Here Is Your War [Illustrated Edition]
About this ebook
Out of the foxholes he shared with them, and from his own heart straight to the folks back home, comes Ernie Pyle’s story of our soldiers’ first big campaign abroad. He takes you to live with them on the great adventure of their lives, and tells you the thousands of little things you want to know about how they are living this war from day to day. To Ernie Pyle they are the same boys we have always known, from the Main Streets, Broadways and farms throughout America. They are the boys who had to learn much of the art of war as they went along, who often paid a bitter price for their knowledge. They emerge by the hundreds from these pages as the living, gallant, unpretentiously heroic Americans who are writing one of the great chapters of our history.
For six months Ernie Pyle...wrote news columns about the war in Tunisia which were increasingly recognized as one of the greatest pieces of reporting in American journalism. Toward the end of the campaign they were running on the front pages of countless newspapers. Americans discovered in them a new feeling about the war, a human warmth, an unstereotyped approach—in other words, exactly what they were most interested in—not grand strategy but how the boys were making out. These columns, in full-length form in which they were individually filed, form the basis for a wonderfully moving story of our soldiers throughout the entire campaign, from embarkation from England through ultimate victory. HERE IS YOUR WAR is great reporting indeed, but more than that it is a book of timeless and permanent excellence.
“A full-length, deeply human portrait of the American soldier in action...the things that those at home want most to know.”
—EDWARD STREETER, N.Y. Times Book Review
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About the author
Ernest Taylor Pyle (August 3, 1900 - April 18, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. As a roving correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, he earned wide acclaim for his accounts of ordinary people in rural America, and later, of ordinary American soldiers during World War II. His syndicated column ran in more than 300 newspapers nationwide.
Pyle was born near Dana, Indiana and, after attending local schools, he joined the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War I at age 17. He served three months of active duty and was discharged with the rank of Petty Officer Third Class.
After the war Pyle attended Indiana University, editing the Indiana Daily Student newspaper and traveling to the Orient with his fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. With only a semester left he quit to accept a job at a newspaper in LaPorte, Indiana.
He worked there for three months before moving to Washington, D.C., where he served as a reporter for the tabloid newspaper, The Washington Daily News. In 1932, Pyle was named managing editor and served in the post for three years.
From 1935 through 1941 he traveled throughout the United States, writing about rural towns and their inhabitants. After the U.S. entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style to his wartime reports, first from the home front, and later from the European and Pacific theatres. On April 18, 1945, he was killed by enemy fire on Iejima during the Battle of Okinawa.
At the time of his death he was among the best-known American war correspondents. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his spare, poignant accounts of “dogface” infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told”, wrote Harry Truman. “He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”
