America’s Most Beloved War Correspondent

By C. Bernard Bambury

Few today may recognize the name Ernie Pyle. And strangely enough, humble Old Ernie may have found that to his liking. Throughout the years 1939-1945, Ernie Pyle, the “Everyman” journalist, turned frontline WWII correspondent, was both loved and trusted, by all newspaper-reading Americans. Through his candid reporting, he illustrated the struggles and efforts, large and small, of ordinary men and women thousands of miles away, bringing the war home to the countless concerned mothers, fathers, wives and loved ones of the fighting men deployed throughout the European, North African, and Pacific theaters.

Throughout the war, Americans contributing to the war effort on the home front, comprised a vast readership, ravenous for all news, big and small, coming from the war front. And many readers were often less concerned with reading about the larger geopolitical situations or upcoming offensives, and far more interested in learning of the day in, day out, lives of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers and neighbors. Ernie Pyle, the slim, unassuming, “Everyman,” brought these images to the American public with an unrivaled style and candor. “He was the interpreter, the medium, the teacher who taught Americans what to think and how to feel about their boys overseas.”

Ernie Pyle perfected his journalistic craft as a young reporter traveling the vast, burgeoning American cities and countryside throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s.  Born August 3, 1900, to tenant farmers in Western Indiana, he developed into the quintessential “common man.”  Lacking any trace of pretention or journalistic angle, he appealed to many. Most people, especially America’s depression-era working-class, felt very comfortable opening up to Ernie about their thoughts, hopes, and even their dreams (which he could masterfully capture and present to his readers, far and wide, painting an exceptional canvas of “Human Interest” pieces, covering the everyday lives and challenges of ordinary men and women).

For example, while covering the immensely popular rise of civilian aviation throughout the 1920s, he focused less on the celebrity Charles Lindberg types, and spent most of his time conversing with the airplane mechanics, cargo and mail pilots, crop dusters and daring barnstormers. This approach gained great appeal with many readers and provided Ernie with tremendously interesting, insightful, and credible copy, featured in the dozens of newspapers carrying his articles at the time.

When war broke out, his method of crafting stories through the eyes of the “common man,” resonated with American audiences of all origins. Before the war, “He wrote about unimportant, inconspicuous people, what they thought and said … But when war broke out, his little people were transported from Omaha and Tucumcari to the slit trenches and foxholes of North Africa. What they said and thought suddenly became very important,” wrote the popular “Look” magazine in 1942. Ernie Pyle’s familiarity and natural inclination to his subject matter provided for a near bottomless well from which to draw an unending stream of storied descriptions reverberating with a rapidly growing readership throughout the country.

In James Tobin’s book “Ernie Pyle’s War,” the reader gets a special insight into what made Ernie tick. Countless WWII books and documentaries highlight Ernie Pyle’s talents and incredible contribution to the war effort, but rarely touch on the true complexity of the man. “I’ve written that war is not romantic when you’re in the midst of it … But I will have to admit there is an exhilaration in it; an inner excitement that builds up into a buoyant tenseness which is seldom achieved in peacetime.”

His hard-fought frontline coverage, and the prose he developed to confer it to the readers at home, helped connect the families with their fighting men, who were oft unable or simply unwilling to write home. “Yet here was Ernie Pyle willing to stand in for them six days a week, in comforting and colorful detail.  And the illusion that he was writing letters on behalf of the soldiers fostered a second illusion: that he was acting as their paterfamilias, a wise and omnipresent uncle looking after the boys in their time of peril.”

By examining Ernie Pyle’s personal correspondences with close friends and associates, Turner’s book reveals both the simple mirth and deep malaise he felt throughout his life. Of general ill health (the U.S. Navy rejected his early attempt at enlistment), a beloved wife often committed to the sanitarium, a crushing schedule (grown the more so by the demands of his new-found fame), bouts of heavy drinking (he was not considered an alcoholic by the standards of the time), and his increasingly frequent close calls with death in the combat zone, all served to drain Ernie till he was near empty, physically and emotionally. Covering the war in Italy in 1943: “Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules … I don’t know who the first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.” And writing of the North African campaign in 1942: “Our men can’t make this change from normal civilians into warriors and remain the same people.”

Ernie Pyle accompanied the Allied soldiers to the coast of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (saying he wanted “to ride with the boys that were going in the hard way.”). And despite increasing tension from the German bullets, artillery, and attack aircraft, he masterfully conveyed the experiences of the men fighting a fierce and determined enemy. He returned to the United States, fully spent and exhausted, just before Christmas 1944.

Though pressed by his friends, and even his employers, all urging him that he had already done more than his share for the war effort, he felt compelled to cover the lives of the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in the Pacific. “I owe it to these guys” was Ernie’s reply to their concerned pleas. His luck ran out on the Japanese island of Okinawa, when an enemy bullet struck him in his left temple.  Buried, still wearing his helmet, a simple inscription on a monument still standing today reads: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”  President Harry Truman offered a fitting tribute: “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.”

Photos courtesy of “Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II” by James Tobin.