Battle of Monte Cassino

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Monte Cassino left more than 105,000 Allied soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in a campaign that lasted from January to June of 1944. At the centre of it all stood a fourteen-century-old Benedictine abbey perched on a hilltop above the Liri valley in central Italy. The Germans had promised not to use it. The Allies bombed it anyway. And when the rubble settled, the Germans moved in and made it a fortress. The questions the battle raises are still argued today: Was the destruction of the abbey a military blunder or a tragic necessity? Could a different decision have spared tens of thousands of lives? And why, when the Allies finally broke through, did the commander who was supposed to trap the retreating German army turn his forces toward Rome instead?

• 2. The Gustav Line

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  Highway 6, the ancient Via Casilina, was the most direct road from Naples to Rome, and it ran straight through the Liri valley. At the valley's southern entrance sat the rugged mass of Monte Cassino. Whoever held those heights controlled the road. The Germans had spent three months preparing their position there, using dynamite to carve defensive positions from the rocky slopes and stockpiling ammunition in advance of the Allied advance. Together with the Rapido River, the Gari River, and the flooded Pontine Marshes to the west, the terrain formed what the Germans called the Gustav Line. The Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943 and at Salerno in September had set off a northward push, but the original estimate that Rome would fall by October 1943 proved far too optimistic. On the eastern front, Ortona was captured by the 1st Canadian Division, but a halt had come with winter blizzards at the end of December. That left the Liri valley route as essentially the only viable path to Rome. Standing in the way were peaks with excellent observation over the entire valley floor, a fast-flowing river that could not easily be bridged under fire, and a hilltop abbey that dominated everything below it.

• 3. The Abbey Question

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  In December 1943, Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring ordered German units not to occupy the Monte Cassino abbey and informed both the Vatican and the Allies of this decision. Despite that assurance, Allied reconnaissance aircraft and officers began reporting what they believed were German troops inside. Geoffrey Keyes, the U.S. II Corps commander, flew over the monastery several times and found no evidence of German occupation. When told of others' claims, he reportedly said, "They've been looking so long they're seeing things." The commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, flew over personally and described seeing a radio mast, German uniforms on a clothesline, and machine gun emplacements near the walls. Major General Francis Tuker, whose 4th Indian Division was being tasked with attacking Monastery Hill, found a book from 1879 in a Naples bookshop that described the abbey's construction. He concluded that its walls, standing 150 feet high and at least 10 feet thick, could not be dealt with by field engineers and that only large bombs would work. His view on the bombing was mixed: he believed the real mistake was attacking Cassino at all rather than going around it. Bernard Freyberg, commanding the New Zealand Corps, thought the question of whether the abbey was being used as an observation post was almost beside the point. "If not occupied today, it might be tomorrow," he noted, and an intact building sheltering hundreds of infantry would be impossible to storm. Clark, who did not want the monastery bombed, finally pressed General Alexander directly for a written order. Alexander gave it.

• 4. The Bombing and Its Aftermath

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  On the 15th of February 1944, 142 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers led the attack, followed by 47 North American B-25 Mitchell and 40 Martin B-26 Marauder medium bombers. In all, 1,150 tonnes of high explosives and incendiary bombs fell on the abbey, reducing the summit to a smoking mass of rubble. The raid had not been coordinated with the ground commanders: the brigade commanders of the 4th Indian Division were in a morning planning meeting when the bombers flew overhead. The New Zealand Corps was two days away from being ready to attack. Sixteen bombs fell on the Fifth Army compound at Presenzano, 17 miles from Monte Cassino, exploding yards from the trailer where Clark sat at his desk. Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione told the senior U.S. diplomat at the Vatican, Harold Tittmann, that the bombing was "a colossal blunder, a piece of a gross stupidity." From every investigation that followed, it is certain that the only people killed inside the monastery that day were 230 Italian civilians seeking refuge there. About 40 people remained in the ruins the next morning: the six monks who survived in the abbey's deep vaults, their 79-year-old abbot Gregorio Diamare, three tenant farmer families, orphaned children, the badly wounded, and the dying. At 07:30 on the 17th of February, the abbot led the survivors down the mule path toward the Liri valley, reciting the rosary. One monk, Carlomanno Pellagalli, returned to the ruins; German paratroopers who spotted him wandering later thought he was a ghost. He was not seen again after the 3rd of April. Fallschirmjager forces of the German 1st Parachute Division occupied the rubble and turned it into a fortress and observation post, exactly the military problem Allied planners had feared, but made worse by having a field of ruins to hide in rather than an intact structure with narrow windows.

• 5. Four Battles, Mounting Losses

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  Between the 17th of January and the 18th of May 1944, the Gustav Line was attacked four separate times. The first assault saw the U.S. 36th Division attempt a crossing of the swollen Gari River on the 20th of January. Only 40 men of the 141st Infantry Regiment made it back to Allied lines; the regiment had virtually ceased to exist by the evening of the 22nd of January. The 36th Division lost 2,100 men killed, wounded, and missing in 48 hours. That assault became the subject of a Congressional inquiry after the war. The 34th Division, in a grinding fight through boulder-strewn mountains sown with mines and hidden barbed wire, came within 400 yards of the abbey before being halted by overwhelming machine gun fire from below the monastery walls. Their losses ran to about 80 percent of their infantry battalions, around 2,200 casualties. Their performance in those mountains was later described as one of the finest feats of arms carried out by any soldiers during the entire war. The second battle, under Freyberg's New Zealand Corps, saw the Royal Sussex Regiment lose 12 of its 15 officers and 162 of its 313 men in two nights of fighting on Point 593. The third battle on the 15th of March opened with 750 tonnes of bombs and a creeping barrage from 746 artillery pieces, but only 8 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 yards of the target point. Defences rallied faster than expected, rain returned, and flooded craters turned the rubble into a morass. Allied commanders were convinced they were on the brink of success as late as the 21st of March, but the attack was called off on the 23rd. In their time on the Cassino front, the 4th Indian Division lost 3,000 men and the 2nd New Zealand Division lost 1,600 killed, missing, or wounded. By that point the German XIV Corps War Diary recorded that front-line battalions had strengths of between 40 and 120 men.

• 6. Operation Diadem and the Polish Flag

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  For the fourth and final battle, General Alexander shifted the bulk of the British Eighth Army from the Adriatic front across the spine of Italy to join Clark's Fifth Army on a 20-mile front between Cassino and the sea. The deception operation was elaborate: dummy tanks, false radio traffic, and amphibious assault training for the U.S. 36th Division all suggested a seaborne landing north of Rome. As late as the second day of the final battle, Kesselring estimated the Allies had six divisions on his front. There were thirteen. The assault opened on the night of 11-the 12th of May with 1,060 guns on the Eighth Army front and 600 guns on the Fifth Army front. Moroccan Goumiers from Juin's French Expeditionary Corps, travelling through mountain terrain the Germans had left undefended because it was judged impassable, outflanked entire defensive positions. General Władysław Anders led the Polish II Corps in two punishing assaults on Monte Calvario. The first assault on 11-the 12th of May cost the Polish II Corps 281 officers and 3,503 other ranks against the 4th Parachute Regiment alone. Eight hundred German defenders had, as one account described it, turned the area into "a miniature Verdun." On the 17th of May, Anders launched the second Polish attack. With their supply lines threatened by the Allied advance in the Liri valley, the Germans withdrew during the night. At dawn on the 18th of May 1944, at 10:20 in the morning, a patrol of the Polish 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment raised a Polish flag over the ruins of the monastery. The only defenders remaining were thirty German wounded who had been unable to move. The British flag followed shortly after. The German Senger Line collapsed on the 25th of May, and the way to Rome lay open.

• 7. The Road to Rome

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  With the German 10th Army in retreat, the plan called for Major General Lucian Truscott's U.S. VI Corps to break out of the Anzio beachhead and drive eastward to cut off the retreating Germans at Valmontone on Route 6. By the 25th of May, Truscott's forces were driving as planned. The 10th Army, with Kesselring's reserves fully committed, would have been encircled within a day. Then Clark ordered Truscott to change direction from northeast toward Valmontone to northwest toward Rome. Truscott later wrote that he was "dumbfounded" and described the order as having "prevented destruction of Tenth Army." Truscott was so alarmed that he refused to comply until he could speak with Clark in person, but Clark was not reachable. Seven divisions of the 10th Army escaped to the Trasimene Line, linked up with the 14th Army, and eventually made a fighting withdrawal to the Gothic Line north of Florence. Rome fell on the 4th of June 1944, just two days before the Normandy landings. Leese's British Eighth Army, which had been told by Alexander to bypass Rome and pursue the retreating Germans, harassed the 10th Army for some 225 miles toward Perugia over six weeks. The battle took its full toll: Parker's estimate puts total Allied casualties across the four Cassino battles, the Anzio campaign, and the capture of Rome at over 105,000, with Axis casualties of at least 80,000. The town of Cassino itself was completely razed. Of its prewar population of 20,000, some 2,026 were killed during the raids and the battle. The battle has been described as a Pyrrhic victory.

• 8. Treasures, Ghosts, and Legacy

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  Months before the bombing, two officers in the Hermann Goering Panzer Division, Captain Maximilian Becker and Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel, persuaded church authorities and their own commanders to use the division's trucks and fuel to evacuate the abbey's contents. They recruited local labourers, paid with rations and twenty cigarettes a day, and found carpenters among their troops to build crates. The task was completed in the first days of November 1943. The richness of what was saved included 800 papal documents, 20,500 volumes in the Old Library, 60,000 in the New Library, 500 incunabula, 200 manuscripts on parchment, and 100,000 prints. Among the works removed were paintings by Titian, an El Greco, and two Goyas. In more than 100 truckloads, the convoys brought monks to Rome as escorts. Abbot Diamare formally presented signed parchment scrolls in Latin to General Paul Conrath, to "tribuno militum Julio Schlegel" and to "Maximiliano Becker medecinae doctori" for rescuing the monks and treasures. The U.S. government's own assessment of the abbey's status shifted over the following decades. In 1961, the assertion that German use of the abbey was "irrefutable" was removed from the record. A congressional inquiry in the twentieth anniversary year of the bombing concluded that "no German troops, except a small military police detachment, were actually inside the abbey" before the bombing. The final change to the U.S. Army's official record, made in 1969, concluded that "the abbey was actually unoccupied by German troops." Walter M. Miller Jr., an American Catholic who served as part of a bomber crew that participated in the destruction of the monastery, later wrote in A Canticle for Leibowitz - a novel about monks preserving the remnants of knowledge after a nuclear war - that his experience at Monte Cassino had directly inspired it. All members of the Polish units who fought at Cassino were awarded the Monte Cassino Commemorative Cross.