Book Review: 'Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II'
Cover Design: Paul Smith. Photo Credit: © Lilly Library, Indiana University. © 2006 Simon & Schuster/Free Press On April 18, 1945, a 45-year-old war correspondent named Ernest Taylor Pyle was accompanying Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge, commanding officer of the U.S. Army's 305th Infantry Regiment, part of the 77th Infantry Division, on a jeep with three other officers on the small island known as Ie Shima (now Iejima), off the coast of Okinawa. Pyle, who was better known to his readers and the U.S. service personnel he wrote about in a nationally-syndicated column as "Ernie," had landed ashore with the 77th Division just one day before. As the five men drove to Coolidge's new headquarters in an area that was not yet cleared of Japanese defenders, a lone enemy gunner fired his Nambu machine gun at the jeep, forcing its occupants to take cover in a nearby ditch. "After a moment," writes author James Tobin in Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitn