Looking back to 1945

The Hoosier State Press Association has offered the following material about Ernie Pyle, an Indiana journalist who chronicled the GI's activities in World War II until his death April 18, 1945. We've reprinted Pyle's last column, and following are a biography and information about the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum, which is operated by a non-profit group, The Friends of Ernie Pyle.

The column is as important today as it was in 1945.

The Friends of Ernie Pyle

The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum features the famous journalist's birthplace and a museum dedicated to Pyle's life and writings as a war correspondent. It is owned by the Friends of Ernie Pyle, who are dedicated to preserving and expanding the legacy of the writer whose columns linked the soldiers on the front line to worried families on the home front. To preserve Ernie Pyle's memory is to preserve the sacrifices made by what has been dubbed "The Greatest Generation." To learn more about the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum located in Dana, Indiana, or make a donation to assist the efforts of the Friends of Ernie Pyle to honor him and that generation, go to http://www.erniepyle.org.

Ernie Pyle biography

The son of tenant farming parents in west-central Indiana, Ernie Pyle became history's greatest war correspondent. When Pyle was killed by a Japanese machine gun bullet on the tiny Pacific island of Ie Shima in 1945, his columns were being delivered to more than 14 million homes according to his New York Times obituary.

During the war, Pyle wrote about the hardships and bravery of the common soldier, not grand strategy. His description of the G.I.'s life was more important to families on the home front than battlefront tactics of Gens. Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, or George Patton.

Prior to the United States' entry into World War II, Pyle traveled to England and wrote about the Nazi's continual bombing of London. His columns helped move the mood of America from isolationism to sympathy for the stubborn refusal of Great Britain to succumb to the will of Adolf Hitler.

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist's legacy rests in his words and the impact they had on Americans before and during a war that threatened to take the world behind a curtain of fascism. His columns open a window to the hardships endured by the common U.S. soldier during World War II and serve today to honor what has been called "The Greatest Generation."

This column was never completed. A handwritten draft of it was found in Pyle's pocket, April 18, 1945, the day he was killed by a Japanese machine-gunner on the island of Ie Shima.

On victory in Europe

by Ernie Pyle

And so it is over. The catastrophe on one side of the world has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has come at last. I suppose our emotions here in the Pacific are the same as they were among Allies all over the world. First a shouting of the good news with such joyous surprise that you would think the shouter himself had brought it about.

And then an unspoken sense of gigantic relief-and then a hope that the collapse in Europe would hasten the end in the Pacific.

It has been seven months since I heard my last shot in the European War. Now I am as far away from it as it is possible to get on this globe.

This is written on a little ship lying off the coast of the Island of Okinawa, just south of Japan, on the other side of the world from Ardennes.

But my heart is still in Europe, and that's why I am writing this column.

It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.

For the companionship of two and a half years of death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one's soul, and it cannot be obliterated.

True, I am with American boys in the other war not yet ended, but I am old-fashioned and my sentiment runs to old things.

To me the European War is old, and the Pacific War is new.

Last summer I wrote that I hoped the end of the war could be a gigantic relief, but not an elation. In the joyousness of high spirits it is so easy for us to forget the dead. Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.

But there are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production-in one country after another-month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference.

We hope above all things that Japan won't make the same stubborn mistake that Germany did. You must credit Germany for her courage in adversity, but you can doubt her good common sense in fighting blindly on long after there was any doubt whatever about the outcome.

Permission to re-publish Ernie Pyle's column was given by the Scripps Howard Foundation and distributed by the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana.