Ernie Pyle
"Of course I am very sick of the war and would like to leave it and yet I know I can't. I've been part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I've come to feel a responsibility to it or something. I don't know quite how to put it into words, but I feel if I left it would be like a soldier deserting." Ernie Pyle to Geraldine Seibolds Pyle, 1944
Ernest Taylor Pyle, a roving war correspondent for the Scripps Howard Newspaper chain never returned from the front lines to his front porch on the farm in Dana , Indiana. One of the 36 American war correspondents killed in World War II, he died on April 18, 1945, the victim of a Japanese sniper’s bullet, on Ie Shima, a small island off the coast of Okinawa.
In the homey style of a personal letter to a friend, Ernest Taylor Pyle wrote articles about off the beaten track and remote places across America and the people who lived there. In 1940, he went to London in time to witness the great fire bombing at the end of December. When America entered World War II, he became a war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. He accompanied Allied troops on the invasions of Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, using his homey reporting style to tell the story of the beaches and foxholes of World War II. Ernie Pyle humanized the most complex, mechanized, destructive war in history and told the stories of the men and women who fought it with empathy, humor, and sensitivity.
As John Steinbeck said, “regiments- and that is General Marshall’s war. Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage – and that is Ernie Pyle’s war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone.”
Over 300 newspapers carried Ernie Pyle’s columns and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for distinguished correspondence during 1943. He also received the Purple Heart for being wounded in action on the Anzio beachhead.
Ernie Pyle worked as an editor and not a reporter on just a few occasions. He was the first editor of a special edition of Indiana University’s student newspaper, the Daily Student, that was produced for more than 30 years at the Indiana State Fair. Two times during World War II, he helped Naval personnel edit newspapers on board ships.
Modern journalism has been hard pressed to produce an equal to Ernie Pyle, partially because of his talent and storytelling ability. His ability to tell interesting stories about ordinary people explains some of his success. Readers at home and the soldiers and sailors overseas didn’t remember all of the facts, but they did remember the stories he told. It appears that even censors were fascinated by his stories and found it difficult to black out even one line from the stories that Ernie Pyle told.
Journalism itself has changed much since Pyle’s time. Modern technologies such as the Internet and its instant communications have somewhat removed the journalist as the middleman, interpreter and teller of the stories and placed the individual in the middle of the storytelling equation. Ernie Pyle’s stories would still survive the Internet.
Ernest Taylor Pyle, Shy and Insecure
Throughout his life, Ernie Pyle said over and over again,” I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.” Ernie Pyle’s fears about not being liked were seldom realized.
Like the places he would writer about later in his career, Ernest Taylor Pyle’s birthplace was remote, located born in a corner of Indiana farm country near Dana, Indiana. His parents, William and Maria Taylor Pyle, lived in a small white farm house on a dusty country road and had spent their entire lives in farming country. They were tenants on the Sam Elder farm, located south and west of Dana. Ernest, they never called him Ernie, was born on August 3, 1900, their only child. His parents assumed that their son would follow in their farming footsteps, but even at a young age, Ernie had other ideas. He and his dog Shep would patrol the chickens. and he and Shep lay under the canopy of the ancient maple trees in his front yard dreaming of faraway places.
Ernie’s father, William “Pop” Pyle, said that Ernie liked to ride horseback but he didn’t like working with horses because horses were too slow for him. “He always said that the world was too big for him to be doing confining work here on the farm.” Ernie Pyle disliked farming and said one that “Anything was better than looking at the south end of a horse going north.”
Shy and introspective, Ernie Pyle often sat by himself during games at the country school house he attended, and later in high school he went for walks by himself. In 1918, when he was almost 18, Ernie joined the United States Navy Reserve, but World War I ended shortly after that. Ernie served only three months in World War I.
Ernie Pyle, Journalist
After the War, Ernie went to At Indiana University he worked on the Indian Daily Student in the one story brick building where the paper was assembled. Early writers about Ernie said that he Ernie Pyle took up journalism because campus wisdom rated journalism as an easy major, but the in reality Indiana University didn’t offer journalism courses until the 1930s.When he was a junior, Ernie traveled to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
In 1923, Ernie quit Indiana University a few months before he would have graduated to take a job as a cub reporter on the La Porte Indiana Herald-Argus. Some earlier versions of the story say that he left the Indiana University because of a broken heart. A girl that he had been dating gave him back his pin so she could date a doctor ten years older than she, whom she would eventually marry. Other friends said that after traveling to the Far East during his junior year, Ernie felt too confined by the university. Another story goes that when the chairman of his department heard that a newspaper in LaPorte, Indiana, needed a reporter and he recommended Ernie. The newspaper had an outstanding staff for its day. Five of its reporters had college degrees or like Ernie, had almost finished.
Within a year, Ernie went to Washington D.C. to join the staff of the Washington Daily News, a new tabloid that Roy W. Howard, head of Scripps-Howard had founded. He had also grown his journalistic roots in Indiana.
All the of the editors on the News were young, including Editor-in-Chief John M. Gleissner, a friend of Warren G. Harding, Lee G. Miller who would later write the Ernie Pyle Album-Indiana to Ie Shima. The staff of the Washington Daily News tended toward the young and Hoosier. Nelson Poynter, an Indiana University graduate later made a new for himself at the St. Petersburg, Florida Times, and Lee Miller, Ernie’s immediate boss for most of his career also came from Indiana and graduated from Harvard at age 19.
Ernie was named managing editor of the Washington Daily News and served in the position from 1923-1926. During the entire time, he fretted that he couldn’t get any writing done.
He later recalled that the story that Kirke Simpson, an Associated Press Reporter, wrote about the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery heavily influenced him the most at this point in his life. “I cried over that and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece,” he told friends
Ernie Pyle’s Writing Style
Ernie loved working at the Washington Daily News. He wrote to a friend that he had covered a press conference that President Calvin Coolidge gave, and noted that a Washington Post photograph showed him at the edge of the president’s desk.
He worked for three years as managing editor of the Washington Daily News. Copies of the memos he wrote to the staff reveal someone requiring tough, persistent, reporting and good writing. He also recognized that the placement of a story played an important part in its readership.
As Ernie matured, so did his writing and in some ways he was a writer struggling to escape a journalist’s skin. He was learning how to tell stories. He could meet journalistic deadlines, but he preferred the time to craft his work. He saw his stories. As a reporter, he rarely took notes except to record information like names and dates. He stored stories, often more than a dozen, in his mind until he had a chance to write them.
He struggled to get the words from his head and fingers to the typewriter and paper. He wrote and edited and rewrote and reedited, sometimes multiple times, trying to get the exact rhythm and the exact words. Sometimes, he admitted, his columns weren’t very good, but he was learning his craft. For much of his journalistic life he turned out six columns a week, 700 words in each column.
Ernie Pyle didn’t have to pad or embellish his stories, because he had the ability to hear and see them. He had very few complaints about the accuracy of his stories and when someone complained Pyle immediately acted. He reached back in his mind and looked at the “recordings” in his brain and recalled practically word for word, picture for picture, what had happened. Paradoxically, Ernie constantly monitored the quality of his writing and suffered deep bouts of depression about it because it never measured up to his expectations.
Ernie Pyle Married Jerry Siebolds
While Ernie worked in Washington, he met Geraldine “Jerry” Siebolds, a government worker from Minnesota. Their courtship and early married years are shrouded by time and privacy, but correspondence indicates that Ernie Pyle quickly realized that Jerry had severe problems. In fact, Jerry endured bouts of what modern doctors would call maniac depression and alcoholism and they began a tumultuous relationship. Ernie described her as “desperate within herself since the day she was born.” Apparently Jerry loved to manipulate words like Pyle did and she inspired him. Friends say that she wrote some of the columns that were credited to him.
They were quietly married in 1925 and they didn’t have a honeymoon. They went back to work after the ceremony. 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 destroying her from both within and without.
Often the Pyle drove without speaking to each other and they usually booked separate rooms in hotels. By the late 1930s, both Pyles well acutely aware that their marriage was on the verge of collapse, but neither knew how to solve their problems. When Ernie went to London to cover the London Blitz, he installed Jerry in a new house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but their marriage continued to be troubled.
Time Magazine noted on April 27, 1942, that Scripps-Howard Columnist Ernie Pyle had divorced Geraldine Siebolds Pyle. He referred to her in many of his columns as “that girl,” and after sixteen years of marriage they were divorced in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Pyles were actually divorced on April 14, 1942, and Ernie Pyle said that he hoped the divorce would shock Jerry into treatment and recovery. Before he went to Africa, he left a proxy with a good friend that Jerry could use to remarry him if she felt she was on the road to recovery. On March 10, 1943, while still in Africa, he received the news that he and Jerry had been remarried.
A Road Trip and Aviation Writing
About a year after he and Jerry were married, Ernie and Jerry took $1,000 in savings, quit their jobs, bought a Ford Roadster and camping equipment and embarked on a tour of the United States, traveling more than 9,000 miles. Ten weeks later, they pulled into New York City, broke, hungry, and with a broken down Ford Roadster.
Almost immediately Ernie found a job working nights at the Evening World and eventually moved to the day shift at the New York Post. By 1928 Ernie and Jerry had moved back to Washington, D.C. and he created a position of aviation writer for himself at the Daily News.
From 1928-1932, Ernie Pyle wrote about aviation for the Scripps-Howard papers. While he wrote about aviation, he sharpened his story telling ability and profiled the aviation profession, highlighting its 1920s heroes and heroines. He knew everybody or as Amelia Earhart said, “any aviator who didn’t know Ernie Pyle was a nobody. “
In 1932, he became managing editor of the Daily News. In 1934, Ernie returned from a trip to California where he had recuperated from a severe bout of flu. When he returned, his publisher suggested that he write some columns about his trip to fill in for Heywood Broun, the vacationing syndicated columnist. He wrote a series of eleven columns that were such a hit that G.B. Parker, editor in chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said that he found Ernie’s vacation articles had “a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out.”
The first Ernie Pyle column appeared on August 8, 1935, and he and Jerry traveled around North and South America while he wrote human interest features. From 1935 to 1942, Ernie and often Jerry Pyle roamed the western hemisphere and he wrote a column about his wanderings and developed into a consummate craftsman of short prose. One of his biographers, James Tobin, noted that “in the process he created “Ernie Pyle” and he studied unknown people doing extraordinary things and wrote about them.”
He traveled to Canada and wrote about the Dionne quintuplets. He visited Flemington, New Jersey and reported about the Hauptmann trial there. He and Jerry toured drought seared Montana and the Dakotas and recorded what they saw. In 1937, he wrote about people and their work and hopes and desires in Alaska. He went 1,000 miles down the Yukon and sailed Arctic seas with the Coast Guard. He wrote captivating pieces about the five days he spent with lepers at Molokai and recorded his feelings. “I felt unrighteous at being whole and clean,” he told his readers. He wrote about Devil’s Island, toured South America by plane. He crossed the United States 35 times. He covered 150,000 miles of the Western Hemisphere, wearing out three cars, and three typewriters.
Ernie Pyle wrote these experiences like a letter home to people whose life circumstances allowed them to experience such journeys only through his eyes. Ernie Pyle’s column earned a national audience when The United Features syndicate sold it to papers outside of the Scripps Howard chain in 1938, but Ernie didn’t reach his largest audience until World War II when more than 200 newspapers across the country carried his column. Later, Ernie compiled some of his columns and published them under the title of Home Country.
The London Blitz, 1940 -“They Came Just After Dark”
A trip to London at the end of 1940 to report on the Nazi bombing there catapulted Ernie Pyle to international fame. In one of his first columns, he wrote a brilliant word-picture of the biggest attack of the war. He opened his column about the Blitz in London by writing," It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire…” He went on to describe the terrible beauty of myriads of fires from the bombing lighting up the London sky. He wrote that it was “the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.” His coverage of the Nazi bombing of London in 1940 was so graphic that his dispatches were cabled back for British readers.
With his elegant and eloquent columns about the Blitz, Ernie Pyle showed Scripps-Howard that he commanded words as surely as an RAF pilot zooming in on a Heinkel bomber. Americans for the first time read word pictures about the impact of war in Europe. In 1941, a book of his columns about the Blitz in England, titled Ernie Pyle in England, was published.
Ironically, Ernie Pyle nearly missed the big London attack. For several weeks he had been marooned in Lisbon, Portugal, trying to get a flight to London. If he had been delayed for a few more weeks, he would have missed the final large scale German air attack on London.
World War II Correspondent
After the United States entered World War II, Ernie Pyle became a war correspondent for Scripps Howard. In 1942, he went to the front in Northern Africa and followed the infantry to Sicily, Italy, and France. In one of his first columns from Africa, Ernie Pyle told the story of the time that he found shelter in a ditch with a frightened Yank when a Stuka dived and strafed. When the Stuka had gone, he tapped the soldier’s shoulder and said, “Whew, that was close, eh?” The soldier didn’t answer. He was dead.
His reporting from North Africa in late 1942 and early 1943, his working methods, and his memory secured Ernie Pyle’s reputation as a war reporter. Ernie did not file daily stories on the fighting and the strategic situation. He looked for stories, filed them in his mind, and when he left the front lines, he wrote the stories. His readers usually read a story several weeks after Pyle had written it.
Writing from Tunisia, in April 1943, Ernie Pyle told how the Americans laid out their dead in cemeteries with hundreds of graves, marked with crosses and the Star of David. He said that in contrast, the Germans buried their dead in smaller roadside plots outlined with white stones.
"In one German cemetery of about a hundred graves, we found 11 Americans... Their graves are identical with those of the Germans except that beneath the names on the wooden crosses is printed 'Amerikaner,' and below that the Army serial number. We presume their dog tags were buried with them. On one of the graves ... is also printed: 'T-40.' The Germans apparently thought that was part of his number. Actually it only showed that the man had his first anti-tetanus shot in 1940."
Ernie Pyle Has Connections in High and Low Places
Although Ernie and his Scripps-Howard bosses often contacted each other by cable, he operated autonomously most of the time, without editors supervising him. He roamed around following stories and telling them. Not all of his stories were about men in foxholes. General Omar Bradley and General Dwight Eisenhower were his friends and he even had friends in the White House.
When Ernie needed air plane passage home from England as he did in 1941, he asked his bosses to contact the president of Pan American Airlines for a seat on one of their new Clippers. Or he asked his friend from Indiana, Lowell Mellett, adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to intervene at the White House. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, complimented Ernie in her column “My Day,” and Ernie wrote her several letters thanking her for her support. Ernie thanked the people who praised his work, another secret to his success.
He interrupted his reporting several times to return home on leave to care for Jerry while they were still married and to recuperate from combat. His reputation and popularity continued to grow, mostly because he wrote about soldiers, not the battles they fought, in his columns. He named names, which endeared him to soldiers and their families. Ernie Pyle had a talent for telling the story of “G.I. Joe,” sons, brothers, husbands. He became the friend of fighting men from the lowliest private to the four star general.
World War II Correspondent-Europe
One of Ernie Pyle’s most widely read and reprinted columns, "The Death of Captain Waskow," appeared when the Allied forces were bogged down at the Anzio beachhead in Italy in January 1944. Ernie wrote about the death of Captain Henry Waskow of Belton, Texas, an exceptionally popular leader in January 10, 1944. His men brought his body down from a mountainside by mule and placed it next to four others, but the soldiers didn’t want to leave Captain Waskow.
"The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave ... one soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, 'God damn it.' That's all he said and then he walked away ...
"Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: 'I sure am sorry, sir.'
"Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand in his own, he sat there for a full five minutes ... looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
“And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”
Ernie Pyle wrote a column in 1944 advocating “fight pay” for all of the soldiers in combat to match the “flight pay” that airmen were paid. Congress passed a law awarding $10 a month extra pay for combat infantrymen which they named “The Ernie Pyle Bill.”
In 1944, Ernie Pyle won the Pulitzer prize for distinguished correspondence, one of a number of prizes he won during the war. He wasn’t at the New York ceremonies for the presentation of the award which took place on D Day.
Instead, he went ashore in Normandy on D Day plus one. He wrote about preparations to invade at Normandy, “The best way I can describe this vast armada and the frantic urgency of the traffic is to suggest that you visualize New York city on its busiest day of the year and then just enlarge that scene until it takes in all the ocean the human eye can reach clear around the horizon and over the horizon. There are dozens of times that many.”
Although he didn’t really want to land on the Normandy Beach one day after D Day, Ernie went because General Bradley asked him to go. In June 1944, Ernie Pyle landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus one and walked down the coast littered with the flotsam and jetsam of war. The columns that he wrote about Normandy were multi-layered. He described jumbled rolls of soldier’s packs, socks, sewing kits, diaries, hand grenades and letters from home with the addresses on each neatly razored out for security reasons. Ernie said, “I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.”
The Allied drive across France to Paris severely taxed Ernie Pyle’s stamina and his inner resources. The constant encounters with dead people unnerved him, just as it did many soldiers during the war. Ernie nearly died from an accidental bombing by the Army Air Forces at the beginning of Operation Cobra near Saint Lo in Normandy.
When he rode into Paris on August 25, 1944, Ernie Pyle had been overseas 29 months, spent nearly a year on the front lines, and had written more than 700,000 words of newspaper copy. By September 1944, he had gone gray at the temples, his face had seamed, and his reddish hair thinned. He confided to his millsions of readers, "I don't think I could go on and keep sane." In a September 5, 1944, column Pyle said that he had "lost track of the point of the war," and he hoped that a rest in his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home would restore him enough to go "war horsing around the Pacific." His devoted GI's understood. They wrote him sincere farewells and wished him luck.
Time at Home, 1944
Ernie and Jerry Pyle both loved Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ernie noted in Yank Magazine that “Lots of people don’t like the country around Albuquerque, but it suits me fine. As soon as I finish this damned assignment, I’m going back there and settle down for a long time.”
In late 1944, Ernie Pyle returned home to Albuquerque and the adulation that he received frightened and overwhelmed him. His books, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, compiled from his columns, were on the best seller lists. He received honorary degrees from Indiana University and the University of New Mexico. Over the past two years he had earned more than half million dollars and his name was a household word. Whenever he showed himself in public, he attracted attention.
For a time Ernie Pyle loafed at the white clapboard cottage that he and Jerry shared in Albuquerque. He would sit there with “That Girl” and stare for hours across the lonely mesa, but the front haunted him. He wanted to spent time alone with Jerry to rebuild their relationship, but tourists, a movie, and just being famous constantly interrupted him. So many tourists stopped by his home that he had to rent a hotel room in town to do his writing. Jerry tried to commit suicide during this visit home. Despite the pull of “That Girl” and home, Ernie Pyle headed to the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Ernie Pyle in the Pacific
After less than six months at home, Ernie Pyle headed to the Pacific Theater of war early in 1945. Friends speculated about why Pyle went to the Pacific. When Roy W. Howard suggested Ernie go to the Pacific in the fall of 1943, he opposed the idea. Perhaps Ernie didn’t want to return to the bloody fighting in Europe that he had witnessed in 1944. He did tell friends that he didn’t want to go to the Pacific, but publicly he said that he owed it to the men and women serving there to tell their stories. He knew that he would be deemed unpatriotic if he stopped writing about the war.
After he decided to cover events in the Pacific, Ernie argued with the United States Navy about its rule that he couldn’t use the real names of sailors in his columns. The Navy bent the rule just for him which caused some jealous among the other war correspondents. He took his first cruise aboard the aircraft carrier USS Cabot and he categorized his life on board as easy compared to his infantry experience in Europe.
He wrote unflattering portraits of the Navy and soon he weathered a storm of criticism for apparently short changing the perils of war in the Pacific. During the controversy he admitted that his heart still marched with the infantrymen in Europe, but he set his jaw and resolved to report the Navy efforts in the invasion of Okinawa. Aboard ship, Ernie seemed distant and impersonal, but his attitude changed when he went ashore.
Erie Pyle had plans for after the War. He thought he would take to the road again with “That Girl” and write in a world returned to peace and quiet. In his last letter to George A. Carlin, head of the United Feature Syndicate which he worked for 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.”
Ernie Pyle landed with Marines on Okinawa on April 1, 1945. He explained why he focused on the ordinary GI’s instead of officers and war strategy in his columns:
"I haven't written about the Big Picture because I don't know anything about it ... our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents ... and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves."
On April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle found himself landing on the tiny island of Ie Shima, off the coast of Okinawa with the Army’s 77th Division. He was headed for the front lines. Contrary to some reports, Ernie Pyle did not predict his own death. His letters reveal that like most of the troops he dreaded invasions and landings. Once he reached the shore, he went about his normal business. He was nervous about the landings on Okinawa, but he landed on a part of the beach with practically no Japanese resistance.
A story about Ernie Pyle on Ie Shima in the Stars and Stripes records that a wounded soldier with a bloody bandage on his arm came up the slope and asked Pyle for his autograph. “Don’t usually collect these things, but I wanted yours. Thanks a lot,” he said sheepishly.
Ernie Pyle Is Killed on Ie Shima
Many of the correspondents had left, but Pyle was writing a story about a tank destroyer team so wearing green fatigues and a cap with a marine emblem on April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle traveled in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, of Helena, Montana, commanding officer of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division and three other men. The Army had cleared the road running parallel to the beach and two or three hundred yards inland, free of mines and hundreds of truck, tanks and jeeps had driven over it.
As the jeep reached a crossroads, laying in open country with no cover, an enemy machine gun stationed on a coral ridge about a third of a mile away opened fire on them. The men stopped the jeep and jumped into a ditch. Ernie Pyle and Lt. Colonel Coolidge raised their heads to look for the other men. They spotted the other and Ernie smiled and asked Lt. Colonel Coolidge, “Are you all right?”
Suddenly, the machine gun opened fire again and Ernie Pyle died instantly from a bullet that penetrated the left side of his helmet and entered the left temple. The Ernie Pyle State Historical site in Dana, Indiana, has a Government telegram to Ernie’s father stating that he had been killed by a sniper, but whether by machine gun fire or sniper, Ernie Pyle died instantly.
Colonel Coolidge told the story of Ernie Pyle’s death as reported in the New York Times. “We were moving down the road in our jeep. 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. A little later Pyle and I raised up to look around. Another burst hit the road over our heads and I feel 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.”
Colonel Coolidge was visibly shaken as he told the facts of Ernie Pyle’s death. “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 Shima unless we are notified otherwise.”
According to a story by Evans Wylie, in Yank Magazine, several groups immediately tried to recover Ernie Pyle’s body with tank support, but they were driven back each time. Late in the afternoon, Chaplain N.B. Saucier of Coffeeville, Mississippi, received permission to try to recover Ernie Pyle’s body. Litter bearers T-S Paul Shapiro of Passaic, New Jersey, Sgt. Minter Moore of Elkins, West Virginia; Cpl. Robert Toaz of Huntington, New York and Sgt. Arthur Austin of Tekamah, Nebraska volunteered to go with him. The men reached the crossroads and crawled up the ditch, dragging the litter behind them.
Army Signal Corps photographer Cpl. Alexander Roberts of New York City went ahead of them and was the first man to reach Ernie Pyle’s body.
Ernie Pyle lay on his back, much like he peacefully sleeping, his face unmarked. His hands were fooled across his chest and he clutched his battered cap rumored to be the same one that he had carried through all of his other campaigns. The litter bearers placed his body on the stretcher and slowly inched back along the ditch, still under sniper fire. He was three and a half weeks short of his 45th birthday.
Ernie Pyle’s Last Column
His pocket Ernie Pyle carried notes for a last column about where he had been, and the imminent victory over Germany:
"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. ...
"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 millstones 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 across 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...
"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, by the multiple thousands. That's the difference ..."
Before the soldiers buried Ernie Pyle, they read the remainder of the column they found in his pocket. "Dead men by mass production, in one country after another, month after month and year after year," he had written. "Dead men in winter and dead men in summer; dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous."
Ernie Pyle couldn’t know that he captured not only the lives and deaths of G.I.’s in World War II, but soldiers in every war that human beings have fought before and since then.
Ernie Pyle is Buried
World War II would grind on for another four months, but it had ended for Ernie Pyle, one of its most famous war correspondents. He was buried with his helmet on in a long row of graves, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The Navy, Marine Corps, and Army all sent representatives to the ten minute service. In 1949, Pyle was reburied at the Army Cemetery on Okinawa and then moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
The military built a monument on Ie Shima on the spot where Ernie Pyle was killed. The monument resembled a truncated triangle shape of the Statue of Liberty with the Division’s insignia on the upper part with text engraved below. The inscription says: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
When the United States returned Okinawa to Japanese control after the war’s end, the Ernie Pyle monument was one of just three American memorials allowed to stay in place. Ernie Pyle was one of the few American civilians killed during World War II to be awarded the Purple Heart.
The Stars and Stripes newspaper carried the story of his death on Thursday April 19, 1945. In a front article it said: Ernie Pyle is Killed In Action on Pacific Isle. “Ernie Pyle is dead. The beloved little guy who lived with America’s fighting men and reported the war through their eyes died as he might have wished – at the front.”
His Family Mourns Ernie Pyle
Mrs. Geraldine Pyle, “That Girl”, in the Ernie Pyle stories, was grief-stricken at the news of her husband’s death. She had been notified of his death before it was announced in Washington, but she had received no details.
In Dana, Indiana, William C. Pyle, the father of Ernie Pyle, and Mrs. Mary Bales, his Aunt Mary, were stunned by the news of his death. Mrs. Ella Goforth, a neighbor, told newspaper reporters that Ernie Pyle’s father and aunt had received the news of his death from another neighbor who had heard about it on the radio. “They’re not taking the news very well,” Mrs. Goforth said.
A Nation Mourns Ernie Pyle
Ernie Pyle’s death came just six days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. When people from President Harry S. Truman to millions of ordinary people heard that he had been killed, they cried. President Truman issued a statement saying, “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 how wisely, how warm heartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”
Like many of his columns about ordinary soldiers, Ernie Pyle’s death made the front pages of newspapers across the county and an entire nation still at war and mourning a beloved president mourned him as well.
General 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.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to Ernie Pyle by saying, “The GI’s in Europe – and that means all of us here – have lost one of our best and most understanding friends, Blue Network correspondent Herbert Clark reported in a broadcast from Paris.
General Mark W. Clark paid tribute to Ernie Pyle by saying, “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.”
Albuquerque and the State of New Mexico were stunned by the news that Ernie Pyle had been killed. The Seventeenth Legislature of New Mexico, by resolution, declared August 3, Ernie Pyle’s birthday, as “Ernie Pyle Day.”
Mayor of Albuquerque Clyde Tingley said, “Ernie Pyle was Albuquerque’s adopted son and all of us sorely grieve his passing.”
Soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who had become almost as famous for his GI cartoons as Ernie Pyle had become for his newspaper columns, said, “Ernie is mourned by the Army.”
Bill Mauldin correctly identified the reaction of the troops. Even in the midst of heavy fighting, the troops mourned the death of Ernie Pyle.
Army photographer Alexander Roberts wrote to Lee Miller, Ernie Pyle’s friend and his first biographer. “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.”
Newspapers across American editorialized about Ernie Pyle, who gave their readers a front line glimpse of World War II. John Hohenberg, in his book on foreign correspondents, described that contribution best when he said:
“No reader of Ernie Pyle's World War II pieces for Scripps-Howard newspapers could fail to be moved by his personal involvement with G.I. Joe, a powerful factor in creating a toughened national morale.”
The Ernie Pyle, B-29 Superfortress
The employees of Boeing-Wichita using funds earned through the 7th War Loan Drive, paid for and built a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Serial Number 44-70118. On May 1, 1945, they dedicated The Ernie Pyle. Lieutenant Howard F. Lippincott, USAF, and his crew ferried the Ernie Pyle to the Pacific War Theater.
Initially, The Ernie Pyle was assigned to the Second Air Force, Kearney AAFKS and sent to the Twentieth Air Force, Pacific Theater of Operations on May 27, 1945. When the Superfortress reached its operations based in the Pacific, the nose art was removed because the base commander thought it would become a prime Japanese target for propaganda reasons.
The Ernie Pyle survived the war and returned to the United States on October 22, 1945. It was stored at Pyote AAFTX and disposed as surplus on March 25, 1953.
The Story of G.I. Joe, the 1945 War Film
The Story of G.I. Joe, a 1945 American War film, is credited in prints as Ernie Pyle’s Story of G.I. Joe. The story of the film is told through the eyes of Ernie Pyle, Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, and Ernie Pyle cooperated in making the film which William Wellman directed. The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Robert Mitchum’s only nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Burgess Meredith played Ernie Pyle, Robert Mitchum starred as Lt. Capt. Bill Walker, Freddie Steele played Sgt. Steve Warnicki, and Wally Cassell played Pvt. Dondaro. Jimmy Lloyd portrayed Pvt. Spencer, John R. Reilly played Pvt. Robert ‘Wingless’ Murphy, and William Murphy played Pvt. Charles R. Mew. Dorothy Coonan Wellman played Nurse Lt. Elizabeth “Red” Murphy. Sicily and Italy combat Veterans of the campaigns in Africa played themselves.
The film’s story is a tribute to the American World War II infantryman, G.I. Joe, told from Ernie Pyle’s perspectives and with dialogue and narration from his columns. The film concentrates on C Company 18th Infantry, that Ernie Pyle follows into combat in Tunisia and Italy.
The Story of G.I. Joe premiered two months to the day after Ernie Pyle was killed in action on Ie Shima. In his February 14, 1945, column that he titled “In the Movies,” Ernie Pyle commented, “They are still calling it The Story of G.I. Joe. I never did like the title, but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try.”
The Ernie Pyle Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Pyle and his wife, Jerry, had this house built in 1940 after years of roving the country as a columnist for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Pyle was born in Indiana and Jerry was from Minnesota, but they chose Albuquerque for a home after visiting many times and developing, in Pyle's words, "a deep, unreasoning affection" for New Mexico.
Jerry Pyle died a few months after Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper’s bullet on Ie Shima in May 1945. In 1948, the City of Albuquerque acquired the house from the Pyle estate and converted it into the first branch library of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System, naming it the Ernie Pyle Library.
Although the library is an active branch, the appearance of the Pyle Home was carefully preserved. Both the interior rooms and the landscaping to the picket fence that Pyle built and the grave marker of his dog Cheetah, have been preserved as Pyle memorabilia and archives. Thousands of people from around the world visit the library. The Pyle Library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 22, 1997, and on September 20, 2006, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Indiana University
At Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where Ernie Pyle began his journalism training, the School of Journalism is housed in “Ernie Pyle Hall,” and scholarships created soon after his death with the proceeds of the world premiere of The Story of G.I. Joe, are still awarded to students with ability in journalism and a military service record.
Most of the archives containing his material at found at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana, Indiana, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society. The Ernie Pyle state Historic site at Dana, Indiana includes Ernie Pyle’s boyhood home which is fully restored. It features a replica of a World War II Quonset hut that contains many of Ernie Pyle’s army artifacts including his Purple Heart and many other mementos that people from the community where Pyle grew up donated.
Ernie Pyle Obituary Photograph Resurfaces Years After Ernie Pyle’s Death
Army photographer Alexander Roberts had taken a photo of Ernie Pyle shortly after the Japanese sniper’s bullet had killed him on April 18, 1945. The photograph shows Ernie Pyle shortly after the machine gun bullet killed him. He is wearing Army fatigues, boots and a helmet. He is lying on back, his folded hands holding a military cap. There is a think trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth, but otherwise he looks like he is peacefully sleeping.
Although Lee Miller, Ernie Pyle’s first biographer and AP archivists believed that the photograph had never been published, it had indeed been published two times. The December 14, 1979, edition of the Burlington North Carolina Daily Times-News published the photograph and it was published in the 1983 memoir, buddy Ernie Pyle: World War II’s Most Beloved Typewriter Soldier by retired Army and AP photographer Rudy Faircloth.
Alexander Roberts, the Army photographer who had crawled forward under fire to take the picture said that military officials had withheld it. Then in June 2008, 63 years after Ernie Pyle died on Ie Shima, the photograph resurfaced. The Associated Press inquired about the Alexander Robert negative and photo at eight military museums and history centers and none had heard of it. The National Archives & Records Administration was one of the archives that the Associated Press asked about the photograph and the most likely place where it would be. Edward McCarter, NARA’s top still photos archivist, commented that with all of the photo research done on World War II, and thousands of letters requesting information about the holdings of the NARA’s holdings, “My guess is it would have been ‘discovered’ by a researcher of staff member by now.”
Edward McCarter speculated that the prints taken from Army photographer’s negative at the time of Pyle’s death, “would appear to be the only record that the photo was actually made.”
Veterans who served aboard the USS Panamint, a navy combinations ship in the Okinawa campaign kept at least two such prints of the Alexander Roberts photo of Ernie Pyle. The two veterans never met, but they acquired their photos in similar ways and both of them recognized how important the photograph was to posterity. Retired naval officer Richard Strasser, 88, of Goshen, Indiana, remembered Ernie Pyle visiting the Panamint just before he was killed. Strasser said that he had a friend named George who ran the Panamint’s darkroom and George gave him a package of pictures after Japan surrender in August 1945.
Several months after Strasser had returned to civilian life, he opened the envelope and to his surprise, he found the picture of Ernie Pyle. He said that at the time Ernie’s widow Jerry Pyle was still living and he considered sending the photograph to her. “But I had mixed feeling about it and in the end I did nothing,” he said.
Strasser provided his photograph, a crisp contact print from the 4-by-5-inch negative, to the Associated Press. He also made it available to the Newseum, a $435 million news museum in Washington, D.C. The Newseum’s managing editor, Margaret Engel, said that the photo had strong historical interest, especially because of the circumstances of Ernie Pyle’s death. “It remains a compelling story for students of journalism and the war.”
The other print of the Alexander Roberts picture came from Ex-Petty Officer Joseph T. Bannan, 82, of Boynton Beach Florida, who joined the USS Panamint’s crew in May 1945 after a kamikaze damaged his own ship. He said that he got his Pyle photo from a ship’s photographer that he remembers only as “Joe from Philadelphia.”
Bannan remembered that “Joe” told him that he had been ordered to destroy the negative because it would adversely affect the morale of the American public. In 2004, he donated copies of the photograph to the Wright Museum, The Ernie Pyle State Historical Site at Dana, Indiana, and the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
James Tobin, is a professor at Miami University of Ohio, and the author of an Ernie Pyle biography published in 1997. He said of the photograph, “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.”
Ernie Pyle's Letters Revealed His Humanity
Feelings of inadequacy haunted Ernie Pyle for his entire life. “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me,” he wrote. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her own newspaper column, My Day, “I have read everything he has sent from overseas and recommended his writing to all Americans. For three years Ernie Pyle’s columns had entered more than 14 million homes like personal letters from the front. The families of soldiers prayed for Ernie Pyle like they prayed for their own sons. International fame, love, and admiration didn’t erase Ernie Pyle’s insecurities.
James Tobin, one of Pye’s biographers, noted that “sadness verging on bitterness always colored Ernie Pyle’s early years,” and Tobin said that Pyle’s adult personal life held much unhappiness.
The office of Owen V. Johnson Indiana University journalism professor and historian is located in Ernie Pyle Hall on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. He is working his way through over 1,200 letters that Ernie Pyle wrote to friends, family, and his editors at Scripps Howard. Professor Johnson will publish some of the letters and perhaps a CD of the entire collection.
Some of the letters tarnish Ernie Pyle’s reputation as a saint. Some of the letters contain obscenities, sexual fantasies, despair, accounts of drunken stupors and extra marital affairs and critiques of his colleagues. In a letter to his bosses at Scripps-Howard dated September 24, 1941, Ernie Pyle outlined his situation and explained why he had fallen behind in his work. He offered to resign if he couldn’t be granted a leave of absence to care for Jerry, his wife, who was ill.
During his ten years of writing columns, Ernie Pyle wrote 2.5 million words, but his private letters which have never been published in full, reveal his life in ways that his columns never did. Professor Johnson said, “In reading the letters you understand what great accomplishments that Pyle’s columns were. Despite all these troubles, he turned out inspiring stories.”
Both Lee Miller and Jim Tobin used excerpts from Pyle’s letters, most of which are stored at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Ernie Pyle’s letters are written with a sense of wartime urgency and drama and are a window to the battlefront realities, according to Tobin who supports Professor Johnson’s book project. “I think Ernie was a hero and I think all cultures, including ours, need heroes. But not phony saints,” he said.
Ernie Pyle Museum is Economic Casualty
The Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana, Indiana, consisted of a Visitor Center and a Historic House. The Visitor Center exhibited feature life-size scenes based on Ernie Pyle’s writing and experiences as a World War II correspondent. The exhibits included state of the art audio and video stations and contained authentic World War II uniforms, weapons, and gear, including a 1944 Willys jeep.
The Historic House is from the farm where Ernie Pyle was born and was furnished as an early 1900s rural Indiana farmhouse.Dana, Indiana residents worked with the American Legion and the Eli Lilly Foundation to move and restore the Historic House from the farm where Ernie was born and the house was dedicated in 1976 as an Indiana State Historical Site. The Friends of Ernie Pyle worked with the Scripps Howard Foundation to build two Quonset huts to become the Site’s Visitor Center in 1995 and the permanent exhibits were completed in 1998.
The Ernie Pyle State Historical Site became a casualty of the economic downturn when the state of Indiana padlocked it in 2010. The state said that it couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year that it costs to operate the site after revenues are deducted. Artifacts are being moved to the Indiana State Museum.
Ernie Pyle Remains as a Spokesman for His Generation
For the people who lived during World War II and for those who fought it, Ernie Pyle has remained on a pedestal. Like the other journalists of the time, he supported the cause and he believed his role was helping the troops win the war against evil isms. His writing captures the quiet heroism of American troops and the courage of ordinary men as well as generals. He didn’t picture himself as a watchdog of democracy. In fact, his letters are almost completely devoid of politics.
The fact that World War II made him rich troubled Ernie Pyle. He felt uneasy making money from his books and the movie about his life, although he believed that the money would give him a financial cushion in peacetime and economic hardship. If Pyle had survived the war, his fame would have made it impossible for him to return to his quiet, anonymous travels across North America.
It is difficult to imagine what course he would have taken. Perhaps he would have written more books. His stories are still as readable today as they were when he wrote them and his powers of observation and description are still difficult to match. The generation he wrote about is rapidly passing into time, but Ernie Pyle stories allow a wide open window into that generation’s stories.
References
Pyle Ernie, Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Reprinted in Commager, Henry Steele, The Story of the Second World War (1945); Johnson, David, The London Blitz : The City Ablaze, December 29, 1940 (1981).
Books
Boomhower, Ray E. The soldier’s Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle, Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006.
Miller, Lee Graham. The Story of Ernie Pyle. Greenwood Press, 1970.
Nichols, David. Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Disptaches. Simon & Schuster, First Touchstone Edition, 1987.
Tobin, James. Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II. Modern War Studies. University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Pyle, Ernie. Brave Men. Bison Books, 2001.
Periodicals
“Ernie Pyle”, Evans Wylie, Yank Staff Correspondent. Yank Magazine, May 18, 1945, p. 4
Newspapers
Sheboygan Press, April 19, 1945, page 1.
New York Times, April 19, 1945, page 1.
"Of course I am very sick of the war and would like to leave it and yet I know I can't. I've been part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I've come to feel a responsibility to it or something. I don't know quite how to put it into words, but I feel if I left it would be like a soldier deserting." Ernie Pyle to Geraldine Seibolds Pyle, 1944
Ernest Taylor Pyle, a roving war correspondent for the Scripps Howard Newspaper chain never returned from the front lines to his front porch on the farm in Dana , Indiana. One of the 36 American war correspondents killed in World War II, he died on April 18, 1945, the victim of a Japanese sniper’s bullet, on Ie Shima, a small island off the coast of Okinawa.
In the homey style of a personal letter to a friend, Ernest Taylor Pyle wrote articles about off the beaten track and remote places across America and the people who lived there. In 1940, he went to London in time to witness the great fire bombing at the end of December. When America entered World War II, he became a war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. He accompanied Allied troops on the invasions of Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, using his homey reporting style to tell the story of the beaches and foxholes of World War II. Ernie Pyle humanized the most complex, mechanized, destructive war in history and told the stories of the men and women who fought it with empathy, humor, and sensitivity.
As John Steinbeck said, “regiments- and that is General Marshall’s war. Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage – and that is Ernie Pyle’s war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone.”
Over 300 newspapers carried Ernie Pyle’s columns and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for distinguished correspondence during 1943. He also received the Purple Heart for being wounded in action on the Anzio beachhead.
Ernie Pyle worked as an editor and not a reporter on just a few occasions. He was the first editor of a special edition of Indiana University’s student newspaper, the Daily Student, that was produced for more than 30 years at the Indiana State Fair. Two times during World War II, he helped Naval personnel edit newspapers on board ships.
Modern journalism has been hard pressed to produce an equal to Ernie Pyle, partially because of his talent and storytelling ability. His ability to tell interesting stories about ordinary people explains some of his success. Readers at home and the soldiers and sailors overseas didn’t remember all of the facts, but they did remember the stories he told. It appears that even censors were fascinated by his stories and found it difficult to black out even one line from the stories that Ernie Pyle told.
Journalism itself has changed much since Pyle’s time. Modern technologies such as the Internet and its instant communications have somewhat removed the journalist as the middleman, interpreter and teller of the stories and placed the individual in the middle of the storytelling equation. Ernie Pyle’s stories would still survive the Internet.
Ernest Taylor Pyle, Shy and Insecure
Throughout his life, Ernie Pyle said over and over again,” I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.” Ernie Pyle’s fears about not being liked were seldom realized.
Like the places he would writer about later in his career, Ernest Taylor Pyle’s birthplace was remote, located born in a corner of Indiana farm country near Dana, Indiana. His parents, William and Maria Taylor Pyle, lived in a small white farm house on a dusty country road and had spent their entire lives in farming country. They were tenants on the Sam Elder farm, located south and west of Dana. Ernest, they never called him Ernie, was born on August 3, 1900, their only child. His parents assumed that their son would follow in their farming footsteps, but even at a young age, Ernie had other ideas. He and his dog Shep would patrol the chickens. and he and Shep lay under the canopy of the ancient maple trees in his front yard dreaming of faraway places.
Ernie’s father, William “Pop” Pyle, said that Ernie liked to ride horseback but he didn’t like working with horses because horses were too slow for him. “He always said that the world was too big for him to be doing confining work here on the farm.” Ernie Pyle disliked farming and said one that “Anything was better than looking at the south end of a horse going north.”
Shy and introspective, Ernie Pyle often sat by himself during games at the country school house he attended, and later in high school he went for walks by himself. In 1918, when he was almost 18, Ernie joined the United States Navy Reserve, but World War I ended shortly after that. Ernie served only three months in World War I.
Ernie Pyle, Journalist
After the War, Ernie went to At Indiana University he worked on the Indian Daily Student in the one story brick building where the paper was assembled. Early writers about Ernie said that he Ernie Pyle took up journalism because campus wisdom rated journalism as an easy major, but the in reality Indiana University didn’t offer journalism courses until the 1930s.When he was a junior, Ernie traveled to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
In 1923, Ernie quit Indiana University a few months before he would have graduated to take a job as a cub reporter on the La Porte Indiana Herald-Argus. Some earlier versions of the story say that he left the Indiana University because of a broken heart. A girl that he had been dating gave him back his pin so she could date a doctor ten years older than she, whom she would eventually marry. Other friends said that after traveling to the Far East during his junior year, Ernie felt too confined by the university. Another story goes that when the chairman of his department heard that a newspaper in LaPorte, Indiana, needed a reporter and he recommended Ernie. The newspaper had an outstanding staff for its day. Five of its reporters had college degrees or like Ernie, had almost finished.
Within a year, Ernie went to Washington D.C. to join the staff of the Washington Daily News, a new tabloid that Roy W. Howard, head of Scripps-Howard had founded. He had also grown his journalistic roots in Indiana.
All the of the editors on the News were young, including Editor-in-Chief John M. Gleissner, a friend of Warren G. Harding, Lee G. Miller who would later write the Ernie Pyle Album-Indiana to Ie Shima. The staff of the Washington Daily News tended toward the young and Hoosier. Nelson Poynter, an Indiana University graduate later made a new for himself at the St. Petersburg, Florida Times, and Lee Miller, Ernie’s immediate boss for most of his career also came from Indiana and graduated from Harvard at age 19.
Ernie was named managing editor of the Washington Daily News and served in the position from 1923-1926. During the entire time, he fretted that he couldn’t get any writing done.
He later recalled that the story that Kirke Simpson, an Associated Press Reporter, wrote about the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery heavily influenced him the most at this point in his life. “I cried over that and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece,” he told friends
Ernie Pyle’s Writing Style
Ernie loved working at the Washington Daily News. He wrote to a friend that he had covered a press conference that President Calvin Coolidge gave, and noted that a Washington Post photograph showed him at the edge of the president’s desk.
He worked for three years as managing editor of the Washington Daily News. Copies of the memos he wrote to the staff reveal someone requiring tough, persistent, reporting and good writing. He also recognized that the placement of a story played an important part in its readership.
As Ernie matured, so did his writing and in some ways he was a writer struggling to escape a journalist’s skin. He was learning how to tell stories. He could meet journalistic deadlines, but he preferred the time to craft his work. He saw his stories. As a reporter, he rarely took notes except to record information like names and dates. He stored stories, often more than a dozen, in his mind until he had a chance to write them.
He struggled to get the words from his head and fingers to the typewriter and paper. He wrote and edited and rewrote and reedited, sometimes multiple times, trying to get the exact rhythm and the exact words. Sometimes, he admitted, his columns weren’t very good, but he was learning his craft. For much of his journalistic life he turned out six columns a week, 700 words in each column.
Ernie Pyle didn’t have to pad or embellish his stories, because he had the ability to hear and see them. He had very few complaints about the accuracy of his stories and when someone complained Pyle immediately acted. He reached back in his mind and looked at the “recordings” in his brain and recalled practically word for word, picture for picture, what had happened. Paradoxically, Ernie constantly monitored the quality of his writing and suffered deep bouts of depression about it because it never measured up to his expectations.
Ernie Pyle Married Jerry Siebolds
While Ernie worked in Washington, he met Geraldine “Jerry” Siebolds, a government worker from Minnesota. Their courtship and early married years are shrouded by time and privacy, but correspondence indicates that Ernie Pyle quickly realized that Jerry had severe problems. In fact, Jerry endured bouts of what modern doctors would call maniac depression and alcoholism and they began a tumultuous relationship. Ernie described her as “desperate within herself since the day she was born.” Apparently Jerry loved to manipulate words like Pyle did and she inspired him. Friends say that she wrote some of the columns that were credited to him.
They were quietly married in 1925 and they didn’t have a honeymoon. They went back to work after the ceremony. 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 destroying her from both within and without.
Often the Pyle drove without speaking to each other and they usually booked separate rooms in hotels. By the late 1930s, both Pyles well acutely aware that their marriage was on the verge of collapse, but neither knew how to solve their problems. When Ernie went to London to cover the London Blitz, he installed Jerry in a new house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but their marriage continued to be troubled.
Time Magazine noted on April 27, 1942, that Scripps-Howard Columnist Ernie Pyle had divorced Geraldine Siebolds Pyle. He referred to her in many of his columns as “that girl,” and after sixteen years of marriage they were divorced in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Pyles were actually divorced on April 14, 1942, and Ernie Pyle said that he hoped the divorce would shock Jerry into treatment and recovery. Before he went to Africa, he left a proxy with a good friend that Jerry could use to remarry him if she felt she was on the road to recovery. On March 10, 1943, while still in Africa, he received the news that he and Jerry had been remarried.
A Road Trip and Aviation Writing
About a year after he and Jerry were married, Ernie and Jerry took $1,000 in savings, quit their jobs, bought a Ford Roadster and camping equipment and embarked on a tour of the United States, traveling more than 9,000 miles. Ten weeks later, they pulled into New York City, broke, hungry, and with a broken down Ford Roadster.
Almost immediately Ernie found a job working nights at the Evening World and eventually moved to the day shift at the New York Post. By 1928 Ernie and Jerry had moved back to Washington, D.C. and he created a position of aviation writer for himself at the Daily News.
From 1928-1932, Ernie Pyle wrote about aviation for the Scripps-Howard papers. While he wrote about aviation, he sharpened his story telling ability and profiled the aviation profession, highlighting its 1920s heroes and heroines. He knew everybody or as Amelia Earhart said, “any aviator who didn’t know Ernie Pyle was a nobody. “
In 1932, he became managing editor of the Daily News. In 1934, Ernie returned from a trip to California where he had recuperated from a severe bout of flu. When he returned, his publisher suggested that he write some columns about his trip to fill in for Heywood Broun, the vacationing syndicated columnist. He wrote a series of eleven columns that were such a hit that G.B. Parker, editor in chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said that he found Ernie’s vacation articles had “a Mark Twain quality that knocked my eye out.”
The first Ernie Pyle column appeared on August 8, 1935, and he and Jerry traveled around North and South America while he wrote human interest features. From 1935 to 1942, Ernie and often Jerry Pyle roamed the western hemisphere and he wrote a column about his wanderings and developed into a consummate craftsman of short prose. One of his biographers, James Tobin, noted that “in the process he created “Ernie Pyle” and he studied unknown people doing extraordinary things and wrote about them.”
He traveled to Canada and wrote about the Dionne quintuplets. He visited Flemington, New Jersey and reported about the Hauptmann trial there. He and Jerry toured drought seared Montana and the Dakotas and recorded what they saw. In 1937, he wrote about people and their work and hopes and desires in Alaska. He went 1,000 miles down the Yukon and sailed Arctic seas with the Coast Guard. He wrote captivating pieces about the five days he spent with lepers at Molokai and recorded his feelings. “I felt unrighteous at being whole and clean,” he told his readers. He wrote about Devil’s Island, toured South America by plane. He crossed the United States 35 times. He covered 150,000 miles of the Western Hemisphere, wearing out three cars, and three typewriters.
Ernie Pyle wrote these experiences like a letter home to people whose life circumstances allowed them to experience such journeys only through his eyes. Ernie Pyle’s column earned a national audience when The United Features syndicate sold it to papers outside of the Scripps Howard chain in 1938, but Ernie didn’t reach his largest audience until World War II when more than 200 newspapers across the country carried his column. Later, Ernie compiled some of his columns and published them under the title of Home Country.
The London Blitz, 1940 -“They Came Just After Dark”
A trip to London at the end of 1940 to report on the Nazi bombing there catapulted Ernie Pyle to international fame. In one of his first columns, he wrote a brilliant word-picture of the biggest attack of the war. He opened his column about the Blitz in London by writing," It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire…” He went on to describe the terrible beauty of myriads of fires from the bombing lighting up the London sky. He wrote that it was “the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.” His coverage of the Nazi bombing of London in 1940 was so graphic that his dispatches were cabled back for British readers.
With his elegant and eloquent columns about the Blitz, Ernie Pyle showed Scripps-Howard that he commanded words as surely as an RAF pilot zooming in on a Heinkel bomber. Americans for the first time read word pictures about the impact of war in Europe. In 1941, a book of his columns about the Blitz in England, titled Ernie Pyle in England, was published.
Ironically, Ernie Pyle nearly missed the big London attack. For several weeks he had been marooned in Lisbon, Portugal, trying to get a flight to London. If he had been delayed for a few more weeks, he would have missed the final large scale German air attack on London.
World War II Correspondent
After the United States entered World War II, Ernie Pyle became a war correspondent for Scripps Howard. In 1942, he went to the front in Northern Africa and followed the infantry to Sicily, Italy, and France. In one of his first columns from Africa, Ernie Pyle told the story of the time that he found shelter in a ditch with a frightened Yank when a Stuka dived and strafed. When the Stuka had gone, he tapped the soldier’s shoulder and said, “Whew, that was close, eh?” The soldier didn’t answer. He was dead.
His reporting from North Africa in late 1942 and early 1943, his working methods, and his memory secured Ernie Pyle’s reputation as a war reporter. Ernie did not file daily stories on the fighting and the strategic situation. He looked for stories, filed them in his mind, and when he left the front lines, he wrote the stories. His readers usually read a story several weeks after Pyle had written it.
Writing from Tunisia, in April 1943, Ernie Pyle told how the Americans laid out their dead in cemeteries with hundreds of graves, marked with crosses and the Star of David. He said that in contrast, the Germans buried their dead in smaller roadside plots outlined with white stones.
"In one German cemetery of about a hundred graves, we found 11 Americans... Their graves are identical with those of the Germans except that beneath the names on the wooden crosses is printed 'Amerikaner,' and below that the Army serial number. We presume their dog tags were buried with them. On one of the graves ... is also printed: 'T-40.' The Germans apparently thought that was part of his number. Actually it only showed that the man had his first anti-tetanus shot in 1940."
Ernie Pyle Has Connections in High and Low Places
Although Ernie and his Scripps-Howard bosses often contacted each other by cable, he operated autonomously most of the time, without editors supervising him. He roamed around following stories and telling them. Not all of his stories were about men in foxholes. General Omar Bradley and General Dwight Eisenhower were his friends and he even had friends in the White House.
When Ernie needed air plane passage home from England as he did in 1941, he asked his bosses to contact the president of Pan American Airlines for a seat on one of their new Clippers. Or he asked his friend from Indiana, Lowell Mellett, adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to intervene at the White House. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, complimented Ernie in her column “My Day,” and Ernie wrote her several letters thanking her for her support. Ernie thanked the people who praised his work, another secret to his success.
He interrupted his reporting several times to return home on leave to care for Jerry while they were still married and to recuperate from combat. His reputation and popularity continued to grow, mostly because he wrote about soldiers, not the battles they fought, in his columns. He named names, which endeared him to soldiers and their families. Ernie Pyle had a talent for telling the story of “G.I. Joe,” sons, brothers, husbands. He became the friend of fighting men from the lowliest private to the four star general.
World War II Correspondent-Europe
One of Ernie Pyle’s most widely read and reprinted columns, "The Death of Captain Waskow," appeared when the Allied forces were bogged down at the Anzio beachhead in Italy in January 1944. Ernie wrote about the death of Captain Henry Waskow of Belton, Texas, an exceptionally popular leader in January 10, 1944. His men brought his body down from a mountainside by mule and placed it next to four others, but the soldiers didn’t want to leave Captain Waskow.
"The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave ... one soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, 'God damn it.' That's all he said and then he walked away ...
"Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: 'I sure am sorry, sir.'
"Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand in his own, he sat there for a full five minutes ... looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
“And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.”
Ernie Pyle wrote a column in 1944 advocating “fight pay” for all of the soldiers in combat to match the “flight pay” that airmen were paid. Congress passed a law awarding $10 a month extra pay for combat infantrymen which they named “The Ernie Pyle Bill.”
In 1944, Ernie Pyle won the Pulitzer prize for distinguished correspondence, one of a number of prizes he won during the war. He wasn’t at the New York ceremonies for the presentation of the award which took place on D Day.
Instead, he went ashore in Normandy on D Day plus one. He wrote about preparations to invade at Normandy, “The best way I can describe this vast armada and the frantic urgency of the traffic is to suggest that you visualize New York city on its busiest day of the year and then just enlarge that scene until it takes in all the ocean the human eye can reach clear around the horizon and over the horizon. There are dozens of times that many.”
Although he didn’t really want to land on the Normandy Beach one day after D Day, Ernie went because General Bradley asked him to go. In June 1944, Ernie Pyle landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus one and walked down the coast littered with the flotsam and jetsam of war. The columns that he wrote about Normandy were multi-layered. He described jumbled rolls of soldier’s packs, socks, sewing kits, diaries, hand grenades and letters from home with the addresses on each neatly razored out for security reasons. Ernie said, “I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.”
The Allied drive across France to Paris severely taxed Ernie Pyle’s stamina and his inner resources. The constant encounters with dead people unnerved him, just as it did many soldiers during the war. Ernie nearly died from an accidental bombing by the Army Air Forces at the beginning of Operation Cobra near Saint Lo in Normandy.
When he rode into Paris on August 25, 1944, Ernie Pyle had been overseas 29 months, spent nearly a year on the front lines, and had written more than 700,000 words of newspaper copy. By September 1944, he had gone gray at the temples, his face had seamed, and his reddish hair thinned. He confided to his millsions of readers, "I don't think I could go on and keep sane." In a September 5, 1944, column Pyle said that he had "lost track of the point of the war," and he hoped that a rest in his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home would restore him enough to go "war horsing around the Pacific." His devoted GI's understood. They wrote him sincere farewells and wished him luck.
Time at Home, 1944
Ernie and Jerry Pyle both loved Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ernie noted in Yank Magazine that “Lots of people don’t like the country around Albuquerque, but it suits me fine. As soon as I finish this damned assignment, I’m going back there and settle down for a long time.”
In late 1944, Ernie Pyle returned home to Albuquerque and the adulation that he received frightened and overwhelmed him. His books, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, compiled from his columns, were on the best seller lists. He received honorary degrees from Indiana University and the University of New Mexico. Over the past two years he had earned more than half million dollars and his name was a household word. Whenever he showed himself in public, he attracted attention.
For a time Ernie Pyle loafed at the white clapboard cottage that he and Jerry shared in Albuquerque. He would sit there with “That Girl” and stare for hours across the lonely mesa, but the front haunted him. He wanted to spent time alone with Jerry to rebuild their relationship, but tourists, a movie, and just being famous constantly interrupted him. So many tourists stopped by his home that he had to rent a hotel room in town to do his writing. Jerry tried to commit suicide during this visit home. Despite the pull of “That Girl” and home, Ernie Pyle headed to the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Ernie Pyle in the Pacific
After less than six months at home, Ernie Pyle headed to the Pacific Theater of war early in 1945. Friends speculated about why Pyle went to the Pacific. When Roy W. Howard suggested Ernie go to the Pacific in the fall of 1943, he opposed the idea. Perhaps Ernie didn’t want to return to the bloody fighting in Europe that he had witnessed in 1944. He did tell friends that he didn’t want to go to the Pacific, but publicly he said that he owed it to the men and women serving there to tell their stories. He knew that he would be deemed unpatriotic if he stopped writing about the war.
After he decided to cover events in the Pacific, Ernie argued with the United States Navy about its rule that he couldn’t use the real names of sailors in his columns. The Navy bent the rule just for him which caused some jealous among the other war correspondents. He took his first cruise aboard the aircraft carrier USS Cabot and he categorized his life on board as easy compared to his infantry experience in Europe.
He wrote unflattering portraits of the Navy and soon he weathered a storm of criticism for apparently short changing the perils of war in the Pacific. During the controversy he admitted that his heart still marched with the infantrymen in Europe, but he set his jaw and resolved to report the Navy efforts in the invasion of Okinawa. Aboard ship, Ernie seemed distant and impersonal, but his attitude changed when he went ashore.
Erie Pyle had plans for after the War. He thought he would take to the road again with “That Girl” and write in a world returned to peace and quiet. In his last letter to George A. Carlin, head of the United Feature Syndicate which he worked for 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.”
Ernie Pyle landed with Marines on Okinawa on April 1, 1945. He explained why he focused on the ordinary GI’s instead of officers and war strategy in his columns:
"I haven't written about the Big Picture because I don't know anything about it ... our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents ... and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves."
On April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle found himself landing on the tiny island of Ie Shima, off the coast of Okinawa with the Army’s 77th Division. He was headed for the front lines. Contrary to some reports, Ernie Pyle did not predict his own death. His letters reveal that like most of the troops he dreaded invasions and landings. Once he reached the shore, he went about his normal business. He was nervous about the landings on Okinawa, but he landed on a part of the beach with practically no Japanese resistance.
A story about Ernie Pyle on Ie Shima in the Stars and Stripes records that a wounded soldier with a bloody bandage on his arm came up the slope and asked Pyle for his autograph. “Don’t usually collect these things, but I wanted yours. Thanks a lot,” he said sheepishly.
Ernie Pyle Is Killed on Ie Shima
Many of the correspondents had left, but Pyle was writing a story about a tank destroyer team so wearing green fatigues and a cap with a marine emblem on April 18, 1945, Ernie Pyle traveled in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, of Helena, Montana, commanding officer of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division and three other men. The Army had cleared the road running parallel to the beach and two or three hundred yards inland, free of mines and hundreds of truck, tanks and jeeps had driven over it.
As the jeep reached a crossroads, laying in open country with no cover, an enemy machine gun stationed on a coral ridge about a third of a mile away opened fire on them. The men stopped the jeep and jumped into a ditch. Ernie Pyle and Lt. Colonel Coolidge raised their heads to look for the other men. They spotted the other and Ernie smiled and asked Lt. Colonel Coolidge, “Are you all right?”
Suddenly, the machine gun opened fire again and Ernie Pyle died instantly from a bullet that penetrated the left side of his helmet and entered the left temple. The Ernie Pyle State Historical site in Dana, Indiana, has a Government telegram to Ernie’s father stating that he had been killed by a sniper, but whether by machine gun fire or sniper, Ernie Pyle died instantly.
Colonel Coolidge told the story of Ernie Pyle’s death as reported in the New York Times. “We were moving down the road in our jeep. 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. A little later Pyle and I raised up to look around. Another burst hit the road over our heads and I feel 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.”
Colonel Coolidge was visibly shaken as he told the facts of Ernie Pyle’s death. “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 Shima unless we are notified otherwise.”
According to a story by Evans Wylie, in Yank Magazine, several groups immediately tried to recover Ernie Pyle’s body with tank support, but they were driven back each time. Late in the afternoon, Chaplain N.B. Saucier of Coffeeville, Mississippi, received permission to try to recover Ernie Pyle’s body. Litter bearers T-S Paul Shapiro of Passaic, New Jersey, Sgt. Minter Moore of Elkins, West Virginia; Cpl. Robert Toaz of Huntington, New York and Sgt. Arthur Austin of Tekamah, Nebraska volunteered to go with him. The men reached the crossroads and crawled up the ditch, dragging the litter behind them.
Army Signal Corps photographer Cpl. Alexander Roberts of New York City went ahead of them and was the first man to reach Ernie Pyle’s body.
Ernie Pyle lay on his back, much like he peacefully sleeping, his face unmarked. His hands were fooled across his chest and he clutched his battered cap rumored to be the same one that he had carried through all of his other campaigns. The litter bearers placed his body on the stretcher and slowly inched back along the ditch, still under sniper fire. He was three and a half weeks short of his 45th birthday.
Ernie Pyle’s Last Column
His pocket Ernie Pyle carried notes for a last column about where he had been, and the imminent victory over Germany:
"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. ...
"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 millstones 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 across 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...
"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, by the multiple thousands. That's the difference ..."
Before the soldiers buried Ernie Pyle, they read the remainder of the column they found in his pocket. "Dead men by mass production, in one country after another, month after month and year after year," he had written. "Dead men in winter and dead men in summer; dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous."
Ernie Pyle couldn’t know that he captured not only the lives and deaths of G.I.’s in World War II, but soldiers in every war that human beings have fought before and since then.
Ernie Pyle is Buried
World War II would grind on for another four months, but it had ended for Ernie Pyle, one of its most famous war correspondents. He was buried with his helmet on in a long row of graves, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The Navy, Marine Corps, and Army all sent representatives to the ten minute service. In 1949, Pyle was reburied at the Army Cemetery on Okinawa and then moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
The military built a monument on Ie Shima on the spot where Ernie Pyle was killed. The monument resembled a truncated triangle shape of the Statue of Liberty with the Division’s insignia on the upper part with text engraved below. The inscription says: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
When the United States returned Okinawa to Japanese control after the war’s end, the Ernie Pyle monument was one of just three American memorials allowed to stay in place. Ernie Pyle was one of the few American civilians killed during World War II to be awarded the Purple Heart.
The Stars and Stripes newspaper carried the story of his death on Thursday April 19, 1945. In a front article it said: Ernie Pyle is Killed In Action on Pacific Isle. “Ernie Pyle is dead. The beloved little guy who lived with America’s fighting men and reported the war through their eyes died as he might have wished – at the front.”
His Family Mourns Ernie Pyle
Mrs. Geraldine Pyle, “That Girl”, in the Ernie Pyle stories, was grief-stricken at the news of her husband’s death. She had been notified of his death before it was announced in Washington, but she had received no details.
In Dana, Indiana, William C. Pyle, the father of Ernie Pyle, and Mrs. Mary Bales, his Aunt Mary, were stunned by the news of his death. Mrs. Ella Goforth, a neighbor, told newspaper reporters that Ernie Pyle’s father and aunt had received the news of his death from another neighbor who had heard about it on the radio. “They’re not taking the news very well,” Mrs. Goforth said.
A Nation Mourns Ernie Pyle
Ernie Pyle’s death came just six days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. When people from President Harry S. Truman to millions of ordinary people heard that he had been killed, they cried. President Truman issued a statement saying, “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 how wisely, how warm heartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”
Like many of his columns about ordinary soldiers, Ernie Pyle’s death made the front pages of newspapers across the county and an entire nation still at war and mourning a beloved president mourned him as well.
General 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.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower paid tribute to Ernie Pyle by saying, “The GI’s in Europe – and that means all of us here – have lost one of our best and most understanding friends, Blue Network correspondent Herbert Clark reported in a broadcast from Paris.
General Mark W. Clark paid tribute to Ernie Pyle by saying, “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.”
Albuquerque and the State of New Mexico were stunned by the news that Ernie Pyle had been killed. The Seventeenth Legislature of New Mexico, by resolution, declared August 3, Ernie Pyle’s birthday, as “Ernie Pyle Day.”
Mayor of Albuquerque Clyde Tingley said, “Ernie Pyle was Albuquerque’s adopted son and all of us sorely grieve his passing.”
Soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who had become almost as famous for his GI cartoons as Ernie Pyle had become for his newspaper columns, said, “Ernie is mourned by the Army.”
Bill Mauldin correctly identified the reaction of the troops. Even in the midst of heavy fighting, the troops mourned the death of Ernie Pyle.
Army photographer Alexander Roberts wrote to Lee Miller, Ernie Pyle’s friend and his first biographer. “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.”
Newspapers across American editorialized about Ernie Pyle, who gave their readers a front line glimpse of World War II. John Hohenberg, in his book on foreign correspondents, described that contribution best when he said:
“No reader of Ernie Pyle's World War II pieces for Scripps-Howard newspapers could fail to be moved by his personal involvement with G.I. Joe, a powerful factor in creating a toughened national morale.”
The Ernie Pyle, B-29 Superfortress
The employees of Boeing-Wichita using funds earned through the 7th War Loan Drive, paid for and built a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, Serial Number 44-70118. On May 1, 1945, they dedicated The Ernie Pyle. Lieutenant Howard F. Lippincott, USAF, and his crew ferried the Ernie Pyle to the Pacific War Theater.
Initially, The Ernie Pyle was assigned to the Second Air Force, Kearney AAFKS and sent to the Twentieth Air Force, Pacific Theater of Operations on May 27, 1945. When the Superfortress reached its operations based in the Pacific, the nose art was removed because the base commander thought it would become a prime Japanese target for propaganda reasons.
The Ernie Pyle survived the war and returned to the United States on October 22, 1945. It was stored at Pyote AAFTX and disposed as surplus on March 25, 1953.
The Story of G.I. Joe, the 1945 War Film
The Story of G.I. Joe, a 1945 American War film, is credited in prints as Ernie Pyle’s Story of G.I. Joe. The story of the film is told through the eyes of Ernie Pyle, Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent, and Ernie Pyle cooperated in making the film which William Wellman directed. The Story of G.I. Joe was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Robert Mitchum’s only nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Burgess Meredith played Ernie Pyle, Robert Mitchum starred as Lt. Capt. Bill Walker, Freddie Steele played Sgt. Steve Warnicki, and Wally Cassell played Pvt. Dondaro. Jimmy Lloyd portrayed Pvt. Spencer, John R. Reilly played Pvt. Robert ‘Wingless’ Murphy, and William Murphy played Pvt. Charles R. Mew. Dorothy Coonan Wellman played Nurse Lt. Elizabeth “Red” Murphy. Sicily and Italy combat Veterans of the campaigns in Africa played themselves.
The film’s story is a tribute to the American World War II infantryman, G.I. Joe, told from Ernie Pyle’s perspectives and with dialogue and narration from his columns. The film concentrates on C Company 18th Infantry, that Ernie Pyle follows into combat in Tunisia and Italy.
The Story of G.I. Joe premiered two months to the day after Ernie Pyle was killed in action on Ie Shima. In his February 14, 1945, column that he titled “In the Movies,” Ernie Pyle commented, “They are still calling it The Story of G.I. Joe. I never did like the title, but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try.”
The Ernie Pyle Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Pyle and his wife, Jerry, had this house built in 1940 after years of roving the country as a columnist for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Pyle was born in Indiana and Jerry was from Minnesota, but they chose Albuquerque for a home after visiting many times and developing, in Pyle's words, "a deep, unreasoning affection" for New Mexico.
Jerry Pyle died a few months after Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper’s bullet on Ie Shima in May 1945. In 1948, the City of Albuquerque acquired the house from the Pyle estate and converted it into the first branch library of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System, naming it the Ernie Pyle Library.
Although the library is an active branch, the appearance of the Pyle Home was carefully preserved. Both the interior rooms and the landscaping to the picket fence that Pyle built and the grave marker of his dog Cheetah, have been preserved as Pyle memorabilia and archives. Thousands of people from around the world visit the library. The Pyle Library was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 22, 1997, and on September 20, 2006, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Indiana University
At Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where Ernie Pyle began his journalism training, the School of Journalism is housed in “Ernie Pyle Hall,” and scholarships created soon after his death with the proceeds of the world premiere of The Story of G.I. Joe, are still awarded to students with ability in journalism and a military service record.
Most of the archives containing his material at found at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana, Indiana, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society. The Ernie Pyle state Historic site at Dana, Indiana includes Ernie Pyle’s boyhood home which is fully restored. It features a replica of a World War II Quonset hut that contains many of Ernie Pyle’s army artifacts including his Purple Heart and many other mementos that people from the community where Pyle grew up donated.
Ernie Pyle Obituary Photograph Resurfaces Years After Ernie Pyle’s Death
Army photographer Alexander Roberts had taken a photo of Ernie Pyle shortly after the Japanese sniper’s bullet had killed him on April 18, 1945. The photograph shows Ernie Pyle shortly after the machine gun bullet killed him. He is wearing Army fatigues, boots and a helmet. He is lying on back, his folded hands holding a military cap. There is a think trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth, but otherwise he looks like he is peacefully sleeping.
Although Lee Miller, Ernie Pyle’s first biographer and AP archivists believed that the photograph had never been published, it had indeed been published two times. The December 14, 1979, edition of the Burlington North Carolina Daily Times-News published the photograph and it was published in the 1983 memoir, buddy Ernie Pyle: World War II’s Most Beloved Typewriter Soldier by retired Army and AP photographer Rudy Faircloth.
Alexander Roberts, the Army photographer who had crawled forward under fire to take the picture said that military officials had withheld it. Then in June 2008, 63 years after Ernie Pyle died on Ie Shima, the photograph resurfaced. The Associated Press inquired about the Alexander Robert negative and photo at eight military museums and history centers and none had heard of it. The National Archives & Records Administration was one of the archives that the Associated Press asked about the photograph and the most likely place where it would be. Edward McCarter, NARA’s top still photos archivist, commented that with all of the photo research done on World War II, and thousands of letters requesting information about the holdings of the NARA’s holdings, “My guess is it would have been ‘discovered’ by a researcher of staff member by now.”
Edward McCarter speculated that the prints taken from Army photographer’s negative at the time of Pyle’s death, “would appear to be the only record that the photo was actually made.”
Veterans who served aboard the USS Panamint, a navy combinations ship in the Okinawa campaign kept at least two such prints of the Alexander Roberts photo of Ernie Pyle. The two veterans never met, but they acquired their photos in similar ways and both of them recognized how important the photograph was to posterity. Retired naval officer Richard Strasser, 88, of Goshen, Indiana, remembered Ernie Pyle visiting the Panamint just before he was killed. Strasser said that he had a friend named George who ran the Panamint’s darkroom and George gave him a package of pictures after Japan surrender in August 1945.
Several months after Strasser had returned to civilian life, he opened the envelope and to his surprise, he found the picture of Ernie Pyle. He said that at the time Ernie’s widow Jerry Pyle was still living and he considered sending the photograph to her. “But I had mixed feeling about it and in the end I did nothing,” he said.
Strasser provided his photograph, a crisp contact print from the 4-by-5-inch negative, to the Associated Press. He also made it available to the Newseum, a $435 million news museum in Washington, D.C. The Newseum’s managing editor, Margaret Engel, said that the photo had strong historical interest, especially because of the circumstances of Ernie Pyle’s death. “It remains a compelling story for students of journalism and the war.”
The other print of the Alexander Roberts picture came from Ex-Petty Officer Joseph T. Bannan, 82, of Boynton Beach Florida, who joined the USS Panamint’s crew in May 1945 after a kamikaze damaged his own ship. He said that he got his Pyle photo from a ship’s photographer that he remembers only as “Joe from Philadelphia.”
Bannan remembered that “Joe” told him that he had been ordered to destroy the negative because it would adversely affect the morale of the American public. In 2004, he donated copies of the photograph to the Wright Museum, The Ernie Pyle State Historical Site at Dana, Indiana, and the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
James Tobin, is a professor at Miami University of Ohio, and the author of an Ernie Pyle biography published in 1997. He said of the photograph, “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.”
Ernie Pyle's Letters Revealed His Humanity
Feelings of inadequacy haunted Ernie Pyle for his entire life. “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me,” he wrote. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her own newspaper column, My Day, “I have read everything he has sent from overseas and recommended his writing to all Americans. For three years Ernie Pyle’s columns had entered more than 14 million homes like personal letters from the front. The families of soldiers prayed for Ernie Pyle like they prayed for their own sons. International fame, love, and admiration didn’t erase Ernie Pyle’s insecurities.
James Tobin, one of Pye’s biographers, noted that “sadness verging on bitterness always colored Ernie Pyle’s early years,” and Tobin said that Pyle’s adult personal life held much unhappiness.
The office of Owen V. Johnson Indiana University journalism professor and historian is located in Ernie Pyle Hall on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. He is working his way through over 1,200 letters that Ernie Pyle wrote to friends, family, and his editors at Scripps Howard. Professor Johnson will publish some of the letters and perhaps a CD of the entire collection.
Some of the letters tarnish Ernie Pyle’s reputation as a saint. Some of the letters contain obscenities, sexual fantasies, despair, accounts of drunken stupors and extra marital affairs and critiques of his colleagues. In a letter to his bosses at Scripps-Howard dated September 24, 1941, Ernie Pyle outlined his situation and explained why he had fallen behind in his work. He offered to resign if he couldn’t be granted a leave of absence to care for Jerry, his wife, who was ill.
During his ten years of writing columns, Ernie Pyle wrote 2.5 million words, but his private letters which have never been published in full, reveal his life in ways that his columns never did. Professor Johnson said, “In reading the letters you understand what great accomplishments that Pyle’s columns were. Despite all these troubles, he turned out inspiring stories.”
Both Lee Miller and Jim Tobin used excerpts from Pyle’s letters, most of which are stored at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Ernie Pyle’s letters are written with a sense of wartime urgency and drama and are a window to the battlefront realities, according to Tobin who supports Professor Johnson’s book project. “I think Ernie was a hero and I think all cultures, including ours, need heroes. But not phony saints,” he said.
Ernie Pyle Museum is Economic Casualty
The Ernie Pyle State Historic Site at Dana, Indiana, consisted of a Visitor Center and a Historic House. The Visitor Center exhibited feature life-size scenes based on Ernie Pyle’s writing and experiences as a World War II correspondent. The exhibits included state of the art audio and video stations and contained authentic World War II uniforms, weapons, and gear, including a 1944 Willys jeep.
The Historic House is from the farm where Ernie Pyle was born and was furnished as an early 1900s rural Indiana farmhouse.Dana, Indiana residents worked with the American Legion and the Eli Lilly Foundation to move and restore the Historic House from the farm where Ernie was born and the house was dedicated in 1976 as an Indiana State Historical Site. The Friends of Ernie Pyle worked with the Scripps Howard Foundation to build two Quonset huts to become the Site’s Visitor Center in 1995 and the permanent exhibits were completed in 1998.
The Ernie Pyle State Historical Site became a casualty of the economic downturn when the state of Indiana padlocked it in 2010. The state said that it couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year that it costs to operate the site after revenues are deducted. Artifacts are being moved to the Indiana State Museum.
Ernie Pyle Remains as a Spokesman for His Generation
For the people who lived during World War II and for those who fought it, Ernie Pyle has remained on a pedestal. Like the other journalists of the time, he supported the cause and he believed his role was helping the troops win the war against evil isms. His writing captures the quiet heroism of American troops and the courage of ordinary men as well as generals. He didn’t picture himself as a watchdog of democracy. In fact, his letters are almost completely devoid of politics.
The fact that World War II made him rich troubled Ernie Pyle. He felt uneasy making money from his books and the movie about his life, although he believed that the money would give him a financial cushion in peacetime and economic hardship. If Pyle had survived the war, his fame would have made it impossible for him to return to his quiet, anonymous travels across North America.
It is difficult to imagine what course he would have taken. Perhaps he would have written more books. His stories are still as readable today as they were when he wrote them and his powers of observation and description are still difficult to match. The generation he wrote about is rapidly passing into time, but Ernie Pyle stories allow a wide open window into that generation’s stories.
References
Pyle Ernie, Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Reprinted in Commager, Henry Steele, The Story of the Second World War (1945); Johnson, David, The London Blitz : The City Ablaze, December 29, 1940 (1981).
Books
Boomhower, Ray E. The soldier’s Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle, Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006.
Miller, Lee Graham. The Story of Ernie Pyle. Greenwood Press, 1970.
Nichols, David. Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Disptaches. Simon & Schuster, First Touchstone Edition, 1987.
Tobin, James. Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II. Modern War Studies. University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Pyle, Ernie. Brave Men. Bison Books, 2001.
Periodicals
“Ernie Pyle”, Evans Wylie, Yank Staff Correspondent. Yank Magazine, May 18, 1945, p. 4
Newspapers
Sheboygan Press, April 19, 1945, page 1.
New York Times, April 19, 1945, page 1.