Ernie Pyle.

Shortly after D-Day, the Pulitzer prize-winning war correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers Ernie Pyle was asked to write about the Army Ordnance Corps and its behind-the-scenes work it accomplished supporting front-line troops. Pyle was known for telling the stories of the ordinary Americans who fought and died in the war, and was syndicated in over 700 newspapers. He was one of only eight reporters accompanying troops on Omaha Beach.

In this special supplement published in the November-December 1944 edition of Ordnance magazine, Pyle writes about the units charged with retrieving abandoned military vehicles in battle zones. True to form, this reporting was not conducted after the fact, but while accompanying the soldiers during the mission on July 30, 1944.

Pyle died under similar circumstances less than a year later during the Battle of Okinawa.

Somewhere in Normandy

July 29, 1944

It was just beginning dusk when the order came. A soldier came running up the pasture and said there was a call for our Ordnance evacuation company to pull out some crippled tanks.

We had been sitting on the grass and we jumped up and ran down the slope. Waiting at the gate stood an M19 truck and behind it a big wrecker with a crane.

The day had been warm but dusk was bringing a chill, as always. One of the soldiers loaned me his mackinaw.

Soldiers stood atop their big machine with a stance of impatience, like firemen waiting to start. We pulled out through the hedgerow gate onto the main macadam highway. It was about ten miles to the front lines.

"We should make it before full darkness," one of the officers said.

We went through the shattered Carentan and on beyond for miles. Then we turned off at an angle in the road.

"This is Purple Heart Corner," the officer said.

Beyond there the roadside soldiers thinned out. Traffic ceased altogether. With an increasing tempo the big guns crashed around us. Hedges began to make weird shadows. You peered closely at sentries in every open hedgegate just out of nervous alertness.

The smell of death washed past us in waves as we drove on. There is nothing worse in war than the foul odor of death. There is no last vestige of dignity in it.

We turned up a gravel lane, and drove slowly. The dusk was deepening. A gray stone farmhouse sat dimly off the road. A little yard and driveway semicircled in front of it. Against the front of the house stood five German soldiers, facing inward, their hands above their heads. An...