On what exact date was Hemingway wounded in World War I?

Ernest Hemingway was wounded in World War I on July 8, 1918. He was serving as a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Red Cross on the Italian Front when an Austrian mortar barrage struck near Fossalta di Piave.

Hemingway had been carrying chocolate and cigarettes to soldiers at the front line. Shrapnel tore into both of his legs, yet accounts describe him helping wounded Italian soldiers reach safety despite his own injuries. He was treated first at a distribution center and field hospital, then transferred to a Red Cross hospital in Milan for recovery.

The date is often remembered because the episode became central to Hemingway's public mythology and later influenced his fiction. His wartime experiences supplied material for "A Farewell to Arms," though that novel's plot and characters are not a straightforward autobiography. Hemingway was only 18 when he was wounded. For his conduct, he received the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor and the Italian War Merit Cross, and the injury became one of the defining events of his early life.