SOURCE: "Ernie of the Warm Heart," in The Columnists, New York Publishers, 1944, pp. 296-317.

[In the following essay, Fisher discusses Pyle's World War II journalism, noting that Pyle's concentration on the details of soldiers' lives and experiences made him an exceptional war correspondent.]

Ernie Pyle is a columnist only in the sense that he has available each day a certain amount of newspaper space which he may fill with such matter as seems proper to him at the time. By the Big Think standards, he is no columnist at all.

After a couple of years on virulently active battle fronts, he has neglected to evolve seven better ways to win the war. Heads of nations look to him in vain for an approving word or a line of kindly criticism. He is more concerned with the current problems of the soldier in an adjoining fox hole than with the peace to come. When he discusses the millennium it is likely to be one where dry socks are available, where there is an occasional slug of Bourbon whisky, and where a sniper isn't offering him personal attention from a tree ahead on the left.

He has muffed the larger opportunities quite badly. He is only a passenger in the world, riding it in fear and pity and pride, instead of carrying it around handily in his hip pocket.

In his work during World War II, Pyle has not even been the familiar type of reporter or war correspondent. That is, he has not covered the lead story. He does not deal with the official communiquàs, tactical movements, and ground gained or lost. He is a feature writer, doing what the papers used to call side-light stuff. But he has been doing it with such superb simplicity and skill that he is probably the bestknown American writer of the war. He is certainly the one whom newspaper readers regard with deepest affection. He has never tried to tell them where mankind is going. He tells them instead where young Joe slept last night, and how many blankets the boy had, and was his food good. Sometimes he tells them how he died.

The simplicity isn't professional dress. Pyle is, of course, a man of normal sophistication: product of many news rooms, responsible jobs and much travel. No untrained writer could step as surely as he along the line which separates honest feeling from mawkishness when the tale is of great and terrible events.

The genuine simplicity in him is so constant that it has been known to drive his editors to walking the floor at nights and snapping at their loved ones. Ernie, for example, might have had his great success two full years before he did. He was in London during the blitz of 1940-41. Until then he had been a moderately popular roving reporter, doing a daily series of pieces on the back roads of America. But the bombing of London moved him to a few columns of great beauty and sensitiveness. His sales to papers around the United States increased by fifty percent.

Some column features grow slowly over the years and some succeed almost instantly. The Scripps-Howard papers and the United Feature Syndicate, which handle Pyle, felt in early '41 that he was the war writer of whom all syndicates had dreamed. He was riding a skyrocket, they said. A few more pieces like that and.…

While they were discussing it, Ernie came home. He was tired and nervous, he said. He was going to take a rest.

Syndicates are accustomed to columnists who clutch at success, or at least accept it gratefully. There are writers who watch added papers hungrily and who, upon learning that their column has been dropped by one, will travel halfway across the country to plead with the dissatisfied editor. Men argued with Ernie and told him he was a fool to throw away his big opportunity.

No, he said, he was tired and nervous. He was going to take a rest.

The rest cost him all his new buyers and it obscured his new fame. When he went abroad again in 1942, he was down to 40 papers, most of them small and unprofitable. He spent some time with American troops in Ireland and then sailed with them when the invasion of Africa began late in that year.

His stories of what the fighting meant to individual soldiers caught the public mood once more. Thirty new papers were added to his string with unusual speed, and most of them were large. The boom grew as Ernie moved with the Army from Africa to Sicily. At the end of fifteen months of constant action, however, returning correspondents began dropping in at Scripps and United Feature's offices in New York.

"Maybe you'd better bring poor little Ernie home for a rest," they said. "He's had tough going."

He was, accordingly, summoned home. His friends at the office awaited him uneasily. Although he is a man of medium height—five feet, seven and one-half inches—he usually weighs only 110 pounds, and so looks smaller. In addition, although he is springy as a buggy whip and normally in health, he is by nature of an anemic countenance and generally frail appearance. No one was at all certain what sort of wraith to expect.

Ernie came in looking better than he had ever looked in his life. His color was good, he had discarded a life-long slouch. It appeared that hardship had agreed with him astoundingly.

"He'd put on two pounds." George Carlin, managing editor of United Feature explained later, "He looked all filled out."

Plans for the stay in America were discussed. In the syndicate field, Ernie was Hot. He could write of America, tell of contrasts, perhaps rehash material the censors had banned and, in general, keep the pot steaming until his return overseas.

"No," said Ernie slowly, "I'm tired. I'm going to take a rest."

There was, once again, no way of changing him. Perhaps he had seen things which made celebrity and affluence unimportant. He set forth for Albuquerque, New Mexico—where his wife had built in his absence the first home the wandering Pyles ever knew—leaving Scripps and United wondering moodily what to tell the customers.

In one western city there were two papers which had persistently turned down salesmen offering the Pyle column for years. Now they wired in for it within twenty minutes of one another. That pleasant sort of thing was happening all the time. Moreover, the early part of the trip had not been particularly profitable in the syndicate's eyes. Ernie's personal expenses overseas are reported to be moderate, averaging only about $15 a week, even though they are paid by his employers. But cable tolls are high.

Someone, casting around, thought of the uncertain experiment of reprinting columns Ernie wrote long before the war, when his beat was no larger than America. They were sent out with large ceremony, but with a good deal of inner diffidence.

There was never any doubt about their reception. The public told Ernie to go home and rest and God bless him, and meanwhile read with relish old pieces about the farm where he grew up; the mother, lately dead, whom he had adored; and bell-hops and old men with wooden legs and all the places he had seen, and the unimportant people he had met and liked. As it happened, the final wonder was the fact that sales increased while he was away. They kept increasing when he went abroad again and, at the time of this writing, the Pyle pieces were being sold to 206 newspapers, with a circulation of over 10,000,000. New orders were still arriving, sometimes at the rate of six a day, and there was a feeling that the boom had not yet reached its peak.

Pyle established another record in his field, with no effort and little attention to the mechanics of it. Here Is Your War, a book of his articles, was published at about the time of his return. It sold 70,000 copies within the first two months. The pieces appeared unedited, as they were first published. Ernie's only chore was writing a final chapter. No other book of columns, including those of Westbrook Pegler or the late Heyward Broun, ever approached the Pyle sales figure.

In addition to his income from the book royalties, Pyle is reported to receive $25,000 a year from Scripps-Howard, which sends his column to the 18 papers in its chain, and half of the gross income from all sales to other newspapers. Selling expenses, like transmission expenses, are paid by the syndicate. In the case of Pyle, as in those of Pegler and Raymond Clapper, Scripps-Howard is the employer and editor; United Feature simply sells the material around the country.

Pyle has never displayed any sign of being afflicted by a sense of authority as a result of his success and fame. Most people familiar with the trade believe he has suffered less from that ailment than any of his fellow columnists. It is only infrequently that his dispatches deal with matters of state, and then they are held within the bounds of first-hand knowledge.

One was rather a celebrated beat. In the beginning of 1943, before the Tunisian battle was decided, correspondents in North Africa were not permitted by censors to send home an accurate picture of political conditions. But on January 4th, Ernie startled his editors and readers with a flat statement that pro-Axis French officials were still in power in some offices and that our policy in Algeria was one of "soft-gloving snakes in our midst."

The manner in which the story passed the censors has not been made publicly clear. It is believed, though, that some censorship officer who was accustomed to Pyle's warm and innocuous dispatches, simply looked at his byline and let the piece through half-read.

Ernie, having filed what he knew from personal observation, went on to other matters without troubling to argue the significance of his report or to do a series of essays on political philosophy. But in America, his paragraphs furnished material for a week's speculation by other writers.

Pyle's work has usually had a quiet realism. He has reported many ugly and distressing things. He may have passed more of them through the censors than more pretentious writers. But if he saw a tank go up in flames early in the war, or fell in with an outfit suffering from lack of equipment, he made his report in accordance with the facts he knew. He did not extend it to speculations upon American industrial and labor relations, the international shipping situation and the science and history of warfare. That is a rare quality in a columnist newly come to the peak of adulation. It comes out of a newspaper background and Pyle's insistence that he is still primarily a reporter. He has said frequently that he dislikes the habit of some correspondents of withholding from dispatches material which they sell later to magazines or other sources.

"I believe," he says, "that what I get should go into the column."

He is as interested in names and addresses as a well-trained kid on his first police beat. A very strong sense of responsibility to readers who buy his stuff to see if their own son's name is there impels him to use as many names as he can. A characteristic column said that the most freakish victory he knew had been accomplished by "Lieutenant Cowell Vandeventer, 6028 Clemens Ave., St. Louis," and then having made certain that the hero's home town would know whom they were reading about, went on with the story.

Ernie Pyle has known too many towns not to honor the individuality of each. It would not occur to him to deliver a pretentious sermon on the virtues of ordinary people, because he has never bothered much to determine which people are ordinary and which are not. He just makes sure that in dealing with generals and privates he spells the names with the same care.

The itching foot which took him around the country and then to war was a strange heritage on the Indiana farm where he was bred. He was born three miles from the town of Dana on August 3, 1900, the son of William and Maria Taylor Pyle. He was christened Ernest Taylor Pyle.

"I wasn't born in a log cabin," he explained apologetically when the interviewers first began to look him up, "but I did start driving a team in the fields when I was nine, if that helps any."

He went through the grade and high schools and then to the University of Indiana. He took the journalism course there, not because he was interested in newspaper work at the time, but because it was a cinch course, charmingly disassociated from farming. He tried playing football but found the 100 pounds he carried weren't adequate and settled for the manager's post on the team. He worked summers. Once he got down to Kentucky and got a job in the oil fields. Once he shipped as bell-hop on a liner and went to Japan with the university baseball team making one of those sporting good-will junkets which were discontinued as of December 7, 1941. He managed the baseball team too.

He quit college after three and a half years, served a hitch with the Naval Reserve during World War I, and then, more or less casually, went to work as a reporter on the Laporte, Indiana, Herald-Argus. He only stayed three months; at the end of that time he moved on to the Washington News.

He liked Washington, married there, and stayed three years. His wife is, of course, "that girl who rides around with me …," a lady who appeared in so many peacetime columns that she became as familiar to readers as her husband. She was Geraldine Siebolds, of Hastings, Minnesota, a Government employe when Ernie met her. He had gone around with only one other girl before her.

In the third year in Washington, there developed in Ernie that urge to be on his way which seems to be almost pathological, and which has never abated. He quit his job and went to New York. For a time he worked on the evening World and then moved to the Post.

The Post was at that time edited by Ralph Renaud, whose staff was recruited for its originality and for editorial freshness. The head of the copy desk kept a couple of special chairs on the rim where, from time to time, he sat bright young reporters, with a view to training them in unhackneyed editing. Ernie was one of them, and the now-doddering editor still remembers the first head he wrote.

The story concerned a citizen who was waylaid by foot-pads on the footpath of Brooklyn Bridge and pushed over the rail in the struggle. The head said:

THIEVES ROB MAN; THROW HIM AWAY

It so delighted his superior that Ernie might have remained a copy-reader to this day. It is an occupation regarded by some as moderately genteel and desirable, and by others as a fate worse than death. In 1928, though, Ernie quit and went back to the News in Washington.

Air travel was still novel and his city editor assigned him to the airplane beat. The job was supposed to consist of a listing of travelers using the Washington airport. Ernie filled it with humor and humanity and anecdote and, in consequence, was made aviation editor of the Scripps-Howard chain in 1928. (The News is a Scripps paper.)

He was a memorable aviation editor, quite possibly because he saw in every plane the apotheosis of travel. He gave it up to become managing editor of the News. He was a good one, until the day in 1934 when Bruno Richard Hauptmann was arrested for the kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby.

"Hell," said Ernie, "they're always arresting somebody in that case."

And he buried the story.

It was one of those errors which shake American journalism to the roots every hundred years or so. Ernie was far too good a man for the bounce, however, so it was suggested that he take a vacation for a while. He had been ill and needed one anyway.

He headed for Arizona with That Girl. On the way, when he thought of it, he wrote discursive and informal letters to Lowell Mellett, editor of the News. The Scripps people are very good at discerning unorthodox talents. Mellett read the letters, passed them around the office and then began to use a few in the paper.

The Pyles returned at a time when Heywood Broun, then the ranking Scripps columnist, was on vacation. Mellett turned Broun's space in the News over to Ernie. His vacation anecdotes aroused enough mild interest to induce the Scripps chain to give him what was, all in all, probably the most charming assignment ever turned over to a newspaperman. He was to get into his car and go where he pleased, stay as long as he pleased and then move on to wherever he pleased, sending back a column a day. Ernie accepted it, groggy with delight, and with every newspaperman in the country envying "that Scripps guy who all he's got to do is drive around on the expense account and write one lousy little piece a day." He and his wife, who is called Jerry and who is as blonde and as slight as Ernie, filled up the gasoline tank and got going.

Large events never engaged Ernie's attention, nor were they supposed to. According to Scripps' idea, and to his own, he was traveling by proxy for a good many people of restive heart who were never able to travel themselves. His life work was writing home to Aunt Bessie and Uncle Ben. He took it seriously.

A columnist is a man who, having put all his eggs in one basket (which may not be quite substantial enough to hold them, at that) naturally keeps the basket with him day and night. The column is the pay-off; any energies or gifts which might be spread over a hundred incidents or details of another job have got to be concentrated in some thousand words a day. Every day.

Each columnist regards his column according to his nature. To Walter Winchell, it is more intimate a part of himself than his underpants. Miss Dorothy Thompson finds hers a vehicle for high and erratic flight. Westbrook Pegler delights in his as a club with which to clout the world. But it is doubtful if any of them spend many minutes completely detached in mind from the blank piece of paper waiting for them the next day.

The first Pyle article, as part of his permanent job, appeared in August of 1935 and within less than a year he was discussing that "one lousy little piece a day" with the classic columnist's complaint:

"The job would be wonderful, if it weren't for having to write the damned column."

But the traveling was a delight which never ended. The Pyles became the only couple in America who quite literally had no home. Their life was lived in a diverting abyss between the last town and the next town. Just before his trips to the wars began, Ernie summed it up in this way:

We have traveled by practically all forms of locomotion, including piggyback. We have been in every country in the western hemisphere but two. We have stayed in more than eight hundred hotels, have crossed the continent exactly twenty-four times, flown in sixty-six different airplanes, ridden on twenty-nine boats, walked two hundred miles, gone through five sets of tires and put out approximately $2,500 in tips. In the past six years, these columns have stretched out to the horrifying equivalent of twenty-two full-length books. Set in seven point type they would make a newspaper column three-quarters of a mile long. The mere thought of it makes me sick at my stomach.

Of all the places we've been, we'd rather pay another visit to Hawaii. In the states we are partial to New Mexico. My most interesting long trip was through Alaska, although I wasn't crazy about it at the time.… We have worn out two cars, three typewriters, and pretty soon I'm going to have to have a new pair of shoes. I love to drive and never get tired of it, but on long days I do get to hurting on the bottom.

The most serious predicament we've ever been in was when an airplane motor went dead as we were 10,000 feet over the Andes in northern Peru. But we flew for an hour on one motor, and it turned out just like all good short stories. Sure, we were scared.… For four years straight we have got our last Christmas presents in April.

But the story of the perpetual vacation was not a big success, as columnar successes go. United Feature began trying to sell it outside the Scripps chain in 1938. Only four papers bought it during the next six months. The others came almost as slowly.

Syndicated columns are sold—as are barrels of flour, shoes and case lots of peppermint chewing gum—by traveling salesmen. Prices are flexible and subject to bargaining, bidding and the general relationship between syndicate and newspaper. Some syndicates make up "budgets," offering virtually every feature they handle at a flat rate. The paper buying a budget uses what it pleases and salts the rest away with the pleasant feeling that at least the opposition can't get it.

Budget prices vary, naturally, with the circulation of the buyer. In extreme cases, a syndicate has been known to offer a very small country weekly the entire output for $12 a week. A paper accepting, and demanding the lot, would receive some 300 features—a wild hodge-podge of comic strips, jokes, capsule philosophies, picture pages and various sorts of filler—in a load of mats weighing a full ton. (Mats are the thin fibre molds into which type metal is poured.)

When the war began only 22 papers aside from the 18 in the Scripps-Howard chain had become Pyle customers. They were for the most part in small towns and small cities.

But there was something noticeable about the trade. Pyle was a stable commodity. Once a paper started him it was unlikely to drop him later. His readers were singularly devoted. Aunt Bessie and Uncle Ben got into the habit of looking forward to the daily letter. The things that interested Pyle interested them: the size of the policemen's feet in Camel's Hump, Mo., so to speak; the modern comfort station in some Iowa county seat; the look of mountain snow and the way the wind felt at night on the prairie.

He rode a freight truck from Denver to Los Angeles and a bus from New York to San Francisco. He drove to Canada to see the Quintuplets and then down to Mexico to get warm (he hates cold). He is by nature a shy man, but he talked endlessly with everyone he met: gas station men by the thousands, traffic cops, farmers, ranchers, bank clerks, storekeepers, bartenders, bankers and bums. Half the time he told of the places where they lived. The other half, he told about the people themselves. It is significant that in the five years preceding the war Ernie, who must have known more of America and his fellow Americans than any living man, never followed his colleagues in announcing dogmatically that the national mood was—or should have been—thus and so.

When the war began he saw no reason to change his method. Going abroad, he found that the people about whom he used to write were still around him, except that they were in uniform. He kept on relaying their stories home.

When the bombs fell on London in 1940 and Ernie was there, there were some professional misgivings back in New York. The gentle tone of his column had never altered from that of the first letters to Mellett on the News. But there was something in the magnitude of the new kind of war which might induce over-writing in the most careful craftsman.

"Ernie," a friend said recently, "didn't lose his simplicity when the big thing came up."

His first piece on the blitz appeared in America on January 1, 1941. He watched the attack from the roof of the Savoy Hotel and wrote:

Some day when peace has returned again to this odd world, I want to come to London again and look down the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges. And I want to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of 1940. It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.…

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched.… The sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke.…

And now and then, through a hole in the pink shroud, there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star—the old-fashioned kind that has always been there.… These things all went together to make the most hateful, the most beautiful scene I have ever known.

After the piece appeared in America it was cabled back to British newspapers, so that Londoners might see how their city had looked.

Later, Pyle visited the early public bomb shelters. He found them as makeshift "as our own makeshift depression camps at home." But, he wrote:

When you see a church with a bomb hole in its side and 500 pretty safe and happy people in its basement, and the girls smoking cigarettes inside the sacred walls without anybody yelling at them, then I say the church has found a real religion.

When he came back after the blitz, to ignore the editors and his new readers, and to rest, it was to find that his first home had been built in his absence. It was at Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had approved rough plans before he left and his wife had supervised the building job.

Perhaps the house jinxed the Pyles. At any rate, in April of 1942, a mid-western newspaper printed an effusive advertisement about Ernie and "That Girl" on one of its inner pages. On the first page was an announcement of their divorce, on grounds of incompatibility, after sixteen years of marriage.

Eleven months later they were re-married. The move was initiated by Pyle. He had gone back overseas shortly after the divorce, but the wedding was performed by proxy in March of 1943. A special ruling of the Judge Advocate of the Army in North Africa was necessary to permit the ceremony.

Ernie had worked out his own method of covering his part of the war by then. He'd go out and live with a frontline outfit for a time, talking to everyone he could find, from the ranking officers down, taking what they took in the way of enemy attack. (For months he was bombed, strafed, shelled, machine-gunned and sniped at.) Afterward he'd go a distance to the rear and hole up for days, writing what he had seen.

He'd make seven copies of his stuff. One went to the Army paper, The Stars and Stripes. Five were started back to the Scripps-Howard office by cable. He started five, by various channels, because in the confusion of war there was no certainty about which one would get through. He'd keep the seventh copy himself in case, as he explained it, "everything else went wrong."

Afterward, exhausted, he'd sleep for a whole day or more.

His success swelled at home mostly because American families knew he was going through the same thing their sons were enduring. His pictures—notably a line drawing done by George Biddle on the edge of some battlefield—showed him as a frail and not too significant-looking fellow. His columns had humor in them at times, but they were full of death as well, and the fear of death. As they came in day after day over the months, they added up to what is perhaps the most accurate, detailed and skillful picture of the life of combat troops this war has known.

In an article about Pyle written for the Saturday Evening Post in October of 1943, under the dateline "Somewhere in Africa," Frederick C. Painton said that Ernie had, in the days of his peacetime columns, "made of himself a character who lived in a daily installment of a serial adventure which people read smilingly 'to see what Ernie's up to now.'"

The serial was continuing, but they didn't read smilingly during the African and Sicilian campaigns, for they were reading about their own boys as well as Ernie. But they read eagerly and in the thousands of letters sent him each year, the names of mothers began to predominate. They said they felt a little as if he were their own son. An astounding number began to pray for him. He is, most likely, the only columnist of record who has ever been prayed for with any degree of enthusiasm.

Some of his material was disconcerting to a startling degree. Thus, he informed a nation dedicated to the habit of incessant bathing, that after a while one felt no hard-ship in missing a bath at the front, and, indeed became quite likely to skip the opportunity to take one if much trouble was involved.

He told of the terror that lay in scrambling for fox holes when enemy planes came in close and of the continuing misery of wet clothes. He told of the simple practicality of life in combat areas; a chaplain, who had been obliged to do the chaplain's job of going through the effects of a group of ten men killed in action, told Pyle that the most commonplace article carried was toilet paper.

And once in Tunisia, weary to death of the desert, he wrote humorously that if someone would just send him a little sack of sand for Easter, everything would be wonderful. The Charlotte, N.C., Civitan Club promptly dispatched one to him.

The National Press Club at Washington, a tolerably cynical organization not un-used to war correspondents, took up an anonymous collection among members and dispatched it to Scripps-Howard with a request that they "send a little something to Ernie Pyle, cigarettes, or nickel chocolate bars," for he was the only one who had made the war real to them. Uncounted other packages went his way, so that he had scores of thousands of cigarettes to distribute to the troops.

The National Headliners Club of Atlantic City gave him its award for the best foreign feature writing of 1942. Army generals called his material helpful to morale and the Infantry Journal praised his reporting. Thousands of soldiers came to know him by sight, and Painton reported that Pyle knew at least a thousand by name.

Toward the end of the Sicilian campaign he became ill. He recovered, writing a piece on the thing he called Battlefield Fever. You don't die of it, he said, but you think you're going to. He described it:

It's the perpetual dust choking you, the hard ground wracking your muscles, the snatched food sitting ill on your stomach, the heat and the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving and the never settling down and the go, go, go night and day, and on through the night again. Eventually it works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull, dead pattern … yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and, God, I'm so tired!

When he got back to America a little while later, in September of 1943, he apologized for not going on into Italy. He knew that the soldiers were more weary than he, he said. And he wrote:

I was fed up and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you're apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired. I had come to despise and be revolted by war out of any logical proportion. I couldn't find the Four Freedoms among the dead men. Personal weariness became a forest that shut off my view of events about me. I was no longer seeing the things that you at home want to know about the soldiers.

He went back to the house at Albuquerque for his rest, while Scripps and United Feature searched through files and pulled out his old columns.

The radio and lecture people came after him with stupendous offers: $25,000 advance guarantee for a personal tour, $1,500 for a single radio appearance, $1,000 a night for other programs. His friends estimate that he might, in his two months at home, have earned an extra $60,000. He rested instead, playing a little poker and snooker pool, throwing darts and fanning over things with old friends whilst Lee Miller of Scripps—whose special title is Vice President in Charge of Ernie Pyle—tried to keep the visitors away.

He traveled to New York to pick up some special equipment at Abercrombie & Fitch shortly before he went overseas again. George Carlin took him to lunch at the Yale Club and, one thing leading to another, the shopping went undone.

So he left for Italy on his third trip to the war traveling light, as usual. He had made no speeches about the sort of peace he preferred, had written no essays on what is wrong with America. He had endangered his whole columning franchise for a few games of pool and now, letting others talk of the significance of things, he was going back to see how G.I. Joe was getting along in the mud.