Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

[NormanStewart]

Ernie’s father, Aunt Mary stunned at news of death

Neighbor hears news on radio and informs family on Indiana farm

DANA, Indiana (UP) – William C. Pyle, father of war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and the writer’s “Aunt Mary” – Mrs. Mary Bales – were stunned today by word of his death.

Mrs. Ella Goforth, a neighbor, said the aging relatives of the famed newspaperman received word from another neighbor woman who heard the news on the radio.

“They’re just not able to talk about it now,” Mrs. Goforth said in a phone conversation from the Pyle farm home, near the Indiana-Illinois state line.

“They’re not taking the news very well.”

Mrs. Nellie Hendricks, who lives across the field from the Pyle home, heard the first news of Ernie’s death. She ran across the field to tell the writer’s father and his aunt. Then they turned on their own radio and heard the news, according to Mr. Goforth.

She said:

Mr. Pyle had a letter from Ernie about two weeks ago. That was the last word they had from him. He told them he thought he’d be home sooner than he’d expected – but of course, he didn’t know about this.

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Tribute from Time –
‘It will be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle’s war’

Wednesday, April 18, 1945

The following widely-quoted tribute to Ernie Pyle appeared in Time Magazine:

…He is the most popular of them all. His column appears six days a week in 310 newspapers with a total circulation of 12,255,000. Millions of people at home read it avidly, write letters to him, pray for him, telephone their newspapers to ask about his health and safety.

Abroad, G.I.’s and generals recognize him wherever he goes, seek him out, confide in him. The War Department and the high command in the field, rating him a top morale-builder, scan his column for hints. Fellow citizens and fellow newsmen have heaped honors on him.

Wrote of small people

What happened to Ernie Pyle was that the war suddenly made the kind of unimportant small people and small things he was accustomed to write about enormously important.

Many a correspondent before him had written of the human side of war, but their stories were usually about the heroes and the exciting moments which briefly punctuate war’s infinite boredom.

Ernie Pyle did something different. More than anyone else, he has humanized the most complex and mechanized war in history. As John Steinbeck has explained it:

“There are really two wars and they haven’t much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions and regiments – and that is Gen. Marshall’s war.”

War of common men

“Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage – and this is Ernie Pyle’s war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone.”

One reason that Ernie Pyle has been able to report this little man’s war so successfully is that he loves people and, for all his quirks and foibles, is at base a very average little man himself.

Understands men

He understands G.I. hopes and fears and gripes and fun and duty-born courage because he shares them as no exceptionally fearless or exceptionally brilliant man ever could. What chiefly distinguishes him from other average men is the fact that he is a seasoned, expert newsman. His dispatches sound as artless as a letter, but other professionals are not deceived. They know that Ernie Pyle is a great reporter.

…In his unique way, he is almost sure to be a sort of national conscience. He may be that even if he is killed in battle. For if Ernie Pyle should die tomorrow, as well he may, it would still be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle’s war.

[NormanStewart]

G.I.’s hardest hit by death of Pyle

Overseas veterans feel loss keenly
Wednesday, April 18, 1945

Ernie Pyle’s death was a shock to the nation, but it hit hardest the men wearing those overseas service ribbons.

Servicemen and civilians alike were shocked by the word of his passing today, but on Pittsburgh’s streets, in the USO canteen, in drug stores and in public buildings it was the man in uniform who felt the keenest loss.

Met him in Italy

Pvt. William McGonigal of Montgomery County sat in the Canteen and stared at the floor when he heard the news. Then he said:

I shook hands with him near the Volturno River in Italy. He wrote about our outfit making the crossing. He was the one correspondent everyone wanted to meet. There was something about him… always up there on the line with us…

Added Pvt. Keat P. Heefner of Mercersburg: “He was with my outfit in Normandy… He was tops. We looked forward to seeing what he wrote just as much as civilians did…”

WACs pay tribute

Near the Canteen, two WAC sergeants told how they felt:

“It’s the second tragedy in a week,” declared Sgt. Connie McKim, and her companion, Sgt. Mary Haumesser, added: “I always read his column. No one could have written better.”

Said Pvt. Kenneth Strouse of Lakeside, Ohio: “We all learned things about the Army from Ernie, things we never learned from the Army itself…”

“It’s just Ike losing another commander-in-chief,” asserted Pvt. John J. Kane, 711 Southern Avenue.

But it fell to Lt. E. M. Morgan, whose address here is the Downtown YMCA, to sum up the way the servicemen felt about Ernie Pyle: “He had a lot of guts.”

That was the reaction of Pittsburghers in high places and low as the news spread throughout the city and received a reaction of stunned disbelief.

G.I.’s lose spokesman

“The G.I.’s have lost their spokesman,” said Orphans Court Judge Alexander C. Tener. “His columns and books were unique literature of warfare. He was close to the heart of every loyal American.”

Attorney Oliver K. Eaton: “His death is one of the real tragedies of the war… There’ll never be another Ernie Pyle…”

Brought war into home

Director of Elections David Olbum: “He brought the war right into your kitchen…”

Frank Knox, police radio operator: “Through his columns I had a clear insight into the things my two boys are going through in Italy and Germany…”

Then there was “Richey,” the veteran “newsboy” at Liberty Avenue and Ferry Street, who was shocked at the news.

“It’s a tough blow to the readers who depended on Pyle,” he declared.

In Morals Court Magistrate W. H. K. McDiarmid declared Pyle’s death “a great shock to me, and a great loss to American journalism,” and Safety Director George E. A. Fairley added: “He was loved by the fighting men because he was not afraid to take the chances they took.”

‘National calamity’

“His passing is a national calamity. Ernie Pyle is just a household word. Everybody knows him,” said Collector of Interna! Revenue Stanley Granger, a veteran of the last war.

Another World War I veteran, Daniel Core, deputy clerk of U.S. Courts: “I think he gave us more insight into the life of a private soldier than any other correspondent has done.”

Weatherman William S. Brotzman, when told of Ernie Pyle’s death, exclaimed:

That’s a pity. He’s one of the best. He included so much in his stories – a good picture of the country, what the weather was like, what the boys were experiencing.

Knew trials best

Postmaster Stephen Bodkin said:

Ernie Pyle knew the problems and trials and tribulations of the doughboy perhaps better than any other person. I read him every day and read all his books. He was the war’s top-notch correspondent.

Judge Frank P. Patterson:

This dreadful war has brought us many tragedies, but none so personally shocking as the death of this fine reporter. He told the news as no other war correspondent did; he was a man who had the common touch. I, like everyone else, feel an overwhelming sense of loss in his passing.

“I think his loss will be felt deeply by the American public,” said Harry T. O’Connor, special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office, FBI.

[NormanStewart]

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.

[NormanStewart]

Pyle wounded by Anzio bombs

Wednesday, April 18, 1945

Ernie Pyle almost lost his life on the Anzio Beachhead in March 1944, when German planes bombed a waterfront home he and other correspondents had taken over as their press headquarters.

Glider bombs wrecked the “Villa Virtue,” as the correspondents had named it, and Ernie was cut on the cheek by flying glass.

He was in bed when the planes came in to attack but he jumped up and began to cross the room to watch. He was blown back across the room by the first bomb, which struck about 10 yards from the building.

Three seconds later, as Ernie was picking himself from the floor, a second bomb crashed right beside the villa. The walls were blasted in, the ceiling crashed on Pyle’s bed and what remained of the villa was filled with thick dust and the acrid smell of explosives.

That wasn’t the only time Ernie Pyle ever was close to death, but thereafter he always referred to the incident as “my escape.”

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Firing of Paris made Ernie sick of war

Wednesday, April 18, 1945

It was the bombing and burning of Paris by the retreating Germans last year which finally so sickened Ernie Pyle of war that he had to come home.

Interviewed in New York, he told why he had left the front.

He said:

It’s sort of hard to explain. I’ve been through plenty of bombings but when the Germans came over and pasted hell out of Paris soon after we got there, I suddenly knew that I had to get home and away from war. Seeing Paris burn really got me.

He returned on a ship bringing wounded soldiers.

He said:

They all wanted to tell me they understood why I was going back. I felt kind of funny. There I was physically unhurt, standing over those kids with arms and legs and eyes gone – all battered to hell – and they telling me they knew what the score was and that it was all right by them that I was getting out.

[NormanStewart]

Pyle not dead – lives forever, senator says

WASHINGTON (UP) – Ernie Pyle’s senators paid tribute to him today.

Sen. Raymond E. Willis (R-Indiana) reminded the Senate that Pyle was born and reared in Indiana.

“Indiana,” Sen. Willis said, “is proud to claim Ernie Pyle as our noblest contribution to the cause of the preservation of freedom.”

Sen. Carl A. Hatch (D-New Mexico) from the state in which Mr. Pyle maintained his home – at Albuquerque – claimed him, too.

“Ernie Pyle is not dead,” Sen. Hatch said. “He was not killed by Japanese bullets. He shall live wherever the story of brave fighting men is told anywhere in the world.”

But though Mr. Pyle was born in Indiana and lived in New Mexico, he was claimed by everybody.

Everywhere in the Capitol, secretaries, elevator boys, policemen as well as lawmakers, were talking about Ernie Pyle. An elevator boy said: “You know, the servicemen would have elected him President.”

[NormanStewart]

Pyle death shocks Aero Club head

Knew Ernie before he started rambling
Wednesday, April 18, 1945

The death of Ernie Pyle was a great shock to Clifford Ball, president of the Aero Club of Pittsburgh, and Mrs. Ball, who were intimate friends of the Pyles for 16 years.

Mr. and Mrs. Ball met Ernie Pyle and his wife Geraldine, or Jerry, in 1929 when they went to Washington on their honeymoon.

Became close friends

“Ernie then was aviation editor of The Washington Daily News,” Mr. Ball recalled. “I was arranging for an airmail line into Washington and he came to see me, bringing Mrs. Pyle with him.”

Started roving job

Mr. Ball said:

We became very close friends, like brothers and sisters. We visited each other for years and corresponded frequently.

This is how Ernie came to be a roving reporter. As aviation editor, he wrote human interest stories about people who fly. Then they made him managing editor and he stopped writing. When 18 out of 22 subscribers in one small community stopped the paper because he wasn’t writing anymore, the management decided to make a roving reporter out of him.

When he left for overseas the first time, he came here to get his outfit and Mrs. Ball went with him while he shopped.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 19, 1945)

Pyle to rest among G.I.’s he loved

Writer to be buried in Army cemetery
By Mac R. Johnson, United Press staff writer

From the last two paragraphs of Here Is Your War, by Ernie Pyle, written after the African campaign.

On the day of final peace, the last stroke of what we call the “Big Picture” will be drawn. I haven’t written anything about the “Big Picture,” because I don’t know anything about it. I only know what we see from our worm’s-eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die; of Jong darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks… and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown ridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter, too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves.

That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go on from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field… I don’t know whether it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn’t make any difference, once a man has gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing to them anymore. They died and others lived and nobody knows why it is so. They died and thereby the rest of us can go on and on. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones beneath the wooden crosses, except perhaps to pause and murmur, “Thanks, pal.”

OKINAWA – Ernie Pyle will be buried among the soldiers he immortalized.

The beloved little war correspondent killed by a Jap machine-gunner yesterday probably will be laid to rest in an Army cemetery here in the Ryukyus where he covered his last campaign.

The soldiers he loved brought him back from the battlefield back to where the noise of the guns is distant and dull. They lifted his pint-sized frame from the ditch where he fell, victim of a sneak machine-gun ambush.

They put him on a litter, and crossed his arms, and then carried him back to the rear.

Jap jealous of prize

It wasn’t easy. That Jap machine-gunner seemed jealous of his prized victim. It was four hours after Ernie was killed before anybody could get to his body.

Cpl. Alexander Roberts, Army photographer from New York City, tried to get in to take pictures. He said every time anybody would try to enter the clearing where Ernie had been killed the gunner would open up.

Finally, Cpl. Roberts crawled into the clearing on his belly, pushing his camera ahead of him.

“Ernie’s face was not twisted in pain or agony,” he said. “He looked pleasant and peaceful. If there hadn’t been a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth, you might have thought he was sleeping.”

Said he would get it

Ernie always said he would get it, that he had used up his chances. He said it again just before he landed with the assault troops on Okinawa. He told a public relations officer that he had a premonition about the campaign. And he said to another officer that he thought he would go back to the States “right after this one.”

Instead, he went from Okinawa to Ie Island because, as he told a friend, his premonition was “pretty silly as I’ve run into nothing hot yet.”

So he went on

So he went on – as he had gone from Ireland to North Africa, to Sicily, Italy, France and the Pacific – to get more stories about his beloved G.I.’s. He wanted to write about the Marines.

Erie was an old dough from the word go. He sweated and suffered with the doughfeet, shared their hopes, fears, and thrills – their lives. Today he shared death with them and it was believed he would be put to rest with them, in a G.I. Army cemetery.

Ernie would have liked that.

Ernie Pyle spent his last hours doing the job he had always done – gathering notes from G.I.’s for his columns, James MacLean, United Press correspondent, reported.

Detained by cold

A two-day-old cold had confined him to the sick bay of a transport and prevented him from landing with other correspondents in the assault waves on Ie until Tuesday. He spent that day interviewing soldiers and officers on the battlefield.

Wherever he went he was surrounded by G.I.’s who swarmed around him, forgetting the battle in progress. They tried to get him to autograph captured Jap money, American bills or invasion bills until their officers ordered the men back into position.

Milton Chase, 33, a correspondent for Radio Station WLW in Cincinnati, and a former staff member for United Press in Shanghai, said Ernie walked very carefully on Ie, because of his fear of landmines.

Mr. Chase said:

He told me that the weapon he hated worst – more than machine guns, shells or anything else – was “stumbling blindly into minefields because they explode before you can duck or take cover.”

[NormanStewart]

I DARE SAY —
Ernie Pyle

By Florence Fisher Parry

…As I wrote these words, the news of Ernie Pyle’s death came in… And I find that I must scrap what I have written… No, death does not mean “utter and final defeat.” Not to this man, who walked its way as one marked for the dread rendezvous.

Now that the world has come, we are not in the least surprised. We see now that this man would not, could not, survive the thing that drew him back to it. Some deep compulsion sent him forth again, against his will, against all the overtures which creature comforts must have made to his tired body and more tired soul.

He was so tired; the sickness of battle had seeped into the very marrow of him. He did not want that last assignment, an assignment which no human being but himself would have had the heart to give him.

But he had to go.

Feeling the bony finger on him, he still had to go.

You have to live with yourself; and, you have to die with yourself. These are compulsions which are known only to the great, the selfless. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life on the altar of such compulsion.

Through a glass darkly

He would have called himself a little man, an unimportant man. He did not take on stature as he grew in fame; he merely took on more humanity and humility. He did not value his life more; he valued it less and less, as it became more important to others. He never saw himself in the history books. Few great men are as great as that.

I think what made him so dear to so many was that he was frail and acknowledged that he was afraid. It gave the boys in battle a kinship with him. He admitted to the very fear that was in them; and so they got to believing that to be afraid was a common and natural thing, and not contemptible at all, nothing to be ashamed of. It gave them comfort. If he had done nothing more than that, he still would be a great man, immortal to the boys he understood so well and who will mourn him in a way peculiar and different from all other kinds of mourning…

I find myself thinking of verses in the Bible, verses that seem to sing of Ernie Pyle and all his modest brotherhood the world over.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind… charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up… seeketh not her own… thinketh no evil… beareth all things… endureth all things…

For now we see through a glass, darkly…

No longer darkly, Ernie…

How blinding clear it must be now to you!

[NormanStewart]

Lt. Lucas: Ernie Pyle was great reporter because he was what he wrote

Columnist feared Okinawa campaign, death of others, not his, worried him
By Lt. Jim G. Lucas, USMC combat correspondent

WASHINGTON – A month ago, at Guam, Ernie Pyle told me he was afraid of the Okinawa campaign.

I knew what he meant. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He didn’t take that into account, he was afraid of the sight and smell of death – the other fellow’s death – and of the mess a bloody show can make of a man inside.

Later, when he wrote his first Okinawa story, he said that. He wrote he’d dreaded going ashore and stepping over dead men who’d come in alive. He said he was relieved not to find them.

Ernie was a great reporter because he was your reporter. He was writing for you. I had just come through Tarawa when I read his account of the death of the young Texas captain in Italy. To me, that was the finest prose ever written. I knew, on Tarawa, that Ernie Pyle, in Italy, had written that for me. It was something we shared together.

He was what he wrote

He was a great reporter because he was what he wrote. He didn’t think of himself as great. At Guam, he was distressed if the military singled him out for special favors. His whole attitude was that this was a lot of fuss about nothing. He’d much rather sit around and be one of the boys.

If you sat down with Ernie to talk about someone, he knew he wanted you.

If you sat down because he was Ernie Pyle, he was unhappy and uneasy.

The announcement that Ernie Pyle was coming to the Pacific caused a lot of excitement. Marines, privates to generals, wanted him. The boys who went to Iwo Jima were disappointed because he didn’t go along. They felt compensated because he was on a carrier off shore. But I heard many complaints because he wasn’t with them on the beach.

Friend wounded

When I flew out of Iwo Jima, I found Ernie at Adm. Nimitz’s press headquarters on Guam. I stopped to tell them about Sgt. Dick Tenelly, a 4th Division combat correspondent who once worked with him on the Washington Daily News. Dick was wounded early in battle. I told Ernie that Sgt. Tenelly might lose a leg.

It hurt him.

“God, I hope not,” he said. “Dick deserves better than that.”

He wanted to know how it happened. I couldn’t tell him much only that Sgt. Tenelly had been shot through both legs, and evacuated before I could see him. He told me about men he’d seen wounded in Europe, and what it did to him.

Scared to death

“I’m on the next one, you know,” he said. “I’m scared to death.”

I said he didn’t look scared.

“Did you ever see anyone who did?” he asked. “But I don’t sleep much at night thinking about it.”

He said he wanted to get “the feel” of the Pacific war, and that was the reason he was going with the Marines to Okinawa. It wasn’t because he wanted to get into any more trouble.

“The Marines want you along,” I said. “The boys on Iwo are sore because you weren’t there.”

“They’re a cheerful bunch,” he grinned. “Want to get me hurt, do they? I’m glad I wasn’t. That must have been a rough one.”

We assured him it was.

Made war real

You didn’t have to meet Ernie Pyle to know him. It helped, perhaps, but his gift was that he was able to leave something of himself in every piece he wrote.

They’ll bury Ernie in the Pacific, but he won’t be forgotten. I wish he’d been able to see more of the Pacific war. He wouldn’t have liked it – he’d have hated it bitterly – but he’d have been able to make a lot of others hate it with him. Because when he wrote of war, he made it real, perhaps because it was so real to him.

[NormanStewart]

Chaplain, Marine brave Jap fire to get Pyle’s body

By Jack Hooley, Blue Network war correspondent

IE ISLAND (April 18) – Ernie Pyle died here on Ie Island at 10:15 in the morning. An hour later, word of his death had spread over open water as far as Mi Island, two miles away. Relayed by an artillery officer at the front by radio, by blinker light and by word of mouth, it had spread from Ie to the ships standing off shore – all in that short time.

The facts are quickly told. Ernie Pyle went ashore the evening before. In the morning, having heard that our troops were engaged in heavy fighting for a time below a mountain peak on the tiny island, he set out for the spot with Lt. Col. Joseph Coolidge.

The two men bumped along in a jeep over the narrow road taken by our troops the day before. As the jeep rounded a corner, a sudden burst of fire from a Jap machine gun hidden on a ridge sent both men scrambling for a ditch.

The gunfire stopped. Both had been through this kind of thing before.

Death came instantly

After a few minutes they peered cautiously over the edge. Another burst of fire and Col. Coolidge ducked back. He turned to Ernie.

The veteran correspondent lay on his back, too still for life.

Death had come instantly from three bullet wounds in the temple.

Every bit of movement brought a burst of fire from the hidden Japs, but finally Col. Coolidge managed to crawl to cover and submit his report.

Tank men helpless

For a long while, Ernie’s body was inaccessible. Finally, the chaplain of the outfit asked for volunteers to bring him in.

First three tanks moved up. Their appearance was the signal for the machine-gunner to open up with such a steady fire that the crew men were helpless inside the tanks.

When they retired, Cpl. Alexander Roberts of New York City volunteered to go alone. From the point beyond which the Yanks had retired about 125 yards back of the bend in the road, Cpl. Roberts crawled to the jeep.

He found Pyle’s face beneath the helmet he wore, peaceful in death. In his left hand, Ernie clutched the Marine fatigue cap he always wore.

Preferred cap

“A helmet is a lot of iron for a man like me to carry around,” he said to me recently, “so when I get to a safe place I switch to a cap.”

With the way shown by Cpl. Roberts, the chaplain, who had not wished to risk four lives, crawled over the ground with a litter bearer and they made 80 yards of the return trip before the machine gun opened upon them.

Four hours after his death, Ernie Pyle’s body was inside our lines again.

The boys in the lines out here were thrilled when Ernie Pyle came out to the Pacific. G.I.’s, Marines and youngsters on the ocean knew that he didn’t have to but they were glad he came anyway.

“We had waited for him so long,” said one of them today.

[NormanStewart]

Editorial: Ernie

Newspaper people, we think, may be forgiven sometimes if they take advantage of their solitary medium of expression to speak out of their hearts about one of their own.

Our troubles, our losses, are not your troubles and your losses. They are our own. You, ordinarily, have no reason to be interested in them.

But, this once, we think you are interested.

You are interested because Ernie Pyle was as much of you as he was of us.

Ernie is dead. You don’t believe it. Neither do we. Neither do the G.I. Joes, nor the Navy Joes, nor the Marine Joes. Nobody believes it. But it is true.

Killed in action!

That was Ernie, all over.

He didn’t want to go. He had seen enough of war. Of its bloody form. Of its ultimate and inevitable terminus – death. Of its amazing horror. Of its gruesome catastrophe. Of its inhuman methods.

Ernie was scared. And he admitted it. He admitted his fright as no coward ever would do.

But he went.

He went because he had to go. Something drove him to go. Even as it has drawn every G.I. Joe. Every Joe who was a friend of Ernie. Every Joe to whom Ernie was an everlasting friend.

Ernie made himself go back to the war – after he had seen so much of it. After he had had so many close calls. Not for glory. He had enough of that. Not for money. He had that, too. He went – well, he had to go. Ernie was that kind of a little guy.

What we say about Ernie Pyle just makes so many words. What the G.I.’s say about him makes a memorial more fitting than any the greatest lyricist could pen.

He was one of them. Willfully, thoughtfully and, still, unconsciously, he was one of them. He couldn’t help it. He died one of them.

When Ernie went off to the Pacific, he wrote in his first column: “Well, here we go again.”

That was Ernie. Not wanting to go. Hating all that going meant. Yet feeling compelled to go.

“Here we go again.”

And soon after he got there – that is, in the Marianas – Ernie wrote about the B-29s. How they went off on their missions, knowing full well some never would come back.

“It is just up to fate,” he said. “But you cannot know ahead of time who it will be.”

The law of averages caught up to Ernie. He knew it would catch up, someday. But he went anyway.

“You cannot tell ahead of time who it will be.”

This time, God bless him, it is Ernie.

We can’t believe it. You can’t believe it. But – his number came up. That’s the way it is in war. It has been that way with thousands of Americans – level-headed, scared Americans, brave men. Men whom Ernie knew so well and typified so well. But it’s true.

Last February, when Ernie resumed writing, after a terribly earned rest, we said: “Something has been missing in the coverage of the war since Ernie had to come home for a rest.”

Now, something will be missing – forever.

[NormanStewart]

Kate Smith broadcasts eloquent tribute to Pyle

NEW YORK – In her noon broadcast yesterday over the Columbia network, Kate Smith paid the following tribute to the late Ernie Pyle, famed war correspondent:

The nation which lost its leader less than one week ago has a new grief to bear this noon. For only a short time ago, the Navy Department announced that Ernie Pyle, beloved war correspondent and friend of every G.I. Joe, has been killed in action.

Died in harness

Like his Commander-in-Chief who fell last Thursday, Ernie died in harness. He was struck down by enemy machine gun fire on a little island off Okinawa. He was right up there in the front line, as always. Sweating it out with the fighting men, in the thick of battle doing the same magnificent job that he has done ever since America went to war.

United States soldiers, sailors and Marines have lost a staunch friend in the death of Ernie Pyle. He was their champion and their hero.

Suffered with men

The bald little reporter had lived and suffered with American fighting men through months of bitter fighting in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France. He came home after those campaigns, simply, he said, because he couldn’t bear the sight of death any longer.

But it wasn’t long before he was off again, this time to the Pacific. Ernie Pyle followed the call of duty. He felt he owed it to America’s fighting men to support their valiant conquests in the Pacific. And there he met the death he had been close to so many times before.

Truman expresses sentiment

President Truman spoke these words a moment ago, and they speak the sentiments of every American who knew Ernie Pyle through his human, realistic accounts of the war. He said “no man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. More than any other man he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms.”

“Nobody knows how many individuals in our forces and at home he helped with his writings. But all Americans understand now how wisely, how warmheartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen. God bless him. May he rest in peace.”

[NormanStewart]

G.I. preview for Pyle film

Movie’s release due in July
By Maxine Garrison, Press Hollywood correspondent

HOLLYWOOD – The death of Ernie Pyle will bring no changes or additions to the film, G.I. Joe, based on the famous war correspondent’s frontline reportings.

Lester Cowan, producer of the movie in which Burgess Meredith portrays Mr. Pyle, said that the completed film will be shown first to troops on Okinawa – the self-same men who were Ernie’s “buddies.”

The film will not be released to the public until July, Mr. Cowan said.

[NormanStewart]

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In addition to today’s column, we will print several others which we have just received from Ernie on Okinawa. We believe he would have wanted it this way.

OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – That was one of the most miserable damn nights out of the hundreds of miserable nights I have spent in this war.

Bird Dog and Gross and I turned into our sacks just after dark. So did everybody else who wasn’t on guard. It was too early to go to sleep, so we just lay there in the dark and talked. You could hear voices faintly all over the hillside.

We didn’t take off our clothes, of course; nobody does in the field. I did take off my boots but Bird Dog and Gross left theirs on for they had to stand watch on the field telephones from 1 till 2 a.m.

The three of us lay jammed up against each other, with Bird Dog in the middle. We smoked one cigarette after another. We didn’t have to hide them under the blanket for we were in a protected position where a cigarette couldn’t be seen very far.

Like flamethrowers

Right after dark the mosquitoes started buzzing around our heads. These Okinawa mosquitoes sound hike a flame thrower. They can’t be driven off or brushed away.

I got a little bottle of mosquito lotion out of my pocket and doused mv face and neck, though I knew it would do no good. The other boys didn’t even bother.

Suddenly Bird Dog sat up and pulled down his socks and started scratching. Fleas were after him. Even the grass has fleas in it over here!

For some strange reason I am immune to fleas. Half the boys are red welted with hundreds of itchy little flea bites, but I have never had one.

Choice mosquito bait

But I’m the world’s choicest morsel for mosquitoes. And mosquito bites poison me. Every morning, I wake up with at least one eye swollen shut.

That was the way it was all night, with all of us – me with a double dose of mosquitoes, all the rest with a mixture of mosquitoes and fleas. You could hear Marines hushfully cussing all night long around the hillside. Suddenly there was a terrible outburst just downhill from us and a Marine came jumping out into the moonlight, cussing and jerking at his clothes.

“I can’t stand these damn things any longer,” he cried. “I’ve got to take my clothes off.”

We all laughed under our ponchos while he stood there in the moonlight and stripped off every stitch, even though it was very chilly. He shook and brushed his clothes, doused them with insect powder and then put them back on.

This unfortunate soul was Cpl. Leland Taylor of Jackson, Michigan. His nickname is Pop, since he is 33 years old.

Pop is a “character.” He has a black beard and even in the front lines he wears a khaki overseas dress cap which makes him stand out.

After Pop went back to bed, everything became quiet for several hours, but hardly anybody was asleep. The next morning the boys on guard said Pop must have smoked three packs of cigarettes that night. It was the same way with Bird Dog, Gross and me.

All night without even raising our heads we could see flashes of the big guns of our fleet across the island. They were shelling the southern part and also shooting flares to light up the front lines in the south.

Watch shells in flight

There were times when we could actually see red-hot shells, traveling horizontally the whole length of their flight, 10 miles away from us, and then see them explode.

Every now and then throughout the night our own company’s mortars were called upon to shoot a flare over the beach behind us, just to make sure nothing was coming In.

Once there was a distinct rustling of the bushes in front of us. Of course, the first thing I thought of was a Jap.

But then I figured a Jap wouldn’t make that much noise and finally I decided it was one of the houses the mortar boys had commandeered, crashing through the bushes. And that’s what it turned out to be.

Along about 4:30, I guess we did sleep a little from sheer exhaustion. That gave the mosquitoes a clear field. When we woke up at dawn and crawled stiffly out into the daylight, my right eye was swollen shut, as usual.

All of which isn’t a very war-like night to describe, but I tell it just so you’ll know there are lots of things besides bullets that make war hell.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 20, 1945)

Senator proposes medal for Pyle

WASHINGTON (SHS) – Sen. Raymond Willis (R-Indiana) has prepared a resolution to bestow a congressional medal posthumously upon Ernie Pyle and expects to introduce it today.

He will ask Sen. Homer Capehart (R-Indiana) to join in its introduction, he said. Sens. Carl Hatch and Dennis Chavez, from Ernie’s adopted state of New Mexico, may also be invited to sponsor the introduction.

Sen. Willis said:

Ernie Pyle belongs to all Americans. But we Hoosiers have a special claim on the memory of this great historian of G.I. Joe. He was our best beloved native son. In this war he moved to the unchallenged rank of our greatest war correspondent.

As a newspaperman, I feel another personal tie. For he was a martyr to his profession.

The medal would be awarded to “That Girl” Mrs. Jerry Pyle, who lives in their home at Albuquerque.

[NormanStewart]

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In addition to today’s column, we will print several others which we have received from Ernie on Okinawa. We believe he would have wanted it this way.

OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – My company of Marines started moving just after breakfast. We were to march about a mile and a half, then dig in and stay in one place for several days, patrolling and routing out the few hidden Japs in that area.

We were in no danger on the march – at least we thought we weren’t, so not all the Marines wore steel helmets. Some wore green twill caps, some baseball caps, some even wore civilian felt hats they had found in Japanese homes.

For some reason soldiers the world over like to put on odd local headgear. I’ve seen soldiers in Italy wearing black silk opera hats. And over here I’ve seen Marines in combat uniform wearing Panama hats.

I’ve always enjoyed going along with an infantry company on the move, even some of the horrible moves such as we had in Italy and France. But the move we made that morning here on Okinawa was really a pleasant one.

It was early morning and the air was good. The temperature was perfect. The country was pretty. We all felt that sense of ease when you know nothing very bad is ahead of you. There is no weight on your spirit. Some of the boys were even smoking cigars.

Always funny sights

There are always funny sights in a column of soldiers moving along. Our mortar platoon had commandeered a dozen local horses to carry heavy pieces. One of the Marines had tea the pack onto his horse with a Japanese oboe – one of those brightly colored reams of sash Japanese women wear on their backs.

And here came this Marine, dirty and unshaven, leading a sorrel horse with a big bowtie of black and while silk, three feet wide, tied across its chest and another similar one tied under its belly, the ends standing out on both sides.

Troops carry the oddest things when they move. One Marine had a Jap photo album in his hand. One had a wicker basket. Another had a lacquered serving tray. They even had a phonograph with Jap records, strapped onto a horse.

Lots of them wore Japanese insignia or pieces of uniform. Later an order came out that any Marine caught wearing Jap clothing would be put on burial detail. I guess that was to keep Marines from shooting each other by mistake.

Orders ‘revised’

There were frequent holdups ahead of us and we would stop and sit down every hundred yards or so. One Marine commenting on the slow progress said: “Sometimes we take off like a crippled duck, and other times we just creep along.”

The word was passed down the line, “Keep your eyes open for planes.” About every sixth man would turn his head and repeat it and the word was sent back along the column like a wave. Except toward the rear they made it comical–

“Keep your eyes open for Geisha girls.”

We were walking almost on each other’s heels, a solid double line of Marines. My friend, Bird Dog Clayton, was behind me. He said, “A column like this would be a Jap pilot’s delight.”

Another said, “If a Jap pilot came over the hill, we’d all go down like bowling balls.” But no Japs came.

Makes harmonica talk

At one of our halts the word passed back that we could sit down, but not to take off our packs. From down the line came music, a French harp and ukulele, playing “You Are My Sunshine.” When it was finished the Marines would call back request numbers and our little concert went on for five or ten minutes out there in the Okinawa fields.

The harmonicist was Pvt. William Gabriel, a bazookaman from a farm near Houston, Texas. He is only 19, but a veteran with one wound.

He is a redhead and the shyest soldier I’ve ever met. He is so bashful he can hardly talk. But he makes a harmonica talk.

Playing with him was an officer – Lt. “Bones” Carsters of Los Angeles. Bones has a mortar platoon. He strummed cords on a sort of ukulele common to Okinawa. It has three strings and the head is always made of tightly stretched snakeskin. It gives you the willies just to look at one.

When we started on again the way ahead was clear and we went that time like the well-known duck and after about a mile we were there, all panting.

[NormanStewart]

Will you give a pint of blood in memory of Ernie Pyle?

The Red Cross blood bank is running behind its quota. Good news has sharply decreased blood donations.

And this at a time when casualties are heavy – both in the European and Pacific theaters?

Many folks have called The Press, suggesting some sort of memorial for Ernie Pyle.

Ernie doesn’t need a memorial. But if one could be dedicated to him, what could be finer than the life of some G.I. Joe – saved from death by a pint of your blood?

Therefore, next week will be Ernie Pyle Week at the Red Cross blood bank. Will you give a pint to save some wounded Yank? Remember, Ernie gave his life.

Won’t you call Grant 1680 and make an appointment to give a pint of blood – just a little tribute to Ernie Pyle?

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 21, 1945)

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In addition to today’s column, we will print several others which we have received from Ernie on Okinawa. We believe he would have wanted it this way.

OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – Now I’ve seen my first Jap soldiers in their native state – that is, before capture. But not for long, because the boys of my company captured them quicker than a wink.

It was mid-forenoon and we had just reached our new bivouac area after a march of an hour and a half. The boys threw off their packs, sat down on the ground, and took off their helmets to mop their perspiring foreheads.

We were in a small grassy spot at the foot of a hill. Most of these hillsides have caves with household stuff hidden in them. They are a rich field for souvenir hunters. And all Marines are souvenir hunters.

So immediately two of our boys, instead of resting, started up through the brush, looking for caves and souvenirs. They had gone about fifty yards when one of them yelled: “There’s a Jap soldier under this bush.”

We didn’t get too excited for most of us figured he meant a dead Jap. But three or four of the boys got up and went up the hill. A few moments later somebody yelled again: “Hey, here’s another one. They’re alive and they’ve got rifles.”

So, the boys went at them in earnest. The Japs were lying under two bushes. They had their hands up over their ears and were pretending to be asleep.

Too scared to move

The Marines surrounded the bushes and, with guns pointing, they ordered the Japs out. But the Japs were too scared to move. They just lay there, blinking.

The average Jap soldier would have come out shooting. But, thank goodness, these were of a different stripe. They were so petrified the Marines had to go into the bushes, lift them by the shoulders, and throw them out in the open,

My contribution to the capture consisted of standing to one side and looking as mean as I could.

One Jap was small, and about 30 years old. The other was just a kid of 16 or 17, but good-sized and well-built. The kid had the rank of superior private and the other was a corporal. They were real Japanese from Japan, not the Okinawan home guard.

They were both trembling all over. The kid’s face turned a sickly white. Their hands shook. The muscles in the corporal’s jaw were twitching. The kid was so paralyzed he couldn’t even understand sign language.

We don’t know why those two Japs didn’t fight. They had good rifles and potatomasher hand grenades. They could have stood behind their bushes and heaved grenades into our tightly packed group and got themselves two dozen casualties, easily.

The Marines took their arms. One Marine tried to direct the corporal in handbook Japanese, but the fellow couldn’t understand.

The scared kid just stood there, sweating like an ox. I guess he thought he was dead. Finally, we sent them back to the regiment.

The two Marines who flushed these Japs were Cpl. Jack Ossege of Silver Grove, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, and Pfc. Lawrence Bennett of Port Huron, Michigan.

His first blitz

Okinawa was the first blitz for Pvt. Bennett and this was the first Jap soldier he’d ever seen. He is 30 years old, married, and has a baby girl. Back home he was a freight dispatcher.

The Jap corporal had a metal photo holder like a cigarette case. In it were photos which we took to be of three Japanese movie stars. They were good-looking, and everybody had to have a look.

Cpl. Ossege had been through one Pacific blitz, but this was the first Jap he ever took alive. As an old hand at souvenir hunting, he made sure to get the Jap’s rifle.

That rifle was the envy of everybody. Later when we were sitting around, discussing the capture, the other boys tried to buy or trade him out of it. “Pop” Taylor, the black-whiskered corporal from Jackson, Michigan, offered Ossege $100 for the rifle.

The answer was no. Then Taylor offered four quarts of whiskey. The answer still was no. Then he offered eight quarts. Ossege weakened a little. He said, “Where would you get eight quarts of whiskey?” Pop said he had no idea. So, Ossege kept the rifle.

So, there you have my first two Japs. And I hope my future Japs will all be as tame as these two. But I doubt it.

[NormanStewart]

Pyle and 5 G.I.’s buried together

Evergreen and wheat used for wreath
By Mac R. Johnson, United Press staff writer

ABOARD ADM. TURNER’S FLAGSHIP, Okinawa – A white cross today marked the grave of Ernie Pyle in a small cemetery 600 yards inland from “Red Beach” on embattled Ie Shima.

The white-haired little man, who rose from obscurity to become the greatest champion of little-known but important G.I.’s, was buried yesterday with five enlisted men who died as he did, in action.

Enlisted men of the Army’s 77th Infantry Division built a crude wooden coffin of boards ripped from K-ration boxes and on it they placed a wreath of Japanese evergreen and a sheaf of ripe golden wheat.

Led by general

The funeral party was led by Maj. Gen. Andrew D. Bruce, commanding general of the 77th Infantry Division. It was halted at the beach when the enemy dropped 100 rounds of mortar fire in the area.

There were no salutes. Taps was not blown. This was a cemetery for combat men in a combat zone and the ceremony was simple. It lasted 35 minutes.

A trench had been bulldozed in the brown soil of an open field. Individual graves had been dug in the bottom of the trench. The bodies of the five enlisted men and Mr. Pyle were placed in the common grave.

Chaplain officiates

Capt. Nathaniel B. Saucier of Coffeeville, Mississippi, a regimental chaplain, read the burial service for all six.

Mr. Pyle’s body was wrapped in a blanket like any officer or G.I. and a dog tag wired around his body.

Five hundred yards away, on the spot where Ernie was killed by Jap machine gun bullets, soldiers erected a sign which reads:

AT THIS SPOT THE 77TH INFANTRY DIVISION LOST A BUDDY
ERNIE PYLE
18 APRIL, 1945

[NormanStewart]

Editorial: Tribute to Ernie

Greenwich, Connecticut, is not a metropolis, like New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh or Washington. It’s a city of the size that Ernie Pyle would have liked as his home.

It is interesting therefore that from Greenwich came the first editorial written about Ernie Pyle’s death. Within an hour and a half after the death was reported, the following was sent to Scripps-Howard offices in New York by Niver W. Beaman, editor of The Greenwich Times:

Ernie Pyle, war correspondent, is dead, killed by a Jap machine gunner, and the greatest tribute that can be paid him is the sense of personal loss felt by millions of Americans who never even saw this hard-working little man.

When President Roosevelt died suddenly last week, the comment most often heard was “It is just as though someone in my own family had died.” Although Ernie Pyle held no public office, his death has brought the same stunned exclamations.

Ernie Pyle was not the typical war correspondent. He wrote not of tactics and strategy. He went into the lines with the fighting men and wrote of them as individuals, naming them by name and city. He described his reporting as a “worm’s eye view of the war.” He could have lived with the generals. He preferred the enlisted men.

He wrote homely little pieces about his friends – and every man in uniform was his friend, because he shared their dangers, asked no special privileges, talked their language. And he wrote their language.

Often the reader of Pyle’s column in Scripps-Howard newspapers and other newspapers in which it was syndicated, knew personally the men of whom he wrote because Ernie met thousands of fighting men, and named them, described them, made them live in print.

If the reader didn’t actually know one of the men whom Ernie met, the reader knew somebody almost like him. If it wasn’t your brother, Joe, or your son, Junior, or the kid that lived next door to you, and often it was, it was a G.I. so much like your own that you had the feeling of being with your very flesh and blood. That was Ernie Pyle’s great talent – the ability to take you with him. He was a great reporter but more than that he was a grand, modest, scared, brave little guy.