Word Celebrity Blog

The God-Damned Infantry
by Ernie Pyle

IN THE FRONT LINES BEFORE MATEUR, NORTHERN TUNISIA, May 2, 1943 – We’re now with an infantry outfit that has battled ceaselessly for four days and nights.

This northern warfare has been in the mountains. You don’t ride much anymore. It is walking and climbing and crawling country. The mountains aren’t big, but they are constant. They are largely treeless. They are easy to defend and bitter to take. But we are taking them.

The Germans lie on the back slope of every ridge, deeply dug into foxholes. In front of them the fields and pastures are hideous with thousands of hidden mines. The forward slopes are left open, untenanted, and if the Americans tried to scale these slopes they would be murdered wholesale in an inferno of machine-gun crossfire plus mortars and grenades.

Consequently we don’t do it that way. We have fallen back to the old warfare of first pulverizing the enemy with artillery, then sweeping around the ends of the hill with infantry and taking them from the sides and behind.

















I’ve written before how the big guns crack and roar almost constantly throughout the day and night. They lay a screen ahead of our troops. By magnificent shooting they drop shells on the back slopes. By means of shells timed to burst in the air a few feet from the ground, they get the Germans even in their foxholes. Our troops have found that the Germans dig foxholes down and then under, trying to get cover from the shell bursts that shower death from above.

Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.

All the guns in any one sector can be centered to shoot at one spot. And when we lay the whole business on a German hill the whole slope seems to erupt. It becomes an unbelievable cauldron of fire and smoke and dirt. Veteran German soldiers say they have never been through anything like it.




















Now to the infantry – the God-damned infantry, as they like to call themselves.

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 fifty 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 unshaven. 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 antlike 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.

Ernie Pyle

Brave Men, Brave Men!

by Ernie Pyle


NORTHERN TUNISIA, April 22, 1943 – I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them.

I did, and definitely.

The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they now talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. To them now there is nothing morally wrong about killing. In fact it is an admirable thing.




















I think I am so impressed by this new attitude because it hasn’t been necessary for me to make this change along with them. As a noncombatant, my own life is in danger only by occasional chance or circumstance. Consequently I need not think of killing in personal terms, and killing to me is still murder.

Even after a winter of living with wholesale death and vile destruction, it is only spasmodically that I seem capable of realizing how real and how awful this war is. My emotions seem dead and crusty when presented with the tangibles of war. I find I can look on rows of fresh graves without a lump in my throat. Somehow I can look on mutilated bodies without flinching or feeling deeply.

It is only when I sit alone away from it all, or lie at night in my bedroll recreating with closed eyes what I have seen, thinking and thinking and thinking, that at last the enormity of all these newly dead strikes like a living nightmare. And there are times when I feel that I can’t stand it and will have to leave.



















But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.

He wants to kill individually or in vast numbers. He wants to see the Germans overrun, mangled, butchered in the Tunisian trap. He speaks excitedly of seeing great heaps of dead, of our bombers sinking whole shiploads of fleeing men, of Germans by the thousands dying miserably in a final Tunisian holocaust of his own creation.

In this one respect the front-line soldier differs from all the rest of us. All the rest of us – you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa – we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over. The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.




















Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.

In the semifinals of this campaign – the cleaning out of central Tunisia – we had large units in battle for the first time. Frankly, they didn’t all excel. Their own commanders admit it, and admirably they don’t try to alibi. The British had to help us out a few times, but neither American nor British commanders are worried about that, for there was no lack of bravery. There was only lack of experience. They all know we will do better next time.

The 1st Infantry Division is an example of what our American units can be after they have gone through the mill of experience. Those boys did themselves proud in the semifinals. Everybody speaks about it. Our casualties included few taken prisoners. All the other casualties were wounded or died fighting.
























"They never gave an inch," a general says. "They died right in their foxholes."

I heard of a high British officer who went over this battlefield just after the action was over. American boys were still lying dead in their foxholes, their rifles still grasped in firing position in their dead hands. And the veteran English soldier remarked time and again, in a sort of hushed eulogy spoken only to himself:

"Brave men. Brave men."















Ernie Pyle

Digging and Grousing

by Ernie Pyle





















ON THE NORTH AFRICAN DESERT, March 23, 1943 – When our Sahara salvage expedition finally found the wrecked airplanes far out on the endless desert, the mechanics went to work taking off usable parts, and four others of us appointed ourselves the official ditch-diggers of the day.






















We were all afraid of being strafed if the Germans came over and saw men working around the planes, and we wanted a nice ditch handy for diving into. The way to have a nice ditch is to dig one. We wasted no time.

Would that all slit trenches could be dug in soil like that. The sand was soft and moist; just the kind children like to play in. The four of us dug a winding ditch forty feet long and three feet deep in about an hour and a half.

**********

The day got hot, and we took off our shirts. One sweating soldier said: "Five years ago you couldn’t a got me to dig a ditch for five dollars an hour. Now look at me.

"You can’t stop me digging ditches. I don’t even want pay for it; I just dig for love. And I sure do hope this digging today is all wasted effort; I never wanted to do useless work so bad in my life.

"Any time I get fifty feet from my home ditch you’ll find me digging a new ditch, and brother I ain’t joking. I love to dig ditches."




















Digging out here in the soft desert sand was paradise compared with the claylike digging back at our base. The ditch went forward like a prairie fire. We measured it with our eyes to see if it would hold everybody.

"Throw up some more right here," one of the boys said, indicating a low spot in the bank on either side. "Do you think we’ve got it deep enough?"

"It don’t have to be so deep," another one said. "A bullet won’t go through more than three inches of sand. Sand is the best thing there is for stopping bullets."

A growth of sagebrush hung over the ditch on one side. "Let’s leave it right there," one of the boys said. "It’s good for the imagination. Makes you think you’re covered up even when you ain’t."

That’s the new outlook, the new type of conversation, among thousands of American boys today. It’s hard for you to realize, but there are certain moments when a plain old ditch can be dearer to you than any possession on earth. For all bombs, no matter where they may land eventually, do all their falling right straight at your head. Only those of you who know about that can ever know all about ditches.

**********

While we were digging, one of the boys brought up for the thousandth time the question of that letter in Time magazine. What letter, you ask? Why, it’s a letter you probably don’t remember, but it has become famous around these parts.

It was in the November 23 [1942] issue, which eventually found its way over here. Somebody read it, spoke to a few friends, and pretty soon thousands of men were commenting on this letter in terms which the fire department won’t permit me to set to paper.

To get to the point, it was written by a soldier, and it said: "The greatest Christmas present that can be given to us this year is not smoking jackets, ties, pipes or games. If people will only take the money and buy war bonds . . . they will be helping themselves and helping us to be home next Christmas. Being home next Christmas is something which would be appreciated by all of us boys in service!"

The letter was all right with the soldiers over here until they got down to the address of the writer and discovered he was still in camp in the States. For a soldier back home to open his trap about anything concerning the war is like waving a red flag at the troops over here. They say they can do whatever talking is necessary.

"Them poor dogfaces back home," said one of the ditch-diggers with fine soldier sarcasm, "they’ve really got it rugged. Nothing to eat but them old greasy pork chops and them three-inch steaks all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have to eat eggs several times a week."

"And they’re so lonely," said another. "No entertainment except to rassle them old dames around the dance floor. The USO closes at ten o’clock and the nightclubs at three. It’s mighty tough on them. No wonder they want to get home."

"And they probably don’t get no sleep," said another, "sleeping on them old cots with springs and everything, and scalding themselves in hot baths all the time."

"And nothing to drink but that nasty old ten-cent beer and that awful Canadian Club whiskey," chimed in another philosopher with a shovel.

"And when they put a nickel in the box nothing comes out but Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw and such trash as that. My heart just bleeds for them poor guys."

"And did you see where he was?" asked another. "At the Albuquerque Air Base. And he wants to be home by next Christmas. Hell, if I could just see the Albuquerque Air Base again I’d think I was in heaven."

That’s the way it goes. The boys feel a soldier isn’t qualified to comment unless he’s on the wrong side of the ocean. They’re gay and full of their own wit when they get started that way, but just the same they mean it. It’s a new form of the age-old soldier pastime of grousing. It helps take your mind off things.

Ernie Pyle

Tank Battle at Sidi-Bou-Zid

by Ernie Pyle



THE TUNISIAN FRONT, March 1, 1943 – This . . . will be an attempt to describe what [the beginning of] a tank battle looks like.

Words will be poor instruments for it. Neither can isolated camera shots tell you the story. Probably only Hollywood with its machinery of many dimensions is capable of transferring to your senses a clear impression of a tank battle.

The fight in question was the American counterattack on the second day of the battle at Sidi-Bou-Zid which eventually resulted in our withdrawal.

It was the biggest tank battle fought so far in this part of the world. On that morning I had a talk with the commanding general some ten miles behind the front lines before starting for the battle scene.

He took me into his tent and showed me just what the battle plan was for the day. He picked out a point close to the expected battle area and said that would be a good place for me to watch from.

The only danger, he said, would be one of being encircled and cut off if the battle should go against us.

"But it won’t," he said, "for we are going to kick hell out of them today and we’ve got the stuff to do it with."

















Unfortunately, we didn’t kick hell out of them. In fact, the boot was on the other foot.

I spent the forenoon in the newly picked, badly shattered forward command post. All morning I tried to get on up where the tanks were but there was no transportation left around the post and their communications were cut off at noontime.

We sat on the ground and ate some British crackers with jam and drank some hot tea. The day was bright and mellow. Shortly after lunch a young lieutenant dug up a spare jeep and said he’s take me on up to the front.

We drove a couple of miles east along a highway to a crossroads which was the very heart center of our troops’ bivouacs. German airmen had been after this crossroads all morning. They had hit it again just a few minutes before we got there. In the road was a large crater and a few yards away a tank was off to one side, burning.

The roads at that point were high and we could see a long way. In every direction was a huge semi-irrigated desert valley. It looked very much like the valley at Phoenix, Arizona – no trees but patches of wild growth, shoulder-high cactus of the prickly-pear variety. In other parts of the valley were spotted cultivated fields and the tiny square stucco houses of Arab farmers. The whole vast scene was treeless, with slightly rolling big mountains in the distance.
















Unfortunately, we didn’t kick hell out of them. In fact, the boot was on the other foot.

I spent the forenoon in the newly picked, badly shattered forward command post. All morning I tried to get on up where the tanks were but there was no transportation left around the post and their communications were cut off at noontime.

We sat on the ground and ate some British crackers with jam and drank some hot tea. The day was bright and mellow. Shortly after lunch a young lieutenant dug up a spare jeep and said he’s take me on up to the front.

We drove a couple of miles east along a highway to a crossroads which was the very heart center of our troops’ bivouacs. German airmen had been after this crossroads all morning. They had hit it again just a few minutes before we got there. In the road was a large crater and a few yards away a tank was off to one side, burning.

The roads at that point were high and we could see a long way. In every direction was a huge semi-irrigated desert valley. It looked very much like the valley at Phoenix, Arizona – no trees but patches of wild growth, shoulder-high cactus of the prickly-pear variety. In other parts of the valley were spotted cultivated fields and the tiny square stucco houses of Arab farmers. The whole vast scene was treeless, with slightly rolling big mountains in the distance.


















Suddenly out of this siesta-like doze the order came. We didn’t hear it for it came to the tanks over their radios but we knew it quickly for all over the desert tanks began roaring and pouring out blue smoke from the cylinders. Then they started off, kicking up dust and clanking in that peculiar "tank sound" we have all come to know so well.

They poured around us, charging forward. They weren’t close together – probably a couple of hundred yards apart. There weren’t lines or any specific formation. They were just everywhere. They covered the desert to the right and left, ahead and behind as far as we could see, trailing their eager dust tails behind. It was almost as though some official starter had fired his blank pistol. The battle was on.


Ernie Pyle

A FORWARD AIRDROME IN FRENCH NORTH AFRICA, February 10, 1943 – Lt. Jack Ilfrey is the leading American ace in North Africa at the moment. However, that’s not my reason for writing about him.
In the first place, the theory over here is not to become an individual fighter and shoot down a lot of planes, so being an ace doesn’t mean so much. In the second place, somebody else might be ahead of Ilfrey by this evening, with fate pulling the strings the way she does.

So I’m writing about him largely because he is a fine person and more or less typical of all boys who fly our deadly fighters.
























Jack Ilfrey is from Houston. His father is cashier of the First National Bank.

Jack is only twenty-two. He has two younger sisters. He went to Texas A & M for two years, and then to the University of Houston, working at the same time for the Hughes Tool Company. He will soon have been in the Army two years.

It is hard to conceive of his ever having killed anybody. For he looks even younger than his twenty-two years. His face is good-humored. His darkish hair is childishly uncontrollable and pops up into a little curlicue at the front of his head. He talks fast, but his voice is soft and he has a very slight hesitation in his speech that somehow seems to make him a gentle and harmless person.

There is not the least trace of the smart aleck or wise guy about him. He is wholly thoughtful and sincere. Yet he mows ‘em down.
























Here in Africa Ilfrey has been through the mill. He got two Focke-Wulf 190’s one day, two Messerschmitt 109’s another day. His fifth victory was over a twin-motored Messerschmitt 110, which carries three men. And he has another kill that has not yet been confirmed.

He hasn’t had all smooth sailing by any means. In fact he’s very lucky to be here at all. He got caught in a trap one day and came home with two hundred sixty-eight bullet holes in his plane.

His armor plate stopped at least a dozen that would have killed him.Jack’s closest shave, however, wasn’t from being shot at. It happened one day when he saw a German fighter duck into a cloud. Jack figured the German would emerge at the far end of the cloud, so he scooted along below to where he thought the German would pop out, and pop out he did – right smack into him, almost.

They both kicked rudder violently, and they missed practically by inches. Neither man fired a shot, they were so busy getting out of each other’s way. Jack says he was weak for an hour afterward.




































There is nothing "heroic" about Lt. Ilfrey. He isn’t afraid to run when that is the only thing to do.

He was telling about getting caught all alone one day at a low altitude. Two Germans got on his tail."I just had two chances," he says. "Either stay and fight, and almost surely get shot down, or pour on everything I had and try to get away. I ran a chance of burning up my engines and having to land in enemy territory, but I got away. Luckily the engines stood up."

Ilfrey, like all the others here, has little in the way of entertainment and personal pleasure. I walked into his room late one afternoon, after he had come back from a mission, and found him sitting there at a table, all alone, killing flies with a folded newspaper.

And yet they say being an ace is romantic.

Ernie Pyle

War Is Hell - World War 2


















World War II started in on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland without warning, after signing many peace agreements with his future enemies. By the evening of September 3rd, Britain and France were at war with Germany and within a week, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa had also joined the war. The world had been plunged into its second world war in 25 years.




















The United States stayed out of the war until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. The would be six long and bloody years of total war, fought over many thousand of square kilometres.

From the Hedgerows of Normandy to the streets of Stalingrad and Paris, to the icy mountains of Norway; to the sweltering deserts of Libya, to the insect infested jungles of Burmal to the coral reefed islands of  the Pacific Ocean and across the waterways of the world.




















United States was involved in the war from December 7, 1941 until September 2, 1945. It lasted 1,365 Days.

Some of the worst battles occurred during this war. Fighting and/or espionage took place on almost every continent and ocean on earth. It Was the largest and most deadly war waged in human history. It is estimated that over 60 million people, 3% of the world’s population at the time, died during this war. Most of Europe and large parts of Asia lay in ruins.




















 Approximate 16 million Americans served in the armed forces during WWII. We had over 1 million total casualties - 416,800 Dead or Missing In Action; 700,000+ Wounded; An average of 305 a day for 1,365 Days.

Foxholes Grow Ever Deeper
As Nazi Bombing Raids Go On

by Ernie Pyle



















 Ernie Pyle AFRICA, JANUARY, 1943: While bad weather stymies the ground fighting in Tunisia, the air war on both sides has been daily increasing in intensity until it has reached a really violent tempo.

Not a day passes without heavy bombing of Axis ports, vicious strafing of cities and airdromes, losses on both sides and constant watchful patrolling.

Here, at one of our airdromes, all of us can assure you that being bombed is no fun. Yet these tired, hard-worked Americans jokingly decided to send a telegram to Allied headquarters asking them to arrange for the Jerrys to stop there each evening and pick up our mail.

I am living at this airdrome for a while. It can't be named, although the Germans obviously know where it is, since they call on us frequently. Furthermore, they announced quite a while ago by radio that they would destroy the place within three days.
















I hadn't been here three hours till the Germans came. They arrived just at dusk. And they came arrogantly, flying low. Some of them must have regretted their audacity, for they never got home. The fireworks that met them were beautiful from the ground, but must have been hideous up where they were.

They dropped bombs on several parts of the field, but their aim was marred at the last minute. There were no direct hits on anything. Not a man was stratched, though the stories of near misses multiplied into the hundreds by the next day.

One soldier who had found a bottle of wine was lying in a pup tent drinking. He never got up during the raid just lay there cussing at the Germans:

"You can't touch me, you blankety-blanks! Go to hell, you so-and-so's!"

When the raid was over he was untouched, but the tent a foot above him was riddled with shrapnel.


















Another Soldier made a practice of keeping a canteen hanging just above his head. That night when he went to take a drink the canteen was empty. Investigation revealed a shrapnel hole, through which the water hnd run out.

Another soldier had the front sight of his rifle shot off by a German machine-gun bullet.

Some of the soldiers were actually picking tiny bits of shrapnel out of their coats all the next day. Yet, as I said, not a drop of American blood was shed.

When this airdrome was first set up the soldiers dug slit trenches just deep enough to lie down in during a raid, but after each new bombing the trenches get deeper.

Everybody makes fun of himself but keeps on digging. Today some of these trenches are more than eight feet deep. I'll bet there has been more whole-hearted digging here in two weeks than WPA did in two years.
























The officers don't have to hound their men. They dig with a will of their own, and with a vengeance. If we stay here long enough we'll probably have to install elevators to get to the bottom of the trenches.

After supper you see officers as well as men out digging. Each little group has its own trench design. Some are just square holes. Some form an L. Some are regulation zigzag.

The ground here is dry, and the trenches don't fill up with water as they do in the coastal and mountain camps. The earth is as hard as concrete. You have to use an ax as well as a pick and shovel.

You'd love OUR air-raid alarm system. It consists of a dinner bell hanging from a date palm tree outside headquarters. When the radio watchers give the order the dinner bell is rung. Then the warning is carried to the far ends of the vast airdrome by sentries shooting revolvers and rifles into the air. At night it sounds like a small battle.














When the alarm goes the soldiers get excited and mad, too. When the Germans come over the anti-aircraft guns throw up a fantastic Fourth of July torrent of red tracer bullets. But to the soldiers on the ground that isn't enough, so they let loose with everything from Colt .45s up to Tommy guns.

If the Germans don't kill us we'll probably shoot ourselves.

Ernie Pyle

A DREADFUL MASTERPIECE

by Ernie Pyle

LONDON, December 30, 1940 – Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.

And standing there, I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.

For on that night this old, old city – even though I must bite my tongue in shame for saying it – was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.

It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.



















They came just after dark, and somehow I could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.

Shortly after the sirens wailed I could hear the Germans grinding overhead. In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart. They were not too far away.

Half an hour after the firing started I gathered a couple of friends and went to a high, darkened balcony that gave us a view of one-third of the entire circle of London.

As we stepped out onto the balcony a vast inner excitement came over all of us – an excitement that had neither fear nor horror in it, because it was too full of awe.

You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires – scores of them, perhaps hundreds.


















The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen’s valor only to break out again later.

About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.

The bombs did not make a constant overwhelming din as in those terrible days of last September. They were intermittent – sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes a minute or more.

Their sound was sharp, when nearby, and soft and muffled, far away.

Into the dark, shadowed spaces below us, as we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell.

We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pinpoints of dazzling white, burning ferociously.
























These white pinpoints would go out one by one as the unseen heroes of the moment smothered them with sand. But also, as we watched, other pinpoints would burn on and pretty soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work – another building was on fire.

The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape – so faintly at first that we weren’t sure we saw correctly – the gigantic dome and spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

St. Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions – growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.

The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow.

Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light – anti-aircraft shells bursting. After the flash you could hear the sound.

Up there, too, the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star – the old-fashioned kind that has always been there.

Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows – the dark shadows of  buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

Later on I borrowed a tin hat and went out among the fires. That was exciting too, but 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 on a holiday night – 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. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all.

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

Ernie Pyle

QUOTATIONS BY ERNIE PYLE


"About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury." - Ernie Pyle

"All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over." - Ernie Pyle

"At last we are in it up to our necks, and everything is changed, even your outlook on life." - Ernie Pyle

"Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece." - Ernie Pyle

"But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me." - Ernie Pyle

"I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them." - Ernie Pyle

"I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great." - Ernie Pyle

"I've really been sick with this cold, but I think I might have kept the columns going anyhow except I was just so low in spirit, I didn't have the will to struggle against them when my deadline was so close and I felt so lousy." - Ernie Pyle

"If I can just see the European war out I think I might feel justified in quitting the war." - Ernie Pyle

"If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone." - Ernie Pyle

"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." - Ernie Pyle

"It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire." - Ernie Pyle

"Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with." - Ernie Pyle

"Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges." - Ernie Pyle

"Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now." - Ernie Pyle

"The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery." - Ernie Pyle

"The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later." - Ernie Pyle

"The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not." - Ernie Pyle

"The men are walking. They are fifty 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." - Ernie Pyle

"War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth." - Ernie Pyle

"Nobody has ever refused to talk with me. Only one man has ever refused to let me write about him, and even he was friendly and we talked for an hour."- Ernie Pyle

“In the joyousness of high spirits, it is easy for us to forget the dead.” – Ernie Pyle

"Good Lord, I don't think we could continue the war without the jeep. It does everything. It goes everywhere. It's as faithful as a dog, strong as a mule, and agile as a goat. It constantly carries twice what it was designed for, and keeps on going." - Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle: 60 Years After His Death

by Owen V. Johnson

This article appeared in the Bloomington (Indiana.) Herald-Times

Published: April 15, 2005

Ernie Pyle, perhaps America's most famous war correspondent, died 60 years ago on the tiny island of Ie Shima, off the coast of Okinawa in the Pacific. He was three and a half weeks short of his 45th birthday.

Pyle's death came just six days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away. In both cases, many Americans felt they had lost an old friend. Newspapers across the country editorialized about the man who gave readers a sense of what being on the front lines was like.

No journalist since then has been able to establish himself as the equal of Pyle, though many have dreamed of matching the accomplishments of this 5-7, 110 pound native of Dana, Ind. Part of the reason was Pyle's talent. Part of the reason is that journalism has changed since Pyle's day. And part of the reason is the myth that has grown up around Pyle.

In letters to friends, Pyle used to complain about the stories that people invented about him.

It's true that Pyle attended Indiana University and left one semester short of graduation. He didn't major in journalism because it was an easy major, as some writers of the past suggested. Although IU had a Department of Journalism, it didn't offer a major until the 1930s.

It's doubtful that Pyle left the university because of a broken heart. It's true that his beloved Harriett had given him back his pin so that she could date a doctor 10 years her senior, whom she would eventually marry. (She died about 10 years ago in Bedford, Ind.)

More likely, Pyle found the university too provincial. After a taste of travel to the Far East during his junior year, he was ready to move on. The immediate cause of his departure may, in fact, have been a run-in with a faculty member in the Department of Journalism, most likely the chair.

When the chair learned that a newspaper in LaPorte, Ind., was looking for a reporter, he nominated Pyle. That newspaper staff was a remarkable one for its day. Five reporters there had college degrees or like Pyle, had almost finished.

Within a short time, Pyle was on his way to join the staff of the Washington Daily News, a new tabloid founded by Scripps-Howard head Roy W. Howard, whose journalistic roots also had been planted in Indiana.

The paper boasted a brilliant, young staff that included Nelson Poynter, an IU graduate who made a name for himself at the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times; and Lee Miller, Pyle's immediate boss for much of his life, another brilliant Hoosier, who had graduated from Harvard at the age of 19.

They worked hard and they played hard. Pyle reveled in the environment. Just two years out of college, he was writing about life in the nation's capital. He glowed as he wrote to a friend how he had covered a press conference given by President Calvin Coolidge, noting that a Washington Post photograph showed him at the edge of Coolidge's desk.

On a couple of occasions, Pyle was an editor, not a reporter. He was the first editor of a special edition of IU's student newspaper, the Daily Student, produced for more than 30 years at the Indiana State Fair. Twice during World War II, he helped Naval personnel edit newspapers on board ships.

As a civilian, he worked three years as managing editor at the Daily News. Copies of memos he wrote to the staff show someone who expected tough, persistent reporting and good writing. But he also recognized that how a paper played a story was important. It had to have stories to "smash" on page one.

To some degree, however, Pyle was a writer stuck in a journalist's skin. He was learning how to tell stories. He could write a story on deadline, but he preferred the chance to craft his work.

More importantly, Pyle saw stories. Rarely as a reporter did he take notes, except to record information such as names and dates. He stored the stories, sometimes more than a dozen, in his mind until he had a chance to hole up somewhere and write them.

Even then he struggled to get the words down on paper. He wrote and edited and rewrote, sometimes six or seven times, trying to get just the right rhythm and just the right words.

As Pyle would have been the first to admit, sometimes the columns weren't very good. But for much of his journalistic life he had to turn out six columns a week, with 700 words in each column.


Pyle honed his abilities to tell stories while writing about aviation, a field of heroes and heroines in the late 1920s that naturally created stories. He knew everybody. Or, as Amelia Earhart put it, any aviator who didn't know Pyle was a nobody.

Pyle didn't embellish. He didn't have to because of his ability to see stories. Only on a few occasions did someone complain about the accuracy of a Pyle story. On those occasions Pyle could reach back in his mind and look back at the "recordings" in his brain and recall practically word for word, picture for picture, what had happened.

In 1925, still fairly new in Washington, Pyle married Jerry Siebolds, a government worker from Minnesota. We know little about their courtship and the early years of their marriage. We do know that Pyle quickly recognized that there was something wrong with Jerry.

Doctors today would recognize signs of manic depression. Perhaps it was the creative manic times that originally attracted Pyle to Jerry. She apparently loved to play with words, just as he did. She apparently was his muse. She wrote some of the columns that were attributed to him.

They were married quietly with no honeymoon. After the ceremony they went back to work.

Until his death, Pyle struggled with his wife's illness. He started traveling across the country in 1935 with her by his side, writing columns and perhaps hoping that they might find a solution to the demons that were consuming her.

But they often drove in silence. In hotels they usually had separate rooms. Her alcohol and drug abuse increased. In the days before Viagra and Cialis, Pyle suffered erection inadequacies.

By the late 1930s, they both knew that their marriage was in crisis, but neither knew what to do. There's even some evidence that in the summer of 1940, he was ready to give up. Friends who were worried about him set him up with a Brown County (Ind.) Theatre actress for some frolicking that did not lead to sex.

(One night during that same Brown County visit, he had dinner with Herman B Wells, the young president of Indiana University, and an old IU classmate. That same week, in one of the most revealing interviews he ever gave, he recalled for a Bloomington reporter how when he was a student, he had worked at the railroad roundhouse, where he had once crossed a picket line, something he later regretted.)

In 1942, Ernie and Jerry, after much discussion, decided to divorce. Pyle would say he hoped this would shake Jerry to her senses. But by that time, she was too far gone.

A year later, while Pyle was in central Africa, he heard the news that he and Jerry had been remarried. He had left a proxy with a good friend that could be exercised if Jerry felt she was on the road to recovery.

A trip to London at the end of 1940 to report on the Nazi bombing there catapulted Pyle to fame. It was launched by a brilliant word-picture of the biggest attack of the war.

"It was a night when London was ringed with fire," Pyle wrote.

It showed his bosses at Scripps-Howard that Pyle was more than just a provincial writer. For the first time, Americans could picture the war's impact in Europe. When Pyle returned to Great Britain in the summer of 1942, they knew who he was and what to expect from him.

Remarkably, Pyle almost missed the big attack in London. He had been stalled for several weeks in Lisbon, Portugal, trying to catch a flight to London. If he had arrived a couple of weeks later, he would have missed the last, big air attack that the Germans launched on London.

Despite Pyle's reputation as the quiet, mild-mannered buddy of the GIs in the foxhole, he was well-connected. In 1941 when he was trying to arrange passage back from London, he didn't hesitate to get his bosses to contact directly the president of Pan American Airlines for priority on one of their new Clippers. Or if that didn't work, he could ask his Indiana friend, Lowell Mellett, to intervene at the White House, where Mellett was an adviser to the President.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the president's wife, in her own column, had complimented Pyle on his work. Pyle wrote her several letters, thanking her for her support.

That was another secret to Pyle's success. He thanked those who praised his work. A Pyle letter for sale on e-Bay earlier this spring thanked a reviewer for what he had written about Pyle's book, "This is Your War."

Pyle's reporting from North Africa in late 1942 and early 1943 cemented his reputation as a war reporter.

The secret of that success explains why no one has been able to take his place in the pantheon of war correspondents.

Ernie Pyle didn't have to file daily stories on the fighting and the strategic situation. Instead, he did as he had done before. He looked for stories and stored them up in his mind, then went back away from the front lines and wrote them up. What Americans read in the paper usually appeared several weeks after Pyle wrote it.

While Pyle and his Scripps-Howard bosses often had cable contact with each other, most of the time he operated somewhat autonomously. He didn't have editors who choreographed his every move. He roamed about following tellable stories.

They weren't all about the men in the foxholes, either. He treasured having Gens. Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower as his friends. At the very least, such friendships could open doors when they needed to be opened.

Several of Pyle's most famous columns were not the result of his planning, but of the chance of timing or of someone else's decision.

"The Death of Captain Waskow," Pyle's most famous column, appeared when the Allied forces were bogged down at the Anzio beachhead in Italy. In the column, which described how Waskow's men paid homage to him after the captain's body, one of many brought down from the mountainside, was laid alongside a stone wall.

The column captured the tragedy of war, but also showed how the comradeship it built would win the war.

Pyle didn't want to be on the beach at Normandy, one day after D-Day. He hated invasions because he knew the chance of death was high. But Gen. Bradley asked him to go. Without that request, we wouldn't have the picture of the beach one day after the fighting that was captured in "Saving Private Ryan."

The columns that he wrote from the beach are many-layered. Those looking for inspiration will find it there. Those who abhor war will also find inspiration.

In 1944 Pyle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, one of a bundle of prizes that he won during the war. Pyle wasn't present in New York for the presentation of the award, which took place, remarkably on D-Day.

Pyle's ability to tell stories explains in large part why he was so successful. Even censors were probably taken in by the stories. They found it difficult to remove even one stone from the stories that Pyle had constructed.

Readers at home or the soldiers and sailors who read his stories overseas remembered not the facts, but the stories. They could share the stories with others. The facts of other reporters were quickly forgotten as the front moved on. Pyle's stories survived.

The Allied drive across France to Paris took a severe toll on Pyle. Not only did he witness an attack of friendly fire, but he saw more dead people than he ever had before. Over time this unnerved him, just as it did on so many soldiers during the war.

He came home where he was overwhelmed and scared by the adulation that he received.

He wanted to spend time alone with Jerry to try to rekindle their relationship. But he was interrupted by tourists, a movie, and the business of being famous. Tourists came by his house in Albuquerque, N.M., wanting just a few minutes of his time. But lots of tourists meant lots of time.

Pyle had to rent a hotel room in town to do his writing.

During Ernie's stay, Jerry tried to commit suicide.

Early in 1945, Pyle headed to the Pacific. He didn't want to go, but at least publicly he said he owed it to the men and women there.

Why he chose to go to the Pacific isn't exactly clear. When Roy W. Howard suggested the idea in fall 1943, while Pyle was on a home visit, Pyle opposed it.

Perhaps the bloody fighting he witnessed in Europe in 1944 convinced him he didn't want to go back there. And he knew he would be viewed as unpatriotic if he quit writing about the war.

Pyle never hit his stride in the Pacific. None of his columns there is among his famous ones. When he was on board ship the war seemed distant and impersonal. It only became real when he went ashore.

Too much has been made of Pyle's premonition of death. His letters indicate that like most other troops, he feared invasions and landings. Once those were over, he was fine.

He was scared about the landing on Okinawa, but he landed on a portion of the beach where practically no Japanese resistance was encountered.

A few days later, he came ashore on the small adjacent island of Ie Shima. It had been captured by the Allied Forces, but it hadn't been cleared.

On April 18, 1945, a Japanese machine gun fired on the jeep in which Pyle was riding. Pyle and the others hit the dirt by the side of the road. When Pyle raised his head to check on the others, he was hit in the head and died instantly.

In his pocket was the draft of a column Pyle was preparing to mark the end of the European war. It was so depressing that it wasn't published at the time.

Pyle died at the height of his fame, during the combat that had made him so famous.

Pyle, in death, was buried first on Ie Shima (an island that one member of congress proposed should be renamed Ernie Pyle Island), and then in 1949 at Punchbowl Cemetery in Honolulu.

In death, Pyle has remained on a pedestal. For those who lived during the war, his writing recaptures the quiet heroism of American troops. Like other journalists of the time, he supported the cause. He saw his role as one of helping the troops gain victory. He did not picture himself as a watchdog of democracy. Pyle's letters, in fact, are remarkable by the almost complete absence of politics.

Pyle never had to take sides on the war in Korea, the removal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, or the threats of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. He was spared the division of Vietnam.

That the war had made Pyle rich bothered him. He was not comfortable with making money from his books and the movie about his life. He did think that in peacetime it would provide him with a financial cushion in a time in which he foresaw economic hardship.

It's hard to imagine what Pyle would have done if he had survived the war. His fame meant that he would no longer be able to return to his quiet travels as an unknown across North America.

Pyle's stories remain eminently readable today. His powers of observation and description are still difficult to match.

The generation he wrote about is rapidly passing from the scene. But Ernie Pyle will always be able to tell us that generation's stories.

Ernie Pyle was the most widely read, most popular, even beloved, journalist of the Second World War. His popularity arose partly from the abundance of knowledge he provided to those at home about what their loved ones overseas were going through. But in large part, his popularity was due to his compassion and fondness for the common soldier. His colums were like letters that might be from their "loved ones" overseas.

He would spend days or weeks at a time with a unit, eating soldier's food, sleeping in foxholes and talking to the men when they weren't busy dodging enemy fire. When he wrote a piece about a soldier, he typically gave the man's name, address, hometown and pre-war occupation. At times, he even described the soldier's family back home. His detailed descriptions, along with his concern for the men that he wrote about, and his willingness to expose himself to their REAL discomforts and dangers, very quickly made Ernie Pyle a legendary figure.

At the present time we are engaged in two wars at the same time. Most Americans are not engaged in the military effort. We talk about sacrifice, but, when we read Ernie Pyle's columns, we begin know  the true meaning of sacrifice that was made then. Our men and women in uniform are still making it today!

What the millions of readers did not know, was that Ernie Pyle's personal life was a sad mess. His wife was mentally unstable and drank heavily. She was sometimes suicidal, and, in the years before the war, she was frequently hospitalized. Ernie Pyle, himself, suffered frequent bouts of depression. In 1942, he divorced his wife Jerry, he continued to write her and to visit her when he was back in the United States.

Ernest Taylor Pyle was a U.S. newspaperman, journalist, author and Pulitzer Prize winner. He was one of the most famous war correspondents of World War II, and is best remembered for his vivid descriptions of the human spirit in the face of the brutality and pathos of war. Pyle referred to himself as a 'simple Hoosier, a farm boy from Dana, Indiana.' As a syndicated columnist, he wrote what he thought friends at home would enjoy. As it turned out, it was what millions nationwide wanted to read.

Ernie was born to Will and Maria (Taylor) Pyle near Dana, Indiana on August 3, 1900. Pyle spent his childhood 'mud-crawling in cricks' throughout Helt Township in Vermillion County, Indiana, riding his sorrel horse Cricket and hunting with constant canine companion Shep. From the time his Aunt Mary took him to see a circus in Terre Haute in 1908, the red-head yearned to see the entire world and its marvels.

In 1919, he studied journalism in college at Indiana University. While at the university, he joined the Naval Reserve and was an active participant. During his tenure with the Naval Reserve, he served on the U.S.S. Wilmette, formerly the Eastland. By 1922, the summer before his senior year, he became the editor-in-chief for the Indiana Daily Student. When he left college months before graduating to become a reporter for the LaPorte (Indiana) Herald, he could not have imagined that the building housing IU’s journalism school would one day be named 'Ernie Pyle Hall.'

After accepting a position as telegraph editor for the Washington Daily News of the Scripps-Howard chain, Pyle met Geraldine 'Jerry' Siebolds, a Minnesota native. They were married in 1925. Life in the nation’s capitol was exciting after Pyle created a popular column on aviation, but when he was promoted to managing editor in 1932, his creative typewriter was mute. He sought leave to become a roving reporter in 1935. The syndicated column which resulted permitted him to see the world and write about people from all walks of life. He traveled the countryside in a Rambler and crafted his column around the lives of ordinary folks coping with the Depression. His column eventually appeared in as many as 200 newspapers. The Pyle's purchased a small house in Albuquerque, New Mexico that Ernie called home. His travel schedule imposed undue stress upon his marriage. Ernie and Jerry eventually divorced, but they still remained committed to each other.

Ernie Pyle always wrote about the people who matter, not the people who think they matter.
Excerpt From Home Country (pp. 136-137)

Ernie Pyle Writing at a Field Desk "The ship stopped at Mackinac Island for two hours. This was my second visit there. The first one was in June of 1921, during the time I was a member of the Naval Reserve. That summer, having nothing else to do, I dug my sailor pants out of the attic and went to Chicago for a three weeks' Naval Reserve training cruise."

"We sailed on the USS Wilmette, formerly known as the Eastland. It was the ship that turned over in the Chicago River in 1915 and drowned eight hundred twelve people. When it was raised, the Navy bought it and painted it gray and filled it full of innocent farm boys who wanted to be sailors. It was still in a sinking condition, I assure you. It constantly shied to the right, and once in a while felt as though it wanted to lie down in the water."

"But anyhow, it did carry us to Mackinac Island where we tied up for a full day. By this time I had rapidly risen in the ranks from mere seaman to the exalted position of second-class cook. "

"That entitled me to stay on board all the time we were at Mackinac, frying pork chops. I had to start at two in the afternoon to get all the pork chops fried for the evening chow. I would fry two huge skillets full at a time, and when they were done I would dump them in a washtub. I had two tubs full by evening. It was hotter than a Kansas prarie fire on board the Wilmette that afternoon, and the galley was twice as hot as that. I was working without a shirt, and a dirty apron was tied around my waist. Grease kept popping on my arms and face. I looked like a pork chop."

"The Navy loves a show, so it had thrown the ship open to visitors that afternoon and hundreds of vacationists at Mackinac came aboard. All afternoon they filed around the decks. The galley happened to be on the main deck, and visitors could stop and look right in the galley door at the funny man frying pork chops. A lot of them did. It gave them, I am sure, a great deal of  entertainment. But I didn't care. They would look and pass on, right out of the cook's life."

"But gradually I became aware that somebody had been standing in the door a long time without moving on with the rest of the crowd. I turned around and looked. And who do you suppose it was? Admiral Farragut? No. Mrs. Roosevelt? No. The governor of Michigan? No.It was a girl friend of mine from college, and she was standing there laughing at me."

"That's all there is to the story. I'm sorry I started it. It would have been a much better story if I had been in love with her, but I wasn't. I think we just talked for a while, and then she got off the ship, and I saw her in school that fall and we probably never spoke of it again."

Readers loved Ernie Pyle’s informal and comfortable writing style.  Reporting from the front lines during World War II, he wrote not of battle statistics but about the daily lives of common soldiers in the trenches.


Reporting the War

“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.” — Ernie Pyle,  “The God-Damned Infantry,” 1943

During their travels, Ernie Pyle compiled notes about interesting individuals and wrote columns while Jerry typed them on a portable typewriter.  After 1937 Ernie hit the road alone, leaving Jerry in Albuquerque to keep the home fires burning.  By 1942 she worried about his safety while he drafted and typed columns from abroad, covering operations in England and North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France.

Pyle’s columns covered almost every branch of the service, but he most highly praised the common foot soldier.  He even publicly supported a bill to provide extra “fight pay” for soldiers performing combat service.

Ernie Pyle interviewed Sergeant Don Bell, a rodeo rider, in June or July 1944 outside of St. Lo, France.  Bell recalled that the foxhole they shared caved in during German shelling.  Pyle said, “I have my notes, but my little portable typewriter is buried in that hole.”  They hurriedly abandoned the foxhole, leaving the typewriter behind.  

Sgt. Bell later salvaged it, kept it through the war, and donated it to the Museum in 1990.  A photograph of Pyle in Normandy, typing on an Underwood, may have been taken after this event.

Don Bell recalled the interview as comforting.  He wrote, “…Ernie had taken my ma’s wisdom and turned it into a soldier’s lesson: to find strength in battle you take hold of strength you’ve known at home…and of the faith that underlies it.”


Thank You

“I Am Pleased, You Bet.” — Ernie Pyle, Ph.D., 1944

During his lifetime, Ernie Pyle received numerous honors and awards.  Honored early in his career as well as posthumously, while serving abroad and while at home, Pyle shyly avoided the public whenever possible.  Upon receiving an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of New Mexico, he could only squeak out a nervous, “Thank you.”  Later, grinning, he admitted, “I am pleased; you bet!”  A month later, he endured a repeat performance while being awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from Indiana University, the first such degree ever bestowed.

The Pulitzer Foundation was aware of Pyle’s abilities as early as 1933, when he won honorary mention for his column on a coal miners’ strike in Gallup.  Eleven years later, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for his World War II columns of 1943, which were published as Here is Your War (1943) and Brave Men (1944).  Next to serving with his buddies in the trenches, winning the Pulitzer was perhaps the reporter’s highest honor.

Among numerous other honors and opportunities, he collaborated with producer Lester Cowan and director William Wellman on The Story of G.I. Joe, with actor Burgess Meredith starring as Ernie Pyle.  Though he didn’t like the title, Pyle felt the film might be a hit.  A huge success, The Story of G.I. Joe premiered in Albuquerque in July 1945 just two months after his death.

In his folksy, blue collar writing style, Pyle tells of the day the large estate he and the other war correspondents were living in was shelled by the Germans early one morning. Had he not moved away from the window where he stood a few seconds before one of the shells landed he would have been killed. Instead, he writes of "being tossed around like a rag doll", but escaping with nothing but a small laceration on his face.

Foreshadowing the transition faced by veterans of this and future wars, Ernie Pyle writes that the soldiers returning stateside will face a period of adjustment, adjusting to life with loved ones who never fully grasp the heroic and horrific things a soldier endures on the battlefield.
The final thought Pyle expresses on page 466 of Brave Men, reads as follows: “Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be master of peace. All we can do is fumble and try once more – try out of the memory of our anguish – and be as tolerant with each other as we can.”


One Regret

 “My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.” – Ernie Pyle, “On Victory in Europe,” 1945

He writes of the European war: “The end of the war will be gigantic relief, but it cannot be a matter of hilarity for most of us. Somehow it would seem sacrilegious to sing and dance when the great day comes – they are so many who can never sing and dance again.”

After returning home from the liberation of Paris, Ernie Pyle accepted what was to be his last assignment – covering the war in the Pacific with the Navy and Marines. He turns his thoughts to the ongoing war with Japan that is still being staged in the Pacific theater, writing that it “may yet be long and bloody” as he notes that his homeland – the United States – that may soon find itself “half at war and half at peace.”

He may have had a idea that his luck would run out a year or so later - When Ernie Pyle left for the Pacific Theater in 1945, he told friends and colleagues that he felt sure he  would die there.

In April 1945, the one-time Indiana farm boy, Ernie Pyle arrived in the Pacific after four years of covering combat in North Africa, Italy and France. On April 16, the Army's 77th Infantry Division landed on Ie Shima, a small island off Okinawa, to capture an airfield.

 

Recording The Scene

Ernie Pyle's body lay alone for a long time in the ditch at the side of the road. Men waited at a safe distance, looking for a chance to pull the body away. But the machine gunner, still hidden in the coral ridge, sprayed the area whenever anyone moved. The sun climbed high over the little Pacific island.

Finally, after four hours, a combat photographer Alexander Roberts crawled out along the road, and despite continuing enemy fire, crept forward – a "laborious, dirt-eating crawl," he later called it – to record the scene pushing his heaving Speed Graphic camera ahead of him. Reaching the body, he held up the camera and snapped the shutter.

His risky act earned Mr. Roberts a Bronze Star medal for valor.

Mr. Roberts and two other photographers had been at a command post 300 yards away when Col. Joseph Coolidge, who had been with Ernie Pyle in the jeep, reported what happened.

The lens captured a face at rest. The only sign of violence was a thin stream of blood running down the left cheek. Otherwise he might have been sleeping. His appearance was what people in the 1930s and '40s called "common." He had often been described as the quintessential "little guy," but he was not unusually short. In fact, at five feet eight inches, his frame precisely matched the average height of the millions of American soldiers serving in the U.S. Army. It was his build that provoked constant references to his size -- a build that once was compared accurately to the shape of a sword. His silver identification bracelet, inscribed "Ernie Pyle, War Correspondent," could have fit the wrist of a child. His face was very thin, with skin "the color and texture of sand." Under his combat helmet, a wrinkled forehead sloped into a long, bald skull fringed by sandy-red hair gone gray. His nose dipped low.His teeth went off at odd angles.

"It's a striking and painful image, but Ernie Pyle wanted people to see and understand the sacrifices that soldiers had to make, so it's fitting, in a way, that this photo of his own death ... drives home the reality and the finality of that sacrifice," said James E. Tobin, a professor at Miami University of Ohio.

A moment later the regimental chaplain and four non-commissioned officers crawled up with a cloth litter. They pulled the body out of the machine gunner's line of fire and lifted it into an open truck, then drove the quarter-mile back to the command post on the beach. An Associated Press man was there. He had already sent the first bulletin.

In Mourning

Ernie Pyle didn’t measure his self-worth by how much he was paid, nor by the number of  opportunities for publicity.  He did, however, care about his readership.  By the time of his death, Ernie’s columns appeared in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers. 

"Command Post, Ie Shima, April 18 (AP) – Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his  co-workers, GIs and Generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning ..."

The bulletin went via radio to a ship nearby, then to the United States and on to Europe. Radio picked it up. Reporters rushed to gather comments. In Germany, General Omar Bradley heard the news and could not speak.  In Italy General Mark Clark said, "He helped our soldiers to victory."

Bill Mauldin, the young soldier-cartoonist whose war-worn G.I.'s matched the pictures Pyle had drawn with words, said, "The only difference between Ernie's death and that of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by the Army."
At the White House, still in mourning only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, President Harry Truman said, "The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle."

One of Pyle's editors at the Scripps-Howard newspapers, George Parker, spoke on the radio. "He went into war as a newspaper correspondent among many correspondents," Parker said. "He came back a figure as great as the greatest -- as Eisenhower or MacArthur or Nimitz." Parker spoke of "that strange and almost inexplainably intimate way" in which Pyle's readers had known him.

People called newspaper offices all day to be sure Ernie Pyle was really dead. He had seemed so alive to them. Americans in great numbers had shared his life all through the war -- his energy and exhaustion; his giddy enjoyments and attacks of nerves; his exhilarations and fears. Through Pyle's eyes they had watched their "boys" go to distant wars and become soldiers -- green and eager at the start, haggard and worn at the end. Through his eyes they had glimpsed great vistas of battle at sea and they had stared into the faces of men in a French field who thought they were about to die. So no one thought it strange for President Truman to equate the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt and a newspaper reporter.

Upon word of the tragedy, memorials were erected and services were held worldwide.


Though Spencer's painted sign has been replaced by a permanent granite marker, the inscription is the same.

"If I had not been there to see it, I would have taken with a grain of salt any report that the GI was taking Ernie Pyle's death 'hard,' but that is the only word that best describes the universal reaction out here," Mr. Roberts, an Army photographer, wrote to Lee Miller, a friend of Mr. Pyle's and his first biographer.


Plagued by bouts of illness and depression, Jerry Pyle passed away only seven months after her husband. Heirs of the Pyle estate eventually donated the property to the City of Albuquerque, and in 1948 the Pyle House opened to the public as a branch of the Albuquerque Public Library.

The Unfinished Column

The job of sorting and shipping Pyle's personal effects fell to Edwin Waltz, a personable and efficient Navy man who had been working as the correspondent's personal secretary at Pacific Fleet headquarters at Guam. There wasn't much to go through -- a few clothes and toilet articles; books; receipts; some snapshots and letters. Here was Pyle's passport, stamped with the names of places he had passed through on his journeys to war -- Belfast and London; Casablanca and Algiers; and on the last page, "Pacific Area."

"9 killed & 10 wounded out of 33 from D-Day to July 25 ..."

"... drove beyond lines ... saw orange flame & smoke -- shell hit hood -- wrecked jeep -- dug hole...with hands -- our shells & their firing terrible-being alone was worst..."

"Blowing holes to bury cows -- stench everywhere."

Waltz also found a handwritten draft of a newspaper column. Knowing the war in Europe could end any day, Ernie Pyle started writing a column to mark the victory. He would never have a chance to complete it.

"And so it is over," the draft began. "The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that had so long seemed would never come has come at last."

He was writing this in waters near Japan, he said, "but my heart is still in Europe...For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce."

"I suppose emotions here in the Pacific are the same as they were among the Allies all over the world. First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about."

And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief — "and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific."

"It has been seven months since I heard my last shot in the European war. Now I am as far away from it as it is possible to get on this globe."

"It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended."

"For the companionship of two-and-a-half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one's soul, and it cannot be obliterated."

"True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things."

"To me the European war is old, and the Pacific war is new."

"Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks."

"But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world."

"Dead men by mass production — in one country after another — month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer."

"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous."

"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them."

"These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference..."

For unknown reasons Scripps-Howard's editors chose not to release the column draft, though V-E Day followed Ernie's death by just three weeks. Perhaps they guessed it would have puzzled his readers, even hurt them. Certainly it was a darker valedictory than they would have expected from him. The war had been a harsh mistress to Ernie. First it had offered him the means of escaping personal despair. Then, while his star rose to public heights he had never imagined, the war had slowly driven him downward again into "flat black depression." But he kept this mostly to himself. Instead he had offered readers a way of seeing the war that skirted despair and stopped short of horror. His published version of World War II had become the nation's version. And if Ernie Pyle himself had not won the war, America's mental picture of the soldiers who had won it was largely Pyle's creation. He and his grimy G.I's, frightened but enduring, had become the heroic symbols of what the soldiers and their children would remember as "the Good War."

James Tobin, author of the impressive biography "Ernie Pyle's War", does not deny that his subject often  smoothed the jagged facts of war, but he provides both the context - an era and a war in which correspondents were expected to be  "team players" who helped their side to win hearts and minds at home - and the personal conflict raised for Pyle by the often  irreconcilable demands of telling the truth and building morale.

In addition to detailing Ernie Pyle's mostly unhappy personal life, James Tobin also includes samples of his columns, proving once and for all that Pyle  was more than just a hick who fell into reporting; the man had real, substantial talent, evidenced by his ability to put words together and his sensitivity to the subjects he wrote about. More than just a biography, Ernie Pyle's War is also a study of war, and the peculiar,  twilight world of suffering and half-told truths to which men like Ernie Pyle were drawn.

"Ernie Pyle showed everybody else the way. He was a hell of a reporter." - Charles Kuralt, 1989

"Ernie Pyle... told more about the victories and defeats of World War II than all the official communiques ever issued." - Andy Rooney

"I lay there in the darkness...thinking of the millions far away at home who must remain forever unaware of the powerful fraternalism in the ghastly brotherhood of war." - Ernie Pyle