August 3
SEEING-EYE REPORTER DAY
Steven Spielberg captured ‘reality’ with film, cast, crew, and the technology of the 1990s in his award-winning film, Saving Private Ryan. Some five decades earlier, Ernie Pyle, using the hunt and peck method on a beat-up old typewriter (on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.), drew word pictures of the landing at Normandy. He watched the landings from a ship.
The next day, he walked where the troops had gone before. The popular war correspondent wrote, “I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping in the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.”
“... There in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers’ packs. There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out -- one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked ...”
Ernie Pyle was born on this day in 1900 in Indiana. He grew up on a farm near the town of Dana (the location of the Ernie Pyle Museum and Historic Site), the only child of Will and Maria Pyle. Although his military career was brief, having enlisted in the Naval Reserve shortly before the end of WWI, it was his career in journalism that took him to the front lines. Pyle studied journalism at Indiana University, but left before getting his degree to work in the real world. His first job as reporter was for the LaPorte Herald, but he moved on to the Washington Daily News in Washington D.C. It was for this Scripps Howard newspaper that Pyle wrote an aviation column, the first of its kind in America. He was then given the managing editor’s positionwhich was followed by the job of roving reporter for all Scripps Howard papers.
Ernie Pyle’s first reporting of a battle scene (the Battle of Britain) was in 1940. A year later, he started what would become one of the most widely read columns in journalism history, as he covered the United States’ involvement in WWII. Pyle’s stories were written from the trenches where he became one with the infantrymen he preferred to write about. His gripping accounts of the bloody fighting in North Africa, Sicily and Anzio captured the attention of all America. After Normandy and the liberation of Paris, Pyle began covering the war in the Pacific. It was on Ie Shima (now Iejima), a small island off Okinawa, that his career came to an end. Worrying more about his Army buddies than himself, he didn’t take cover but turned to ask if they were OK while under Japanese sniper fire. He took a bullet in the left temple. A memorial stands on the site where Ernest T. Pyle was killed on April 18, 1945. Once buried there, his remains now lie at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater on Oahu, Hawaii. Pyle was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously.
The man referred to by the Army and Navy Journal as ‘the seeing-eye reporter’ said of himself, “I want to make people see what I see.” You can still see through the eyes of Ernie Pyle. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist compiled his columns in several books, Here is Your War, Brave Men, and Last Chapter.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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