Ernie

It's not that I have a premonition that death's going to catch up with me. It's nothing more than any foot soldier in the lines feels. . . . You begin to feel that you can't go on forever without being hit. I 'feel that I have used up all my chances. And I hate it. ... I don't want to be killed.

It was Ernie Pyle, talking to a fellow newsman three months ago. Like many correspondents, and more than most, he had certainly used up chances. He had covered London in the blitz, slugged across North Africa, landed with the troops in Sicily. He had been bombed, slightly wounded and awarded the Purple Heart at Anzio. He had gone into Normandy on D + 1 and later watched in horror as Lieut. General Lesley J. McNair and other Americans were killed by their own planes at Saint-Lo.

Others could do the headquarters reporting, but his kind of copy, the artfully simple "hometown name-&-address stuff" about U.S. fighting men, compelled him to be up front. "War to an individual is hardly ever bigger than a hundred yards on each side of him," Pyle wrote. That 200 yards was his beat. In articles home to 393 daily and 297 weekly newspapers (total daily circulation: 13,390,144) Ernie Pyle covered that 200-yard view, its terrors, fatigues, laughs and heroism, more vividly and more simply than any other U.S. reporter. After 29 months of it, he wrote from France last September:

I have had all I can take 'for a while. . . . I've been immersed in it too long. . . . My mind is confused. . . . All of a sudden it seemed to me that if I heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut.

He returned to the U.S., not unaware of the fame he had attained but unready for its demands. The people of Albuquerque gave him a $500 wrist watch. Paulette Goddard, Olivia de Havilland and Jinx Falkenburg kissed him, all in one afternoon. Two universities gave him honorary degrees. Admirers sent him apples, pecans, a cowboy belt, a jeep. He won a Pulitzer Prize, and the first Raymond Clapper Memorial Award for war correspondence. His collected G.I. columns, Here Is Your War, sold over a million copies; a second collection, Brave Men, sold 875,000. Hollywood made a movie (soon to be released) with Burgess Meredith playing Ernie Pyle. Ernie's earnings reached a half million dollars.

I have never aspired to be famous. If I had, then I could say to myself, "All right, brother, you made your bed, now lie in it." But this thing just happened. . . . I feel sad, because it has given me the big things of life and taken away the precious little things.

The little things were his old newspaper cronies, his folks in Indiana, "That Girl" in the picket-fenced white house in Albuquerque and, above all, the desire of a shy man to move about at his own gait. After three and a half months of being lionized, he got ready to go to war again, this time to the Pacific:

I'm certainly not going because I've got itchy feet again, or because I can't stand America, or because there's any mystic fascination about war. . . . I'm going simply because there's a war on and I'm part of it. . . . I've got to--and I hate it.

It was harder than ever for this skinny (no pound) little man, with grey-fringed balding head and offside grin, to be his simple self. Generals and admirals hogged him. His talent as a G.I. Boswell was to catch fighting men in their unselfconscious moods, and to report what he saw and heard in prose as homely (and sometimes as unselfconsciously eloquent) as their ways; but now he was a celebrity, sought after for autographs.

Finally, in the Okinawa invasion, he seemed to have found himself again. The Marines were apologetic, because the initial landing was so easy. "Brother," he told one of them, "I've had all the excitement I need for a lifetime."

He wrote to his wife on March 31: "I've promised myself and I promise you that if I come through this one I will never go on another one." But there was a sideline invasion coming up, on the ten-mile square isle of le Jima, three miles off Okinawa, and Pyle went along.

I try not to take any foolish chances, but there's just no way to play it completely safe and still do your job.

Last week on le Jima, Ernie Pyle, 44, met death from a Jap machine-gunner's bullet.

Big men paid him tribute. Said President Truman: "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told." Said General Eisenhower: "All of us here have lost one of our best and most understanding friends." The G.I.s he wrote about paid their respects too. On Ie Jima, Corporal Landon Seidler fashioned a handmade wooden casket for him. Soldiers nailed Pyle's dogtags on the top, and buried him on le beside the G.I. dead. For the spot where he had fallen, Corporal Seidler carved a wooden plaque: "At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy--Ernie Pyle--18 April, 1945."

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