Book Review: 'Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II'
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| 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 Eyewitness to World War II, "Ernie raised his head and the machine gunner fired again, hitting him in the left temple just below the line of his helmet."
Four hours later - even though the Nambu gunner fired at anyone that moved - Tobin writes, "a combat photographer crawled out along the road, pushing his heavy Speed-Graphic camera ahead of him."
Reaching the body, he held up the camera and snapped the shutter.
The lens captured a face at rest. The only sign of violence was a thin stream of blood running down the left cheek. Otherwise he might have been sleeping.1 His appearance was what people in the 1930s and ’40s called “common.” He had often been described as the quintessential “little guy,” but he was not unusually short. In fact, at five feet eight inches, his frame precisely matched the average height of the millions of American soldiers serving in the U.S. Army. It was his build that provoked constant references to his size—a build that once was compared accurately to the shape of a sword. His silver identification bracelet, inscribed “Ernie Pyle, War Correspondent,” could have fit the wrist of a child. The face too was very thin, with skin “the color and texture of sand.” Under the combat helmet, a wrinkled forehead sloped into a long, bald skull fringed by sandy-red hair gone gray. The nose dipped low. The teeth went off at odd angles. Upon meeting Pyle a few months earlier, the playwright Arthur Miller had thought “he might have been the nightwatchman at a deserted track crossing.”2 In death his hands were crossed at the waist, still holding the cloth fatigue cap he had worn through battles in North Africa, Italy, France, and now here in the far western Pacific, a few hundred miles from Japan.
A moment later the regimental chaplain and four non-commissioned officers crawled up with a cloth litter. They pulled the body out of the machine gunner’s line of fire and lifted it into an open truck, then drove the quarter-mile back to the command post on the beach. An Associated Press man was there. He already had sent the first bulletin:
COMMAND POST, IE SHIMA, April 18, (AP)—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, G.I.’s and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning.
The bulletin went via radio to a ship nearby, then to the United States and on to Europe. Radio picked it up. Reporters rushed to gather comment. In Germany General Omar Bradley heard the news and could not speak. In Italy General Mark Clark said, “He helped our soldiers to victory.” Bill Mauldin, the young soldier-cartoonist whose war-worn G.I.’s matched the pictures Pyle had drawn with words, said, “The only difference between Ernie’s death and that of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by the Army.” At the White House, still in mourning only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, President Harry Truman said, “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle.”
Among his possessions was a draft of a column Pyle wrote in advance of Germany's surrender in Europe, the theater of war which he had observed in person. However, this final column was not printed when it arrived at the offices of Scripps-Howard. His editor refused to publish it posthumously, citing the recent death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the fact that many readers would be confused if they read a column written by a man they'd been told was dead.
Written in Pyle's elegantly simple style - a style he had honed many years before as a roving reporter who started out writing articles about aviation, then about what Pyle saw in his travels across the country during the Great Depression - his "Victory in Europe" column is full of admiration for the GIs he had come to know well during his earlier assignments from 1942 to 1944. At the same time, it reveals a glimpse of the depression and war-weariness that the troubled and insecure man from Indiana felt.
And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last. I suppose our emotions here in the Pacific are the same as they were among Allies all over the world. First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about.
And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief-and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific.....
This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from Ardennes.
But my heart is still in Europe, and that’s why I am writing this column.
It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.
For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one’s soul, and it cannot be obliterated.
True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things.
To me the European War is old, and the Pacific War is new.
Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.
But there are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
Dead men by mass production-in one country after another-month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.
Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went way and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference,
If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call “The Good War.”
Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column—all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell.
It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent—a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death. - Publisher's book description, Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II
If you've read Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, you'll probably recognize James Tobin's Ernie Pyle, a talented man whose writing style was simple yet evocative of the subjects he wrote about. His passion for aviation helped him become one of the nation's premier chroniclers of American pilots; later, his wanderings across the U.S. - he visited all of the 48 states in the Union by September of 1936 - as a correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Though he cultivated an avatar of a genial and compassionate man, Pyle was a hypochondriac who was always coming down with something, was prone to bouts of depression, and had a tumultuous marriage with an equally troubled woman, Geraldine "Jerry" Siebold. Though she was Pyle's constant companion throughout his roving correspondent days (Pyle affectionately referred to Jerry in his columns as "That Girl That Rides With Me," their mental health issues made their marriage an often stormy one. Ernie Pyle's War chronicles their emotional ups and downs in detail, as well as Pyle's wartime liaisons with other women, especially a prominent war correspondent he met in Europe.
There are also accounts of his travels across the globe, plus a presentation of his most famous World War II column, "The Death of Captain Waskow."
Although Tobin is an admirer of America's best-known World War II correspondent, he is also not shy about discussing his human frailties. This is an honest and sometimes critical examination of Pyle, both as an ordinary person and as a professional journalist, whose attitude could be summed up as "the Army loved him because he was a team player."
Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II is a fascinating biography. It is also a reminder that Pyle's popularity with the "brass" reflected the media's cozy "we trust you guys with what you are doing" attitude toward the generals and admirals during the war, and that officers who had come of age - figuratively - during "the Good War" did not understand the more confrontational reporting style of journalists such as David Halberstam who covered the Vietnam War. Tobin devotes quite a bit of space to this theme in the afterword to the 2006 edition of Ernie Pyle's War, which was reissued in the midst of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His observations are interesting and relevant, especially for conservative readers who are convinced that the "mainstream media" is unpatriotic and disrespects America's military.
Tobin also includes a small selection of Pyle's columns from both his Depression-era travels and his coverage of World War II. Sadly, it's only a sampling of his many syndicated essays about the war, but the ones that Tobin selected give readers who have not read Pyle before a glimpse at the writing that earned Ernie the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his columns about ordinary GIs in the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe.
This is an excellent and balanced biography. I give Ernie Pyle's War a rating of four out of five stars
Source: Simon & Schuster Product Page: Ernie Pyle's War
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