Man About the World

Ernest Taylor Pyle, better known to millions as Ernie, is an inconspicuous, frail, 110-lb. man of 42, homely and quiet-mannered. He looks exactly as if he came smack off an Indiana farm -- which he did, some two decades ago. This week this pixyish little man, America's most widely read war correspondent, won one of the National Headliners Club's annual awards for newspaper, radio and photographic excellence. Pyle's award (one of twelve) was for "best foreign feature" reporting.

For the past six months Ernie Pyle has padded around North Africa, talking with infantrymen, artillerymen, pilots, truck drivers, nurses, doctors, and writing a uniquely refreshing column in the identical manner in which he had written about the U.S. for many years.

In his smooth, homespun, easy-to-read style, he has told his readers what the American soldier eats, how he dresses, whether his socks are warm enough, how & when & where he sleeps, what he feels in battle, what he thinks when he is not fighting, how he lives and how he dies. To do this, he has lived with the troops.

Several weeks before Tunisia fell to the Allies, Reporter Pyle went into battle with the infantry. He was shelled, bombed, strafed, machine-gunned. Once he had, for a whole day, the sole attention of a German sniper. In one day's fighting, he wrote, thousands of shells passed over his position, and one German dud bounced so close he could have fielded it like a hot grounder. He returned to the rear a little greyer, slept almost continuously for three days, then sat down to write a fistful of columns. Examples of his stuff:

> "A big military convoy moving at night . . . is something that nobody who has been in one can ever forget. . . . The moon was just coming out. The sky was crystal-clear, and the night was bitter cold. . . . We had to cross over a mountain range. There were steep grades and switchback turns, and some of the trucks had to back and fill to make the sharper turns. . . . We had long waits. . . . We would shut off our motors and then the night would be deathly silent except for a subdued undertone of grinding motors far ahead. . . ."

> "It must be hard for you folks at home to conceive how our troops at the front actually live. . . . Some . . . have not slept in a bed for months. . . . They never take off their clothes at night, except their shoes. They don't get a bath oftener than once a month. . . . Nobody keeps track of the days or weeks. . . . You see men sleeping anywhere, any time. . . ."

> "One afternoon Lieut. Duncan Clark of Chicago, one of the press censors, came to cheer me up." (Pyle at this time had what he called "African Pip" or "Puny Pyle's Perpetual Pains.") "I was busy killing flies. . . . Lieut. Clark said he had discovered . . . that flies always take off backwards. Consequently if you'll aim about two inches behind them, you'll always get your fly on the rise. So for the next few days I murdered flies under this scientific system. And I must say that I never missed a fly as long as I aimed behind it. . . ."

> "You become eminently practical in wartime. A chaplain who recently went through the pockets of ten Americans killed in battle said the dominant thing he found was toilet paper. Careless soldiers who were caught without such preparedness have to use 20-franc notes. . . ."

> "[Infantrymen] are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without . . . A narrow path comes like a ribbon over a hill miles away, down a long slope, across a creek, up a slope and over another hill. All along the length of this ribbon there is now a thin line of men. For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

"The men are walking. They are 50 feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary. . . . It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middleaged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory--there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever. . . ."

42 to 122. Pyle's columns are distributed by the United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Pyle's salary is approximately $25,000 a year, including a percentage of the varying amounts newspapers pay for his columns. He does not pay his own expenses. (He lives frugally, especially since he has been in Africa; recently his expenses have run about $15 a week.) When he left for North Africa in November he had 42 papers on his string, with a combined circulation of 3,347,765. This week he had 122 papers, with a combined circulation of 8,848,862.

Sand and Cigarets. More satisfying, probably, to Ernie Pyle is the wide acclaim that has come to him. He gets thousands of fan letters from big and little people. The Charlotte, N.C. Civitan Club sent him a letter of appreciation and a bag of sand, after he had said facetiously in a column from sandy North Africa: "If somebody will just send me a little sackful of sand for Easter, everything will be wonderful." From admirers (members of the Indiana Legislature, the National Press Club in Washington, and just plain people) Pyle has received over $6,000 worth of cigarets for him and distribution among the troops.

One of the most substantial approvals of Pyle came from the Youngstown Vindicator, which used his column this spring when Columnist Westbrook Pegler was on vacation. When Pegler returned, the Vindicator kept Pyle.

Writing and Restlessness. Ernie Pyle's first newspaper job was on the La Porte, Ind. Herald, whence he went in 1923 to the Washington Daily News (Scripps-Howard) as a reporter, later became a deskman. By 1932, after a brief fling at Manhattan news rooms, he had become the Washington Daily News's managing editor. Unhappy, in 1935 he asked for a roving assignment.

Pyle has been a roving reporter ever since, prowling around the U.S., Canada, Alaska, South and Central America by train, ship, plane, horseback but mostly by auto, and writing chatty, personalized copy, always digging out the ignored and ignoring the obvious.

The first hints of the fame that was ahead for Pyle came in 1940, when he went to England to write about the wartime doings of people there. His dispatches about the great fire-bombing of London in December 1940 were milestones of graphic journalism, later were published in book form (Ernie Pyle in England). Pyle returned to the U.S. in 1941, prowled around the country some more, finally booked Clipper passage for Hawaii. At the last minute his booking was canceled to make room for some China-bound propellers. While Pyle cooled his heels in San Francisco, his Clipper reached Hawaii just as Jap bombs began to fall on Pearl Harbor.

In mid-1942 he went to England and Ireland again to write about American soldiers stationed there. He followed some of those same soldiers into North Africa. His present plan: to stay in North Africa awhile, to decide where he will go next only when he knows where the news will be hottest next. He is restless already.

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