(Right)War Correspondent Ernie Pyle pictured aboard Cabot (second from left)

"Ernie Pyle showed everybody else the way. He was a hell of a reporter."

"Ernie Pyle... told more about the victories and defeats of World War II than all the official communiques ever issued."

"I lay there in the darkness...thinking of the millions far away at home who must remain forever unaware of the powerful fraternalism in the ghastly brotherhood of war."

January 1945: Ernie Pyle goes " ..warhorsing off to the Pacific."

All over the ship the scuttlebutt was that something big was up. Famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle had come aboard the U.S.S. Cabot CVL-28 at Ulithi, they had then weighed anchor and for several days steamed north into colder Pacific waters with task force 58, all the while making preparations for a major strike. Finally, on the day the operation orders were to be opened, a young officer asked Pyle if he knew what was up. Pyle knew but wasn't talking, so he asked the young man for his Zippo lighter. He scratched on the bottom of the lighter, gave it back to the officer and said, "Stick this in your pocket, and promise not to look at it until the orders are opened." Later, when it was announced that the operation orders were opened, the young officer took the Zippo from his pocket. Scratched on the bottom was one word: "Tokyo" The first all-out carrier assault on Japanese homeland was to begin and Pyle had asked to see it, so he had been assigned to the Iron Woman.

In February 1945, during the operations for the assault on Iwo Jima and the Fifth Fleet raids against Honshu and Nansei Shoto, famed Scripps-Howard war correspondent Ernie Pyle spent a few weeks aboard the U.S.S. Cabot after arriving in the Pacific in January. His column was read by millions of people in local papers around the country, and Pyle had become the most popular wartime journalist in America through his stories about GIs on the front lines in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France.

Pyle had come to see and report on the Pacific war, and he had asked to be assigned to a small carrier because he thought he might be able to find a more intimate setting for observing and interacting with the crew than he could find on one of the large Essex-class carriers. He was assigned to the U.S.S. Cabot, known as "The Iron Woman" because she had been continuously at sea and had participated in all of the Pacific campaigns for more than a year.

"Her battle record sounds like a train-caller on the Lackawanna railroad. Listen-.."

Pyle filed numerous stories from the decks of the Cabot but was prevented by censorship from revealing the name of the ship; a fact that, while perhaps necessitated by the demands of the war, ironically kept Cabot anonymous to posterity even though millions of people read about her. She became the most famous ship no one ever heard of. Referring to her only by her nickname, "The Iron Woman", this is Pyle's description of her that appeared in newspapers nation-wide: