Section 12 of 14
Stacks of mail soon arrived at the Waskow farmhouse. The letters were filled with words of comfort and expressions of sympathy. One was written on a handkerchief, as if to associate Pyle's column with a blotter of tears. Another was written on a scrap torn from a brown paper sack. Others came on the back of a grocery receipt and in V-mail, the military's wartime postal system.166
The letter writers didn't know Henry's parents names, or his postal address. They wrote on the outside of the envelopes, "To the Family of Henry T. Waskow, Belton, Texas," and that was enough to carry it through to its destination. Mary Goth Waskow collected the envelopes in stacks and asked her youngest daughter to read them when she got home from her telephone company job at the hospital.
Mary Lee, twenty-one years old, realized then that responsibilities she had not previously considered were landing on her shoulders. Her mother was badly shaken. Her father was struggling to be strong. Two of her older brothers had moved away from home. The other two had gone to Europe—and only one of them, severely wounded, had come back.
"I had been so sheltered by those older brothers. I grew up so much in those six weeks [after Henry's death]," Mary Lee Cox, her voice cracking, said. "Everybody was suddenly saying to me, 'What are we going to do now?' They had all had that responsibility. It was never mine before."167
Her mother lay in bed, listening to the letters being read aloud. Sometimes she called a halt when she had had enough, asking her daughter to read through the rest silently. Mary Lee and her father then went outside. Sometimes the two of them would read some more.
Mary Lee hoped her mother would grow well enough to attend a memorial service in Belton for her son. She did not. She seemed to give up. Death came at 1:30 a.m. on February 22.
She was Lutheran but the service was at First Baptist Church in Belton. Three preachers combined two services, a funeral for her and a memorial for her son, who had made it clear to his sister that if he died in the war, he wanted to be buried where he fell.168 Four Texans who had fought with the Thirty-Sixth Division in Italy attended: Lieutenant Warren Klinger of Monahans, Sergeant Jack White of Belton, Sergeant Lawrence Dahlberg of Melvin, and Sergeant August Waskow. All had made the trip from McCloskey General Hospital in Temple, where they were recovering from wounds.
The last time Klinger had seen Captain Waskow, Klinger was on a stretcher being carried away from the battlefield. Waskow had tried to cheer him up. Now, Klinger, his right arm suspended in an airplane splint, mounted to the pulpit and said, "I am happy to have known him, to have served with him, to have been his fellow officer."169
Mary Waskow was buried in the stony red soil of Belton's North Cemetery. Henry Waskow was buried in Italy, but a memorial stone was placed near the grave of his mother.
Later that year, a letter from the Army arrived at the Waskow home. It was addressed to "Mrs. Waskow" and said that her son posthumously had been awarded the Legion of Merit for "gallantry in action in the North African Theater of Operations." Mary Lee, adjusting to her growing role as head of the household, received the award from Colonel B.F. Delamater Jr., the commander of Camp Hood (now Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas. A news photographer snapped their picture.
Meanwhile, two film versions of the fighting that surrounded Waskow's death moved forward.
The first, Huston's Battle of San Pietro, was completed in the spring of 1944. Huston's view of war was unsentimental. The thirty-minute documentary featured huge close-ups of the helmeted heads of the men of the Thirty-Sixth Division as they moved into battle or rested afterward; the straightforward narration, provided by Huston, informed the viewer that many of those on screen soon would die. The frankness proved to be too much for some American officials. The House Military Affairs Committee saw the Battle of San Pietro while touring the Italian front in December 1944. Several representatives wanted to eliminate the scenes of dead American soldiers. However, four enlisted men who were special guests at the screening, arranged by Fifth Army Lieutenant General Mark Clark, declared that the film should appear uncensored in the States.170 It was shown largely intact, but not until 1945. The War Department held up domestic screenings of the frank and gritty film. A historian of Roosevelt's relations with the news media has suggested that the film's release was timed to keep the public from an emotional letdown as the nation's attention turned from the war winding down in Europe to the still-raging combat in the Pacific.171
The other film was The Story of G.I. Joe. It appeared in theaters in the summer of 1945, shortly after Pyle's death from a Japanese machinegun bullet on the island of Ie Shima. Burgess Meredith portrayed Pyle, and other actors portrayed the infantrymen featured in the journalist's columns. Robert Mitchum got the role of Henry Waskow, who Cox said was given a different name in the movie at the Army's insistence. He is "Lieutenant Walker" in the film—a politically astute choice, considering that the general commanding the Thirty-Sixth Division also was named Walker.
Reviews were laudatory, including James Agee's full-page commendation in The Nation. Agee wrote that it would be "impossible . . . to say enough in praise of the performance of Bob Mitchum."172
The development of the character of [Lieutenant Walker] is so imperceptible and so beautifully done that, without any ability to wonder why, you accept him as a great man in his one open attempt to talk about himself and the war, and as a virtual divinity in the magnificent scene which focuses on his dead body. This closing scene seems to me a war poem as great and as beautiful as any of Whitman's.173
Life magazine's review said Mitchum's "Walker" was a "tough sentimentalist" and described a scene in which Walker threatened the commissary department to get turkey dinners for his men—without mentioning that it was based on actual events. However, the magazine's reviewer did make the connection between the film's climax and the Pyle column about Waskow's body being brought down the mountain on the back of a mule.
Life also said how the two versions differed. Restrictions on profanity in Hollywood movies, imposed by the Hays Office, resulted in the deletion of the quotation "God damn it!" from the film.174
