Ernie Pyle: The Real Life Captain America

Journalism used to play by different rules than it does today. Once upon a time, a journalist could become a hero.

Ernie Pyle was born on August 3, 1900 in Dana, Indiana, three hours due south of Chicago and two hours due west of Indianapolis. Traveling the world was his singular passion, so after graduation from high school, Pyle enlisted in the Navy with aspirations to head overseas. I can’t help but imagine that the reaction to his enlistment was similar to the one experienced by the fictional Steve Rogers because Pyle was tiny and thin at 5 foot 7 inches and 113 pounds. Perhaps there was a sigh of relief in the naval training center at the University of Illinois when the signing of the armistice ended the war and dashed Pyle’s hopes of a tour overseas. However, like Steve Rogers, his day would come. Armed with words and moral character rather than physical strength, Pyle traveled the war-torn world to become a national folk hero, earning a Purple Heart. I can’t help but think that Ernie Pyle was the real Captain America. 

Deciding that he did not want to follow in the farming footsteps of his family, Ernie Pyle studied economics and journalism at Indiana University, leaving just a semester short of a degree to take a job at the La Porte Herald. Soon after, he traveled to Washington D.C. to write for the Washington Daily News. Dodging the editor’s desk doldrums as best he could, Pyle wrote an aviation column that became popular and gave him the opportunity to interview such notables as Amelia Earhart. 

Pyle realized, however, that he preferred to write about everyday heroes rather than those in the limelight. About mail pilot Bill McConnell, Pyle wrote that he “has never been to the North Pole, or the South Pole, or flown across the ocean at midnight with a pig in his lap, or stayed in the air a week without changing his socks…. No, all he ever did was fly the night air mail between Cleveland and Cincinnati every night for 34 consecutive nights last winter. Two hundred and thirty-eight hours in the air in a month.” 

Traveling at every opportunity, Ernie Pyle took breaks from writing and editing jobs to log 9,000 miles in a Ford Model T roadster with his wife Jerry, who he called “That Girl Who Rides With Me.” By the late 1930s, Pyle found a way to combine his travel and writing passions as a roving correspondent, sometimes referred to as the “Rambling Reporter,” for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Pyle became a household name by writing feature stories about fascinating, common, every-day people in rural and urban America. These stories were the ones that Pyle felt were his best work, even though his war correspondence garnered more fame.

“One story a day sounds as easy as falling off a log,” Pyle wrote in one column. “Try it sometime.”

In 1938, he took an interest in my great-grandmother, Pansy Stockton, who “sort of unsoured him on art.” His article about her circulated throughout the country. That Ernie Pyle was writing about the sun painting artist was news in itself and his article was referenced and quoted many times over the decades that followed.

When he interviewed someone, Pyle didn’t tend to take notes. “Some said he seemed to absorb a story through his pores. After a concentrated stretch of observing, he would often carry a dozen or more columns in his head and then go off by himself and at one crack peck them all out with two fingers on his Underwood portable,” (Lancaster, 1981). 

By 1940, Pyle estimated he’d “covered 200,000 miles and been on five of the six continents and crossed both oceans and delved into every country in the Western Hemisphere and written upward of 1,500,000 words.”

Also by 1940, Europe and Africa were in the midst of war, and Pyle’s marriage was strained, so he flew overseas as a war correspondent. He was in London in 1940 during Nazi bombing. He wrote a vivid article about what it was like to be in a city that was at once both terrible and beautiful, a city “ringed and stabbed with fire,” and described the way St. Paul’s Cathedral emerged mirage-like in the haze of the carnage, unscathed. 

By 1942, he was in North Africa reporting on the experiences of the fighting men, who he followed into Sicily. When he returned home for a break in 1943, he had become so popular that there was an offer to make a book of his column called Here Is Your War. It was Pyle’s second book. The first was published in 1941: Ernie Pyle in England.

Pyle returned to Italy in 1943, getting right in the trenches with the men, experiencing what they were experiencing. The stories printed during these years gave the people of the United States an on-the-ground view of what was happening in the burgeoning war and lead to Ernie Pyle’s international fame. 

Rodeo rider and cowboy Don Bell tells a compelling story about meeting Ernie Pyle when he was a soldier in France. It is well worth the read and the link is below. Pyle was first and foremost the infantrymen’s best friend.

“I’m fighting hard, Mr. Pyle,” Bell remembered saying, “but it’s hell out here. At times, when the big guns get whaling away, when snipers start poppin’ from the hedges, I just want to fold my tent.”

“You’re not alone, Tex,” responded Pyle, “I’ve met guys all along the front who feel that way…. A lot of those boys fight off that pitiful feeling. When they get down, they think of home, but they don’t pine for comforts and safety and all that. They think of the trials they’ve endured…the values that’ve held them up. Take a West Virginia boy I saw yesterday, an infantryman like you. He always carries a little chunk of coal in his pocket. He’s a miner, from a family that’s always mined, and when he gets battle depression, he reaches into his pocket and clenches that bit of coal. Then he says to himself, ‘If I can take the mines, I can take this.’ War or no war, Tex, struggles never let up. You keep the good ones in mind. You’re a cowboy. Just think of what you’ve lived through.”

Bell said that over the course of the war, he kept his nerves by remembering a rugged ride or a bull he’d stayed on. It gave him the strength to last the war and win medals for bravery. Bell said the lesson stuck with him throughout his life: “Gain strength by keeping in mind the strong things you’ve done.” (Bell, 1985). 

Another bastion of hope to the fighting men at that time was the aptly named Bob Hope. Pyle met him and his traveling troupe in Sicily, Italy in August 1943. In his column “Bob Hope Visit is Tonic to Troops,” Pyle wrote, “I was in two different cities with them during these raids and I will testify they were horrifying raids. It isn’t often that a bomb falls so close that you can hear it whistle. But when you can hear a whole stack of them whistle at once, then it’s time to get weak all over and start sweating. The Hope troupe can now describe that ghastly sound.”

In January 1944, Pyle wrote what was perhaps his most famous column: “The Death of Captain Waskow.” It was a description of the way Waskow’s men responded to his death. “I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow down.” Those sixteen simple words capture Pyle’s approach to journalism. He had to live it to write it; he had no choice but to do it right. For Pyle, there were no short cuts.

In May 1944, Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished war correspondence. He wasn’t at the award ceremony because he was getting ready to ship out with infantrymen heading for Normandy.

Pyle’s detailed description of Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, inspired scenes in the movie “Saving Private Ryan.”

The fighting man’s advocate, Pyle wrote a column requesting that infantrymen receive combat pay, which led to The Ernie Pyle Bill, granting an increase in wages for combat infantrymen. 

He came home in 1944 and could have retired at that point. There was another book in the works called Brave Men. And, even more amazing, there was a movie in the works called Ernie Pyle’s The Story of G. I. Joe starring Burgess Meredith as Ernie Pyle and Robert Mitchum as Captain Walker.  Pyle got to travel to Hollywood to meet with the production team and actors and reacquaint himself with Bob Hope. Pyle signed a photograph of the two of them together that Hope’s family stated had a place of honor throughout Hope’s life. Pyle wrote on the photograph: “Bob Hope, you bastard – I can’t top you so I’ll just shut up – your Sicilian friend, Ernie Pyle, Dec 20, 1944.”

It says something about Pyle’s character that at this point when he had seen enough of war and death, risked his life enough times, and met with so much success as a writer, he decided to put himself in danger once again and live among the fighting men in order to tell the story of that other war in the Pacific. 

One soldier remembered meeting Ernie Pyle, “just Ernie,” in a jeep, and the easy way he listened to all of their military histories, and then they asked him how he ended up telling the stories of the infantrymen. Pyle said he realized “reporters attended the same press conferences then tried to create a unique news angle from the briefing. Ernie said he resolved to be different. His tactic would be to travel with the GIs – telling their story,” (McGouldrick). 

They asked Pyle why he came to the Pacific, expressing that they felt he’d seen enough to earn a rest. At first, Pyle didn’t answer. Then, after much thought, he said that he didn’t have a choice. The war theatres were different. The European theatre carried with it a sense of accomplishment in liberating the continent from the German Nazis and Italian fascists. The Japanese had bombed the United States without warning. The war in the Pacific was personal. 

Another difference between Europe and the Pacific was distance. Battle theatres were much closer in Europe. In the Pacific, there were thousands of miles of ocean between islands and it was much easier to feel lost.

He sailed for Okinawa, Japan with the 77^th Infantry Division. When he and an army officer encountered gun fire while riding in a jeep, they sought cover in a ditch. Pyle was shot and killed when he lifted his head. The men in the Army unit built a monument where he died: “At this spot the 77^thInfantry Division lost a buddy. Ernie Pyle. 18 April 1945.”

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:
“The sad news has just come to us that Ernie Pyle has been killed at the front with our boys on Okinawa. To thousands and thousands of people all over the world, his column has brought the best understanding of the human side of our fighting men. Mr. Pyle wanted above everything else to see them and be with them in the Pacific. I am glad he had the opportunity but, like many others, I shall miss his column, with its gracious understanding of human beings. I shall never forget how much I enjoyed meeting him here in the White House last year and how much I admired this frail and modest man who could endure hardships because he loved his job and our men.” 

President Harry Truman wrote about Ernie Pyle, “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.”

August 3, his birthday, is Ernie Pyle Day. To celebrate, I encourage you to listen to someone’s story, keep in mind the strong things you’ve done, and resolve to not cut corners. 

To read a selection of Ernie Pyle’s stories about life in the United States, look for a copy of Home Country. And for a selection of Ernie Pyle’s war columns, read Brave Men. 

Select the link to read some of Ernie Pyle’s wartime columns.

SOURCES:
Bell, Don. “I Meet Ernie Pyle in a Foxhole.” Guideposts. 1985. 
Chrisinger, David. “Ernie Pyle – The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day.” The New York Times. June 5, 2019.
Coyne, Kevin. “The Road Book: Before Ernie Pyle went to war, he wrote about America.” Columbia Journalism Review.January/February 2012.
Enriquez, Kaitlyn Crain. “Spotlight: Remembering Ernie Pyle.” National Archives: The Unwritten Record. April 18, 2018.
Guise, Kim. “Two Ambassadors: Bob Hope and Ernie Pyle.” The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. January 9, 2019.
Lancaster, Paul. “Ernie Pyle.” American Heritage. February/March 1981. 
Leveridge, Brett. “Ernie Pyle Courageously Chronicled the Soldier’s Experience.” Guideposts. July 27, 2017.
McGouldrick, Jack. “A Visit with Ernie Pyle – the GI’s War Correspondent.” The Ernie Pyle WWII Museum.
Roosevelt, Eleanor. “My Day, April 19, 1945.”  The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017). 
Official Military Personnel File of Ernest T. Pyle.
PBS National Archive. “Ernie Pyle.”