The Soldier's Truth

Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II

By: David Chrisinger

Narrated by: David Chrisinger

A beautiful reckoning with the life and work of the legendary journalist Ernie Pyle, who gave World War II a human face for millions of Americans even as he wrestled with his own demons

At the height of his fame and influence during World War II, Ernie Pyle’s nationally syndicated dispatches from combat zones shaped America’s understanding of what the war felt like to ordinary soldiers, as no writer’s work had before or has since. From North Africa to Sicily, from the beaches of Anzio to the beaches of Normandy, and on to the war in the Pacific, where he would meet his end, Ernie Pyle had a genius for connecting with his beloved dogfaced grunts. A humble man, himself plagued by melancholy and tortured by marriage to a partner whose mental health struggles were much more acute than his own, Pyle was in touch with suffering in a way that left an indelible mark on his readers. While never defeatist, his stories left no doubt as to the heavy weight of the burden soldiers carried. He wrote about post-traumatic stress long before that was a diagnosis.

In The Soldier's Truth, acclaimed writer David Chrisinger brings Pyle’s journey to vivid life in all its heroism and pathos. Drawing on access to all of Pyle’s personal correspondence, his book captures every dramatic turn of Pyle’s war with sensory immediacy and a powerful feel for both the outer and the inner landscape. With a background in helping veterans and other survivors of trauma come to terms with their experiences through storytelling, Chrisinger brings enormous reservoirs of empathy and insight to bear on Pyle’s trials. Woven in and out of his chronicle is the golden thread of his own travels across these same landscapes, many of them still battle-scarred, searching for the landmarks Pyle wrote about.

A moving tribute to an ordinary American hero whose impact on the war is still too little understood, and a powerful account of that war’s impact and how it is remembered, The Soldier's Truth takes its place among the essential contributions to our perception of war and how we make sense of it.

The story of a storyteller

This author's quest to learn more about his family heritage in World War II instead leads him to the story of Ernie Pyle. Extensively researched but written the heart, this account of the conflict's best-known correspondent is compelling. If you enjoy biographies that focus on the story behind the story, this book is for you.

The author's clear depiction of Ernie Pyle's life and experiences.

Loved that the author was hands on with his writing, experiencing the locations Ernie Pyle had written his columns from.

The personal as well as war-side of Ernie Pyle.

I wish they would’ve wrapped up the story of his wife. We’re left hanging. It would have completed Ernie and Jerry’s story.

Enjoyed this story of a simple man in an extraordinary situation.

I’m not sure whether he struggled more with his job reporting on the soldiers he met in combat or his troubled private life back in the states.

An Important Life to Remember

My guess is that most Americans have never heard of Ernie Pyle despite the fact that he was a national celebrity 80 years ago. This book does a really good job of covering Ernie's life, especially the war years. Ernie won fame an accolades for his plain spoken columns covering the war from the perspective of the soldier on the front line.

Ernie's chosen line of work was not easy. In addition to the stress of war, he was dealing with a troubled marriage on the home front, where his wife "Jerry" was suffering from mental illness. Chain smoking and heavy drinking took a toll. Although Ernie was only 44 when he died, he looks 20 years older in contemporary photos.

Through it all, Ernie produced remarkable columns from the front that were beloved on the home front, and especially by the soldiers. It is probably difficult in the current environment--where news comes from disparate and often incoherent sources--to understand the importance of this one modest reporter. The book does a good job of explaining that.

I wish that David Chrisinger had not narrated his own book. He narrates as if telling a bedtime story to a child--it's competent, but it's just reading. There is no performance here. A good narrator could have improved this tremendously.

One more shortcoming: The book is largely about the complicated relationship of Ernie and Jerry. It includes a graphic description of Jerry's attempted suicide. Despite that, we are told nothing about what happened to Jerry after Ernie's death. It just seems like a big omission.