Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

The Pittsburgh Press (March 20, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – We were launching our midmorning patrol flight. The sun was out bright, and the day warmly magnificent. Everything was serene.

I already had become acquainted with some of the pilots, and before each flight I would go to the “ready room” and find out from the blackboard the numbers of planes my friends were flying, so I could identify them as they went past.

Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet is one of the pilots I know best. We got acquainted because we have a mutual friend – war correspondent Chris Cunningham, with whom I shared a tent and sometimes worse through Tunisia and Italy. Jimmy and Chris are from the same hometown – Findlay, Ohio.

We knew the very moment he started that Jimmy was in trouble. His plane veered sharply to the right, and a big puff of white smoke spurted from his right brake band. Then slowly the plane turned and angled to the left as it gained speed.

Sensed trouble

The air officer up in the “island” sensed catastrophe, and put his hand on the warning squawker. All the sailors standing on the catwalk, with their heads sticking up over the edge of the flight deck, quickly ducked down. Yet such is the rigidity of excitement, I never even heard the squawker.

It was obvious Jimmy couldn’t stop his plane from going to the left. He had his right wheel locked, and the tire was leaving burned rubber on the deck, yet it wouldn’t turn the plane. And it was too late for him to stop now.

His wheels raked the anti-aircraft guns as he went over, his propeller missed men’s heads by inches, his left wing dropped, and in a flash, he disappeared over the side.

When the plane again came into view, only the tail was sticking out of the water. And then Jimmy bobbed up beside it. he had gotten out in a few seconds.

When he got back to us, Jimmy told me what happened from there on. He said that when the plane went in the water, it went so deep that it got dark in the cockpit. Jimmy wasn’t hurt by the crash, outside of a small cut on his forehead.

He pulled his various buckles, opening his hatch cover and releasing himself from his seat harness. But as he did so he fell forward (the plane was riding nose down in the water, of course) and in a moment was standing on his head, under water, and in a hell of a fix.

Cut radio cord

But somehow, he got himself upright, and then he couldn’t get out because his radio cord, attached to his helmet, was still plugged into its socket back of his seat.

So, he took his big sheath knife out of its holder, cut the radio cord, and then carefully put the knife back. He says he doesn’t know why he put it back. All this happened under water, and in mere seconds.

Some part of Jimmy’s clothing caught as he was getting out, and he gave a big yank to free himself. Thus, he tore his Mae West wide open, both compartments of it, and he had no buoyancy at all. But he is an excellent swimmer, so he stayed up.

Lucky again

When Jimmy went over the side, a destroyer was running about a mile to our left. Here Jimmy was lucky again. For that wasn’t the destroyer’s normal position; it just happened to be cutting across the convoy to deliver some mail on the other side.

Jimmy had hardly hit the water when we saw the destroyer heel over in a swath-cutting turn. They had been watching the takeoffs through their glasses, and had seen him go over. Our own ship, of course, had to keep right on going straight ahead. And our next plane took off without the slightest wait, as though nothing had happened.

The destroyer had Jimmy aboard in just seven seconds. They didn’t put over a boat for him, but instead sent a swimmer out after him, with a line tied around his waist.

He got to Jimmy just in time. Jimmy passed out in his arms. With no lifebelt, he had taken too much salt water aboard.

In the meantime, the destroyer had let down a metal stretcher, and another swimmer was there to help get Jimmy into it. it took a while for them to get him on, for he was dead weight, and the stretcher kept going up and down with the waves.

But finally they managed it. Jimmy was safe and alive, although a very water-laden and passed out young man from Ohio.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 21, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – Destroyers love to pick up airplane pilots out of the ocean. When they rescued our Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet, of Findlay, Ohio, after his plane had plunged over the side, it was pilot-rescue No. 15 for them.

They keep a box score on it, just as carriers keep score of the planes they shoot down. They even keep records of their speed, and try to break records. They fished out Jimmy seven minutes after he went over. Their record rescue is three minutes.

On the destroyer they put Jimmy to bed, got the water out of him and some morphine into him, and sewed up the gash on his head. The doctor joked as he sewed, telling Jimmy he was sorry he couldn’t find a bigger needle so it would hurt more.

Jimmy was nightmarish all night. He didn’t get sick at his stomach until next morning, when he tried to get some breakfast down. He had a headache next day, but after that he was all right.

Destroyers treat rescued pilots as though they were kings. They put Jimmy up in the skipper’s private cabin, since the skipper was on the bridge day and night anyhow.

Jimmy wore the skipper’s bathrobe and house slippers and underwear. The skipper came in a couple of times to take a bath, and actually apologized for intruding.

Fishing out pilots is such a frequent occurrence that the skipper even keeps a bundle of brand-new toothbrushes in his medicine cabinet for such sudden guests.

Scroll prepared for pilots

By the time Jimmy came to, the laundry had washed and pressed his clothes. He didn’t have his wallet with him, so his pictures and private papers were spared a dunking.

This certain destroyer has fished out so many pilots that they have a scroll already printed for such cases, and all they have to do is fill in the name. It’s a picturesque certificate like you get when you cross the Equator.

Across the top of Jimmy’s scroll was engraved the words, “The Blank’s Home for Dripping Aviators.”

And beneath it was this:

Know ye that Lt. James Van Fleet on such and such a date abruptly appeared into our happy home, and due to the peculiarities of his arrival has been found worthy of being honored as a Blank’s Dripping Aviator.

Engraved over the scroll was a huge arm reaching out from a destroyer, hauling a wet flier out of the ocean by the seat of his pants.

Ice cream for the destroyer

They returned Jimmy to us three days later, when they were delivering messages and mail from the flagship. They sent him over in a boson’s chair, pulled across on a heavy line strung between the two ships.

We got Jimmy aboard, and then we sent something back across in the chair to the destroyer. You’d never guess what it was. It was 20 gallons of ice cream!

Our carrier always does that when a destroyer rescues one of our pilots. Apparently, all carriers don’t, for the destroyer sent back a scribbled note saying, “Thanks a lot. That is the nicest thing that has ever happened to us.”

After they told me the whole story, we sent a signal back to the destroyer asking for the names of the two men who rescued him. The destroyer came right back–

The swimmer was Seaman Franklin Calloway of Philadelphia, and the one who helped was Petty Officer Melvin Collins, of Ottumwa, Iowa.

They’re smart on that destroyer. Because a few hours later here came another message saying, “If that information is for the press, might add that both men received Bronze Stars for similar rescue work during operations off Leyte last fall!”

Former schoolteacher

Jimmy Van Fleet is 25, and incongruous as it seems, was a schoolteacher before he became a fighter pilot in the Navy. He has a son seven months old whom he has never seen.

Jimmy asked me if I had ever been in Vienna. He said that was his dad’s “dream city.” His father was a Pfc. in the last war, and spent three years in a hospital in Vienna, and always has wanted to go back.

These columns are probably the first news Jimmy’s folks have had of his little midocean escapade. It is glorious news alongside the last grave message they had.

For Jimmy’s only brother, Ens. Donald Van Fleet, also a carrier pilot, was killed off Formosa just a few months ago. He had got two Jap planes in the two weeks before he himself was shot down. We are grateful that the sea gave Jimmy back.

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How has it not melted? 75 litres of ice cream for the destroyer? That is torture. No one is gonna get enough.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 22, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – One of the first friends I made aboard our aircraft carrier was a tall, well-built, mustached sailor named Jerry Ryan.

He wears dungarees, smokes a pipe sometimes, and always wears his sleeves rolled up, He’s from Davenport, Iowa, but his wife is living in Indianapolis. He is a boilermaker first class.

Jerry had served one hitch in the Navy before the war. He knows all the little ins and outs of how to get along. Everybody likes him. He isn’t especially talkative, yet it’s safe to say he knows more people than anybody else on the ship.

Ryan is what is known in be the Navy as “a good man.” He’s skilled in his work, he’s dependable, and he’s very smart. Hed die before he’d curry favor with anybody.

He’s the kind an officer can depend on utterly – if that officer plays square with Ryan. But he gets a pretender so quickly it would make your head swim.

Ryan’s concept of right and wrong is very sharply drawn, and the Irish in him doesn’t hesitate when a crisis comes. The other boys were telling me of an incident–

It was one of the days when Jap bombs hit this ship, off the Philippines. A great hole was torn in the deck. Several men were killed, and many wounded. Bodies of their comrades were still lying mangled on the deck.

A sailor came up to look at the damage, and said almost exultingly, “Oh boy, this’s great. Now at last they’ll have to send us back to America for repairs.”

Without saying a word, Ryan turned and knocked him down.

Oil shack is a social center

Ryan runs what is known as the “oil shack.” From this little domain the condensers are regulated. He has dials and gauges and a phone and a clipboard on which are kept hourly records of oil pressures and water levels and all that stuff.

The “shack” is a little room about the size of an apartment kitchenette, with a metal workbench and drawers full of tools, and one folding canvas stool.

Ryan’s oil shack is a social center. There is always somebody hanging around. You can get a cup of coffee there, look at sea shell collections, see card tricks, or find out the latest rumors that started on the bridge five minutes ago.

Jerry brews coffee for his guests in a nickel-plated pot over an electric grill. The pot has a red hash mark for a hitch of service in the Navy. And soon he is going to award it the Purple Heart. It got dented in the Philippines typhoon.

Some nights we pop corn in the “oil shack.” The boys’ folks send them corn in cans, and they beg butter from the galley, and pop ‘er up in a skillet on the grill.

Lucky Ryan good friend of cook

One of Ryan’s, friends who comes to eat popcorn is a Negro – a tall, athletic fellow from his hometown of Davenport. They were on the ship together for a year before they found out they were from the same place.

The colored boy’s name is Wesley Cooper. He is a cook. He was a star athlete back home. He’s the best basketball player in the whole crew. When he gets done with the war, he has a scholarship waiting for him at the University of Iowa.

Wesley comes down to the shack almost every night after supper. He smokes a curved stem pipe, and holds one hand up to it, and listens and grins and doesn’t say much.

We were popping corn one night. One of the boys said, “Wes, how about getting us some more butter?” And another one said, “Wes, bring some salt, will you?” And a third said, “And bring me a sandwich when you come down, will you, Wes?”

And Wes grins and his white teeth flash and he said, “I suppose you’d like for me to go up and cook you a whole meal?” And he never made a move.

Ups and downs of war

Another of my best friends is Howard Wilson, a bosn’s mate second class. Like Lt. Jimmy Van Fleet, the fighter pilot we wrote about, he is from Findlay, Ohio. In fact they are good friends.

Wilson is a low-spoken, handsome and highly intelligent man of 35. He has a beautiful home and a good business back in Findlay. He is part owner and general manager of three movie theaters. His wife is running them while he is away.

In those bygone years back in the old hometown, Jimmy Van Fleet used to go to Howard Wilson and borrow money when he got hard up. Now the younger Jimmy dwells in the comparative luxury of officers’ quarters, and the older Howard lives the lowlier life of a sailor, sleeping on a rack in a crowded compartment, and wearing dungarees.

That’s the way things go in wartime. Howard is old and wise enough that it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. He accepts the war and his own lot calmly.

The other pilots know of this friendship, and ask Jimmy if he’s keeping on the good side of Howard to insure he’ll have a job when the war is over. He says he is.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 23, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC – The second day I was aboard our carrier, the chief steward came up to my cabin and happily announced that he had a cake for me, but it was so big he didn’t know how to handle it.

For a while I couldn’t get what he was driving at, but finally he made it clear.

It seemed the night bakers had baked a huge cake for me, and it was to be served at dinner that evening. The steward was worried because the cake was so big they didn’t have a board big enough to put it on, and therefore couldn’t put it on the table where everybody could see it.

But that evening when we went down to dinner, here was the cake in front of my chair, right in the middle of the table, almost filling it up. They had solved the problem by getting the carpenters to make a board.

Written in pink icing on top of the white cake were the words “Welcome Aboard, Mr. Pyle,” and as somebody suggested, I was so taken aback at being called “Mr. Pyle” that I didn’t recognize it at first.

I was very pleased and embarrassed by this first official cake of my lifetime, and of course I had to take a lot of ribbing from my friends. They said they’d been slaving on that ship for a year and nobody ever baked a special cake for them.

Misses roundup

After supper I groped my way through the labyrinth of passages below, and finally tracked down the thoughtful person who had baked the cake.

He was Ray Conner, baker second class from LeGrande, Oregon. LeGrande is in Eastern Oregon not far from Pendleton, and Ray was moaning that he hadn’t seen the famous Pendleton roundup now for three years.

I asked him how he happened to bake a cake for me, and he said well he had got through his regular baking a little early the night before, and hadn’t anything else to do, and just thought it was a good idea.

Ray’s father is a schoolteacher, and Ray was studying to be one, but now after all this business, he kind of doubts he’ll want to teach school.

If I had to be in the Navy, I think I’d about as soon be a baker as anything else. The bakeshop is always clean as a whistle, and it always smells good. And you are almost your own boss.

Ray is quite satisfied with his lot in the Navy, mainly because a bakery is so wonderfully clean. “I can’t stand to work in filth,” he said.

Another cake!

I was feeling pretty stuck-up about my cake, and then next evening when we went down to supper, here was a big cake on the adjoining table. Did I see red!

I made a few discreet inquiries to see who had the gall to have a cake in front of him so soon after my triumph. And I learned it was for the pilot who, the day before, had made the 8000th landing on our carrier. It seems that’s a tradition, for every thousandth landing.

So after the meal I went around and introduced myself to this cad. He was Lt. Edward Van Vranken of Stockton, California.

I said, “I’m pretty sore. I thought I was the only one around here who rated a cake.”

And he said, “Well, I’m jealous. You had photographers taking pictures of your cake. But could I get a photographer? No.”

So I said, “Well, that’s better. So you made the 8000th landing? Was it a good one?”

Old stuff to him

And he grinned and said, “Well, I got aboard.” And then he said, “As a matter of fact, it was a pretty good landing. And if you’re ever in California after the war, come to Stockton and we’ll have something better than cake.”

Lt. Van Vranken is no neophyte at landing on carriers. He was flying from one when we invaded Morocco in 1942, and he was there.

He had made around 120 carrier landings before he came on this ship, and now his total is up around 200. A guy who makes that many landings on a carrier and is still making them, didn’t learn it in correspondence school.

Eight thousand landings is small stuff for the big carriers. For some of them are lots older, and too they have three times as many planes to land every day.

I think the record in our oldest carriers is something up around 80,000. But we like 8,000 on our ship. And anyhow we haven’t got enough flour for 80 cakes.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 24, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – The first time you see a plane land on a carrier you almost die. At the end of the first day my muscles were sore just from being all tensed up while watching the planes come in.

It is all so fast, timing is so split-second, space is so small – well, somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn’t be any of them left alive.

Planes don’t approach a carrier as they would on land – from way back and in a long glide. Instead, they almost seem to be sneaking up as if to surprise it. They’re in such an awkward position and flying at such a crazy angle you don’t see how they can ever land on anything.

But it’s been worked out by years of experience, and it’s the best way. Everything is straightened out in the last few seconds of flying. That is – if it works.

Anything can happen in those last few seconds. Once in a great while the plane loses its speed and spins into the water just behind the ship. And planes have been known to ram right into the stern of the ship,

The air currents are always bad. The ship’s “island” distorts the currents, and makes the air rough. Even the wake of the ship – the waters churned up by the propellers – have an effect on the air through which the planes must pass.

If half a dozen planes come in successively without one getting a “wave off” from the signalman, you’re doing pretty well. For landing on the deck of a small carrier in a rough sea is just about like landing on half a block of Main Street while a combined hurricane and earthquake is going on.

Few are perfect

You would call it a perfect landing if a plane came in and hit on both wheels at the same time, in the center of the deck headed straight forward, and caught about the third one of the cables stretched across the deck.

But very few of them are perfect. They come in a thousand different ways. If their approach is too bad, the signalman waves them around again.

They’ll come in too close to the edge of the deck, and sometimes go right on over the catwalk. They’ll come in so high they’ll miss all the arresting gear and slam into the high cables stretched across mid-decks, called “the barrier.”

Some do somersaults

Sometimes they do a somersault over the barrier, and land on their backs. Sometimes they bounce all around and hit the “island.” Sometimes they bounce 50 feet in the air and still get down all right. Sometimes they catch fire.

During the Tokyo strike, one of the big carriers running near us lost three planes in 10 minutes. One was shot up and had to “ditch” in the water alongside the ship.

The next one slammed into the “island,” and was so wrecked they just heaved the wreckage over the side. The next one to come in crashed the “barrier” and burned up.

And on the other hand. you’ll land planes for weeks without a bad crackup. We wrecked three planes our first three days out in crashes – and not a single one after that.

The first time I watched our boys land. They were pretty bad. They hadn’t flown for about two weeks, and were a little rusty.

Carrier stance

As I was watching the first flight come in one by one, my roommate, Lt. Cmdr. Al Masters, came up behind me and said: “Well, I see you’ve got the carrier stance already. I noticed you leaning way over to help pull them around into position.”

When all the planes were back, I walked over to Cmdr. Al Gurney, the air officer, and said “If I’m going to watch this for the whole trip, you’ll have to provide me with some heart-failure medicine.”

And he replied: “Well, think of me. I had to watch 2,000 of them. It’ll drive you nuts.”

The previous skipper of this ship finally got so he refused to watch when the planes were coming in. He just stood on the bridge and kept looking forward.

But as the trip wore on the boys improved and my own nerves hardened, and between us we managed to get all our planes down for the rest of the trip without a single casualty either to them or to me.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 26, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – There are moments when a voyage to war has much of the calm and repose of a pleasure cruise in peacetime.

For day after day, we sailed in seas that were smooth and warm, under benign skies. There was no air of urgency about us. True, we kept air patrols in the sky, but it was really a practice gesture, for we were far away from any enemy.

Sailors at work wore no shirts. Little bunches of flying fish skimmed the blue water. You needed dark glasses on deck. Pilots took sun baths on the forecastle.

Up on the broad flight deck, clad only in shorts, the chaplain and executive officer were playing deck tennis. And in the afternoon the forward elevator was let down, the officers and men played basketball.

Every night we had movies after supper. It was hard to keep it in your mind that we were a ship of war, headed for war.

Then ever so gradually the weather changed, as we plowed northward. Yesterday and all the days behind it had been tropically hot. Today was surprisingly and comfortably cool. Tomorrow would be cold. We were nearing the great hunting grounds off Japan.

On the last day you could sense the imminence of it all over the ship. Not by anything big, but by the little things. Our weeks of monotony and waiting were at an end.

The daily briefings of the pilots became more detailed. There was less playboyishness among the crew. Ordinary ship’s rules were changed to battle rules.

What is known as the “extended action bill” went into effect. Sailors could let down their racks in the daytime, and get a little extra rest.

Captain stays on bridge

Meal hours, instead of being at 12 and 6 o’clock sharp, were changed to run from 11 till 1, and from 4:30 and 6:30, so that men on watch could trade off and dash in for a bite. The captain never left the bridge, either to eat or sleep.

When you came into your cabin, you found your bunk had been made up with a “flash sheet” around it. That is a black rubberized sheet, to protect you from bomb burns.

Everybody was issued “flash gear.” That consists of several items – a thin grey hood that covers your head and hangs down over your shoulders; a white cloth on an elastic band to cover your nose and mouth; isinglass goggles for your eyes; and long gray cloth gloves with a high gauntlet.

All of this to save your hands and face from the searing, flamethrowing blast of a big shell or bomb when it explodes. On some ships the men paint their faces with an anti-flash grease, making them look like circus clowns, but we didn’t on our ship.

On the lower decks, every compartment door was closed. This was done so that if a torpedo should hit, it would flood only the compartment where it struck. All the rest of the ship would be sealed off from it.

The ship’s hospital was shut off, and the medics set up business in the many prearranged and stations scattered on higher decks about the ship. They could even perform operations at any one of a dozen temporary spots set up in mess halls or cabins.

Long underwear comes out

Also, we broke out cold weather gear for the bone-chilling days ahead. An extra blanket was put on our bunks. Blue Navy sweaters came out for the first time. And blue stocking caps, and several kinds of rain capes with a parka, and you even saw a few pea jackets.

And yes, believe it or not, we even had long underwear too. It had never been used before, and goodness knows how long it had been baled up in shipboard stockrooms.

Some of it was moldy. In fact, the suit they got out for the captain – well, they had to wash and dry it hurriedly before giving it to him, because it smelled so badly from mold.

After supper on the night before our strike, we saw the movie The Magnificent Dope. I guess it’s old, but it was good and awfully funny.

At least we thought so, for everybody laughed hilariously. When tension builds up in a man before a period of great danger, the tension is usually inner, and not often visible. That’s the way it was at the movie that night.

Except I noticed there were only half as many people at the movie as usual. And not long after it was over, everybody had gone to bed. For they knew there would be no rest tomorrow.

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Pyle vies with citation in letter from Navy hero

Monday, March 26, 1945

Shipmate of Ernie Pyle on the Tokyo carrier strike and recent winner of the Silver Star – that’s Lt. Leonard S. Levison, 26, a Pitt graduate who during his 20 months of active service has participated in practically every major Pacific naval action.

In his last letter to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur A. Levison of 1613 Shady Avenue, Lt. Levison was just as excited about Pyle coming aboard his ship as he was about his citation. In fact, Lt. Levison took Ernie from a conference on the Admiral’s ship to the carrier as the mighty task force set out for Tokyo.

Lt. Levison is in charge of the catapult and arresting gear of his carrier. This is ordinarily a two-man job, but he has been handling it by himself.

He received the Silver Star “for distinguishing himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity on November 25, 1944, when he performed his duties calmly under intense strafing by Jap planes.”

A violent explosion occurred near him when one of the flattop’s planes was strafed. The catapult room was damaged and the high-pressure air flask was in danger of exploding. The citation said Lt. Levison bled the flash, reducing the danger, and then heroically returned to the flight deck and skillfully assisted in fighting fires and helping remove wounded during a subsequent air attack.

The East End officer was further cited for distinguished service and meritorious performance of duty earlier last year. States the citation:

Lt. Levison operated and maintained his equipment with such expert skill and efficiency that he was largely instrumental in successful completion of his carrier’s air operations.

“To think,” said his father, an official of the Blaw-Knox Company, “that he is in charge of complicated mechanisms! When he was home, we couldn’t trust him to drive a nail.”

At Pitt, Lt. Levison was sports editor of the Pitt News. Graduated in 1939, he worked for a New York department store until commissioned an ensign in 1942. A brother, Murray, is in the midshipman school at Northwestern University.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 27, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – We were up an hour and a half before daylight, for our planes had to be in the air at the first hint of dawn.

The first patrol was always launched by catapult, because in the wind-swept semi-darkness, it was too dangerous for them to make the run down the rolling deck.

After seeing the flight launches the first few days, it became old stuff, and I would have stayed in bed and ignored it, but that was impossible. The catapult’s huge launching machinery was directly above my cabin, and every time it shot a plane off it was just as though the Washington Monument had fallen on the ship. Rip Van Winkle himself couldn’t have slept through it. So, I just got up.

The fighter pilots were given their last briefing. In the “ready room” the squadron commander and intelligence officer showed them on maps and by drawings on the blackboard, just where they would strike.

The squadron commander asked how many of the pilots had no wrist watches. Six held up their hands. The funny part was that the ship had no extra wrist watches, so I don’t know why he asked the question in the first place.

Then he told what our approximate total of planes over Japan would be, and how many it was probable the Japs would put up against us. And then he said: “So you see, each one of us will only have to take care of three Jap planes!”

Constant blanket of protection

The pilots all laughed and looked at each other sheepishly. (Days later, when the final scores were in, we found our force had destroyed Japs at nine-to-one.)

And at the end of his briefing, the squadron commander gave strict orders for the pilots not to shoot at Japs coming down in parachutes.

“They’re supposed to do it to us,” he said, “but it isn’t the thing for us to do.”

The bomber pilots and their enlisted gunners and radiomen were briefed the same way. After the intelligence officer had finished, the squadron commander said:

We’re going to dive low on the target before releasing our bombs. Since we’re risking our necks anyhow, there’s no point in going at all unless we can do some damage, so go down low.

All through the various strikes on Japan, our task force kept enough planes back to fly a constant blanket of protection in the sky above us.

I remember the funny sign chalked on the blackboard of the “ready room” the first day, urging our patrol pilots to extra vigilance for Jap planes that might sneak out from the mainland to attack us. The sign said: “Keep Alert – Remember Your Poor Scared Pals on the Ship!”

‘Sits’ on Jap sub all day

We didn’t know whether our first planes over the mainland would surprise the Japs or not. It didn’t seem possible, yet there were no indications that they knew.

For two days on our approach, we had been knocking off Jap reconnaissance planes and picket boats. We hoped we had got these scattered planes and boats before they had time to radio back home the news of our presence. One of our destroyers had even sat all day on top of a Jap submarine to keep him from coming to the top and sending a warning.

But still we didn’t know for sure, so there was tenseness that first morning. We knew almost exactly what time our first planes would be over the Tokyo area.

We went to the radio room to listen. The usual Japanese programs were on the air. We watched the clock. Suddenly – at just the right time – the Jap stations all went off the air.

There was silence for a few minutes. And then the most Donald Duck-like screaming and jabbering you ever heard. The announcer was so excited you had to laugh.

We knew our boys were there. After that, for us on the ship, it was just a matter of waiting, and hoping. And as the blackboard sign said, of being poor scared pals.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 28, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – All but six of our planes were back from their strike on Tokyo and safely landed.

The six formed a separate flight, and we couldn’t believe that all of them had been lost, and for that reason our officers didn’t feel too concerned.

And then came a radio message from the flight leader. It said that one of the six was down in the ocean, and that the other five were hanging around to try to direct some surface vessels to the rescue. That’s all we knew for hours. When we finally got the story, this was it:

Ens. Robert Buchanan of Clementon, New Jersey, was hit by flak as they were driving on their target some 20 miles west of Tokyo. Buchanan himself was not hurt.

He kept his plane up till he got over water, but it was still very much Japanese water. In fact, it was in Tokyo’s outer bay – the bigger one of the two bays you see on the map leading in to Tokyo.

Ens. Buchanan is an ace, with five Jap planes to his credit. He ditched his plane successfully, and got out in his rubber boat. He was only eight miles from shore and five miles from the big island that stands at the bay entrance.

Then the flight leader took charge. He is Lt. John Fecke of Duxbury, Massachusetts. He is also an ace and an old hand at the game. He has downed seven Jap planes.

Fecke took the remaining four of the flight and started out looking for an American rescue ship. Thery found one about 30 miles off the bay entrance.

Uses mirror to signal

They talked to him on the radio, told him the circumstances and he sent back word he was willing to try. But he asked them to stick with him and give air support.

So Lt. Fecke ordered the other four to stay and circle above the ship, while he went back to pick up Buchanan’s location and guard him.

But when he got there, he couldn’t find Buchanan. He flew for 25 minutes around Tokyo Bay and was about to despair when he began getting sun flashes in his eyes.

He flew over about three miles and there was Buchanan. He had used his signal mirror, just like it says in the book.

In the meantime, the ship’s progress was slow. It took almost two hours to get there. And one by one the aerial escort began getting in trouble, and one by one Fecke ordered them home to our ship, which was getting farther away all the time.

Lt. Irl Sonner of Petaluma, California, lost the use of his radio, and had to leave.

Lt. Max Barnes of Olympia, Washington, got dangerously low on gas, and Fecke sent him home. Gas shortage also sent back Lt. Bob Murray of Muncie, Indiana.

That left only Lt. Fecke circling above the man in the boat, and Lt. Arnold Berner of Springdale, Arkansas, flying lone aerial escort for the rescue ship.

Finally, the ship was past the bay entrance. The skipper began to have his doubts. He had to go within three miles of the gun-dotted island, he was within five minutes flying distance of land, and Jap planes could butcher him.

Go right into lion’s mouth

Furthermore, he looked at his chart, and saw that he was in “restricted waters,” meaning they were probably mined. It was certainly no place for a ship to be.

The skipper radioed Fecke and said he couldn’t go any further. Fecke radioed back and said, “It’s only two miles more. Please try.”

The skipper answered and said, “Okay, we’ll try.”

And they pulled it off. They went right into the lion’s mouth, pulled out our pilots, and got safely away. Then, and then only, did Fecke and Berner start home.

They came back to us three hours after all the rest had returned. They had flown six hours on a three-hour mission. But they helped save an American life by doing so.

That night I lay in my bunk reading a copy of Flying magazine. It was the issue of last October, nearly six months old. It was the annual Naval aviation issue.

And in an article entitled “Life on a Carrier,” on Page 248, was this paragraph:

It’s a mighty good feeling to know that even if you were shot down in Tokyo Harbor, the Navy would be in to get you.

It never had happened when that piece was written. But it has happened now.


TAILPIECE: The rescue ship radioed us the next day that Buchanan was feeling fine, and that just to be impartial, they also had rescued another Navy pilot, a disgruntled Jap pilot, and a lone bedraggled survivor of a Jap picket boat!

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Editorial: Rescue story

A good example of the reason Ernie Pyle, America’s favorite war correspondent, will be found today on Page 1, Second Section.

He tells of a squadron of flier who refused to desert one of their number shot down in Tokyo’s outer bay. the squadron located a U.S. ship and talked the skipper into going in after the pilot.

While the squadron provided air cover, the ship steamed within three miles of the gun-dotted shore, picked up the pilot and escaped.

Ernie writes the story, just as he does all his stories simply. So, he achieves quality that all the purple words in the dictionary wouldn’t apply.

If Ernie has a trick of writing, it is that he likes to have a kicker on the end of a story. You will find a kicker on this one, too. It will make you grin as you say to yourself, “That’s how our boys fight the war.”

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 29, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – On our airplane carrier, we are all wondering what day Mrs. Speidel had her baby. Here is the reason we wonder:

Her husband is Lt. John Speidel, who pilots a torpedo bomber from our carrier. He is only 22, and naturally was excited at the prospect of becoming a father. His wife lives in Philadelphia.

Now Lt. Speidel isn’t so young that he believes literally the date of arrival which the doctor gives several months ahead of time, but at least it’s something to shoot at.

And so it came about that the date and Lt. Speidel’s assignment on his first mission over Tokyo coincided. He thought what a wonderful double event.

But at the last moment the mission was canceled and our entire task force counted its scores and headed south. The double went aglimmering.

Next day we were within flying distance of the Japanese islands to the south, and we suddenly get orders for a special bombing mission on them. Lt. Speidel went.

And his plane got shot up. He was lucky to get back at all. He had a hole in his wing, he couldn’t get his flaps down, and his airspeed indicator was shot out. It seemed improbable that he could land at all.

Waved over to big carrier

He made two tries at it. Both looked disastrous, and he was waved off. He simply couldn’t slow down enough. So they sent him over to one of the big carriers with lots of deck room, and he landed all right over there. It was quite a day.

Now some of us older hands realize that a baby may be born the day before the doctor predicts, or the day after. So, we wonder if Lt. Speidel might just possibly have had his two big days in one after all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mrs. Speidel reports the baby came early. He was a week old the day his father was bombing the Jap islands. The baby’s name is John Jr. and he’s doing fine. So is Mrs. Speidel.

The two men who fly with Lt. Speidel are Al Kerby, radioman from Woodbury, New Kersey, and Gunner William Groepper of Avoca, Indiana. They’re interested in what happened too.

Remember the boys we wrote about yesterday – Ens. Robert Buchanan who was shot down into Tokyo Bay, and Lt. John Fecke, who directed the rescue?

Well, it wasn’t the first time those two had seen exciting times together.

Last fall, off Formosa, a flight of 70 Jap planes pounced on two of our cruisers that were crippled. Fecke was leading a flight of eight, of which Buchanan was one.

Those eight took on the 70 Japs. They shot down 29 of them, lost one plane, broke up the attack and saved the cruisers.

Fecke and Buchanan each got five Jap planes in that one foray. And each got the Navy Cross for the job. So, this little Tokyo Bay incident didn’t rattle them.

Lieutenant fools Ernie

When I first saw Lt. Fecke, I said to myself, “There’s a westerner for sure.” He just has that weather-beaten, cowboy look. I liked him before I ever really knew him.

And then he fooled me by turning out to be a New Englander, Massachusetts-born, and a New Hampshire University graduate, in a business course at that. He’s 26 now.

But he has the westerner’s knack for steadiness. He is very quiet and polite. He knows how to do things. He never gets excited. He has shot down seven planes.

The others describe him as the man you’d like to have along if you ever got the trouble. To which Ens. Buchanan would undoubtedly say “Amen!”

The night after our strike on the southern islands, everybody was relaxed and felt that wonderful sense of relief over a dangerous job being finished.

That night we showed a movie for the first time in three or four days. It was a western, called The Lights of Old Santa Fe, with a regulation hero and villain and runaway horses and shootin’ and everything.

Those fliers received it like modern audiences receive The Drunkard. We almost hissed the villain off the screen. We booed at all underhand business. We cheered all good deeds. We whistled and clapped when the hero took the girl in his arms.

I think we enjoyed it more than any movie on the whole trip.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 30, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – The pilot on our carrier who shot down the first Jap plane of our trip was Ens. Frank Troup of Decatur, Alabama. It was a reconnaissance plane, and he got it the day before we got to Tokyo waters.

It was his fifth, and made him an ace. Troup said the only reason he got it was that he happened to be closer than his wing-mates when they spotted it.

The boys who fly the patrols say that when they spot a single Jap plane, everybody in the patrol opens wide open, and it’s just like a horse race to see who gets within shooting distance first. This time it was Troup.

Next in line to Troup was Ens. Bob Hickle of Long Beach, California. That was the third time they’d been together when Troup got a plane. It had almost got to be a joke. Hickle had gradually worked into the same category as “always a bridesmaid, but never a bride.”

Hickle joked, “Now that Troup has got five, he’ll have to start helping me get some.”

And the very next morning Hickle came back glowing. He had got his first plane. Yes, Troup was with him, but Hickle got it all by himself, without any help.

I asked Hickle how it felt, and he said he was so anxious to get him that he almost ran into the pieces when the Jap turned over in the air and exploded.

‘Sure, he’s my father’

Some other of my friends among the pilots:

Lt. Pleas Greenlee of Shelbyville, Indiana. He’s the executive officer of the fighter squadron. He’s rather short, pleasant-faced, sucks at a pipe and always wears house-slippers around the ship. He has one Jap plane to his credit.

Before I knew his first name or where he was from, I asked him if he was any relation to Pleas Greenlee, a prominent Hoosier whom I’d met several times in Indiana.

“Yes,” said the fighter pilot, “he’s my father!”

Young Greenlee is an Annapolis graduate. His wife and baby girl are in Shelbyville. He has color photos of them all over his cabin. He is spending his spare time right now making a “pig-bank” out of a cocoanut for his little daughter.

Pittsburgher’s sport is skiing

Ens. Herbert Gidney Jr. of 623 Devonshire Street, Pittsburgh, is a torpedo-bomber pilot who was making his first combat strike when he flew over Tokyo. He said he was so engrossed with doing everything just right that he wasn’t scared at all.

Gidney is a big fellow. He went to Lehigh University, and you’d sweat he’d have to be a football player. But no, his great love is skiing. He used to take trips way up into New England just to ski. He even walks as though he were on skis!

Gidney has a system of letter-writing I’ve never seen before. He figures the only way to get letters is to write letters., so he writes 16 letters a week. Exactly 16.

He has a list of 16 people, made out on a big sheet of paper like a scoreboard, and checks each one off as he finished the letter.

Ens. Gidney, 23, is a son of Mr. and Mrs. H. A. Gidney of 623 Devonshire Street, who are vacationing at Pinehurst, North Carolina, at present. Mr. Gidney, a Gulf Oil executive, is a retired Army colonel.

Shakes Ernie’s confidence

Lt. Howard Skidmore, another torpedo bomber pilot, is from Villa Grove, Illinois.

When he told me that I said, “Why, that’s where my mother was born.” And then I got to thinking no, she was born at Camargo, a few miles south. And now I’m not sure.

At any rate Lt. Skidmore has lots of relatives around my hometown of Dana, Indiana, and has been over there lots of times to see them.

Lt. Skidmore had a unique experience on this ship. Last fall, he was sitting in his plane with the engine running, just ready to start his takeoff.

And at that moment a Jap bomb hit the deck less than a dozen feet in front of Skidmore’s plane. It killed several men and tore a big hole in the deck.

Yet Skidmore wasn’t scratched, and the close explosion didn’t even deafen him or give him a headache. Maybe that’s the result of coming from a good hometown.

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The Pittsburgh Press (March 31, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – When our planes come back from a strike, they circle around the ship until they get the signal to land.

Then they break out of formation one at a time into what is called the “landing circle.” They try to space it so that one plane will be landed and clear of the “barrier,” just as the next one approaches.

When an approaching pilot is about half a mile out, the landing signal officer begins giving him sign-language instructions.

The landing signal officer is known as the LSO. He is one of the most important men on the ship. He is a flier himself. But his is no part-time job that is traded around among the pilots. He has been especially trained, and that is his sole job.

The LSO stands on a platform just off the stern. Behind him is a large square of canvas, to make a background for his signals. Underneath the platform is a heavy rope netting, to catch him if he should fall off.

He wears a yellow sweater and yellow helmet, so the incoming pilots can easily spot him. And in each hand is a paddle about twice the size of a ping-pong paddle. They are either yellow or bright orange. These are his signal paddles.

From the moment the LSO starts his signals the incoming pilot never takes his eyes off of him. From that point on, the LSO actually flies the plane on remote control, and the pilot is only a robot who does what the LSO tells him to do.

By sign language, the LSO tells him he’s too high or too low, too fast or too slow, that his tail hook isn’t down, or a dozen different things.

Split-second thinking

The pilot corrects these mistakes as he approaches. If his correction is perfect, the LSO gives him the “cut” sign just before he reaches the flight deck.

Instantly he takes his eyes off the LSO and more begins flying his own plane. Only half a dozen seconds are left. He has to act fast, and get that plane down.

But if the approach isn’t quite right, then the LSO at the very last second gives him a frantic “wave off” signal, and the pilot “pours on the coal,” misses the deck by a scant few feet, and goes around for another try.

The LSO must decide at the last moment, actually in a fraction of a second, whether to let the pilot try it or not. I don’t know of any situation that requires faster mind-making-up. You sure can’t go into “conference” with anybody on that one.

The landing signal officer on our ship is a fine man. His name is Bill Green, and he comes from Newton, Iowa. He is a lieutenant.

He graduated from a commerce course at the University of Iowa in 1942, and was honorable mention for All-American that year. He intends to be a lawyer.

An LSO first must be a flier himself; second, he must be a man of steady nerves and sound judgment; and third he must be a psychologist in a way, and know his pilots.

Bill Green is all three. Everybody likes him, and everybody has faith in him. It would be a sad bunch of pilots who had an incompetent LSO.

Identifies pilots by planes’ movements

Bill knows the flying traits of each pilot so well that he can identify every one just by the movements of his plane, when he is still a mile from the ship!

In watching our landings, I saw one pilot “waved off” seven times one day before he got in. So, I asked Bill if that was a record. He said it certainly was not. A few months ago, he had to wave off a pilot 21 times before he finally got aboard. Which meant that one pilot was trying to land for almost two hours!

The landing signal officer’s job is a precarious one. Many a time Bill has had to duck, jump or even run. The ship’s photo lab has a marvelous picture of Bill actually being chased across the deck by a plane making a near-crash landing.

There is always an assistant LSO on every carrier, in training to take over a regular job himself. Bill’s assistant is Ens. Kal Porter of Ogden, Utah.

One day I got up my nerve, and went back and stood with them while they landed a whole flight of planes. You would swear every plane was going to land right on top of you. Before it was over I had decided that if I were running the Navy, I’d let them all land in the water.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 1, 1945)

Always an apostle of the underdog –
Ernie Pyle ignores success, feels he must keep going

Life Magazine reviews his career – He’s not the type his readers imagine
Sunday, April 1, 1945

erniepyle
Ernie Pyle and friend ‘Cheetah’ enjoying the sun whole Ernie was home from the wars. (Photo by Bob Landry)

Success thrust itself upon him… he cares nothing for the money it has brought, and is embarrassed by the fame… but he keeps going because he feels that he must.

That’s Ernie Pyle, columnist of The Pittsburgh Press and 676 other newspapers, as he is described by Lincoln Barnett in this week’s issue of Life Magazine.

Life devotes parts of nine pages to Ernie, reviewing his career, appraising his success, and adding considerably to the general fund of knowledge about this self-effacing, individual who has become the outstanding war correspondent of World War II.

Not saintly or sad

“By his articulate admirers,” says Mr. Barnett, “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,” “Mr. Barnett continues, “he is neither elderly, little, saintly nor sad.”

He is 44, stands 5 feet 8 inches tall; weighs 112 pounds, and although he appears fragile, he is a tough, wiry man who gets along nicely without much food or sleep.

His sense of humor… assumes a robust earthy color in conversation. His laugh is full-bellied. His profanity is strictly G.I.

Likes to just sit

Although Pyle is America’s No. 1 professional wander, he is fundamentally a sedentary person who likes nothing better than to sit in an overheated room with a few good friends. Sometimes he appears to find conversation less pleasurable than the simple circumstance of being seated.

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 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.”

Apostle of underdog

The Life article points out that Ernie has always been an apostle of the underdog. Seven years ago, after visiting a leper colony, he wrote that “I experienced an acute feeling of spiritual need to be no better off than the leper.”

“And so in war,” says Mr. Barnette, “Pyle has felt a spiritual need to be no better off than the coldest, wettest, unhappiest of all soldiers.”

The article relates that when Ernie gave his consent to the making of the movie, The Story of G.I. Joe, he stipulated that (1) the hero of the picture must be the Infantry and not Pyle; (2) that no attempt be made to glorify him, and (3) that other correspondents be included in the story.

The movie, in which Capt. Burgess Meredith plays Ernie, will be seen by troops overseas in June and be released to the civilian public in July.

Huge earnings

In spite of his refusal to capitalize on his fame when he returned from the European fronts, Ernie has made close to half a million dollars in the past two years, Mr. Barnett estimates.

While he was home, he wore one suit, which he bought for $41.16 when he landed in New York. His home is a modest house in Albuquerque, which cost about $5,000. He puts his money into war bonds and, according to Mr. Barnett, “quietly bestows substantial sums upon friends, relatives, G.I.’s and anybody else he likes.”

“Although Pyle disdains his affluence,” the article continues, “he is keenly appreciative of the aureole of national esteem and affection that now envelopes him.”

Hundreds pray for him

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?”

His success has been achieved without much push on Ernie’s part, the article maintains.

It declares that he took journalism at the University of Indiana because someone told him it would be an easy course.

He quit college a few months before he would have graduated, and went to work on a small newspaper in Indiana. Four months later, he went to the Scripps-Howard Washington Daily News as a copyreader.

Married ‘that girl’

“He was an excellent headline writer,” says Mr. Barnett, “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 going to Washington, he married Geraldine Siebolds, an attractive girl from Minnesota who had a job with the Civil Service Commission, Later, when he became a roving reporter, she was known to mullions as “that girl.”

He became managing editor of The News in 1932, but declared that he “hated the damn job.” Three years later, convalescing from influenza, he and Jerry took a motor trip to the Southwest. When they returned, Ernie turned in some articles about his trip and asked for an assignment as roving reporter.

Gets his wish

“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 newspapers.

For the next five years Pyle roamed the Western Hemisphere. Those itinerant pre-war years were the happiest of his 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 Rue Michelet.

He goes to 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.

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 until he reached North Africa the following year that the Pyle legend began to evolve.

The article tells how Ernie, afflicted by one of his periodic colds, remained in Oran while the other reporters went to the front. There he met some obscure civilians who told him about the turbulent political situation in North Africa, and he scored an important scoop.

The doughboys’ saint

Gradually, as he moved about among the soldiers, covering the “backwash” of the war, he became the patron saint of the fighting foot soldier, the article relates. But he didn’t know it for a long time.

He thought, when he wrote it, that his famous column on the death of Capt. Waskow was no good.

He went on to Normandy, and went on suffering the privations and dangers of the soldiers. Gradually the suffering he saw began to get under his skin. He had premonitions of death. Finally, he had to come home. Soldiers wrote saying they didn’t blame him.

After a long rest he pushed off again, this time to the Pacific. He chose a small carrier because he knew he would feel more at home there – and because such ships hadn’t been receiving much notice.

“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…”

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LIFE (April 2, 1945)

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.”

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‘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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The Pittsburgh Press (April 2, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC (delayed) – The main thing I never understood about how an aircraft carrier operates, is what they did with all the rest of the planes while one was landing or taking off.

I had thought the flight deck had to be entirely clear of planes. I thought that as soon as one took off, they brought the next one up from the lower deck by elevator, and sent it off.

It isn’t that way at all. There are always idle planes standing on deck during landings and takeoffs. There have to be, for the hangar deck down below isn’t big enough to hold all the planes. But these idle planes are never along the side of the deck – they are at one end or the other. Here’s how it’s done:

Planes always take off and always land from stern to bow of the ship – or from rear to forward as you simple landlubbers would say.

For the takeoff, all the planes are parked tightly together at the rear of the deck., all have folding wings, which has been one of the great contributions to this war, without them a carrier could hardly carry enough planes to justify itself.

Noise is terrific

These parked planes take up maybe one-eighth of the flight deck – the rear one-eighth. When they get ready to launch planes all the engines are started and warmed up while the planes are still parked tightly together.

The noise is terrific. Angry propellers whirl within inches of the tail of the next ship. “Plane-pushers” by the dozen crawl around, under, and among these flying propellers, adjusting chocks and untying the lines that hold the planes down.

When they are ready, the center plane in the front is taxied out a few feet. His folded wings are unfolded. The pilot tests his controls. puts down his flaps.

A signalman standing ahead and to the right of him indicates by motions when he is to start. He holds on his brakes, speeds up his engine until the noise is ear-splitting, and then the signalman leans over and dramatically swings his arm forward, as though personally to give the plane impetus.

The plane starts rolling. The deck behind him is packed with planes. But the seven-eighths of deck in front is clear. Not a plane or man on it.

No sooner has one plane gone than the next one is ready, has his wings unfolded and is running up his engine. They take off one right after the other, less than a minute apart, until the whole flight is in the air.

Prepare for return

The moment the last plane of the flight is off, a horn signals the fact, and the great flight deck instantly becomes a swarm of men.

Usually there are several planes left on deck, which weren’t scheduled to go. All these are immediately towed to the forward end of the deck, and reparked there.

For, when the planes come back to land, they must use that rear end of the deck. While they are landing, the whole front end of the deck is full of parked planes.

A barrier of steel cables, stretched head-high across the deck, stops any wild-landing plane from crashing into the bunch of tightly parked ships ahead.

As soon as a plane lands, the barrier is dropped, the plane taxies over it, and the barrier is raised again for the next guy coming in. The plane that has just landed is parked among the other inert ones up front and the pilot shuts off his engine.

When the last plane is down, the horn squawks, all the men rush out, and all the planes are towed back to the rear of the deck, ready for the next takeoff.

Almost never, during actual landing of the planes, is the elevator let down. It is used only between flights, to take planes down to the “garage” or bring up fresh ones.

Like cars at carnivals

This moving of planes from one end of the flight deck to the other is called “re-sporting.” It goes on all day long – back and forth, back and forth.

The planes are pulled by tiny tractors. As they run around they look like these little electric cars you bump each other with at carnivals.

At night, probably two-thirds of the planes are “spotted” on deck. They are parked tightly together, and tied down to gratings in the flight deck by heavy rope.

If we’re sailing into a storm, they’re tied additionally with steel cable. And all night long men are posted among them, to see that nothing breaks or goes wrong.

Despite all this, there have been times when the ocean was so rough and the deck careening at such a steep angle, that planes would break all their moorings and go screeching over the side. That would be when I was down in my cabin, very seasick.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 3, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

OFF THE OKINAWA BEACHHEAD (by Navy radio) – This is the last column before the invasion. It is written aboard a troop transport the evening before we storm onto Okinawa.

We are nervous. Anybody with any sense is nervous on the right before D-Day. You feel weak and you try to think of things, but your mind stubbornly drifts back to the awful image of tomorrow. It drags on your soul and you have nightmares.

But those fears do not mean any lack of confidence. We will take Okinawa. Nobody has any doubt about that. But we know we will have to pay for it. some on this ship will not be alive 24 hours from now.

We are in convoy. Many, many big ships are lined up in columns with our warships escort on the outsides. We are an impressive escort on the outsides. We are an impressive sight – yet we are only one of many similar convoys.

We left from different places. We have been on our way many days. We are the biggest, strongest force ever to sail in the Pacific. We are going into what we expect to be the biggest battle so far in the Pacific.

Our ship is an APA, or assault transport. The ship itself is a war veteran. She wears five stars on her service ribbon – Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Southern France. She wears the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Legion of Merit Silver Star. She has fared well on the other side. We hope her luck holds out in the Pacific.

We are carrying Marines. Some of them are going into combat for the first time. Others are veterans from as far back as Guadalcanal. They are a rough, unshaven, competent bunch of Americans. I am landing with them. I feel I am in good hands.

Two of a stripe

I’ve shared a cabin with Marine Maj. Reed Taylor of Kensington, Maryland. He is a Guadal vet and he jokingly belittles newcomers who weren’t through “green hell.” The major and I are sort of two of a stripe and we get along fine.

We have the nicest cabin either of us ever had at sea. And we’ve take advantage of it by sleeping away almost the whole trip. We’ve slept day and night. So have many others.

There is a daily argument on ship whether or not you can store up sleep and energy for the ordeal ahead. The doctor says it’s nonsense – that you can’t store up sleep.

Between naps I’ve read two books. They are Bob Hope’s I Never Left Home (how I wish I never had) and Bob Casey’s Such Interesting People only I wish I could hear Bob Casey tell all those stories in person, lying on his cot in France and roaring and shaking with his own laughter. Bob’s laughter would be good for us now. A Marione officer said, “I haven’t laughed for three days.”

Nobody complains

Our trip has been fairly smooth and not many of the troops were seasick. Down in the holds the Marines sleep on racks four tiers high. It isn’t a nice way to travel. But I’ve never heard anybody complain. They come up on the deck on nice days to sun and to rest and to wash clothes, or lie and read or play cards.

We don’t have movies. The ship is darkened at subset and after that there are only dim lights. The food is good. We get news every morning in a mimeographed paper and once or twice a day the ship’s officers broadcast the latest news over the loudspeaker.

They’ve kept us informed daily of the progress of the Okinawa bombardment that preceded our landing. Every little bit of good news cheers us. The ship, of course, is full of rumors, good and bads, but nobody believes any of them.

Daily briefings

Meetings are held daily among the officers to iron out last-minute details of the landing. Day by day, the Marine troop are fully briefed on what they are to do.

Everything we read about Okinawa stresses that the place is lousy with snakes. It’s amazing the number of people who are afraid of snakes. Okinawa “snake-talk” crops into every conversation.

On the last day we changed our money into newly manufactured “Invasion Yen,” drew two days K rations, took a last bath, and packed our kits before supper. We had a huge turkey dinner and, say, we have steak and eggs for breakfast.

“Fattening us up for the kill,” the boys laughingly say.

At 3 o’clock on the last afternoon there was a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. It was the afternoon before Easter Sunday. A lot of us could not help but feel the tragic irony of it, knowing about tomorrow’s battle.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 4, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

WITH THE MARINES ON OKINAWA BEACHHEAD (by Navy radio) – You wouldn’t believe it. and we don’t either. It just can’t be true. And yet it is true.

The regiment of Marines that I am with landed this morning on the beaches of Okinawa and were absolutely unopposed, which is indeed an odd experience for a Marine.

Nobody among us had dreamed of such a thing. We all thought there would be slaughter on the beaches. There was some opposition to the right and to the left of us, but on our beach, nothing, absolutely nothing.

We don’t expect this to continue, of course. A Marine doesn’t fool himself like that. Certainly, there will be hard fighting ahead and we all have our fingers crossed. But to get the firm foothold we have, with most of our men ashore and our supplies rolling in, is a gift for which we are grateful.

More like home

This is Easter Sunday morning. It is a beautiful one. One of the Marines, after spending months in the tropics, remarked a while ago, “This weather feels more like American weather than anything since I left home.”

It is sunshiny and very warm. We had heard it would be cold and many of the boys wore heavy underwear. Now we are sweating and regretting. I wore two pairs of pants, but I am about to take off one of them.

We are dressed in green herringbone combat uniforms. Everybody made the trip in khaki and changed this morning aboard ship. The men left their old khaki lying on their bunks and they’ll be collected by the Navy, cleaned and used to clothe prisoners and our own casualties who have lost their clothes.

On our ship we were up to 4 a.m. We had done our final packing of gear last night. We brought ashore only what we could carry on our backs. When we put on our new green fatigues, one Marine remarked, “the latest Easter style – herringbone twill.”

Wonderful feeling

My schedule for landing was an early one. I was ashore a short time after the first wave. Correspondents were forbidden to go before the fifth wave. I was on the seventh.

I had dreaded the sight of the beach littered with mangled bodies. My first look up and down the beach was a reluctant one. And then like a man in the movies who looks and looks away and then suddenly looks back unbelieving. I realized there were no bodies anywhere – and no wounded. What a wonderful feeling!

In fact, our entire regiment came ashore with only two casualties. One was a Marine who hurt his foot getting out of an amphibious truck. And the other was, of all things, a case of heat prostration!

And to fulfill the picnic atmosphere, listen to this–

Aboard ship we had turkey dinner last night. So, this morning they fixed me up with a big snack of turkey wings, bread, oranges and apples. So instead of grabbing a hasty bite of K rations our first meal ashore, we sat and lunched on turkey wings and oranges.

Nice Easter

There are low chalky cliffs on this island. In these cliffs are caves. In the caves are brick-colored urns a couple of feet high. And in these urns are the ashes of many honorable ancestors.

Our bombardment had shattered many of these burial vaults. What our big guns missed, the soldiers and Marines took a precautionary look into by prying off the stone slabs at the entrances.

In front, looking out to sea, stands our mighty fleet with scores of little black lines extending to shore – our thousands and thousands of landing craft bringing more men and big guns and supplies.

And behind me, not two feet away, is a cave full of ex-Japanese, which is just the way it should be. What a nice Easter Sunday after all.

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