The American Reporter
Vol. 5, No. 1049 -- April 15, 1999

ERNIE PYLE: THE STUFF OF FOOTNOTES, NOT HEADLINES, IN WAR
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- In an interview following the 1997 publication of "Ernie Pyle's War," a chronicle of the renowned Scripps-Howard World War II correspondent, author James Tobin made the observation that Pyle really wasn't interested in breaking news.

Tobin pointed to the policy issues, the news from the declarers and strategists of war. Pyle truly did not write about them.

Instead, the famed foxhole reporter wrote about life in the trenches, the ground-level, dirt-eating, wet shoes, little-food, lots-of-marching, life-on-the-line news. The stuff of footnotes rather than of headlines.

Once, when a Scripps-Howard executive asked Pyle to write more about soldiers from Cleveland so that more papers could be sold in Cleveland, the correspondent resolutely refused. "I've always just written about whomever I run onto, and they turn out eventually to cover the whole U.S.," Pyle said.

Yet, Pyle's dispatches from the war in Europe and later in the Pacific have become almost sacred script. One needn't be from Texas to appreciate Pyle's most anthologized piece of writing about a soldier from Texas, "The Death of Captain Waskow." Pyle's coverage remains a model for war correspondents of "how it should be done," but Pyle rarely wrote things the way journalists are expected to write them.

In this media age, adopting Pyle's attitude on stories about soldiers from Cleveland would be throwing oneself in front of the juggernaut of current journalistic wisdom that demands "giving the readers what they want."

I have a sense that Pyle wrote for the men he walked beside, not for their superiors, not necessarily for their folks back home, certainly not for his publishers. He told his compatriots' stories honestly and forthrightly, and he consistently and unself-consciously used the personal pronouns I, we, my and ours in talking about their ventures.

In this year of the 54th anniversary of his being killed by a sniper - April 18, 1945 -- on a tiny island off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, it's difficult to imagine Ernie Pyle carrying a laptop into the war zones in which he accompanied the fighting men of World War II and scrambling to beat the competition with an eye on the prize. It's difficult, in fact, to imagine Pyle catering to any of the conventions that seem to drive contemporary journalists.

Pyle wrote about Zippo lighters because they were popular among the fighting men, not because Zippo was advertising in Scripps-Howard papers or supplying cigarettes for the troops.

Were he writing in Bosnia or Macedonia today, Pyle might be writing about some form of laptop computer or other electronic gear only because he saw it being used by soldiers. Whether he'd be carrying such equipment himself remains an open question. This journalist whose name is ubiquitous on the Internet probably would have shunned e-mail.

Tobin speculates concerning Pyle in a modern war, "It would have been difficult for Ernie to keep up with the flow of events."

I think Tobin contradicts himself here and misses the point of Pyle's writing. He didn't try to keep up with the flow of events, no more than a combat soldier could have.

In discussing televised images of the Persian Gulf War, Tobin notes, "there's not a single piece of writing that I can recall" that came out of Desert Storm.

Perhaps that's because the print media spent too much time competing with televised images and didn't give their writers the time and space they needed to get the front-line stories. We've replaced our eyewitnesses with cameras.

We tend to forget that Pyle rarely wrote against a deadline. Most of his dispatches from the front were published several days if not weeks after he wrote them. As Tobin noted, Pyle didn't write with an eye toward policy; he wrote with an eye toward the humanity that found itself engaged with an enemy and the alterations to life that such engagement brought.

Reading Pyle's dispatches - many of which are collected in a 1986 volume edited by David Nichols called "Ernie's War" -- one gets the clear impression that Pyle didn't concern himself a great deal with scooping anyone or writing for any audience other than the men with whom he marched.

He reported the war that he "run onto," and despite the seeming small and insignificant stories that he told, he had the journalistic instinct to know that "they turn out eventually to cover the whole U.S."

That's an insight not shared by many modern editors. Pyle's dispatches didn't demand accompanying art and graphics; they were descriptive snapshots of the war in themselves, the "worm's eye view," as Pyle liked to call it.

In an intriguing memoir of World War II called "Letters Home: A War Memoir (Europe 1944-1945)," the late John Ausland, a former State Department adviser who landed at Normandy on D-Day with the U.S. 4th Division, includes his memory of Ernie Pyle and provides some insight into Pyle's ways.

Ausland's memoir is posted in its entirety on the WWW: http://sites.netscape.net/appdad/ww2_ausland.html. [Unfortunately, this URL no longer holds Ausland's memoir.  I'm searching for it, and will change it when I locate it.  --ara, July, 2006]  One of his chapters is called "Ernest Hemingway and Ernie Pyle With the 4th."

Ausland's observation of the contrasts in these two writers is instructive: He writes:

"Hemingway was preoccupied with death and, at the very least, combat lured him. ... he was not content to report on the fighting but at times participated in it."

Pyle, Ausland writes, discussed his abhorrence of combat while he and Ausland shared a Normandy farmhouse shelter. Ausland quotes Pyle's summary: "... for me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit."

Where Hemingway took a kind of sadistic, self-aggrandizing, exhibitionist approach to reporting the war and in the end failed to capture the fighting man's experience, Ausland writes, Pyle "comes as close to succeeding as anyone I have read" in capturing the feelings and experiences of combat."

Unlike Pyle's dispatches, Ausland concludes of Hemingway's war reports, "It is clear to me that Hemingway's heart was not in his articles and that they simply legitimated his adventures."

Reading Ausland's impressions, I came away thinking Hemingway would have leaped at the request to write about soldiers from Cleveland, but in the end we'd have learned only more about Ernest Hemingway and not much about the brave men sleeping, cursing, eating, dreaming, crying and dying beside Ernie Pyle.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net