Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II

James Tobin. Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II. Free Press, 1997.

I thought the tip-of-the-iceberg perspective I would use for the World War II project I'm working on would be a comparison of what was going on overseas and how the home front coped with the results of the war and the absence of their loved ones. Unfortunately, that strategy is still too large for a ninety-minute lecture, so I contemplated and I brainstormed, I watched videos, and most importantly I kept reading. I learned about war correspondents, and Ernie Pyle in particular, and became fascinated with that writer who we don't hear much about anymore.

In his time he was wildly popular. He joined the guys on the front lines in Egypt, Italy, France, the Pacific theater, and places in-between. The violence he witnessed took its toll on his mental health but he soldiered on, only occasionally returning home to check on his wife, Jerry, who was also battling depression. This biography follows Pyle through his 44 years and supplies

samples of the war writing that made Pyle famous. Ernie Pyle described his columns as written from "a worm's eye view," meaning that he wrote about the experience of the infantry guys with whom he toured the war. There are occasional profiles of officers, but mostly he wrote about the enlisted men he knew well and shared their feelings and post-war aspirations with the world in his columns. He was everyone's friend and everyone's hero.

Ernie Pyle walked along the beaches in Normandy the day after D-Day and took in the sights as he stepped over bodies and parts of bodies. His resulting columns, though, described the equipment and vehicles damaged and left behind. This was for the benefit of the people at home who would soon find out that they had lost sons, brothers, and fathers and didn't need to know exactly, in gory detail, how they died. Learning about the broken vehicles and equipment littering the beach gave them an idea of the magnitude of this battle and how bravely their loved one fought.

This fantastic book pushed me over the edge of fascination with Ernie Pyle into obsession with this talented, original writer. Author James Tobin did his research and paints a complex portrait of Pyle the man, Pyle the innovative writer, and the phenomenon he created at home and on the front line. Oh, does this sound like a commercial for the book? I hope not, but it probably does. What I would like prospective readers to know is that this book is an effective and compelling way to learn about that huge war that affected almost everyone on the planet. I had a father and six uncles who served in various branches of the military. They all came home, but didn't talk much about the experience except, in the case of my father, to identify photographs and a few artifacts without much story. Even by the time I came along, twenty years after this war, my father wasn't sharing war stories. This book filled in some gaps for me. At the same time it enlightened me about the writers, photographers, videographers, and cartoonists who did their part by informing the troops and the public about the war in a time before Twitter, the World Wide Web, and even TV news.