Byline: Ernie Pyle
The country's best-known war correspondent learned his trade as an aviation reporter.
- By Rebecca Maksel
- Air & Space magazine, November 2011
Though he had a student pilot’s permit, Pyle never got a license.
Courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
(Page 3 of 4)
“He is an aviator, but 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.”
In these early columns, Pyle developed the easy, homespun style that would later characterize his World War II correspondence. Of Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle running a 1929 radio beacon test: “If you had been at College Park Field just at dusk yesterday, you would have seen a little man, all stuffed and beclothed until he looked like a big man, waddle into his airplane and fly away into the northern darkness.”
Pyle wrote about pilots by day and socialized with them by night, often in his tiny second-floor apartment on N Street in southwest Washington. The airmail pilots were so comfortable with the slight, redheaded reporter that if they were forced to land due to bad weather, they’d call the postal service first and Pyle second, to give him the story.
Miller wrote that in 1929, “a young naval lieutenant, Apollo Soucek...was trying to set an altitude record. When he landed at the Naval Air Station after his first high flight and asked for a cigarette, Ernie was the first to hand him one. Another day, following a second flight, Ernie was there again with a cigarette. Still later, ‘Soakum’ stepped from his plane after another altitude flight—but Ernie wasn’t there. Soucek refused to smoke until Ernie was located, at Washington-Hoover Airport across the river, and rushed by taxi to do the honors.”
Pyle’s instincts were not always right. After flying in one of Eastern Air Transport’s big Curtiss Condors in November 1931, he offered this summary: “We think your airplanes are the most comfortable in the world, your pilots without peers, and your flying hostess idea a lot of foolishness.”
In 1940, the newspaper suggested a European trip; Pyle, by now a national columnist for Scripps-Howard, was lukewarm. Reluctantly, he decided to report from England, arriving in a blacked-out London on December 9, during the Blitz. His columns, eventually published as the book Ernie Pyle in England, were successful from the start; First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan, telling readers in her own newspaper column, “I don’t know whether any of you are reading about Ernie Pyle’s trip to England with as much interest as I am, but I have read everything since he left….”
After England, Pyle thought about following the American air forces: “I could become sort of an adopted unofficial biographer for them,” he wrote Miller. “In a way I could revive the old aviation column....” He ended up in Algeria instead, just two weeks after the invasion of Africa, his first columns covering the Allied troops that had made the original landings, and the hospital units that cared for the wounded. Pyle told Miller he found these columns “inadequate,” but they offered something—the empathetic voice, perhaps—that readers at home seemed to need.
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Comments (3)
I remember this.
Posted by walter chambers on September 20,2011 | 04:04 PM
Pyle has a brilliant description of a crippled bomber limping back to base in North Africa in his book This is Your War.
Posted by Stephen Hartshorne on March 31,2012 | 03:51 PM
There are five Americans without whom our victory in WWII would have been much more costly and difficult. Ernie, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Nimitz and Henry Kaiser. Ernie told the story of the sons, brothers and fathers of our country in elegant simplicity to an audience desperate to understand what their loved-one's day-to-day was like. It is possible that as casualty lists mounted an anti-war sentiment could have blossomed by late 1944. Ernie kept reality in front on the home folks, both the good and bad, funny and tragic, and kept us focused better than any propoganda film. Two of the most powerful statements on the futility of war are the Captain Waskow column and the column found in his shirt pocket after his death. Yet these gems explained why we had to do what we did, giving millions the motivation and courage to continue on. He never preached, never ranted, never raved. He took it all in at great personal sacrifice, and put it on paper with a lyrical simplicity rare in any form of prose. He didn't pull punches. He didn't tell anyone how to feel. He just makes you feel, even today. His is the true history of the War and Pre-war America with a total focus on the everyday Americans who lived this history. His decision in the face of personal tragedy to freely go to the Pacific to continue the story is one of the great pure heroic acts of the War. . . if not the century. He gave all, truly all. It breaks my heart that he is so unknown today, even to historians and history buffs and journalists. Of course, you can argue that Ernie, being essentially a humble man, is happier being an unknown. All he wanted was the quiet simple life with Jerry in their home in the desert, a reward he never enjoyed. While Ernie was awarded a special medal by Congress after his death on Ie Shima, it should have been the Congressional Medal of Honor. Ernest Taylor Pyle deserves so much more from us. It is up to us to give him his due.
Posted by Jim Fisher on May 19,2012 | 09:20 PM