In July 1944, Pyle was nearly caught in the accidental bombing by the U.S. Army Air Forces at the onset of Operation Cobra near Saint-Lô in Normandy . A month after witnessing the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Pyle publicly apologized to his readers in a column on September 5, 1944, stating that "my spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused" and he said that if he "heard one more shot or saw one more dead man, I would go off my nut." He later said he had "lost track of the point of the war" and that another two weeks of coverage would have seen him hospitalized with "war neurosis." An exhausted Pyle wrote that he hoped that a rest at his home in New Mexico would restore his vigor to go "warhorsing around the Pacific".