*Includes pictures
*Includes Pyle's accounts of the war
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
"Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly - but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation." - Ernie Pyle
"No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen." - President Harry Truman
Ernie Pyle's life reads like a 1950s movie script. Born the beloved and only child of hardscrabble American farmers, he made good grades in school, graduated, and went off to college at "State," in his case the University of Indiana. Overcoming his shyness, he studied journalism and wrote stories for the school paper that earned him a position of esteem among his fellow students. He partied hard but kept his grades up, and then married a girl as high spirited as he was. Together, they left school early and made their way to the nation's capital, where the farm boy got a job with a big city paper. In the years that followed, they traveled the country, meeting the great and the simple alike, and writing stories that made them the envy of the common man.
Underneath the veneer, there was a dark side to Pyle's life, one that made his story, if the whole truth were to be told, more suitable for a cable television miniseries. First, the girl he married grew into a woman with severe mental illness that broke their relationship and opened the door to multiple extramarital affairs. Pyle himself seems to have battled depression and had trouble living in anything less than an exciting, constantly changing environment. This put him on the path to becoming the most famous war correspondent of World War II, and ultimately one of the most famous journalists in American history.
It is possible, indeed likely, that Pyle's troubles contributed, at least in part, to the exquisite nature of his writing, for when he described the blitz of London as a thing a beauty, he was looking at it through the eyes of a man who knew what it was to love a woman who lived in her own personal hell, one that he often joined her in. Likewise, when he told the war stories of the common soldier, stories that would make him beloved by the frightened families back home, he had a way of making it seem that, even if a son or father or brother was being shot at, he was also, at least in some way, back home, sitting on a porch in the early morning sun or on a city stoop in the cool darkness of night. He brought the war home, not just in it horror, but also in its humanity, and his words made him famous.
Of course, fame typically comes at a price, and in Pyle's case, it cost him his life on Okinawa, where he was fittingly covering one of the deadliest campaigns in American history. Killed by Japanese sniper fire, Pyle died doing what he loved best, and hopefully, that was enough for him. Ernie Pyle: The Life and Legacy of the Most Famous Journalist Killed in Battle during World War II examines the turbulent life of the correspondent. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Ernie Pyle like never before.