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.