Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 – April 18, 1945) was an American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II. Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941 for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942–44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima (then known as Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa.
At the time of his death in 1945, Pyle was among the best-known American war correspondents. His syndicated column was published in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers nationwide. President Harry Truman said of Pyle, "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."
Ernest "Ernie" Taylor Pyle was born on August 3, 1900, on the Sam Elder farm near Dana, Indiana, in rural Vermillion County. His parents were Maria (Taylor) and William Clyde Pyle. At the time of Pyle's birth his father was a tenant farmer on the Elder property. Neither of Pyle's parents attended school beyond the eighth grade.
Pyle, an only child, disliked farming and pursued a more adventurous life. After graduating from a local high school in Bono, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War I. Pyle began his training at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but the war ended before he could be transferred to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station for additional training.
Pyle enrolled at Indiana University in 1919, aspiring to become a journalist. However, Indiana University did not offer a degree in journalism at that time, so Pyle majored in economics and took as many journalism courses as he could. Pyle began studying journalism in his sophomore year, the same year he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and began working on the Indiana Daily Student, the student-written newspaper. During his junior year Pyle became the newspaper's city editor and its news editor; he also worked on the Arbutus, the campus yearbook, although he did not enjoy the desk-bound work. Pyle's simple, storytelling writing style, which he developed while a student at IU, later became his trademark style as a professional journalist and earned him millions of readers as a columnist for Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate.
In March 1922, during his junior year at Indiana University, Pyle and three of his fraternity brothers dropped out of school for a semester to follow the Indiana University baseball team on a trip to Japan. Pyle and his fraternity brothers found work aboard the S.S. Keystone State. During its voyage across the Pacific Ocean, the ship docked at ports such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila, as well as in Japan before returning trip to the United States. Pyle's interest in traveling and exploring the world continued in his later years as a reporter.
After his trip across the Pacific, Pyle returned to Indiana University Bloomington, where he was named editor-in-chief of the Indiana Summer Student, the summer edition of the campus newspaper. During his senior year at Indiana University, Pyle continued his work at the Daily Student and the Arbutus. He also joined Sigma Delta Chi, the journalism fraternity, and was active in other campus clubs. In addition, Pyle was selected as a senior manager of IU's football team, making him a letterman along with the other members of the team in 1922.
Pyle left school in January 1923 with only a semester remaining and without graduating from IU.
He took a job as a newspaper reporter for the Daily Herald in La Porte, Indiana, earning $25 a week. Pyle worked at the Daily Herald for three months before moving to Washington, D.C., to join the staff of The Washington Daily News.
Pyle met his future wife, Geraldine Elizabeth "Jerry" Siebolds (August 23, 1899 – November 23, 1945), a native of Minnesota, at a Halloween party in Washington, D.C., in 1923.
They married in July 1925. In the early years of their marriage the couple traveled the country together. In Pyle's newspaper columns describing their trips, he often referred to her as "That Girl who rides with me." In June 1940, Pyle purchased property about 3 miles (4.8 km) from downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had a modest, 1,145-square-foot (106.4 m2) home built on the site. The residence served as the couple's home base in the United States for the remainder of their lives.
Ernie and Jerry Pyle had a tempestuous relationship. He often complained of being ill, was a "heavy abuser of alcohol at times," and suffered from bouts of depression, later made worse from the stress of his work as a war correspondent during World War II. His wife suffered from alcoholism and periods of mental illness (depression or bipolar disorder). She also made several suicide attempts. Although the couple divorced on April 14, 1942, they remarried by proxy in March 1943, while Pyle was covering the war in North Africa. They did not have any children. Newspapers reported that Jerry Pyle "took the news [of her husband's death] bravely," but her health declined rapidly in the months following his death on April 18, 1945, while he was covering operations of American troops on Ie Shima. Jerry Pyle died from complications of influenza at Albuquerque, New Mexico, on November 23, 1945.
Staff reporter and aviation columnist
In 1923, Pyle moved to Washington, D.C., to join the staff as a reporter for the Washington Daily News, a new Scripps-Howard tabloid newspaper, and soon became a copy editor as well. Pyle was paid $30 a week for his services, beginning a career with Scripps-Howard that would continue for the remainder of his life. When Pyle joined the Daily News all the editors were young, including editor-in-chief John M. Gleissner, Lee G. Miller (who became a lifelong friend of Pyle)
Charles M. Egan, Willis "June" Thornton Jr., and Paul McCrea.
By 1926, Pyle and his wife, Geraldine "Jerry", had quit their jobs. In ten weeks the couple traveled more than 9,000 miles across the United States in a Ford Model T roadster. After briefly working in New York City for the Evening World and the New York Post, Pyle returned to the Daily News in December 1927 to begin work on one of the country's first and its best-known aviation column, which he wrote for four years. Pyle's column appeared in syndication for the Scripps-Howard newspapers from 1928 to 1932. Although he never became an aircraft pilot, Pyle flew about 100,000 miles (160,000 km) as a passenger. As Amelia Earhart later said, "Any aviator who didn't know Pyle was a nobody."
In 1932, at the age of thirty-one, Pyle was named managing editor at the Daily News, serving in the position for three years before taking on a new writing assignment. In December 1934 Pyle took an extended vacation in the western United States to recuperate from a severe bout of influenza. Upon his return to Washington, D.C., and while he filled in for the paper's vacationing syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, Pyle wrote a series of eleven articles about his trip and the people he had met. The series proved popular with both readers and colleagues. G.B. ("Deac") Parker, editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said he had found in Pyle's vacation articles "a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out".
In 1935, Pyle left his position as managing editor at the Daily News to write his own national column as a roving reporter of human-interest stories for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate. Over the next six years, from 1935 until early 1942, Pyle and his wife, Jerry, whom Pyle identified in his columns as "That Girl who rides with me," traveled the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and South America, writing about the interesting places he saw and people he met. Pyle's column, published under the title of the "Hoosier Vagabond," appeared six days a week in Scripps-Howard newspapers. The articles became popular with readers, earning Pyle national recognition in the years preceding his even bigger fame as a war correspondent during World War II. Selected columns of Pyle's human interest stories were later compiled in Home Country (1947),