Ernie Pyle, a Pulitzer Prize–winning World War II correspondent, made his final landing on the hostile beach of Ie Shima, in Japan, on April 17, 1945. The circumstances surrounding his death have been shrouded in mystery, with different accounts offering varying explanations. Some suggest that he went ashore to witness the U.S. Army’s frontline fighting so he could write about their attempt to capture the island’s strategic landing strips. Others propose that he wanted to get back into the mud with soldiers because he felt guilty about the fame and money he had earned as America’s best-known war correspondent.
Robert Sherrod, a fellow war correspondent who shared a cabin with Pyle before the invasion of the island, offers what may be the best explanation. In a post-war interview, he said that Pyle rarely refused a request from a doughboy or any other friend, and he probably went on the invasion because a soldier had persuaded him to do so.
Pyle landed on Ie Shima dressed in khakis, looking like a general ready to inspect his frontline troops. Some officers waiting for him were concerned that his outfit would attract snipers, so they convinced him to wear a jungle-green coat instead. As they drove toward a new command post closer to the front lines, a Nambu machine gun began firing from a terraced coral ridge on their left, about a third of a mile away.
Ernie Pyle landed on Ie Shima dressed in khakis, looking like a general ready to inspect his frontline troops.
Pyle, the regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge, and an enlisted man named Dale W. Bassett jumped out of the jeep and dived into a roadside ditch close to a crossroads. Coolidge later recounted to The New York Times that they raised their heads to look around, and another burst hit the road above them. Coolidge fell back into the ditch, visibly shaken, with tears in his eyes. The next image of Pyle he saw was of the frail-looking newspaperman lying motionless in the dirt, facing the sky.
Grant MacDonald, a photographer for the Associated Press, was the first on the scene and reported on Pyle’s death. While he was writing the sanitized version of the story, a battle for Pyle’s body was raging. General Andrew D. Bruce, the commander of the 77th Infantry Division, ordered tanks to retrieve Pyle’s body, but enemy machine-gun fire made it impossible.
Four hours later, a squad of litter bearers led by army chaplain Nathaniel B. Saucier volunteered to crawl along the road’s ditch, litter in tow. Corporal Alexander Roberts, of New York City, accompanied them and was the first to reach Pyle’s body. Roberts captured the photograph that, until 2008, was believed to have been lost to history.
The photograph shows a lifeless man dressed in a cotton khaki uniform lying on his back, slumped down a sandy berm, with his head resting in a steel helmet against the dirt. His upper body is slightly twisted to the right. A pair of sunglasses with a missing left lens has slid down his straight nose and covered his stone-like eyes. Folded across his midsection, small hands with dead fingers touch a jungle-green, billed cap. Aside from a dried tear of blood trickling down from the corner of his mouth, he appears to be napping in the warmth of the tropical sun.
Pyle was buried that day in his uniform with his helmet on, in a long row of graves, with full military honors. An infantry private rested on one side of him, a combat engineer on the other.
Around his wrist was the watch he’d received 13 years earlier from his friend Amelia Earhart, who’d given it to him at a small ceremony put on by the early-aviation community at Washington-Hoover Airport. It was a present to thank Pyle for his coverage of her and her friends’ aerial exploits. Pyle, the roving correspondent from Indiana who told the soldier’s truth to 14 million daily readers, was 44 years old.
David Chrisinger’s The Soldier’s Truth is out now from Penguin Press
