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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Once proud Nazi captured at party shrine sobs openly as Yanks take Nuremberg
…
Branch of Reichsbank containing 70 million in Reichsmarks and silver coin captured
…
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.