By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
Taking his seat at the steel table in the officers' wardroom, 19-year-old U.S. Navy Ensign Frank Tooze joined some illustrious company the morning of April 18, 1945.
Among the eight or so
men at the table was correspondent Ernie Pyle. The seat next to him was open and Tooze took it.
They were aboard the USS Biscayne, flagship for the squadron of destroyers acting as radar picket ships against incoming
kamikaze attacks.
Pyle had been covering the war in the Pacific from aircraft carriers and other naval ships and now wanted to get in where he felt most like a reporter - with the men fighting on the ground.
After
going through North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France, getting shot at as much as many GIs, the 42-year-old Pyle looked to young Tooze to be tired.
""You got the feeling he had been at it a long time,''
Tooze, now a retired Erie surgeon, recalled.
As they ate breakfast, Tooze recalls Pyle saying he had seen war from fleet's angle, now he'd like to go with Marines.
""He seemed like he'd been at it a long time.''
Yple told the naval officers, ""I'm going ashore one more time. I wonder if the CO (commanding officer) would give me permission.''
""I told him, "You don't need permission. You're Ernie Pyle. I don't think anyone would deny you access to anything.'''
No one did. Pyle easily left the flagship to go ashore at Ie
Shima, a tiny island off the coast of Okinawa. He was killed there the next day.
Looking back at the breakfast now and how Pyle appeared, Tooze remarked, ""He seemed resigned to his fate almost.''
The news
that Pyle was dead was related by another war correspondent aboard the Biscayne at the time - Don Pryor of CBS.
Tooze has the copy of the news story Pryor gave to the CBS radio listeners.
""This is Don
Pryor off the coast of Okinawa. Ernie Pyle was killed yesterday morning by a Japanese machine gun sniper.
""This was going to be his last operation. That's what he said when we left Guam. And he wasn't
going ashore this time, until later, after the hard fighting was over. He hadn't been feeling well. And besides, for a long while - even before he left Europe and went home for a ""long rest,'' as he said - he
hadn't been too convinced that his luck hadn't run out.''
""After all the other islands we had been to, we thought this one would be pretty tame,'' Tooze said.
The Okinawa campaign had not been entirely
tame for the Navy. Hundreds of kamikaze attacks had been launched at the fleet. More than three dozen ships had been sunk, hundreds damaged and nearly 5,000 sailor killed.
On June 22, the Biscayne had its
300th kamikaze attack and Tooze celebrated his 20th birthday.
Tooze's assignment was navigation. During battle stations, he was assigned to the combat information center inside the ship.
