81 years ago today, the most beloved war correspondent in American history was killed by a Japanese machine gun bullet on a small Pacific island called Ie Shima. He was 44 years old. He had survived North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. He had written about the war for four years from inside the foxholes with the men who were fighting it. The soldiers called him their buddy. When he died they built him a monument on the spot where he fell. 🎖️🇺🇸
Born August 3, 1900, near Dana, Indiana — an only child on an 80-acre grain farm in rural Vermillion County. His parents were tenant farmers who had never gone beyond the eighth grade. Ernie hated farming with every fiber of his being and pursued the one escape available to a poor boy in rural Indiana — education. He enrolled at Indiana University. He signed up for a journalism course because he thought it would be easy.
It was not easy. It was the thing he was born to do.
He left Indiana University before his senior year to take a newspaper job and never looked back. Through the 1920s and 1930s he roamed — traveling the country with his wife Jerry in a beat-up car, writing columns about ordinary American life for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. He wrote about dust storms and rodeos and small-town diners and the people who ran them. He became the first aviation columnist in American journalism. His column was syndicated to hundreds of papers nationwide.
Then the war came and everything changed.
Pyle went to Europe in 1942 as a war correspondent. What he did there — what separated him from every other reporter covering the Second World War — was simple and radical. He did not write about generals. He did not write about strategy or tactics or the movement of armies across maps. He wrote about the men in the mud.
He lived with the infantry. He ate their food, slept in their foxholes, wore their clothes, learned their names and their hometowns and what they missed most about home. He wrote about a sergeant from Ohio who kept a photograph of his daughter in his helmet. He wrote about a private from Texas who had never been more than fifty miles from the town where he was born and was now freezing in an Italian winter. He wrote about what it felt like to be exhausted and cold and afraid and to keep going anyway because the man next to you was doing the same.
Americans back home read his columns and felt — for the first time — that they understood what their sons and husbands and brothers were actually experiencing. Not the official version. The true one.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for a column called The Death of Captain Waskow — a piece about soldiers bringing the body of their beloved company commander down from a mountain in Italy on the back of a mule and the wordless grief of the men who gathered around him in the dark. It is still considered one of the finest pieces of journalism in American history.
By 1944 his column ran in more than 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies nationwide. President Roosevelt read him. Eleanor Roosevelt quoted him in her own newspaper column. General Eisenhower said Pyle understood the American fighting man better than anyone alive.
After Normandy — which Pyle covered from the beach on June 7, 1944 — he came home exhausted and broken. He had seen too much. He wrote to friends that he had become so revolted by the sight of young men dying that he had lost track of the whole point of the war. He needed to stop.
Readers wrote to him by the thousands asking him to go to the Pacific. Pressure mounted. In early 1945 Pyle went to the Pacific Theater — reluctantly, by his own admission, with a premonition he could not shake that he would not come home.
On April 17, 1945, he came ashore on Ie Shima — a small island ten miles northwest of Okinawa that Army forces had just seized. On the morning of April 18 he was riding along a road with Colonel Joseph Coolidge of the 77th Infantry Division when a Japanese machine gun opened up on their jeep. Both men jumped into a ditch. A moment later Pyle raised his head to look around.
A bullet struck him in the left temple, just below his helmet. He was killed instantly.
The soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division buried him where he fell — between an infantry private and a combat engineer — and erected a simple wooden marker that read: At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.
President Truman issued a formal statement. He said: 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.
General Eisenhower said: The GIs in Europe — and that means all of us — have lost one of our best and most understanding friends.
Ernie Pyle died six days after Franklin Roosevelt. America was absorbing two losses simultaneously — the Commander in Chief and the man who had told the country what the Commander in Chief's army was actually going through.
His body was later moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater near Honolulu. He rests there among the soldiers he wrote about.
The monument the 77th Division built on Ie Shima still stands.
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