And that is exactly what Pyle (1900-45) did, first traveling around the nation in the 1930s and then getting a firsthand look at World War II. The best of his war columns are collected in "Ernie's War." 

Pyle was a correspondent and columnist extraordinaire. He first made his name traveling with his wife across America in the 1930s, writing about the places he saw and people he met. In 1940, he went to England to witness the Battle of Britain and a superb war columnist was born. Soon after his arrival, he described London as German bombers set it ablaze:

"London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with pinpoints of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines ... These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known." 

As the United States entered the war, Pyle became a legend, traveling with the troops, talking with them, sharing rations and cigarettes with them, shivering with them - and watching some of them die. He translated his experiences into simple descriptions that sometimes took on an astonishing power:

"As I plowed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand. But they weren't driftwood," he wrote. "They were a soldier's  two feet. He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly." 

Pyle was the rare columnist who came under fire not for what he wrote but so that he could write. Traveling with the troops in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and the Pacific, he told the people back home what their sons were doing - his columns were chock full of names and addresses. They were also full of descriptions of every conceivable thing one could want to know about the war, the details of all the seemingly everyday tasks that made it possible for men to fight each other in great numbers.

But, he rarely offered opinions. Though Pyle saw what he described as "dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them," he didn't venture suggestions on how to win the war or offer preachy messages about the common foot soldier. Wrote Charles Fisher in a book about columnists in 1944: "It would not occur to him to deliver a pretentious sermon on the virtues of ordinary people, because he has never bothered much to determine which people are ordinary and which are not. He just makes sure that in dealing with generals and privates, he spells the names with the same care."

On April 18, 1945, Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper during the battle for Okinawa. His nation, still grieving over the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a few days before, mourned him. Pyle's death forever left unfinished his column about the end of the war, from which the "dead men" line in the preceding paragraph is taken. 
 

David Cohen is an editor  for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of  “Rugged and Enduring: The Eagles, The Browns and 5 Years of Football.” (Xlibris.com)