America at war! (1941–) – Part 5

U.S. Navy Department (April 1, 1945)

CINCPOA Communiqué No. 317

The United States Tenth Army, whose principal ground elements include the XXIV Army Corps and the Marine III Amphibious Corps, invaded the west coast of the island of Okinawa in the Ryukyus in great force on the morning of April 1 (East Longitude Date). This landing is the largest amphibious operation of the war in the Pacific to date.

ADM R. A. Spruance, USN, Commander Fifth Fleet, is in overall tactical command of the operation. The amphibious phase of the operation is under command of VADM Richmond Kelly Turner, USN, Commander Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet. The Tenth Army is under command of LTG Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., USA.

The landings were made by ships and landing craft of the United States Fifth Fleet supported by the guns and aircraft of that fleet.

The attack on Okinawa has also been covered and supported by attacks of a strong British carrier task force under VADM Sir Bernard Rawlings against enemy positions in the Sakishima group.

Troops of the XXIV Army Corps are commanded by MG John R. Hodge, USA, and the Marines of the III Amphibious Corps are commanded by MajGen Roy S. Geiger, USMC.

The attack on Okinawa was preceded by the capture of the islands of the Kerama group west of the southern tip of Okinawa which commenced on March 26. The amphibious phases of this preliminary operation were commanded by RADM I. N. Kiland, USN. The troops consisted of the 77th Army Division under command of MG Andrew D. Bruce, USA. The capture of these outposts was completed prior to the main landings on Okinawa and heavy artillery is now emplaced there and in support of the Okinawa attack.

The amphibious support force is under command of RADM W. H. P. Blandy, USN, who was also present at the capture of the Kerama group of islands and in general charge of those operations. The battleships which form the principal gunfire support element are commanded by RADM M. L. Deyo, USN.

Fast Carrier Task Forces of the U.S. Pacific Fleet which are participating in the attack are under command of VADM Marc A. Mitscher, USN. The escort carriers which are supporting the attack are under command of RADM C. T. Durgin, USN.

More than 1,400 ships are involved in the operation. The landings were preceded by and are being covered by heavy gunfire from battleships, cruisers and light units of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. U.S. carrier aircraft are providing close support for the ground troops. Strategic support is being given by the shore‑based air forces of the Southwest Pacific Area, the Pacific Ocean Areas, and by the 20th Air Force.

The operation is proceeding according to plan. The troops who went ashore at 1830, Tokyo Time, advanced inland rapidly and by 1100 had captured the Yontan and Kadena airports with light losses.

The capture of Iwo Island gave us an air base only 660 miles from Tokyo and greatly intensified our air attacks on Japan. The capture of Okinawa will give us bases only 325 miles from Japan which will greatly intensify the attacks by our fleet and air forces against Japanese communications and against Japan Itself. As our sea and air blockade cuts the enemy off from the world and as our bombing increases in strength and proficiency our final decisive victory is assured.

CINCPOA Communiqué No. 318

United States forces on Okinawa advanced inland rapidly throughout the first day of the assault and by 1800 on April 1 (East Longitude Date) forward elements of the XXIV Army Corps and Marine Third Amphibious Corps had expanded the beachhead to a three-mile depth at several points. Enemy resistance continued to be light. Sporadic mortar and artillery fire fell on the beaches early in the day. The landing beaches were made secure against small arms fire as our forces deepened their positions behind the beaches. Heavy units of the Fleet continued to shell enemy installations on the island and carrier aircraft gave close support to the ground troops throughout the day. Four enemy planes attacking our surface forces were destroyed. Unloading of supplies on the beaches has begun.

Installations on Ishigaki and Miyako Islands in the Sakishima group were heavily hit by carrier aircraft of the British Pacific Fleet on March 31 and April 1. Of 20 Japanese aircraft which landed in the Sakishimas during these attacks, 14 were destroyed and 6 damaged by British aircraft.

Mustangs of the VII Fighter Command bombed Susaki airfield and harbor installations at Chichi Jima and other targets on Haha Jima in the Bonins on March 31.

Corsair and Hellcat fighters bombed supply areas in the Palaus on March 31. One of our fighters was destroyed but the pilot was rescued. On the same date, Marine fighters bombed the airstrip on Yap in the western Carolines.

Führer HQ (April 2, 1945)

Kommuniqué des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht

Südwestlich des Plattensees und in der Grenzsteilung südwestlich Steinamanger wehrten unsere Verbände heftige Angriffe der Bolschewisten ab. Im oberen Raabtal konnten die Sowjets dagegen nach Nordwesten Boden gewinnen. Westlich des Neusieder Sees wurden feindliche Panzerspitzen in harten Kämpfen am Leitha-Abschnitt und am Südrand des Leitha-Gebirges aufgefangen. Nördlich der Donau leisteten unsere Truppen zwischen dem Ostrand der Kleinen Karpaten und der Waag dem nach Nordwesten drängenden Gegner erbitterten Widerstand.

Erneute feindliche Durchbruchsversuche in Oberschlesien scheiterten zwischen Schwarzwasser und Jägerndorf an der Standhaftigkeit unserer Divisionen, die in der zweiten Märzhälfte mit dem Abschuß von 952 Panzern einen bedeutenden Abwehrerfolg errangen. Die Besatzung von Breslau schlug starke, von Panzern und Schlachtfliegern unterstützte Angriffe ab.

Mit unvermindert starkem Kräfteaufwand setzten die Sowjets an der Danziger Bucht ihre Angriffe in der Oxhöfter Kämpe und gegen die westliche Weichselniederung fort. Sie konnten jedoch nur wenig Gelände gewinnen und verloren 39 Panzer.

Nordwestlich Dohlen zerbrachen die mit neu herangeführten Kräften geführten Angriffe des Feindes am entschlossenen Widerstand unserer Kurlandkämpfer.

Im Westen dauern die schweren Abwehrkämpfe im holländischen Grenzgebiet zwischen dem Niederrhein und Enschedes an. Östlich Burgsteinfurt hielten unsere Truppen das Vordringen des Feindes auf. Auch bei Münster behaupteten sie sich gegen starke Angriffe. Östlich und südöstlich. Davon konnte der Gegner bis an die Ränder des Teutoburger Waldes beiderseits Bielefeld durchstoßen, wurde dann aber unter hohen Panzer- und Menschenverlusten zum Stehen gebracht. Von Süden hervorgehend, haben die Amerikaner den Raum Söst-Lippstadt erreicht. Am Nordrand des Industriegebietes sind um Recklinghausen heftige Kämpfe im Gange.

An der unteren und mittleren Sieg wurdet durch harten Widerstand und im Gegenangriff ein Vordringen des Feindes verhindert. Auch am Rothaargebirge und im Raum von Winterberg wurden zahlreiche Angriffe abgewiesen.

Eine weit im Rücken der Amerikaner stehende Kampfgruppe der Waffen-SS, durch eine Fahnenjunkerschule des Heeres verstärkt, hat in den letzten drei Tagen dem Gegner schwerste Verluste zugefügt und mehr als 35 Angriffe bis zu Regimentsstärke zurückgeschlagen. 38 Panzer und gepanzerte Fahrzeuge, zahlreiche Lastkraftwagen und Mannschaftstransportwagen wurden erbeutet oder vernichtet und mehrere hundert Amerikaner, darunter 50 Offiziere, als Gefangene eingebracht.

Angriffe auf Kassel scheiterten unter starken. Panzerverlusten für den Feind. Zwischen der Werra und dem Kinzigtal hat sich der Druck des Gegners vor allem nördlich der Rhön verstärkt. Im Spessart sowie zwischen der unteren Tauber und dem Maindreieck sind erbitterte Abwehrkämpfe entbrannt. Aus dem Gebiet zwischen Bad Mergentheim und der Rheinebene südlich Heidelberg drückt der Feind weitet nach Süden. In der Rheinebene selbst gelang den Amerikanern ein Einbruch bis Bruchsal doch wurden ihre den ganzen Tag über wiederholten Angriffe auf die Stadt selbst blutig zurückgeschlagen.

Tag- und Nachtangriffe unserer Luftwaffe richteten sich mit nachhaltiger Wirkung gegen die feindlichen Nachschubverbindungen.

An der Westalpenfront konnte der Gegner erst nach siebenmaligen starken Angriffen einen Stützpunkt am kleinen Sankt Bernhard nehmen.

In Mittelitalien scheiterten zahlreiche Aufklärungsvorstöße der Amerikaner südwestlich Bolognas.

Nach längeren schweren Kämpfen in Kroatien ist sowohl im Raum von Bihac wie in Ostbosnien eine Kampfpause eingetreten.

Bei Angriffen amerikanischer Terrorverbände gegen Orte in Südostdeutschland entständen Personenverluste und schwere Häuserschäden vor allem im Stadtgebiet von Marburg an der Drau.

Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (April 2, 1945)

FROM
(A) SHAEF MAIN

ORIGINATOR
PRD, Communique Section

DATE-TIME OF ORIGIN
021100A April

TO FOR ACTION
(1) AGWAR
(2) NAVY DEPARTMENT

TO (W) FOR INFORMATION (INFO)
(3) TAC HQ 12 ARMY GP
(4) MAIN 12 ARMY GP
(5) AIR STAFF
(6) ANCXF
(7) EXFOR MAIN
(8) EXFOR REAR
(9) DEFENSOR, OTTAWA
(10) CANADIAN C/S, OTTAWA
(11) WAR OFFICE
(12) ADMIRALTY
(13) AIR MINISTRY
(14) UNITED KINGDOM BASE
(15) SACSEA
(16) CMHQ (Pass to RCAF & RCN)
(17) COM ZONE
(18) SHAEF REAR
(19) SHAEF MAIN
(20) PRO, ROME
(21) HQ SIXTH ARMY GP 
(REF NO.)
NONE

(CLASSIFICATION)
IN THE CLEAR

Communiqué No. 359

UNCLASSIFIED: Allied forces advancing from the west and from the south have linked up in the vicinity of Lippstadt, 75 miles east of the Rhine, and encircled the whole of the German Army Group B. The destruction of this large enemy force in the densely populated area of the Ruhr and in the mountainous district to the south, will take time but will not preclude the advance of allied armored columns farther into Germany. North of the Ruhr, our forces continued to make good progress advancing more than 15 miles in some sectors. Geseke, southeast of Lippstadt, has been captured and our units are mopping up in Paderborn where resistance from enemy tanks, bazookas and small arms fire has been stiff. Farther to the southeast, our armored elements advanced three and one-half miles east of Warburg.

In the vicinity of Rimbeck, northwest of Warburg, our infantry encountered resistance from an estimated 1,000 enemy troops.

Our infantry in a six-mile advance, reached a point north of Besse, six and one-half miles south of Kassel. Armored units crossed the Fulda River in the area 15 miles south of Kassel and entered Adelshausen. We encountered strong enemy resistance in this area from assault guns and tanks.

Farther to the southeast, our armored elements advanced eight miles to the vicinity of Nesselröden, west of Eisenach, while other units reached the vicinity of Heringen, 13 miles southwest of Eisenach. In these advances, we encountered road blocks and resistance from assault guns and tanks. Hersfeld has been cleared by our infantry, and north of Fulda we captured Langenschwarz and entered Lüdermünd. Northeast of Fulda, we reached the vicinity of Obernüst.

In the area northeast of Hanau, our cavalry entered Eidengesass. Mopping up proceeds in the area north of Frankfurt against strong resistance from enemy groups. Rail and road communications in the areas of Iserlohn, Holzminden, Siegen, Mühlhausen, Eisenach, Erfurt and east of Fulda were attacked by fighter-bombers. Fanatical resistance continued in Aschaffenburg.

At Shweinheim, the enemy continued to resist by infiltrating after the town had been cleared. Our rapid armored advance up the Main River continued and gains of up to 18 miles were made.

Our forces control more than 14 miles along the Main River southeast of Würzburg and generally have broken out of the Odenwald into the Wurzburg-Heilbronn plain. In the action near Bad Wergentheim, we captured a lieutenant general, commander of a corps.

South of Mannheim, the last units which crossed the Rhine advanced eastward up to 18 miles and crossed the autobahn.

Allied forces in the west captured 22,877 prisoners 31 March.

Strongpoints, gun positions and fortified building impeding the progress of our forces in the sector east and northeast of the Main River were heavily bombed by fighter-bombers in great strength. Targets were in an area extending from Aschaffenburg to Königshofen, some 60 miles to the northeast.

Barracks and supply areas near Stuttgart including targets at Vaihingen an der Enz and Ludwigsburg were attacked by medium bombers.

Rocket-firing fighters hit a convoy of more than 100 vehicles, some loaded with ammunition, attempting to move northeast from Enschede on a partially blocked road. Scattered motor transport was attacked in the Lingen area. Twenty railyards were hit during the day. Nearly 800 transport vehicles and 43 tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed.

A number of airfields including those at Herzberg and at Grossen Behringen south of Mühlhausen also were bombed. Forty-seven aircraft were destroyed on the ground and others were damaged. One enemy aircraft was shot down. From all operations 31 of our fighters are missing.

COORDINATED WITH: G-2, G-3 to C/S

THIS MESSAGE MAY BE SENT IN CLEAR BY ANY MEANS
/s/

Precedence
“OP” - AGWAR
“P” - Others

ORIGINATING DIVISION
PRD, Communique Section

NAME AND RANK TYPED. TEL. NO.
D. R. JORDAN, Lt Col FA4655

AUTHENTICATING SIGNATURE
/s/

U.S. Navy Department (April 2, 1945)

Communiqué No. 590

Pacific Area.
The LCI (G) 974 has been lost in the Philippine Area as the result of enemy action.

Next of kin of casualties have been informed.

CINCPOA Communiqué No. 319

Elements of XXIV Army Corps moved across the island of Okinawa on April 2 (East Longitude Date) to a point on the east coast near the village of Tobara. Advances averaging several thousand yards were made along the entire Tenth Army line against scattered resistance. In the center of the island in rugged terrain increasing enemy activity was being encountered by some of our troops. In the northern sector advances were made throughout the day by the Marines of the III Amphibious Corps. The ground troops were supported in their drive by carrier aircraft, by gunfire from heavy units of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and by field artillery. Observation planes began operation from Yontan and Kadena airfields. During the night of April 1 and 2, five enemy aircraft were shot down. The unloading of supplies is proceeding satisfactorily.

Corsair and Hellcat fighters and Avenger torpedo planes of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing attacked houses, a causeway, and a bridge and set a supply dump afire in the Palaus on April 2.

Liberators of the 7th Army Air Force bombed runways on Susaki airfield on Chichi Jima in the Bonins on March 31.


CINCPOA Press Release No. 56

For Immediate Release
April 2, 1945

MG James E. Chaney, USA, has assumed duty as Island Commander of Iwo Island.

BG Ernest M. Moore, USA, commanding general of the VII Fighter Command of the 7th Air Force has also been assigned duty in command of all aircraft of all services based at Iwo Island.

LIFE (April 2, 1945)

Allied armies vault the Rhine

War cemetery

Crosses in a Belgian field honor the men who died to win the Rhine

Editorial: Christianity and creeds

‘Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine’ – Timothy I, 4:16

MacArthur is home in a ruined Manila

One of the war’s worst city battles half destroys the ‘Pearl of the Orient,’ pride of the Philippines

Old clothing

Collection for war victims begins

Maine mural

Kennebunkport’s angry citizens get ready to remove unwanted art

Academy Awards

5,000 anonymous spectators also turn in Oscar-worthy performances

Five thousand people, nearly all of them in various stages of hysteria, packed the bleachers and roped-off sections outside Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood on the Academy Award night. What they would most like to have seen is shown above. Actually they had no hope of getting into the theater, which was filled with much of the world’s highest-priced entertainment talent. They were nevertheless content to get close-up glimpses of moviedom’s great figures arriving and departing, to get crumbs of recognition from them as they passed.

Inside the theater the stars and makers of Going My Way took seven of the 27 Oscar awards. Bob Hope made faces behind Bing Crosby’s back as the latter’s award was announced. Barry Fitzgerald, waiting to be photographed after accepting his award, untied a tight shoelace for comfort. A few days later, Mr. Fitzgerald, practicing his golf swing in his house, knocked over his Oscar, which, having been made of plaster this year instead of metal, smashed to bits.

Movie murderer

Sidney Greenstreet, specialist, commits one of his deftest jobs

The control of Germany

Harvard president urges strict control and inspection of industry to prevent another war
By James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University

U.S. Army replacements

Newly-trained men move in quick, steady flow from U.S. to fill casualty gaps at front

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

erniepyle
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.”

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