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EXCERPT
PROLOGUE: "And So It Is Over"
APRIL 18, 1945
Ernie Pyle's body lay alone for a long time in the ditch at the side of the road. Men
waited at a safe distance, looking for a chance to pull the body away. But the machine
gunner, still hidden in the coral ridge, sprayed the area whenever anyone moved. The sun
climbed high over the little Pacific island. Finally, after four hours, 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. 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." 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 warworn 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."
One of Pyle's editors at the Scripps-Howard newspapers, George Parker, spoke on the radio.
"He went into war as a newspaper correspondent among many correspondents,"
Parker said. "He came back a figure as great as the greatest -- as Eisenhower or
MacArthur or Nimitz." Parker spoke of "that strange and almost inexplainably
intimate way" in which Pyle's readers had known him. Indeed, people called newspaper
offices all day to be sure Ernie Pyle was really dead. He had seemed so alive to them.
Americans in great numbers had shared his life all through the war -- his energy and
exhaustion; his giddy enjoyments and attacks of nerves; his exhilarations and fears.
Through Pyle's eyes they had watched their "boys" go to distant wars and become
soldiers -- green and eager at the start, haggard and worn at the end. Through his eyes
they had glimpsed great vistas of battle at sea and they had stared into the faces of men
in a French field who thought they were about to die. So no one thought it strange for
President Truman to equate the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt and a newspaper reporter. For
Pyle had become far more than an ordinary reporter, more even than the most popular
journalist of his generation. He was America's eyewitness to the twentieth century's
supreme ordeal.
The job of sorting and shipping Pyle's personal effects fell to Edwin Waltz, a personable
and efficient Navy man who had been working as the correspondent's personal secretary at
Pacific Fleet headquarters at Guam. There wasn't much to go through -- a few clothes and
toilet articles; books; receipts; some snapshots and letters. Here was Pyle's passport,
stamped with the names of places he had passed through on his journeys to war -- Belfast
and London; Casablanca and Algiers; and on the last page, "Pacific Area." Waltz
also found a little pocket notebook filled with cryptic jottings in a curlecue script --
notes Pyle had made during his last weeks in France in 1944.
9 killed & 10 wounded out of 33 from D-Day to July 25 ...
...drove beyond lines...saw orange flame & smoke -- shell hit hood -- wrecked jeep --
dug hole...with hands -- our shells & their firing terrible-being alone was
worst....
Blowing holes to bury cows -- stench everywhere.
Waltz also found a handwritten draft of a newspaper column. Knowing the war in Europe
could end any day, Pyle had collected his thoughts on two sheets of paper, then marked up
the sentences with arrows and crossings out and rewordings.
"And so it is over," the draft began. "The catastrophe on one side of the
world has run its course. The day that had so long seemed would never come has come at
last." He was writing this in waters near Japan, he said, "but my heart is still
in Europe...For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse
that tolerates no divorce." He hoped Americans would celebrate the victory in Europe
with a sense of relief rather than elation, for
in the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead.
...there are so many of the living who have 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 away 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.
For unknown reasons Scripps-Howard's editors chose not to release the column draft, though
V-E Day followed Ernie's death by just three weeks. Perhaps they guessed it would have
puzzled his readers, even hurt them. Certainly it was a darker valedictory than they would
have expected from him. The war had been a harsh mistress to Ernie. First it had offered
him the means of escaping personal despair. Then, while his star rose to public heights he
had never imagined, the war had slowly driven him downward again into "flat black
depression." But he kept this mostly to himself. Instead he had offered readers a way
of seeing the war that skirted despair and stopped short of horror. His published version
of World War II had become the nation's version. And if Ernie Pyle himself had not won the
war, America's mental picture of the soldiers who had won it was largely Pyle's creation.
He and his grimy G.I's, frightened but enduring, had become the heroic symbols of what the
soldiers and their children would remember as "the Good War."
Excerpted from ERNIE PYLE'S WAR © Copyright 2001 by James Tobin. Reprinted with permission by The Free Press. All rights reserved.
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