Legendary newsman Ernie Pyle, whose vivid reporting from the front lines of World War II won him a Pulitzer Prize and the admiration of readers and the soldiers whose stories he told, will be honored at a ceremony Friday marking the 80th anniversary of his death during the Battle of Okinawa.
The event, hosted by the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation, will be held at 10 a.m. at the National Cemetery of the Pacific, where Pyle is buried, followed by a luncheon at noon at the Oahu Veterans Center. Both events are open to the community.
Pyle, whose long career as a journalist saw him take on the roles of reporter, editor and columnist, was best known for the human-interest stories he wrote during the Great Depression and for his accounts of combat as a World War II correspondent.
The foundation said in a news release that Ernie Pyle Remembrance Day also will honor all veterans, “whom Ernie respected so dearly,” and the journalists following in his footsteps of human-interest storytelling, “which is now more prevalent than ever.”
The tradition of commemorating Pyle’s death began in 1949, the year his remains were repatriated from Okinawa and interred at the cemetery in Punchbowl Crater. Buck Buchwach, then-editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, wrote and delivered the eulogy.
Every five years, people would gather again at the ceremony and Buchwach would read from that first eulogy until his own passing in 1989. Buchwach’s wife, Margaret, tried to keep the tradition alive, but by the end of the 1990s it had faded.
The Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation revived the tradition in 2015. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of that year’s ceremony, but the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion ultimately held a ceremony in 2021.
The 80th anniversary event at Punchbowl is being supported by the American Legion, VFW, University of Hawaii’s School of Communications, Oahu Veterans Center, several U.S. military units and the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. Suzanne Vares-Lum, current director of the security studies center and an alum of UH’s journalism program, will give the memorial address.
Pyle was born in Indiana in 1900. An only child, he decided early on that farming wasn’t for him. He enlisted in the Navy during World War I, but the war was over before he finished training. He enrolled at Indiana University and decided to pursue journalism, working at newspapers around the country.
In 1927, Pyle became one of the country’s first aviation columnists, writing about the rapidly evolving world of airplanes and the people who flew them. He himself never learned to fly a plane but logged thousands of flight miles as a passenger. Famed flyer Amelia Earhart once remarked that “any aviator who didn’t know Pyle was a nobody.”
In the 1930s, by then working as an editor and growing increasingly tired of his desk-bound daily grind, Pyle hit the road with his wife and wrote stories for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate about the places he went and the people he met, from Walt Disney to common working people.
His travels took him from the heart of the Great Plains Dust Bowl to Alaska, Mexico, South America and even to Hawaii, where he wrote about the Hansen’s disease colony at Kalaupapa.
His unpretentious, personal tone and empathetic stories of regular people struck a chord with readers around the country and made him a household name.
When World War II broke out, Pyle brought that personal touch to stories of war. He traveled to Europe to cover the Battle of Britain and Nazi Germany’s relentless bombing of London. In 1942, he accepted an assignment to become a war correspondent for Scripps-Howard, taking him to the front lines with American troops.
His stories focused not on grand strategy, troop movements or generals, but on vivid accounts of battles and the effects they had on the young men America had sent to fight them — what Pyle would call a “worm’s eye view.”
Pyle braved bullets and bombs alongside the troops, endearing him to the grunts and offering a window into the war to Americans back home. In 1944, he wrote a column from Italy proposing that ground soldiers in combat should get “fight pay,” similar to the “flight pay” airmen received. That year he would also be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
On April 18, 1945, Pyle came ashore with members of the U.S. Army’s 77th Infantry Division on Iejima, a small island northwest of Okinawa. During a skirmish that day between American soldiers and Japanese troops, a bullet pierced Pyle’s left temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly.
To this day, a memorial stands at the spot where he died, bearing the inscription, “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
President Harry Truman, who had been president for less than a week after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, paid tribute to Pyle, declaring that “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.”
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the name of Indiana University.
