Yanks storm into outskirts of Baguio
Filipino guerrillas rescue 7,000 civilians
…
Superfortresses hammer Japan twice within 12 hours
B-29s aim of airports housing planes used in suicide attacks against Yanks off Okinawa
Reported new landing by U.S. troops was on Minna Island, off Okinawa’s Motobu Peninsula. Nearby Ie Island was virtually occupied. The Japs continued to fight hard on Motobu Peninsula. To the northeast of Okinawa (inset map), U.S. Superfortresses blasted Jap airfields on Kyushu Island twice in 12 hours, and U.S. carrier planes joined in the attacks. In the Philippines, U.S. forces stormed Baguio.
GUAM (UP) – More than 100 Superfortresses ripped Japan’s six main suicide-plane bases in Southern Kyushu before dawn today for the second time in less than 12 hours.
The Superfortresses’ fastest one-two punch yet against Japan was designed to knock out airfields from which enemy suicide pilots have been taking off to crash their explosive-laden planes against U.S. warships off Okinawa.
Today’s raid marked the third anniversary of Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle’s historic carrier-based raid on Tokyo, now nearly one-tenth destroyed as result of B-29 fire raids in the past six weeks.
Report new landing
A Jap broadcast said U.S. troops have landed on tiny Minna Island, just south of nearly-conquered Ie Island and three miles off Okinawa’s embattled Motobu Peninsula.
The invasion, like that of Ie, was designed to gain additional airfields for the Americans, the broadcast said. It indicated the landing occurred simultaneously with that on Ie Monday.
Pacific Fleet headquarters was silent on the purported landing but announced that two-thirds of Ie had already been cleared against moderate resistance.
Marines win hill
On Okinawa, Marines battled 1,200 to 2,200 Japs entrenched in the hills of Motobu Peninsula in the northern sector. The Japs counterattacked four times yesterday and an important hill changed hands twice in the vicious fighting. Three hundred enemy dead were found when the Marines finally won a firm hold on the hill.
The XXIV Army Corps front above Naha, the capital of Okinawa, was quiet.
Superfortresses which roared out from the Marianas to bomb Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost home island, early today passed in flight some of the last squadrons homeward bound from yesterday’s afternoon raid.
Both forces sowed their explosives on Tachiarai, Kanoya, East Kanoya, Izumi, Kokumbu and Nittaghara airfields.
2,813 planes blasted
The raids were believed to have added materially to the toll of 2,813 Jap planes destroyed or damaged over and on Southern Japan and the Ryukyu Island chain since March 17.
A Pacific Fleet communiqué said U.S. air forces alone had destroyed 2,200 enemy aircraft in the period. British carrier planes accounted for an additional 80 and B-29s destroyed 105 more. Another 428 were damaged.
A XXI Bomber Command announcement said B-29s which hit Japan early Monday burned out an additional 5.2 square miles in Tokyo and 2.9 square miles in the nearby industrial center of Kawasaki.
Hate for Nazis burning deep in Yanks now
G.I.’s get first-hand evidence of atrocities
By William H. Stoneman
…
25,000 sick and dying, piles of bodies found in Nazi ‘black hole’
Cases of cannibalism reported in camp housing civilian internees of all nations
By Richard D. McMillan, United Press staff writer
…
Free for six days, captives are too weak to leave
In one house of Buchenwald camp, 1,700 lie side by side – one in 15 dies every night
By Robert Richards, United Press staff writer
…
Ernie’s father, Aunt Mary stunned at news of death
Neighbor hears news on radio and informs family on Indiana farm
DANA, Indiana (UP) – William C. Pyle, father of war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and the writer’s “Aunt Mary” – Mrs. Mary Bales – were stunned today by word of his death.
Mrs. Ella Goforth, a neighbor, said the aging relatives of the famed newspaperman received word from another neighbor woman who heard the news on the radio.
“They’re just not able to talk about it now,” Mrs. Goforth said in a phone conversation from the Pyle farm home, near the Indiana-Illinois state line.
“They’re not taking the news very well.”
Mrs. Nellie Hendricks, who lives across the field from the Pyle home, heard the first news of Ernie’s death. She ran across the field to tell the writer’s father and his aunt. Then they turned on their own radio and heard the news, according to Mr. Goforth.
She said:
Mr. Pyle had a letter from Ernie about two weeks ago. That was the last word they had from him. He told them he thought he’d be home sooner than he’d expected – but of course, he didn’t know about this.
Tribute from Time –
‘It will be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle’s war’
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
The following widely-quoted tribute to Ernie Pyle appeared in Time Magazine:
…He is the most popular of them all. His column appears six days a week in 310 newspapers with a total circulation of 12,255,000. Millions of people at home read it avidly, write letters to him, pray for him, telephone their newspapers to ask about his health and safety.
Abroad, G.I.’s and generals recognize him wherever he goes, seek him out, confide in him. The War Department and the high command in the field, rating him a top morale-builder, scan his column for hints. Fellow citizens and fellow newsmen have heaped honors on him.
Wrote of small people
What happened to Ernie Pyle was that the war suddenly made the kind of unimportant small people and small things he was accustomed to write about enormously important.
Many a correspondent before him had written of the human side of war, but their stories were usually about the heroes and the exciting moments which briefly punctuate war’s infinite boredom.
Ernie Pyle did something different. More than anyone else, he has humanized the most complex and mechanized war in history. As John Steinbeck has explained it:
“There are really two wars and they haven’t much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions and regiments – and that is Gen. Marshall’s war.”
War of common men
“Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage – and this is Ernie Pyle’s war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone.”
One reason that Ernie Pyle has been able to report this little man’s war so successfully is that he loves people and, for all his quirks and foibles, is at base a very average little man himself.
Understands men
He understands G.I. hopes and fears and gripes and fun and duty-born courage because he shares them as no exceptionally fearless or exceptionally brilliant man ever could. What chiefly distinguishes him from other average men is the fact that he is a seasoned, expert newsman. His dispatches sound as artless as a letter, but other professionals are not deceived. They know that Ernie Pyle is a great reporter.
…In his unique way, he is almost sure to be a sort of national conscience. He may be that even if he is killed in battle. For if Ernie Pyle should die tomorrow, as well he may, it would still be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle’s war.
G.I.’s hardest hit by death of Pyle
Overseas veterans feel loss keenly
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
Ernie Pyle’s death was a shock to the nation, but it hit hardest the men wearing those overseas service ribbons.
Servicemen and civilians alike were shocked by the word of his passing today, but on Pittsburgh’s streets, in the USO canteen, in drug stores and in public buildings it was the man in uniform who felt the keenest loss.
Met him in Italy
Pvt. William McGonigal of Montgomery County sat in the Canteen and stared at the floor when he heard the news. Then he said:
I shook hands with him near the Volturno River in Italy. He wrote about our outfit making the crossing. He was the one correspondent everyone wanted to meet. There was something about him… always up there on the line with us…
Added Pvt. Keat P. Heefner of Mercersburg: “He was with my outfit in Normandy… He was tops. We looked forward to seeing what he wrote just as much as civilians did…”
WACs pay tribute
Near the Canteen, two WAC sergeants told how they felt:
“It’s the second tragedy in a week,” declared Sgt. Connie McKim, and her companion, Sgt. Mary Haumesser, added: “I always read his column. No one could have written better.”
Said Pvt. Kenneth Strouse of Lakeside, Ohio: “We all learned things about the Army from Ernie, things we never learned from the Army itself…”
“It’s just Ike losing another commander-in-chief,” asserted Pvt. John J. Kane, 711 Southern Avenue.
But it fell to Lt. E. M. Morgan, whose address here is the Downtown YMCA, to sum up the way the servicemen felt about Ernie Pyle: “He had a lot of guts.”
That was the reaction of Pittsburghers in high places and low as the news spread throughout the city and received a reaction of stunned disbelief.
G.I.’s lose spokesman
“The G.I.’s have lost their spokesman,” said Orphans Court Judge Alexander C. Tener. “His columns and books were unique literature of warfare. He was close to the heart of every loyal American.”
Attorney Oliver K. Eaton: “His death is one of the real tragedies of the war… There’ll never be another Ernie Pyle…”
Brought war into home
Director of Elections David Olbum: “He brought the war right into your kitchen…”
Frank Knox, police radio operator: “Through his columns I had a clear insight into the things my two boys are going through in Italy and Germany…”
Then there was “Richey,” the veteran “newsboy” at Liberty Avenue and Ferry Street, who was shocked at the news.
“It’s a tough blow to the readers who depended on Pyle,” he declared.
In Morals Court Magistrate W. H. K. McDiarmid declared Pyle’s death “a great shock to me, and a great loss to American journalism,” and Safety Director George E. A. Fairley added: “He was loved by the fighting men because he was not afraid to take the chances they took.”
‘National calamity’
“His passing is a national calamity. Ernie Pyle is just a household word. Everybody knows him,” said Collector of Interna! Revenue Stanley Granger, a veteran of the last war.
Another World War I veteran, Daniel Core, deputy clerk of U.S. Courts: “I think he gave us more insight into the life of a private soldier than any other correspondent has done.”
Weatherman William S. Brotzman, when told of Ernie Pyle’s death, exclaimed:
That’s a pity. He’s one of the best. He included so much in his stories – a good picture of the country, what the weather was like, what the boys were experiencing.
Knew trials best
Postmaster Stephen Bodkin said:
Ernie Pyle knew the problems and trials and tribulations of the doughboy perhaps better than any other person. I read him every day and read all his books. He was the war’s top-notch correspondent.
Judge Frank P. Patterson:
This dreadful war has brought us many tragedies, but none so personally shocking as the death of this fine reporter. He told the news as no other war correspondent did; he was a man who had the common touch. I, like everyone else, feel an overwhelming sense of loss in his passing.
“I think his loss will be felt deeply by the American public,” said Harry T. O’Connor, special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office, FBI.
Clapper’s death in Pacific recalled
Pyle second killed on Scripps-Howard staff
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
When Ernie Pyle was struck down by a Jap machine-gun bullet on a little island off Okinawa, he was the second Scripps-Howard war correspondent to lose his life in those little-known places where this war is fought.
In February of last year, Raymond Clapper, who left the security of his Washington office to go to the Pacific theater, died in a plane crash during the invasion of the Marshall Islands.
Dots on a map
Okinawa… The Marshalls. Little dots on a map but the sites where brave men died as they tried to bring to the folks at home the bitter realty of war.
Ernie Pyle and Ray Clapper were great friends. Each had the ability to write for the man in the street, the woman in the home.
As Ernie put it in an article he wrote about his colleague in November 1940:
Ray Clapper, in his own mind, writes for the milkman in Omaha. He has come a long way from his own prairie days, but to him the milkman in Omaha is still America, and that feeling is probably what is making his column a great one.
Award to Pyle
Last May, the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for distinguished war correspondence was given to Ernie Pyle by Williard Smith, president of Sigma Delta Chi, professional journalism fraternity. Already Mr. Pyle had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Mr. Clapper was awarded posthumously the William Allen White Memorial Award.
Planes were taking off for the Marshall Island invasion, when Mr. Clapper was killed. He was in one piloted by a squadron commander.
As the planes were forming up to blast the Japs on their island strongholds, two collided. Both planes crashed in a lagoon. There were no survivors.
The words Mr. Clapper wrote from North Africa in July 1943 are particularly applicable to the deaths of two great correspondents.
“What appalls me about war is the unbelievable waste of life and effort and nature’s riches,” Mr. Clapper wrote.
Pyle wounded by Anzio bombs
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
Ernie Pyle almost lost his life on the Anzio Beachhead in March 1944, when German planes bombed a waterfront home he and other correspondents had taken over as their press headquarters.
Glider bombs wrecked the “Villa Virtue,” as the correspondents had named it, and Ernie was cut on the cheek by flying glass.
He was in bed when the planes came in to attack but he jumped up and began to cross the room to watch. He was blown back across the room by the first bomb, which struck about 10 yards from the building.
Three seconds later, as Ernie was picking himself from the floor, a second bomb crashed right beside the villa. The walls were blasted in, the ceiling crashed on Pyle’s bed and what remained of the villa was filled with thick dust and the acrid smell of explosives.
That wasn’t the only time Ernie Pyle ever was close to death, but thereafter he always referred to the incident as “my escape.”
Firing of Paris made Ernie sick of war
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
It was the bombing and burning of Paris by the retreating Germans last year which finally so sickened Ernie Pyle of war that he had to come home.
Interviewed in New York, he told why he had left the front.
He said:
It’s sort of hard to explain. I’ve been through plenty of bombings but when the Germans came over and pasted hell out of Paris soon after we got there, I suddenly knew that I had to get home and away from war. Seeing Paris burn really got me.
He returned on a ship bringing wounded soldiers.
He said:
They all wanted to tell me they understood why I was going back. I felt kind of funny. There I was physically unhurt, standing over those kids with arms and legs and eyes gone – all battered to hell – and they telling me they knew what the score was and that it was all right by them that I was getting out.
Pyle not dead – lives forever, senator says
WASHINGTON (UP) – Ernie Pyle’s senators paid tribute to him today.
Sen. Raymond E. Willis (R-Indiana) reminded the Senate that Pyle was born and reared in Indiana.
“Indiana,” Sen. Willis said, “is proud to claim Ernie Pyle as our noblest contribution to the cause of the preservation of freedom.”
Sen. Carl A. Hatch (D-New Mexico) from the state in which Mr. Pyle maintained his home – at Albuquerque – claimed him, too.
“Ernie Pyle is not dead,” Sen. Hatch said. “He was not killed by Japanese bullets. He shall live wherever the story of brave fighting men is told anywhere in the world.”
But though Mr. Pyle was born in Indiana and lived in New Mexico, he was claimed by everybody.
Everywhere in the Capitol, secretaries, elevator boys, policemen as well as lawmakers, were talking about Ernie Pyle. An elevator boy said: “You know, the servicemen would have elected him President.”
Pyle death shocks Aero Club head
Knew Ernie before he started rambling
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
The death of Ernie Pyle was a great shock to Clifford Ball, president of the Aero Club of Pittsburgh, and Mrs. Ball, who were intimate friends of the Pyles for 16 years.
Mr. and Mrs. Ball met Ernie Pyle and his wife Geraldine, or Jerry, in 1929 when they went to Washington on their honeymoon.
Became close friends
“Ernie then was aviation editor of The Washington Daily News,” Mr. Ball recalled. “I was arranging for an airmail line into Washington and he came to see me, bringing Mrs. Pyle with him.”
Started roving job
Mr. Ball said:
We became very close friends, like brothers and sisters. We visited each other for years and corresponded frequently.
This is how Ernie came to be a roving reporter. As aviation editor, he wrote human interest stories about people who fly. Then they made him managing editor and he stopped writing. When 18 out of 22 subscribers in one small community stopped the paper because he wasn’t writing anymore, the management decided to make a roving reporter out of him.
When he left for overseas the first time, he came here to get his outfit and Mrs. Ball went with him while he shopped.
Eighth Army flanks Bologna, nears city from southeast
Yanks within eight miles of stronghold, capture two peaks to southwest
…
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
NOTE: This column by Ernie Pyle was part of his general running story of the battle of Okinawa, written during the campaign that led to his death. It is believed that other instalments were filed by him and will be received for publication.
OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – The company commander, Capt. Julian Dusenbury, said I could have my choice of two places to spend the first night with his company.
One was with him in his command post. The command post was a big, round Japanese gun emplacement, made of sandbags. The Japs had never occupied it, but they had stuck a log out of it, pointing toward the sea and making it look like a gun to aerial reconnaissance.
Capt. Dusenbury and a couple of his officers had spread ponchos on the ground inside the emplacement and had hung their telephone on a nearby tree and were ready for business. There was no roof on the emplacement. It was tight on top of a hill and cold and very windy.
My other choice was with a couple of enlisted men who had room for me in a little gypsy-like hideout they’d made.
It was a tiny, level place about halfway down the hillside, away from the sea. They’d made a roof for it by tying ponchos to trees and had dug up some Japanese straw mats out of a farmhouse to lay on the ground.
I chose the second of these two places, partly because it was warmer, and also because I wanted to be with the men anyhow.
Mustache trouble
My two “roommates” were Cpl. Martin Clayton Jr. of Dallas, Texas, and Pvt. William Gross of Lansing, Michigan.
Cpl. Clayton is nicknamed “Bird Dog” and nobody ever calls him anything else. He is tall, thin and dark, almost Latin-looking. He sports a puny little mustache he’s been trying to grow for weeks and he makes fun of it.
Pvt. Gross is simply called Gross. He is very quiet, but thoughtful of little things and they both sort of looked after me for several days. These two have become very close friends, and after the war they intend to go to UCLA together and finish their education.
The boys said we could all three sleep side by side in the same “bed.” So, I got out my contribution to the night’s beauty rest. And it was a very much appreciated contribution too. For I had carried a blanket as well as a poncho.
These Marines had been sleeping every night on the ground with no cover, except their cold, rubberized ponchos, and they had almost frozen to death. Their packs were so heavy they hadn’t been able to bring blankets ashore with them.
Our next-door neighbors were about three feet away in a similar level spot on the hillside, and they had roofed it similarly with ponchos. These two men were Sgt. Neil Anderson of Coronado, California, and Sgt. George Valido of Tampa, Florida (Incidentally there’s another Neil Anderson in this same battalion).
So, we chummed up and the five of us cooked supper under a tree just in front of our “house.” The boys made a fire out of sticks and we put canteen cups and K rations right on the fire.
Other little groups of Marines had similar little fires going all over the hillside. As we were eating, another Marine came past and gave Bird Dog a big piece of fresh roasted pig they had just cooked, and Bird Dog gave me some. It sure was good after days of K rations.
Several of the boys found their K rations moldy, and mine was too. It was the old-fashioned kind and we finally realized they were 1942 rations and had been stored, probably in Australia, all this time.
Making conversation
Suddenly downhill a few yards. we heard somebody yell and start cussing and then there was a lot of laughter. What had happened was that one Marine had heated a K ration can and, because it was pressure packed, it exploded when he pried it open and there were hot egg yolks over him. Usually, the boys open a can a little first, and release the pressure before heating, so, the can won’t explode.
After supper we burned our K ration boxes in the fire, brushed our teeth with water from our canteens, and then just sat on the ground around the fire, talking.
Other Marines drifted along and after a while there were more than a dozen sitting around. We smoked cigarettes constantly, and talked of a hundred things.
As in all groups the first talk is of surprise at no opposition to our landing. Then the talk drifts to what do I think about things over here and how does it compare with Europe? And when do I think the war will end? Of course, I don’t know any of the answers but we’ve been making conversation out of it for months.
The boys tell jokes, they cuss a lot and constantly drag out stories of their past blitzes and sometimes they speak gravely about war and what will happen to them when they finally get home.
We talked like that for about an hour, and then it grew dark and a shouted order came along the hillside to put out the fires and it was passed on and on, and the boys drifted away to their own foxholes or hillside dugouts, and Bird Dog and Gross and I went to bed, for there’s nothing else to do after dark in blackout country.