THE SOLDIER’S FRIEND
Ernie Pyle always seemed to be in the right place at the right time—until, on April 18, 1945, he wasn’t. That morning, packed in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge and three other U.S. Army officers, he was heading to a command post on the island of Ie Shima, just off the northwest coast of Okinawa, when he was killed by a Japanese sniper.
As Roy Morris relates in this issue’s cover story, at the time of), Walter Cronkite (of United Press), and even Edward R. Murrow (of CBS News). Pyle’s editors at the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain had styled him “Ernie Pyle, the Soldier’s Friend,” and they had recently asked him to head to the Pacific theater of World War II, where he filed six columns a week, just as he had done from the front lines in Africa and Europe.
