‘ERNIE WAS ONE OF US’
On April 18, 1945, at around 10 o’clock in the morning, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Joseph B. Coolidge and four other men were bumping along in a jeep on a shell-pitted dirt road some 200 yards from the beach at Ie Shima (now Iejima), a small island just off the northwest coast of Okinawa, Japan. Coolidge, commanding the 305th Regiment, 77th Infantry Division, was en route to his forward command post; the others were bumming a ride. The road had been cleared of mines, booby traps, and other hazards, but it offered a clear line of sight to a coral ridge 300 yards away. Without warning, a Japanese machine gunner opened fire. The men jumped clear, tumbling into a roadside ditch. Coolidge and one of the other men, both of whom should have known better, raised their heads to look around. “Are you all right?” the man asked. Before Coolidge could reply, there was another brief burst of fire. Coolidge fell backward, unhurt, but his companion sagged to the ground, killed instantly by a bullet to the left temple, just below his helmet.
His name was Ernie Pyle, and at the time of his death he was the world’s most famous war correspondent, perhaps the most famous in American history. Certainly, he was the best liked. It was fitting that Pyle used his last words to ask about a fellow American soldier: He’d spent the past three years doing just that, in person and in print. “Ernie Pyle, the Soldier’s Friend,” his newspaper editors styled him, and millions of readers back home with husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, sweethearts, and friends serving on the front lines of World War II counted on Pyle to keep them informed of their loved ones’ lives—and, all too often, their deaths. Pyle took that responsibility very seriously, and it ultimately wore him down physically and mentally. Indeed, it may have been sheer exhaustion, more than anything, that unaccountably caused the veteran combat observer to raise his head while under fire at Ie Shima.
At the time of his death Pyle was the world’s most famous war correspondent.
Pyle had frequently told his wife and colleagues that he was worn out. He didn’t expect to survive his current assignment, yet he felt he owed it to “the boys” to cover what was shaping up to be the last American campaign of the war. While sailing on a troopship from Western Europe to Okinawa, he had already written, but not filed, what turned out to be his final newspaper column. “And so it is over,” his handwritten draft read. “The day that had so long seemed would never come has come at last.” He was referring to the looming Allied victory in Europe, but he might as well have been speaking about his own fate. “The companionship of two and a half years of death and misery,” he went on to observe, “is a spouse that tolerates no divorce.”
At the White House President Harry S. Truman announced Pyle’s death with a matter-of-factness that the correspondent would have appreciated. “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle,” Truman said. “No man in this war has
