Sub-deb clubs
The Midwest is full of them
…
Ernie Pyle
America’s favorite war correspondent, now in the Pacific, is a diffident journalist who finds it hard to appreciate the importance of being Ernie
By Lincoln Barnett
Ernie and his Shetland sheep dog Cheetah sun themselves on the mesa outside Albuquerque
“I got awful sick of Pyle this last year,” an ordinarily amiable gentleman remarked recently. “The whole country’s so intent on making him a god-darned little elf. I don’t understand it. How people can get all tied up in Pyle is beyond me.”
The speaker was Ernie Pyle’s oldest friend and college classmate, Paige Cavanaugh. His job at the moment is to make sure that The Story of G.I. Joe, a movie about the infantry as seen through Ernie’s eyes, does not overly glamorize its journalist hero. Cavanaugh is bored by the apotheosis of Pyle and has said so in writing. In a letter to Ernie, he announced, “I have completed my plans for the post-war world and I find no place in it for you.”
Certain differences between the public’s conception of Pyle and his own knowledge of the subject provide Cavanaugh with much tart amusement. By his articulate admirers Ernie has come to be envisaged as a frail old poet, a kind of St. Francis of Assisi wandering sadly among the foxholes, playing beautiful tunes on his typewriter. Actually he is neither elderly, little, saintly nor sad. He is 44 years old; stands 5 ft. 8 in. tall; weighs 112 lb.; and although he appears fragile, he is a tough, wiry man who gets along nicely without much food or sleep. His sense of humor, which leavens his columns with quaint chuckling passages, assumes a robust earthy color in conversation. His laugh is full-bellied. His profanity is strictly G.I. His belch is internationally renowned. “Ernie is the world’s champion belcher,” a friend once remarked enviously. “He doesn’t burp, he belches. It’s not a squashy, gurgly belch, but sharp and well-rounded, a clean bark with a follow-through. It explodes.”
Although Pyle is America’s No. 1 professional wanderer, he is fundamentally a sedentary person who likes nothing better than to sit in an overheated room with a few good friends. Unlike most writers he prefers listening to talking. Sometimes he appears to find conversation less pleasurable than the simple circumstance of being seated. When he visited Hollywood last fall, he holed up in Cavanaugh’s house and stayed there eight days without once visiting the studio where G.I. Joe was being filmed. His apparent agoraphobia is a byproduct neither of war nerves nor a swelled head. He has always been self-effacing and he finds himself uncomfortable in his current eminence as the nation’s favorite war reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of two bestsellers. He has been called shy, but he is not timid. His reticence is marked by quiet dignity. He dreads crowds, however, and has avoided making speeches since an occasion during his college days when, addressing an undergraduate audience, he was struck dumb at the height of an eloquent period and fled the stage with one arm frozen in mid-air. He likes people as individuals and writes only nice things about those he mentions by name in his column. “But there are a lot of heels in the world,” he says. “I can’t like them.”
Pyle’s only breach of his self-imposed rule against speech-making occurred six weeks ago when he addressed an audience of 1,000 servicemen in San Francisco. The occasion was notable not only for his oratory, but for the fact that it signalized his departure, for the first time, for the Pacific theaters of war. Last week, from a carrier at sea, Ernie was writing enthusiastically of his experiences as a “saltwater doughboy.” Characteristically he had asked for assignment to a small carrier. “I felt I could get the feel of a carrier more quickly, could become more intimately a member of the family, if I were to go on a smaller one,” he explained. “Also, the smaller carriers have had very little credit and almost no glory, and I’ve always had a sort of yen for poor little ships that have been neglected.”
His inclination toward neglected little ships and neglected “little people” – though he would never employ such a patronizing term – is perhaps the most significant aspect of Pyle’s professional personality. As a roving columnist before the war, he wrote about barbers, bellhops, bartenders and bums. “Ernie avoids important people,” a friend once observed. “There’s only about one in every hundred he likes.” Actually Pyle is a democratic man who gets along as well with generals and admirals as with sailors and G.I.’s. But his individuality as a war correspondent has stemmed from his identification with the ranks, particularly combat infantrymen. He has written about fliers, engineers, artillerymen and tankmen. But he is first and foremost the apostle of the dogface who lives and dies most miserably. It was inevitable that he should have gravitated to the bottom of the military pyramid, for Pyle has always cherished the underdog. Seven years ago, after visiting the U.S. leper colony in the Hawaiian Islands, he made an illuminating confession, “I felt a kind of unrighteousness at being whole and ‘clean.’ I experienced an acute feeling of spiritual need to be no better off than the leper. It was something akin to that sorcery that lures people standing on high places to leap downward.” And so in war, Pyle has felt a spiritual need to be no better off than the coldest, wettest, unhappiest of all soldiers.
One result of Pyle’s dedication to the infantry is his current enshrinement in The Story of G.I. Joe. His connection with the picture originated when Producer Lester Cowan came to him for help in the summer of 1943. The War Department has asked Cowan to make a film about the unsung foot soldier. Pondering how to handle it, Cowan consulted the late Raymond Clapper who told him that Pyle was indisputably the infantry’s No. 1 exponent. After several meetings with Ernie, who was then in the U.S. on vacation, Cowan conceived the idea of integrating his narrative of G.I.’s in Tunisia and Italy around the character of Correspondent Pyle. Ernie agreed to cooperate but with three stipulations: 1) that the hero of the picture must be The Infantry and not Pyle; 2) that no attempt be made to glorify him; 3) that other correspondents be included in the story.
When the producer suggested that he act himself, Pyle retorted drily, “Okay, if you can get somebody who looks like me to write my column.” Public debate on the question, “Who should play Ernie Pyle?” reached an intensity second only to that generated seven years ago by the question “Who should play Scarlett O’Hara?” Thousands of fans wrote Cowan letters suggesting such assorted interpreters as Jimmy Gleason, Walter Huston, Bing Crosby and Jimmy Durante. From all over the country came photographs of balding skinny men who thought they looked like Ernie Pyle. One woman forwarded a snapshot of her balding, skinny husband with the comment, “Like Ernie, to know him is to love him.” Ultimately the contested part went to Capt. Burgess Meredith. The Story of G.I. Joe will have concurrent premieres for servicemen overseas in June and will be released to the civilian public in July. Producer Cowan, who is probably the nation’s No. 1 Pyle fan, is already planning a series of sequels which may ultimately make Ernie the Andy Hardy of World War II.
‘Mr. Pyle doesn’t want to get somewhere’
Although most professional achievements grow out of assiduity and ambition, Pyle paradoxically owes his unwelcome fame and now substantial fortune to his lack of ambition. His wife once astonished a well-meaning friend who wished Ernie to meet certain people who could help him “get somewhere” by proclaiming, “But Mr. Pyle doesn’t want to get somewhere.” The fact that Ernie has reluctantly pursued an uninterrupted course to professional success affords him and Cavanaugh a source of material for badinage. Their friendship developed originally out of mutual regard for each other’s pleasant inertia. But unlike Ernie, Cavanaugh has succeeded in happily drifting from one small job to another without ever making much money. One night last fall, during Pyle’s visit to Hollywood, Cavanaugh heard him sighing and tossing in his bed. “What’s the matter?” Cavanaugh called. “I can’t sleep,” Ernie replied. “That’s because you’re so damn rich,” said Cavanaugh. A little later Pyle heard Cavanaugh flopping around. “Now what’s the matter with you?” he asked. “I can’t sleep either,” Cavanaugh said. “That,” said Ernie, “is because you’re so damn poor.” Cavanaugh laughed, then remarked thoughtfully, “I got an idea. You give me half of your dough and then we can both get to sleep.”
The impact of fame has simply accentuated Pyle’s inherent modesty. During the weeks between his return from Europe last fall and his departure for the Pacific, he could have exploited his reputation in many ways. A radio network offered him $3,000 a week for the privilege of broadcasting transcriptions of his columns. A lecture impresario bid thousands for a personal tour. But money plays no part in Pyle’s mental processes. “What’s $100,000?” he once asked. “How much is that?” For years he refused to tell Cavanaugh the size of his income. “Now,” says Cavanaugh, “we’re square because Pyle doesn’t know how much he makes himself.” His book Here Is Your War has sold 942,000 copies and more editions are forthcoming. Brave Men had sold 861,000 as of February 1. His column is bought by 366 daily papers and 310 weeklies. All in all, his income during the last two years has probably been close to half a million.
He has no feeling for luxury
For all his riches Pyle owns only one suit. Landing in New York last fall with no clothes but his battle-stained uniform, he headed for a cut-rate store near his hotel and bought a suit for $41.16. It was still his only civilian garment when he left for the Pacific six weeks ago. Pyle simply has no feeling for luxury. His little white clapboard house in Albuquerque looks like any FHA model and cost about $5,000. Twice during recent months, it was so overrun with guests he had to surrender his bed. One night he slept on a cot in a shed behind the house. The other time he spread his new Army bedroll on the living-room floor. Although most of the time he doesn’t care whether he eats or not, he likes to cook for guests. He has no fancy tastes in liquor and likes to roll his own cigarettes. His friends often ask him what he does with his money. He doesn’t mind telling them: he puts it in war bonds. He never mentions the fact that he also quietly bestows substantial sums upon friends, relatives, G.I.’s and anybody else he likes.
Although Pyle disdains his affluence, he is keenly appreciative of the aureole of national esteem and affection that now envelops him. Somebody has said, “This war has produced two things – the jeep and Ernie Pyle.” His collated columns have been called “The War and Peace of World War II.” He is regarded in Washington as a kind of oracle. Congressmen and senators quote his words more often than those of any other journalist – and act upon them. Upon his return from Europe more than 50 high-ranking officers flocked to interrogate him at the Pentagon. However, Pyle has steadfastly refused to set himself up as a public thinker. He has rejected all offers to hold forth on the state of the nation, the Army or the world. And he has avoided politics. He didn’t even vote in the last election, explaining that he had lived so many years in Washington he had lost the voting habit. When friends asked him if he liked Roosevelt, he said “Sure.” He also said “Sure” when people asked him if he liked Dewey.
The emotions Pyle evokes in his public go beyond detached admiration. He is probably the only newspaper columnist for whom any notable proportion of readers have fervently prayed. The volume of prayer put forth for him each night can only be estimated by the hundreds of letters he receives from mothers and wives who declare they include him in their bedtime supplications. For some time after D-Day, 90 percent of all reader queries that came into Scripps-Howard offices were: “Did Ernie get in safe?” The bond between Ernie and his readers is strengthened by the fact that he takes time to write personal letters to hundreds of G.I. friends and to their parents and wives. Sometimes he goes to great trouble in behalf of utter strangers. On his homecoming voyage last fall, he met a wounded soldier who was particularly distraught because he could not summon courage to notify his parents he had lost a leg. “Are you trying to tell me you would like me to write that to them?” Pyle asked. That evening he sat down and composed a warm and friendly letter with all the care and craftsmanship he would have devoted to a column.
A fellow newspaperman who has affectionately followed Pyle’s career observed recently that when his big chance came, he was ready for it, thanks not to ambition but to 20 years of journalistic training. He might never have acquired that training had it not been for his physical indolence and a chance meeting with Cavanaugh in his freshman year at college. As a boy growing up on his father’s farm near Dana, Indiana (pop. 850), Ernie had come to dislike agricultural chores. He was a quiet lad who liked to sit and listen to his elders talk. In school he got high marks in English and geography and 100 percent in deportment. By the time he was ready for the University of Indiana, he knew that farming was not for him, but he had no idea what he did want to do. On registration day at the university in the fall of 1919, freshman Cavanaugh spied freshman Pyle idly rolling a cigarette and paused to borrow the makings. “What courses you taking?” Pyle asked. “They tell me,” said Cavanaugh, “that journalism is a breeze.” Together they walked to the journalism building and confronted a professor at the enrollment desk. They stood awkwardly, shifting from one foot to the other, a pair of self-conscious farm boys who didn’t know what to say. It was Pyle who finally spoke. “We aspire to be journalists,” he said.
Ernie just laughed and said, ‘We’ll see.’
For three and a half years Ernie fidgeted in class, cut lectures and did just enough work to get by. He was manager of the football team in his senior year and editor of the campus newspaper. But he had itchy feet and often vanished on solitary walks in the country. A few months before graduation he suddenly quit college and went to work as a reporter on the La Porte, Indiana, Herald-Argus. Cavanaugh tried to discourage him, pointing out that he “wouldn’t amount to much without his diploma” and that a degree would help him get jobs in future years. Ernie just laughed and said, “We’ll see.”
The next 12 years carried Pyle fortuitously, often unwillingly, to the springboard of his success. After four months in La Porte, he landed a job on the copy desk of the Washington News. He was an excellent headline writer but so mousey-mild his associates never dreamed he would ever be more than a pencil slave on the rim of the desk. Two years after coming to Washington, he married Geraldine Siebolds, an attractive and intellectual blonde girl from Minnesota who had a job with the Civil Service Commission. Each evening after work Ernie would sit contentedly at home, rolling cigarettes, chatting with Jerry, or reading. He became telegraph editor of the News in 1928. His interest in airplanes tempted him to essay an aviation column which soon became a popular feature of the News.
Of several circumstances responsible for the evolution of the peripatetic Pyle, perhaps the most important was his appointment as managing editor of the News in 1932. “I hated the damn job,” he says now, “though I think I did pretty good at it.” His restlessness came to the surface after he had fretted as managing editor for three years. In the spring of 1935, while convalescing from influenza, he took a leave of absence and motored through the Southwest with Jerry. On his return he looked with distaste at the dingy newsroom where he had spent most of his waking hours since 1923 and realized he was fed up with editorial labor. He asked for an assignment as roving reporter and to prove his point wrote some sample pieces about his trip. “They had a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out,” the Scripps-Howard editor in chief declared afterward. Pyle got his wish. His salary was raised from $95 to $100 a week and on August 8, 1935, his first travel column appeared in Scripps-Howard papers.
For the next five years, Pyle roamed the Western Hemisphere. He saw most of South America and once surveyed the shores of the Bering Sea. Nobody told him where to go. He wrote about the “long sad wind” that blows in Iowa and about a toothless Alaskan woodsman who made a dental plate out of bear’s teeth and then ate the bear with its own teeth. He wrote about his father (“He is a good man without being repulsive about it”), and about acquiring a new automobile (“Goodbye to you my little old car. In a few minutes I must go and drive you away for the last time. Trading you off for a shiny new hussy. I feel like a dog”). From the quaint introspective essays that recurrently appeared among his travelogs and interviews, his readers came to regard Ernie Pyle as an old friend whose tastes and vicissitudes they vicariously shared. They knew of his difficulties with zipper pants and his periodic illnesses. “If I’m going to be sick all the time,” he wrote once, “I might as well drop all outside interests and devote my career to being sick. Maybe in time I could become the sickest man in America.” With Ernie on his wanderings went Jerry, whom he puckishly referred to as “that girl who rides beside me.” Those itinerant pre-war years were the happiest of Pyle’s life. “The job would be wonderful,” he once said, “if it weren’t for having to write the damned column.” Meanwhile he was evolving his special reportorial capacities and style. When war came, he had no need to revise his technique. His farmers, lumberjacks and bartenders had become privates, sergeants and lieutenants. And Phoenix, Des Moines and Main Street were Palermo, Naples and the Rue Michelet.
‘I just cover the backwash of the war’
“A small voice came in the night and said ‘Go,’” Ernie wrote in the fall of 1940. It was the same voice that had spoken to him in the leper colony in Hawaii. So, he went off to war. Before his departure he bought a little white house in Albuquerque where Jerry could await his return. Till then the Pyles had never owned a home. They had lived for five years in hotel rooms. Now they needed a base – “not a permanent hearthside at all,” he explained, “but a sort of home plate that we can run to on occasion, and then run away from again.” Both Midwesterners, the Pyles had come to love the Southwest. They picked a spot on high ground overlooking miles of tawny mesa. “We like it,” Ernie wrote, “because our front yard stretches as far as you can see.”
Pyle’s first overseas trip in the winter of 1940-41 multiplied readers of his column by 50 percent. Stirred by the spiritual holocaust of London and his own relentless instinct for self-immolation, he produced columns of great beauty and power. But it was not till he reached North Africa the following year that the Pyle legend began to evolve. Despite the success of his British columns, he felt out of place at first among the crack war correspondents who had seen combat in China, Spain, France and Norway. And indeed, many of them regarded him patronizingly as a kind of travelog writer who had somehow obtruded on the war. When Pyle’s ship docked at Oran with the second “wave” of correspondents a fortnight after the initial landings, most of his fellow pressmen hurried eastward toward the front as fast as they could. But Ernie puttered around Oran. Then he caught cold. It was nearly Christmas by the time he reached Allied headquarters in Algiers. “Didn’t you go nuts, stuck back there in Oran?” a friend asked him. “Oh no,” said Ernie. “You guys go after the big stories. I just cover the backwash of the war.” Actually at that moment his columns were being excitedly discussed all over the United States. For while puttering in Oran he had met some obscure civilians who told him about the turbulent political situation in North Africa and he had dispatched some revealing articles criticizing the U.S. policy of “soft-gloving snakes in our midst.” The strict censorship at Algiers would never have cleared them for publication. But the Oran censors, perhaps disarmed by Pyle’s unpretentious reportorial style, let them go through. Not till weeks later did he learn he had inadvertently scooped the slickest newshawks in the world.
Pyle still thought he was covering the “backwash” of the war one morning in January 1943 when he boarded a plane at an airport outside Algiers and headed eastward toward the red eroded ridges of Tunisia. He still had no idea he was to become the patron saint of the fighting foot soldier. He only knew that grand strategy was not his racket. He knew how to move unobtrusively among men and chat with them quietly until they began to articulate their adventures and thoughts. He described the looks of the country and told how he lived. And in writing about himself he defined the soldier’s existence, for he lived no better than any G.I. He dressed like a G.I., in coveralls and a wool cap. He gained almost ten pounds on canned rations but lay awake night after night, quaking with cold, fully clothed inside his bedroll. He learned how to dig foxholes in a hurry. “It wasn’t long,” he wrote, “before I could put up my tent all by myself in the dark with a strong wind blowing and both hands tied behind my back.” And he learned that in cold weather it is more comfortable to go without baths. “The American soldier,” he once observed, “has a fundamental complex about bodily cleanliness which is considered all nonsense by us philosophers of the Great Unwashed, which includes Arabs, Sicilians and me.” Jeeping all over the Tunisian battle area, he got bombed and shelled and on one occasion found himself the sole target of a German machine gunner who sent several bursts in his direction “so close they had fuzz on them.” He left famous heroes to the headline reporters and confined his efforts to the brave but obscure. He made friends in every unit in North Africa. But he gravitated ineluctably to the infantry – “the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys.”
‘Yesterday is tomorrow… when will we ever stop’
Pyle’s articles soon attracted a vast audience at home, and soldiers who had received clippings of his column in their mail began to look upon him as their laureate. They would yell “Hi, Ernie” when they glimpsed him in the field, and whenever a press car passed troops on a toad, scores would shout, “Is Ernie Pyle in that car?” He was showered with gifts of food, souvenirs, good-luck trophies. One unit gave him a captured German Volkswagen. In return he handed out hundreds of cigarettes and scores of lighters sent to him by admirers at home.
As the months passed somber tones crept into Pyle’s columns. In North Africa, despite perils and bloodshed, he had felt that the physical discomforts of war – the animal-like existence, cold, sleeplessness, hunger for women – caused soldiers greater distress than fear of death or the horror of killing. He confessed he had at first enjoyed the simplicity of life in the field and had found the sense of danger exhilarating. But in the bitter defiles of Italy, he began to be oppressed by the terrible weariness of mind and soul that overcame men after weeks under fire. “It’s the constant roar of engines,” he wrote, “and the perpetual moving and the never settling down and the go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again. Eventually it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern – yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I’m so tired!” Ernie himself came to feel exhausted and written out. One night after a spell in the wet mountains he attempted a column about some dead men – among them a Capt. Waskow – whose bodies had been brought down from a bleak ridge where fighting had raged for days. The story refused to take shape and several times he almost gave up. When it was finished, dubious of its merit, he asked Don Whitehead of the Associated Press to read it. Whitehead said, “I think it’s the most beautiful piece you’ve ever done.” Ernie declined to be cheered up. Whitehead then passed the column on to Clark Lee, Dick Tregaskis and several other correspondents, all of whom confirmed his judgment. But Ernie decided they were simply trying to be nice and went to bed miserable. Back home the exquisite understated emotion and quiet imagery of his now-famous Waskow column stirred newspaper editors from coast to coast. The New York World-Telegram headlined it “An Epic Story by Ernie Pyle.” The Washington News devoted its entire front page to it.
Pyle had the narrowest escape of his war career a few weeks later. Attracted always to the scenes of deadliest combat, he went to the Anzio beachhead. Early one morning a German bomber dropped a stick of 500-pounders squarely across a villa which was serving as press headquarters. Pyle’s upstairs room, where he had been lying in bed, was demolished. But he miraculously emerged from mountains of rubble and shattered glass with only a scratch on his check. After that his colleagues called him “Old Indestructible.” It was his last adventure in Italy. The invasion of Europe was brewing and in April 1944 Ernie flew to England to await D-Day.
Premonitions of death
Pyle’s working habits had subtly and involuntarily changed. In North Africa he had been able to move about as he pleased. By the time he reached France, he was so famous he could scarcely walk down a village street without soldiers of all ranks accosting him and requesting his autograph. He discovered that G.I.’s had come to regard mention of their names in his column as comparable to an official citation. Commanding officers besought him to visit their special units, then engulfed him with time-consuming hospitality. Pyle found that these flattering attentions interfered with his work and he regretted his loss of freedom. Yet his innate kindness and courtesy made it impossible for him to brush off admirers, even at embarrassing moments. One day, while accompanying an infantry company that had been assigned to clean out a strong point in Cherbourg, he got caught in a duel between an American tank and an enemy pillbox. While Ernie and another correspondent watched from a doorway, the tank was hit by a German shell and knocked out. “Let’s get out of here,” said the other correspondent and sprinted down the street. It was almost an hour before Ernie rejoined him. “Some of the fellows that jumped out of that tank knew me from my picture,” he apologized, “so I had to stop and talk.”
The spiritual torment and revulsion against war that had oppressed him in Italy descended on him even more darkly among the hedgerows of Normandy, though few readers guessed what underlay the warm, easy and frequently humorous content of his columns. He had been with the war nearly two and a half years, had lived longer in the front lines and witnessed more fighting than most other correspondents and indeed than most soldiers. He found himself increasingly haunted by a premonition of his own death. “Instead of becoming used to danger,” he told a friend in Normandy, “I become less used to it as the years go by. I’ve begun to feel I have about used up my chances.” The experience that finally convinced Pyle he needed a vacation was the battle of St. Lô when American planes accidentally bombed the front lines of American forces on the ground. To soften up the Germans an epic concentration of 2,500 bombers had been ordered to blast an area behind the St. Lô-Marigny Road. The dividing line between U.S. and German troops had been marked out by strips of colored cloth. “The flight across the sky was slow and studied,” Pyle wrote. “I’ve never known a storm, or a machine, or any resolve of man that had about it the aura of such ghastly relentlessness… And then the bombs came. They began like the crackle of popcorn and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise that seemed surely to destroy all the world ahead of us.” Little by little a gentle wind carried the curtains of dust and smoke back over the American lines, and soon successive flights of bombers aiming at the smoke line began dropping their death cargo on Americans. As the bombs fell about him Pyle dived into a wagon shed beside an officer. “We lay with our heads slightly up – like two snakes – staring at each other in a futile appeal, until it was over… There is no description of the sound and fury of those bombs except to say it was chaos, and a waiting for darkness.” Pyle later confided to friends that this episode had been the most horrible and horrifying of all his war experiences. “I don’t think I could go through it again and keep my sanity,” he said.
After St. Lô, Ernie pulled back of the lines and slept for nearly 24 uninterrupted hours. Then for three days he found himself unable to write a line. He remained in France long enough to witness the liberation of Paris. Then he headed home. “I’m leaving for one reason only,” he wrote in his farewell column, “–because I have just got to stop. ‘I’ve had it,’ as they say in the Army… My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused… All of a sudden it seemed to me that if I heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut.” He was not exaggerating. Analyzing his mental state several months later, he confessed, “I damn near had a war neurosis. About two weeks more and I’d have been in a hospital. I’d become so revolted, so nauseated by the sight of swell kids having their heads blown off, I’d lost track of the whole point of the war. I’d reached a point where I felt that no ideal was worth the death of one more man. I knew that was a short view. So, I decided it was time for me to back off and look at it in a bigger way.”
‘If I can survive America…’
Hundreds of soldiers wrote Ernie goodbye letters, saying in effect “We understand.” Not one reproached him for leaving. And many expressed relief that he was leaving danger behind. Back home his fellow countrymen welcomed him like a Congressional Medal hero. Strangers rushed up to him on street corners to wring his hand and express their esteem. One night he went to a Broadway show. Before he reached his seat a swelling buzz of recognition focused every eye on the back of his balding head. Gratified but at the same time terrified by such attentions, Pyle took refuge in the sanctuary of a hotel room and remained there during most of his stay in New York while his friend, Lee Miller, managing editor of the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, Washington Bureau, stood guard at the never-silent telephone, shielding him from impresarios, autograph hunters and other well-meaning intruders. Friends noticed he appeared at ease only in the company of G.I.’s. Whenever some veteran of Tunisia spied him and yelled, “Hi Ernie, remember Kasserine Pass?” Pyle would fondly throw his arms around him and drag him off to a bar for a session of reminiscence. “If I can survive America,” Ernie told Miller, “I can survive anything.”
Even at home in Albuquerque he found it difficult to relax. There too the phone chattered and sightseers cruised past his house, seeking a glimpse of Ernie sunning on his terrace. Mail kept him busy three hours a day. In addition to his manifold professional distractions, Ernie’s vacation was marred by anxiety over the health of his wife. She had been recurrently ill for several years, and this factor had aggravated the depression that shadowed his last months overseas. His pleasure on returning home was vitiated by the fact that Jerry was in the hospital on the day he arrived. One afternoon when his melancholy was deepest and chances of her ultimate recovery seemed dim, he told Cavanaugh, “Here I am with fame and more money than I know what to do with – and what good does it do me? It seems as though I haven’t anything to live for.” Then, remarkably, Jerry rallied and came home from the hospital early in December. Her progress toward health accelerated week by week during Ernie’s stay in Albuquerque. When he went to Hollywood on his way to the Pacific, Jerry accompanied him. One evening they went nightclubbing and danced for the first time in years.
‘I dread going back…’
It was with profound misgivings that Ernie set off again to war. “I dread going back and I’d give anything if I didn’t have to go,” he said. “But I feel I have no choice. I’ve been with it so long I feel a responsibility, a sense of duty toward the soldiers. I’ve become their mouthpiece, the only one they have. And they look to me. I don’t put myself above other correspondents. Plenty of them work harder and write better than I do, But I have in my column a device they haven’t got. So, I’ve got to go again. I’m trapped.” There was only one bright spot in Pyle’s contemplation of his new assignment. “Out in the Pacific,” he said, “I’ll be damned good and stinking hot. Oh boy!”
And so Ernie boarded a plane in San Francisco and headed for Hawaii, the Marianas and points west. Ultimately he will rejoin his Army G.I.’s in the Philippines or on some other embattled archipelago. But for a while now he will devote his special talents to the Navy. He was under a full head of steam last week, writing as fondly and luminously of “his” ship as ever he did of “his” company of doughfeet in Italy. “My carrier is a proud one,” he proclaimed. “She is known in the fleet as ‘The Iron Woman,’ because she has fought in every battle in the Pacific in the years 1944 and 1945.” Day by day his new friends became as vivid to Pyle readers as his old friends in foxholes beside the Rhine.
However long the war may last, Pyle is determined to cover it to the last shot. This resolution disturbs many of his admirers who regard Ernie Pyle as a nonexpendable national asset and who fear the mathematics of survival may now be against him. Although such an apprehension is not the prime element in his reluctance to return to war, he recognizes death as a disagreeable possibility. He is not afraid to die, but he looks forward very much to a day when he can jump into a car with unlimited gasoline and drive once again with Jerry by his side down the long white roads of the Southwest. “I can’t bear to think of not being here,” he says. “I like to be alive. I have a hell of a good time most of the time.”
The Pittsburgh Press (April 2, 1945)
BRITISH PERIL ROCKET BASES
150,000 Nazis trapped in Ruhr
Monty’s tanks smash past Muenster – Patton 152 miles from Berlin
…
Yanks splitting Okinawa
Jap resistance flares on southern flank as invaders near capital
Ashore on a key Jap base, U.S. soldiers and Marines were closing on Naha, the capital of Okinawa Island. U.S. forces seized a beachhead 8¾ miles long on the west coast of the island and drove halfway to the eastern shore. The Americans landed between Zampa Cape and Chatan and drove through the latter town toward Naha. British warships supported the American operation by bombing the Sakishima Islands to the southwest.
GUAM (UP) – U.S. invasion troops smashed forward more than halfway across Okinawa today in a swift advance against scattered Jap sniper and pillbox resistance.
Front dispatches said an announcement that Okinawa had been split in two was expected hourly.
Hard fighting flared on the southern flank of the U.S. Army-Marine front where tank-led infantrymen were driving toward Naha, the island’s burning capital, less than seven miles distant.
Tokyo radio reported without Allied confirmation that Americans completed a new landing today on Kume, 52 miles west of Okinawa and 340 miles northwest of Formosa.
Tens of thousands of troops of the new U.S. Tenth Army smashed ashore along a wide beachhead. Two airfields and more than a dozen villages were captured. Dispatches indicated U.S. planes soon would be using at least one of the two captured airdromes.
United Press writer E. G. Valens, accompanying forward elements of two Army units driving across Okinawa from the captured Kadena Airfield, said resistance continued to be comparatively light. This column was heading downhill toward Noza and the Nagusuku Bay naval anchorage on the east side of the island.
The hardest fighting raged in the “badlands” north of Naha, the prime objective of this invasion only 362 miles south of Japan.
Roads heavily mined
There, the troops under Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner collided with Jap-prepared positions and machine-gun nests. Roads were heavily mined. But when the mines were neutralized, soldiers moved in on bulldozers to widen the roads.
Carrier planes from the invasion armada lying offshore pinpointed enemy targets ahead of advancing troops.
Mr. Valens said one dauntless dive bomber made an emergency landing on Kadena airstrip. It was the first large American plane to land there.
Wrecked planes everywhere
At Kadena, the attackers found gun emplacements were little more than wooden pigsties. The wreckage of Jap planes lay scattered across the captured airfields, indicating the effectiveness of the pre-invasion bombardment and carrier strikes.
Norman Paige, Blue Network correspondent, reported from Okinawa that Jap civilians here begun surrendering “in droves.” “They seemed glad to give themselves up,” Mr. Paige said.
Mr. Paige said the “general impression” on Okinawa was that the main Jap garrison had moved to Formosa, was hiding in the hills or underground, or had been fooled into believing the landing would occur at the southern tip of Okinawa instead of the south-central west coast.
Capital’s towers in sight
Radio towers of Naha, a city of 165,000, were clearly visible to advancing U.S. troops.
The Yanks were already days ahead of schedule on their greatest invasion of the Pacific war.
Reinforcements of men, tanks, guns and supplies were flowing across the beaches in a steady stream.
Warships ranging from new 45,000-ton battleships to rocket-firing gunboats poured a steady drumfire of shells into enemy positions ahead of the ground forces. Some 1,500 carrier planes also shuttled back and forth over the island.
A Jap communiqué conceded that the Americans were continuing to reinforce the beachhead, but claimed that Jap forces had intercepted the invaders in “furious fighting.”
Melbourne radio reported that Australian monitors heard a Jap broadcast asserting that Allied invasion forces also landed on Kume Island, 52 miles west of Naha. Kume is the westernmost of the Ryukyu Island chain.
The enemy communiqué also asserted that 41 more ships in the invasion armada had been sunk or damaged.
Close on Japan
The landing on Okinawa brought U.S. forces nearly twice as close to Japan proper as they are on Iwo, 750 miles south of Tokyo. The northern tip of 65-mile-long Okinawa lies only 330 miles southwest of Kyushu, southernmost of the Jap home islands.
Capture of the island would give the Americans strategic air, land and sea bases from which to mount an eventual invasion of Japan proper or the China coast, only 400 miles to the west.
Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific feet, hailed the invasion as assuring “our final decisive victory.”
Severing life line
Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the invasion fleet, said capture of Okinawa would sever Japan’s lifeline to her southern empire and make it impossible for her fleet to operate or base in Southern Japan. Traffic on the Yangtze River, lifeline of the Jap Army in China, also would be shut off. he said.
The main landing on Okinawa was preceded by landings beginning last Monday on the Kerama Islands 10 to 20 miles west of Okinawa.
Maj. Gen. Andrew D. Bruce’s 77th Infantry Division quickly seized all eight islands in the group and set up heavy artillery to support the Okinawa invasion. A seaplane and harbor base was established at one island.
10-day bombardment
An unprecedented 10-day air and sea bombardment, during which warships alone hurtled 5,000 tons of steel and explosives into the Jap defenses, paved the way for the landing on Okinawa by the Tenth Army under Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., former commander in Alaska.
Front dispatches said Maj. Gen. John R. Hodge’s XXIV Army Corps, veterans of Leyte, landed at the southern end of the beachhead against little more than occasional sniper fire.
Meet light opposition
The first regiment ashore swept a mile south across rice paddies and grain fields to the burning farm village of Kue, then swarmed down onto the flat, rolling shoreline leading south to Naha.
Command post radios reported battalion troops along the shore before dusk last night had driven through Chatan, eight miles north of Naha, against light opposition, including some mortar and rifle fire.
Other Army troops, spearheaded by amphibious tanks, struck inland and seized the Kadena Airfield, then fanned out against still bafflingly-light resistance. The Japs blew up few bridges, but others were captured intact by the Army troops.
Capture height
Another Army column captured a strategic height at Nozato, northernmost point of a hill mass dominating the southern sector of the assault area.
Late reports from the Army front said heavy American equipment was rolling inland over narrow roads six to eight feet wide and through sandy fields. Many troops walked boldly upright through rolling fields of sugarcane, sweet potatoes and grain.
Even lighter resistance, if possible, was met by Maj. Gen. Roy S. Geiger’s III Marine Amphibious Corps, conquerors of Guam, at the northern end of the beachhead.
Not a single Marine was killed or wounded in the first half hour of the invasion and, 8½ hours later, most Marines were yet to see a Jap soldier. U.S. casualties were described as “incredibly light.”
Take airfield quickly
The Marines went ashore at and south of Zampa Cape, some 16 miles north of Naha and westernmost point of the island, and in the first hour captured Yontan Airfield.
Gen. Geiger, veteran of many other Pacific campaigns, expressed amazement at the lack of resistance met by his forces.
“I’m damned if I’ve ever been on a battlefield hike this,” he said. “They’re sunk now.”
Big Jap force on island
The Japs were known to have 60,000 to 80,000 troops on Okinawa and their failure to oppose the landing was even more surprising in view of the fight to the death put up by the enemy garrison at Iwo.
Okinawa is also the most heavily populated Jap island yet invaded by the Americans. Its 435,000 inhabitants comprise nearly half the entire population of the Ryukyu Island chain, stretching from Japan to Formosa.
At the end of the first day, Gen. Buckner said he was “elated” with the progress of the campaign.
“We are locking down the Mikado’s throat.” he said.
Adm. Turner, on his flagship, was more conservative. He was “satisfied.”
Eleven to 13 Jap planes attempted to attack the invasion armada during the landing operations, but all were destroyed.
A British task force supported the invasion with a carrier-based air assault on Ishigaki and Miyako Islands in the Sakishima group southwest of Okinawa Saturday and Sunday. Of 20 Jap planes which landed in the Sakishimas during the attacks, 14 were destroyed and six damaged by the British aircraft.
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200 Japs commit suicide as Yanks invade Keramas
Survivors on island near Okinawa say they were told Americans would torture them
By E. G. Valens, United Press staff writer
WITH 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION, in the Ryukyus (April 1, delayed) – Fear implanted by their own authorities caused an estimated 200 Jap civilians to attempt mass suicide on Tokashiki Island in the Keramas.
Some disemboweled themselves with grenades, others hanged themselves from trees. A number of them were still living when the Yanks reached the scene, but a Jap machine-gunner cut down the first litter-bearers, He was eliminated quickly, however.
The mass suicide, the first recorded since Saipan, was discovered when one battalion prepared to bivouac for the night about three miles north of Tokashiki town. Horrible cries of pain came from a small valley almost a mile away. When the troops investigated, they found the civilians scattered about, some dead, some dying.
White flag hauled down
Cpl. Alexander Roberts, Army photographer of New York City, was one of the first to arrive. He estimated the number of Japs at more than 200.
A white surrender flag flashed momentarily from amid the group, but it was hauled down before soldiers or doctors could reach it.
First aid was given immediately to those who could be saved. Morphine was given to the others to ease their pain.
The survivors told officers that their officials said if the Americans came all the women would be tortured and the men killed.
With these fears in mind, many fathers strangled their families and then took their own lives by pressing grenades against their stomachs or by leaning into the noose of a rope tied to a tree. One old man wept when he saw how the Americans treated the women. Only a short time ago he had strangled his daughter who was wounded in the pre-invasion bombing.
The invasion of the Keramas last Monday was one of the oddest in amphibious warfare. Each of the eight islands was invaded in an independent operation under the direct control of only a captain, major or lieutenant colonel.
Seize suicide fleet
It was a lightning small-scale stepping-stone operation right under the Jap noses on Okinawa with enemy air bases in every direction – north, south, east and west.
But now all the eight islands guarding the Okinawa landing beaches, less than 20 miles away, are secure and a major portion of a secret Jap suicide boat fleet is at the bottom of the Pacific.
The Yanks seized or destroyed 290 of these 16-foot boats, which might have seriously hampered the Okinawa operation. They were discovered in caves along the shores of four of the Kerama Islands.
Special Japanese currency carried by Okinawa Yanks
U.S. troops for first time invade area heavily populated by enemy civilians
By Mac R. Johnson, United Press staff writer
ABOARD INVASION FLAGSHIP, off Okinawa (April 1, delayed) – U.S. troops set several precedents in the invasion of Okinawa today.
For the first time in the Pacific war, they carried yen – Japanese currency – and hit an area heavily populated by Jap civilians.
Before they went ashore the troops were required to exchange their U.S. dollars for yen at a rate of 10 yen to the dollar.
The invasion yen, especially designed to differentiate from the Jap yen, was declared legal tender on proclamation and the Yanks were not permitted to take any greenbacks ashore. No metal coins will be honored in the Ryukyus.
435,000 Japs on island
The invasion of Okinawa may be a guide to what is in store as the Americans move closer to Japan. the island has a population of 435,000 Japs – more than half of the entire Ryukyus – although they are different in many ways from the Japs in the homeland.
They look like Japs, but are a little shorter, stockier and dark, often with coarser features. Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commander of the U.S. Tenth Army, describes them as the “scrubby type of Jap – if there’s anything scrubbier than a Jap.”
The Okinawans consider themselves closer to China and Chinese culture than to Japan, and the Japs consider them an inferior people.
Some several hundred of the Ryukyuans already have returned to their homes on Zamami, in the Keramas, and the Americans are following a policy of “leave ‘em alone as long as they behave.”
Naha largest town
The civilian problem on the conquered islands is being handled by a large Military Government organization under the Tenth Army civil affairs officer, Brig. Gen. William E. Crist of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
On Okinawa, most of the population is concentrated in the southern third of the island, where the largest town, Naha, with more than 65,000 persons, is located.
The rest of the island, which like the nearby islands is very unhealthy, is very mountainous and of little value. Malaria is common in this section and the water supply usually is contaminated.
There are many insects and the jungles are infested by five species of deadly snakes of the pit viper variety.
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Air blockade of Japan sealed
Okinawa assaults cost Japs 1,052 planes
By Lloyd Tupling, United Press staff writer
ABOARD ADM. MITSCHER’S FLAGSHIP OFF OKINAWA – The invasion of Okinawa, viewed as the last step in completing an air blockade of Japan, was the crowning blow of an almost continuous assault which started March 17 and has cost the enemy 1,052 planes destroyed or damaged.
The strategic importance of the island was emphasized today by high-ranking officers who pointed out that only the North Japan Sea which leads to Manchuria and Siberia will be out of striking range of U.S. bombers based on Okinawa.
Strikes at fleet first
Operations against Okinawa started March 17 with strikes against the Imperial Jap Fleet hiding in the Inland Sea. Since that time, Vice Adm. Marc A. Mitscher’s carrier planes have flown more than 8,000 sorties, bagged 1,052 Jap planes, knocked out 20 enemy warships and sank or damaged 200 other vessels, mostly small coastal craft.
The air attack was climaxed yesterday when wave after wave of fighter planes swept Okinawa’s beaches with a curtain of hot lead in front of Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner’s Tenth Army troops.
Most of the past two weeks have been spent bombing, rocketing and strafing gun positions, underground hangars, submarine pens and scores of small craft which could have opposed the invasion troops.
Astride supply route
Establishment of air bases on Okinawa will make even more desperate the Jap supply problem which became acute when U.S. planes from Philippines bases closed off the South China Sea. With our air force sitting astride the East China Sea at Okinawa and the Western Pacific at Iwo Jima, Japan’s problem of supply will be doubly difficult.
Air operations from Okinawa will put a double squeeze on the enemy war effort, keeping the remnants of Hirohito’s fleet bottled up in sheltered home waters and making it difficult to haul supplies to troops in northern China or bring in raw materials to the homeland.
Operations to pin down shipping in Japan’s home waters actually started several days before the invasion of Okinawa when U.S. search planes started operating out of Kerama Retto, 15 miles west of Okinawa. Kerama Retto was occupied six days ago.
Japs say Okinawa will decide war
Warn entire strategy depends on island
By the United Press
The Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Hochi, in a remarkably frank editorial on the significance of the Okinawa invasion, warned the Jap people today that the loss of that key bastion will mean that “there can be no hope of turning the course of the war.”
The editorial, as quoted by Tokyo radio, said the “entire strategy of the Pacific” was based on the battle of Okinawa.
“The loss of Okinawa will mean the collapse of the vanguards of Japan proper,” the newspaper said.
Two other Tokyo dailies maintained the usual Jap propaganda line. The Asahi Shimbun, according to the broadcast, asserted the invasion “does not mean the war situation is turning in their [Allied] favor,” adding that at the “decisive moment everything should be thrown into the encounter.”
The Mainichi Shimbun said that “if we succeed in destroying the enemy, we will be able to turn to the offensive.”
Okinawa called Easter gift – landing like rehearsal
Gunboats touch off swooshing barrages of rockets in support of new Pacific invasion
By William McGaffin
WITH THE U.S. TENTH ARMY ON OKINAWA (April 1, delayed) – A mighty new army of Marines and soldiers went to church ion their transports 13 hours earlier than folks on Fifth Avenue this beautiful Easter Sunday. Then they walked ashore on Okinawa Island in an almost unopposed landing.
It was virtually a bloodless beachhead they established on this strategically vital island. Not since Kiska have we had such an easy time.
I watched the landing through glasses from the bridge of an amphibious flagship. This afternoon I followed the troops ashore and walked over the major part of the Marine beachhead with gray-haired Maj. Gen. Roy S. Geiger, commanding general of the Marine III Amphibious Corps troops, who comprise half of the Tenth Army.
Asks about casualties
At every command post we visited on this picturesque pine tree-clad island, the 60-year-old general inquired about casualties and everywhere the answer was a fantastically low figure. There were, for example, only 10 wounded and one killed in one Marine regiment up to two this afternoon, according to Lt. Col. Fred Beans of Cleburne, Texas, who is the executive officer of the regiment.
“I’ve seen only six dead Japs,” the colonel added.
Casualties were described as “exceedingly light,” too, with the XXIV Army Corps making up the rest of the Tenth Army.
Some called it an Easter present, other dubbed it “April Fool.” The general commented: “Doggone. I never, never have been on a battlefield like this before. It’s just a rehearsal. only more fun.”
1,500 planes attack
This is officially credited with being the “largest amphibious operation of the war in the Pacific to date.” More than 1,400 ships are involved and 1,500 carrier-based planes are providing close support.
It was exhilarating to watch the battleships slamming away at point blank range in the grand climax to a solid week of preparatory naval bombardment, to see the gunboats touch off swooshing barrages of rockets, to see flight after flight of planes thunder in to bomb and strafe and rocket.
After this, landing-boats paraded by with flags flying and started toward shore with their precious human cargoes. Half a mile from shore they surmounted a nasty reef and kept on going. At 0846 (8:46 a.m.) they hit the beach.
A clean beach
No landing craft were lost to enemy action on the half of the beach I visited ana no mines were found. It was a clean beach with no bodies, no damaged equipment, no crowded first-aid stations.
It was such a strange looking beachhead it didn’t seem as though we could be landing on hostile territory.
One Marine said: “It looks just like Jones Beach (on Long Island) on a Sunday afternoon.”
We control the sea and air. There is no sight of enemy fleet. Our planes have had a field day over the target, with no ack-ack opposing them. The weather, which worried us on our way here, was perfect today – cool, with a bright sun and a smooth sea.
Troops walk upright
The troops walked upright after they landed and made excellent progress. They captured two airfields before the end of the morning.
It is believed that there were anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 enemy troops here. If that is true, we cannot understand why they didn’t oppose our landing more vigorously. The only living things we encountered were civilians. They were friendly and bowed low to the Marines who then led them to reception camps.
The general expressed himself as mystified by the Jap conduct. It is quite possible that there will be some bloody struggles yet. But we got artillery and tanks ashore today. And by letting us take two airfields the Japs simply gave us Okinawa.
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