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Mr. JAMES TOBIN (Author, "Ernie Pyle's War"): Ernie Pyle was the
most famous war correspondent of World War II. He started out as just
one war correspondent among many and became a kind of folk hero,
really, identified with the war effort, identified with the fighting
men of World War II in a way that really no other reporter ever has
been.

LAMB: Why are you interested in him?

Mr. TOBIN: I suppose I'm interested in him just because I started to
read his stuff when I was in graduate school at the University of
Michigan. I was writing a dissertation about the home front during
World War II and knew that I had to read some war correspondence;
started out with Pyle. And I had read only a few of his pieces before
I realized I was on to something quite extraordinary.

LAMB: When was this picture taken?

Mr. TOBIN: That picture was taken in the fall of 1944 at--it was in
the studio. You can see in the background when you've got the
full thing like that, you see the busts in the background. It
was taken in the studio of Jo Davidson, who was a famous sculptor in
New York. And he was doing a bust of Pyle. And Al--Alfred
Eisenstadt, the famous Life photographer, came in and took Ernie's
picture.

LAMB: Where was Ernie Pyle born?

Mr. TOBIN: In Dana, Indiana, which is a little farm town out on the
far western edge of Indiana, just a couple of miles from the Illinois
border. Born in 1900.

LAMB: What's it near?

Mr. TOBIN: It ain't near much. It's near...

LAMB: What's the closest...

Mr. TOBIN: It's near Clinton. Terre Haute is the nearest
decent-sized town.

LAMB: So it's right on the western border.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: How long did he live there?

Mr. TOBIN: He got out as soon as he could; lived there until he went
to college at Indiana University just after finishing high school.
Went back only when he felt obliged to see his folks.

LAMB: Have you been there?

Mr. TOBIN: Oh, yes. Yeah, a number of times.

LAMB: What's there?

Mr. TOBIN: The town of Dana, I'm told, is not much different than it
was when Ernie was living there. It's a h--a lovely little town. And the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, which is a part of the--part of the state museum, you know, setup, is there. And it has
both a Pyle museum and a wonderful collection of Pyle materials. It's where I did a good deal of my research.

LAMB: So what do you see when you get there?

Mr. TOBIN: You see a silo. That's the first thing you see coming
out from Indianapolis. You cross the Wabash River and you come up a
rise and you're suddenly in a landscape that is just about as flat
as western Texas. And you drive a little bit farther and then you see
a silo and a little--I've always thought of it as a little oasis of
trees surrounding the town. And there's a little traditional main
street and houses surrounding it. You stand in the middle of Dana and
you can look to the east and to the west and you see the farms on
either edges--either side of town.

LAMB: And when you first get to the Ernie Pyle Memorial Museum or
whatever you call it...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...what do you see there of him?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, you see that--the house where he was born; not the
house where he actually grew up, which is still outside of town. This
house was outside of town and was moved in about 1975, I think. And
it's a pretty, little, white farmhouse that has been moved in. And
there's also a mural there on the side --of a building that
commemorates Pyle and the GIs of World War II.

LAMB: So what is he? What's he all about?

Mr. TOBIN: Pyle was a working newspaperman in the '20s and '30s, a
good one, but one who never reached any particular kind of acclaim or
fame, until he went out on the road in 1935 for the Scripps-Howard
newspapers and became one of only a very small handful of roving
reporters. That's what he was called. He wrote a six-day-a-week
column just based on the stuff that he saw wherever he went. He
went--he traveled all around the US, and they gradually extended his
trips farther and farther through the Western Hemisphere; went to
Alaska and--and South and Central America and wrote about just
whatever he could find.

It's an extraordinary collection of material that both he and I felt
was really his best stuff. If you get into Ernie's stuff before the
war, you're really reading the most remarkable of his
material. But, of course, he just was known to his fans, a relatively
small group of people who were subscribers to the Scripps-Howard
papers and some syndicated papers that picked him up.

And this, as I say, was not the period of his great fame. That
only happened when he went overseas. He went through a terrific
personal crisis and decided that the best way to sort of free himself
from that was to get overseas and cover the war. And...

LAMB: What--what was his personal crisis?

Mr. TOBIN: Pyle was a troubled guy himself: depressive, drank too
much. But his great difficulty was a very sad marriage. He was
married to a woman who was bright, witty, a wonderful woman in many
ways, Geraldine--Jerry--but had just terrific emotional problems and
was alcoholic and suicidal. And their relationship just became more
and more difficult as she tried to recover --from her
problems. And that didn't happen. The recovery didn't happen, and so
ultimately they divorced in early 1942. And to just sort of escape
this problem and to try and shock her back into a sense of sanity, he
decided it was best to go overseas.

LAMB: So how long were they married?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, let's see, they were married in 1925 and were
divorced then in early '42 and then remarried while Pyle was
overseas--remarried by proxy when he was in Africa and stayed married
until his death in '45. And she died a few months thereafter.

LAMB: One of the things I kept writing down about him, as you go
through the book, is--I don't know how strong you--these words are,
but `drunkenness and depression and...'

Mr. TOBIN: Hers or his?

LAMB: His. I mean, he knew...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...that...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. I don't--yeah. I'm no expert on alcoholism and didn't feel...

LAMB: `Self-loathing and suicidal despair,' and, you know-but --actually, that was her.

Mr. TOBIN: That describes her, right. Right.

LAMB: Yeah. But there was, `always tired, anxiety-ridden, stress-ridden.'

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because the guy
that readers came to know in the column was almost
happy-go-lucky. You got the sense of a--sort of this
carefree tramp driving all around the country. It's a very
lighthearted column before the war, and yet he was under terrific
strain all the time. It was a tough job that he had set for himself,
to write six columns a week. And writing it not as a Walter Winchell
did it, with press agents calling him all the time, but a working
reporter who had to find out stuff wherever he was. And--so that was
a--that was just a tough strain. And, of course, that became worse
for various reasons during the war.

And--but he was a melancholy guy, a depressive guy, no question about
it. And I never quite figured out why. I made a few guesses in the
book, but I could never quite pinpoint the causes of his troubles.

LAMB: And now--where do you live now?

Mr. TOBIN: I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

LAMB: What do you do for a living?

Mr. TOBIN: I'm a reporter for the Detroit News.

LAMB: How long have you done that?

Mr. TOBIN: Since September of 1986, right after I got through with grad school.

LAMB: And all--how many degrees do you have?

Mr. TOBIN: More than I need. Well, I have a BA and a MA and a PhD
in history.

LAMB: You run into many reporters that have PhDs in history?

Mr. TOBIN: No, I don't. No. A lot--lot of people say, `Why the heck did you spend the time doing that if you were just going to be a newspaper reporter?'

LAMB: Why did you?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I sort of bounced back and forth trying to decide whether to be a journalist or a historian and had decided at a certain point that I wanted to go whole-hog the academic route. And then, oh, for a variety of reasons having to do with my wife and I having our first baby and--and her having a good job that we didn't want to give up, decided to go back into journalism. And after I finished the PhD--and--and the PhD came in surprisingly handy at many points along the way; gives you a different perspective on things.

LAMB: What was your first job in journalism?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I did various internships while I was in college and--but --I've never really had a real job with any paper other than The News in Detroit.

LAMB: And where's your home originally?

Mr. TOBIN: Outside of Detroit--Birmingham, Michigan.

LAMB: Anybody in your family a journalist?

Mr. TOBIN: No. But all...

LAMB: Anybody in your family a historian?

Mr. TOBIN: No. Uh-uh. But all interested in history and all
readers.

LAMB: How often have you run into people that know all about Ernie Pyle?

Mr. TOBIN: Practically anytime that I hit anybody over the age of
60. Then it's a big name. And they say, `Oh, of course' and `I
remember reading him' or `My dad cared so much about Ernie Pyle' or
`My mom cared so much about Ernie Pyle.' When I talk to folks my age
or younger, I usually get a blank stare. It's not a name that's lasted.

LAMB: What would have happened to Ernie Pyle in this country or even in the news business if he had covered the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf situation the same way...

Mr. TOBIN: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...he covered World War II?

Mr. TOBIN: That's a real good question and I think that he--I--you
know, I think it's the nature of the war, to some extent, that led him
to be as supportive of the troops as he was in World War II. If he
had been covering Vietnam at the time that David Halberstam or
Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne were there, I think he would have started
to write the story the way they wrote it. They went in supporting the
war effort. And it was only when they started to report what they saw
happening in front of them that they came to become skeptics.

LAMB: In a minute I'm going to show some video of a training tape that--or training film. It's old stuff. It's not--actually, there's not much we could find on...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...Ernie Pyle on film. Why is that?

Mr. TOBIN: I just don't know the answer to that question. Why the Newsreel guys didn't pick up on him more, I'm not sure. Whether they weren't as far forward as he was--I just don't know. There's a little bit that exists.

LAMB: There's a photo in the book of Ernie Pyle with George Patton, and the cutline on this photo says, `He never, ever mentioned George Patton in any column he ever wrote.'

Mr. TOBIN: Right.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. TOBIN: All we know for sure is what a good friend of his, Don
Whitehead, who worked for the Associated Press, said, which is just
that--that Pyle hated Patton's guts. The only references of Ernie's
own in his letters home just referred to--I think he just called him
`the big general.' That always meant--that always meant Patton.
Patton was the antithesis of Pyle. He was a--you know, a
terrific soldier, but something of a braggart and a great egotist who,
you know, rode herd over his--over his men, and Pyle didn't have much use for that.

LAMB: We got some video, and the context of it--before I show it, I want to ask you at what point was Ernie Pyle the best known in this country? And for what reason at that time?

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, his great fame begins in the spring
of 1943. He has, at that point, been in North Africa for a number of
months, but it's when the infantry campaign really picks up in North
Africa, when the warm weather comes and the--the spring campaign
really begins he started to write these dispatches home. And
very quickly people started to realize that this guy is covering the
war in a way that nobody else is. And he suddenly becomes this sort
of `must-read' figure.

And then he covers the Sicilian campaign that summer and that sense of--of, `My God, you--you've got to see what this guy is writing' really picks up. And it's because he is offering a very realistic and at the same time very affectionate view of what the average soldiers are going through in combat and--and not just in combat, but when they're not in combat, when they're sitting around in--in rest camps, when they're waiting to go into battle, recovering. And it's a view of the soldiers that folks weren't getting anywhere else.

LAMB: Let's look at this video. This is about a minute and 22 seconds long. And what it is, it's a training film...

Mr. TOBIN: OK.

LAMB: ...in which you've got a bunch of actors dressed up in military uniforms talking about ordnance or whatever.

Mr. TOBIN: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And he comes into the picture, as you'll see. I mean, he--his being comes in. Let's watch that, and we'll get back to more on Ernie Pyle.

(Excerpt from training film)

LAMB: `As a journalist, a great booster of everybody at the front.' How would that work again today?

Mr. TOBIN: You mean, would it be the right way to cover a war that happened today?

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. TOBIN: God, it just wouldn't happen. I've j--been reading about
coverage of the Gulf War and that wasn't how most reporters saw their
role. The whole mind-set has shifted, and I won't say which way was
right and which was wrong. But Ernie did s--he certainly--well,
you know, I don't--he didn't set out to be a cheerleader for the GI.
He set out to tell what he was seeing. And because of a kind of--just
an--a natural gift for empathy, I think he saw that these soldiers
were going through a very great ordeal that people at home needed to understand.

And it was a great ordeal and it was very different from the sort of
ordeal that--if you can call it that, that troops went through in the Gulf War, which was just so quick--not a pleasant experience, but --not what Army infantry went through in Italy, say.

LAMB: In your appendix you have some of the pieces that he wrote.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: How did you sift through all those and decide?

Mr. TOBIN: That was hard. Well, some--a couple choices were hard
because I wanted to pick early things that he had written that were
representative of the pre-war stuff. The wartime columns were easier.
There are certain columns that are just real well-known to
anybody who remembers Pyle and, at the same time, representative
--of his war works so that anybody who hadn't read his stuff
just could immediately get a sense--get a taste for his writing and why he was who he was.

LAMB: What's your favorite piece?

Mr. TOBIN: Oh, I don't know. Some of the--there are pieces
that Ernie wrote that nobody remembers that I like a lot.
There's a--sh--it's hard to explain, but there's a piece that he
writes about looking at a picture magazine. I think it's--I
never could quite figure it out; I think it's Time--just in North
Africa, where he sort of speculates about why war seems dramatic when
you're away from it, but it doesn't seem dramatic when you're in the
middle of it. That's a very sensitive piece.

And the most--the best known of his pieces is quoted right in the
text of the-- book, and it's about a scene in which an infantry
captain is led down on the--he's been killed in Italy, and he's led
down off a--off a mountain on the back of a mule and his--sort of--the
body is greeted by several of his guys down at the bottom of this
mountain. Officer's name is Henry Waskow. That's a--it
remains both his most famous and probably his most moving story.

LAMB: Well, if it's all right with you, I'd like to ask you to read
it, and because--I mean, I picked it out, page 134, because it's
hard, if you've never head of Ernie Pyle or have any idea why anybody
would care as much as you did to write a book about him...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...in this day. So if you don't mind, just read...

Mr. TOBIN: Sure.

LAMB: We've got some--we've got it typed up so people can follow it
along, but it's a--it's a bit long. But go ahead.

Mr. TOBIN: Mm-hmm. OK. The--the dateline is: At the front lines
in Italy. And this was written--I know that the fellow died
December 14th, 1943, so that's the setting.

`In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and
respected by the soldiers under them, but never have I crossed the
trail of any man as beloved as Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton,
Texas.

Captain Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had
been in this company since long before he left the States. He was
very young, only in his middle 20s, but he carried in him a sincerity
and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

"After my own father, he comes next," a sergeant told me. "He always
looked after us," a soldier said. "He'd go to bat for us every time."
"I've never known him to do anything unkind," another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain
Waskow down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see
far up the trail and even part way across the valley. Soldiers made
shadows as they walked.

Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto
the backs of mules. They came lying belly down across the wooden
packsaddle, the heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their
stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and
down as the mule walked.

The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so
Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans
were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies when they got down to
the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.

The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the
mule and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half-light, he
might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the other.
Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the stone wall
alongside the road. I don't know who that first one was. You feel
small in the presence of dead men and ashamed of being alive, and you
don't ask silly questions.

We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went
back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw,
waiting for the next batch of mules. Somebody said the dead soldier
had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about
him. We talked for an hour or more; the dead man lay all alone,
outside in the shadow of the wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more
bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there in
the moonlight in the road where the trail came down off the mountain.
The soldiers who left them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain
Waskow," one of them said quickly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it
in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took the other bodies
off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You
don't cover up dead men in the combat zones. They just lie there in
the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

The uncertain mules moved off to their olive orchards. The men in the
road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I
could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow's body;
not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him
and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear. One soldier
came and looked down and he said out loud, "Goddamn it."

That's all he said and then he walked away. Another one came and he
said, "Goddamn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a last--a few
last moments and then turned and left.

Another man came--I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell
officers from men in the half-light, for everybody was grimy and
dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face and then
spoke directly to him as though he were alive, "I'm sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over and he,
too, spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper, but awfully
tenderly, and he said, "I sure am sorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the
captain's hand and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the
dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he
never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. Finally, he put the
hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the
captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered
edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked
away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men
lying in a line end to end in the shadow of the lone stone wall. We
lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all
asleep.'

LAMB: What was the impact on the country when columns like that came out?

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. That particular column, you know, sort of was an
instant sensation and was reprinted beyond Pyle's papers and was acclaimed.

It was interesting, I sort of found different things that people
wrote about it and it was read in different ways, depending on
people's point of view. And although Pyle himself was very proud of
that column, he never said, `Here's why I wrote it. Here's what it
meant to me.' Some people saw it as--well, it was--the interesting
thing, some people --were shocked that soldiers would swear in
the middle of the combat zone. That bothered some folks. Others saw
it --as sort of a passivist statement, a curse upon wars and
some--somebody said. You know, I see it more as sort of a testament
to the comradeship of the soldiers.

It's interesting, I spoke to a couple of the guys who were there
that night including the soldier who brought Pyle's body down from the mountain.

LAMB: That--not Pyle's body.

Mr. TOBIN: Not Pyle's body; Waskow's body.

LAMB: Waskow's body.

Mr. TOBIN: Guy named Reilly Tidwell, who was from a small town in
Texas and had been Waskow's runner and--his messenger--and had been
right next to him when Waskow was killed and was worried about whether
the body was going to be--was going to be removed. It's up at the top
of this mountain, Mt. Simoucro--and had been waiting for a day or
two, figuring that the guys who were--he had--himself had been
wounded--Tidwell was. And so when the body didn't come down, figured
he'd better go back up and get it and he did and was wounded again on
his way back down, and then he was one of the guys in the little circle of men there.

And he became--it's interesting, the column was so acclaimed that
Tidwell, although not named in the column, was sought out and became
sort of a war hero himself. He was put on tour and taken around
the country.

LAMB: And where did you find him again?

Mr. TOBIN: He lived in--gosh, he's now--he just died recently
and I can't remember the town that he has lived in. But it was one of
those things where you sort of talk to one person who put you in touch
with another person who said, `You've got to talk to Reilly Tidwell
and here's his phone number.'

LAMB: What was his reaction when you called him?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, Tidwell had done this interview before. He was
s--sort of well known in those circles and he wasn't shocked to be
contacted. So--but very pleased and had felt--had very tender feelings about Pyle.

LAMB: When did you start on your book in the first place?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I did some work on it when I was in grad school
--in the middle '80s and then started back in about--well, I guess I
went down to Indiana University, where some of the Pyle papers are, in
late '91, got a--sort of got a look at the letters and then really started in earnest in about '93.

LAMB: A lot of correspondence that you quote in there from his wife, Jerry.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: Where was that?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, to his wife.

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. TOBIN: Not very many of her letters to him survived. The bulk
of that is at IU, at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. There's
a real treasure trove of stuff, most of which is Pyle's letters to his
boss at Scripps-Howard, Lee Miller, and that's at this little Pyle
historic site in Dana.

LAMB: You have a picture in the book of Lee Miller and also Lester Cowan?

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: Who are they?

Mr. TOBIN: Miller was...

LAMB: That was his picture, by the way. Where is this?

Mr. TOBIN: I beg your pardon?

LAMB: Where is this picture?

Mr. TOBIN: That picture is at Dana, and Miller, on the right, was
Pyle's editor and close friend, not his--not really his closest
personal friend, but they were very close professional colleagues and
worked both before and during the war together. And Miller
really became sort of Pyle's agent, too. Scripps-Howard called him
vice president in charge of Pyle because just managing Pyle's career
during the war became such an undertaking.

Lester Cowan was the Hollywood movie producer who wanted and did
make a movie based on Pyle's writings. Yeah, that's a picture of
Pyle with Burgess Meredith, who played the role of Pyle in the movie
"The Story of GI Joe."

LAMB: When was the movie put out?

Mr. TOBIN: The movie actually came out after Ernie was killed, in
the summer, of '45 and was--it's funny, it's not in general
circulation now. It's sort of tied up in Cowan's estate but was
acclaimed as a great work of war realism at the time. You look at it
now and it doesn't seem to compare in terms of realism to more recent
movies.

LAMB: We have some more raw footage of--I guess that's lingo for our
business, but it's--it's just...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...old black-and-white footage of Ernie Pyle. Why don't we run
this? I think this was about--we have about a minute of it, and
there's no audio on it, and we can see what he looked like on a ship.

Mr. TOBIN: That's in the Pacific. Yeah.

LAMB: At what point in his career did he go to the Pacific?

Mr. TOBIN: He had been all through the various campaigns in Africa
and Europe. This film I'm not sure if I've seen this or not. It's
great to see it. You see that smile, very famous smile. And he
went--he came home after the liberation of Paris really exhausted and
down and felt like he couldn't go on any further. But then felt
and, you know, was sort of advised by various folks, including
Eleanor Roosevelt, that it would be a great idea if he--oh, that's
a--there's a very famous still from that footage right at that moment. Yeah, it's in the book. Yeah, a guy wrote to me who--when Pyle was signing on top of his head, the guy wrote to me and
said, `That's me that Ernie's--whose head I'm--whose head Ernie is
signing the autograph on top of.' But anyway, he just came to feel
that he had an obligation to the Marines and sailors and--and soldiers
who were in the Pacific to tell their story, too.

LAMB: You mean, in this photograph, you have talked to the man that he's...

Mr. TOBIN: Guy--guy--yeah, guy claims that he's the guy that--right underneath Ernie's hand there.

LAMB: How did he know you were working on this?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I put out a couple of query letters, one in The NewYork Times Book Review, which got a terrific result from some wonderful folks who knew Ernie, and then a couple in veterans magazines--I'm trying to think--VFW Magazine, and I think that guy saw
that author's query in VFW and wrote to me. I got a number of interesting replies.

LAMB: Howdoes that work? How do you do the ads?

Mr. TOBIN: It's as easy as can be. The New York Times Book Review--I just--I'm forever indebted to them. It's free. It's just no big deal. You say, `I want to--I'm doing this book. I'd like
to do this query.' They say, `Great. Fax us a copy,' and there it was just a few weeks later. And I got just amazing, invaluable material from that, including--a guy wrote to me who was the son of a woman named Moran Livingstone, with whom Ernie had a long love affair during
the war. And just based on this one exchange of letters, he told me who he was, and I wrote back to him and I said...

LAMB: Did you say he was the son of?

Mr. TOBIN: He was the son of Moran Livingstone. And it was--this
confirmed that this was the woman that I had read about, heard about. I knew that Ernie had had an affair during the war, but I wasn't positive of with whom. And the son said, `Yeah, she
was the one,' and he sent me back just an envelope, a clipping of a file full of Ernie's love letters to her, the originals. And my wife, who was an archivist, sort of rolled her eyes saying she
couldn't believe that this guy had committed these letters-these original Ernie Pyle letters to the--to the mail, but he had. And so we made copies and got them back, and they're wonderful letters that reveal many of Ernie's deepest thoughts about the war.

LAMB: When was their relationship?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, they met just before the war. She was married to
the--a guy named Barney Livingstone, who was the head of the AP bureau
in Albuquerque, which is where the Pyles made their home, and they
sort of ran in the same social circle. And they developed a close
friendship and, I think, sort of had a mutual crush on each other.
And then after Ernie was divorced during that time, the--I think
that's when the--the affair sort of began and became more intense
after his remarriage.

LAMB: You have even the specific information that Ernie Pyle was impotent.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: How do you find that out?

Mr. TOBIN: He told his best friend, Page Cavanaugh, and talked about
it quite frankly in letters to P--to Cavanaugh.

LAMB: And wha--how did you find that out?

Mr. TOBIN: That the letters existed?

LAMB: No, that he--you know...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...I mean, how did you get the--yeah, or...

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I mean, you--he's--I mean, it's a--yeah, it's
an extraordinary friendship between these two. Cavanaugh had been a
World War I veteran whom Ernie met when they were both in school at
IU. And Ernie was just the kind of guy who didn't keep secrets from
his best friends and he d--he is constantly making himself--making fun
of himself for his impotence. But it was what a psychiatrist would
call selective impotence. He was not able to have a sexual
relationship with his wife after a certain time but then overcame it
with Moran Livingstone.

LAMB: How close did he come to getting shot at or wounded...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...throughout the entire time? And go back over the years that he was actually in the combat zone.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's see, he goes--well, he
he had been in London during the Ba--during the Battle of Britain and spent so--several months there when London was being bombed. Doesn't, you know--I mean, he sees--he sees the bombing like anybody else who was in London at the time, but he doesn't have any particular close calls. Then he goes to North Africa in late fall of '42, just a couple of weeks after the American invasion
there, goes all through the campaign in--in Tunisia and is definitely close to the front there, comes under artillery fire there and under German bombing there, then goes to Sicily and is, you
know, close to the front --all through that period and then again in Italy.

And I guess the closest call in Italy is when the--there's a picture
of that. This is in Anzio, the beachhead, which was a very
narrow beachhead, almost the whole--there wasn't--as they said, there
was no rear at Anzio. They were constantly under shell fire. And
this is a--sort of a villa on the waterfront where the press had their
headquarters. Pyle was sleeping upstairs and a big stick of bombs hit
right next to this building. And he had just gotten out of bed and
gone over to the window when the bomb hit. Wall collapsed right onto
the bed where he had been only a few seconds earlier. So that
was a real close call and really shook him up very badly.

LAMB: How many books have been written about him?

Mr. TOBIN: This is the second biography. Lee Miller, his editor,
wrote a biography called the "Story of Ernie Pyle." It was published
in 1950. There were two compilations of Pyle's columns published in
the '80s put together by a guy named David Nichols. And that--one is
called "Ernie's War," and then the second was--published in '89, was
called "Ernie's America," which is the prewar stuff.

LAMB: The censors--what was is relationship to the censors
and what was the difference in World War II compared to the wars
in the last 30 years?

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ernie got to know a bunch of the
censors pretty well, palled around with them in North Africa and sort
of sympathized with their unenviable position. His stuff did not
reveal much that worried the censors much. The censors worried about
things that would reveal military doings of various kinds. And
Ernie's stuff was so feature in what we call soft news that they
didn't concern themselves much and he wasn't censored much.

He was bitterly disappointed at one point at the end of the North
African campaign when he wrote a column about battle fatigue, and that
was thought to be not good for home-front morale. And so he was very
angry and disappointed about that. That is the only incident I know
of on the European side of things where he couldn't wr--you know, send
something that he wanted to that he had actually written.

In the Pacific, the Navy was very particular about actually
naming sailors and soldiers and Marines, and Ernie really bridled
at that because the heart and soul of his column was to talk about
individual guys. And, in fact, he was so unhappy with this--he
had been promised ahead of time in going to the Pacific that
he would be allowed to name fellows in the column. But then
it was--there were holdups, and the Navy wouldn't let that stuff go through.

And so he finally marched into the public information office in
Guam, I think, which is where fleet headquarters were, and said,
really, `Maybe it's a better idea if I just go on to the Philippines
and rejoin the Army under General MacArthur. I'm sure they'd have a
much more understanding view.' And that ended Ernie's censorship
problems with the Navy right there.

LAMB: Roy Howard--he comes up several times. Who was he?

Mr. TOBIN: Roy Howard was the chairman of the Scripps-Howard
chain and was a guy who hadn't paid too much attention to Ernie's
career before the war but then realized, of course, that he was a very
hot commodity and took an interest in Ernie's career, which made Ernie
nervous because Ernie didn't like brass of all types, either in
the--on the military side or on the newspaper side. And so it
made him a little uncomfortable when Howard would sort of scrutinize
what Ernie was up to. And Howard wanted Ernie to go to the
Pacific very much because Howard idolized MacArthur and felt that
Ernie ought to go and do some good PR for MacArthur, and Ernie
resisted successfully.

LAMB: When he started to become well known, things like Pulitzers,
Time magazine cover stories...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah.

LAMB: ...radio shows and all that, ex--explain how that started to
happen.

Mr. TOBIN: Well, let's see, he was awarded the Pulitzer for the body
of hi--or a certain body of his work for 1943, so that was mostly the
North African and Sicily stuff.

LAMB: How important was it when he won it?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I think it was the same as it is now. It was the
ultimate in journalism awards and--but nobody really--certainly nobody
was surprised. And, in fact, I don't know if this has happened at
other times, but the guy who was sort of the executive secretary of
the Pulitzer committee at Columbia actually solicited an entry from
Ernie Pyle, wrote to Lee Miller and said, `We certainly would welcome
a Pyle entry.' And that was very unusual and they didn't
understand what the heck was going on. But it looked like the
decision had already been made. That was in January on '44, I think,
and the Pulitzers aren't awarded until April or May. So that was
unusual.

LAMB: What about the Time magazine cover story?

Mr. TOBIN: That happened in--while Ernie was in Normandy, I
think, in July of '44, and he knew about it a little bit ahead of time
but was extremely disappointed when he actually saw it. It was a very
flattering piece, but a lot of it was wrong, and some of Time's guys
had gone to Hollywood to gather material and had made the mistake of
talking to scriptwriters who were working on Lester Cowan's movie.
And at that point those guys were making a fair amount up out of whole
cloth but didn't make it clear to the Time guys that this stuff was
not literally true. And so it portrayed Ernie as a much more sort of
bewildered and backwards sort of guy than he was. He was a very
shrewd person, a very intelligent--and this portrayed him as kind of a
bumbling, inept guy who just sort of lucked into the--the sort of
writing that he did. And so he was privately quite incensed about the
cover story.

LAMB: Have you ever heard his voice?

Mr. TOBIN: Just a little bit, not much.

LAMB: What's it sound like?

Mr. TOBIN: It's surprisingly deep for a little guy. He's--he has
a low voice, and I found out that as he--when he was a kid,
Ernie was--he went through that period that all of us do when
their--their voice breaks, and he developed a habit of deliberately
speaking--sort of lowering his head and speaking slowly and softly
and--to keep himself from squeaking, and that habit stuck with him.
It's a--it's a plain voice. When--he was solicited to do a
lot of radio work and his--and he considered it at various times. And
some of his close friends and superiors at Scripps-Howard sort of
politely advised him that that probably wouldn't be a great idea.
They don't--they didn't think he'd have a great radio voice.

LAMB: So how did he live when he was in a war zone?

Mr. TOBIN: He would, as much as possible, get himself attached to
sort of a low-echelon unit, ideally an infantry company, and he would
spend time living with those guys for as much as a couple of weeks.
And he wouldn't--he--likely would not write while he was with them.
He would save up stuff, largely saving it up in his head--he didn't
take notes much--go back to a press area, and that's where he would do his writing.

And interestingly, you know, we--he's remembered for being--for
sort of taking people to the--sort of the-- emotional
experience of being in combat, of--sort of making that come to
life. And so it's assumed that he was typing columns while right
there in the foxholes. In fact, he was almost never right at the
fighting front. He was normally just to the rear a little bit in a
safer area, and he would say that when he was at the front
his--especially when he'd been there a long time, he would become numb
to the experience of combat and to the terrible scenes
that he was witnessing. It was only when he came back and was
spending time thinking about it and bringing it back to his memory
that he was able re-create these scenes.

And so what we're getting is sort of combat through the filter of
Pyle's sensibilities and removed a week or two from the scenes. That
wasn't always the case. For instance, when he was covering the
invasion of Normandy, he writes a very famous couple of columns about
simply walking on the beach at Omaha Beach, writing about the little
things that he sees at his feet, the personal debris that soldiers had
left behind, whether dead or still alive. He wrote those columns
right away. He spent a day on the beachhead and then quickly went
back to a ship and composed those columns. So that's pretty
firsthand, very shortly after the event. Then he came back to the
beachhead.

LAMB: As a matter of fact, I think I've got some of these. He says,
`I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of
France.'

Mr. TOBIN: Mm-hmm. That's it.

LAMB: `It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men
were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were
floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water,
for they were dead.' It's rather direct.

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah, it's kind of a surreal quality to that. It's an
odd way of opening that scene.

LAMB: `The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size
of your hand, millions of them. In the center, each of them had a
green design exactly like a four-leaf clover, the good-luck emblem.
Sure. Hell, yes. I walked for a mile and a half along the water's
edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for
the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast and
startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from
the human life, has always been one of the outstanding features to
those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable, and we
did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.'
Did he go in with the landing force there?

Mr. TOBIN: No, he went in the second day, June 7th. He--it's kind
of interesting. He had hooked up with General Bradley--General Omar
Bradley, who was in charge of the-- ground forces in the
invasion. He had hooked up with his staff in--over in England, and
Bradley invited him to go with him on his ship. And that was the kind
of invitation that you didn't turn down very lightly, but he did turn
it down ultimately and went ashore with--well, he went over on
a ship with just sort of low-level GIs and then actually went onto the
beachhead with members of Bradley's staff. Sohe was right
there on Omaha Beach, but it was the day after the worst of the
fighting. The fighting had moved about a mile inland at that point.

LAMB: When you--know, your book came out, what--what's the
reaction you're finding from people?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, again, I still get blank stares from younger folks,
and I try and, you know, sort of say, `It's not Gomer Pyle that we're
writing about here.' That's the name Pyle that they remember.

LAMB: Do they really think there's a connection?

Mr. TOBIN: They--I think-- people wonder. I've often
wondered whether the folks who came up with the name Gomer Pyle were
consciously or subconsciously drawing on that name, which is a name
that connotes the kind of common-man quality that Pyle had. But folks
who are, as I say, 50, 60 or older, they respond viscerally.
They--they're delighted to see that--that somebody's writing about
him, and they're always puzzled that somebody who was not of that
generation would write about him. I don't know. I guess as a guy who
loves history, I can't imagine why someone wouldn't want to write
about him, and it flabbergasts me that nobody has written a more
recent biography.

LAMB: Who keeps the name alive and--like back in Dana, Indiana? Who
pays for the--keeping the home going?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, the state of Indiana pays for keeping this
place up and there is an absolutely wonderful woman who has devoted
her--the last 20 years of her life, Evelyn Hobson, to collecting Pyle
material. And it's because of her that there is such a wealth
of material at this one spot. And busloads of people come through
there every week, thousands of people...

LAMB: Busloads?

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah, thousands of people of that generation visit that
site every year.

LAMB: And how do they entertain you once you get there?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, there's a new--well, the--as I say, the
original museum site is in the home where Pyle was born.
They carted that house into Dana 20 years or so ago.
Now there is a more extensive museum that's built in a couple of
Quonset huts on the property, and there's a very nice museum there
that--that sort of introduces the visitor not just to Pyle's life but
sort of to the whole combat experience in World War II.

LAMB: In his early years, who influenced him?

Mr. TOBIN: That's a good question, and I don't think I've answered
that as well as I would have liked to. I know that he read Ring
Lardner as a kid. He read a lot as a kid--Ring Lardner, a great sort
of colloquial-style writer of the--of--of Pyle's boyhood. And when I
went to red some of to read some of Lardner's stuff, a light went
on and I thought y--I was picking up some of that influence in Pyle's work.

LAMB: How old is he in this picture?

Mr. TOBIN: That's his high school graduation picture, so I guess he's 18.

LAMB: What were his parents like?

Mr. TOBIN: H--Ernie's mother was the one who, according to a
neighbor who is still alive, wore the pants in the family, Maria
(pronounced muh-ree-uh) Pyle, called Marie. I'm sorry, I should say
her name is pronounced Maria (pronounced mariah), though spelled Maria
(pronounced muh-ree-uh). She's there in the center. That's after she
had become quite feeble from a stroke in the l--in the later '30s.
And that's Ernie's car in the background that he used in his roving
reporter days. And Marie Pyle was a formidable person in the
neighborhood, strong, devout, f--I think a lot of fun but a pretty
tough customer.

His father, Will Pyle, was a very shy and retiring man. And the other
woman in that picture is his aunt, Marie Pyle's sister, Mary Taylor,
who married a fellow named George Bales. And Ernie was devoted to
them, but they led the sort of small-town farm existence that he
wanted to get away from. He did not--I think Ernie, more than
anything else, was haunted by the image of his father, who was a man
who never went very far in life and Ernie felt sorry for him, and I
think that helps to account for the melancholy of his later years.

LAMB: How many books were published in his name?

Mr. TOBIN: Let's see, the first book was called "Ernie Pyle in
England," which is about that Battle of Britain period, then "Here Is
Your War," which is about North Africa, and then "Brave Men" is a
collection of columns from Sicily, Italy and--and France. And then
there's a book published posthumously called "Last Chapter," which is
the Pacific columns, and then a wonderful book published in 1947
called "Home Country," which is a collection of columns from the
travel period.

LAMB: In those days, how many sold?

Mr. TOBIN: Tons. Best-sellers of the--at least of the--"Here Is
Your War" and "Brave Men" were big best-sellers.

LAMB: How --I don't know what the word is. How much money did he have when he died?

Mr. TOBIN: Boy, I used to know that when I had all this financial
sit--the statements sitting in front of me. He was on his way to
becoming quite a wealthy man and had been paid a lot of money for the
movie rights. Whether he was a millionaire, I'm not quite sure.

LAMB: He left Europe and eventually got to the Pacific. How did that happen?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, he had hoped to go all the way through the end of
the war in Europe. He comes under the--just to sort of explain
how he comes to leave Europe, because it was a surprise to a lot of
people, after the invasion he's with infantry and then comes
under the bombardment at the so-called San Lo breakout. This
is when Bradley coordinated this huge effort to break out of
the Normandy beachhead, which had been very, very difficult to do and
the Allies had failed to do a couple of times.

And so there was a--an absolutely horrific artillery bombardment and
mistakes were made by the Air Force which involved American bombs
falling on American troops. And Ernie was in that and had
bo--bomb--American bombs falling all around him, and that was an
experience that really shook him very deeply. He continues for a
number of weeks but has really sort of lost his steam and he
says in a column, `I had been--pushed down into a flat, black depression.'

So he sticks it out through Paris and then decides he has to leave, goes home for a rest and doesn't get a rest because, by that point, his fame is such that he is being constantly hounded for
appearances and, you know, just all kinds of things, the real celebrity whirlwind type of thing, and decides at that point that he does feel an obligation to go over to the Pacific.

And it's funny, I mean, people have asked me, `Could he have stayed
home?' and I think the answer really is no. He had become so much a
part of the war effort, so much a symbol of the war effort that to
stay home would have been unbearable to him. And he said, `I couldn't
have lived with my conscience if I had stayed home.' Certainly, he had
done as much as anybody could expect him to do, but he felt --that
he had to go, and so he did.

LAMB: Where'd he go?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, let's see, first he flew to Hawaii and then...

LAMB: What was the timing on this?

Mr. TOBIN: Let's see, he goes--it's a long trip to get to the
Pacific and he reaches Guam about the end of January '45. And one of
his first things is to go on a long carrier trip. That's what some of
that footage is from, I think. He goes on a carrier trip on board
the USS Cabot, which was a so-called baby flat top, one of the smaller
aircraft carriers, and takes a long cruise, which he found
unbelievably sort of peaceful and easy to take. And he gets in
trouble with a lot of the guys over in the Pacific because
he says that their war is paradise compared to the war in the
Pacific. And the guys over there are disappointed to hear him say
that and criticize him for it.

And so it's partly to convince himself that he is doing justice to the
Pacific side that he goes in on the invasion of Okinawa, which
involves him then in the--in the little campaign called Ie Shima, a
little island off Okinawa, which is where he's killed.

LAMB: Let me just show the last--some more video that we have. It's
one of those Universal Newsreels of the end. Why don't we go
ahead and roll that, and we can get your...

Unidentified Man: (From "Landings on Okinawa" Newsreel) The admiral
of the fleet's five stars flying above the Pacific naval headquarters
at Guam are ready to follow Admiral Nimitz, left, about to set out for
the conquest of Okinawa. Coming aboard the flagship of task force 58
is Admiral Mitcher, scourge of the enemy in waters about Japan.
Fourteen hundred ships get under way, and the invasion forces aboard
cast worry aside for the moment and beat a tune out on the old
squeezebox while Ernie Pyle, left, watches a fast-stepping jitterbug
run up a little hot rug-cutting for the biggest invasion fleet ever
assembled in the Pacific.

LAMB: And what happens then?

Mr. TOBIN: He goes ashore on D-Day at Okinawa, which was Easter
Sunday, April 1st, '45. The landings on the first day are--are really
quite easy, surprisingly easy. The Japanese had concentrated inland,
so it was a lot easier to take than everybody expected. People
knew that Okinawa was going to be a very bloody campaign. He spends
some time with Marines--went in with Marines and spent time with
Marines for the first, oh, 10 days or so and then goes back to write
that up.

And then he hears about--Oh, what is it then?--an armored troop
carrier that's going to be used in this little campaign of Ie Shima
and decides just kind of casually that he wants to get a look at how
that's going to be used in action. And so on the 17th of April he
went ashore with the Army, the 77th Division, and spent an afternoon
and a night on shore and then catches a ride with a colonel,
who's crossing the island to set up a new command post. Their jeep is
fired upon by a Japanese machine gunner. Ernie and the others jump
out of the jeep, go into a ditch at the side of the road and a minute
later Ernie raises his head up to get a look at what
the--what's happened to the other guys, and he's hit in the head
and killed.

LAMB: What happens then?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, this is how I start the book: He--his body
just lies there for several hours, and a number of guys finally come
and retrieve it and pull him back.

LAMB: Why is it there for several hours?

Mr. TOBIN: Because anybody who tried to retrieve it would have been
killed by this machine gunner who hadn't yet been--gotten out of
there.

LAMB: He wrote 2 1/2 million words...

Mr. TOBIN: Yeah, that's right.

LAMB: ...in how many years?

Mr. TOBIN: I'm not sure. I think that covers the whole period from
'35 on, so about 10 years.

LAMB: Can you find all those words somewhere?

Mr. TOBIN: You bet, yeah. The--you know, a good deal of it is
in these collections, especially the war. You can find just about
everything he wrote during the war in either the newer collections
published in the '80s or in the old stuff, which you can find in any
good used bookstore. The travel columns--is--it's harder to get
your hands on all of that stuff, but the typescripts are at
the Lilly Library now at Indiana University.

LAMB: What do you think you would have thought of him if you knew him?

Mr. TOBIN: Everybody who knew Ernie Pyle liked him. He was an
extraordinarily nice guy and I can't find anybody who felt otherwise.

LAMB: Plan to write another book?

Mr. TOBIN: Sure hope so. Don't have an idea yet.

LAMB: No idea at all?

Mr. TOBIN: Well, I'm kicking around a couple things but nothing firm enough to be sure yet.

LAMB: What would make this book a success for you?

Mr. TOBIN: You know, it's a terrific feeling to have people who knew him--or, you know, who read him during the war, of that generation, read the book and appreciate it. But I guess it's
been really fun to have folks more my age or younger read it and say, `Boy, that's a view--that's a glimpse of the war that I'd never had before.' So I'd love to have a bunch of people say that to me.

LAMB: And our guest has been James Tobin. Again, here is the cover. Where'd this photo come from?

Mr. TOBIN: That photo is now at the Lilly Library. That's an Army
Signal Corps photo that I think has never appeared before. That's
at the NCO beachhead.

LAMB: "Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II."
Thank you very much.

Mr. TOBIN: Thank you.

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Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II