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Tuesday, March 23, 2010
ERNIE PYLE -
AMERICAN WAR HERO
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.
BIOGRAPHY OF ERNIE PYLE
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.
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.
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.
On April 18, 1945, while riding in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge during the Battle of Okinawa, they came under Japanese machine-gun fire. While he was ducking into a ditch on Ie Shima, Ernie Powell was suddenly hit shot in the temple and died instantly. His death came less than a month before what would have been his 45th birthday.
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.
When the playwright Arthur Miller met Ernie Pyle a few months earlier, he thought "he might have been the nightwatchman at a deserted track crossing."
In death Ernie Pyle's hands were crossed at the waist, still holding the cloth fatigue cap he had worn through battles in North Africa, Italy, France, and now here in the far western Pacific, a few hundred miles from Japan.
Mr. Roberts' photograph, however, was never seen by the public, the War Department had withheld it "out of deference" to Mr. Pyle's ailing widow, Jerry. "It was so peaceful a death ... that I felt its reproduction would not be in bad taste," he said, "but there probably would be another school of thought on this."
"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."
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.
Ernie Pyle had become far more than an ordinary reporter, more even than the most popular journalist of his generation. He was America's eyewitness to the twentieth century's supreme ordeal.
Upon word of the tragedy, memorials were erected and services were held worldwide.
Army S/Sgt. Charles Spencer, who served with 77th Infantry Division in Pacific Theater, was on the Japanese Island of Ie Shima, just off the coast of Okinawa. He was about one mile from the spot at which noted war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper, Charles was chosen to print a marker and place it on the spot where Ernie Pyle was killed, The marker read: "At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy Ernie Pyle 12 April 1945".
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.
Ernie Pyle was first buried among soldiers on Ie Shima. In 1949 his body was moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater, near Honolulu.
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."
Waltz also found a little pocket notebook filled with cryptic jottings in a curlecue script -- notes Pyle had made during his last weeks in France in 1944.
"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."
In the years since Ernie Pyle's death, his particular brand of journalism has been criticized: he's been accused of ignoring the stupidity of generals, of downplaying the horror of battle, and of presenting the war in a better light than it actually deserved to be portrayed.
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
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