Friday, April 18, marks the 80^th anniversary of the death or Ernest “Ernie” Taylor Pyle, the American journalist and war correspondent who won awards and the hearts of the American people for his stories from the soldier’s point of view in the battles during World War11

A reporter for Scripps- Howard newspapers since 1935,Pyle was known for his folksy style and ability to write extraordinary stories about ordinary people.

When the nation went to war in 1941, Pyle was assigned by the newspaper syndicate to cover the European and Pacific theaters, writing his stories about the men fighting the battles from their point of view. For his efforts, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for writing about the “dogface” infantry soldiers. He was killed by enemy fire during the Battle of Okinawa and at his wish was buried in Leija, Japan.

Born Indiana on August 3, 1900, Pyle was the son of a tenant farmer who disliked farming and enlisted in the Naval Reserve during World War I and began studying at the University of Illinois. When the war ended, he enrolled at Indiana University but since there was no degree in journalism at the time, he majored in economics but took several courses in journalism

He became a reporter for the student -written newspaper, then its editor, and eventually a columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspapers because of his unique writing style. In between, he traveled extensively, joined a journalism fraternity and left school to be a reporter for a daily newspaper ,later for the Washington Daily News.

He married in 1925, and he and his wife traveled extensively while he wrote, often about her as “the girl who rides with me.” Both suffered from alcoholism he also from depression, they divorced, re-married by proxy while he was in Europe during the war, and she died eight months after he did from declining health and influenza.

Pyle covered the Battle of Britain in 1940, then returned to Europe in 1942 as a war correspondent, spending time with military during the North African, and Italian campaigns and the Normandy landings. He suffered combat stress related issues and spent several weeks recuperating in the United States in 1944 before returning to the Asiatic-Pacific theater.

He was killed covering the Invasion of Okinawa.

He had come ashore with the Army’s 305th Infantry Regiment,77^th Infantry, and was traveling by jeep with the commanding officer and three other officers toward a new command post when the vehicle came under fire from a Japanese machine gun.

The men immediately took cover in a nearby ditch. According to the officers, Pyle raised his head to look around, another burst hit the road Pyle was hit by a machine-gun bullet that entered his temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly. He was buried, wearing his helmet, and President Dwight Eisenhower said at the time of his death, “The GIs in Europe––and that means all of us––have lost one of our best and most understanding friends.”

After the war, his remains were moved to the US Military Cemetery on Okinawa and later to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. His headstone describes him as “the pre-eminent war correspondent of his era.”

He was awarded the Purple Heart, a rare honor for non-militants, has had a ship, library, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, an island a highway rest stop, and a reserve center named for him, in addition to receiving numerous military, journalism and citizen awards as well as a scholarship for journalists.

His most famous column is The Death of Captain Waskow

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ITALY, January 10, 1944 – In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my own father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.

“He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

“I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair,” another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself, and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.

I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. “This one is Captain Waskow,” one of them said quietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.” That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.” He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

“I sure am sorry, sir.”

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Source: Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches, edited by David Nichols, pp. 42-44

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