War Correspondent Ernie Pyle with 
Lt. Comm. Otto Helweg during WW11

War Correspondent Ernie Pyle (left) is aboard a navy warship on which Lt. Comm. Otto Helweg (right), Hartford, is serving in the Pacific.  Helweg, former commander of the Hartford American Legion post, served in the navy in the last war and in peacetime was a member of the navy reserve. 

A tribute regarding Pyle appeared in Don F. Cochran's "Around Our Town" column below.
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The Day Spring - 1945
Don F. Cochran

Ernie's at Rest

Ernie Pyle, the Vagabond from Indiana, is at rest - stopped by a Jap sniper's bullet at Okinawa.  This skinny, humble man from a farm in Vermillion Co. became the greatest war correspondent "of any country, in any war, in any language" because he wrote about the common soldier - the man in the foxhole. 
The Little People lose a Great Voice. 

Ernie Pyle

      Ernie Pyle was the 12th American correspondent to be killed in the present war.  Like the others, he gave his life that the people back home might know what their boys were doing on the fighting fronts.

In our previous wars a certain amount of glamour was attached to the war correspondent who was represented in stories, and later in movies, as an adventurous character who risked all in getting "scoops" for his newspaper.  This romantic view was unfair to the men of Spanish War and World War I days, and in this war men like Ernie Pyle have done much to dispel that sort of illusion.

For Pyle had the common touch to an unusual degree.  He knew how to write the sort of thing the folk at home wanted to know about the men in the armed services. He made his work a public service.

The idea was not original with him, but the way it was written, the very simplicity of his style, made him nationally known.  The books made up from his collected dispatches were among the best sellers.

In one of his recent dispatches, filed from Okinawa just a few days before he went to Ie Jima where he was killed by bullets from a machine gun, he spoke of the "sad uncanny silence that follows the bedlam of war."  

Many will regret the silent typewriter of Ernie Pyle.