Ernie Pyle

At the end of the Sicily campaign, one reporter went to Eisenhower and said there were 50,000 GIs on the island who would love to shoot Patton.

And the journalists who were really embedded with the common U.S. soldier, men such as Ernie Pyle, Andy Bruni, or Bill Malden, they had very negative views of Patton and wrote about them.

They called him a bad general or said that he was from the Dark Ages or that he got a lot of too many men killed.

In fact, in one instance in Tunisia, Patton acted so atrociously, he was almost shot by his own troops and he had to beat a hasty getaway.

So a few companies... entered a bidding war for the rights to produce this one because the book was a massive smash.

Ernie Pyle writes a massive bit in one of his books about finding Richard Dresdegist to get him to sign the copy.

Very big book.

Yeah, big fan.

The biggest stars of the era actively stepped back from being entertainers.

They became conduits for grief, like Bob Hope reading Ernie Pyle.

Ernie Pyle was the definitive voice of the infantryman.

The dog faces, right?

Yes.

I was wrong.

Michael Ware is now the Ernie Pyle of his generation.

His reporting is a testament to what we all did, and if it, it's not for men and women like Michael Ware, our story would've gone unremarked.

Most of the men I just described got little or no recognition for their valor.

But soon Pike was on a plane back to England, while Colonel Frederick took over the command of the First Special Operations Force for the Army.

What survived from Pyle's idea was the creation of an elite force of Canadians and Americans who would start training for commando attacks.

But as it developed, the target was no longer Norway.

It became the entrenched Germans who were preventing the Allies from moving through Italy, namely the high mountains of Italy, on their way toward joining the Allied attack on Germany's homeland.

During the mountain campaign, the 1st SSF suffered 77% casualties.

511 total, 91 dead, 9 missing, 313 wounded, with 116 cases of exhaustion.

Some of the best descriptions of this fighting came from 43-year-old Ernie Pyle, the famous American war correspondent whose column about life at the front for ordinary GIs captured the attention and respect of millions back home.

We've done a couple of his stories over at 1001 Classic Short Stories.

That's weirddarkness.com/official

Our drama this evening, through the cooperation of Lester Cohen Productions, stars Mr. Burgess Meredith in Mr. Pyle.

The play will be introduced by Arch Oboler.

Ernie Pyle was a thin little man with a balding head and a shy grin, hardly the dashing, glamour-filled war correspondent of fiction.

And yet he became the most popular war correspondent of our time and the buddy of every soldier from the generals down the line in the very unglamorous business that is war.

I've written a factual play about Ernie Pyle because to many who have had to stay on this side of the ocean, he was their eyes and their heart.

[dramatic music] [engine rumbling]

Well, what about that, Mr. Pyle?