The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Still, Eaker continued to talk as if the Air Force had unlocked the gates of Rome. “The Germans would do well to bear in mind,” he told reporters, “that what we have done to Fortress Cassino on the ides of March we will do to every other position they decide to hold.”
Three hundred and fifty Allied tanks waited in the shadows to sweep through Cassino at one P.M. on Wednesday as a single New Zealand infantry battalion tramped south on Via Caruso along the Rapido River. Pushing into the smoke-draped town, the Kiwi riflemen found “a perplexing and dangerous shambles,” with entire blocks reduced to “sprawling cairns of stone and brick.” As scouts crept past the broken walls of the city jail, a spatter of picket fire broke the silence. Bullets nickered overhead and the cough of mortar tubes carried from Monte Cassino’s lower slopes, along with the demented whine of a German machine gun.
The planned pace of one hundred yards’ advance every ten minutes slowed to one hundred yards an hour. A squadron of Sherman tanks also trundled into Cassino, pitching up and down across the rubble “like a flotilla headed into a stormy sea,” as the New Zealand official history described it. Crews dismounted with picks and shovels to clear the road for a few yards’ advance only to find bomb craters so deep, so wide, and so plentiful that sappers would have to build bridges across them—some as long as seventy feet. After surveying the pocked landscape, now lashed with plunging fire from Monte Cassino’s east face, Kiwi engineers calculated that they would need two days to bulldoze a path to the town center, even in peacetime.
Teeming rain fell at dusk, mocking Captain Ludlum’s forecast and quickly turning the craters into moats. A second battalion followed the first into town; ordered to capture the rail station on Cassino’s southern lip, the riflemen failed even to reach Highway 6 in the moonless labyrinth, “each soaked man…clinging miserably to the bayonet scabbard of the man in front,” as Fred Majdalany recounted.
In the dying light, a single intrepid company had scaled the sheer hillside below the Rocca Janula, seizing the ancient bailey walls and the crumbling abbot’s keep on Point 193, known as Castle Hill. It was the first good news of the day, and the last. Heidrich’s paratroopers held several strongpoints on the rising ground of Cassino’s southwest quarter, including the Hotel Continental, the Hotel des Roses, and a palazzo known as the Baron’s Palace: each commanded views of Highway 6 in both directions. Hours passed before Kiwi reinforcements surged into the fight, and they amounted to a single rifle company; not for two days would as many as three battalions invest the town. By noon on Thursday, March 16, only nine tanks could be counted in Cassino, most of them immobilized by debris, craters, and galling fire. Rain and shell fire ruined radios and cut phone lines, leaving isolated companies to fight a dozen desperate, disconnected battles. Momentum stole away, and with it the chance to win through. The great armored fleet waited in the shadows, listening for a summoning trumpet that never sounded.
Several hundred feet above the town, the 4th Indian Division had its own miseries. Two companies of Rajputana Rifles reached Castle Hill with orders to seize the upper hairpins on the Via Serpentina. But artillery chopped two trailing companies to pieces, scattering the survivors and killing or wounding the battalion officers almost to a man. Another battalion, the 9th Gurkha Rifles, scuttled six hundred yards across the mountain face through gusts of mortar and machine-gun fire; one wounded captain commanded his company from a stretcher while clutching a pistol. By dawn on Thursday, March 16, the Gurkha vanguard held Hangman’s Hill, a prominent shoulder only three hundred yards from the abbey walls.
However valiant, the feat proved a mixed blessing for Freyberg and his commanders. This isolated, eight-acre lodgment of five hundred Gurkhas on a steep brow of limestone became “a moral lien on the efforts of the corps,” as the official Kiwi history acknowledged. Operation DICKENS quickly became as much about supporting the doughty, beleaguered Gurkhas as about breaking into the Liri Valley.
Beleaguered they were. “The fire was so heavy we could not lift our heads up,” one survivor recalled. Riflemen built breastworks from stacked corpses and rummaged through the haversacks of dead comrades for crackers and grenades. Medics equipped with just scissors and pocket-knives amputated limbs in an open culvert. A courtyard well in a ruined farmhouse provided water, whose sharp flavor was found to derive from a dead mule at the bottom. Indian porters ordered to Hangman’s Hill mutinied rather than cross half a mile of shell-swept no-man’s-land; after the second day, resupply came only by air, in belly tanks dropped by A-36s from fifty feet, or by parachute. Gurkhas marked their position with colored smoke, which German paratroopers quickly mimicked to confuse the pilots. In 160 sorties, most bundles tumbled out of reach, including bags of blood for transfusions that floated onto the abbey to be seized by German surgeons.
Enough food and ammo fell within the perimeter to sustain the little redoubt on very short rations; a cask of rum helped comfort the wounded in their culvert. Yet unable to ascend or descend, tormented by mortar fire and creeping snipers, the Gurkhas remained marooned hour after hour, day after day. “Surely,” a Gurkha officer, E. D. Smith, wrote in his diary, “it is pointless to keep on attacking the Monastery defences.” He added, “God help us all.”
An anxious Clark kept vigil at Presenzano, where the grumble of distant guns spilled down the valley like a drumroll. Hesitant to intrude on Freyberg’s fight—meddling in a subordinate’s tactical operation was considered bad form—Clark seethed at the plodding pace of the New Zealand attack.
“Freyberg’s handling of the ensuing attack has been characterized by indecision and lack of aggressiveness,” he told his diary on Friday. In visits to Spadger’s command post, he urged that more infantry battalions be committed to battle. Freyberg and his staff resisted, convinced that three battalions in town and three more on the slopes sufficed; others must be held in reserve for a pursuit up the Liri Valley. Clark persisted, proposing that the British 78th Division attack the base of Monte Cassino while tanks struck from the north and more New Zealanders swept into town.
“I told Freyberg the tanks to be employed were American,” Clark added in his diary entry on Friday. “He could lose them all and I would replace them within 24 hours.” Freyberg replied that when casualties in the 2nd New Zealand Division reached a thousand he intended to abandon the attack unless success seemed imminent. By Saturday, Clark’s exasperation was bitterly terse: “Freyberg is not aggressive; is ponderous and slow.”
Whether additional firepower could have sundered the German line is problematic. Kiwi riflemen had captured Cassino’s rail station and fought through the charred botanical gardens to within two hundred yards of the Hotel Continental. “Push on, you must go hard,” Freyberg urged. But an attempt to capture the hotel “through the servants’ entrance” by swarming downhill from the hairpin turn known as Point 202 ended badly: machine-gun slugs cut down the lead attackers and sent others scampering back up the slope. Freyberg finally threw a fourth battalion into the town late on Saturday, but paratroopers had reinforced their strongpoints as well as the battered houses below Castle Hill.
“Almost every building or stump of a building contained a sniper’s or machine gunner’s post,” the New Zealand Corps noted. “The town was a place of unexpected encounters.” Paratroopers reinfested structures already cleared; forty Maoris would share a house with the enemy for three days, occasionally shooting through the walls, and a dressing station was evacuated from one cellar so that Sherman tanks could blast an enemy machine-gun nest on an upper floor of the same building. Soldiers began referring to Cassino as “Little Stalingrad.”
On Sunday, March 19, as the battle for the town stalemated, two death struggles on opposite faces of Monte Cassino decided the battle for the mountain. Just before dawn, three hundred paratroopers bounded down the slope from the abbey, green ghosts skidding on the scree and shooting from the hip. An outpost of Essex and Rajputana soldiers at Point 165 was said to have “disappeared in a smother of enemies
An arcing signal flare after twenty minutes recalled the attackers, but as night thinned in the east they struck again, hammering the castle gate like insolent Saracens while Heidrich’s gunners in the town below added more streams of fire. A sniper’s bullet drilled the British commander through the brain—“We talked a bit and then he died,” a fellow officer later reported—but once again the defenders, now reduced to barely sixty men, beat back the attack. In a third assault, at nine A.M., eight paratroopers drew close enough to detonate a demolition satchel beneath a buttress on the west wall; dust and smoke billowed through the bailey, and twenty-two Essex soldiers lay interred beneath the masonry. Yet every German who leaped into the breach was cut down with savage bursts of gunfire from the courtyard. Tommies ran the gauntlet from Via Caruso up to the castle keep, lugging sandbags stuffed with ammunition. Mortar barrels glowed like pokers in a hearth; after fifteen hundred rounds, several tubes lay bent and useless. By early afternoon the shooting had subsided to a sullen bicker and Castle Hill, unconquered, was paved with dead paratroopers; every Essex officer was dead or wounded. A captured German sergeant major offered congratulations and, lacking a sword, tendered his fur-lined gloves as a trophy. But the 4th Indian purchase on Monte Cassino’s eastern slope was more precarious than ever.
Two thousand yards across the crest, below the mountain’s west face, the second struggle also played out on the Sabbath morn. Over the past two weeks, sappers had built a rough road along Snakeshead Ridge, using bulldozers and a ton of explosives to chew through the limestone. With orders to “cause chaos and consternation in the ranks of the Hun”—not unlike Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants—an armored fleet moved south in two columns on the virgin road at six A.M.: sixteen Kiwi Shermans, eight Indian tanks, and sixteen light M-3 General Stuarts from the U.S. 760th Tank Battalion. By nine A.M., the road had narrowed to a corrugated lane as the procession turned toward the abbey at Albaneta Farm. Around Point 593, the weather-gnawed bodies of 34th Division soldiers killed six weeks earlier still lay wedged among the rocks, lost boys turned to bone and stone. Tankers could peer down into the Liri Valley on their right, then swivel left to see the abbey’s fractured walls half a mile across the rift to the left known as Death Valley.
Then the noose cinched. A German lieutenant managed to lay three mines on the path, blowing the tracks off the lead Stuart. Immobile and angry, the Yank crewmen opened fire on an enemy mule train clopping toward the abbey, killing fifteen Germans and five animals with more than 80 tank shells and 2,500 coaxial machine-gun bullets. “I hated to shoot the mules as they looked like good ones,” the tank commander later confessed. But the column was stuck, unable to maneuver on the narrow trail and insufficiently protected by lagging infantry. As more tanks came to grief, striking mines or brewing up from mortar fire, German snipers picked off crewmen squirming through their belly hatches. At 5:30 P.M. those tanks still capable of movement began to creep back up Snakeshead Ridge, turrets reversed, firing over their exhaust vents. Three Shermans and three Stuarts had been destroyed, and sixteen others damaged. As night descended on Sunday, flaming hulls stood like orange beacons along the futile path past Albaneta Farm.
General von Senger on several occasions had skirted the spiny ridge northwest of Point 593 as he stalked the battlefield with his walking stick. Using the abbey as a pole star, he traveled alone and on foot to be less conspicuous—an adjutant trailed several hundred yards behind the corps commander—and always in daylight, to see as much as possible. “No tree escaped damage, no piece of ground remained green,” Senger noted. When shell fire drew near, he went to ground or zigged and zagged, aware of “the whistling of splinters, the smell of freshly thrown-up earth…smells from glowing iron and burnt powder.” At times he imagined that he had been “carried back thirty years and was wandering across the battlefield at the Somme.”
Little reliable information had seeped from Cassino during the first two days after the bombing. Senger knew that Heidrich often failed to report lost ground on the assumption that his paratroopers would soon reclaim it. At times it seemed the town must surely fall, rupturing the Gustav Line. “Things are not too splendid here,” Tenth Army had advised Kesselring on Friday morning. Some battalions had been pared to platoon size: forty men. Machine gunners were even forced to fire sparingly lest the raised dust betray their nests. Senger hoped for more rain.
Yet the failed Allied tank foray on Sunday and the paratroopers’ near seizure of Castle Hill gave renewed hope. Entrenched Germans held the abbey ruins with mortars, machine guns, and phones linked to a network of artillery observers; no one heeded the addled monk flitting through the ruined cloisters. Allied smoke was noxious—on Saturday alone 22,000 smoke rounds had been fired in an effort to blind the German observers—but the paratroopers simply donned their gas masks, which also mitigated the stench of decay. Falling smoke canisters caused “a number of unpleasant wounds,” but Indian troops themselves complained that the smoke “screened nothing from nobody.”
As for the town, Senger thought the initial Allied attacks lacked urgency. Enemy assault companies continued to butt against German strongpoints rather than skirting them to let follow-on forces mop up. The rubble canalized Allied armor, and German gunners, if overmatched, managed to mass fires with artillery, rockets, and even antiaircraft guns. Much had been learned from the catastrophes at Stalingrad and Ortona about urban warfare. Savage fighting remained, but there was a chance the town would hold. Perhaps the most heartening sign came from the irascible Heidrich, who despite Senger’s offer to reinforce him with an entire panzer grenadier regiment balked at sharing the glory of defending Cassino with any forces not wearing paratrooper green.
General Freyberg also prowled the lowering hills—one morning, he stopped within mortar range of Monte Cassino to listen for nightingales—and he was reaching the same conclusion as his German adversary: the town would not fall. “Another lovely day—climatically,” he told his diary on Monday, March 20, yet there was no climax, only more death and misery for niggling gains. Each day he parsed the casualty returns, his arithmetical scribbles covering the pages as the New Zealanders approached and then far surpassed his threshold of a thousand killed, wounded, and missing. “I think you and the Boche are both groggy,” Clark told him, but Freyberg chose to press the fight despite private doubts. In a conference on Tuesday afternoon, March 21—the date St. Benedict died on Monte Cassino—he rallied Alexander, Clark, and Leese with hope of a breakthrough. “Surely the enemy is very hard pressed too,” Churchill cabled Alexander.
No breakthrough obtained. “Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world—what men!” Alexander wrote Brooke on Wednesday with perhaps excessive admiration. German troops still held the northwest and southwest corners of Cassino and enough of the beetling slope to isolate the Indian troops on Hangman’s Hill and the Kiwis holding the lower hairpin at Point 202. On Thursday, eight days after the bombing, Freyberg asked to pull back. When Field Marshal Wilson urged him to soldier on, Freyberg replied with the single proper noun that froze the blood of any British general: “Passchendaele,” the grisly Flemish battlefield of 1917.
Alexander concurred, as did Clark, who proposed keeping Kiwi casualty figures secret to avoid alarming the home front. “The NZ Division has shot its bolt, as well as the Indian Division,” Clark told his diary, “but I wanted the recommendation to call off the attack to come from the British…. I hate to see the Cassino show flop. It has been a most difficult situation…. The New Zealanders and Indians have not fought well.”
That calumny betrayed the valor of several hundred dead
At 8:15 P.M. on Friday, March 24, some 259 Gurkhas crept down the slope, quiet as cats, between parallel walls of covering artillery. At Point 202 they picked up forty-five Kiwis and left their badly wounded with a keg of rum and a large red cross snipped from parachute silk. Swinging left down the Via Serpentina, the column slipped over the lip of Castle Hill at eleven P.M. Jeeps met them on the Rapido’s far bank, ferrying the men to Portella for food and hot tea. “Never will I forget that nightmare of a march,” a Gurkha officer wrote. “At times we had no alternative but to strike soldiers who just gave up interest in anything, including a desire to live.”