Roving Reporter, Ernie Pyle

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Ernie Pyle V Norman

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.

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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.

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Ernie Pyle V Norman

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.

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american_red_cross

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?

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 21, 1945)

Ernie Pyle V Norman

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.

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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

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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.

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Ferguson: Ernie Pyle

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

My last letter from Ernie Pyle came from Albuquerque:

I haven’t written you in a long time. Your piece which I was reading last night gave me the chance. One sentence struck me as so thoughtful, so true (men who have slept in foxholes and endured the hardships of actual war, develop a profound pity for the misfortunes of humanity) at least that’s the way I feel. I’m not sure all soldiers do.

My vacation hasn’t been much of a vacation. The public pressure has been unbelievable I’m taking of for the Pacific in a few days, I certainly Mrs. Ferguson don’t itch to go, but feel I must. I don’t suppose any of us will be the same by the time this whole thing is over.

He went to the Pacific and will not come back, dear, shy, lovable Ernie. To his personal friends and millions of devoted readers, the world will not be the same without him.

But Ernie wouldn’t have wanted eulogies. He gladly shared a soldier’s life; he did not try to avoid a soldier’s death. It seems a fitting climax to his great career as interpreter of American fighting men, that he should walk into the valley of shadows with those who went that way. They were his comrades in arms, his pals, and in death they are not divided.

His last dispatches are accounts of their valor, fellowship and mirth under stress of war. He leaves life with his genius at its full flower. He went at high tide – and all who do are blessed.

Let there be no lamentations for Ernie Pyle, although we who are bereft of him may sorrow for ourselves. He has found peace.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 22, 1945)

Love: They killed our pal Ernie, but we can help ‘his boys’

By Gilbert Love
Sunday, April 22, 1945

They killed Ernie Pyle – little inoffensive Ernie, who never harmed anyone in all his life.

He was our friend. We may never have seen him, but through his columns we knew him well. We suffered with him, were afraid with him, laughed and cried with him.

He took us to war with him, and because of this we knew how all our fine young men were living and dying. That was Ernie’s mission. It was his stern duty – the thing that forced him to go back to war, when he already had done more than his share, to meet his death on tiny Ie Island in the far Pacific.

What can we do?

What are we going to do about Ernie? We can’t go over there and take personal revenge on the Jap who took his life, although some of us felt a wild urge to do that when we heard the news of his death last Wednesday morning. We can’t do anything for Ernie himself.

But we can carry on his work.

The kind of people Ernie loved knew what to do when they heard of his death. Soldiers and workers began going to the Red Cross Blood Bank in the Wabash Building to give blood “for Ernie.” He couldn’t use it, of course, but his G.I.’s could.

Taking their cue from these special friends of Ernie’s, the Red Cross people designated this coming week at Ernie Pyle Week at the Blood Bank.

Anyone who wants to pay a small tribute to Ernie can walk into the Blood Bank any time between 9:45 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For evening or Saturdays an appointment should be made by calling GRant 1680.

The Week is a perfect memorial to Ernie, the kind he would have liked. No sad music and orations for him. If folks wanted to do something nice for him, he’d like to have them do it for “his boys.”

And the boys need it. Despite mounting casualties, and increased need for blood plasma to save lives, smaller and smaller numbers of donors have been visiting the Blood Bank. The news is good, and it’s assumed that the war is over.

400 pints daily quota

It isn’t over for the soldiers who are being mowed down by the cornered Nazis, or for the soldiers and sailors and marines who are facing their greatest battles against Japan.

The Blood Bank in the Wabash Building has a quota of 400 pints of blood a day. Not since March 1, when the Allies were still battling on the approaches to Germany, has the quota been met. Since that time the average has been 300 a day, and last week not even that figure was reached.

Wherever Ernie Pyle is now, he would be very happy to know a Pittsburgh district residents thought enough of him to bring their donations of life-giving blood up to par, if only for one week.

Frequent appeals

While he was on the Italian front, Ernie sent an appeal to the home folks to give blood for plasma. And here are a few significant paragraphs that he wrote on November 21, 1944:

This fall I came home from France on a ship that carried 1,000 of our wounded American soldiers. About a fourth of them were terribly wounded stretcher cases. The rest were up and about. These others could walk, though among the walking were many legs and arms missing, many eyes that could not see.

Well, there was one hospitalized soldier who was near death on this trip. He was wounded internally, and the Army doctors were trying desperately, to keep him alive until we got to America. They operated several times, and they kept pouring plasma and whole blood into him constantly, until they ran out of whole blood.

Didn’t want stampede

I happened to be in the head doctor’s cabin at noon one day when he was talking about this boy. He said he had his other doctors at that moment going around the ship typing blood specimens from several of the ship’s officers, and from unwounded Army and Navy officers aboard. They were doing it almost surreptitiously, for they didn’t want it to get out that they needed blood.

And why didn’t they want it to get out? Because if it had, there would have been a stampede to the hospital ward by the other wounded men, offering their blood to this dying comrade. Think of that – a stampede of men themselves badly wounded, wanting to give their blood.

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Great stories he wrote provide best memorial to Ernie Pyle

Sunday, April 22, 1945

The best memorial to Ernie Pyle is what he wrote.

At a time when the nation, and especially the servicemen, are mourning the death of the man who yesterday was buried with five enlisted men on Ie Shima, we publish these excerpts from hi columns as examples of Ernie’s work.

In the front lines in Tunisia

I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end, they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.

I wish you could see just one of the ineradicable pictures I have in my mind today. In this particular picture I am sitting among clumps of sword-grass on a steep and rocky hillside that we have just taken. We are looking out over a vast rolling country to the rear.

A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill.

All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

The men are walking. They are 50 feet apart for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing.

They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaved. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged.

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory – there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.

The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of ant-like men.

There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

From Italy

War correspondents try not to think of how high their ratio of casualties has been in this war. At least they try not to think of it in terms of themselves, but Ray Clapper’s death sort of set us back on our heels. Somehow it always seemed impossible that anything could ever happen to him. It made us wonder who is next.

I think the most frequent comment in this area was one that would have made Ray proud. People said:

“The old story again. It’s always the best ones that get it.”

From London during the Nazi blitz

The thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London – London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines.

These things all went together to make the most hateful most beautiful single scene I have ever known.

From San Francisco before his last trip

There’s nothing nice about the prospect of going back to war again. Anybody who has been in war and wants to go back is a plain fool in my book.

I’m certainly not going because I’ve got itchy feet again, or because I can’t stand America, or because there’s any mystic fascination about war that is drawing me back.

I’m going simply because there’s a war on and I’m part of it and I’ve known all the time I was going back. I’m going because I’ve got to, and I hate it…

Also from San Francisco

Friends warn me about all kinds of horrible diseases in the Pacific. About dysentery, and malaria, and fungus that gets in your ears and your intestines, and that horrible swelling disease known as elephantiasis.

Well, all I can say is that I’m God’s gift to germs. Those fungi will shout and leap for joy when I show up. Maybe I can play the Pied Piper role – maybe the germs will all follow me when I get there, and leave the rest of the boys free to fight.

So, what with disease, Japs, seasickness, and shot and shell – you see I’m not too overwhelmed with relief at starting out again.

But there’s one thing in my favor where I’m going; one thing that will make life bearable when all else is darkness and gloom. And that one thing is that, out in the Pacific, I’ll be good and stinking hot. Oh boy!

In Marianas, writing of cousin Jack Bales

Jack has had two jars of Indiana fried chicken from my Aunt Mary. She cans it and seals it in mason jars, and it’s wonderful. She sent me some in France, but I’d gone before it got there.

Jack took some of his fried chicken in his lunch over Tokyo one day. We Hoosiers sure do get around, even the chickens.

In Marianas, watching Superfortresses take off

Finally, they were all in the air, formed into flight, and vanished into the swallowing sky from which some would never return.

I had the same feeling watching the takeoff that I used to have before the start at Indianapolis. Here were a certain number of cars and men. Some of them you knew. They had built and trained for weeks for this day. At last, the time had come.

And in a few hours of desperate living, everything would be changed. You knew that within a few hours some would be glorious in victory, some would be defected in failures, some would be colorless “also rans,” and some – very probably – would be dead.

And that’s the way you feel when the B-29s start out. It is just up to fate. In 15 hours, they will be back – those who are coming back. But you cannot know ahead of time who it will be.

Off Okinawa the night before D-Day

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…

Our ship is an APA, or assault transport…

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.

With the Marines on Okinawa beachhead

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!

On Okinawa

An assault on an enemy shore is a highly organized thing. It is so intricately organized, so abundant in fine detail that it would be impossible to clarify it all in your mind. No single man in our armed forces knows everything about an invasion.

But just to simplify one point–

Suppose we were invading an enemy beach on a four-mile front. It is not as you would think, one overall invasion. Instead, it is a dozen or more little invasions, simultaneously and side by side. Each team runs its own invasion. A combat team is a regiment. Our regimental commander and his staff were on the little control ship. Thus, our control ship directed only the troops of our regiment.

As I’ve written before, war to an individual is hardly ever bigger than a hundred yards on each side of him. And that’s the way it was with us at Okinawa.

From Italy writing of war

It’s the perpetual dust choking you, the hard ground wracking your muscles, the snatched food sitting ill on your stomach, the heat and the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines 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.

In Africa, watching the crippled bomber

Then we saw the plane – just a tiny black speck. It seemed almost on the ground, it was so low, and in the first glance we could sense that it was barely moving, barely staying in the air. Crippled and alone, two hours behind all the rest, it was dragging itself home.

I am a layman, and no longer of the fraternity that flies, but I can feel. And at that moment I felt something close to human love for that faithful, battered machine, that far dark speck struggling toward us with such pathetic slowness.

All of us stood tense, hardly remembering anyone else was there. With our nervous systems, we seemed to pull the plane toward us. I suspect a photograph would have shown us all leaning slightly to the left. Not one of us thought the plane would ever make the field, but on it came – so slowly that it was cruel to watch.

It reached the far end of the airdrome, still holding its pathetic little altitude. It skimmed over the tops of parked planes, and kept on, actually reaching out – it seemed to us – for the runway. A few hundred yards more now. Could it? Would it? Was it truly possible?

They cleared the last plane, and they were over the runway. They settled slowly. The wheels touched softly. And as the plane rolled on down die runway, the thousands of men around that vast field suddenly realized that they were weak and that they could hear their hearts pounding.

The last of the sunset died, and the sky turned into blackness, which would help the Germans if they came on schedule with their bombs. But nobody cared. Our 10 dead men were miraculously back from the grave.

On the death of his mother

That night in London, back in my room alone, it seemed to me that living is futile, and death the final indignity.

I turned off the lights and pulled the blackout curtains and went to bed. Little pictures of my mother raced across the darkness before my eyes.

Pictures of nearly a lifetime. Pictures of her at neighborhood square dances long, long ago, when she was young and I was a child. Pictures of her playing the violin. Pictures of her doctoring sick horses; of her carrying newborn lambs into the house on raw spring days.

I could see her as she stood on the front porch, crying bravely, on that morning in 1918 when I, being youthful, said a tearless goodbye and climbed into the neighbor’s waiting buggy that was to take me out of her life.

The pictures grew older. Gradually she became stooped and toil-worn, and finally white and wracked with age… but always spirited, always sharp.

On that first night, I had felt in a sort of detached bitterness that, because my mother’s life was hard, it was also empty. But how wrong I was.

For you need only have seen the great truckloads of flowers they say came from all over the continent, or the scores of Indiana youngsters who journeyed to her both in life and in death because they loved her, to know that she had given a full life, and received one, in return.

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Pyle’s closest pal writes of ‘my friend’

Hears news via radio with Army on Luzon
By Lee Miller, Scripps-Howard staff writer

This story about Ernie Pyle was written by Lee Miller, heretofore managing editor of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, and Ernie’s closest friend. When Ernie became famous and was roving over the world, Lee handled so much of Ernie’s business that he was jokingly referred to as “vice president in charge of Pyle.”

MANILA, Philippines (April 19, delayed) – I am tired and grieved and I don’t feel like writing anything.

They asked me to send in an article about my friend Ernie Pyle but Ernie wrote his own story. He wrote it in his blood – there with the foot soldiers whose dangers it was his self-imposed lot to share.

I was shaving out of a helmet this morning in a tent at the 49th Fighter Group, many miles from Manila. A radio came on in an adjacent tent. I couldn’t hear distinctly, but suddenly I thought I heard Ernie’s name. Jerry Thorp, with whom I shared a tent along with Paul Cranston, jumped from his chair and shouted: “What did he say?”

We stood there transfixed as the announcer went on. President Truman, he was saying, had paid tribute for the nation to the great reporter.

Details unimportant

The announcer went on with the meager details. But details seemed of no moment now. Ernie was gone – my closest friend for more than 20 years, years in which we shared some tragedies as well as pleasant things.

He was dead, dead the way he had increasingly feared he might die – in the violence of combat.

Ernie hated the thought of dying. He told me that in his first months of war he felt more excitement than fear, but that in the years that followed, as one friend after another was killed, and as he himself survived many brushes with death, he came to dread what might happen to him.

Didn’t want to go back

He didn’t want to go back to the war. He said so on return from Europe last year. He said it in New York, in Washington, in Albuquerque, in Hollywood, in San Francisco and Honolulu, where I saw him off in January. He forced himself to go, as a duty.

And it was indeed a duty. For never, surely, in the history of journalism had so many people come to trust implicitly the word of one particular reporter, nor so many people to feel personal devotion to a reporter.

I had been planning to go up to Baguio this morning. But I thought my office – Ernie’s office – in Washington would be trying to reach me, and I decided I’d better get to Manila. There was a five-hour wait at the airstrip before I got a ride in a B-24 going halfway. Meantime I talked to the air force noncoms leaving for home on rotation after more than three years in this theater.

“First President Roosevelt and now Ernie,” said Sgt. Harry A. McMahon of Memphis. “It won’t be the same back home now.”

Later when I changed from bomber to jeep, Capt. Al Stoughton of Washington said a Red Cross girl down at the airdrome had burst into tears at the news. All the way down the line, and here in Manila tonight, people have been saying: “Is it true about Ernie Pyle?”

At a ceremony for presentation of decorations to some engineer troops, a detailed account of Ernie’s death was read aloud to the hushed gathering.

Legend to men

I picked up my mail. My mother had written from Indiana, “I hope Ernie gets back all right. We’ve watched his progress on Okinawa closely and were so glad he had a safe landing.”

A delayed wireless from Washington said Ernie was planning to remain in the Ryukyus several weeks. A letter from my office enclosed clippings of several of Ernie’s columns, and a picture.

Ernie had never visited the Southwest Pacific Theater. He had planned to. Weeks ago, he wrote me that he hoped to see me on Luzon. But he was a legend to these men out here who never knew him.

It is still impossible to compass the fact that Ernie, that human, earthy, gentle, wise man, is gone from this troubled world whose collective madness he abhorred but whose shortcomings were overshadowed for him by the nobility of the individual human being.

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Editorial: Ernie Pyle week

This week will be Ernie Pyle week at the Red Cross blood bank.

If you read Ernie’s columns from the war fronts – and who didn’t? – take an hour off one day this week and donate a pint of blood.

That pint of blood will make a greater contribution to the war effort than any other single thing you could do.

It may save the life of one of our fighting men.

Apparently because favorable news from the war fronts has made many people forget there is still much fighting to be done, blood donations have fallen off sharply.

Months ago, Ernie wrote from Sicily:

I beg you folks back home to give and keep on giving your blood. We’ve got plenty on hand here now, but if we ever run into mass casualties such as they have on the Russian front, we will need untold amounts of it.

We’ve now run into those mass casualties on Iwo Jima, on Okinawa. There’ll be more when we assault the main islands, of Japan. We’re still getting heavy casualties in Germany. Those casualties will continue until all the pockets and lines of resistance in that mad country are wiped out.

A pint of blood is a cheap price for you to pay for the life of a man fighting for his country. But it will do the job.

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The Pittsburgh Press (April 23, 1945)

Ernie’s friends fill blood bank

Pay him tribute he would have liked
Monday, April 23, 1945

Ernie Pyle’s friends are paying him the kind of tribute he would have liked this week.

They are giving a pint of life-saving blood to the Red Cross Blood Bank in the Wabash Building. On Saturday, even before the official Ernie Pyle Week began, they gave the Blood Bank its best Saturday in a month.

This morning at 10 o’clock, all the places were filled with donors, most of whom were giving their blood as a memorial to the well-loved little writer who now lies in an Army cemetery on a Pacific island.

Always read him

Several of the donors were workers at the Pittsburgh Pipe and Coupling Company in Allison Park.

“I always read him,” said Earl J. Hanlon of Gibsonia, who was giving his seventh donation in memory of Ernie Pyle. With him were John Holland and George Hubal of the Same company, who gave their sixth and fifth donations.

Mrs. Lorraine Cole of Wexford came in early to give her fifth pint of blood to honor Ernie. Her son, Sgt. John Cole, was in the Okinawa invasion, his fifth in two years overseas. He met Ernie just a day or two before his death, according to a letter which the Coles received last week.

“He is such a little fellow, and he has a wonderful grin,” wrote Sgt. Cole. “He is rated tops with everyone out here.”

His favorite writer

Mr. and Mrs. Cole have three other sons, Renald, Robert and Richard, all in the Navy, and a foster son, John Cawigan of Brooklyn, who is also on Okinawa. Mr. Cole, general manager of the Kelley-Koett X-Ray Corporation, will come to the bank this week to give his fourth donation.

“He was my favorite writer. If I didn’t read anything else, I read his column,” said James Kelly of Fair Oaks, who gave his second pint of blood as a tribute to Ernie Pyle this morning.

A veteran of 23 months in Iran with an Army motor transport unit, Les Williamson, 151 Straw Ave., Bellevue, gave his first donation to the Red Cross Blood Bank today in honor of the war correspondent who was the common soldier’s friend and interpreter.

Made up his mind

“I saw it in The Press yesterday and that made up my mind,” said Louis Stover, 42 Waldorf St., a worker at Dravo, who visited the Blood Bank this morning for the second time.

Other admirers of Ernie Pyle who wish to help save the life of a wounded soldier as a tribute to the writer’s memory may make an appointment by calling the Blood Bank, GRant 1680, or may come into the Wabash Building any time after 9:45 a.m.

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Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

Before he was killed on Ie Shima, Ernie Pyle, as was his habit, had written a number of columns ahead. He did this so there would be no interruptions in the column while he was getting material for more. Several more are expected.

OKINAWA (by Navy radio) – It’s marvelous to see a bunch of American troops go about making themselves at home wherever they get a chance to settle down for a few days.

My company of First Division Marines dug in at the edge of a bomb-shattered village. The village was quaint and not without charm. I was astonished at the similarity with the villages of Sicily and Italy.

The town didn’t really seem oriental. The houses were wooden one-story buildings, surrounded by little vegetable gardens. Instead of fences, each lot was divided by rows of shrubs or trees. The cobblestoned streets were just wide enough for a jeep. They were winding and walled on both sides by head-high stone walls.

A good part of the town lay shattered. Scores of the houses had burned and only ashes and red roofing tile were left. Wandering around, I counted the bodies of four Okinawans still in the streets. Otherwise the town was deserted.

The people had fled to their caves in the hillsides, taking most of their personal belongings with them. There is almost no furniture in Japanese houses, so they didn’t have to worry about that.

After a few days the grapevine carried the word to them that our commander picked out a nice little house on a rise at the edge of town for his command post.

Marines on an afternoon off

The house was very light, fairly clean, and the floors were covered with woven straw mats. A couple of officers and a dozen men moved into the house and slept on the floor and we cooked our rations over an open stone cookstove in the rear.

Then the word went around for the men of the company to dig in for several days. Two platoons were assigned to dig in along the outer sides of the nearby hills for perimeter defense.

The boys were told they could keep the horses they had commandeered, that they could carry wooden panels out of the houses to make little doghouses for themselves, but not to take anything else, and that they could have fires, except during air alerts.

They weren’t to start their daily mop-up patrols in the brush until the next day, so they had the afternoon off to clean themselves up and fix up their little houses.

Different men did different things. Some built elaborate houses about the size of chicken houses, with floor mats and chairs and even kerosene lanterns hanging from the roof.

One Mexican boy dug a hole, covered it with boards, and then camouflaged it so perfectly with brush you really couldn’t see it.

Some spent the afternoon taking baths and washing clothes in the river. Some rode bicycles around town. Some rode their horses up and down. Some foraged around town through the deserted houses. Some went looking for chickens to cook. Some sat in groups and talked. Some just slept.

Wear Jap kimonos

An order went out against wearing Jap clothing or eating any of the local vegetables, pork, goat, beef or fowl. But this was before the order came out.

The Marines had dug up lots of Japanese kimonos out of the smashed houses and put them on while washing their one set of clothes. If you ever want to see a funny sight, just take a look at a few dozen dirty and unshaven Marines walking around in pink and blue women’s kimonos.

A typical example was Pvt. Raymond Adams of Pleasant, Tennessee. He had fixed himself a dugout right on the edge of a bluff above the river. He had a grand view and a nice little grassy front yard. Out there he had driven stakes and built a fire. He hung his helmet over the fire like a kettle and was stewing chicken. He had taken off his clothes and put on a beautiful pink and white kimono.

Later a friend came along with a Jap bicycle with one pedal off, and Adams tried without much success to ride it up and down a nearby lane.

If there ever is a war play about Marines, I hope they include one tough-looking private in a pink-and-white kimono, stewing chicken and trying to ride a one-pedaled bicycle through a shattered Japanese village.

Pvt. Adams is married and has a boy eight months old he has never seen. If the baby could have seen his father that day he would probably have got the colic from laughing so much.

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