Ernie was there, and died.
Beyond that, I don't know.
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Pyle, who had become famous for his syndicated
newspaper columns focusing on the average infantrymen
in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France, had
reluctantly agreed to report on the war in the Pacific,
telling his readers he was going “simply because
there’s a war on and I’m part of it and I’ve known all
the time I was going back. I’m going simply because
I’ve got to go, and I hate it.”Arriving in the new
theater of operations, he compared it to learning how
to live in a new city. “The methods of war, the
attitude toward it, the homesickness, the distances,
the climate—everything is different from what we have
known in the European war.”After spending three weeks
with the crew of a small aircraft carrier, the USS
Cabot, and battling with U.S. Navy censors about his
reporting (he won the fight), Pyle debated whether he
should accompany the U.S. Marines for the invasion of
Okinawa. He believed he would be killed if he went in
with the troops for the landings, but decided to go. “I
think I’ll come through it after all,” he wrote his
friend and editor Lee Miller.
Pyle’s coverage of the last battle in the Pacific war
began with a sober final intelligence briefing on the
Panamint berthed in the Ulithi atoll, after which
“nobody could have felt overconfident,” noted Sherrod.
After hearing from invasion planners that the Okinawa
landings were expected to be “horrendous—worse than
Iwo,” according to Sherrod, Pyle said to him, “‘What I
need now is a great big drink.’ We did have a drink.
Many of them.”Ulithi’s jovial commander, Commodore
Oliver Owen “Scrappy” Kessing, had arranged a farewell
party at the officers’ club (the Black Widow) on Asor
Island for the correspondents and high-ranking officers
from the navy and First and Sixth Marine Divisions. The
party included a band and, “miraculously,” women—about
seventy nurses from the six hospital ships in the
anchorage, plus two women radio operators from a
Norwegian ship. “Everybody got drunk . . . as people
always do the last night ashore,” Sherrod recalled,
noting that Pyle had been “the lion of the party.”The
next morning, as the approximately forty reporters and
photographers left Asor for their assigned ships,
Kessing had an African American band on the dock
playing its own “boogie-woogie” version of sad farewell
music. Also on hand to see them off was a Seabee
lieutenant whose detachment had built most of the base
and a special guest, Coast Guard Commander Jack
Dempsey, the former boxing champion. Someone in the
crowd on the dock shouted out a warning to Pyle to be
sure to keep his head down on Okinawa. “Listen, you
bastards,” Pyle joked to his colleagues, “I’ll take a
drink over every one of your graves.” Then, he turned
to Dempsey, who, Sherrod noted, weighed about twice as
much as the rail-thin reporter, put up his fists in
mock belligerence, and asked the former boxer, “Want to
fight?”On his way to Okinawa onboard the USS Charles
Carroll, a Crescent City-class attack transport, Pyle
prepared for the ordeal ahead of him by getting as much
sleep as he could in a cabin he shared with Major Reed
Taylor, a veteran of the fighting on Guadalcanal
earlier in the war. Between his naps, Pyle tried to
catch up on his reading and listened to the latest war
news broadcast once or twice a day over the ship’s
loudspeakers. “Every little bit of good news cheers
us,” he noted. “The ship, of course, is full of rumors,
good and bad, but nobody believes any of them.” Before
sailing, Pyle had been able to add a note to a letter
to his wife, Jerry, that read: “Because of censorship I
can’t tell you where I am, or why, or what happens.
They are waiting for me so I must go now. I hate it
that this letter is so short, so inadequate. I love you
and you are the only thing I live for.”On the morning
of the invasion, April 1, 1945, Pyle enjoyed a ham-and-
egg breakfast before stepping onto a landing craft for
his trip to shore with the Fifth Marine Regiment. He
and other correspondents were set to land about a hour
and a half after the American forces hit the beach.
“There’s nothing romantic whatever in knowing that an
hour from now you may be dead,” Pyle wrote. He also
dreaded what he might find on the beach—the mangled
bodies of wounded and dead marines he had come to know
well on the voyage.Both Pyle and the marines were
stunned, and delighted, to discover there had been very
few casualties; the landings had been unopposed by the
Japanese. One of the relieved marines wished he could
“wear Ernie Pyle around his neck as a good-luck charm”
for the rest of the war. The beach was quiet enough for
Pyle to enjoy a picnic meal of turkey wings, bread,
oranges, and apples. “You can’t know the relief I
felt,” he wrote Jerry, “for as you know I had dreaded
this one terribly. Now it is behind me, and I will
never make another landing, so I can’t help but feel
good about that.”The ease of the initial landings gave
way to much tougher fighting as American forces made
their way inland. The main Japanese force had withdrawn
to the southern portion of the island, where they hid
their artillery and heavy weapons in caves and dugouts,
protecting them from attacks form the air and from the
U.S. ships offshore. Pyle spent two days with the
marines before returning to his transport to write. He
rejoined the Fifth Marines and was on hand when they
captured some frightened enemy soldiers. “Fortunately
they happened to be the surrendering kind, rather than
[the] fight-to-death kind, or they could have killed
several of us,” he wrote his wife about the
experience.Returning to the Panamint, Pyle learned
about a new mission involving the Seventy-Seventh
Infantry Division, tasked with capturing Ie Shima, a
ten-mile-square island located west of Okinawa and home
to three Japanese airfields. The operation was set for
April 16. Pyle agreed to go with the soldiers for the
fight, but only after the initial landing had been
made. “I’ve got almost a spooky feeling that I’ve been
spared once more and that it would be asking for it to
tempt fate again,” he wrote Miller. “So I’m going to
keep my promise to you and to myself that that
[Okinawa] was the last one. I’ll be on operations in
the future, of course, but not on any more landings.”
Pyle worked on a draft of a column he intended to
release when victory was achieved in Europe.The
Seventy-Seventh met with stiff resistance from the
Japanese on Ie Shima when it hit the beach on April 16
— a landing Pyle observed from the Panamint. The next
day, Pyle and other correspondents boarded a landing
craft for the trip to the small island’s beach. After
landing, Pyle went to the command post of the
division’s 305th Regiment. As he talked to the soldiers
and their officers, he saw one GI killed by a Japanese
mine. “I wish I was in Albuquerque!” he exclaimed,
remembering his home there. He spent the night on Ie
Shima, sleeping in a former Japanese dugout.At about
ten o’clock the next morning, Pyle climbed into a jeep
with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, the 305th’s
commanding officer. Coolidge and three other soldiers
hoped to find a site for a new command post for the
regiment. Joining Pyle and Coolidge on the trip were
Major George H. Pratt and two enlisted men, Dale W.
Bassett and John L. Barnes. The group traveled down a
narrow road that had been cleared of mines and was
thought to be safe. “We followed some 2½ ton trucks and
every indication pointed to a fairly calm trip except
for occasional mortars dropping into the open fields on
either hand, where two infantry division battalions had
dug in for the night. The men were finishing breakfast
and preparing to move forward to new positions.”At the
jeep slowed to avoid traffic ahead near the village of
Ie, a Japanese soldier hidden in a coral ridge about a
third of a mile away fired on the vehicle with his
Nambu machine gun. “All of us without a second thought
jumped for safety into the ditch on either side of the
road,” Coolidge remembered. Pyle, Bassett, and Coolidge
dove into a ditch on the right-hand side of the road,
while Barnes went to the left and Pratt crouched
further ahead in a ditch near a small farm road. Both
Coolidge and Pyle raised their heads to see if the
others had been hit by the enemy’s fire. Seeing Pratt,
Pyle asked, “Are you all right?” The Japanese soldier
fired again. After ducking the bullets, Coolidge turned
to see Pyle lying on the ground. “He was lying face up,
and at the time no blood showed, so for a second I
could not tell what was wrong,” Coolidge noted. A
bullet had struck Pyle’s left temple—America’s favorite
war correspondent was dead.
After recovering Pyle’s body, soldiers built a coffin
for their friend and buried him along with the others
killed on Ie Shima. About two hundred men from all
ranks and representing all parts of the armed forces
attended the burial service held on April 20, which
lasted about 10 minutes. “With the exception of an
occasional blast of distant guns and the murmuring of
the waves 100 yards away, all was quiet,” recalled
Nathaniel B. Saucier, the 305th’s chaplain.Edwin Waltz,
Pyle’s personal secretary at Pacific Fleet
headquarters, went through the correspondent’s personal
effects and discovered the handwritten draft of his
column about the end of the war in Europe. “My heart is
still in Europe, and that’s why I’m writing this
column,” Pyle noted. “It is to the boys who were my
friends for so long.” His only regret of the war was
that he was not with them when final victory had been
won against the Germans. The column, which was never
published, reveals as does no other piece of writing
the terrible personal toll the conflict took on him.
Pyle wrote that buried in his brain forever would be
the sight of cold, dead men scattered everywhere: “Dead
men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to
hate them.” For the reader at home, Pyle wrote, these
men were merely “columns of figures, or he is a near
one who went away and didn’t come back. You didn’t see
him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road
in France.” Pyle and his colleagues, however, saw them,
and they saw them by the uncountable thousands: “That’s
the difference.”
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