Remember...
George Edward Pyles
1914-1944
"The world must know what happened, and never forget."
General Dwight D. Eisenhower
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Remember...George Edward Pyles
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George Edward Pyles was born on June 16, 1914, in Wetzel County, West Virginia, to Eli Pyles and Emma Beegle Pyles. Although spellings of the names of George's family members vary, Federal Census listings from 1920, 1930, and 1940 provide a picture of who was living in the Pyles household during those decades. The 1920 census shows Eli and Emma living in Magnolia, Wetzel County, with sons Harry, Theodore, and George and daughters Anna (Anne or Annie), May (Mae), and Pearl. Theodore and George were still in the household in 1930, as were Anne and Pearl, along with Louise (Eloise), who did not appear in the 1920 census data, although she would have been about nine years old at the time of the enumeration. By 1940, Eli was 70 years old and Emma, 67. George (25) and Pearl (23) still resided at home. In this census, George was shown as having completed the eighth grade.
When George registered for the draft on October 16, 1940, he indicated that he was employed by the WPA, at New Martinsville. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was an ambitious employment and infrastructure program created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression. Over its eight years of existence, the WPA put roughly 8.5 million Americans to work building schools, hospitals, roads, and other public works. Further, according to the History.com website,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the WPA with an executive order on May 6, 1935. It was part of his New Deal plan to lift the country out of the Great Depression by reforming the financial system and restoring the economy to pre-Depression levels.The unemployment rate in 1935 was at a staggering 20 percent. The WPA was designed to provide relief for the unemployed by providing jobs and income for millions of Americans. At its height in late 1938, more than 3.3 million Americans worked for the WPA.
The WPA—which in 1939 was renamed the Work Projects Administration—employed mostly unskilled men to carry out public works infrastructure projects. They built more than 4,000 new school buildings, erected 130 new hospitals, laid roughly 9,000 miles of storm drains and sewer lines, built 29,000 new bridges, constructed 150 new airfields, paved or repaired 280,000 miles of roads and planted 24 million trees to alleviate loss of topsoil during the Dust Bowl. ("Works Progress Administration [WPA]," History, 13 July 2017, updated 21 September 2022, accessed 13 June 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/works-progress-administration.)
West Virginia was the beneficiary of many WPA projects, but it is unclear which of these programs employed George Edward Pyles in New Martinsville. Nonetheless, his tenure with the WPA may have been short lived, as he enlisted in the U.S. Army on April 27, 1941.
Private First Class George Edward Pyles was assigned to an infantry unit and reported to the 264th Regiment, 66th Infantry Division. The movement of the 66th after leaving the States is chronicled in several places. According to one account,
. . . the three regiments of the 66th Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. H. F. Kramer, Lincoln, Nebr., had sailed from New York harbor on Nov. 15, 1944, aboard the Army transport George Washington, and the Navy transport George O. Squier. They had disembarked at Southampton and Plymouth, England, Nov. 26 and were billeted in barracks and towns in the vicinity of Dorchester, Dorset County.The balance of the division left the States Dec. 1, arriving in England on the Brittanic 12 days later. The time in England was spent filling shortages in equipment and preparing for combat. Vigorous last minute training was conducted for small units.
This was the final step in one and one-half years of training. Activated at Camp Blanding, Fla., April 15, 1943, with a cadre of officers and NCOs from the 89th Inf. Div., the Black Panthers spent three months in individual training before moving to Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Ark., for unit exercises. There, under XXI Corps, Fourth Army, it completed division problems, including rigorous "D Series," and transferred approximately 5000 fully-trained men to ports of embarkation as overseas reinforcements.
Camp Rucker, Ala., was the next stop for the division. There, personnel underwent further specialized training including small-unit infantry-tank tactics. Seven thousand reinforcements from ASTP training centers, Army Air Forces and the AAA Command were brought into the division. Sailing orders came in October and the division moved to Camp Shanks and Camp Hamilton outside New York City to prepare for embarkation. ("66th: The Story of the 66th Infantry Division," in G. I. Stories booklets, Lone Sentry website, accessed 17 March 2023, https://www.lonesentry.com/gi_stories_booklets/66thinfantry/index.html.)
Unfortunately, Pfc. Pyles would ultimately succumb to the fate of the many U.S. soldiers who were casualties aboard the ill-fated ship, the SS Leopoldville. He was killed on Christmas Eve 1944, when the SS Leopoldville was sunk off the coast of France by a German U-boat (U-486).
A detailed account of the sinking of the troop transport Leopoldville is told in Part 9 of The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 2nd ed., pp. 305-325). Adventure novelist Clive Cussler and his co-author Craig Dirgo write compellingly about the tragedy as they weave a tale of fact and supposition about the events that led to the loss of the ship. It is a story of an operation gone wrong, fraught with disorganization, miscommunication, confusion, and chaos. Intended to reinforce troops exhausted by and decimated in the Battle of the Bulge, the 262nd and 264th Regiments of the U.S. Infantry finally received orders on December 23 to move out from Southampton, England, to Cherbourg, France. The Leopoldville and another troop transport, the Cheshire, began boarding at 0200 hours on the 24th.
Originally a Belgian passenger liner, the Leopoldville had been under charter to the British Admiralty since the beginning of the war. Though the Leopoldville had been retrofitted to be a troop ship, it had a tired and worn appearance to the troops. The ship was under the command of Flemish Captain Charles Limbor, who had spent a quarter century with the Belgian Lines and was considered a quiet, but competent, seaman. The Leopoldville had crossed the Channel many times and transported many troops without incident. But this crossing would be different. There was no great enthusiasm among the men for moving into the European theater; after all, it had been more than six months since D-Day, and many assumed that the action was winding down. Skipping a partially prepared Christmas dinner, they were rushed onto the boats and then had a lengthy wait before setting sail. Boarding was particularly chaotic; first, a company of paratroopers had been boarded and then taken off. Cussler calls the boarding "a further omen of the tragedy to come" (p. 307). The two regiments were mixed together, and instead of boarding by platoon, the men simply boarded in the order in which they appeared. There was no plan for providing sleeping space for the troops, despite the fact that they would be on ship for eighteen hours before disembarking. In addition, they had not been trained in how to launch the ship's lifeboats or how to wear lifejackets.
The Leopoldville had never before crossed in a zigzag fashion, but was ordered to do so this time because of known submarine activity. At about 1754 hours, the ship suffered a torpedo strike. Most of the men in the lower compartments were lost at this time, but a few escaped and made it to the upper deck. Among the survivors of the initial strike, there seemed to be little panic. But then a series of miscommunications began. Captain Limbor made the assumption they were sinking swiftly and ordered all but essential crew to abandon ship. Abandon ship they did—the American troops watched in shock as the Belgian and Congolese crew left ahead of them on the lifeboats. Cussler calls the behavior of the troops waiting on deck for rescue "one of the finest examples of discipline ever observed." He adds: "All stood in blind obedience awaiting orders that never came" (p. 322). Though rescue ships would eventually come from Cherbourg, they were in no hurry to get to the ship due to the delay in communications. And because of Christmas celebrations, the rescue ships were lightly manned. The loudspeaker was no longer working, so Captain Limbor walked around the ship giving orders to the remaining men—in French or Flemish—which added to the confusion about launching lifeboats.
Men began jumping into the icy water of the Channel in full gear; they did not know to divest themselves of their heavy clothing and gear and did not know how to activate their life jackets. Of those who did not die of hypothermia in the water, some died ashore at Cherbourg because medics overlooked signs of life. While 1,400 infantrymen had survived, nearly 800 U.S. infantry were dead.
Although the German media broadcast details of the sinking as early as January 7, 1945, a month passed before it was acknowledged in U.S. newspapers, and even then, it appears that the account was deliberately inaccurate. On January 25, the Philadelphia Inquirer Washington bureau quoted Secretary of War Henry Stimson as saying "the ship sank swiftly . . . and 248 men were killed and 517 are missing. The rest, over 1400, were saved."
We now know, of course, that the ship did not sink swiftly, and the missing men were, in fact, dead. Subsequent investigations criticized Commander John Pringle, Commander of the Brilliant, lead ship of the convoy. Pringle received an official reprimand but was allowed to continue his naval career. Captain Limbor, the only officer not to survive the sinking, went down with the Leopoldville. Investigations also faulted him and his crew: He failed to accurately assess the damage to the ship; had he done so, he would have known they were sinking slowly, not rapidly. The ship could have been towed. He could have facilitated better communication with the troops and given better instructions for using lifeboats and other equipment.
There were a number of reasons for the cover-up of the actual details of the sinking, one having to do with maintaining the morale of the troops. The silence was comparable to that which withheld details concerning the losses during the Battle of the Bulge, potentially demoralizing and embarrassing the Allied forces at the time.
Of the nearly 800 U.S. troops who perished on the Leopoldville, 493 were never recovered. Of those who were recovered, many are still interred in St. Mere Eglise or Normandy American Cemetery, even though in 1947 the United States allowed their families to bring them to the states for burial. (Summary based on Part 9 of the Cussler/Dirgo book and Tonya Allen's article "The Sinking of the SS Leopoldville," http://uboat.net/history/leopoldville.htm [accessed 11 November 2011].)
| A headstone application for Pfc. George Edward Pyles was submitted by his mother on April 28, 1948. It appears that this reflects an actual burial, and the headstone is not just a cenotaph as his remains were transferred to the U.S., arriving first at Columbus, Mississippi, on May 24. His family was finally able to lay him to rest at Northview Cemetery in New Martinsville, West Virginia. |  |
Article prepared by Patricia Richards McClure
June 2023
West Virginia Archives and History welcomes any additional information that can be provided about these veterans, including photographs, family names, letters and other relevant personal history.