Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II

Air & Space Power Journal, Spring, 2005 by Michael Pierson

Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II by James Tobin. Free Press (http://www.simon says.com), 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020, 1997, 320 pages, $25.00 (hardcover), $15.25 (softcover).

Millions of Americans found themselves riveted to television sets as elements of the US Army and Marine Corps ventured into harm's way at the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Helmeted reporters sent home live reports from behind dusty tanks, thanks not only to new technology but also to the US military's renewed commitment to "embedding" reporters. As the war raged, we heard again and again--and still do today--tales of GI Joes still fighting the good fight, longing for home, and complaining about the food but never challenging the authorities who sent them there. This reporting was a far cry from that done by "hotel warriors" during the first Gulf War.

Journalists have written about the common soldier for a long time, but the formula story of the American GI Joe--attempted with varying degrees of success by today's reporters--originated with the legendary Ernie Pyle. Ernie Pyle's War, James Tobin's insightful biography, gives us a well-written view into how a talented travel reporter became the paradigm of war correspondents. More importantly for students of military history, culture, and current events, the book reveals how Pyle was its much a creation of his times as of his talents.

Tobin treats his readers to Pyle's homey style extensively throughout the well-researched book, sometimes to prove a point and other times just to give them a look at the little man from Indiana whom Americans came to love in the 1940s. Pyle's popularity derived from his simple though distinctive writing and his concentration on personal details that gave parents, siblings, and sweethearts back on the home front an almost rose-colored view of the war. Tobin includes a sampler of Pyle's columns in an appendix that readers should turn to first.

We find that Pyle's reporting style differed from that of most World War II correspondents, whose dispatches from Allied headquarters bear strong resemblance to those of the Pentagon press corps today. He was not the only reporter to live with the troops, exposing himself to the same dangers and living with their deprivations and fears. But Pyle could make battle-hardened troops comfortable, listen to them talk, join in their activities, and then weave yarns about them, casting these citizen-soldiers as simple heroes in an epic struggle between good and evil. He developed his style while traveling the small towns of America. writing about common people and homelike situations. His travel pieces and war dispatches gave readers a Norman Rockwell view of America as it climbed out of the Great Depression; they held out hope to many Americans who just wanted their boys to come home safely.

Pyle's popularity with high-ranking officers helped him get in on major operations, including the invasion of Sicily. Not free to roam the battlefield, however, he stayed in constant contact with military press officers. He was also subject to the same military field censorship that prevented reporters from discussing most of the negative aspects of an industrialized war that cost millions of Allied and civilian lives. Pyle did write of death and vicious injury, but always in the context of an acceptable sacrifice--as part of a larger, righteous campaign in which good would inevitably prevail.

On a personal level, though, the carnage took a heavy toll on Pyle's psyche. Tobin uses the journalist's letters to his beloved wife, Jerry, and to his editors and friends to shed light on Pyle's fears that he himself suffered from "battle fatigue," like so many of the bleary-eyed GIs he lived among. Recounting Pyle's departure from Europe for the last time, the author notes that "after the constant drumbeat of death in Normandy, he told a reporter later, 'I damn near had a war neurosis.... About two weeks more and I'd have been in a hospital.... I'd reached a point where I felt that no ideal was worth the death of one more man.'" Although Pyle wrote in Iris columns of his personal fatigue (after all, he was in his early 40s and had no military training before setting off to war), his readers saw him as a link to family members serving overseas. He received letters by the thousands asking him to look up a relative serving somewhere in Europe and, later, in the Pacific.

Modern wartime audiences--and military public-affairs officers as well--long for Ernie Pyle's positive perspective on war. War reporters are not members of the military team, as they were in Pyle's time (nor should they be). Today's reporters struggle to replicate his style, access to troops, and commercial success. However, both America and American journalism have become so cynical and have changed so much since the 1940s that we may never see another journalist like Ernie Pyle.

Tobin's biography, the product of extensive research, is an easy read--especially for students of World War II. But one need not have intimate knowledge of the war's intricacies to be able to understand this very human reporter who covered mankind's greatest inhumanity. War veterans will find that Pyle's reporting--and his conveyance of personal impressions of the war to friends and family--rings true even today. The simple fact then and now is that no one can prepare for the experiences of wax, either on the front lines or on the home front.