Churchill hints Nazi regime near collapse
Warning on atrocities also revealed
…
Pyle to rest among G.I.’s he loved
Writer to be buried in Army cemetery
By Mac R. Johnson, United Press staff writer
From the last two paragraphs of Here Is Your War, by Ernie Pyle, written after the African campaign.On the day of final peace, the last stroke of what we call the “Big Picture” will be drawn. I haven’t written anything about the “Big Picture,” because I don’t know anything about it. I only know what we see from our worm’s-eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die; of Jong darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks… and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown ridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter, too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.
That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go on from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field… I don’t know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn’t make any difference, once a man has gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing to them anymore. They died and others lived and nobody knows why it is so. They died and thereby the rest of us can go on and on. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur, “Thanks, pal.”
OKINAWA – Ernie Pyle will be buried among the soldiers he immortalized.
The beloved little war correspondent killed by a Jap machine-gunner yesterday probably will be laid to rest in an Army cemetery here in the Ryukyus where he covered his last campaign.
The soldiers he loved brought him back from the battlefield back to where the noise of the guns is distant and dull. They lifted his pint-sized frame from the ditch where he fell, victim of a sneak machine-gun ambush.
They put him on a litter, and crossed his arms, and then carried him back to the rear.
Jap jealous of prize
It wasn’t easy. That Jap machine-gunner seemed jealous of his prized victim. It was four hours after Ernie was killed before anybody could get to his body.
Cpl. Alexander Roberts, Army photographer from New York City, tried to get in to take pictures. He said every time anybody would try to enter the clearing where Ernie had been killed the gunner would open up.
Finally, Cpl. Roberts crawled into the clearing on his belly, pushing his camera ahead of him.
“Ernie’s face was not twisted in pain or agony,” he said. “He looked pleasant and peaceful. If there hadn’t been a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth, you might have thought he was sleeping.”
Said he would get it
Ernie always said he would get it, that he had used up his chances. He said it again just before he landed with the assault troops on Okinawa. He told a public relations officer that he had a premonition about the campaign. And he said to another officer that he thought he would go back to the States “right after this one.”
Instead, he went from Okinawa to Ie Island because, as he told a friend, his premonition was “pretty silly as I’ve run into nothing hot yet.”
So he went on
So he went on – as he had gone from Ireland to North Africa, to Sicily, Italy, France and the Pacific – to get more stories about his beloved G.I.’s. He wanted to write about the Marines.
Erie was an old dough from the word go. He sweated and suffered with the doughfeet, shared their hopes, fears, and thrills – their lives. Today he shared death with them and it was believed he would be put to rest with them, in a G.I. Army cemetery.
Ernie would have liked that.
Ernie Pyle spent his last hours doing the job he had always done – gathering notes from G.I.’s for his columns, James MacLean, United Press correspondent, reported.
Detained by cold
A two-day-old cold had confined him to the sick bay of a transport and prevented him from landing with other correspondents in the assault waves on Ie until Tuesday. He spent that day interviewing soldiers and officers on the battlefield.
Wherever he went he was surrounded by G.I.’s who swarmed around him, forgetting the battle in progress. They tried to get him to autograph captured Jap money, American bills or invasion bills until their officers ordered the men back into position.
Milton Chase, 33, a correspondent for Radio Station WLW in Cincinnati, and a former staff member for United Press in Shanghai, said Ernie walked very carefully on Ie, because of his fear of landmines.
Mr. Chase said:
He told me that the weapon he hated worst – more than machine guns, shells or anything else – was “stumbling blindly into minefields because they explode before you can duck or take cover.”
Yanks seize three-fourths of Okinawa, push to north
First 18 days of campaign cost Americans 7,895 killed, wounded or captured
GUAM (UP) – Marines completed the conquest of three-quarters of Okinawa today with a push to the northern tip of the island only 330 miles south of Japan.
The first 18 days of the Okinawa campaign, along with associated operations in the rest of Ryukyu Island chain and supporting carrier raids on Japan proper, cost 7,895 Americans killed, wounded or captured, a Pacific Fleet communiqué announced.
Navy suffers heaviest
Heaviest losses were suffered by the Navy – 989 officers and men killed, 2,220 wounded and 1,491 missing. Tenth Army Marines and soldiers lost 478 dead, 2,457 wounded and 260 missing.
Though Marines of the III Amphibious Corps had brought all of central and norther Okinawa under American control, they were still battling isolated enemy groups on Motobu Peninsula jutting out from the northwest coast.
Yanks stalled near Naha
In southern Okinawa, the XXIV Army Corps was still stalled by strong Jap positions shielding Naha, the island’s capital. The Fleet’s big guns and carrier planes were hammering the defenses.
Other forces on Ie Island three miles west of Motobu Peninsula made substantial gains in the northeast section of the island, but Jap troops in dug-in positions and pillboxes around Iegusugu Peak were resisting stiffly.
On Hitler’s birthday eve –
Allies seeking ‘death blow’ to Reich, Goebbels wails
Fuehrer will go forward to the very end, propagandist says in lauding leader
LONDON, England (UP) – Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels said today that the Allies have launched what may be their final offensive of the war in an attempt to deal a “death blow” to Germany.
His speech, filled with foreboding, was scheduled for delivery to the German people tonight on the eve of Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday. The text was broadcast in advance by the official Nazi DNB Agency.
It was not known whether Hitler would also speak on what well may be his last birthday.
Goebbels said:
The last decisive round of the war approaches its end. Events never before have been balanced on the razor’s edge as now…
It seems once again all the powers of hate and destruction gather, perhaps for the last time, to surge against our fronts from the west, east, southeast and south in order to pierce them and deal a death blow to the Reich.
Goebbels said the “head of the enemy conspiracy” – presumably the late President Roosevelt – had been “crushed by fate, the very fate that on July 20, 1944, preserved our Fuehrer so he could complete his mission.”
He extolled what he called the virtues of Hitler and asked:
What could enemy statesmen oppose to these qualities of our Fuehrer?
Nothing but numerical superiority, nothing but them foolish destructive madness, thew diabolical rage of annihilation, behind which looms chaos and the final disintegration of civilized humanity.
Despite the odds against her, Germany will win the war, he said. Hitler will find the way out, he promised.
He said:
Our Fuehrer will go forward until the very end. We vow we will never let him down… Is it conceivable that a nation like ours, in the giddiness of one frantic moment, would be ready to sell its birthright for a dish of lentils?
He said the present stage of the war was the “last act of the immense and tragic drama which began August 1, 1914.”
“What we thought we could evade in November 1918, we now have made up for thrice over,” he said.
Goebbels told the Germans that it was “virile and German” to hoist the swastika where the Allies expect the white flag.
He said:
Let us show the enemy that he can hurt us, but not kill us; that he can draw blood from us, but cannot beat us to our knees; can torment us, but not humiliate us.
He asserted that the German Army had brought to Europe “prosperity, calm, order, well-consolidated conditions, work in abundance for everybody and life worth living.
The Allies, he said, left in their wake “poverty, grief, chaos, desolation, destruction, unemployment, hunger and death en masse.”
U.S. losses rise 12,810 to 912,200
WASHINGTON (UP) – Officially announced U.S. combat casualties reached 912,200 today. This was an increase of 12,810 in a week.
The U.S. combat casualty total included 813,870 Army and 98,330 Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard losses since December 7, 1941.
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson reported that U.S. Army casualties in Europe during March “were limited” to 47,023. This included 6,214 killed, 35,443 wounded, and 5,366 missing.
Ground force losses in Europe since D-Day, he said, now total 473,215, including 79,795 killed by the Germans, 334,919 wounded, and 58,501 missing.
Mr. Stimson said that he “would not have anyone think that even in this past week or two the Allied forces in Germany have had an easy time of it; on the contrary, we have run into centers of the stiffest kind of resistance.”
The total U.S. casualties:
| Army | Navy | TOTAL | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Killed | 162,505 | 37,920 | 200,425 |
| Wounded | 496,803 | 45,554 | 542,357 |
| Missing | 83,926 | 10,595 | 94,521 |
| TOTALS | 813,870 | 98,330 | 912,200 |
Of the Army wounded, 261,596 have returned to duty.
Marshall confers with President
WASHINGTON (UP) – President Truman summoned Gen. George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff, to the White House for a 15-minute conference today.
After the conference Gen. Marshall smilingly told reporters that he had “lots and lots” of news.
“But,” he added with a grin, “I can’t give it to you.”
Gen. Marshall said he couldn’t say anything on the subject of the nearness or remoteness of V-E Day.
Roosevelt’s birthday urged as legal holiday
WASHINGTON (UP) – Sen. Sheridan Downey (D-California) yesterday introduced a joint resolution to designated January 30, the birthday of President Roosevelt, as a legal holiday.
Navy bill approved
WASHINGTON – The House passed and sent to the Senate today a bill to give the Navy $24,879,510,546 to finance its knockout blows against Japan.
Now?!! The war is nearly over.
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I DARE SAY —
Ernie Pyle
By Florence Fisher Parry
…As I wrote these words, the news of Ernie Pyle’s death came in… And I find that I must scrap what I have written… No, death does not mean “utter and final defeat.” Not to this man, who walked its way as one marked for the dread rendezvous.
Now that the world has come, we are not in the least surprised. We see now that this man would not, could not, survive the thing that drew him back to it. Some deep compulsion sent him forth again, against his will, against all the overtures which creature comforts must have made to his tired body and more tired soul.
He was so tired; the sickness of battle had seeped into the very marrow of him. He did not want that last assignment, an assignment which no human being but himself would have had the heart to give him.
But he had to go.
Feeling the bony finger on him, he still had to go.
You have to live with yourself; and, you have to die with yourself. These are compulsions which are known only to the great, the selfless. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life on the altar of such compulsion.
Through a glass darkly
He would have called himself a little man, an unimportant man. He did not take on stature as he grew in fame; he merely took on more humanity and humility. He did not value his life more; he valued it less and less, as it became more important to others. He never saw himself in the history books. Few great men are as great as that.
I think what made him so dear to so many was that he was frail and acknowledged that he was afraid. It gave the boys in battle a kinship with him. He admitted to the very fear that was in them; and so they got to believing that to be afraid was a common and natural thing, and not contemptible at all, nothing to be ashamed of. It gave them comfort. If he had done nothing more than that, he still would be a great man, immortal to the boys he understood so well and who will mourn him in a way peculiar and different from all other kinds of mourning…
I find myself thinking of verses in the Bible, verses that seem to sing of Ernie Pyle and all his modest brotherhood the world over.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind… charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up… seeketh not her own… thinketh no evil… beareth all things… endureth all things…
For now we see through a glass, darkly…
No longer darkly, Ernie…
How blinding clear it must be now to you!
Lt. Lucas: Ernie Pyle was great reporter because he was what he wrote
Columnist feared Okinawa campaign, death of others, not his, worried him
By Lt. Jim G. Lucas, USMC combat correspondent
WASHINGTON – A month ago, at Guam, Ernie Pyle told me he was afraid of the Okinawa campaign.
I knew what he meant. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He didn’t take that into account, he was afraid of the sight and smell of death – the other fellow’s death – and of the mess a bloody show can make of a man inside.
Later, when he wrote his first Okinawa story, he said that. He wrote he’d dreaded going ashore and stepping over dead men who’d come in alive. He said he was relieved not to find them.
Ernie was a great reporter because he was your reporter. He was writing for you. I had just come through Tarawa when I read his account of the death of the young Texas captain in Italy. To me, that was the finest prose ever written. I knew, on Tarawa, that Ernie Pyle, in Italy, had written that for me. It was something we shared together.
He was what he wrote
He was a great reporter because he was what he wrote. He didn’t think of himself as great. At Guam, he was distressed if the military singled him out for special favors. His whole attitude was that this was a lot of fuss about nothing. He’d much rather sit around and be one of the boys.
If you sat down with Ernie to talk about someone, he knew he wanted you.
If you sat down because he was Ernie Pyle, he was unhappy and uneasy.
The announcement that Ernie Pyle was coming to the Pacific caused a lot of excitement. Marines, privates to generals, wanted him. The boys who went to Iwo Jima were disappointed because he didn’t go along. They felt compensated because he was on a carrier off shore. But I heard many complaints because he wasn’t with them on the beach.
Friend wounded
When I flew out of Iwo Jima, I found Ernie at Adm. Nimitz’s press headquarters on Guam. I stopped to tell them about Sgt. Dick Tenelly, a 4th Division combat correspondent who once worked with him on the Washington Daily News. Dick was wounded early in battle. I told Ernie that Sgt. Tenelly might lose a leg.
It hurt him.
“God, I hope not,” he said. “Dick deserves better than that.”
He wanted to know how it happened. I couldn’t tell him much only that Sgt. Tenelly had been shot through both legs, and evacuated before I could see him. He told me about men he’d seen wounded in Europe, and what it did to him.
Scared to death
“I’m on the next one, you know,” he said. “I’m scared to death.”
I said he didn’t look scared.
“Did you ever see anyone who did?” he asked. “But I don’t sleep much at night thinking about it.”
He said he wanted to get “the feel” of the Pacific war, and that was the reason he was going with the Marines to Okinawa. It wasn’t because he wanted to get into any more trouble.
“The Marines want you along,” I said. “The boys on Iwo are sore because you weren’t there.”
“They’re a cheerful bunch,” he grinned. “Want to get me hurt, do they? I’m glad I wasn’t. That must have been a rough one.”
We assured him it was.
Made war real
You didn’t have to meet Ernie Pyle to know him. It helped, perhaps, but his gift was that he was able to leave something of himself in every piece he wrote.
They’ll bury Ernie in the Pacific, but he won’t be forgotten. I wish he’d been able to see more of the Pacific war. He wouldn’t have liked it – he’d have hated it bitterly – but he’d have been able to make a lot of others hate it with him. Because when he wrote of war, he made it real, perhaps because it was so real to him.
Chaplain, Marine brave Jap fire to get Pyle’s body
By Jack Hooley, Blue Network war correspondent
IE ISLAND (April 18) – Ernie Pyle died here on Ie Island at 10:15 in the morning. An hour later, word of his death had spread over open water as far as Mi Island, two miles away. Relayed by an artillery officer at the front by radio, by blinker light and by word of mouth, it had spread from Ie to the ships standing off shore – all in that short time.
The facts are quickly told. Ernie Pyle went ashore the evening before. In the morning, having heard that our troops were engaged in heavy fighting for a time below a mountain peak on the tiny island, he set out for the spot with Lt. Col. Joseph Coolidge.
The two men bumped along in a jeep over the narrow road taken by our troops the day before. As the jeep rounded a corner, a sudden burst of fire from a Jap machine gun hidden on a ridge sent both men scrambling for a ditch.
The gunfire stopped. Both had been through this kind of thing before.
Death came instantly
After a few minutes they peered cautiously over the edge. Another burst of fire and Col. Coolidge ducked back. He turned to Ernie.
The veteran correspondent lay on his back, too still for life.
Death had come instantly from three bullet wounds in the temple.
Every bit of movement brought a burst of fire from the hidden Japs, but finally Col. Coolidge managed to crawl to cover and submit his report.
Tank men helpless
For a long while, Ernie’s body was inaccessible. Finally, the chaplain of the outfit asked for volunteers to bring him in.
First three tanks moved up. Their appearance was the signal for the machine-gunner to open up with such a steady fire that the crew men were helpless inside the tanks.
When they retired, Cpl. Alexander Roberts of New York City volunteered to go alone. From the point beyond which the Yanks had retired about 125 yards back of the bend in the road, Cpl. Roberts crawled to the jeep.
He found Pyle’s face beneath the helmet he wore, peaceful in death. In his left hand, Ernie clutched the Marine fatigue cap he always wore.
Preferred cap
“A helmet is a lot of iron for a man like me to carry around,” he said to me recently, “so when I get to a safe place I switch to a cap.”
With the way shown by Cpl. Roberts, the chaplain, who had not wished to risk four lives, crawled over the ground with a litter bearer and they made 80 yards of the return trip before the machine gun opened upon them.
Four hours after his death, Ernie Pyle’s body was inside our lines again.
The boys in the lines out here were thrilled when Ernie Pyle came out to the Pacific. G.I.’s, Marines and youngsters on the ocean knew that he didn’t have to but they were glad he came anyway.
“We had waited for him so long,” said one of them today.
‘Our dream is ended,’ SS trooper laments
Once proud Nazi captured at party shrine sobs openly as Yanks take Nuremberg
…
Another Nazi treasure seized in Magdeburg
Branch of Reichsbank containing 70 million in Reichsmarks and silver coin captured
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Editorial: Ernie
Newspaper people, we think, may be forgiven sometimes if they take advantage of their solitary medium of expression to speak out of their hearts about one of their own.
Our troubles, our losses, are not your troubles and your losses. They are our own. You, ordinarily, have no reason to be interested in them.
But, this once, we think you are interested.
You are interested because Ernie Pyle was as much of you as he was of us.
Ernie is dead. You don’t believe it. Neither do we. Neither do the G.I. Joes, nor the Navy Joes, nor the Marine Joes. Nobody believes it. But it is true.
Killed in action!
That was Ernie, all over.
He didn’t want to go. He had seen enough of war. Of its bloody form. Of its ultimate and inevitable terminus – death. Of its amazing horror. Of its gruesome catastrophe. Of its inhuman methods.
Ernie was scared. And he admitted it. He admitted his fright as no coward ever would do.
But he went.
He went because he had to go. Something drove him to go. Even as it has drawn every G.I. Joe. Every Joe who was a friend of Ernie. Every Joe to whom Ernie was an everlasting friend.
Ernie made himself go back to the war – after he had seen so much of it. After he had had so many close calls. Not for glory. He had enough of that. Not for money. He had that, too. He went – well, he had to go. Ernie was that kind of a little guy.
What we say about Ernie Pyle just makes so many words. What the G.I.’s say about him makes a memorial more fitting than any the greatest lyricist could pen.
He was one of them. Willfully, thoughtfully and, still, unconsciously, he was one of them. He couldn’t help it. He died one of them.
When Ernie went off to the Pacific, he wrote in his first column: “Well, here we go again.”
That was Ernie. Not wanting to go. Hating all that going meant. Yet feeling compelled to go.
“Here we go again.”
And soon after he got there – that is, in the Marianas – Ernie wrote about the B-29s. How they went off on their missions, knowing full well some never would come back.
“It is just up to fate,” he said. “But you cannot know ahead of time who it will be.”
The law of averages caught up to Ernie. He knew it would catch up, someday. But he went anyway.
“You cannot tell ahead of time who it will be.”
This time, God bless him, it is Ernie.
We can’t believe it. You can’t believe it. But – his number came up. That’s the way it is in war. It has been that way with thousands of Americans – level-headed, scared Americans, brave men. Men whom Ernie knew so well and typified so well. But it’s true.
Last February, when Ernie resumed writing, after a terribly earned rest, we said: “Something has been missing in the coverage of the war since Ernie had to come home for a rest.”
Now, something will be missing – forever.