While most World War II correspondents focused on casualty rates, war strategies, and equipment losses, Ernie Pyle wrote in a sense-of-place style that endeared him not only to American soldiers, but also to their friends and family members at home. Newspapers touted wide-angle news, but Pyle captured the jots and tittles.
Sometimes his prose elicited gut punches and tears, other times smiles and reflections. He earned distinction by focusing on the minutiae of everyday soldiering when it seemed the devastating war erased all semblance of humanity.
A 1991 issue of Military Review: The Professional Journal of the United States Army describes Pyle as “America’s most beloved war correspondent.” Born in Indiana in 1900, Ernest (Ernie) Taylor Pyle answered the call to war not with gun in hand, but toting a well-weathered Corona typewriter.
For six years prior to America entering the war, the journalist-editor-columnist traveled the world with his wife, Jerry, and wrote about people and places he experienced along the way. When encountering the Dust Bowl of the West, for example, he showed readers the desolate landscape, writing, “Sand was not drifting, or floating, or hanging in the air—it was shooting south, in thick veins, like air full of thrown baseballs.”
After Londoners began experiencing nightly bombings in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, Pyle asked to travel there to begin war coverage. Instead of providing readers with a dry, definitive account of Germany’s blitz on the United Kingdom, Pyle submitted copy that took them there and conveyed the Britons’ resolve. “London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs.”
After a few months in England, Pyle returned to America to learn that his writings were revered nationwide. A publisher approached him about printing his columns into a book, “Ernie Pyle in England,” which was released in late 1941.
Though reserved in character, Pyle accepted an opportunity in 1942 as a full-time war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Beginning in North Africa, he was entrenched with sundry divisions of U.S. military during various campaigns, including the Normandy landings.
By hanging out in bunkers, foxholes, and mess halls, Pyle observed soldiers’ complexities as they relayed horrible, humorous, and heartwarming battlefield encounters. Servicemen were never just fighting numbers to Pyle. His writings expressed secondhand what they experienced firsthand.
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp. …
Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
For his “everyman” writing style, he received a 1944 “correspondence” Pulitzer Prize. He returned to America in the fall of 1944 and was given a hero’s welcome. Yet, despite fatigue and a wife suffering with depression, Pyle felt he needed to continue to be there for soldiers fighting in the Pacific. In January 1945, he set sail for the Pacific theater, where he covered the fighting front as he had done in Europe. However, on April 18, 1945, just six days after President Franklin Roosevelt died of a stroke, a Japanese machine gun bullet ended Pyle’s life.
No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. More than any other man he became the spokesman of the ordinary American in arms doing so many extraordinary things. … Nobody knows how many individuals in our forces and at home he helped with his writings. But all Americans understand now how wisely, how warmheartedly, how honestly he served his country and his profession. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
