Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1945)

ERNIE PYLE^S Warnicki is ordered on his last Italian patrol by Capt. Walker OREWORD; The editors of Photoplay jHr asked me to novelize Ernie Pyle’s “The ^M. ^ Story of G.I. Joe” on which film I served as technical director following my return from the Philippines where I was a war correspondent attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But the only way this great film could he j novelized would be to requote to you the hril j liantly written columns my dear friend wrote j from day to day throughout the North African ' and Italian campaigns. So I am simply telling the story of his picture, leaving in as much as possible of the actual wordage written by Ernie Pyle. Where I haven’t his own words to place before you, I have written my own as nearly as 1 possibly could in the manner in which I know, from | many years of close association with him, the t late great Ernie Pyle would have written them. y This is the story of “The Story of G.I. Joe.” George Lait j T HERE is one, six feet four long, lying in the > ' tent. Another is just an average-sized guy. 3 Then in comes a shorty, a stranger. His teeth i are clopping with the cold. 3 Oh yes, it can get dirty cold at night in | North Africa, and this is one of those nights, J with the huge silver globe of a full moon hang | ing hke an icy sim in the star-spangled sky. A moon like that makes it almost bright as day and in this eerie light, almost as far as the eye can see, stretches a line of trucks, tanks, jeeps, armored cars and all the other wheeled and tracked paraphernalia of desert war. The coliunn is stationary. Along both sides of this stream of vehicles, pup tents have been erected. Against the sides of these mechanized monsters crude canvas shelters hang. And Ernie , Pyle, America’s best-loved overseas correspondent wbo gave bis life at le 48 Ernie Pyte stood side by side with our fiyhtiny men.