Ernie Pyle Museum

It¹s just a dot on the Indiana map, between the Wabash River and the
Illinois border, directly west of Indianapolis. The little farm-country town
of Dana is surrounded by corn and soybean fields that stretch beyond the
horizon. Its one-block business district has seen better days.
But Dana has a landmark of historical significance of which it is
intensely proud. It is the home of the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site.
If you¹re under 50 years of age the name Ernie Pyle may mean nothing to
you. But it means everything to the 600-some citizens whose older but
well-kept homes line Dana¹s narrow streets.
Ernie Pyle, who grew up just outside of Dana, was American¹s most
beloved World War II civilian newspaper correspondent. The site¹s Ernie
Pyle Visitor Center and beautifully restored Historic House are dedicated to
preserving Pyle¹s memory and that of the GIs he admired and wrote about in
his daily column.
It may be one of the most poignant but least known of the nation¹s many
military museums. But Dana¹s citizens, through the volunteer efforts of
Friends of Ernie Pyle, Inc., are doing their best to make it better known.
They are having to do it more on their own as the state reduces funding,
cuts back on staff and shortens operating hours.
This off-the-beaten-path historical gem, a half-mile north of U.S. Route
36 on State Route 71, at the south edge of downtown Dana, is worth going out
of the way to see. Tour it and you will understand that it is more than just
a tribute to a hometown hero.
Why a memorial to a newspaper correspondent? Because Ernie Pyle was one
of a kind. He didn¹t write about the war. He wrote about the men who fought
the war. To Pyle, it wasn¹t about the battles; it was about the human
element. He personalized the war for the folks back home.
The memorial had its beginnings when the 1851 farmhouse where Pyle was
born near Dana was given to the community by the Pyle family¹s landlords.
Grants from the Indiana American Legion and the Eli Lilly Foundation enabled
the Dana community to move the house to its present site and restore it
complete with furnishings of the early 1900s.
Upon completion, it was given to the State of Indiana and has been
operated as a state historic site since 1976.
But the house showed little of Pyle¹s distinguished career as a war
correspondent. That was made possible years later by a $250,000 grant from
the Scripps Howard Foundation to start the museum. Pyle had been a long-time
columnist for Scripps Howard newspapers. His columns were syndicated
nationwide.
Housing for the museum came in the form of two military-style Quonset
huts received in April 1995, fifty years after Pyle¹s death. Architectural
and design work was begun and the project completed in three years. Local
veterans provided input and donated items for the exhibits. It opened in
April 1998.
The Quonset huts house the Ernie Pyle Visitor Center, a multi-media
presentation of authentic World War II scenes brought to life by enlarged
reproductions of some of Pyle¹s best columns.
Dioramas portray such scenes as Normandy Beach the day after D-Day. A
battlefield dugout occupied by two soldiers. Pyle resting by his Jeep
between battles. A depiction of the spot where Pyle died on the tiny Pacific
Island of Ie Shima. Various items of Pyle memorabilia.
A photomural shows Ernie marching with a Marine patrol on Okinawa. Pyle
is seen behind Martin ³Bird Dog² Clayton of Dallas, Texas. Clayton visited
the museum after a friend recognized him in the mural and shared his
recollections with enthralled museum visitors.
The self-guided tour includes a moving video narrated by Andy Rooney,
Charles Kuralt and William Windom, who describe Pyle and his role in
covering the war. If you can complete this tour with a dry eye, you just
don¹t understand war, its inhumanity and horrors, and what Pyle went through
to write about the people who fought it.
Also part of the museum is the Scripps Howard Research Library where, by
appointment, visitors may read Pyle¹s letters and a collection of military
books.
The museum includes a gift shop where a variety of books about Pyle are
available for purchase. The most popular is ³Ernie¹s War,² a collection of
the best of Pyle¹s dispatches, edited with a biographical essay by David
Nichols. The 432-page paperback is a Touchstone Book published by Simon and
Schuster.
If you aren¹t a battle veteran, if you aren¹t old enough to remember
World War II, if you have no idea what war is really like, this book is
³must² reading. It will bring the realities home to you.
Pyle hated war. But after various newspaper jobs and years as a feature
columnist for Scripps Howard, with war having begun in Europe, he found
himself restless, feeling his work ³seemed trivial, bored silly with dull
columns,² as quoted in Nichols¹ book, from which the following Pyle
observations and accomplishments are excerpted.
Eager to get there as a war correspondent, Pyle sailed to England in
November 1940 to report on the battle of Britain, which he felt he did
largely as a tourist. But two years later, with the U.S. now involved in the
fighting, he was back reporting from the front lines in North Africa,
Sicily, Italy, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the
war in the Pacific and the invasion of Okinawa.
At first, life at the front was invigorating. But it became very real
sharing foxholes with the soldiers, enduring the same hardships and dangers,
to describe the infantrymen who fought the war at its dirtiest level. He
became one of them in spirit and practice. He told the story of the American
fighting men from firsthand experience.
Pyle was to writing about the war what cartoonist Bill Mauldin was to
illustrating it with his famous characters Willie and Joe. His cartoons were
funny, but also terribly grim and real. They were, after all, about war.
Pyle¹s column profiling Mauldin called attention to his work and led to
stateside syndication of his cartoons through Scripps Howard¹s United
Features.
In one of his columns Pyle wrote, ³When I sit down to write (I see) men
at the front suffering and wishing they were somewhere else, men in routine
jobs just behind the lines bellyaching because they can¹t get to the
front...²
Pyle covered the war the way the infantry soldier fought it. His
obsession with soldiers¹ names, hometowns and addresses -- which he included
in his columns -- their lives and dreams, countered the anonymity of much of
the writing done by other war correspondents.
While in Italy, Pyle began promoting the idea of giving the combat
soldier recognition in the form of extra pay, as many military personnel in
key positions not on the front lines were receiving. Congress acted quickly
on Pyle¹s suggestion and in May 1944 passed the ³Ernie Pyle bill² giving
fifty percent extra pay for combat service.
After the liberation of Paris, Pyle was ³dragging lower and lower, from
mental exhaustion and just sort of unendurable blue of too much war.² He
decided to go home for a rest, yet felt guilty about leaving his battlefield
comrades.
³Being with the American soldier has been a rich experience,² he wrote.
General Omar Bradley urged Pyle to go home and stay home. His chances
(of survival), the general suggested, were about used up. But after a short
vacation Pyle returned to the war. Although he felt a kinship with the GIs
in Europe, he acquiesced to the armed forces in the Pacific, who badly
wanted him to join them. It was apparent to them what a morale booster he
had been in Europe, how he had made the war there so vivid to stateside
readers.
He found a different kind of war in the Pacific, a war of ³island
hopping² and a completely different pace of waiting for the next move. To
him it was like ³learning to live in a new city.² While with a B-29 bomber
unit he met Lieutenant Jack Bales, step-grandson of his Aunt Mary Bales, who
had kept house for Pyle¹s father in Indiana.
Pyle spent time on the aircraft carrier Cabot to describe life aboard
and relate the experiences of its fighter pilots. Then he transferred to a
destroyer. But the invasion of Okinawa was imminent, a vital step toward
defeating Japan. Although frightened by the prospect of another invasion,
Pyle was convinced that being part of it would ³spice up his copy.²
Pyle decided to cover the Marines, a service branch he had never written
about, for the invasion. Again, he found himself in foxholes with the foot
soldiers. But his heart was still in Europe, where he was so certain of
victory over Germany that he wrote of it weeks before it happened. A rough
draft of a Pyle column told of the soon-to-come end of the war in Europe.
³And so it is over,² he wrote. ³The catastrophe on one side of the world
has run its course. The day that it had so long seemed would never come has
come at last.²
But Pyle didn¹t live to see that inevitable VE Day on May 18, 1945. He
was killed twenty days earlier, six days after President Franklin Roosevelt
died, by Japanese machine gun fire on Ie Shima, off Okinawa. The draft of
that column was found on his body. The war in the Pacific ended three and a
half months after he died.
But if the members of Friends of Ernie Pyle have anything to say about
it, now 60 years later, the memory of their Dana, Indiana, hometown hero
will live on at the well-done historic site named in his honor. Part of the
Friends¹ memorial effort is their Ernie Pyle Festival held at the site
Thursday through Saturday on the second weekend of August.
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IF YOU GO

Dana, Indiana, is about 1-1/2 hours directly west of Indianapolis via
U.S. Route 36. The Ernie Pyle State Historical Site is at the corner of
Maple and Briarwood Avenues, about a half mile north of Rt. 36 on State
Route 71.
The site is open Thursday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays
1 to 5 p.m., April through November. Admission is $3 per person. For more
information write to P.O. Box 338, Dana, IN 47847 or call (765) 665-3633.
Other attractions nearby are Parke County with its 31 historic covered
bridges, Turkey Run and Shades state parks, Raccoon Lake State Recreation
Area, the re-created historic Billie Creek Village and the historic county
seat town of Rockville with its domed courthouse dominating the town square.
Lodging around Dana is sparse. Closest to the Ernie Pyle site is the
Rumple Farmhouse Bed & Breakfast, a refurbished house that was once the home
of the current owner¹s grandfather, at 237 West 500 South, Dana, IN 47847,
phone (765) 665-3514. Reservations are recommended.