The legendary life and career of newsman Ernie Pyle was celebrated Friday at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater, the famed war correspondent’s final resting place.
The Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation put on the ceremony, which marked the 80th anniversary of his death during the Battle of Okinawa. Another ceremony was held on the island of Iejima, where a single bullet fired by a Japanese soldier struck Pyle in the head and killed him.
The ceremony brought together members of Pyle’s extended family, veterans, educators, former war correspondents and community members who wanted to pay tribute to Pyle, who was best known for his
human-interest reporting during the Great Depression and the intimate accounts of common service members during World War II.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Suzanne Vares-Lum, an alum of University of Hawaii’s journalism and ROTC programs, said she first encountered Pyle’s writing as a student at UH, where some of her instructors were former war correspondents as well. She said Pyle’s work left a profound impact on her.
“He was never the loudest man in the room, but he spoke with a voice that carried across oceans, across battlefields and across generations,” Vares-Lum said. “He chose to stand alongside the average soldier, the quiet heroes, rather than chasing the spotlight of generals and war rooms. He wrote from foxholes, not balconies. From bombed-out towns, not press briefings. His style was simple and spare, but it cut deep. It wasn’t about grandeur; it was about truth.”
The tradition of commemorating Pyle’s death at Punchbowl began in 1949, the year his remains were repatriated from Okinawa and interred at the cemetery. 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 death in 1989. Buchwach’s wife, Margaret, tried to keep the tradition alive, but by the end of the 1990s, it had faded.
But in 2013, members of Pyle’s extended family established the Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation, and in 2015 the foundation helped revive the tradition. Steve Maschino, a cousin of Pyle who sits on the foundation’s board, told attendees that the foundation hopes to “promote Ernie’s style
of writing with that human exercise story, versus the raw news today that sometimes can seem void of the human side.”
Marine veteran Jason Seal, senior vice commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Hawaii, read Buchwach’s eulogy, which proclaimed that Pyle “was a little guy who loved the little guy, and he brought the front to the front door of every American home. His fame lies above all in the integrity of what he wrote. His byline meant truth.”
Beverly Keever, who worked as a correspondent in Vietnam covering the war for seven years and later became a UH journalism
instructor, said remembering Pyle’s work is important today.
“The press today is under such unprecedented attacks of a new kind, new kind of bullets,” Keever said. “This is a really special occasion, 80 years after his death.”
Pyle was an only child raised on a farm in Indiana, and soon decided farming wasn’t for him. He enlisted in the Navy during World War I, but the fighting ended before he finished training. He pursued journalism and enjoyed a long career with stints as a beat reporter, columnist and editor. In the 1930s, feeling trapped behind a desk, he hit the road with his wife and wrote stories about the places they went and people they met.
His travels took him from the heart of the Great Plains Dust Bowl to Alaska, South America and even to Hawaii, where he wrote about the Hansen’s disease colony at Kalaupapa. When war broke out in Europe, he traveled to London to write about Germany’s relentless bombing of the British Isles.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he began reporting on the front lines with U.S. troops, taking him to North Africa, Europe and eventually bringing him back to Hawaii and the Pacific. His last assignment was with the 77th Infantry Division on Iejima.
“His words brought the islands to the Main Street America,” Vares-Lum said. “Americans in Kansas, New York and Georgia could feel the breeze of a Waikiki, could understand the struggles on Guam, Tarawa, Okinawa, and we here in Hawaii remember him as one who walked among us, who listened, who cared and who understood. … He walked into danger with a notepad. He reminds us to speak the truth, even when it’s hard.”
