World War II correspondent who reported from the front lines on the lives of the men and women of the armed forces. He was beloved by the troops and by Americans at home. He posthumously received the Purple Heart, the only war correspondent so honored. He was with troops in North Africa, at Anzio, in Normandy and on Okinawa, telling stories from the perspective of ordinary soldiers.

“There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions, and regiments,” writer John Steinbeck observed. “Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men, who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about food, whistle at Arab girls, or any other girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humanity and dignity and courage — and that is Ernie Pyle’s war.” 

Pyle spent almost three years covering the war, longer than most soldiers served in the war. “Now to the infantry — the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves,” he wrote from North Africa in May 1943. “I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.”  

In “The Death of Captain Waskow,” Pyle recorded the death of a Texas infantry officer and how his men honored him — really the story of the constant shadow of death on the battlefield. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists selected that column as the best column written during the 20th century.

Pyle’s writing was honored in 1944 with the Pulitzer Prize.

In a March 1944 column, Pyle proposed that combat soldiers get “fight pay,” similar to the “flight pay” that pilots received. It wasn’t the money that was important, he wrote, but an honor for those on the front lines. Two months later, Congress passed the “Ernie Pyle bill.”

“The wreckage was vast and startling,” Pyle wrote the day after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. “The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.”  

Pyle went through his most challenging days after the invasion. He came under “friendly fire” bombing during Operation Cobra, which contributed to his development of PTSD. When frightened by ordinary thunder in liberated Paris, he boarded a hospital ship back to the U.S. to recuperate. He was embarrassed to be on a ship with soldiers with extensive physical injuries, but they assured him that they understood.

“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 Truman said upon hearing of Pyle’s death at the hand of a Japanese machine gunner in April 1945.  

Some 1,600 correspondents, including almost 150 women, reported on World War II. Many more, both print and broadcast, have served in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts. Pyle, also a World War I Navy veteran, is the best known of them. His name, representing his fellow correspondents, should replace that of Henry Benning.

Owen V. Johnson, associate professor emeritus of journalism at Indiana University, is the author of “At Home with Ernie Pyle,” and is editing a book of Pyle’s collected letters. Follow him on Twitter @PyleFootsteps.