He appeared on the cover of Time magazine when that meant anything. But, far more importantly, he appeared, just about out of nowhere, in battle encampments and in the assaults on Italy and Normandy, when that meant almost everything. He did not do war tactic or energy politics. His tactic was harnessing the energy of accounts of ordinary males fighting, and suffering, and dying and, on practically each and every occasion, displaying the raw courage of soldiers, sailors, and aviators struggling to preserve the values of democracy at a time when they had been in their greatest 20th century peril.

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He did so not with the rat-tat-tat of a weapon but with the tick-tick-tick of a typewriter, which he transformed into a weapon of morale on the different wartime foreign fronts, and for deep understanding on the residence front. “In the hands of a much less talented writer, the topic of Ernie’s columns could have come across as hopelessly trivial,” Chrisinger writes. “Instead, his keen consideration to detail gave his columns a granularity and an immersive really feel that was quick for lots of readers to connect with.”

He knew practically nothing of the good tides of history and small of the broader scope of the war. But he knew human nature, and was possessed of a deep sense of humanity, and so even though some — Hemingway, for instance — saw good drama in the grand sweep of events throughout the war, Pyle saw drama in the good travail of the grunts on the ground, the worries of the males in the field, the smaller sufferings amid the good sufferings of the conflict.

Chrisinger, the executive director of the Public Policy Writing Workshop at the University of Chicago’s Harris College of Public Policy and the director of writing seminars for The War Horse, a nonprofit newsroom concentrating on the human elements of military life, sets out how Pyle concentrated on what he referred to as the “worm’s eye view” of the war. But he was, as Winston Churchill described himself, a glowworm. He wrote about the prevalent soldier but his function was not prevalent.

Nor was his function in the war years. “Americans at residence necessary him to clarify the war to them, and what life for their sons and husbands was definitely like,” Chrisinger writes. “If these who produced it residence had been ever going to locate some semblance of peace, Pyle realized, the American men and women necessary to realize why their boys froze at the sound of trucks backfiring, why the smell of diesel or copper transported them back to some shell-pocked battlefield, why they had been coarsened and reluctant to speak about all they endured.”

Did the sentimentality of Pyle’s function make him, as his critics charged, a mere propaganda agent for the war work? His function could have had that impact, but it did not have that intent. The onetime wandering travel writer mastered the art of producing the ordinary appear extraordinary. In telling the stories of other individuals he told his personal story, 1 pockmarked by a broken marriage to a broken lady, 1 shaped by self-doubt and bouts of depression.

Dressed in Army coveralls and a knit cap, he strolled amongst the troops, lingered in the mess tent, and took notes. Then he wrote sentences like this: “I couldn’t enable feeling the immensity of the catastrophe that has place males all more than the planet, millions of us, to walking in machinelike precision all through lengthy foreign nights — males who really should be comfortably asleep in their personal warm beds at residence.”

He wrangled with censors, occasionally outwitting them but largely submitting to their demands. As soon as, throughout the Africa campaign, he wrote a draft saying that “never had been so handful of commanded so badly by so lots of.” It in no way produced it into print. What survived, time just after time, was newspaper copy like this:

“Men at the front suffering and wishing they had been someplace else, males in routine jobs just behind the lines bellyaching mainly because they cannot get to the front, all of them desperately hungry for somebody to speak with apart from themselves, no girls to be heroes in front of, damn small wine to drink, valuable small song, cold and relatively dirty, just toiling from day to day in a planet complete of insecurity, discomfort, homesickness and a dulled sense of danger.”

All this produced him weary. (“I had come to despise and be revolted by war clear out of any proportion.”) Surrounded by death (he wrote of D-Day’s “shoreline of carnage”), he was plagued by thoughts of his personal death. And death lastly came to him, in a ditch on the island of Ie Shima in April 1945. In sadness Harry Truman told the nation that “no man in this war has so effectively told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting males wanted it told.” He could have stated, just, that Ernie Pyle died as he lived.

THE SOLDIER’S TRUTH: Ernie Pyle and the Story of Globe War II

By David Chrisinger

Penguin, 400 pages, $30

David Shribman, for a decade the Globe’s Washington bureau chief, is a nationally syndicated columnist.