Who was Ernie Pyle?
Mr. JAMES TOBIN (Author, “Ernie Pyle’s War”): Ernie Pyle was the most famous war correspondent of World War II. He started out as just one war correspondent among many and became a kind of folk hero, really, identified with the war effort, identified with the fighting men of World War II in a way that really no other reporter ever has been. LAMB: Why are you interested in him? Mr. TOBIN: I suppose I’m interested in him just because I started to read his stuff when I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan. I was writing a dissertation about the home front during World War II and knew that I had to read some war correspondence; started out with Pyle. And I had read only a few of his pieces before I realized I was on to something quite extraordinary. LAMB: When was this picture taken? Mr. TOBIN: That picture was taken in the fall of 1944 at–it was in the studio. You can see in the background when you’ve got the full thing like that, you see the busts in the background. It w
Mr. JAMES TOBIN: Ernie Pyle was the most famous war correspondent of World War II. He started out as just one war correspondent among many and became a kind of folk hero, really, identified with the… No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, by Doris Kearns Goodwin Watch Video Video clips containing world war II | * end of old version –> Read Transcript From the transcript: …with Eleanor I’d like to understand why she was unable, at a certain moment in the middle of the war, when he asked her to be his wife again and stop traveling and stay home and take care of him, to say yes to him. I mean, I know that he loved her, I know she still loved him, and I’d want to say, “Why… Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression & War , by David Kennedy Watch Video Read Transcript From the transcript: … But I took a group of mostly Stanford alumni down there. And I gave some lectures on World War II. We had a group of maybe 75 or 80 people a
” Then just allow me to say that he was one of the greatest wartime (WWII) journalists and photojournalists, although they did not use those terms back then; he merely called himself a war correspondent. But his columns and his remarkable photography made the war come alive for those back home while their GIs were fighting overseas. It has often been said that “he wrote about people, not war.” Ernie made the cover of Time magazine in July 1944. Regrettably he was felled by a Japanese machine gun just nine months later in April 1945, just shortly before the war ended in the Pacific. This quote from one of the many books written about his life sums it up pretty well: “If you think Ernie Pyle is ancient history, think again. Barely half a century ago he was one of the most famous people in America. The columns he wrote were read by millions, anticipated and revered as though they were regular bulletins from a sacred source. … What he called his ‘worm’s-eye’ view of combat set a standard f
