Three correspondents, killed in a flash
The September 30, 1943 edition of London's Daily Herald gave prominent play to a story filed via cable a few days earlier by its war correspondent A.B. Austin, who had been covering the Italian campaign.
"Along the Road of Death we are driving to the Plain of Naples," Austin's report began. "We have captured Camerelle, the German stronghold at the head of the five-mile-long defile, and are heading due east for Vesuvius and Naples. For the past five days of bitter fighting I have seen a mile added to the Road of Death each day."
Not long after the tabloid hit the streets, another telegram reached the Daily Herald office: Austin and two other correspondents had been killed in Italy on September 28.
Austin, William J. Munday of the Sydney Morning Herald and Stewart Sale of Reuters were among several correspondents moving into Nocera on the road from Salerno to Naples with Allied armored vehicles. Those three and a reporter from the Exchange Telegraph agency were standing on a street corner when a German tank or half-track fired at their position.
"Suddenly there was a blinding flash and an explosion," the Exchange Telegraph correspondent reported. "I was flung many yards and buried under debris. When I dug myself out I saw my three companions lying dead."
Munday was 32 years old, Sale 38 and Austin 40. All were experienced war correspondents who had seen plenty of front-line action.
Before they landed in Italy, Austin went ashore with Lord Lovat's Commandos at Dieppe, Sale flew on a bombing raid to Berlin and Munday accompanied British troops retreating from Burma into India ahead of the Japanese army.
A Daily Herald account said their deaths brought to 29 the number of British, Commonwealth and American correspondents killed in action. To that point, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in an editorial:
The modern war correspondent enjoys no easy life at the base. He goes into action with the troops, and shirks no risks in getting the news. ... Journalism is proud of these men, and will salute in Munday a distinguished comrade gone nobly to his rest.