Foundation, Family Members Honor ‘Soldier’s Journalist’ Ernie Pyle

HONOLULU, Hawaii — Veterans, family and members of the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation recently gathered at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu to honor the memory of Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman Ernie Pyle on the 80th anniversary of his death.

The gathering, once a nearly regular event, was the first since the COVID pandemic disrupted the remembrance at Honolulu’s Punchbowl Crater.

During the ceremony, Pyle, a native of Dana, Indiana, was remembered for his gripping accounts of the lives of ordinary infantry soldiers, first in Europe, and then in the Pacific theater during World War II.

More than that, said James Horton, the cemetery’s director, the observance of Pyle’s death at the hands of a sniper during the U.S. liberation of Okinawa, “serves as a memorial to honor all the men and women who have served in the armed forces, and have been killed doing so.

“This ceremony has been going on since 1949, off and on, and I think it’s a great way to pay tribute to the common man and to a specific man, who lived in the trenches and told the stories of people that matter, people that were doing the real work of defending the American way of life.”

Pyle had already accomplished a number of firsts before he ever dreamed of being a war correspondent.

Through luck, hard work and serendipity, he became a reporter for the now defunct Washington Daily News, a paper owned by the E.W. Scripps Company, and became — improbably, because he was no pilot — one of the nation’s first aviation correspondents.

So well known was his column, which was circulated by the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, that Amelia Earhart was said to have quipped “Any aviator who didn’t know Pyle was a nobody.”

But Pyle’s greatest fame came after he was promoted to managing editor of the Daily News and, three years later, came down with a bad case of influenza.

Like many people suffering from a chest ailment, the writer/editor was advised to go out west and spend time in the dry air of the American Southwest. Pyle ultimately spent more than six weeks in New Mexico.

Upon his return, he learned the popular columnist, Heywood Broun, was about to leave on his own extended vacation. In a bind, Pyle volunteered to pinch hit for Broun, writing about his trip and the people he encountered along the way.

The columns, representing a new kind of human interest writing, were an immediate sensation, inspiring G.B. Parker, the editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspapers, to promote Pyle, whom he likened to Mark Twain, to a columnist full time.

Pyle’s writing, published under the title of the “Hoosier Vagabond,” appeared six days a week across the entire newspaper chain beginning in 1935; those columns continued until 1942, when he traveled to North Africa to cover the U.S. military campaign there.

His stories, told from the perspective of ordinary soldiers, explaining how the war was affecting them, were written in a plain, informal style that set his reporting apart and became the envy of fellow journalists.

But the going was far from easy.

Over the course of his career, both Pyle and his wife Geraldine, known to all as “Jerry,” suffered from battles with the bottle and other mental health issues. She’s now believed to have had bipolar disorder; he began to suffer from bouts of depression and what was likely PTSD, due to his war experiences.

Perhaps worst of all, by the time his columns from the war in Europe won the Pulitzer, Pyle was experiencing regular premonitions of his own death.

On April 18, 1945, those premonitions came true. 

At the time, a U.S. Army infantry division had just captured le Shima (now lejima), a small island just to the northwest of Okinawa.

Pyle, and a lieutenant colonel named Joseph Coolidge, were riding in a jeep to a newly established command post, when they came under fire from a Japanese machine gun. 

Though they initially escaped unscathed, taking cover in a nearby ditch, Pyle later raised his head to have a look around.

“Another burst hit the road over our heads … I looked at Ernie and saw he had been hit,” Coolidge later reported.

A machine-gun bullet had entered Pyle’s left temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly.

In tribute, members of the infantry division buried Pyle alongside their own dead, an infantry private and a combat engineer. His remains were later moved to a U.S. military cemetery on Okinawa.

He was moved again, in 1949, to his present interment site at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

In an email to The Well News, Gerald “Jerry” Maschino, executive director of the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation, explained that the organization was founded 15 years ago by members of the extended Pyle family in a bid to keep his legacy alive.

“Is Ernie Pyle relevant today? I would say absolutely yes,” Maschino said, recalling the title of an earlier Well News piece about Pyle.

“The world needs a few more Ernie Pyles right now and less of some others,” he said, adding, “We continue to promote his human being-centered style of storytelling through education, student awards and partnerships.”

In addition to recently working with Penguin Press on the rerelease of “Brave Men,” a compilation of Pyles best World War II columns, those active partnerships include relationships with the Indiana University Media School, The Scripps Howard Fund, the World War II Museum in New Orleans, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, which has designated April 18 “National Columnist Day” in honor of Pyle.

“We also have close relationships with most veteran associations,” Mashino said.

The foundation’s next event is on Aug. 3, when it will observe National Ernie Pyle Day, as designated by resolution by the U.S. Senate.

“Ernie Pyle was never the loudest man in the room, but he spoke with a voice that carried across oceans, across battlefields and now, across generations,” said Suzanne Vares-Lum, director of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, during the ceremony last month.

“As I understand it after speaking with family members and others here today, he was a man who never imagined that he would be honored in this way,” Vares-Lum continued. “He simply set out to tell the truth, one soldier at a time.

“He was not just a journalist. He was a witness to humanity in its rawest form,” she said.

“First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt once said she would begin her mornings with a cup of tea and Ernie Pyle’s column. She said, ‘You felt you knew the men he wrote about as though you had met them.’ That’s the mark of true storytelling — not to describe events, but to reveal the people behind them. Ernie Pyle understood this,” Vares-Lum added.

“He chose to stand alongside the average soldier, the quiet heroes, rather than chasing the spotlight of generals and war rooms; he wrote from foxholes, not press briefings. His style was simple and spare, but it cut deep.

“In short, Ernie Pyle gave voice to, and allowed us to hear the voices of, the war-fighter who had no voice during World War II, the ones in the mud and the cold, and the ones who carried the burden of history on their backs,” she said.

Vares-Lum closed by noting how appropriate it was that Pyle came to rest at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, which she described as “sacred grounds … where the trade winds whisper stories of sacrifice.”

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue