Just Plain Ernie
On April 18, 1945, a Japanese machine gunner on a small island off Okinawa killed Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent who wrote about the men in the foxholes. Within hours the news had reached the White House, a farmhouse near Dana and a little white house in Albuquerque. The newspapers he had worked for kept the record of that week.
On the morning of April 18, 1945, in a farmhouse south of Dana, Ernie Pyle’s aunt, Mary Bales, had just finished the ironing. His father, William C. Pyle, was sitting in front of the base burner. A neighbor knocked at the door.8,4
The Washington Daily News, the Scripps-Howard paper where Ernie Pyle had once been managing editor, sent a writer to Dana to report what happened next. The neighbor, Nellie Hendricks, had a sick baby at home, and Aunt Mary thought at first that was why she had come. “Oh, haven’t you heard about Ernie?” the neighbor said. She had heard it on the radio.8
Within two days, the president of the United States, the secretary of the Navy, three senators and the British minister of information had all issued statements about a newspaperman from a farm in western Indiana. “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle,” President Harry S. Truman said. “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told.”4
“It was his genius that the mass and power of our military and naval forces never obscured the men who made them,” Truman went on. “He wrote about a people in arms as people still.”4
Forrestal’s statement said Pyle’s reporting had “endeared him to the men of the armed forces throughout the world and to their families at home.” It ended: “More than any one else, he helped America to understand the heroism and sacrifices of her fighting men. For that achievement, the Nation owes him its unending gratitude.”2 From London, the British minister of information, Brendan Bracken, said: “No writer could come closer to the heart of the ordinary man than Ernie Pyle.”9
This story follows that week through two Washington papers, the Daily News and the Evening Star.
Ie Shima
The place was Ie Shima, or Ie, a small island a few miles west of Okinawa, where the Army’s 77th Infantry Division was fighting.1,3
The Navy announced how he died. Pyle, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said, “was killed instantly by Japanese machine gun fire while standing beside the regimental commanding officer of headquarters troops, 77th Division, United States Army.” He added: “At the time of his death he was with the foot soldiers, the men for whom he had the greatest admiration.”2
The fuller account came from the officer beside him. An Associated Press correspondent on Ie got it from Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge of Helena, Ark., who had been riding to the front with Pyle in a jeep.6
“We were riding along,” Coolidge said, “when we were fired on by a Jap machinegun. We dove into a ditch. A little later, Pyle and I raised up to look around. Another burst hit. I looked at Ernie and he was dead. A bullet had entered his left temple just under his helmet.”6
A Blue Network radio correspondent, Jack Hooley, broadcast a slightly different version from the island. In his account, Pyle was “shot three times thru the temple.”3 A United Press story said “three slugs ripped thru Ernie’s green and yellow camouflaged helmet.”7 The reports agree on the essentials. A hidden machine gun fired on the jeep, the two men took cover in a roadside ditch, and when they looked up the gun fired again. Vice Adm. Richmond Kelly Turner said Pyle was killed outright about 10:15 a.m.3
Getting him out took most of the day. “It was five hours after Ernie was killed before anybody could get his body,” the United Press reported. Three tanks were sent in and were driven back by the fire. Finally Cpl. Alexander Roberts, an Army photographer from New York, crawled into the clearing on his belly.7
“Ernie’s face was not twisted in pain or agony,” Roberts said. “He looked pleasant and peaceful. If there hadn’t been a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth, you might have thought he was sleeping.”7 Hooley’s broadcast said Roberts found him “clutching the fatigue cap he always wore.”3
“He was still just plain Ernie”
He was born on a farm near Dana, Ind. The Evening Star gave the date as Aug. 3, 1900; the Daily News’s own staff obituary printed 1903.2,4 His full name was Ernest Taylor Pyle. “Taylor was his mother’s maiden name,” the Daily News said. “But to everybody he was ‘Ernie.’”4 His mother had died while he was in England in March 1941.4
The Star’s obituary said he went into newspapers almost by accident. As a freshman at Indiana University, it said, he and a friend, Paige Cavanaugh, were discussing easy courses. “They tell me,” Cavanaugh said, “that journalism is a breeze.” One thing Pyle was sure of: “He was not going to be a farmer.”2
He did not finish. “A few months before graduation—despite the fact his marks were excellent—Mr. Pyle quit college and went to work as a reporter on the La Porte Herald-Argus,” the Star said. He stayed four months, then went to Washington.2 The Daily News said he had attended the university for three and a half years.4
The Daily News staff wrote about him as one of their own. “Now it is Ernie,” their piece began. “Some of us who worked with him in The Daily News city room were here today when word came he had been killed.” The paper said he had come there in 1923, on his second job after La Porte.4
His last job in that office, they wrote, “was at the managing editor’s desk. He didn’t like to be managing editor; he wanted to be a reporter. He didn’t like to hire and fire people and give orders.”4 The Star said Lowell Mellett, then the Daily News’s editor, made him managing editor in 1932, and quoted Mellett: “He was one of the best desk men anybody ever saw.”2
The Star placed him in a Hoosier line. “Ernie came to Washington steeped in the literary tradition of his native State,” it said, “the tradition of Gen. Lew Wallace, James Whitcomb Riley, Meredith Nicholson, George Ade and Booth Tarkington. He liked to write. No one realized it at the time, but he was unhappy as a desk man.”2
The column that made him famous started with a sick leave. In 1935, the Star said, “after a severe attack of influenza he went to the Southwest to recuperate and, to justify the expense, wrote a dozen travel pieces about his trip.” George B. Parker, the Scripps-Howard editor-in-chief, said those pieces “had a sort of Mark Twain quality that knocked my eyes right out.” Pyle proposed what the Star called “a sort of newspaperman’s dream assignment”: to rove the country and write.2
He married Geraldine Siebolds of Stillwater, Minn., a government worker, on July 7, 1925, the Daily News said. His readers knew her as “That Girl.”4 In 1940 they built a house in Albuquerque, N.M.2
The war
In the war he wrote from the front, and the Star called him “the Pulitzer prize winner and author of two best sellers.”2 He had come close to being killed before. In March 1944, the Star said, a beachhead villa in Italy where he had been sleeping was hit by a bomb shortly after he switched beds, and in France he “was almost killed by Allied bombers at the time Gen. Lesley McNair was killed.”2
He did not pretend to like it. The Star printed his explanation of why he was going to the Pacific after he had come home from Europe. “I’m going simply because there’s a war on and I’m part of it, and I’ve known all the time I was going back,” he had written. “I’m going simply because I’ve got to—and I hate it.”2
On the day the news of his death broke, the Star noted, readers had in hand a new Pyle column, about a night on Okinawa when he was offered two places to sleep: the company command post with the officers, or “a little gypsy-like hideout” with two enlisted men. He chose the second.2
Dana
The Daily News sent a staff writer, Edwin C. Heinke, to Dana. His story ran on April 19 under the headline “The Way the News Came to Ernie’s Folks in the Town Where He Was Born.”8
“The sad word struck Dana yesterday,” he wrote. “From farmyard to farmyard, from bank to post office, to the general store, over the circuits of the rural telephone exchange.” It reached “a modest white house with the green roof, sitting off a dusty country road south of Dana.”8
“Poor Ernest, poor Ernest,” Aunt Mary said. His father, Will, “who will be 78 this fall, could hardly say anything. He had been so proud of his famous son.”8
Neighbors filled the living room. Some stayed in the kitchen and kept coffee hot. Heinke wrote down what they said: “You must trust to the Lord. That is all we can do.” “There isn’t a soldier in the world who won’t miss him.” “He was so venturesome. He knew he had to go, but we had hoped he would be spared.”8
A neighbor, Ella Goforth, told the United Press by phone that day that the father had a letter from Ernie about two weeks before. “He told them he thought he would be home sooner than he’d expected—but of course, he didn’t know about this.”4
The pastor of the Methodist church at Newport, John Walton, stood before he left. “Shall we pray?” he asked. The neighbors bowed their heads.8
Albuquerque
In Albuquerque, the Associated Press reported, word was carried to Geraldine Pyle by her doctor, W. R. Lovelace, and Elizabeth Shaffer, the widow of the Albuquerque Tribune’s editor and a lifelong friend. The doctor said she was “prostrated with grief and under his care.”5
Shaffer wrote for Scripps-Howard the next day. Pyle, she reported, had written his wife on the eve of the Okinawa landing that it would be his last invasion. He planned to keep writing, but from farther back.8 “Couldn’t it be not true?” Geraldine Pyle asked.8
Shaffer said he had written his wife that if he did not come back, he hoped she would not give up. “I can’t bear to think of your giving up if I’m not,” he wrote.8
The island cemetery
He was buried on Ie Shima on April 20, 1945, in the 77th Division’s cemetery.9,10
The Associated Press described the service. “Machine guns beat a sharp tattoo and mortars barked at the front only a short distance ahead today as Ernie Pyle, the Doughboy’s reporter, was buried with military honors.” The division commander, Maj. Gen. Andrew D. Bruce, was there. So was Coolidge. The soldiers kept their helmets on and their pistols ready on the general’s order, because he feared sniper fire. On the way to the cemetery, the funeral party “had to duck mortar shell.”10
A corporal from Richmond, Va., Landon Seidler, made the wooden casket by hand. He also made a wooden marker to stand where Pyle was killed. The AP printed its words: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy—Ernie Pyle—18 April, 1945.”10
The United Press’s correspondent wrote that a squad of riflemen fired a volley “and the flag-draped coffin was lowered into the ground.” Even then, “the thunder of the battle the skinny little Hoosier hated but endured rose to a crescendo on nearby Okinawa.”9
Home
In Washington, Indiana Sen. Raymond E. Willis took the Senate floor. “Indiana is proud to claim Ernie Pyle today as our noblest contribution to the cause of freedom,” he said.2 Two days later, the Daily News reported that Willis wanted to give Pyle a Congressional medal to be presented to his widow. “He was our best beloved native son,” Willis said. “As a newspaperman, I feel another personal tie. For he was a martyr to his profession.”9
The same page said Indiana University Foundation directors were planning a “Pyle Journalism Memorial,” supported by his readers’ gifts. Ideas included a four-year scholarship, a journalism building and an endowment for the whole department.9
Under the words “Thanks, Pal—And Goodbye,” the Daily News printed a tribute to a man who “felt that his number was up—that he would never return alive. He had no wish to be a hero, or to die a hero’s death. He hated war with all his gentle soul.”8
How he died
Ernie Pyle was killed in action on April 18, 1945, on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa, by Japanese machine-gun fire. He had taken cover with Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge in a roadside ditch after a hidden gun fired on their jeep. When the two men raised their heads, the gun fired again.2,6 The Navy said he “was killed instantly.”2 Coolidge said a bullet entered his left temple, just under his helmet. A radio report and a United Press account said three bullets struck him.6,3,7 The Department of Veterans Affairs’ own cemetery page says he “was killed by a Japanese sniper.”11
He was buried on Ie Shima on April 20. According to the VA, he was reburied at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu on July 19, 1949.10,11