Parker - Monte Cassino: the hardest-fought battle of World War II

CONTENTS

For Hannah
Love conquers all

MAPS

FOREWORD

They are saying, The Generals learnt their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters. I ask, how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?

EVELYN WAUGH, OCTOBER 1939

War makes sense only in black-and-white. The Second World War has a unique position in popular memory as a good war, particularly when compared with the First World War. Fought by the United Nations (as the Allies referred to themselves) against the tyranny of Nazism and the aggression of the Japanese, the victorious conclusion of the fighting ended many appalling crimes against humanity and justified all the sacrifices made by the men on the right side. Now, whenever the morality of a war is discussed, it is always measured against the yardstick of the Second World War. It has become the war that justifies war.

To a large extent, the Second World War has been written by its victors as a heroic narrative. For every Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five, there have been hundreds of novels, histories, and films celebrating the unshakeable moral certainties of the fighting. For my generation, growing up in the 1970s, the war films we were shown and the comics that seemed to be everywhere were all about the Second World War. It is impossible to imagine the popular conception of the First World War making an appropriate backdrop for such straightforward stories, just as war games played by young boys never involved the trenches or more recent, even more morally ambiguous conflicts. It was always us against the Nazis, good versus evil.

The First World War, as well as contributing to the causes of the Second, also shaped people's responses to it. At the beginning of the Second World War, it was hoped that new technologies would prevent the appalling attrition of infantrymen that occurred in the First. Interwar advances in aircraft, guns, tanks, submarines, and bombs led people to believe that, this time, the fighting would be fast-moving, mechanized, dominated by air power, somehow remote-controlled, or carried out by a few experts. The popular story of the Battle of Britainwith scores of downed planes being chalked up on blackboards as if it were a cricket matchto an extent conforms to this pattern, and this view of the Second World War, at least in the West, as somehow cleaner than the First, has survived both the subsequent fighting and the postwar period.

The Battle of Monte Cassino throws all of this into question. Instead of fighting a battle of rapid movement, the men found themselves in scenes straight out of the Western Front in 191617. The terrain at Cassino sent the fighting back to a premechanized age. The mountains of central Italy and winter weather conspired to make technology such as armor useless. One hard-working mule was more prized than a dozen tanks, and the Allies' huge numerical advantage in artillery and aircraft was seldom decisive and often a hindrance. For one thing, such firepower had its risks. It has been estimated that a third of Allied casualties in Italy were caused by friendly fire; one American artilleryman at Cassino bemoaned that American bombers killed more of his division than did the Luftwaffe.

Nor was there much nationalistic certainty or unity of purpose driving the forces in Italy. With so many different national and ethnic groups from such radically different societies, it would have been an impossibility. As well as American and British soldiers, the Allied ranks included New Zealanders, Canadians, Nepalese, Indians, French, Belgians, South Africans, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, Poles, Italians, and even Brazilians. Within these groups were units made up of Native Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Maoris. They were all there for different reasons. The result was a coalition riddled at the highest level with distrust and jealousy, with the inevitable consequences of misunderstandings and mistakes. In large part badly led and poorly equipped, the Allied soldiers who fought at Cassino could see from the way they were downgraded in the press at home that they were fighting battles of enormous scale and cost that were, at best, of secondary strategic importance, with the scant resources in reserves to match.

The Germans were even worse off. For every shell that Krupps sent over, General Motors sent back five. As well as artillery ammunition, the Germans were desperately short of basic food and clothing for the frontline troops guarding icy mountaintops in mid-winter. Many froze to death for lack of a greatcoat.

Between these opposing groups of men, in some places facing each other over just twenty or thirty yards of open ground, there was a shared suffering of the fighting and the elements, and surprisingly often the war would be stopped in local areas so that teams of stretcher bearers from both sides could work together to rescue the numerous wounded. Many record the bafflement of then resuming efforts to kill one another once the time of the truce was up.

From firsthand accounts, contemporary diaries and letters, and through listening to hundreds of veterans, a picture emerges of most people's experience of war that is different from the black-and-white image of popular conception. The men's descriptions of their times in action are dominated by confusion, fear, blunders, and accidents; they also talk about the times of boredom, of longing for home, the chickenshit or bull of the army as well as of the companionship with friends, many lost. They discuss how the experience changed them, and their feelings now about what happened.

While aiming to explain the strategic and tactical compromises and fudges that led to the battles, this book focuses on the human experience of the men there at the time, rather than playing what if? games or weighing the performance of the generals. To this end, I have tried as much as possible to let the eyewitnesses tell the story in their own words.

INTRODUCTION

THE MONASTERY AND THE GUSTAV LINE

Only the bloodbaths of Verdun and Passchendaele or the very worst of the Second World War fighting on the Eastern Front can compare to Monte Cassino. The largest land battle in Europe, Cassino was the bitterest and bloodiest of the Western Allies' struggles against the German Wehrmacht on any front of the Second World War. On the German side, many compared it unfavorably with Stalingrad.

After the conquest of Sicily, the invasion of Italy in 1943 saw Allied troops facing the German army in a lengthy campaign on the mainland of Europe for the first time for three years. By the beginning of 1944, Italy was still the Western Allies' only active front against Nazi-controlled Europe, and progress had been painfully slow. The campaign was becoming an embarrassment, and tensions between the Allies were rising.

It was not an easy task the Allies had set themselves. Not since Belisarius in A.D. 536 had anyone successfully taken Rome from the south. Hannibal even traversed the Alps rather than taking the direct route from Carthage. Napoleon is credited with saying, Italy is a boot. You have to enter it from the top. The reason is the geography south of Rome. High mountains are bisected by fast-flowing rivers. The only possible route to the Italian capital from the south is up the old Via Casilina, now known as Route 6. Eighty miles south of Rome, this road passes up the valley of the Liri River. This was where the German commander, Kesselring, chose to make his stand. Towering over the entrance to the valley was the monastery of Monte Cassino.