Background

Ethnicity: Ernie Pyle’s ancestors were of Scottish and English origin.

Ernie Pyle, byname of Ernest Taylor Pyle, was born on August 3, 1900, in Dana, Indiana, United States. He was the only child in the family of farmers William Clyde Pyle, and Maria Pyle (maiden name Taylor).

Education

Ernie Pyle grew up as a hard-working boy who performed household and farm chores, plowed fields, and keenly observed the life of the community around him. He was also a shy boy who felt sensitive about his slight stature and who, as a farmer, was sometimes leased by his peers who lived in town.

Having graduated from high school in his home town Bono, Indiana, Pyle enrolled at the training courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an intention to join the United States Navy at the First World War. His plans weren’t destined to come true because the conflict was soon ended.

In 1919, Pyle entered Indiana University without a clear sense of a future calling. He was persuaded to take journalism courses by a fellow freshman who assured him they were easy. Since that university had no official journalism major at the time, Pyle majored in economics while taking many journalism courses.

Writing as a reporter for the student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, he was sometimes faulted by his editors for what they characterized as an overly simplistic writing style. Nevertheless, he proceeded through the editorial ranks and became editor-in-chief during his senior year.

As an upperclassman, Ernie Pyle experienced a couple of notable adventures that presaged his later experiences as a traveling reporter. During his junior year, he drove from Indiana to Boston with a friend to report on an Indiana-Harvard football game, then was forced to hitchhike back (reportedly in more than fifty cars) when their battered vehicle caught fire.

Then, traveling by steamship with the Indiana baseball team to report on their games with Japanese universities, Pyle was compelled by contract to continue working on the ship until it reached Manila, rather than accompany the team the entire way. That journey provided Pyle with his first byline story, and provided the public with an early example of Pyle’s reporting on ordinary people, in this case, the seamen and passengers aboard the ship.

Rather than serving a full year as editor-in-chief and then graduating, Pyle left Indiana University in his final year in January 1923, in the aftermath of rejection by a girl with whom he was in love.

Later, Pyle received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Indiana University on November 13, 1944.

Career

Ernie Pyle took a job with the La Porte Herald newspaper in Indiana after leaving Indiana University in January 1923. Although he stayed only three months in the periodical, a highlight of his tenure there included covering and reporting on a Ku Klux Klan rally in spite of threats against him. Pyle then moved to Washington, D.C., and began a long association with the Washington Daily News. In 1925, he left the newspaper temporarily to take an automobile tour of the United States with his wife. Penniless after ten weeks, he found copy-desk jobs with the New York Evening World and New York Evening Post. He returned to the Washington Daily News in 1927 as a telegraph editor hired by Lee G. Miller.

Yearning to work as a reporter again, Pyle was given permission to write an aviation column in an era in which aviators were heroic pioneers. After a stint of working on dual tasks, he was made a full-time aviation reporter in June 1929. During this period, Pyle socialized with pilots, whom he worshipped to some degree as heroes. His columns on their exploits brought him the beginnings of national fame, and when he left that post to become managing editor of the Daily News in 1932, he received farewell letters from government officials and pilots as well as ordinary readers.

Pyle’s three years as managing editor of the Daily News gave him much opportunity to imbue his staff with high journalistic standards and to exercise his humanitarian impulses on behalf of his workers, but little chance to write. Tired of the work, he contracted influenza in late 1935 and traveled to the Southwest with his wife, eventually sailing back east from Los Angeles.

Although he returned to his previous managerial job, he published eleven short travel pieces, filling in for the esteemed columnist Heywood Broun when the latter was on vacation. This led Pyle to convince his employers at Scripps-Howard Newspapers to let him travel freely as a roving reporter, sending in six columns per week. Along with his wife, he traveled by car over the following four years, visiting the then forty-eight states plus Alaska and Hawaii as well as Canada and Mexico. He interviewed many colorful people, and injected into his reports a keen sense of his own personality, anticipating the "new journalism" of the 1960s.

Pyle became a syndicated Scripps-Howard columnist in the spring of 1939, just a few months before war broke out in Europe. In 1940, after much soul-searching and against the initial opposition of his wife, he decided to go to England to cover the blitz firsthand. To do so, he had to overcome a considerable, but natural, amount of fear.

On shipboard and in London, Pyle felt that his first columns were flat and emotionless, but a change came over them after he witnessed the firebombing of London on December 29, 1940. He continued describing the action from London until the summer of 1941, winning acclaim for reporting that was both graphic in detail and conversational in tone. His British dispatches appeared in the 1941 book 'Ernie Pyle in England'. The 1941 interlude in the United States was devoted to columns on American subjects and was marred for Pyle on the personal level by attempts to make him a celebrity (which he resisted) and by his wife's mental illness.

He planned to tour the Far East by clipper airship, but his booking was canceled to make room for airplane propellers. The clipper ship, without Pyle, arrived in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, as the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor. Pyle flew back to England on June 19, 1942, and for the next five months wrote about the experiences of American soldiers training there and in Northern Ireland. He went with the American-British expedition to North Africa by convoy in November 1942 and began reporting on the everyday events of the battlefront, both violent and nonviolent.

While in London waiting to cover the D-Day invasion, Pyle learned that he had been awarded the 1944 Pulitzer Prize. He received several other honors on his 1944 return trip to the United States and assisted in the filming of 'The Story of G.l. Joe' which was based on his reportage from Africa and Europe. In January 1945, he left for a prior commitment in the Pacific.

Ernie Pyle landed on Okinawa in April 1945, and two days later landed on the smaller island of le Shima (currently known as Iejima). On the morning of the 18th, he boarded a jeep for the front line. The jeep's occupants dove safely into a ditch when a sniper opened fire with a machine gun. However, Pyle raised his head to check on the other members of the group, and the firing resumed, three bullets struck Pyle in the left temple, under his helmet.

Achievements

• Ernie Pyle was arguably the best-known and best-loved American war correspondent of World War II, a man whose daily syndicated dispatches brought home the reality of infantrymen’s lives and deaths to their loved ones at home in a realistic but optimistic way. He wrote about the fighters as individual common human beings, their day to day tasks, their hunger and heat and cold and fatigue, their fear and their professionalism. At the moment when Pyle was killed in action, his articles were published in 400 daily and 300 weekly periodicals.
  
  Taking great risks to document the experiences of American soldiers during World War II, he was writing immortal war journalism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Pyle still receives praise for the nonfiction works ‘Here is Your War’, ‘Brave Men’, and one of his most famous columns, ‘The Death of Captain Waskow’, named by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists “the best American newspaper column of all time”. ‘Here is Your War’ served a base for ‘The Story of G.I. Joe’, a 1945 movie starring Burgess Meredith as Pyle.
  
  Pyle’s dispatches are cited as role-model by contemporary war correspondents, war veterans, and historians. There is the Ernie Pyle Memorial Fund and its Ernie Pyle Award created by Scripps-Howard Newspapers in 1953 to celebrate reporters who “most nearly exemplify the style and craftsmanship for which Ernie Pyle was known.”
  
  Pyle’s writing was greatly appreciated both before and during World War II. In 1939, J. W. Raper of the Cleveland Press had called him “just about the best reporter in the United States.” Reviewing Pyle’s ‘Brave Men’ in 1944, a Los Angeles Times Book Review commentator declared that “reading this book is something like covering all the invasion fronts at once, talking with men from every city and hamlet in the United States. … You see at once that Pyle is writing for the common man and his mother – and that about includes all of us.” Many soldiers dreamt to become the heroes of his articles.
  
  Pyle’s idea to provide soldiers in combat with “fight pay” that he expressed in one of his columns was put into practice by the United States Congress in May 1944. 50 percent extra pay authorized by the law was named the Ernie Pyle bill.
  
  Ernie Pyle’s restored birthplace in Dana, Indiana, was transformed into the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum which contains lots of archival materials that document his life and work. The Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington, the Indiana State Museum; and the Wisconsin State Historical Society have their funds of information related to the great war correspondent as well. The Ernie Pyle Library established in the last Pyle’s residence in Albuquerque, New Mexico was included in the list of the National Historic Landmarks on September 20, 2006.
  
  The Indiana University named one of its buildings in honor of its notable alumni, Ernie Pyle Hall. Nowadays, it houses the Office of Admissions Welcome Center and the College of Arts and Sciences Center for Career Achievement. There is Ernie Pyle Scholars Honors Program in the University that honors freshman students who excelled in journalism. There are lots of other sites throughout the United States named after Pyle, like Ernie Pyle Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Ernie Pyle Memorial Highway, and a small island in Cagles Mill Lake, southeast of the town of Cunot in Owen County.
  
  August 3, 2018 was proclaimed the National Ernie Pyle Day by the United States Congress upon an initiative of Indiana senators Joe Donnelly and Todd Young. The same date is the Ernie Pyle Day in Indiana itself.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Here Is Your War

    (Ernie Pyle’s story of the soldiers’ first campaign agains...)

    1943
  • Brave Men

    (The firsthand view of what World War II was like for the ...)

    1944
  • Ernie Pyle in England

    (The volume contains columns that Ernie Pyle wrote from De...)

    1941
  • Last Chapter

    (The final book of Ernie Pyle’s war reporting.)

    1949

Views

Quotations: "War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth."

"For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit."

"One of the parodoxes of war is that those in the rear want to get up into the fight, while those in the lines want to get out."

"There is no sense in the struggle, but there is no choice but to struggle."

"I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without."

"It would be wrong to say that war is all grim; if it were, the human spirit could not survive two and three and four years of it. … As some soldier once said, the army is good for one ridiculous laugh per minute. Our soldiers are still just as roughly good-humored as they always were, and they laugh easily, although there isn’t as much to laugh about as there used to be."

"A soldier who has been a long time in the line does have a 'look' in his eyes that anyone who knows about it can discern. It’s a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without conveying any image to the mind. It’s a look that is the display room for what lies behind it—exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do. It’s a look I dread to see on men."

"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."

"Thoughts are wonderful things, that they can bring two people, so far apart, into harmony and understanding for even a little while."

"If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will let you alone."

Membership

Ernie Pyle was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Delta Chi (currently the Society of Professional Journalists) fraternities while studying at Indiana University Bloomington.

Personality

Ernie Pyle demonstrated compassion for ordinary people from an early age. While working on a steamship at age twenty-two, he helped a Filipino man stow away and later obtain an education.

Ernie Pyle found his work difficult and sometimes mentally tormenting although his writings were admired and anticipated eagerly by readers. An innately shy person, he suffered from occasional depressions and bouts of self-doubt about his writing. These were to continue throughout his war years, though he did not reveal those feelings in his dispatches. The problems of his wife Jerry, an alcoholic and a severe depressive, also troubled him during the years on the road and at war.

Quotes from others about the person

• "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen." Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States
  
  "The secret of Ernie's tremendous success and popularity, if there is any secret about it, is his ability to report a war on a personal plane." Mack Morris, Sergeant
  
  "He now occupies a place in American journalistic letters which no other correspondent of this war has achieved. His smooth, friendly prose succeeded in bridging a gap between soldier and civilian where written words usually fail." Life magazine

Connections

Ernie Pyle married Geraldine Elizabeth Siebolds on July 7, 1925. They had no children.

Pyle’s wife had for some years suffered from an emotional disorder that involved periodic depression, compulsive drinking, and more than one suicide attempt. With the concurrence of her doctors he had divorced her on April 14, 1942 in a futile attempt to stimulate her efforts toward mental health, but had remarried her by proxy on March 10, 1943. She died late in 1945.

Father:

William Clyde Pyle

Mother:

Maria Pyle

Maria Pyle with her family.

Spouse:

Geraldine Elizabeth Siebolds

Friend:

Lee G. Miller

Friend:

Omar Bradley

Friend:

Dwight Eisenhower

References

• Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II In this immensely engrossing biography, affectionate yet critical, journalist and historian James Tobin does an Ernie Pyle job on Ernie Pyle, evoking perfectly the life and labors of this strange, frail, bald little man whose love/hate relationship to war mirrors our own.
  1997
• The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle The book offers a look at the newsman who brought the voices and lives of America's soldiers to the homefront during World War II and includes reprints of several of his columns.
  2006
• Ernie Pyle Was My Hero A book by Renita Menyhert.
  2012
• At Home with Ernie Pyle The book celebrates Pyle’s Indiana roots, gathering for the first time his writings about the state and its people. These stories preserve a vivid cultural memory of his time.
  2016