The Pittsburgh Press (March 19, 1944)
Columnist Pyle back on job after bombing
Ernie escapes blast by leap from bed
Somewhere in Italy (UP) – (March 18)
Scripps-Howard columnist Ernie Pyle was back on his job of reporting the “human side” of the war today after narrowly escaping death or serious injury in a German air raid on the Anzio waterfront yesterday.
Mr. Pyle was asleep in his room in the “Villa Virtue,” headquarters for the Allied war correspondent on the beachhead, when the Nazi bombers came over shortly after dawn.
Hurled across room
Awakened by the crash of the anti-aircraft batteries nearby, Mr. Pyle leaped out of bed just in time to be hurled across the room by the blast of a bomb hit only 10 yards from the villa.
He picked himself up in a corner as a second bomb exploded alongside, the building blasting in the walls and tumbling slabs of heavy tile down on the bed in which he had been sleeping.
Four other correspondents in the villa were wounded by the flying debris – three of them seriously enough to require hospital treatment and win them the Army’s Purple Heart award – but Mr. Pyle escaped with a slight cut on his right cheek.
His narrowest escape
Other correspondents who were bruised and shaken up by the explosions agreed that Mr. Pyle probably would have been killed or badly injured if he had been in the bed when the second blast went off.
It was probably his closest brush with death in months of roving reporting on the North African and Italian battlefronts.