A Wounding in Italy

Walking down from the mountain, the man in the American uniform could hear the scream of something sinister headed his way. Months of previous combat experience caused him to instinctively dive to the rocky ground for safety. It was too late. He felt a “smothering explosion” engulf him. In the fraction of the second before unconsciousness came, he knew that he had been hit by a German shell.

He sensed a “curtain of fire” rise, hesitate, and hover for “an infinite second.” An orange mist, like a tropical sunrise, arose and quickly set, leaving him, with the curtain descending, gently, in the dark.

Unconsciousness came and went in seconds. When he awoke, he knew that he had been badly wounded. In that moment he realized something he had long suspected—there was no sensation of pain, only a “movie without sound.” 

Still stretched out on the rocky ground of Mount Corno in the Italian countryside, he could see, a couple of feet from him, his helmet, which had been gouged in two places—one hole at the front and the second ripped through the side. Catastrophe. How could he mange to make it to safety, nearly a mile away down the trail, where the officers that had accompanied him earlier on the mountain, Colonel Bill Yarborough and Captain Edmund Tomasik, he hoped, were waiting?

It was eerily quiet, as if time stood still. He could still move a bit. He sat up and saw figures of crouched men he did not recognize running up the trail. He tried to yell at them but found that his voice produced only unintelligible noise instead of words. Although rattled at first, he became calmer when he realized he could still think—he had lost his power of speech, but not his power to “understand or generate thought.”

Another shell came screaming down. He hugged the ground and braced for the imminent explosion. When it came, he found it was a “tinny echo” of what had before been powerful and terrifying. A frightened soldier skidded into his position to escape the danger, and he tried to talk to the man, seeking his help, but only produced the strangled question: “Can help?” As another shell burst farther down the mountain slope, the soldier, with terror etched across his face, could only say, before he ran away, “I can’t help you, I’m too scared.”

In a haze, he barely remembered the medic who flopped beside him, bandaged his wounded head, and jammed a shot of morphine into his arm. Almost as soon as he had appeared, the medic was gone, and again he was alone. He realized that if he wanted to ever get off that mountain, he had to get up and walk.

Almost miraculously, he found his glasses, unbroken, lying on the rocks a few inches away. He tried to pick them up with his right hand, and realized his entire right arm was stiff and useless. Using his left hand, he picked up his glasses, put them on, and, almost, absentmindedly, placed his helmet on his bandaged head, where it sat, a fine, if precariously balanced, souvenir.

As he staggered down the mountain, he kept dropping and picking up his helmet, and came under fire from a procession of shells. Once a shell burst so close to him that he could have touched it. He was not frightened, but only startled at its nearness.

Finally, he wedged his tall, lanky frame into a small cave to wait out the barrage. He remembered being unconcerned about his plight; nothing seemed to disturb him. In fact, it seemed somehow that after escaping so many close calls during the war, his luck would finally run out. Only his instinct for self-preservation told him what to do. Despite the blood running copiously down his face, blurring his vision, he got up and staggered down the mountain like a robot, unsteady on his feet but under some directional control.

Rounding a bend in the trail, he saw Yarborough and Tomasik trying to help a wounded enlisted man. A surge of pleasure surged through him as he realized he would be saved. The colonel started to wave to him, then stopped, noticing his bloody glasses and blood-soaked shirt. With Yarborough’s help, he made it to a house to await transportation for medical assistance.

The wounded man, Richard Tregaskis, a correspondent with the International News Service, looked across the room and saw a line of soldiers, with “fascinated, awed looks on their faces as they stared at me, the badly wounded man.” Those spectators, he noted, imagined more pain than he felt. “Such is the friendly power of shock,” Tregaskis remembered, “and the stubborn will for preservation.” Reflecting on his experience, he felt almost a sense of relief that at last it had happened—he had been hit. He felt sure he was supposed to die, but he did not.

Finally transported to the Thirty-Eighth Evacuation Hospital, Tregaskis underwent several hours of brain surgery performed by Major William R. Pitts. A shell fragment had driven ten to twelve bone fragments into Tregaskis’s brain and part of his skull had been blown away, with the brain, said Pitts, “oozing out through the scalp wound.”

Recuperating, Tregaskis received a visit from one of the biggest stars of journalism in World War II, Ernie Pyle, columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. After chatting with his colleague, Pyle wrote in his popular column that if he had been injured as Tregaskis had been, he would have “gone home and rested on my laurels forever.”

Tregaskis did go back to the United States—to the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, where doctors put an inert metal (tantalum) plate to cover the hole in his skull. It seemed an end to what had been a brilliant wartime career that included witnessing the Doolittle Raiders take off from the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier to bomb Japan, being in the thick of the action during the Battle of Midway, surviving seven nerve-wracking weeks with U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal, writing a best-selling book about his experiences (Guadalcanal Diary), and accompanying American and British troops for the invasions of Sicily and Italy.

Despite his brush with death, and several months of painstaking effort on his part to regain his power of speech and the feeling in his right hand, Tregaskis did not decide to remain safely at home; he returned to the war. He traveled to Europe for the Normandy beachhead, then followed the First Infantry Division (“The Big Red One”) across France, Belgium, Holland, and into Germany.

Asked by the editors of a national magazine to return to the Pacific to follow the crew of a B-29 Superfortress as it prepared for bombing missions against Japanese cities, Tregaskis was asked by an editor, “Do you really want to go?” Without hesitating, Tregaskis gave an answer that any reporter who covered World War II would understand: “I don’t want to go, but I think I ought to go.” He went.