Ernie Pyles War

America's Eyewitness to World War II

James Tobin

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780684864693
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

When a machine-gun bullet ended the life of war correspondent Ernie Pyle in the final days of World War II, Americans mourned him in the same breath as they mourned Franklin Roosevelt. To millions, the loss of this American folk hero seemed nearly as great as the loss of the wartime president. If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call "The Good War."Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column—all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell.It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent—a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war—North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death.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. Based on dozens of interviews and copious research in little-known archives, Ernie Pyle's War is a self-effacing tour de force. To read it is to know Ernie Pyle, and most of all, to know his war.

1

“I Wanted to Get Out …”

ROOTS AND RISING, 1900-1935

OUTSIDE THE LITTLE TOWN OF DANA, THE TABLE-FLAT PLAIN OF WESTERN Indiana rises ever so slightly to form what natives still call “the mound farm,” a small cluster of white buildings on eighty acres of grain. The thin boy who lived atop this modest elevation in the early 1900s gazed over fields whose peaceful monotony was interrupted only by the little oasis of Dana a mile to the northwest. Only one image would have captured his attention—the tiny silhouette of a wagon or an automobile traversing the horizon on State Highway 36. In other words, the landscape’s most notable feature was the means to escape it. In one way this seems fitting, for the goal of escape possessed the boy from an early age. In another way he never escaped this place.

“That long, sad wind …”

Sadness verging on bitterness always colored Ernie Pyle’s memories of his early years. When he was a traveling newspaper columnist in the 1930s, he once found himself on a remote country road where he felt the dry breeze of his childhood brush his face, awakening a haunting mental picture of small men straining against circumstance and time.“I don’t know whether you know that long, sad wind that blows so steadily across the hundreds of miles of Midwest flat lands in the summertime….” he wrote in his column. “To me [it] is one of the most melancholy things in all life. It comes from so far, and it blows so gently and yet so relentlessly; it rustles the leaves and the branches of the maple trees in a sort of symphony of sadness, and it doesn’t pass on and leave them still. It just keeps coming…. You could—and you do—wear out your lifetime on the dusty plains with that wind of futility blowing in your face. And when you are worn out and gone, the wind, still saying nothing, still so gentle and sad and timeless, is still blowing across the prairies, and will blow in the faces of the little men who follow you, forever.” This was “just one of those small impressions that will form in a child’s mind, and grow and stay with him through a lifetime, even playing its part in his character and his way of thinking, and he can never explain it.”1

“Melancholy … worn out … gentle and sad … little men”—this was a description of Pyle’s father, a carpenter at heart, who farmed because he could not make a steady living from his true vocation. “He’s very meek and no trouble,” Will Pyle’s son once told friends. He might have been summing up Will’s life.2 Ernie depicted him in later writings as a kind but hapless figure, “the man who put oil on his brakes when they were squeaking, then drove to Dana and ran over the curb and through a plate-glass window and right into a dry-good store.” Will’s face would break into a brilliant, sparkling smile when he was pleased or amused. But he spoke little, even to his family. “He has never said a great deal to me all his life, and yet I feel we have been very good friends,” Ernie once told his readers. “He never gave me much advice, or told me to do this or that, or not to.”3

The formidable Maria Taylor Pyle, not Will, filled the role of family protector and leader. Always called Marie, she stood no taller than her husband, but she gave the impression of being much the bigger of the two. She was a woman of ferocious dedication to the practical tasks at hand—raising chickens and produce, caring for her family, serving her neighbors. She “thrived on action,” her son remembered. “She would rather milk than sew; rather plow than bake.” Ernie’s closest boyhood friend recalled her as “a woman of unusual character—she was husky of build, [with] red hair and florid complexion, an unusually hard worker, even for a farm woman, a strict disciplinarian, very considerate of other people.”4 Devout and abstemious, she liked a joke and laughed easily and heartily. She could doctor a horse and play the violin. When the neighbors’ children were born she always attended their mothers, and those children grew up to obey her as readily as their parents. With adults she could be devastatingly blunt. “Marie Pyle didn’t wait to tell my dad what she thought of him,” recalled Nellie Kuhns Hendrix, who grew up next door and was close to the Pyles for many years. “If he done something she didn’t like, she’d tell him about it.”5 No one doubted that, as Ed Goforth, another neighbor, put it later, “She wore the pants in the family.” Goforth remembered arriving one morning to help Will with some work. “She looked over at Mr. Pyle and said, ‘Will, take Ed and go shear the sheep today.’ Well, Ed and Will sheared the sheep that day.”6

She raised her only child, whom she always called Ernest, with a mixture of toughness and tenderness. One of Pyle’s strongest memories captured the contradiction. On a summer day when the boy was four or five, he was walking behind his father’s plow when he stopped to fetch some wild roses for his mother. Cutting the stems with his father’s penknife, he suddenly saw a long snake approaching swiftly through the grass. He screamed, bringing his father on the run, and Will sent him back to the house a half-mile away. Ernest came to a patch of high weeds rising between himself and the house. Fearing another snake might be lurking there, he called to his mother, who appeared at the door and summoned him to come ahead through the weeds. He froze and began to cry, whereupon Marie came and whipped him for his apparent stubbornness. “That evening,” her son wrote thirty years later, “when my father came in from the fields, she told him about the crazy boy who wouldn’t walk through the weeds and had to be whipped. And then my father told her about the roses … and the snake. It was the roses, I think, that hurt her so. My mother cried for a long time that night after she went to bed.” For the rest of her life she retold the story on herself, as if to expiate a sin.7

The other woman in Ernie’s life possessed a will to match his mother’s. She was Mary Taylor, Marie’s older sister, who lived with the family until she married a neighbor, George Bales, at the age of forty, when Ernest was six. “Tall and straight” with “more energy than a buzz saw,” she dominated Bales as Marie dominated Will Pyle. Uncle George was likable and smart but he was a dreamer, preferring grand, unrealized schemes to the myriad small tasks necessary for success on his farm. So it was Mary Bales who put in the long days of labor, raising enough chickens, hogs and cattle to get by. As a boy, Ernie saw a great deal of her. Later, after Marie Pyle and George Bales died, Aunt Mary and Will Pyle lived on together in the Pyle farmhouse.8

Though not prosperous, the Pyles were respected, hardworking, churchgoing people. To their son they passed on decency and compassion, sensitivity toward others and a capacity for hard work. Yet there was some obscure unhappiness in this small family that planted in Ernie the seeds of a lifelong melancholy. It drove him to flee not only Dana but all spheres of safe, straitened routine, to assay large achievements far beyond Dana’s field of vision. The exact sources of these drives can only be guessed at. But they had something to do with Ernie’s enduring image of his small, silent father—and perhaps his uncle, too—toiling with little pleasure or worldly success in the shadow of the two strong-willed sisters. In Ernie’s mind, his father would always be the “little man” straining against “the wind of futility.” And so, Ernie feared, might he become such a man himself. The image persisted in his life and writings. His low points would always be shadowed by the fear that he was nothing but an ineffectual man striving mightily to no purpose, and governed by the whims of a powerful woman. Yet the endearing character Pyle established for himself as a writer, and the subjects of his legendry in World War II, were common men transcending the grinding circumstances of everyday existence. Will Pyle’s memory cut both ways.

Ernie grew up as a keenly intelligent child in a home and a town where intellect and big dreams were not especially esteemed. Homely, small for his age, and fussed over by a strong-willed mother, he tended toward self-pity in a world of boys who all seemed bigger, more easygoing, and blessed with fathers who cut a wider swath than Will. Being a “farm boy” instead of a “town boy” exacerbated his itchy sense of inferiority. “I was a farm boy,” he wrote nearly thirty years later, “and town kids can make you feel awfully backward when you’re young…. Even today I feel self-conscious when I walk down the street in Dana, imagining the town boys are making fun of me.”9 While the other kids in the schoolyard wrestled and roughhoused, “I always sat under a tree and ate my apple.”10 His closest friend, a boy one year older named Thad Hooker, often urged Ernie to try sports. But Thad would be pushed away with a bitter “Aw, hell, you know I’m no good at games.”11 Because his voice cracked when he spoke loudly or excitedly, he developed a lifelong habit of clearing his throat before speaking, then using a low and even tone to lessen the chance of a humiliating squeak. At some point he grew anxious about his teeth, cleaning them constantly with twine.12 Intelligence and insecurity fought in Ernie’s mind, pushing him to the role of the outsider looking in, unsure whether to test himself against the big boys or feign disinterest and wish them all a short trip to hell.

Certainly a farmer’s life held no appeal for him. When Ernie was nine, Will led him into the fields and showed him how to use the harrow and plow. From that point on, Ernie remembered, “I worked like a horse,” an animal he came to despise. He once estimated he rode five thousand miles to school and back on the Pyles’ nag, and he trudged for many more miles behind horses in the fields. That was more than enough. During his years of constant cross-country travel, he refused to stay at farmhouses that rented rooms to guests, saying simply, “I’ve had enough of farms.” “Horses were too slow for Ernest,” Will remembered later. “He always said the world was too big for him to be doing confining work here on the farm.”13

He cherished his glimpses of that wider world. Whenever a post-card arrived in the Pyle mailbox, he would snatch it and paste it into a scrapbook. He read as much as he could—mostly newspapers and adventure tales. On a trip with his father to Chicago about 1910, he got his first impression of the big-city newspaper trade amid the noisy traffic of autos and street vendors. “I remember as a kid … how impressed I was with the ads I could see on the sides of huge trucks hauling loads of newsprint for the Chicago Herald-Examiner,” he once told a friend, “the pictures and names of the writers, and the colored pictures of the comic-strip heroes.”14

One species of hero just then emerging into public consciousness held a special allure. In Ernie’s early teens, the walls of his bedroom sprouted sketch after sketch of race cars—the boxy, big-wheeled behemoths of racing’s earliest days. His inspiration was the Indianapolis 500, then in its infancy but no less redolent of masculine glamour than it is today. One year his parents allowed Ernie to attend the race. He was enthralled by the giant crowd lining the two-and-a-half-mile brick oval, the spectators’ black Model T’s jamming the grassy infield, reporters rushing in and out of the speedway’s five-story “press pagoda,” the howl of engines and the glimpse through the smoke of drivers in their helmets and goggles. The annual race, which he witnessed several times, excited his imagination for many years. Even in his thirties, he daydreamed of racing at Indianapolis—a clue to the yen for glory that stirred beneath his self-deprecating facade. “I would rather win that 500-mile race than anything in this world,” he confessed in 1936. “To me there could be no greater emotion than to come down that homestretch, roaring at 130 miles an hour, those 500 exhausting, ripping miles behind you, your face black with grease and smoke, the afternoon shadows of the grandstands dark across the track, a hundred thousand people yelling and stomping their excitement, and you holding up your proud right arm high in the Speedway tradition of taking the checkered flag—the winner! I have dreamed of myself in that role a thousand times.”15

Not surprisingly, the boy who longed for speedway heroics also longed to join the Army when, in 1917, President Wilson committed American forces to the Allied cause in World War I. Too young for service by more than a year, Ernie watched in frustration as other Dana boys left for Europe, including Thad Hooker, who was permitted to leave school early in 1918 to join up. At the high school commencement that spring, a flag-draped chair took Thad’s place among the graduating seniors. “I could hardly bear to go to commencement, I was so ashamed that I wasn’t in the Army, too,” Ernie recalled later.16 In October 1918 he enlisted in the Naval Reserve, hoping to see action eventually. But that hope burst only a month later, when the warring powers announced an armistice.

With no war to escape to, Ernie searched for alternatives. After the prospect of battle, college seemed a pale second choice, but at least it promised a route away from the farm. So, in the fall of 1919, he left for Bloomington with a single suitcase and an aimless ambition. “He always had big ideas,” said Nellie Kuhns Hendrix, for whom Ernie, ten years older, was a big brother figure, telling the neighborhood youngsters of faraway places and imagined adventures. “He wanted to do things.”17

“We aspire to become journalists …”

The war’s end brought Indiana University its biggest enrollment to date in the fall of 1919: 2,229 students, more than twice the population of Dana. Among the young veterans flooding the campus was Paige Cavanaugh, a wisecracking iconoclast from the small town of Salem, Indiana, who would become Ernie’s lifelong surrogate brother. The two could be serious or raucous together, and they shared many likes and dislikes, though Ernie never could share Cavanaugh’s contempt for war veterans who paraded their special status. “Ernie had a hero complex,” Cavanaugh said later. “He and I both had a good eye for phonies around the campus, and we used to sit around and mimic them. But nobody who had been overseas could do wrong in Ernie’s eyes, no matter how big a blowhard he was.”18

Cavanaugh later enjoyed claiming credit for launching Ernie’s newspaper career, if only by suggesting they enroll in journalism as sophomores because the course was reputed to be easy. In fact, Ernie had expressed a strong interest in the field as a freshman, but university rules prev...