Ernie Pyle

Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 – April 18, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II.

Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving, human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941 for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide he earned wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942–44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa.

At the time of his death in 1945, Pyle was among the best-known American war correspondents. His syndicated column was published in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers nationwide. President Harry Truman was among those who paid tribute to Pyle: "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."

Early life and education

Earnest "Ernie" Taylor Pyle was born on August 3, 1900, on the Sam Elder farm near Dana, Indiana, in rural Vermillion County, Indiana. His parents were Maria (Taylor) and William Clyde Pyle. At the time of Pyle's birth his father was a tenant farmer on the Elder property. Neither of Pyle's parents attended school beyond the eighth grade.

Pyle, an only child, disliked farming and pursued a more adventurous life. After graduating from a local high school in Bono, Lawrence County, Indiana, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War I. Pyle began his training at the University of Illinois at Champaign–Urbana, but the war ended before he could be transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station for additional training.

Pyle enrolled at Indiana University in 1919, aspiring to become a journalist. However, IU did not offer a degree in journalism at that time, so Pyle majored in economics and took as many journalism courses as he could. Pyle began studying journalism in his sophomore year, the same year he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and began working on the Indiana Daily Student, the student-written newspaper. During his junior year Pyle became the newspaper's city editor and its news editor; he also worked on the Arbutus, the campus yearbook, although he did not enjoy the desk-bound work. Pyle's simple, storytelling writing style, which he developed while a student at IU, later became his trademark style as a professional journalist and earned him millions of readers as a columnist for Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate.

In March 1922, during his junior year at IU, Pyle and three of his fraternigy brothers dropped out of school for a semester to follow the IU baseball team on a trip to Japan. Pyle and his fraternity brothers found work aboard the S.S. Keystone State. During its voyage across the Pacific Ocean, the ship docked at ports such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila, as well as in Japan before returning trip to the United States. Pyle's interest in traveling and exploring the world would continue in his later years as a reporter.

After his trip across the Pacific, Pyle returned to IU Bloomington, where he was named editor-in-chief of the Indiana Summer Student, the summer edition of the campus newspaper. During his senior year at IU, Pyle continued his work at the Daily Student and the Arbutus. He also joined Sigma Delta Chi, the journalism fraternity, and was active in other campus clubs. In addition, Pyle was selected as a senior manager of IU's football team, making him a letterman along with the other members of the team in 1922.

Pyle left school in January 1923 with only a semester remaining and without graduating from IU. He took a job as a newspaper reporter for the LaPorte Herald in LaPorte, Indiana, earning $25 a week. Pyle worked at the Herald for three months before moving to Washington, D.C., to join the staff of The Washington Daily News.

Personal life

Pyle met his future wife, Geraldine Elizabeth "Jerry" Siebolds (August 23, 1899 – November 23, 1945), a native of Minnesota, at a Halloween party in Washington, D.C., in 1923. They married in July 1925. In the early years of their marriage the couple traveled the country together. In Pyle's newspaper columns describing their trips, he often referred to her as "That Girl who rides with me."

In June 1940 Pyle purchased property about 3 miles (4.8 km) from downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had a modest, 1,145-square-foot (106.4 m2) home built on the site. The residence served as the couple's home base in the United States for the remainder of their lives.

Ernie and Jerry Pyle had a tempestuous relationship. He often complained of being ill, was a "heavy abuser of alcohol at times," and suffered from bouts of depression, later made worse from the stress of his work as a war correspondent during World War II. His wife suffered from alcoholism and periods of mental illness (depression or bipolar disorder). She also made several suicideattempts. Although the two couple divorced on April 14, 1942, they remarried by proxy in March 1943, while Pyle was covering the war in North Africa. They had no children. Newspapers reported that Jerry Pyle "took the news [of her husgand's death] bravely", but her health declined rapidly in the months following his death on April 18, 1945, while covering operations of American troops on Ie Shima. Jerry Pyle died from complications of influenza at Albuquerque, New Mexico, on November 23, 1945.

Career

Staff reporter and aviation columnist

In 1923 Pyle moved to Washington, D.C., to join the staff as a reporter for the Washington Daily News, a new Scripps-Howard tabloidnewspaper, and soon became a copy editor as well. Pyle was paid $30 a week for his services, beginning a career with Scripps-Howard that would continue for the remainder of his life. When Pyle joined the Daily News all the editors were young, including editor-in-chief John M. Gleissner, Lee G. Miller (who became a lifelong friend of Pyle) Charles M. Egan, Willis "June" Thornton Jr., and Paul McCrea.

By 1926 Pyle and his wife, Geraldine "Jerry,", had quit their jobs In ten weeks the couple traveled more than 9,000 miles across the United States in a Ford Model T roadster. After briefly working in New York City for the Evening World and the New York Post, Pyle returned to the Daily News in December 1927 to begin work on one of the country's first and its best-known aviation column, which he wrote for four years. Pyle's column appeared in syndication for the Scripps-Howard newspapers from 1928 to 1932. Although he never became an aircraft pilot, Pyle flew about 100,000 miles (160,000 km) as a passenger. As Amelia Earhart later said, "Any aviator who didn't know Pyle was a nobody."

Human-interest and columnist

In 1932, at the age of thirty-one, Pyle was named managing editor at the Daily News, serving in the position for three years before taking on a new writing assignment. In December 1934 Pyle took an extended vacation in the western United States to recuperate from a severe bout of influenza. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., and while he filled in for the paper's vacationing syndicated columnistHeywood Broun, Pyle wrote a series of eleven articles about his trip and the people he had met. The series proved popular with both readers and colleagues. G.B. ("Deac") Parker, editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said he had found in Pyle's vacation articles "a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out."

In 1935 Pyle left his position as managing editor at the Daily News to write his own national column as a roving reporter of human-interest stories for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate.[31] Over the next six years, from 1935 until early 1942, Pyle and his wife, Jerry, whom Pyle identified in his columns as "That Girl who rides with me," traveled the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and South America, writin about the interesting places he saw and people he met. Pyle's column, published under the title of the "Hoosier Vagabond," appeared six days a week in Scripps-Howard newspapers. The articles became popular with readers, earning Pyle national notoriety in the years preceding his even bigger fame as a war correspondent during World War II. Selected columns of Pyle's human interest stories were later compiled in Home Country (1947), published posthumously.

Despite his growing popularity, Pyle lacked confidence and was perpetually dissatisfied with his writing; however, he was pleased when others recognized the quality of his work. Pyle's aviation and travel reports laid the groundwork for his life as a war correspondent. Pyle continued his daily travel column until 1942, but by that time he was also writing about American soldiers serving in World War II.

World War II correspondent

Pyle initially went to London in 1940 to cover the Battle of Britain, but returned to Europe in 1942 as a war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Beginning in North Africa in late 1942, Pyle spent time with the U.S. military during the North African Campaign, the Italian campaign, and the Normandy landings. He returned to the United States in September 1943 and in September 1944, spending several week recuperating from combat stress before reluctantly agreeing to travel to the Asiatic-Pacific Theater in January 1945. Pyle was covering the invasion of Okinawa when he was killed in April 1945.

Death

On more than one occasion Pyle was noted for having premonitions of his own death. Before landing he wrote letters to his friend, Paige Cavanaugh, and playwright, Robert E. Sherwood, predicting that he might not survive the war.

On April 17, 1945, Pyle came ashore with the U.S. Army's 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th "Liberty Patch" Division, on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima), a small island northwest of Okinawa that Allied Forces had already captured but not yet been cleared of enemy soldiers. The following day, after local enemy opposition had supposedly been neutralized, Pyle was traveling by jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, the commanding officer of the 305th, and three additional officers toward Coolidge's new command post when the vehicle came under fire from an enemy machine gunner. The men immediately took cover in a nearby ditch. "A little later Pyle and I raised up to look around," Coolidge reported. "Another burst hit the road over our heads ... I looked at Ernie and saw he had been hit." A machine-gun bullet had entered Pyle's left temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly.

Pyle was buried wearing his helmet, among other battle casualties on Ie Shima, between the remains of an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. In tribute to their friend, the men of the 77th Infantry Division erected a monument that still stands at the site of his death. Its inscription reads: "At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945." Echoing the sentiment of the men serving in the Pacific theater, General Eisenhower said: "The GIs in Europe––and that means all of us––have lost one of our best and most understanding friends."

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who frequently quoted Pyle's war dispatches in her newspaper column, "My Day," paid tribute to him in her column the day after his death: "I shall never forget how much I enjoyed meeting him here in the White House last year," she wrote, "and how much I admired this frail and modest man who could endure hardships because he loved his job and our men." PresidentHarry S. Truman also paid tribute to Pyle: "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."

After the war Pyle's remains moved to a U.S. military cemetery on Okinawa. In 1949 his remains were interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii.