Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle (1900-1945) was America's most beloved and famous war correspondent during World War II. His sympathetic accounts of the ordinary GI made him the champion of American fighting men.

Born in a little white farmhouse near Dana, Indiana, on August 3, 1900, to William C. and Maria Pyle, Earnest (Ernie) Taylor Pyle later wrote in one of his columns: "I wasn't born in a log cabin, but I did start driving a team in the fields when I was nine years old, if that helps any." He attended Indiana University for three and a half years, majoring in journalism because his classmates considered it "a breeze."

A few months before graduation in 1923 he quit college to take a job as a cub reporter on the La Porte (Indiana) Herald-Argus. Soon after, he was hired as a copy editor by the Washington Daily News. There he met Geraldine Siebolds of Stillwater, Minnesota. In 1926 they were married. Pyle quit his job, drew out his savings to purchase a Model-T Ford roadster, and the young couple began the first of their many driving trips together around the United States. Ending their vacation in New York City, Pyle went to work as a copyreader on the Evening World and on the Evening Post. In 1928 he returned to the Daily News as telegraph editor, then aviation columnist, and from 1932 to 1935 as managing editor.

Wearied of desk work, Pyle started writing pieces as a roving reporter for the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers in 1935. In the next six years he and his wife, known to millions of readers as "that girl who rides with me, " travelled over 200, 000 miles "by practically all forms of locomotion, including piggyback, " Pyle wrote in one of his columns in 1940. Visiting every country in the Western Hemisphere but two and crossing the United States some 30 times, "we have stayed in more than eight hundred hotels… flown in sixty-six different airplanes, ridden on twenty-nine different boats, walked two hundred miles, gone through five sets of tires and put out approximately $2, 500 in tips." Each day's experience became material for a column: a Nebraska town on relief, old men with wooden legs, a leper colony, Devil's Island, zipper-pants difficulties. Written simply and sensitively, like a letter to a friend back home, they revealed the world to millions of farm-bound and pavement bound Americans who could never make such journeys.

In the fall of 1940 Pyle flew to London to report the Battle of Britain. His vivid, grim accounts of England under Nazi German bombings tore at his readers' hearts, and the "little fellow"—I weigh 108 pounds, eat left-handed, am 28 inches around the waist, and still have a little hair left"—previously content to write about little things soon eclipsed the seasoned war correspondents in his cables back home. When American troops arrived in Europe, Pyle lived with them in Ireland; when they went into combat in Africa, his columns communicated all the hurt, horror, and homesickness the soldiers felt. Then Pyle marched with American troops in Sicily and Italy and landed with them in Normandy, France.

His warm, human stories about the Gls became a daily link between the fighting men and millions of American newspaper readers. His writings were read in some 300 newspapers in the United States like personal letters from the front. Throughout the war Pyle championed the common soldier; he spoke the ordinary Gl's language and made it a permanent part of American folklore. His published collections of columns, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, quickly became best-sellers and were purchased by Hollywood as the basis for a motion picture on Pyle's wartime career entitled "Gl Joe." Although his dispatches never glorified war, Pyle, more than any other correspondent, helped Americans to understand the true heroism and sacrifices of the Gls in battle.

In January 1945 Pyle went to report on the war in the Pacific. He did not relish going. He had already achieved fame and wealth. He had frequent premonitions of death—"I feel that I've used up all my chances, and I hate it. I don't want to be killed." But he journeyed across the Pacific to begin writing from foxholes again "because there's a war on and I'm part of it.… I've got to go, and I hate it." He landed in Okinawa with the Marines and trudged along the trails with the foot soldiers. On April 18, 1945, while riding a jeep toward a forward command post on the island of le Shima to cover the front-line combat, Ernie Pyle was hit by a Japanese machine-gun bullet in his left temple. He died instantly. Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal announced Pyle's death the next day, saddening the many Americans who eagerly read his column each day and all those servicemen who thought of him as their friend and spokesman. President Harry Truman best summed up Pyle's meaning to the World War II generation of Americans: "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. … He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."

Further Reading

Ernie Pyle's character and personality are clearly communicated in his writings: Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), and Brave Men (1944). His wartime reporting is analyzed in John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory, Politics and American Culture During World War II (1976) and in Richard R. Lingeman, Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front 1941-1945 (1970). In a title that highlights Pyle's work, David Nichols edited Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches (1986). Biographical data appears in his obituary in the New York Times (April 19, 1945).

Additional Sources

Faircloth, Rudy, "Buddy, " Ernie Pyle, World War II's most beloved typewriter soldier, Tabor City, N.C.: Atlantic Pub. Co., 1982.

Melzer, Richard, Ernie Pyle in the American Southwest, Santa Fe, N.M.: Sunstone Press, 1996. □

PYLE, ERNIE 1900-1945

War correspondent

The Regular American

Ernie Pyle was the most famous war correspondent the United States ever produced. A Midwesterner who quit college after three years, Pyle was the eyes and voice of the regular American, able to describe the experience of individuals at war in the language of the readers at home.

First Newspaper Job

Pyle missed World War I when his parents ordered him to graduate from high school and refused to allow him to enlist. As a senior at Indiana University in January 1923, Pyle quit to accept a job as a reporter on the La Porte (Ind.) Heraid. In just a few months he was offered a job as a reporter on the Washington Daily News.

Traveling the Country

In July 1925 he married Géraldine "Jerry" Seibolds, an intelligent but troubled civil-service worker. Calling themselves bohemians, the couple did not allow their friends to know of their marriage for many years. In summer 1926 the Pyles quit their jobs and traveled around the United States. After nine thousand miles in ten weeks, the Pyles ended up in New York, where Ernie took a job on the copy desk at the Evening World. In December 1927 Pyle returned to Washington, D.C., and the Washington Daily News, where he began the first aviation column in the United States.

Roving Columnist

In 1932 he was promoted to managing editor, a position he did not enjoy but which he kept for three years. In 1934 a long automobile trip taken to convalesce from a nasty case of influenza suggested his ultimate talent. After his return to Washington he wrote a series of well-received columns about his vacation trip. He convinced Scripps-Howard, the owner of the Washington Daily News, to employ him as a roving columnist. He began writing six columns per week to be printed in the twenty-six Scripps-Howard papers. For five years Pyle traveled throughout the United States, writing his six columns per week, the whole week's worth often completed in one day.

The Battle of Britain

In November 1940 Pyle sailed for Great Britian to report on the Battle of Britain. One of his first stories shows his talent for writing and for reporting:

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

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

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

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

The Costs of War

Over the next four years Pyle traveled through the war zones, both Atlantic and Pacific—Great Britain, Ireland, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, and the islands of the Pacific theater. As he watched the youth of the United States march across Europe and the Pacific Islands, he became fascinated at what war was doing to these young men. They were becoming killers, he realized; he told, indeed warned, the people back home that if and when their brothers, sons, and husbands returned home they would be extremely different from the way they had been when they left.

Okinawa

Pyle left for his last trip at the end of 1944. From Hawaii he traveled with units of the First Marine Division to Okinawa for the invasion that began on 1 April 1945. He went ashore five hours after the first landing and spent two days on the island. He then returned to the ship in order to write. He made several more trips to the island to accompany the Marines. On 17 April 1945 the Marines landed on Ie Shima, a tensquare-mile island west of Okinawa. Pyle did not go ashore on the landing day, as was his normal procedure, but instead waited until the following day. On 18 April 1945 he was killed by a Japanese sniper. There was a great outpouring of grief for the man who had made the life of a soldier and the experience of war available to so many. Gen. Omar Bradley commented that "I have known no finer man, no finer soldier than he."

Source:

Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyles World War II Dispatches, edited, with a biographical essay, by David Nichols (New York: Random House, 1986).

Pyle, Ernie (1900–1945), American journalist of World War II.A native of Dana, Indiana, Pyle worked on a local paper before joining the Washington [D.C.] Daily News in 1923, initially covering aviation and later serving as managing editor. In 1935, Pyle began a syndicated column for the Scripps‐Howard organization, describing his experiences motoring around the United States. Over the next four years, his stories focused on the lives of average citizens.

In 1940, Pyle received his first wartime assignment from Scripps‐Howard, covering the Blitz in England. Two years later, he started reporting on the North Africa Campaign and followed U.S. combat troops to Sicily, Italy, and France. Widely respected by both the public and the average G.I., Pyle succeeded in conveying a sense of the hardship, fear, and endurance of the individual soldier, with a special focus on the combat infantryman. At the height of his fame, his columns were carried by over 400 daily newspapers. In 1944, he won the Pulitzer Prize, and Time magazine featured him on its cover.

In 1945, Pyle, at the behest of the navy, shifted to covering the Pacific theater. He was killed by enemy fire on the island of Ie Shima near Okinawa on 18 April 1945.
[See also News Media, War, and the Military.]

Bibliography

Frederick S. Voss , Reporting the War: The Journalistic Coverage of World War II, 1994.
James Tobin , Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II, 1997.

G. Kurt Piehler

Pyle, Ernie (1900–45) journalist, born Ernest Taylor Pyle in Indiana. Pyle studied journalism at Indiana University. His first job was as a reporter for the La Porte Herald, in La Porte, Indiana; he then moved on to the Scripps-Howard paper the Washington Daily News. He worked for several other papers, including two in New York City, before returning to the Daily News, of which he became managing editor in 1932. In 1935 he became a roving reporter for Scripps-Howard, writing amusing columns based on his experiences traveling around the United States. During World War II, he reported from London on the effects of the German bombardment on the average citizen, describing vividly the courage of the British amid the amorality of war. In 1942 and 1943, he reported from North Africa, covering the bloody battles there. He followed the troops during the invasion of Italy in 1943 and won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his affecting, colorful, compassionate reporting of that campaign. He landed in Normandy the day after D-Day (June 6, 1944) and accompanied French troops into Paris. He was covering the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa when he was killed by Japanese fire.

Ernie Pyle (Ernest Taylor Pyle), 1900-1945, American journalist, b. Dana, Ind. After working (1923-32) as a reporter, an editor, and an aviation writer, he became managing editor of the Washington Daily News. In 1935 he began writing a column syndicated by the Scripps-Howard chain to about 200 newspapers. Pyle captured America's affection by writing about the lives and hopes of typical citizens. During World War II he served as a war correspondent in Europe, N Africa, and the Pacific. He became the most popular of all correspondents, writing about the experiences of enlisted men rather than about battles or the exploits of officers. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished correspondence in 1944, and the next year he was killed by Japanese machine gun fire on Ie Shima. His columns were reprinted in Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), Brave Men (1944), Last Chapter (published posthumously, 1946), and Home Country (prewar writing published posthumously, 1947).

Bibliography: See biographies by L. G. Miller (1950) and J. E. Tobin (1997); D. Nichols, ed., Ernie's War (1987).

Pyle, Ernie (Ernest Taylor Pyle) (1900–1945), journalist and war correspondent in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, whose syndicated articles formed the basis of Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), Brave Men (1944), and Last Chapter (1946). His familiar writing about American soldiers in World War II was the most popular produced during the war, and the author's death from a Japanese machine‐gun bullet on Iwo Jima made him a national hero.