Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
Review by Roger Miller
In the early days of World War II, there was a patriotic song about a real American soldier named Rodger Young. If my boyhood memories of listening to the old 78 rpm record in my grandmother's parlor in the 1950s are accurate, the refrain went something like, "Rodger Young, Rodger Young, fought and died for the men he marched among."
If you changed just one word in that song, "fought," to "wrote," it would fit Ernie Pyle, probably the greatest war correspondent in American history. Ernie Pyle wrote and died for the men he marched among. His story has been compellingly told in James Tobin's "Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II".
"Ernie Pyle's War" is a small gem of biography: small in that it is not bloated with superfluous detail, gem in that it gives us an almost palpable sense of its subject -- and does it with an affection for Pyle that is not blind to the problems surrounding his life and legacy.
To the World War II generation, Ernie Pyle was the man who lived and marched among their husbands, sons, brothers, and uncles, reporting to them six days a week how their "boys" were faring. "If Ernie Pyle himself had not won the war," Tobin writes, "America's mental picture of the soldiers who had won it was largely Pyle's creation." At one point it was estimated that his column for Scripps-Howard newspapers was read by 40 million people.
In a sense, this was nothing new for Pyle. For nearly seven years in the 1930s he and his wife, Jerry, had wandered all over the United States for a column Pyle did on the lives of everyday Americans. It was during these travels that he created "Ernie Pyle," Tobin says, "a figure of warmth and reassurance, a sensitive, self-deprecating, self-revealing, compassionate friend who shared his sadnesses and exhilarations."
(His sadnesses were many. All his life he was plagued by self-doubt, insecurity, and melancholy, and both he and Jerry struggled with her deep mental problems.)
What he learned to do in Depression America he carried over into his wartime reporting: the study of "unknown people doing extraordinary things." Tobin explains: "Subjects like these were an apotheosis of commonness, a transformation of the ordinary into the sublime."
Readers loved it.
They did then; they might not now. Well, actually, the readers might, the critics wouldn't, because, except for the Korean War, no American since then has reported war in quite the same way. World War II correspondents, including Pyle, now frequently are seen as propagandists, cheerleaders for the home team.
To this charge three things need to be said. The first is that Pyle really was different from the rest; he did not uncritically accept patriotic abstractions -- though he was, like all of them, severely restricted by wartime censorship. Two, he was the first, and one of the few, of the reporters who got down in the trenches on the front lines. The third is best articulated by Tobin: "Any argument that Pyle sugarcoated the realities of war must be tempered by his status with veterans. . . . G.I.'s knew the war was worse than it appeared in Ernie's columns, but they knew he knew it, too, because he had been there, and because he hinted at it. . . . [In their own letters home] they observed the same canons of taste that Ernie did. . . . The G.I. myth worked for them, too."
Though he didn't have to, he kept going back to the war, which more and more he felt he wouldn't survive. He didn't. A Japanese machine-gun bullet killed him on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945, at the age of 44.
Why Pyle did it is difficult to say. He felt he had an obligation to the servicemen he loved. And, to be honest to his complex personality, though he hated the war, like General Patton, he also, God help him, loved it.
There is more to that Rodger Young song. It says, "To the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young." It probably is wrong to glorify the infantry, or the profession of arms -- or most professions, for that matter. But it is not wrong -- it is quite fitting -- to honor those who put at risk, or lost, their lives for their country's sake. Equally fitting to honor with an honest book like this a man who lost his life for their sake.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.