Pyle lives on for WWII veterans 60th anniversary nears of war correspondent's death.

NILES -- Long before correspondents were covering the war in Iraq, Ernie Pyle was entrenched with American troops in Europe and the South Pacific during World War II, telling their stories as only he could.

The trail-blazing reporter from Dana, Ind., captivated Americans with his folksy style. He was just as popular with servicemen, who ate with him on the front lines and viewed him as one of their own.

He died in the same manner as many of those he wrote about, succumbing to the burst of a Japanese machine gun on the small island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa.

The date was April 18, 1945 -- three days shy of 60 years ago. Also on the island were two Niles soldiers, Jim Gallagher and Andy McCormick, who had entered the service on the same day and would serve together throughout the war.

"We were on the beach at Ie Shima waiting to advance inland,'' McCormick later wrote. "The famous war correspondent, Ernie Pyle, was off to our right flank, eagerly pushing forward to get the best story possible.

"Out of nowhere, shots rang out, and the 'Soldier's Soldier' fell mortally wounded by a machine gun burst.''

McCormick died eight years ago but his widow, Kathleen McCormick, of Niles, recalled that he had talked with Pyle on several occasions. Her husband, she said, was impressed by Pyle's demeanor.

"Andy would say mostly what a common, ordinary, down-to-earth person Ernie Pyle was,'' she said.

Like McCormick, Gallagher, 81, was with the 132nd Combat Engineers, a battalion attached to the 77th Infantry Division. He said he never talked to Pyle but once ate with him in the same tent.

Gallagher said word of Pyle's death shocked the most hardened U.S. soldiers, some of whom cried openly.

"Pyle was a GI's GI. ... Here he was eating with us one day, and then he was gone,'' he said.

Pyle was just 44 when he died. The son of a tenant farmer, he was an only child.

He studied journalism at Indiana University and left school in 1923 to take a reporter's job at the LaPorte Herald. He was managing editor of the Washington (D.C.) Daily News, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, for three years before he took a job with Scripps-Howard as a roving columnist.

Pyle's coverage of the war began in England and included an account of the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. In that memorable column, he referred to the belongings of dead soldiers as the "long thin line of anguish.''

"It extends in a thin little line, just like a high-water mark, for miles along the beach,'' he wrote. "This is the strewn personal gear, gear that will never be needed again, of those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe. ...

"Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand.''

His books became best sellers, and along with his syndicated columns earned him the then-princely sum of $69,000 one year. He won a Pulitzer Prize, but his success came at a price. He grew depressed by the death that surrounded him, and by the fact that his mother, Maria, had died while he was away.

It didn't help that his wife, Geraldine, suffered from mental illness and tried to commit suicide when Pyle returned home after three years on the front lines.

He committed her to a mental hospital before he left for the Pacific theater and Okinawa. Riding in a Jeep, he was approaching the front when shots from a machine gun raked the vehicle.

Pyle dove into a ditch and, after the fire had ceased, raised his head to locate the source of the gunfire. A subsequent burst struck him in the temple, just below the rim of his helmet.

A monument erected in his honor reads, "On this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy -- Ernie Pyle -- 18 April 1945.''

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What I Always Wanted to Be

Published 4/30/2004 12:07:39 AM

The first good book I ever read, when I was about nine, was Ernie Pyle's Here Is Your War, dispatches from the North Africa campaign in World War II. During the war, Pyle held a place of regard and honor in American culture and letters comparable to that of Will Rogers. His Scripps-Howard columns ran in hundreds of newspapers. He was "one of us," the G.I.s said. When a Japanese sniper killed Pyle in 1945, the nation wept.

Nowadays, people know Ernie Pyle mainly as a name attached to various institutions. Our own Wlady Pleszczynski didn't know who he was till he (Wlady) arrived at Indiana University and found the J-school building named after Pyle. (Pyle was a Hoosier, born in 1900, and he left Indiana's journalism school a semester short of graduation.) There is the generically perceived "Ernie Pyle Award" for journalism. Actually, there are three. Scripps-Howard awards one to an outstanding journalism school student and another to working journalists for human interest writing. Anheuser-Busch awards another for "lifetime achievement" to various established notables like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

The student award doesn't seem to be much of a predictor of journalistic success, or even of a career in journalism. I Googled the names of the 11 winners from 1990 through 2000. Nineteen ninety-three winner Janel Shoun seems to be the most widely published; she works, unsurprisingly, for Scripps-Howard. E. Knight Stivender, 1999 winner, minus the first initial these days, is a staff writer for the Nashville Tennessean. Nellan Young, winner in 2000, writes for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, with some of her articles syndicated by Scripps-Howard.

Nineteen ninety-six winner Catheryne Pully went to work right out of school as an aide to a Congressman, while 1998 honoree Carly Irion apparently competes in rodeos. Of the rest, nothing.

THAT'S ALL KIND OF A SHAME, because Ernie Pyle could really write. There in my grandmother's living room, reading in the dusty shafts of South Dakota light, I was mainlining the good stuff. One is tempted to quote whole sheets of Pyle, and I'm going to quote a lot, because he wrote in long strophes, not just one-liners, and all are worth reading today. The following come from Brave Men, Pyle's book about the Sicily invasion, the Italian campaign, the runup to Normandy, and the D-Day invasion itself.

Pyle could convey the awful grandeur of war:

"Suddenly we were aware of a scene that will shake me every time I think of it for the rest of my life. It was our invasion fleet, formed there far out at sea, waiting for us…On the horizon it resembled a distant city. It covered half the skyline, and the dull-colored camouflaged ships stood indistinctly against the curve of the dark water like a solid formation of uncountable structures blending together. Even to be a part of it was frightening."

He would describe things other writers did not think to describe, here, the firing of tracer shells from ships into the Sicily shoreline:

"A golden flash would appear way off in the darkness. Out of the flash would come a tiny red dot. That was the big shell. Almost instantly, it covered the first quarter of the total distance. Then uncannily it would drop to a much slower speed, as though it had put on a brake…It amazingly kept on in an almost flat trajectory as though it were on wheels being propelled on a level road. Finally after a flight so long it seemed unbelievable that the thing could still be in the air, it would disappear in a little flash as it hit something on the shore. Long afterward the sound of the heavy explosion came rolling across the water."

Pyle's readers loved his personal sketches of individual soldiers and sailors, which always included their addresses:

"Joe Raymer, electrician's mate first class, of 51 South Burgess Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, was a married man with a daughter four years old…Of medium height, he was a pleasant fellow with a little silver in his hair and a cigar in his mouth. Before the war, Joe was a traveling salesman, and that's what he intended to go back to. He worked for the Pillsbury flour people -- had the central-southern Ohio territory. He was a hot shot and no fooling. The year before he went back in the Navy he sold more pancake flour than anybody else in America, and won himself a $500 bonus."

Pyle could be funny, as in this description of his stay in a field hospital, where he found himself felled by a fever. His doctor had just gotten news of the birth of his second child:

"He was so overjoyed he gave me an extra shot of morphine, and I was asleep before I could say, 'Congratulations!'"

He could break your heart, as his own was broken:

"The dying man was left utterly alone, just lying there in his litter on the ground, lying in an aisle, because the tent was full. Of course it couldn't be otherwise, but the aloneness of that man as he went through the last minutes of his life was what tormented me. I felt like going over and at least holding his hand while he died, but it would have been out of order and I didn't do it. I wish now I had."

And in his description of awful weariness that overcame fighting men and correspondents alike, Pyle eerily prefigured his own death:

"We were grimy, mentally as well as physically. We'd drained our emotions until they cringed from being called out from hiding. We looked at bravery and death and battlefield waste and new countries almost as blind men, seeing only faintly and not really wanting to see at all."

ONE MORE INSTITUTION, now forgotten. Apparently April 18, the day Pyle died (sometimes reported as April 17, 1945, because of confusion over the International Date Line), is now Columnist's Day. Jed, Shawn, Bill, Wlady, who knew? A day for us.

I was lucky. There in my grandmother's living room when I was nine, reading Ernie Pyle, I found out what I wanted to be.

Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover, Massachusetts.

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