The death of Ernie Pyle

On the morning of 18 April 1945, on the outskirts of the small town of Ie on the little island of Ie Shima, a few kilometres off the west coast of Okinawa, a Japanese machine gun opened fire on a jeep heading for the new command post of an American infantry regiment. The men in it leapt into a ditch. When one of them raised his head a moment later to see what was happening, another burst struck him in the left temple, just below the rim of his helmet. He was killed instantly. He was the 44-year-old Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent whose columns were read by millions in the United States and whom infantrymen regarded as “their” reporter.

War chronologies record that Pyle, “the famous GI war correspondent”, was killed by machine-gun fire on Ie Shima, a small island off Okinawa. That is exactly what happened – both the US official history and the account of the officer who was with him agree on it.

Chronicler of the infantry

Ernest Taylor Pyle was born in 1900 on a farm in Indiana. Before he went to war he was a journalist with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, writing an aviation column, and in 1935–1940 a roving reporter who travelled around America writing about ordinary people. In 1940 he reported on the Blitz from London. From 1942 he accompanied the American infantry in North Africa, then in Sicily and Italy. His column on the death of Captain Henry Waskow of the 36th Infantry Division, killed in December 1943 in the mountains near San Pietro, was published on 10 January 1944, reprinted by hundreds of newspapers, and is still regarded as one of the finest pieces of reporting of the war.

Pyle did not write about strategy or generals. He wrote about what the soldiers ate, where they slept, how tired they were and how afraid. In May 1944 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his correspondence; on 7 June, the day after the Normandy landings, he went ashore on Omaha Beach, and in the summer he reported on the fighting in the hedgerows. His books Here Is Your War (1943) and Brave Men (1944) were bestsellers. In the autumn of 1944, exhausted, he went home to Albuquerque, telling his readers that his spirit was “wobbly”.

The last journey

Even so, in January 1945 he set out for the Pacific. He felt he could not abandon the soldiers fighting Japan. His first pieces from the navy were coolly received: he wrote that sailors had an easier life than the infantry in Europe, which the navy did not forgive him. On 1 April he went ashore with the Marines during the landing on Okinawa. In the days that followed, massed kamikaze attacks began off the coast, and on 12 April came the news of President Roosevelt’s death.

An island with an airfield

Ie Shima (Iejima in Japanese) is a flat, oval island about 8 kilometres long, lying a few kilometres west of the Motobu Peninsula on Okinawa. Administratively it forms the municipality of Ie. Above the plain rises a solitary hill, Iegusugu, about 180 metres high, which the Americans called the Pinnacle. More important, however, was the airfield – three runways which the Japanese had dug up, blown up and mined before the invasion so that they would not fall into enemy hands. According to the US official history, the main aim of the operation was precisely to gain additional airfields to support the fighting on Okinawa and the air raids on the Japanese home islands.

According to the same source, the island was defended by some 2,000 soldiers, mainly from the 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment of the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade, together with the 50th Special Infantry Battalion and a 580-strong battalion of forcibly conscripted Okinawan labourers. The Japanese had also armed and put into uniform, by American estimates, about 1,500 civilians, many of them women. On 16 April the 305th and 306th Regiments of General Andrew Bruce’s 77th Infantry Division landed on the beaches of the south and south-west coast, followed on 17 April by the 307th Regiment. Resistance centred on the town of Ie, with some 300 houses, on Iegusugu hill and on the ridges the soldiers named Bloody Ridge and Government House Hill. Ernie Pyle came ashore with the 305th Regiment on 17 April, together with the units of the 77th Division.

Outside Ie

On the morning of 18 April Pyle was riding in a jeep with the commander of the 305th Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, and several soldiers. On a road on the outskirts of Ie, running along terraced coral slopes, a concealed machine gun opened fire. According to Coolidge’s account, the two of them took cover in a ditch; after a moment Pyle raised his head to look around, and it was then that the next burst hit him.

He was buried in his helmet in a makeshift military cemetery on the island, in a row of graves between an infantry private and a combat engineer. On his body, his biographers say, was found the draft of a column prepared for the end of the war in Europe. In it Pyle wrote of the “dead men by mass production” – the thousands of fallen he had seen at the front – and asked that they should not be forgotten amid the joy of victory.

The fighting on Ie Shima went on for another three days. At 5.30 p.m. on 21 April the island was declared secured. By 24 April the 77th Division had lost 172 killed, 902 wounded and 46 missing; according to American figures 4,706 Japanese, including armed civilians, were killed and 149 taken prisoner. The Americans evacuated the surviving civilians to the island of Tokashiki in the Kerama group. By 10 May one fighter group was already based on the rebuilt airfield, and by June three.

Mourning

News of Pyle’s death reached the United States the same day, less than a week after Roosevelt’s death, and caused a similarly heartfelt reaction. President Harry Truman declared that “no man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told”. General Dwight Eisenhower wrote that the soldiers in Europe had lost one of their best friends. Eleanor Roosevelt, herself only just widowed, devoted her newspaper column to him. Newspapers across the country carried obituaries on their front pages.

The soldiers of the 77th Division put up a simple memorial at the spot where he died, inscribed: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.” The memorial, later replaced by a more durable one, still stands on the island, and ceremonies are held there every year. Pyle’s remains were moved in 1949 to the military cemetery in Honolulu known as the Punchbowl. He was posthumously awarded the Medal for Merit (July 1945) and, in 1983, the Purple Heart – a rare decoration for a civilian.

His place in the war

Pyle was one of several dozen American correspondents killed on the fronts of the Second World War, but none was as well known. His death came during the bloodiest period of the Pacific War: the fighting on and around Okinawa cost the lives of more than 12,000 Americans, tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers and many of the island’s inhabitants. For American readers, the reporter who had come through Africa, Italy and Normandy only to be killed a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe became a symbol of the price paid by ordinary soldiers. The airfield on Ie Shima, fought for by the regiment he had landed with, was used in the following months to cover Okinawa and to raid Japan, and in August 1945 aircraft carrying the Japanese delegation flying to Manila to discuss the surrender landed there.