April 18, 1945

[03Fox2/1]

Only six days after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, America lost another beloved man of distinction. War correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in action on April 18, 1945, on a small island in the Pacific while under fire from the Japanese. His death also impacted America as a whole, in ways that few others could at that time.

Ernie Pyle was sent to England in 1942 to report on the Battle of Britain. He then covered the American involvement against the Axis powers in the European Theater. From North Africa to Italy to the Normandy landing and fighting in France, Pyle was there with the front line troops. He represented the common fighting man to the American people back home. He told their story of courage and fear and misery and with humor and honesty, was able to convey the reality of war in a far off land with both dignity and many times, levity. He inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic with his many timely stories from the front. The common soldier looked upon him as family and as one of their own because he shared both common danger and hardships and told their story when no one else seemed able to. His stories and dispatches from the front lines directly impacted the morale of Americans on both sides of the Atlantic. Both home front civilians and war front servicemen used his observations and information as reliable reporting of the war effort. With peace and victory against Germany imminent, Pyle was sent to cover the war in the Pacific Theater against Japan.

He arrived in April 1945 , after the conquest of Iwo Jima but in time for the battle on Okinawa. He landed with soldiers of the Army's 77th Infantry on a small island near Okinawa, called Ie Shima. He and three officers in a jeep came under fire and they took cover in a ditch. Pyle looked up and over the ditch and was shot in the head and died instantly. His loss to the military and the entire Nation was significant. One of the most celebrated war correspondents and a friend to GI Joe was dead... silent forever more.

Semper Fi


I have in my possession some newspapers from 1945 and one of them is from Saturday, April 14th. In this newspaper, section one, page five, is one of the stories sent back from the front by Ernie Pyle and since this story is only two days after the death of President Roosevelt and four days before the untimely death of Ernie Pyle, I want to share it with you... it follows:


ERNIE PYLE
"With The Navy"

OKINAWA---(by Navy radio)--
Our war with Japan has gone well in the last few weeks.
We are firmly on Okinawa, which is like having your foot in the kitchen door.
Our wonderful carrier pilots have whittled down the Jap air force daily. Our antiaircraft from ships and from shore batteries has plugged Jap flyers for the highest ratio I've ever known from ack-ack.
Our task forces have absolutely butchered the only Jap task force to put to sea in many months. B-29s are hitting Japan, with fighter escort from Iwo Jima. Airfields are springing up on Okinawa. We all say we sure are glad we are not in the Japs' shoes.

One main question asked over here now is, "How long will the Japs hold out ?" There are all kinds of opinions, but actually nobody knows.
We don't know, because no one in his right mind can pretend to understand the Oriental manner of thinking. They are unpredictable. They are inconsistent. As one officer said, "They are uncannily smart one day, and dumb as hell the next."
Their values are so different from ours. The news broadcasts from Tokyo and Shanghai are an example. These broadcasts are utterly ridiculous.
During our first week on Okinawa, they constantly told of savage counterattacks when there weren't any. They told of driving a large part of our landing forces back to the boats and far out to sea, when actually they fired only a few shots onto the beaches.
On D-Day plus four, they broadcast that despite their counterattacks we finally succeeded in landing 6,000 troops. The truth is that by sunset of the first evening we had an incredible number of scores of thousands of Americans on Okinawa.
Everything that Tokyo said about us was a downright lie. Yet maybe Tokyo really believed it. No one can tell. The Japs don't think as we do.

The crippled Jap air force cannot do us anything but spasmodic harm from now on. And their Navy needn't ever be considered. If you could see the colossal naval power we have here you could hardly believe your eyes. It's one of the most impressive things I've seen in this war.
We have plenty of troops in reserve, and new convoys of supplies have already begun to arrive just as we finished unloading the original massive supply fleet.

On Okinawa the majority of the Japs are on the southern tip, and in considerable strength. The northern area is being combed and a few scattered ones mopped up.
There is tough fighting in the south and it will remain tough to the end. I've heard some officers say the south end of Okinawa may turn into another Iwo Jima. That will mean heavy casualties on our side, but the end of Okinawa is inevitable.
And while the Army's Twenty-fourth Corps of Infantry is doing that job, the rest of the island apparently is wide open for us to develop and we are doing it with our usual speed.
This island has everything we could want in such an island. There is plenty of room for more airfields, room for roads and vast supply dumps and anchorages for ships. And the civilians from whom we had expected trouble are docile and harmless.
The way Americans can build, this island can be transformed in two months. Before long it could look like Guam or Pearl Harbor. We are in Japan's back door and while we are here they can't really do very much to us.

Of course, Japan's vast land armies are almost intact. But if it does come to the great mass land warfare of continental Europe, we now are able to build up strength for that warfare right on the scene.
There is a fighting spirit among us. People are conjecturing about the possibility of the Pacific war ending sooner than we had ever allowed ourselves to think.
For years it looked endless, but now you hear people talk about being home maybe by Christmas. Some really believe they will. Others have their fingers crossed, but they are more hopeful than ever before.
Instead of a war weariness, there seems to be a new eagerness among our forces to sweep on and on, and wind the thing up in a hurry.


* * * * * * * * *
Additional info from 03Fox2/1:

On May 7, 1945, the unconditional surrender of all German Forces to Allies.
May 8, 1945 is V-E Day, Victory in Europe

On August 6, 1945 the first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
On August 9, 1945 the second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

On August 14, 1945 Japan agrees to unconditional surrender, with provisions for the Emperor.
On September 2, Japan signs surrender documents
September 2, 1945 is V-J Day, Victory over Japan

[Reloader]

Very interesting reading 03Fox2/1. Although I had heard of Ernie Pyle, I have never read any of his stuff. From what I have seen and heard before too, I can understand what his loss meant to so many, thanks for posting.

[03Fox2/1]

Reloader,
Thank you for your comments. Here is another one of Ernie Pyle's columns. This one is from the newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, dated April 13, 1945, Friday morning edition, section one, page three.


ERNIE PYLE
"With The Navy"


Okinawa---(By Navy Radio)
--Our first night on Okinawa was uncanny and full of old familiar sounds--the exciting, sad, weary little sounds of war.
It had been six months since I'd slept on the ground, or heard a rifle shot. With the Marines it was about the same.
I was tagging along with a headquarters company of a regiment. We were on a pretty, grassy slope out in the country. The front lines were about a thousand yards ahead. Other troops were bivouacked all around us.
There were still a few snipers hiding around. An officer was brought in just before dark, shot through the arm. So we were on our toes.
Just at dusk three planes flew slowly overhead in the direction of the beach. We paid no attention, for we thought they were ours. But they weren't.
In a moment all hell cut loose from the beach. Our entire fleet and the guns ashore started throwing stuff into the sky. I've never seen a thicker batch of ack-ack.
As one of the Marines said, there were more bullets than there was sky. Those Jap pilots must have thought the world was coming to an end to fly into a lead storm like that only hours after we had landed on Okinawa. All three were shot down.

As deep darkness came on, we got into our foxholes and settled down for the night. The countryside became as silent as a graveyard--silent, that is, between shots. The only sounds were war sounds. There were no country sounds at all. The sky was a riot of stars.
Capt. Tom Brown was in the foxhole next to me. As we lay there on our backs, looking up into the starry sky, he said:
"There's the Big Dipper. That's the first time I've seen that since I've been in the Pacific." For, you see, Marines of this division have done all their fighting under the Southern Cross, where our Big Dipper doesn't show.
As full darkness came, flares began lighting the country ahead of us over the frontlines. They were shot in shells from our battleships, timed to burst above our lines and float down on parachutes. That was to keep the country lighted up so we could see the Japs if they tried to infiltrate, which is one of their favorite tricks.
The flares were shot up several per minute from dusk until the moon came out full. It was very bright after that and the flares were not needed.
But all night long two or three ships kept up a slow shelling of the far hills where the Japs were supposed to be. It wasn't a bombardment; just two or three shells per minute. They passed right over us and I found that passing shells have the same ghostly "window shade rustle" on this side of the world as the other.
My foxhole was only about 20 feet from where two field telephones and two field radios were lying on the ground. All night, officers sat on the ground at these four pieces of communications and directed our troops.
As I lay there listening in the dark, the conversation was startlingly familiar--the words and the thoughts and the actions exactly as I'd known them for so long in the infantry.
All night I could hear those low voices over the phones---voices in the darkness, voices of men running the war at the front.

Not long after dark the rifle shots started. There would be a little flurry far ahead, way to the left. Then silence. Then the blurt of a machine gun closer, and a few scattered single shots sort of framing it. Then a long silence. Spooky.
All night it went like that. Flares in the shy ahead, the crack of big guns behind us, then of passing shells, a few dark figures coming and going in the night, muted voices at the telephones, the rifle shots, the mosquitoes, the stars, the feel of the damp night air under the wide sky--- back again at the kind of life I had known so long.
The old familiar pattern, unchanged by distance or time from war on the other side of the world. A pattern so imbedded in my soul that, coming back into it again, it seemed to me as I lay there that I'd never known anything else in my life. And there are millions of us.

[PanzerBob]

solthumThanks 03Fox2/1, Shame the man never made it, most reporters in this day and age could learn a lot from him. He reported the war, not spun version.

Lest we Forget sal;

[03Fox2/1]

PanzerBob,
Yes, I agree, Ernie Pyle wasn't concerned with being politically correct but he was under the same restrictions of censorship that all of our servicemen endured. Dates and places and numbers of men and unit identifications were all off limits. Even civilian war correspondents had their words carefully scrutinized for information that could help the enemy. His words, in my opinion, reflected what was inside each man in combat, fear and hope and a refusal to allow the enemy to win, no matter what the cost.
At this time, there was a much better relationship between the press and the military and the press and the White House, especially with President Roosevelt. He was treated with upmost respect and the common man believed in him and the press supported this belief. For example, there was an unwritten code of conduct that precluded all press and photographers from writing about or taking or printing shots of President Roosevelt showing his paralysis to the public. And it was very late in the war before photos of American casualties were allowed to be seen by the public.
As a matter of fact, when Ernie Pyle was killed on Okinawa, a photo of him where he died was taken by an Army photographer and developed on a Navy ship. The photo was deemed too damaging for the morale of the American people, so it wasn't released. Publicly the reason given for it not being published was out of respect for the widow of Ernie Pyle. I believe it wasn't until 2005 that this original photo became known and available and made public.
Time has passed but I can still sense the loss to the American people in April of 1945. The battle for Iwo Jima had just concluded with the horrendous number of American and Japanese casualties. Then, President Roosevelt died and next, Ernie Pyle, at a time when the war with Japan seemed to only get worse and the end was so close, yet so uncertain and far away.
Ernie Pyle was initially buried with other American soldiers on Ie Shima Island but his body was removed in 1949 and reburied with full military honors at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, at Punchbowl Crater near Honolulu, Hawaii.

[03Fox2/1]

The optimism expressed by Ernie Pyle at the end his dispatch dated April 14, 1945 is understandable, but unfortunately proved to be so very wrong. Okinawa, like Iwo Jima, had been fortified for many years, the Japanese knew that the attack would surely come. The initial landing was unopposed and early resistance on the island was light. The Japanese had learned to change their tactics, starting with Iwo Jima. No longer would they resist to the maximum at the beaches, instead they would lie in wait and let the enemy come to them. A defense in depth, designed to delay and cause many casualties. It was a war of attrition designed to not win so much as it was to inflict heavy casualties and possibly cause poor morale among the Americans. This would also give the homeland more time to prepare for the final invasion or negotiate terms of surrender. Suicide was preferable to capture but the overall tactics were never meant to win, only postpone the inevitable. Their plan worked better than expected and they came very close to gaining their objective of a negotiated peace. The battle lasted from 1 April to 7 September 1945 and the losses to America were the largest in any Pacific land battle. Okinawa turned out to be the largest and thankfully, the last major land battle against Japan. Over 12,000 Americans were killed in action and 36,000 more were wounded. But in addition to this, there were over 26,000 non-battle casualties, combat stress is what it was called then. The two Army and two Marine divisions that made up this operation and the Navy off shore suffered terrible losses. These losses were so high and America was so war weary after Iwo Jima and now, Okinawa, that Congress demanded an investigation into American tactics as used by our commanders. All of this had a great influence on President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Even with hindsight gained from 63 years later, I can still feel the terrible burden of both duty and command and what it must have been like to fight for each island, never knowing if the next one would be your last.
Semper Fi

[airborne]

Thank you Fox for these great insights from a man at the sharp end without a weapon. I guess he was doing from the front what Ed Murrrow was doing from bomb blitzed London, telling it like it really is.

Thanks for this posting.

Mike

[03Fox2/1]

Mike,
Yes, I agree, both of these men, Pyle and Murrow, had a special way of communicating the war front to those folks back home in a manner that conveyed great insight and sensitivity to the average civilian.
I have a little more about Ernie Pyle, if I haven't wore this subject out with everyone.
In this story, he gives some opinions about enlisted Marines and their commonality with American soldiers fighting in Europe.
Semper Fi


As we know, one who was present with the 1st Marine Division on Okinawa was famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the beloved champion of the GI. After two weeks of the slow starting campaign, Pyle, looking for a story for the Scripps-Howard syndicate, decided to go over to Ie Shima and see how the Army was faring. It was there, during the operation in which the 77th Infantry took the lightly defended little island northwest of Okinawa, that Pyle was killed by a snipers bullet.

The following words are from one of the last pieces Ernie wrote, and one of the few devoted to the men of the Marine Corps. This is in the book, The U.S. Marine Corps in World War II by S.E. Smith. The story is entitled, "Last Chapter" by Ernie Pyle.

"After a short time with the headquarters of the Marine regiment, I moved to a company and lived and marched with them for several days. The company was part of the First Marine Division. I introduced myself to the company commander who took me on a half hour's walking trip around the company area before leaving me with the men.
Our part of the island had not then been declared "secured," and we had received warning of possible attacks from sea that night.
Captain Dusenbury, said I could have my choice of two places to spend the first night with his company. One was with him in his command post, a big, round Japanese gun emplacement made of sandbags. The Japs had never occupied it, but they had stuck a log out of it, pointing it toward the sea so that to aerial reconnaissance it looked like a gun.
My other choice was with a couple of enlisted men who had room for me in a little gypsylike hide-out they'd made. I chose the second of these two places, partly because it was warmer, and also because I wanted to be with the enlisted men."

"As our company was moving forward one day I looked down the line of closely packed Marines and I thought for a moment I was back in Italy. There for sure was Bill Mauldin's cartoon character of GI Joe - the solemn, bearded, dirty, drooping, weary old man of the infantry. This character was Pfc. Urban Vachon of French-Canadian extraction, who came from Laconia, New Hampshire. He had a brother, William, fighting in Germany. Urban was such a perfect ringer for Mauldin's soldier that I asked the regimental photographer to take a picture of him to send back to the States. If you've seen it, you can prove to any disbelievers that soldiers do look the way Mauldin made them look."

"The major part of the battle was being fought by the Army -- my old friends, the doughfoots. This time the Marines had it easy.
Marine Corps blitzes in the Pacific had all been so bitter and the men had fought so magnificently that I had conjured up a mental picture of a Marine as someone who bore a close resemblance to a man from Mars. I was almost afraid of them. I did find them confident, but neither cocky or smart-alecky. They had fears, and qualms, and hatred for war the same as anybody else. They wanted to go home just as badly as any soldiers I've ever met. They are proud to be Marines and they wouldn't be in any other branch of the service, yet they are not arrogant about it. And I found they have a healthy respect for the infantry.
One day we were sitting on a hillside talking about the infantry. One Marine spoke of a certain division -- a division they had fought beside -- and was singing its praises. "It's as good as any Marine division," he said.
"What was that you said ?" a listener cut in.
The Marine repeated it and emphasized it a little. Another Marine stood up and called out loudly, "Did you hear what he said ? This guy says there's an Army division as good as any Marine division. He must be crazy. Haw, haw, haw !"
And yet other boys chimed in, arguing very soberly, and sided with the one who had praised the Army division."


"Before I came into the field, several Marine officers asked me to try to sense just what the Marine spirit is, what is it's source, and what keeps it alive. In peacetime when the Marine Corps was a small outfit, with its campaigns high-lighted, everybody was a volunteer and you could understand why they felt so superior. But with the war the Marine Corps had grown by hundreds of thousands of men. It became an outfit of ordinary people -- some big, some little, some even draftees. It had changed, in fact, until Marines looked to me exactly like a company of soldiers in Europe. Yet that Marine Corps spirit still remained. I never did find out what perpetuated it. The men were not necessarily better trained, nor were they any better equipped; often they were not so well supplied as other troops. But a Marine still considered himself a better soldier than anybody else, even though nine-tenths of them didn't want to be soldiers at all.
They were very much aware of the terrible casualties they'd had in this Pacific war. They were even proud of that too, in a way. Any argument about superiority among units was settled by citing the greatest number of casualties. Many of them even envisioned the end of the Marine Corps at Okinawa. If the Marine divisions had been beaten as they were on Iwo Jima, the boys felt it would have been difficult to find enough men of Marine Corps caliber to reconstitute all the divisions. They even had a sadly sardonic song about their approach to Okinawa, the theme of which was, "Goodby, Marines !"

"The boys of my regiment were continuously apoligizing to me because the Okinawa campaign started out so mildly. They felt I might think less of them because they didn't show me a blood bath. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was probably the happiest American there about the way it turned out for us. I told them that kind of campaign suited me, and without exception they came back with the answer that it suited them too. I heard it said so many times that it almost became a chant: "If they could all be like this, we wouldn't mind war so much.
No, Marines don't thirst for battles. I've read and heard enough about them to have no doubts whatever about the things they can do when they have to. They are o.k. for my money, in battle or out."

[Reloader]

Just found this online report from February this year, about Ernie's death and which includes the photograph taken shortly afterwards:

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0802/after-63-years-death-photo-of-famed-wwii-reporter-ernie-pyle-surfaces.html

[03Fox2/1]

This link has some great information along with a very sad photo of the demise of Ernie Pyle. His death, while unarmed, was no less heroic than that of a foot soldier or marine attacking the enemy with a weapon. Ernie's weapons were his intellect and his typewriter and his courage and devotion to duty was unquestioned by all who had the pleasure of his company. From a general to a boot private, Ernie Pyle had the respect of them all and I will always remember him with the honor he deserves. I will end my stories about him on this sad note.
Semper Fi

[namvet]

After 63 Years,
Death Photo of Famed WWII Reporter Ernie Pyle Surfaces

February 2008

by Richard Pyle
The Associated Press
NEW YORK _ The figure in the photograph is clad in Army fatigues, boots and helmet, lying on his back in peaceful repose, folded hands holding a military cap. Except for a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, he could be asleep.


But he is not asleep; he is dead. And this is not just another fallen GI; it is Ernie Pyle, the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II.




http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0802/images/pyle.jpg

story (story)

he was a hero.