The soldiers' favorite reporter, Ernie Pyle (lower left), gets the story from young U.S. Marines aboard a troop ship in the Pacific.

In contrast to World War I, the U.S. military during World War II perceived the press as being on the same side. That assessment was quite accurate — novelist Ernest Hemingway, for example, carried a gun and actually claimed to have killed German soldiers while covering the war for Collier's magazine. The sense of common purpose engendered trust, and war correspondents were allowed to accompany U.S.forces into the thick of battle, with few restrictions other than that they could not report precise locations.

United Press correspondent Walter Cronkite flew into occupied Holland in a glider, crash landing to avoid enemy fire. Life photographer Robert Capa waded ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day, snapping dramatic photos of the invasion as German bullets whizzed past him. But the dean of World War II correspondents was Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle, who ignored military strategy and the wisdom of generals' decisions, and concentrated instead on depicting the conflict through the eyes of ordinary American GIs.

One of his masterpieces was "The Death of Captain Waskow," in which he described a soldier paying his last respects to a well-liked young officer. "He sat there for five full minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And then finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone."

Other Pyle columns described GIs giving away their rations to starving children in North Africa, and his own nightmares and depression as he waited to embark on the D-Day invasion — maladies no doubt shared by many of the soldiers. Not surprisingly, Pyle was extremely popular both at home and in the war zone, and U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley once noted that "our soldiers always seemed to fight a little better when Ernie was around." After the war ended in Europe, Pyle tried to quit but ended up going back to the war in the Pacific, where he was killed by a Japanese sniper.