Clapper’s death in Pacific recalled
Pyle second killed on Scripps-Howard staff
Wednesday, April 18, 1945
When Ernie Pyle was struck down by a Jap machine-gun bullet on a little island off Okinawa, he was the second Scripps-Howard war correspondent to lose his life in those little-known places where this war is fought.
In February of last year, Raymond Clapper, who left the security of his Washington office to go to the Pacific theater, died in a plane crash during the invasion of the Marshall Islands.
Dots on a map
Okinawa… The Marshalls. Little dots on a map but the sites where brave men died as they tried to bring to the folks at home the bitter realty of war.
Ernie Pyle and Ray Clapper were great friends. Each had the ability to write for the man in the street, the woman in the home.
As Ernie put it in an article he wrote about his colleague in November 1940:
Ray Clapper, in his own mind, writes for the milkman in Omaha. He has come a long way from his own prairie days, but to him the milkman in Omaha is still America, and that feeling is probably what is making his column a great one.
Award to Pyle
Last May, the Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for distinguished war correspondence was given to Ernie Pyle by Williard Smith, president of Sigma Delta Chi, professional journalism fraternity. Already Mr. Pyle had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Mr. Clapper was awarded posthumously the William Allen White Memorial Award.
Planes were taking off for the Marshall Island invasion, when Mr. Clapper was killed. He was in one piloted by a squadron commander.
As the planes were forming up to blast the Japs on their island strongholds, two collided. Both planes crashed in a lagoon. There were no survivors.
The words Mr. Clapper wrote from North Africa in July 1943 are particularly applicable to the deaths of two great correspondents.
“What appalls me about war is the unbelievable waste of life and effort and nature’s riches,” Mr. Clapper wrote.