April 18 wreath laying at monument replica among events planned in 2025
A special ceremony is planned for this spring to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Ernie Pyle’s death.
The Ernie Pyle Remembrance Ceremony will take place from 6:30 to 7:15 p.m. on Friday, April 18, at the Ernie Pyle Rest Park on U.S. 36. The rest park is located about three miles east of Dana in Vermillion County, Indiana.
The event is sponsored by the Friends of Ernie Pyle and open to the public.
The Ernie Pyle Rest Park is home to a monument dedicated to Pyle’s memory. It is an exact replica of the monument that currently stands on the small island of Ie Shima, near Okinawa in the South Pacific, where Pyle was killed by enemy fire in the waning months of World War II.
Pyle achieved fame as a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent covering the war in Europe and Africa in the early 1940s. After reporting and writing columns for American newspapers as Allied forces led by the U.S. military invaded, battled and eventually defeated Nazi Germany and its allies, Pyle returned to the states to take a break from his journalistic work. As the war in Europe subsided, he decided to turn his attention to covering the war being waged against Japan.
On April 18, 1945, Pyle was traveling with a U.S. Army entourage on Ie Shima when the group came under attack. Pyle was struck and killed by a Japanese machine gunner’s bullet. He was 44 years old.
The men of the 77th Infantry Division erected the monument that still stands at the site of his death. Its inscription reads: “At this spot the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy, Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945.”
The Friends of Ernie Pyle will lay a wreath at the replica of that monument during the remembrance ceremony. Other plans for the ceremony remain in the works.
