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. . . ."