The Story of G.I. Joe - Plot

Plot

In the Tunisian desert, the untested infantrymen of C Company, 18th Infantry, U.S. Army, board trucks to travel to the front for the first time. Lt. Bill Walker (Robert Mitchum) allows war correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith), himself a rookie to combat, to hitch a ride with the company. Ernie surprises Walker and the rest of the men by deciding to go with them all the way to the front lines. Just getting to the front through the rain and mud is an arduous task, but the diminutive, forty-two year old Ernie manages to keep up.

Ernie gets to know the men whose paths he will cross and write about again and again in the next year:

• Private "Wingless" Murphy, a good-natured man who was rejected by the Air Corps for being too tall;
• Dondaro, an Italian-American from Brooklyn whose mind is always on women and conniving to be with one;
• Sergeant Warnicki, who misses the young son ("Junior") he has never seen;
• Private Mew, from Brownsville, Texas, who has no family back home but finds one in the outfit, exemplified by his naming beneficiaries for his G.I. life insurance among them.

Their "baptism of fire" is at the Battle of Kasserine Pass, a bloody chaotic defeat. Ernie is present at battalion headquarters when Lieutenant Walker arrives as a runner for his company commander; Walker has already become an always tired, seemingly emotionless, and grimy soldier. Ernie and the company go their separate ways, but months later he seeks them out, confessing that, as the first outfit he ever covered, they are in his mind the best outfit in the army. He finds them on a road in Italy, about to attack a German-held town, just as the soldiers are elated or disappointed at "mail call": letters for Murphy and Dondaro, a package with a phonograph record of his son's voice for Warnicki, but nothing for now Captain Walker. Ernie finds that Company C has become very proficient at killing without remorse. In house-to-house combat, they capture the town. Fatigue, however, is an always present but never conquerable enemy. When arrangements are made for Wingless Murphy to marry "Red", his Army nurse fiancee, in the town they have just captured, Ernie is recruited to give the bride away, but can barely keep awake.

The company advances to a position in front of Monte Cassino, but, unable to advance, they are soon reduced to a life of living in caves dug in the ground, enduring persistent rain and mud, conducting endless patrols and subjected to savage artillery barrages. When his men are forced to eat cold rations for Christmas dinner, Walker obtains turkey and cranberry sauce for them from a rear echelon supply lieutenant at gunpoint. Casualties are heavy: young replacements are quickly killed before they can learn the tricks of survival in combat (which Walker confesses to Ernie makes him feel like a murderer), Walker is always short of lieutenants, and the veterans lose men, including Wingless Murphy. After a night patrol to capture a prisoner, Warnicki suffers a nervous breakdown when, finally hearing his son's voice on the record, his pent up frustrations at the war are released. Ernie returns to the correspondents' quarters to write a piece on Murphy's death and is told by his fellow reporters that he has won the Pulitzer Prize for his combat reporting. Ernie again catches up with the outfit on the side of the road to Rome after Cassino has finally been taken. He greets Mew and a few of the old hands, but the pleasant reunion is interrupted when a string of mules is led into their midst, each carrying the dead body of a G.I. to be gently placed on the ground. A final mule, led by Dondaro, bears the body of Captain Walker. One by one, the old hands reluctantly come forth to express their grief in the presence of Walker's corpse.

"Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road, all alone."

Ernie joins the company as it goes down the road, narrating its conclusion: "For those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, 'Thanks pal, thanks.'"