Word Celebrity Blog

Remembering Ernie Pyle’s Indiana Univ. Ties

Associate professor Owen V. Johnson, a scholar of Ernie Pyle’s life and writing, wrote this essay detailing Pyle’s life and times.

When I was a child, growing up in the state of Washington, Indiana came to mean two things: the Indy 500 and Ernie Pyle.

I found the 500 on the radio one Memorial Day. I discovered Ernie Pyle in my dad’s wartime edition of Brave Men, a collection of Pyle’s columns. Pyle died 10 months before I was born.

As I grew up and my hobby of journalism turned into a profession, the name Ernie Pyle came to mean someone who wrote exceptionally well. He epitomized for large numbers of people what good journalism was, even though most of his work consisted of columns of impression, interpretation and opinion.

Ernie Pyle, struck down by a sniper’s bullet in 1945, would have been 100 years old, Aug. 3, 2000.



IU Activities

Pyle’s first contact with Indiana University was apparently a letter of July 31, 1919, in which he wrote, “I desire to enter Indiana University this fall, and am writing for information.” IU responded the next day with information about enrollment. The paper trail of Pyle’s days as a student at IU is pretty thin. Much myth and iconography has grown up about his days in Bloomington. It’s unclear how much of the myth originated with Pyle.

Frederick C. Painton, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, quotes Pyle as saying, “I took journalism at Indiana University because it was a cinch course and offered an escape from a farm life and farm animals.” John Stempel, a fellow student of Pyle’s and later chairman of the Department of Journalism for 30 years, dealt with many of the Pyle legends in an article he originally wrote for Quill that was reprinted in Newswire on the 50th anniversary of Pyle’s death. It was impossible, Stempel pointed out, for Pyle to have majored in journalism during his years in Bloomington, 1919-23. The university didn’t have a major in journalism until 1932.


























“A Big Man on Campus,” Pyle belonged to the Sphinx Club, the Cootie Club (originally made up only of men who had fought in World War I, but eventually included most campus leaders), the Aeons, the Boosters Club and Sigma Delta Chi, today known as the Society of Professional Journalists. He wrote for the Daily Student, the Arbutus, and “Smoke-Up,” a Sigma Delta Chi paper founded as a “Razz Sheet.” He was also the first elected senior manager of the football team.

A remarkable group of individuals staffed the Daily Student in Pyle’s day. During Pyle’s senior year, he was the city editor the first semester, while Nelson Poynter, later editor of the St. Petersburg Times, took over the post in the second semester. Stempel was news editor the second semester. The pictures of these three men stare out from the same page of the 1923 Arbutus.

Pyle was editor of the Daily Student during the summer of 1922. His great innovation, the Arbutus reported, was the state fair edition of the paper. Copy was written at the fair, carried to Bloomington where the paper was printed, and then 10,000 copies were taken back to Indianapolis.

The 1923 Arbutus also includes a drawing of Pyle with a copy of the Daily Student in his hand. Underneath, in the fashion of the time, is a bit of doggerel:

“This brilliant gem which blushed unseen in Dana,
Long since globe trotter, Student Editor, Aeon and who-knows-what,
Still wears the same old hat, is still the same good fellow,
Lo, this man’s name heads the lot.”



Leaving IU

We know that Pyle left IU “a skip and a hop” from graduation to take a job with the LaPorte (Ind.) Herald. The story told by long-time Bloomington sportswriter Bob Hammel has it that Pyle wanted to distance himself from a shattered romance. But alumni secretary George F. “Dixie” Heighway, in a 1944 letter, wrote, “He left school after some sort of row with the Journalism Department. … I am unable to find out just what this was all about but, probably the less said about it the better anyway.”

So far as we know, Pyle came back to Bloomington just twice after his student days. The first time was in 1937, accompanied by his father. Pyle wrote about the trip on May 21. He visited with Clarence E. Edmondson, dean of students, and a close friend, judging by the frequency with which he asked IU correspondents to convey his greetings to Edmondson and his wife.

“It was they who told a restless boy to go ahead and quit school and go to China if he wanted to,” Pyle wrote about his spring 1922 trip to the Far East. They also supported his taking the job at LaPorte. Pyle saw the Edmondsons again in Colorado on a fishing expedition in the summer of 1941.

But Pyle hadn’t really come back to IU in 1937. “I hadn’t looked at the campus or the new buildings as we came in,” Pyle observed. “I didn’t look at them as we drove out. I had come back, but I hadn’t come back — and never could.”

The Indiana Alumni magazine contacted Pyle in 1938, inviting him to contribute an article. George Heighway repeated the invitation the following year. Pyle replied, telling Heighway about that earlier request: “I really did want to and intend to [contribute], but dammit, it just seems like there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week even to do the column in, and I never got around to it.”

In 1940, Pyle was in Brown County, about which he wrote several columns, later collected in “Images of Brown County” (1980).

In April 1941, in a letter from Albuquerque to his friend Hermie (Herman B Wells), Pyle commented, “I do hope to duck into Brown County again for a day or two at least sometime this summer and will look forward to seeing you again then.” But there doesn’t seem to be a word about Bloomington.

That October, Wells, in response to an inquiry from Pyle, reported that Delphia Wilkerson was in school that semester, and promised to let Pyle know if she needed financial assistance, hinting that Pyle, whose columns were giving him a growing income, may have quietly provided Wilkerson with support.


The Name Lives On
























Ward Biddle, former vice president and treasurer, proposed in a letter to Wells in September 1944 that Pyle be granted an honorary degree. Pyle accepted the invitation, but said he couldn’t set a date because of “desperate illness” in his family, an apparent reference to his wife Jerry’s mental illness. At the end of October, Pyle sent word that he was planning to come to Indiana. On Nov. 13 the assembled students and faculty of IU saw Pyle receive the first honorary degree of humane letters ever presented by IU.

Pyle had finally made his peace with the University. “I still feel that the business at Indiana on Monday was wonderful,” he wrote from Washington at week’s end. “It was the kind of thing that just leaves a good taste in your mouth. Probably the finest part of it to me was that my Dad and Aunt Mary had such a wonderful time.”

Two weeks later, Pyle asked Heighway to find out the name of the “red-headed girl” from the Bloomington High School paper who had wanted to interview Pyle on the day he received his honorary degree. Gladys Morrison had stood quietly nearby, waiting for her time, while Pyle visited with many old friends. Time ran out before she could talk to him. Pyle wanted to make amends by sending her an autographed copy of one of his books.

The Pyle name has remained associated with Indiana University both because his name graces the building in which the School of Journalism is housed, and because of the Ernie Pyle scholarships. The idea of a scholarship originated soon after Pyle’s death on Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. Individual contributions began to arrive, and IU officials invited selected individuals to donate. Heighway wrote to the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, suggesting a contribution of at least $10,000.

A major contribution came from the proceeds of the world premiere at Loew’s theater in Indianapolis, on July 6, 1945, of the film “The Story of G.I. Joe,” which starred Burgess Meredith as Pyle. Both the theatre and Lester Cowan, the film’s producer, promised their share of the take to the scholarship. Newspapers reported that 1,885 people attended the showing, with the sponsoring IU Foundation and the IU Clubs of Indianapolis netting $16,601.95. The program opened with the presentation of an original Pyle manuscript to the highest bidder, with all of the winning bid money going to the purchase of war bonds. A few days before the show, Indianapolis newspapers were reporting that bidding had topped $100,000.

More than 50 years later, the terms of the scholarship remain as they were: ability in journalism, promise of future success in that profession, and war service record, although simple military service is now substituted for the last requirement. The first three winners were Joseph W. Gingery of Indianapolis, who had spent three years as a gunner on a B-24; Norma K. Abbott of Anderson, a member of the WACs for three years; and Ed L. Sovola of Hammond, who had written extensively on war issues. By the time the first scholarships were awarded, the collected funds had reached $40,000.

Ernie Pyle was a master of the reporting art of observation. With the use of strong nouns and verbs, he created word pictures, providing the virtual reality of the pre-television era. These did not come easily from his pencil and typewriter. Pyle struggled to meet the expectations he created for himself. He drank too much, struggled with melancholy and hypochondria, and even suffered some depression. He lived through difficult marriages (he married, then divorced, then remarried) with a lively woman who fought the demons of an almost bi-polar personality, made worse by alcoholism.

There were times when Pyle suffered from reportorial burnout. He didn’t see how he could continue. He abhorred the fame that resulted from his columns. He felt an obligation, however, to his readers, and pressed on. He died virtually at the peak of his fame, just a short time after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The country mourned both as symbols of the allied fight against the Axis powers.

In the years since, Ernie Pyle memorabilia and information have continued to turn up. In 1980, Richard G. Gray, the late dean, received a letter reporting that when Pyle died, he was wearing a watch that had been presented to him by Amelia Earhart on behalf of the aviation writers with whom Pyle served in the late 1920s and early ’30s.


















The Legacy

Today’s students don’t often know the name of Ernie Pyle. Their parents and usually their grandparents were too young to have known Pyle and his work. But the students continue to discover new lessons in Pyle, in his powers of description, the pressures of journalism, or his focus on ordinary people. It’s those discoveries that will keep Pyle’s connection with Indiana University long into the future.

When I began to teach journalism history 20 years agp, the main biography of Pyle was Lee Miller’s 1950 book, “The Story of Ernie Pyle.” Miller also put together “The Ernie Pyle Album” (1946). Ellen Wilson wrote “Ernie Pyle, Boy from Back Home” (1955) in the Childhood of Famous Americans series.

In the second half of the 1980s, David Nichols edited two books of Pyle’s columns, one of his travels across America, and the other from World War II. Pyle’s career spanned only two decades, a substantial part of it in relative obscurity. Before his wartime columns started, his writing only appeared in about 40 Scripps-Howard newspapers, just a small portion of nearly 1,800 U.S. daily newspapers.



























Pyle’s Main Fame Was Concentrated 
In Just About 30 Months Of Wartime.

The most recent biography is James Tobin’s “Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II” (New York: The Free Press, 1997; published in paper by the University of Kansas Press), a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle awards in the biography and autobiography category. He brings to the book a background in both journalism, a Pulitzer Prize nominee at the Detroit News, plus professional study as a historian at the University of Michigan.

This is certainly the most balanced and complete portrait of Pyle’s life. There is respect, but not hero-worship. There is understanding, but not excusing. Tobin tells about Pyle’s early departure from IU, his work as an aviation reporter in Washington, D.C., his travels across the United States, and his life in the battles of World War II.

The following Text is reprinted from 
the New York Times On The Web

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0803.html













April 19, 1945

OBITUARY

Ernie Pyle Is Killed on Ie Island;
Foe Fired When All Seemed Safe

Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES

GUAM, April, 18 -- Ernie Pyle died today on Ie Island, just west of Okinawa, like so many of  the doughboys he had written about. The nationally known war correspondent was killed  instantly by Japanese machine-gun fire.

The slight, graying newspaper man, chronicler of the average American soldier's daily round, in and out of foxholes in many war theatres, had gone forward early this morning to observe the advance of a well-known division of the Twenty-fourth Army Corps.

He joined headquarters troops in the outskirts of the island's chief town, Tegusugu. Our men had seemingly ironed out minor opposition at this point, and Mr. Pyle went over to talk to a regimental commanding officer. Suddenly enemy machine gunners opened fire at about 10:15 A.M. (9:15 P.M., Tuesday, Eastern war time). The war correspondent fell in the first burst.

The commanding general of the troops on the island reported the death to headquarters as follows: "I regret to report that War Correspondent Ernie Pyle, who made such a great contribution to the morale of our foot soldier, was killed in the battle of Ie Shima today."



















AT A COMMAND POST, Ie Island, Ryukyus, April 18 (AP) -- Ernie Pyle, the famed columnist who had reported the wars from Africa to Okinawa, met his death about a mile forward of the command post.

Mr. Pyle had just talked with a general commanding Army troops and Lieut. Col. James E. Landrum, executive officer of an infantry regiment, before "jeeping" to a forward command post with Lieut. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge of Helena, Ark., commanding officer of the regiment, to watch front-line action.

Colonel Coolidge was alongside Mr. Pyle when he was killed. "We were moving down the road in our jeep," related Colonel Coolidge. "Ernie was going with me to my new command post. At 10 o'clock we were fired on by a Jap machine gun on a ridge above us. We all jumped out of the jeep and dived into a roadside ditch.


May Be Buried Where He Fell

"A little later Pyle and I raised up to look around. Another burst hit the road over our heads and I fell back into the ditch. I looked at Ernie and saw he had been hit."He was killed almost instantly, the bullet entering his left temple just under his helmet."I crawled back to report the tragedy, leaving a man to watch the body. Ernie's body will be brought back to Army grave registration officers. He will be buried here on Ie Jima unless we are notified otherwise.

"I was so impressed with Pyle's coolness, calmness and his deep interest in enlisted men.

They have lost their best friend."

Colonel Coolidge was visibly shaken as he told the facts of the columnist's death. Almost tearfully, he described the tragedy. He said he knew the news would spread swiftly over the island.


















The general also was visibly upset as he read a message about Mr. Pyle's death. He said: "I am terribly sorry to hear this news. Just before Ernie went up this road [pointing toward the front lines] he talked with me and Colonel Landrum at this command post, and Ernie made arrangements to meet me back here at 3 o'clock. I told him if he was not here on time I couldn't wait for him, as I had to be back on my flagship."

While the general was talking soldiers standing near by were grieved to hear of Mr. Pyle's death. A short distance ahead enemy machine guns and our own guns and artillery were rattling and roaring. Soldiers exhibited "short-snorter" bills that the writer had signed for them less than an hour before.


Mrs. Pyle Grief-Stricken

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., April 18 (UP) -- Mrs. Geraldine Pyle, "That Girl" in Ernie Pyle's stories, was grief-stricken today at her husband's death.

Mrs. Pyle said she had been notified of his death before it was announced in Washington.Mrs. Pyle answered the telephone in a calm but very low voice. She said she had received no details of his death.


Neighbor Informs Ernie Pyle's Father

DANA, Ind., April 18 (UP) -- William C. Pyle, father of the war correspondent, and the writer's "Aunt Mary" -- Mrs. Mary Bales -- were stunned today by word of Ernie's death.

Mrs. Ella Goforth, a neighbor, said the aging relatives of the newspaper man had received the news from another neighbor, who had heard the news on the radio.

Mrs. Goforth said: "They're not taking the news very well."


 Feared Being Disliked

Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, "I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won't like me."

No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle's death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.

President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer's wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.


























Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column "I have read everything he has sent from overseas," and recommended his writings to all Americans."

For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers' kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.

In the Eighth Avenue subway yesterday a gray-haired woman looked up, wet-eyed, from the headline "Ernie Pyle Killed in Action" and murmured "May God rest his soul" and other women, and men, around her took up the words. This was typical.

It was rather curious that a nation should have worked up such affection for a timid little man whose greatest fear was "Maybe they won't like me."

Yet this fear had started in childhood. Ernie Pyle was born on Aug. 3, 1900, in a little white farmhouse near Dana, Ind., the only child of William and Maria Taylor Pyle.

They were simple people, content to spend their lives in the little white house on the dusty Indiana country road, as William Pyle's parents had spent their lives.

Ernest -- they always called him that, and never "Ernie" -- seemed destined to plod along in much the same way, except that he was restless, and his thoughts strayed from the family acres to far horizons.

He was shy in the country school house, apt to sit apart from classmates during games, and later, in high school and in Indiana University, went off for lonely walks.

He worked on The Indiana Daily Student in the one-story brick building where the paper was put together, and sometimes he strayed down to the Book Nook, the Greek candy kitchen on the campus, but not often.

When Stuart Gorrell, who gets out the Chase National Bank house organ here now, and Paige Cavanaugh, other journalism students, crowded around the Book Nook's broken-down piano to hear Hoagy Carmichael, another classmate, play his "Stardust," Ernie was likely to be off in a corner, smiling and affable, but silent.

He took journalism, incidentally, not because he had any burning desire for a career in it, but because it was rated then as "a breeze." He had no flaming ambition for anything.

He quit college in 1923, a few months before graduation, to work as a cub on The La Porte (Ind.) Herald-Argus and moved on a few months later to a desk job on The Washington (D. C.) News.

If any one thing inspired him, during this period, it was Kirke Simpson's news story on the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Simpson was an Associated Press reporter.

"I cried over that," Pyle told friends later, "and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece."

He stayed on at The Washington News as copy editor from 1923 to 1926, had a year in New York on The Evening World and on The Evening Post and did aviation for the Scripps-Howard papers from 1928 to 1932.

He was managing editor of The Washington News from 1932 to 1935, when he wearied of desk work and started a roving assignment, writing pieces as he went.

With him went his wife. She had been Geraldine Siebolds of Stillwater, Minn., when he met her in Washington and in their tours she was always "That Girl."

Millions of readers came to know and love them, then. The Pyle writings of that period, as in the war years, were nothing more or less than simple letters home.

He traveled to Canada and wrote of the Dionnes. He visited Flemington, N. J., and recalled the Hauptmann trial there; toured through drought-throttled Montana and the Dakotas, and pictured all he saw.

In 1937 he was in Alaska, writing of simple folk and of their labors, their hopes, their desires. He went 1,000 miles down the Yukon, sailed Arctic seas with the Coast Guard.Each day's experience was material for a column -- a letter home to farm-bound or pavement-bound poor people and invalids who could never hope to make such journeys.

He wrote simple, gripping pieces about five days spent with the lepers at Molokai, and put his feeling on paper: "I felt unrighteous at being whole and clean," he told his readers when he came away.

He wrote of Devil's Island, of all South America, which he toured by plane. He covered some 150,000 miles of Western Hemisphere wearing out three cars, three typewriters; crossed the United States thirty-five times.


 Magnet Pulls Him to London

In the fall of 1940 he started for unhappy London. "A small voice came in the night and said go" was the way he put it, and his writings on London under Nazi bombings tore at his readers' hearts.

He lived with Yank troops in Ireland and his descriptions of their day-by-day living brought wider reception. When he went into action with the Yanks in Africa, the Pyle legend burst into flower.

His columns, done in foxholes, brought home all the hurt, horror, loneliness and homesickness that every soldier felt. They were the perfect supplement to the soldiers' own letters.

Though he wrote of his own feelings and his own emotions as he watched men wounded, and saw the wounded die, he was merely interpreting the scene for the soldier.

He got people at home to understand that life at the front "works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern -- yesterday is tomorrow and Troiano is Randozzo and, O God, I'm so tired."

He never made war look glamorous. He hated it and feared it. Blown out of press headquarters at Anzio, almost killed by our own planes at St. Lo, he told of the death, the heartache and the agony about him and always he named names of the kids around him, and got in their home town addresses.

By September, 1944, he was a thin, sad-eyed little man gone gray at the temples, his face seamed, his reddish hair thinned. "I don't think I could go on and keep sane," he confided to his millions of readers.

He started home, with abject apologies. The doughfoots had come to love him. Hundreds of thousands of combat troops, from star-sprinkled generals to lowly infantrymen, knew him by sight, called "H'ya, Ernie?" when he passed.

He wrote, "I am leaving for just one reason . . . because I have just got to stop. I have had all I can take for a while." Yet the doughfoots understood. They wrote him sincere farewells and wished him luck.


Pacific Foxholes Called

His books "Here Is Your War" and "Brave Men," made up from his columns, hit the high spots on best-seller lists, made Hollywood. He was acclaimed wherever he dared show himself in public.

He loafed a while in his humble white clapboard cottage in Albuquerque, N. M. He would sit there with "That Girl" and stare for hours across the lonely mesa, but the front still haunted him. He had to go back.

He journeyed to Hollywood to watch Burgess Meredith impersonate him in the film version of his books and last January he left for San Francisco, bound for the wars again -- the Pacific this time.

He had frequent premonitions of death. He said: "You begin to feel that you can't go on forever without being hit. I feel that I've used up all my chances, and I hate it. I don't want to be killed."

Fortune had come to Ernie Pyle -- something well over a half-million dollars the past two years -- and his name was a household word. He might have rested with that."But I can't," he wrote. "I'm going simply because there's a war on and I'm part of it, and I've known all the time I was going back. I'm going simply because I've got to -- and I hate it."

So he went, and in the endless hours over the Pacific, in great service planes, he wrote with a soft touch of glorious Pacific dawns and sunsets at sea, of green islands and tremendous expanses of blue water.


Shared GI's Post-War Hopes

He journeyed to Iwo on a small carrier and wrote about the carrier crew. Then he moved on to Okinawa and went in with the marines, and there were homely pieces about that.

He had post-war plans. He thought he would take to the white clean roads again with "That Girl" and write beside still ponds in the wilderness, on blue mountains, in country lanes, in a world returned to peace and quiet. And these were the dreams of the doughfoot in the foxhole as much as they were his own.

But he knew that death would reach for him. In his last letter to George A. Carlin, head of the United Feature Syndicate which employed him, he wrote:"I was completely amazed to find that I'm as well known out here as I was in the European Theatre. The men are depending on me, so I'll have to try and stick it out for a long time."

"I expect to be out a year on this trip, if I don't bog down inside again, and if I don't get sick or hurt. If I could be fortunate enough to hang on until the spring of 1946, I think I'll come home for the last time. I don't believe I have the strength ever to leave home and go back to war again."

But yesterday Ernie Pyle came to the end of the road on tiny Ie, some 10,000 miles from his own white cottage and from "That Girl."

In one of his first columns from Africa he had told how he'd sought shelter in a ditch with a frightened Yank when a Stuka dived and strafed, and how he tapped the soldier's shoulder when the Stuka had gone and said, "Whew, that was close, eh?" and the soldier did not answer. He was dead.

So yesterday on Ie a doughfoot, white and tense, looked up from a thin-faced, gray-haired figure prone beside him. Ernie Pyle had written his last letter home.


U.S. Civil and Military Leaders Mourn 'Foxhole Correspondent'

WASHINGTON, April 18 (AP) -- Ernie Pyle's death was announced by Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal, and President Truman issued a statement of condolence."The nation is quickly saddened again, by the death of Ernie Pyle," Mr. Truman said."No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."


























Mr. Forrestal's statement said: "With deep regret, the Navy announces the death on Ie Shima (Island) of Ernie Pyle, whose reporting of this war endeared him to the men of the armed forces throughout the world and to their families at home.

"He was killed instantly by Japanese machine-gun fire while standing beside the regimental commanding officer of Headquarters Troop, Seventy-seventh Division, United States Army. At the time of his death he was with the foot soldiers, the men for whom he had the greatest admiration.

"Mr. Pyle will live in the hearts of all service men who revered him as a comrade and spokesman. More than anyone else, he helped America to understand the heroism and sacrifices of her fighting men. For that achievement, the nation owes him its unending gratitude."


President Praises Service
























In his tribute to the 44-year-old reporter for Scripps-Howard newspapers, who covered the war in Europe before going to the Pacific early this year, President Truman said:

"More than any other man, he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms doing so many extraordinary things. It was his genius that the mass and power of our military and naval forces never obscured the men who made them.

"He wrote about a people in arms as people still, but a people moving in a determination which did not need pretensions as a part of power.

"Nobody knows how many individuals in our forces and at home he helped with his writings. But all Americans understand now how wisely, how warm heartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."


























Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson said today that soldiers have "lost a champion" in the death of Mr. Pyle.

"The understanding of Americans in battle which ran through all of Ernie Pyle's dispatches was drawn from hours spent with them under fire, sharing dangers they endure," Mr. Stimson said.


 General Marshall Expresses Sorrow

























Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff said: Ernie Pyle belonged to the millions of  soldiers he had made his friends. His dispatches reached down into the ranks to draw out the stories of individual soldiers. He did not glorify war, but he did glorify the nobility, the simplicity and heroism of the American fighting man. The Army deeply mourns his death."


 Eisenhower Pays Tribute


























Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to Ernie Pyle Wednesday night, saying: "The GI's in Europe -- and that means all of us here -- have lost one of our best and most understanding friends," a Blue network correspondent, Herbert Clark, reported in a broadcast from Paris, according to The Associated Press.


Governor Dewey Sees Loss to Nation

























ALBANY, April 18 (UP) -- Governor Thomas E. Dewey said today that the death of Mr. Pyle "is a great personal loss to this country and to American journalism."

"Ernie Pyle was a great reporter," Mr. Dewey said. "His warm, human stories of our fighting men -- Ernie's beloved GI's -- had become an integral part of our American life. Every day millions of American newspaper readers eagerly read his column, which was a daily link between us here on the home front and our men fighting on the battlefronts of the world."


New Mexico Mourns "Son"

ALBUQUERQUE, N. M., April 18 (AP) -- Albuquerque and the State of New Mexico were stunned today by the news that Ernie Pyle had been killed.

Only recently the seventeenth Legislature of New Mexico, by resolution, declared Aug. 3, the columnist's birthday, as "Ernie Pyle Day."

"Ernie Pyle was Albuquerque's adopted son, and all of us sorely grieve his passing," said former Governor Clyde Tingley, Mayor of Albuquerque.


General Mark Clark Salutes Writer

























FIFTEENTH ARMY GROUP HEADQUARTERS, Italy, April 18 (UP) -- General Mark W. Clark paid tribute today to Ernie Pyle in the following message:

"A great soldier correspondent is dead, perhaps the greatest of this war. I refer to Ernie Pyle, who marched with my troops through Italy, took their part and championed their cause both here and at home."

"His reporting was always constructive. He was "Ernie" to privates and generals alike. He spoke the GI's language and made it a part of the everlasting lore of our country. He was a humble man and in his humility lay his greatness."

"He will be missed by all of us fighting with the Fifteenth Army Group. There could have been only one Ernie Pyle. May God bless his memory. He helped our soldiers to victory."





















 Burial: National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Honolulu, Hawaii

Ernie Pyle And The  USS Cabot


On 9 Feb., Ernie PYLE, A-14 reported on board to gather news by authorization of the 1st Carrier Task Force, Pacific Fleet. PYLE's two weeks aboard was indeed among the highlights of the Cabot's history. Hundreds of newspapers from coast to coast carried his columns, this time dealing with life on a "flattop".





















The 'Skipper' Walton Wiley Smith and Ernie Pyle just after he came aboard.


The Cabot would have become more famous had it not been for wartime security. The Navy would not let PYLE name the carrier or use the names of the crew at first, but PYLE raised such a fuss that he was allowed to use names and hometowns of the men. However, "Iron Woman" was all that would pass the censors in identifying the ship.

PYLE had a low-key style which made him popular worldwide. He discussed the day-to-day life and thoughts of the enlisted men as well as officers. He wrote about a dozen columns while on the Cabot, and many mothers were thrilled when their son's name were mentioned in the articles.


























Having left Europe in August 1944, PYLE was physically and mentally exhausted. He decided he was through writing from the Front, but the Navy put such pressure on him to go to the Pacific that he finally gave in and was flown to Guam. There, the Navy treated PYLE like a prima donna, and his columns lost their friendly  style for a time.

Pyle had come to see and report on the Pacific war, and he had asked to be assigned to a small carrier because he thought he might be able to find a more intimate setting for observing and interacting with the crew than he could find on one of the large Essex-class carriers. He was assigned to the U.S.S. Cabot, known as "The Iron Woman" because she had been continuously at sea and had participated in all of the Pacific campaigns for more than a year.

On 10 Feb., the Cabot was with Task Group 58.4, headed for Tokyo when Lt. (jg) J. B. VAN FLEET crashed on takeoff in his Hellcat. He was rescued by the USS Franks (DD 554), and this was described in one of PYLE's columns.

Ernie PYLE scratched his shortest war "story" on a Zippo lighter enroute to Tokyo. The scuttlebutt from the galley to bridge was that something big was coming.

A halt hour before the operation orders were to be opened, a young officer pumped PYLE to
find out where the ship was going. PYLE wasn't talking, but he asked the officer for his
Zippo lighter. "Stick this in your pocket," PYLE said, "and promise not to look until the orders are opened." With the first blast of the boatswain's pipe, the young officer took the Zippo from his pocket. Scratched on the bottom was the word, "Tokyo". The first all-out carrier assault on the Japanese homeland was to begin.

On 16 Feb., the fleet was speeding at 23 knots for the war's first naval strike on Tokyo. Carrier aircraft of the 5th Fleet attacked the city exactly one year after the first carrier strike on Truk.

Fleet Admiral Nimitz's communique announced the strike, stating, "This operation has long been planned, and the opportunity to accomplish it fulfills the deeply cherished desire to
every officer and man in the Pacific Fleet."




















During the strike an F6F, piloted by Ens. R. L. BUCHANAN of Clemanton, N.J., developed engine trouble and was forced to make a water landing north of O Shima just outside Yokohama. Members of his flight, led by Lt. FECKE, stayed overhead for an hour and a half. They contacted a rescue submarine, the Pomfret (SS 391) and furnished air cover as she proceeded to rescue BUCHANAN. Visibility  was very poor, and sight contact was being maintained only by the pilot's reflector mirror. The sub passed within three miles of O Shima on Tokyo Bay, but was not attacked.





















As fuel ran low, Lt. FECKE sent the fighters home one by one, but he hung on. BUCHANAN was rescued in good condition and returned to the Cabot later.

TG 58.4, under the command of Admiral Radford included fast carriers Cabot, Langley,
Yorktown, and the newly arrived Randolph. Lt.John MONSARRAT was the Flight Director Officer on the Langley and he writes in his book Angel on the Yardarm: "Our main assignment during the operation was to hit Tokyo and its nearby airfields, in order to prevent the Japanese
from sending raids from Honshu down to Iwo Jima to attack our landing forces. While we were to strike Iwo Jima andChichi Jima as part of the prelanding bombardment, this time the provision of air support to the Marines, once landed, was to be left mainly to the escort carriers accompanying the transports...."

"No Navy planes had yet struck Tokyo, although the Army Air Force had begun to hit it with B-29s from Guam and Saipan...the enemy sent large numbers of fighters to intercept our strike planes but, probably because of the very bad weather, did not mount retaliatory strikes against the carriers so very close to the shore of Honshu...."

"For three days after the landings, we augmented the air support the CVEs were providing the troops, and each night retired a little farther from the island to ward off enemy air attacks. When they came, with great pyrotechnics the 'lamplighters' dropped bright magnesium flares on the western side of the carrier force."

"Then, for the first time in our experience, the Japanese made good use of 'window'-small strips of metal foil cut to match the wave lengths of our radar and dropped in bundles just to the east of our ships. When the strips fanned out in the air and slowly floated down, their radar echos were so strong that they blocked out our radar vision in that particular sector. Thus, with our ships brilliantly silhouetted against the flares and float planes to the west, and our radars blind to the east, the enemy torpedo planes had a golden opportunity  to hit us with devastating effect. For some reason they did not take it..."

"Closer to the island, they did press home their attacks on our ships. We had lent the Saratoga to cover those forces with her night fighters. One night, she took no less than five bomb and torpedo hits. She survived, but limped away, never to return".

"Since the Iwo Jima landing was set for 19 Feb., this attack on Tokyo was to give strategic cover by destroying air forces and bringing to the Japanese homefront an awareness of the war's progress."
                     
"Against a loss of 49 planes, 322 enemy aircraft were shot down and 177 destroyed on the ground. After the strike, the fast carriers returned toward Iwo Jima to give direct support for the landings."
 
















Pyle filed numerous stories from the decks of the Cabot but was prevented by censorship from revealing the name of the ship; a fact that, while perhaps necessitated by the demands of the war, ironically kept ihe Cabot anonymous to posterity even though millions of people read about her. She became the most famous ship no one ever heard of. Referring to her only by her nickname, "The Iron Woman". (A book, The Last Chapter by Ernie Pyle, contains a chapter, "Life on a Flat Top" which is about the Cabot. It is particularly interesting reading for anyone connected with the carrier.)"


The Nation Is Quickly Saddened Again.

Ernie Pyle left the Cabot at the end of February 1945. On Easter, April 1, he went ashore with the Marines on Okinawa. Eighteen days later, he was killed on the nearby island of Ie Shima when a bullet from a Japanese machine gun hit him in the left temple below the rim of his helmet.

News of Pyle's death spread quickly by radio to the Pacific, U.S. and Europe. Gen. Omar Bradley was so stunned he couldn't speak. Only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the country had lost the man through whose eyes they had witnessed the war. President Harry Truman, who had just taken office said, "The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle." and no one thought it inappropriate for him to equate Pyle's death with Roosevelt's; such was the emotional investment the public had in Ernie Pyle.





















A few months after his death, in the closing weeks of the war, hundreds of lighters with the inscription, In Memory of Ernie Pyle 1945, suddenly arrived on board the Cabot from the Zippo Lighter Co. Pyle knew the owner of the company and periodically asked that lighters be sent to soldiers he liked. Apparently, Pyle had grown fond of the "Iron Woman" and her crew.





















Ernie wrote about his feelings after coming aboard the Cahot: "It was a great feeling as I staggered up the gangway to the ship with my sea bag in one hand and the mattress cover loaded with blankets, mattresses, etc. , over my shoulder. At last I have a home -- and a warship at that."

(This column was the last column of Ernie Pyle's to be published. It was one which had been written some time before but not sent to Scripp's Howard.)



Fred Painton: A Tribute

by Ernie Pyle


OKINAWA, April 28, 1945 – This is a column about Fred Painton, the war correspondent who dropped dead on Guam a short time ago.

Fred wrote war articles for Reader’s Digest and many other magazines. He even gambled his future once writing a piece for the Saturday Evening Post about me.

Fred was one of the little group of real old-timers in the European war. He was past forty-nine and an overseas veteran of the last war. His son is grown and in the Army. Fred had seen a great deal of war for a man his age.

He was just about to start back to America when he died. He had grown pretty weary of war. He was anxious to get home to have some time with his family.

But I’m sure he had no inkling of death, for he told me in Guam of his postwar plans to take his family and start on an ideal and easy life of six months in Europe, six in America. He had reached the point where life was nice.


























Fred Painton was one of the modest people; I mean real down-deep modest. He had no side whatever, no ax to grind, no coy ambition.

He loved to talk and his words bore the authority of sound common sense. He had no intellectualisms. His philosophy was the practical kind. He was too old and experienced and too wise in the ways of human nature to belittle his fellow man for the failures that go with trying hard.

Fred didn’t pretend to literary genius but he did pride himself on a facility for production. He could get a thousand dollars apiece for his articles and he wrote a score of them a year. And his pieces, like himself, were always honest. I’ve known him to decline to do an assignment when he felt the subject prohibited his doing it with complete honesty.

Fred’s balding head and crooked nose, his loud and friendly nasal voice, his British Army trousers and short leggings were familiar in every campaign in Europe.

He took rough life as it came and complained about nothing, except for an occasional bout with the censors. And even there he made no enemies for he was always sincere.

There were a lot of people Fred didn’t like, and being no introvert everybody within earshot knew whom he didn’t like and why. And I have never known him to dislike anyone who wasn’t a phony.

Fred and I have traveled through lots of war together. We did those bitter cold days, early in Tunisia, and we were the last stragglers out of Sicily.

We both came home for short furloughs after Sicily. The Army provided me with a powerful Number Two air priority, while Fred had only the routine Number Three.

We left the airport at Algiers within four hours of each other on the same morning. I promised Fred I would call his wife and tell her he would be home within a week.

When I got to New York I called the Painton home at Westport, Connecticut. Fred answered the phone himself. He had beat me home by three days on his measly little priority! He never got over kidding me about that.

As the war years rolled by we have become so indoctrinated into sudden and artificially imposed death that natural death in a combat zone seems incongruous, and almost as though the one who died had been cheated.

Fred had been through the mill. His ship was torpedoed out from under him in the Mediterranean. Anti-aircraft fire killed a man beside him in a plane over Morocco.

He had gone on many invasions. He was in Cassino. He was ashore at Iwo Jima. He was certainly living on borrowed time. To many it seems unfair for him to die prosaically. And yet . . .

 The wear and the weariness of war is cumulative. To many a man in the line today fear is not so much of death itself, but fear of the terror and anguish and utter horror that precedes death in battle.

I have no idea how Fred Painton would have liked to die. But somehow I’m glad he didn’t have to go through the unnatural terror of dying on the battlefield. For he was one of my dear friends and I know that he, like myself, had come to feel that terror.

Ernie Pyle

They Just Lay There, Blinking

by Ernie Pyle.


OKINAWA, April 21, 1945 – Now I’ve seen my first Jap soldiers in their native state – that is, before capture. But not for long, because the boys of my company captured them quicker than a wink.

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

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

So immediately two of our boys, instead of resting, started up through the brush, looking for caves and souvenirs. They had gone about fifty yards when one of them yelled:

"There’s a Jap soldier under this bush."

We didn’t get too excited for most of us figured he meant a dead Jap. But three or four of the boys got up and went up the hill. A few moments later somebody yelled again:

"Hey, here’s another one. They’re alive and they’ve got rifles."





















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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


























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

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

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

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

Ernie Pyle

On Victory in Europe

by Ernie Pyle


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






















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.






















 Times Square on VE Day.


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.

This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from Ardennes.

But my heart is still in Europe, and that’s why I am writing this column.

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. . . .

Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle was with the Navy, his uniform changed.

Aboard a Fighting Ship

by Ernie Pyle


IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC, March 15, 1945 – An aircraft carrier is a noble thing. It lacks almost everything that seems to denote nobility, yet deep nobility is there.

A carrier has no poise. It has no grace. It is top-heavy and lopsided. It has the lines of a well-fed cow.

It doesn’t cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn’t dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. You feel it should be carrying a hod, rather than wearing a red sash.

Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown its nobility. I believe that today every Navy in the world has as its No. 1 priority the destruction of enemy carriers. That’s a precarious honor, but it’s a proud one.



















My carrier is a proud one. She’s small, and you have never heard of her unless you have a son or husband on her, but still she’s proud, and deservedly so.

She has been at sea, without returning home, longer than any other carrier in the Pacific, with one exception. She left home in November 1943.

She is a little thing, yet her planes have shot two hundred thirty-eight of the enemy out of the sky in air battles, and her guns have knocked down five Jap planes in defending herself.

She is too proud to keep track of little ships she destroys, but she has sent to the bottom twenty-nine big Japanese ships. Her bombs and aerial torpedoes have smashed into everything from the greatest Jap battleships to the tiniest coastal schooners.

She has weathered five typhoons. Her men have not set foot on any soil bigger than a farm-sized uninhabited atoll for a solid year. They have not seen a woman, white or otherwise, for nearly ten months. In a year and a quarter out of America, she has steamed a total of one hundred forty-nine thousand miles!


























She has known disaster. Her fliers who have perished could not be counted on both hands, yet the ratio is about as it always is – about one American lost for every ten of the Exalted Race sent to the Exalted Heaven.

She has been hit twice by Jap bombs. She has had mass burials at sea . . . with her dry-eyed crew sewing 40-mm shells to the corpses of their friends, as weights to take them to the bottom of the sea.

Yet she has never even returned to Pearl Harbor to patch her wounds. She slaps on some patches on the run, and is ready for the next battle. The crew in semi-jocularity cuss her chief engineer for keeping her in such good shape they have no excuse to go back to Honolulu or America for overhaul.


























My carrier, even though classed as "light," is still a very large ship. More than a thousand men dwell upon her. She is more than seven hundred feet long.

She has all the facilities of a small city. And all the gossip and small talk too. Latest news and rumors have reached the farthest cranny of the ship a few minutes after the captain himself knows about them. All she lacks is a hitching rack and a town pump with a handle.

She has five barbers, a laundry, a general store. Deep in her belly she carries tons of bombs. She has a daily newspaper. She carries fire-fighting equipment that a city of fifty thousand back in America would be proud of.






















She has a preacher, she has three doctors and two dentists, she has two libraries, and movies every night, except when they’re in battle. And still she is a tiny thing, as the big carriers go. She is a "baby flat-top." She is little. And she is proud.

She has been out so long that her men put their ship above their captain. They have seen captains come and go, but they and the ship stay on forever.

They aren’t romantic about their long stay out here. They hate it, and their gripes are long and loud. They yearn pathetically to go home. But down beneath, they are proud – proud of their ship and proud of themselves. And you would be too.

Ernie Pyle