Ernie Pyle Biography Quotes 20 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Ernest Taylor Pyle was born in 1900 on a small farm near Dana, Indiana, where the rhythms of rural life shaped his earliest impressions of people and place. His parents, William and Maria Pyle, worked the land and encouraged their son's seriousness of purpose and his habit of paying close attention to the stories of ordinary folk. After local schooling, he attended Indiana University in Bloomington. There he worked on the student newspaper and found the newsroom's urgency and camaraderie irresistible. Restless and eager for professional experience, he left the university before graduating to take a job in newspapers, convinced that learning from a live city desk would be the truest education.

Early Career and the Washington Years
Pyle's apprenticeship in journalism took him through small Midwestern papers and then to the Washington Daily News, part of the Scripps-Howard chain. In Washington he proved a deft copy editor and then a distinctive voice on the aviation beat, where he rode in early aircraft, spoke fluently with mechanics and pilots, and explained the new world of flight to readers with plain words and an eye for human detail. The chain's leader, Roy W. Howard, recognized Pyle's talent for reporting the intimate scale of big subjects and encouraged him to range more widely.

The Roving Reporter
In the mid-1930s Pyle became a roving columnist for Scripps-Howard, crossing the country by car and train to write about the main streets, boarding houses, diners, and out-of-the-way places that larger newsrooms overlooked. He wrote with sympathy about farmers and shopkeepers, waitresses and road crews, usually from their side of the counter. His wife, Geraldine "Jerry" Pyle, was often at his side on those long circuits, providing companionship and ballast for a life spent in motion. The two made a modest home in Albuquerque as a base between trips, a place where he could rest and put order to the notes and letters that piled up after months on the road. By the late 1930s his column was syndicated nationally, and he had begun to craft the plain-spoken voice that would later define his war dispatches.

War Correspondent in Europe
After the United States entered World War II, Pyle volunteered to cover American troops overseas. Beginning in North Africa and continuing through Sicily and the Italian mainland, he lived among infantry companies, shared their rations and foxholes when the lines were active, and listened long enough to understand what they wished folks at home could know. He had access to commanders such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, but he kept his attention on privates, sergeants, and junior officers, reasoning that the war's truth lay with those who carried rifles and shivered in slit trenches. His most widely read column, "The Death of Captain Waskow", about Henry T. Waskow of Texas, was a quiet elegy for a beloved company commander brought down from the mountains at night. It became a touchstone for readers because it refused to glamorize or simplify what the men endured.

In June 1944 Pyle reported from the Normandy beachhead, arriving after the first waves but close enough to see the wreckage and the cost. He wrote about the small artifacts of soldiers' lives scattered across the sand and hedgerows, and about the fatigue that defined victory more than any headline. His European columns were collected in books including Here Is Your War and Brave Men, and in 1944 he received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished correspondence, an honor he accepted as recognition of the soldiers whose stories he merely carried.

Home Front, Exhaustion, and Advocacy
Months at the front left Pyle exhausted and ill. He returned to the United States for a period of rest, rejoining Jerry in Albuquerque. The strain of separation and the war's relentless churn weighed on both of them. Even while recovering, he used his platform to advocate for the infantryman's lot. He wrote plainly that those who faced daily combat deserved extra pay; his columns helped push Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to act, and the resulting legislation granted additional pay to combat infantry. Pyle also admired and encouraged fellow chroniclers of the enlisted man, including the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, whose Willie and Joe embodied the humor and grit that Pyle recognized in countless bivouacs.

Return to War and Death in the Pacific
Feeling a duty to finish what he had begun, Pyle went back to war in early 1945 to report on the Pacific campaign. He embedded with naval units and Army formations moving toward Okinawa, again choosing to travel at the pace of foot soldiers. On the small island of Ie Shima, off Okinawa, he set out by jeep with officers of the 77th Infantry Division, including Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge. Caught in sudden machine-gun fire on April 18, 1945, Pyle raised his head from a roadside ditch and was killed instantly. Soldiers who had grown used to seeing him in muddy uniforms and crowded mess tents mourned him as one of their own. Initially buried on the island, he was later interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where many visitors still pause at his grave.

Style, Relationships, and Working Method
Pyle's craft rested on careful listening and a refusal to condescend to his subjects. He put names in his copy so families could find a familiar face amid the vast abstraction of war. He avoided strategy talk unless it touched the men directly, and he wrote about sleep, cold, fear, mail call, and the relief of hot food as if those were the central facts of history. Editors in the Scripps-Howard chain trimmed and placed his columns with a minimum of interference, aware that the voice readers trusted depended on a light hand back home. He stayed in steady correspondence with Jerry, who managed the domestic burdens and anxieties that come with a spouse at war. Friends and colleagues saw his compassion as both strength and risk; he absorbed the sorrow around him until it marked his own health.

Legacy
By the end of his life Pyle had become the best-known American war correspondent of his era, yet he never abandoned the modest frame he considered his proper scale. His columns continue to be taught as examples of narrative reportage that honors its subjects without embellishment. Selections from his wartime work remain in print, and his earlier stateside pieces are valued for their portrait of the country before and during the upheaval of global conflict. His Albuquerque home became a public library branch dedicated to his memory, and his Indiana birthplace preserves the story of a farm boy who learned to translate the extraordinary into the everyday. Above all, the people who mattered most to him remain central to how he is remembered: Jerry, who shared the long miles and the quiet hours; the soldiers whose burdens he shouldered in words; commanders and political leaders he met but never romanticized; and fellow chroniclers like Bill Mauldin, who, like Pyle, gave the common soldier a permanent place in the American record.

Our collection contains 20 quotes who is written by Ernie, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Deep - Military & Soldier - Peace - Change.

Other people realated to Ernie: Hal Boyle (Reporter)