Japanese report –
100 Superfortresses batter Kyushu
…
‘Our dream is ended,’ SS trooper laments
Once proud Nazi captured at party shrine sobs openly as Yanks take Nuremberg
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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.
World order, or World War III?
Simms: Allies must unite, accept responsibility of maintaining peace
Any new league formed at San Francisco must be based on justice, Simms says
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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Millett: Women becoming bitter toward ‘second war’
Wives of servicemen must learn need for extended duty for G.I.
By Ruth Millett
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Kate Smith broadcasts eloquent tribute to Pyle
NEW YORK – In her noon broadcast yesterday over the Columbia network, Kate Smith paid the following tribute to the late Ernie Pyle, famed war correspondent:
The nation which lost its leader less than one week ago has a new grief to bear this noon. For only a short time ago, the Navy Department announced that Ernie Pyle, beloved war correspondent and friend of every G.I. Joe, has been killed in action.
Died in harness
Like his Commander-in-Chief who fell last Thursday, Ernie died in harness. He was struck down by enemy machine gun fire on a little island off Okinawa. He was right up there in the front line, as always. Sweating it out with the fighting men, in the thick of battle doing the same magnificent job that he has done ever since America went to war.
United States soldiers, sailors and Marines have lost a staunch friend in the death of Ernie Pyle. He was their champion and their hero.
Suffered with men
The bald little reporter had lived and suffered with American fighting men through months of bitter fighting in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France. He came home after those campaigns, simply, he said, because he couldn’t bear the sight of death any longer.
But it wasn’t long before he was off again, this time to the Pacific. Ernie Pyle followed the call of duty. He felt he owed it to America’s fighting men to support their valiant conquests in the Pacific. And there he met the death he had been close to so many times before.
Truman expresses sentiment
President Truman spoke these words a moment ago, and they speak the sentiments of every American who knew Ernie Pyle through his human, realistic accounts of the war. He said “no man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. More than any other man he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms.”
“Nobody knows how many individuals in our forces and at home he helped with his writings. But all Americans understand now how wisely, how warmheartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen. God bless him. May he rest in peace.”
Monahan: Constance Moore a singing princess
She and Dennis O’Keefe warring lovers in Vanities at Fulton
By Kaspar Monahan
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Chaplin ordered to pay Joan’s baby $75 weekly
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G.I. preview for Pyle film
Movie’s release due in July
By Maxine Garrison, Press Hollywood correspondent
HOLLYWOOD – The death of Ernie Pyle will bring no changes or additions to the film, G.I. Joe, based on the famous war correspondent’s frontline reportings.
Lester Cowan, producer of the movie in which Burgess Meredith portrays Mr. Pyle, said that the completed film will be shown first to troops on Okinawa – the self-same men who were Ernie’s “buddies.”
The film will not be released to the public until July, Mr. Cowan said.
In Washington –
Bill to give 18-year-olds 6 months training debated
Supporters of draft act amendment say it has good chance of passing
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In addition to today’s column, we will print several others which we have just received from Ernie on Okinawa. We believe he would have wanted it this way.
OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – That was one of the most miserable damn nights out of the hundreds of miserable nights I have spent in this war.
Bird Dog and Gross and I turned into our sacks just after dark. So did everybody else who wasn’t on guard. It was too early to go to sleep, so we just lay there in the dark and talked. You could hear voices faintly all over the hillside.
We didn’t take off our clothes, of course; nobody does in the field. I did take off my boots but Bird Dog and Gross left theirs on for they had to stand watch on the field telephones from 1 till 2 a.m.
The three of us lay jammed up against each other, with Bird Dog in the middle. We smoked one cigarette after another. We didn’t have to hide them under the blanket for we were in a protected position where a cigarette couldn’t be seen very far.
Like flamethrowers
Right after dark the mosquitoes started buzzing around our heads. These Okinawa mosquitoes sound hike a flame thrower. They can’t be driven off or brushed away.
I got a little bottle of mosquito lotion out of my pocket and doused mv face and neck, though I knew it would do no good. The other boys didn’t even bother.
Suddenly Bird Dog sat up and pulled down his socks and started scratching. Fleas were after him. Even the grass has fleas in it over here!
For some strange reason I am immune to fleas. Half the boys are red welted with hundreds of itchy little flea bites, but I have never had one.
Choice mosquito bait
But I’m the world’s choicest morsel for mosquitoes. And mosquito bites poison me. Every morning, I wake up with at least one eye swollen shut.
That was the way it was all night, with all of us – me with a double dose of mosquitoes, all the rest with a mixture of mosquitoes and fleas. You could hear Marines hushfully cussing all night long around the hillside. Suddenly there was a terrible outburst just downhill from us and a Marine came jumping out into the moonlight, cussing and jerking at his clothes.
“I can’t stand these damn things any longer,” he cried. “I’ve got to take my clothes off.”
We all laughed under our ponchos while he stood there in the moonlight and stripped off every stitch, even though it was very chilly. He shook and brushed his clothes, doused them with insect powder and then put them back on.
This unfortunate soul was Cpl. Leland Taylor of Jackson, Michigan. His nickname is Pop, since he is 33 years old.
Pop is a “character.” He has a black beard and even in the front lines he wears a khaki overseas dress cap which makes him stand out.
After Pop went back to bed, everything became quiet for several hours, but hardly anybody was asleep. The next morning the boys on guard said Pop must have smoked three packs of cigarettes that night. It was the same way with Bird Dog, Gross and me.
All night without even raising our heads we could see flashes of the big guns of our fleet across the island. They were shelling the southern part and also shooting flares to light up the front lines in the south.
Watch shells in flight
There were times when we could actually see red-hot shells, traveling horizontally the whole length of their flight, 10 miles away from us, and then see them explode.
Every now and then throughout the night our own company’s mortars were called upon to shoot a flare over the beach behind us, just to make sure nothing was coming In.
Once there was a distinct rustling of the bushes in front of us. Of course, the first thing I thought of was a Jap.
But then I figured a Jap wouldn’t make that much noise and finally I decided it was one of the houses the mortar boys had commandeered, crashing through the bushes. And that’s what it turned out to be.
Along about 4:30, I guess we did sleep a little from sheer exhaustion. That gave the mosquitoes a clear field. When we woke up at dawn and crawled stiffly out into the daylight, my right eye was swollen shut, as usual.
All of which isn’t a very war-like night to describe, but I tell it just so you’ll know there are lots of things besides bullets that make war hell.