The Press: Ernie Pyle's War

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¶ From Hollywood: I had a long talk last night with Chris Cunningham of the United Press, who was with Ernie in Eng land and North Africa. He is here advising the United Artists studios on the production of a movie based on Pyle’s book, Here Is Your War. He says that the studio is sticking fully to Ernie’s stipulation that the picture must be dedicated to the infantry and tell a true story of the G.I.s. But the movie will be full of Ernie. And it will stress his frailties throughout. It will admit his fear of battle, his apprehension about his work, his latest quirk—the conviction that now he is in France, he is going to be killed.

¶ From Normandy: It was the afternoon that Cherbourg fell, and the fighting was still pretty hot. We went a little way and a 20-mm. began shooting at us from be hind. Most of the G.I.s hit the dirt behind a wall. Ernie, who was talking to a couple of them, kept standing and kept his hands in his pockets. I watched his face as he went down the street and he was scared all right. A little later we got mixed up in a tank-v.-pillbox duel and the pillbox knocked the tank out right outside of the house where we were. I said, “Let’s get out of here,” and Ernie said, “O.K., you get a start and then I’ll follow you.” I ran about 25 yards, didn’t see Ernie, and stopped in another house. Presently he came along. When he reached me he said: “Some of those fellows that jumped out of that tank knew me from my picture so I had to stop and talk.”

¶ From Indiana: I spent Sunday at Ernie’s old home with his father, “Pop” Pyle, and his Aunt Mary Bales. It is a comfortable old white farmhouse on a dusty road three miles north of Dana. Several relatives and neighbors dropped in, and as usual the conversation turned toward Ernest (as his father and aunt call him, not Ernie). Aunt Mary got to talking about how Ernest on his last trip home told her that he didn’t feel above any of them when she asked him how it felt to be a celebrity, and Hazel Frist put in: “There just ain’t a bit of that in him, Aunt Mary.” Aunt Mary said Ernest was born with a wanderlust, that she knew it all along. Mr. Pyle said: “He liked to ride horseback but he didn’t like to work with them. Horses were too slow for Ernest. He always said the world was too big for him to be doing confining work here on the farm.”

Least Likely to Succeed. The subject of these reports received from TIME correspondents last week is—as they demonstrate—well on his way toward becoming a living legend. Four years ago he was an obscure roving reporter whose syndicated column of trivial travelogues appeared in an unimpressive total of 40 newspapers. At that time almost any class of war correspondents would have voted him least likely to succeed. Aged 40, small and skinny (5 ft., 8 in., 115 lbs.), perpetually sick or worrying that he was about to be, agonizingly shy, he was completely lacking in the brash and dash of the Richard Harding Davis tradition. He had a great gift of friendship, but it was always an effort for him to meet new people and he especially disliked crowds. Neat in his habits, he hated dirt, disorder and discomfort. Above all, he hated and feared war. Except for a few months of naval R.O.T.C. during World War I, he knew nothing about it. He stood in awe of professional war correspondents and firmly believed himself incompetent to become one.

Yet now, four years later, he is the most popular of them all. His column appears six days a week in 310 newspapers with a total circulation of 12,255,000. Millions of people at home read it avidly, write letters to him, pray for him, telephone their newspapers to ask about his health and safety. Abroad, G.I.s and generals recognize him wherever he goes, seek him out, confide in him. The War Department and the high command in the field, rating him a top morale-builder, scan his column for hints.* Fellow citizens and fellow-newsmen have heaped honors on him.

“Homesick, Violent, Common Men.” What happened to Ernie Pyle was that the war suddenly made the kind of unimportant small people and small things he was accustomed to write about enormously important. Many a correspondent before him had written of the human side of war, but their stories were usually about the heroes and the exciting moments which briefly punctuate war’s infinite boredom. Ernie Pyle did something different.

More than anyone else, he has humanized the most complex and mechanized war in history. As John Steinbeck has explained it:

“There are really two wars and they haven’t much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions and regiments—and that is General Marshall’s war.

“Then there is the war of homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, and lug themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage—and that is Ernie Pyle’s war. He knows it as well as anyone and writes about it better than anyone.”

One reason that Ernie Pyle has been able to report this little man’s war so successfully is that he loves people and, for all his quirks and foibles, is at base a very average little man himself. He understands G.I. hopes and fears and gripes and fun and duty-born courage because he shares them as no exceptionally fearless or exceptionally brilliant man ever could. What chiefly distinguishes him from other average men is the fact that he is a seasoned, expert newsman. ‘His dispatches sound as artless as a letter, but other professionals are not deceived. They know that Ernie Pyle is a great reporter. Young would-be journalists could search far for a better textbook than his life and writings—a profitable study both of skills acquired and handicaps overcome.

Old Dobbin Succumbs. Young Ernie, nicknamed “Shag” for his pinkish, shaggy hair, was a born listener. Too small and bashful to play much with the other kids, he liked to sit around and hear the grown ups talk. What he heard he remembered.

Observant and curious, he pasted in a scrapbook every picture postcard that came to the Pyle house. And he had a solid respect for facts. As a schoolboy, assigned to write a composition about a visit to the county courthouse, he reported; “Many interesting statistics were brought out in the examination of the assessment sheets. It was found that Old Dobbin has completely succumbed to the invasion of the automobile. The total value of horses listed in the county is $297,096, while that of automobiles is $398,322. The average horse is worth a fraction less than $72 and the average auto is slightly above $330. Dobbin still has the advantage of numbers however, as there are four horses to every automobile.”

These were sound journalistic groundings. But when he entered Indiana University in 1919, “Shag” Pyle had not decided much about his career except that he did not want to spend his life “looking at the south end of a horse going north.”

He signed up for journalism because he had heard it was a snap course. The high spot of his college career was a trip to Japan with the Indiana University base ball team. No athlete, he thumbed his way to the coast, worked his passage across the Pacific as a cabin boy. A few months before he was to graduate, his restlessness grew too much for him. He quit school and went to work for the La Porte, Ind.

Herald-Argus. Four months later he moved on to Washington and a job on the News.

There he stayed, except for a brief interlude in New York on the late Evening World and Post, until 1935.

“He was a hell of a good copyreader,” recalls his friend Lee Miller, who now, as managing editor of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, sometimes refers to himself as “vice president in charge of Ernie Pyle.” Editor Lowell Mellett, who still calls Pyle “one of the best desk men anybody ever saw,” promoted him to be managing editor in 1932. But other Newsmen in the dingy city room on New York Avenue never dreamed that quiet, competent, friendly Ernie Pyle would ever be famous. “A good man, but not much drive,” is the general recollection now.

Ernie himself was never happy at a desk. Despite his shyness, something drove him on to move around, meet new people, see new things, get his facts firsthand. For a while he wrote a successful column of aviation chitchat. In 1935, after a severe attack of influenza, he went to the Southwest to recuperate and wrote a dozen travel pieces about his trip. “They had a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out,” remembers Scripps-Howard’s Editor in Chief George B. (“Deac”) Parker. When Ernie proposed that he become a permanent roving reporter, Mellett and Parker agreed.

From Platinum to Molokai. For the next five years, with “That Girl” by his side (small, pert, blond Geraldine Siebolds Pyle was a Government girl when he married her in 1925), Columnist Pyle roved the highways & byways of the Western Hemisphere. He crisscrossed the continent 35 times, wore out three automobiles. He wrote about anything that took his fancy: soap, dogs, doctors, the art of rolling a cigaret, hotel bellhops, hotel rooms, how to build a picket fence, his troubles with a stuck zipper in his pants. He went to Alaska and wrote about being shaved by a woman barber in the mining camp of Platinum, near the Arctic Circle. He went to Molokai and wrote about the lepers. He flew around South America. And for most of the five years he worried.

He worried about his health (“I claim to have been sick in more hotel rooms than any man on earth”). He worried himself into repeated attacks of nervous indigestion over approaching interviews, finally got so he never made an appointment more than a few hours ahead. He grew moody and morose when some Scripps-Howard papers failed to print his column every day. Time & again he decided that his stuff was no good, that he should have stayed on the farm in Dana.

But at the same time Ernie Pyle, the professional, was shrewd enough to capitalize on most of these same worries. In his column he kidded himself, dramatizing every little frailty, foible and misadventure. Gradually he created a sort of prose Charlie Chaplin, a bewildered little man whose best intentions almost always led to pratfalls. His readers loved it. People who recognized a fellow spirit, people who wanted to mother and protect him, wrote to him by the hundred. By 1940 he probably knew more people at firsthand or by mail than any man, with the possible exception of Jim Farley, in the U.S. And he had become a master of the art of putting people at their ease and drawing them out, observing and remembering the significant detail, and reporting his findings in vivid, folksy, readable language. However little he himself may have suspected it, he was ready now for his great assignment.

Death in a Ditch. Ernie himself was a little slow to recognize the nature of the new assignment. At first he tried to be a more or less conventional war correspondent, covering the news as others did. The change began one day in Africa when the press corps was invited to meet Admiral Darlan. Scripps-Howard cabled him to be sure to attend. He was hurrying across an airfield to the interview when a swarm of Stukas swooped down, began splattering bullets around him. He dived into a ditch just behind a G.I. When the strafing was over he tapped his companion on the shoulder and said, “Whew, that was close, eh?” There was no answer. The soldier was dead.

Pyle sat through the interview in a daze, went back to his tent and brooded for hours. Finally he cabled his New York office that he could not write the Darlan story. Instead he wrote about the stranger who had died in the ditch beside him. For days he talked of giving up and going home. But when the shock wore off, he knew for sure that his job was not with the generals and their strategems but with the little onetime drugstore cowboys, clerks and mechanics who had no one else to tell their stories.

The G.I.s were slow to reciprocate the Pyle devotion. In the field Ernie, ab normally sensitive to cold, wraps his skin ny frame in as many thicknesses of non descript clothes as he can lay hands on, makes himself look like a ready-made butt for jokes. At first the G.I.s plagued the funny-looking little man unmercifully, “scrounging” (i.e., swiping) his blankets and water, knocking off his helmet to reveal the wad of toilet paper always kept there, ridiculing his passion for orderliness and his perpetual puttering, pouncing on him in howling droves when he modestly retired behind a bush to relieve himself. Then the letters from home began to arrive, mentioning the Pyle column or enclosing clippings of it. Slowly it dawned on the G.I.s that they had acquired a champion, a man who really understood and cared what they—not as regiments or armies but as individual men—were like and were trying to do. Their affection grew as, time & again, they saw Pyle force himself to share their dangers and keep on sharing them, despite the increasing fears that sometimes made him scream in his sleep, despite the fact that he could go home any time he wanted.

And they also learned that, on the human side, he is somewhat less and more than the sort of super-chaplain he appears to be. Old Newspaperman Pyle cusses with the best of troopers, enjoys a good dirty joke, takes a drink when he feels like it.

He also loves to sneak up on fellow reporters in the dead of night, scare the day lights out of them with a belch which has been favorably compared with the bark of a French 75. There are probably still some G.I.s who would not give their last cigaret or blanket to Ernie Pyle. But nothing that any G.I. can scrounge from another is too good for him.

How He Works. Columnist Pyle, still genuinely humble yet not unaffected by his new fame, is particularly worried lest the forthcoming Pyle-based movie portray him dashing around with pad & pencil, eagerly asking questions and making notes.

Actually, the only notes he ever takes are of the names & addresses which stud his column (occasionally accompanied by such messages as “Corporal Charles Malatesta of Maiden, Mass, asks me to tell his wife that he loves her”). His usual practice is to attach himself to one small unit for several days (in last week’s columns it was an ack-ack gun crew), and live just as they live, doing no writing at all. When he has learned enough, he goes back to the rear and spins out as many columns as the experience is good for. Sometimes he gets as much as three weeks ahead.

When he writes, he yearns to be alone; the normally easygoing Pyle can be extremely short with tentmates who distract him while he is composing. His homespun, sometimes corny, sometimes eloquent style comes natural to him, but it does not come easy. He writes slowly at best, often rewrites a column three or four times.

The Future of a Conscience. Last week, after a breather at a Normandy press camp in the rear, Ernie Pyle—who will be 44 on Aug. 3—was preparing to go up to the battle line again. He dreaded it more than ever. To a fellow correspondent he confided: “The thought of it gives me the willies. Instead of getting used to it, I become less used to it as the years go by. With me it seems to have had a cumulative effect. I am much more afraid of a plane overhead now than I was during the London blitz, or even during our early dive-bombing days in Africa. With those four narrow squeaks at Anzio [where a bomb blew in two walls of a room where he was sleeping] coming after a year and a half of sporadic squeaks, I have begun to feel I have about used up my chances.”

But to “That Girl” who was waiting for him back in their small white house at Albuquerque, N. Mex. (they were divorced in 1942, remarried by proxy the next year), he wrote: “Of course I am very sick of the war and would like to leave it and yet I know I can’t. I’ve been part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I’ve come to feel a responsibility to it or something. I don’t know quite how to put it into words, but I feel if I left it it would be like a soldier deserting.”

With the premonition of death that haunts him now, Ernie Pyle is not doing much personal postwar planning. But if he lives to resume his U.S. roving, as both he and his wife hope to do, he will be one man with a future clearly cut out for him. Everywhere he goes he will find old friends of the foxholes, and it will be his job to report to the nation how justly and successfully they are being received back into civilian life, how they feel about the America they have come back to, what they think of the way the people who stayed home are carrying on the fight for lasting peace and freedom which they began.

Thus, in his unique way, he is almost sure to be a sort of national conscience. He may be that even if he is killed in battle. For if Ernie Pyle should die tomorrow, as well he may, it would still be a long time before Americans forgot Ernie Pyle’s war.

* Last week the War Department adopted a suggestion long urged by Columnist Pyle that it revive the practice of awarding a sleeve stripe for each six months of overseas service. Congresshas passed the so-called “Ernie Pyle Bill” toraise G.I. pay $10 for combat service.

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