“The relentless wearing down of Monte Cassino, namely the bombing of the cultural icon of the monastery, was controversial; the plodding and disorganized campaign also drew criticism.”
By Michael G. Stroud
IN 1943, the Allies were on the march.
By May of that year, Axis forces had been beaten into submission in North Africa. And by August, British and American armies had landed on and captured the island of Sicily.
Axis fortunes continued to decline when on Sept. 3, Italy, after having removed Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) from office and appointing a new government, surrendered to the Allies.
With the tides shifting against them, German forces in Italy had little choice but to dig in. Defensive lines were prepared that incorporated the topography and rugged geography. The town of Cassino and its looming abbey of Monte Cassino was a key to the German defences. Surrounded by mountains, peaks and ridges, the point stood as the literal gateway to the accessible valleys on the way to Rome. For the Germans, Monte Cassino had to be held at all costs; the Allies were equally determined to seize it. With this, the stage was set for one of the Second World War’s most hard-fought campaigns.
The Allied capture of Monte Cassino proved to be the breaking point of the German defences known as the Gustav Line and the liberation of much of Italy.
The back-and-forth struggle waged in the North African desert had come to a finale on May 13, 1943 when German commander-in-chief Hans Jürgen von Arnim (1889-1962) surrendered his army of over 260,000 German and Italian troops to the Allies. The entire North African campaign had cost the Axis over 950,000 troops that were either killed, wounded or captured, several million tons of goods, 6,200 guns, over 2,000 tanks and 70,000 trucks that they could ill afford to lose.[1]
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was ecstatic with the victory and felt that with “one continent redeemed,” the Allies could build on their strategic momentum and push into Italy to continue to close the vice on Germany.[2]
His American and Soviet allies however felt that operations in the Mediterranean theater would be nothing more than a sideshow and a waste of valuable resources that should be used in prosecuting the war against Germany on mainland Europe.
Churchill won the debate; the Allies would liberate Sicily and then Italy itself. The British prime minister’s plan was to use the region as a staging ground for striking at Germany from the south – what he called the “soft-underbelly” of the Third Reich.
The Allied victory in Sicily in August, Operation Husky, netted more than 100,000 Italian prisoners and the evacuation of most German troops to mainland Italy.[3] Hitler reinforced his remaining forces with units from the Eastern theater, but even then the Germans would be on the defensive in Italy, bearing the brunt of the fighting to come.
The Allies, having attained both air and naval superiority over the Mediterranean, as well as the lessons learned from their successful amphibious operations in Sicily, launched their invasion of Italy proper in September 1943. The effort to take Italy was commanded by General Sir Harold Alexander (1891-1969), who took over once Dwight Eisenhower (1880-1969) was reassigned for the upcoming invasion of France. A highly decorated career military man of both world wars and one who, unlike Bernard Montgomery (1887-1976), was generally liked by ordinary soldiers in both British and American armies, Alexander landed two armies on the Italian Peninsula: one on Sept. 3, another on Sept. 9.
Operation Baytown and its three brigades of British and Canadian infantry under Montgomery, landed at the very ‘toe’ of the peninsula and began pushing northward with less-than-expected German resistance. The announcement on Sept. 8 of the Armistice of Cassibile effectively moved the Italians from the Axis camp to the Allies.
Two other operations would land more troops on Italian soil. Operation Avalanche on Sept. 9 would see the U.S. Fifth Army under Mark W. Clark (1896-1984) make landfall near the southwest town of Salerno. They soon met stiff resistance from multiple German divisions, resulting in 9,000 casualties in their push north.[4] Eisenhower considered Clark to be a good staff officer and planner, but his meteoric rise and seeming penchant for looking good to the press and his superiors also bred contempt such as by General George S. Patton (1885-1945) who said that Clark was “’too damned slick.’”[5] This questioning of Clark’s command abilities would play out by the end of the fight for Monte Cassino and the liberation of Rome.
The other landing, Operation Slapstick, occurred at the Italian port city of Taranto on the ‘heel’ of the peninsula. Intended as a diversionary operation to tie up German defenses from the main landing site of Salerno, Slapstick saw the British 1st Airborne Division take the city relatively unopposed.
Having secured their zones, the Allies pushed north in their march toward Rome only to run into the carefully prepared and positioned defensive lines as directed by Generalfeldmarschall der Luftwaffe (Marshal of the Air Force) Albert Kesselring (1885-1960).
Kesselring was made commander-in-chief of all German forces in the Mediterranean in 1943, what Berlin considered the southern theater. After convincing Hitler of the need to hold as much of southern Italy as possible to deprive the Allies of airbases from which to strike the German homeland from, Kesselring constructed the Volturno and Barbara lines south of Rome using the natural layout of the land, including rivers, mountains, and hilltops. These lines were intended to slow the advancing Allies buying time for the establishment of the more important defenses, to be known as the Winter Line.
Also known as the Reinhard Line, it ran from the mouth of the Garigliano River in the west to the Adriatic Coast and was located roughly 50 miles north of Naples and consisted of a series of light fieldworks and defences that were intended as more of a forward position for the Germans.
Located roughly 12 miles north of the Winter Line, the Gustav Line was a masterstroke of military defences that leveraged the heights of the Apennine Mountains, restricted travel for vehicles and armour to a few valleys, while affording the German defenders’ rows of concrete strong points and generous fields of fire that would make the most of their numerical inferiority. At the centre of the Gustav Line was the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino.
The small western Italian town of Cassino was typical with its churches, railway station, valleys, orchards, and Roman ruins. It would be the looming ancient historical site and its abbey from 524 AD that dominated the valley as well as the only traversable route suitable for vehicles that were making for Rome. The rocky hill itself where the abbey sits ranges from its lowest knolls of 1,000 feet to its summit of over 5,000 that remains snow-covered all year.
Its strategic significance in controlling the western approach to Rome was clear to commanders on both sides.
Field Marshal Alexander would go on to say that “’Monte Cassino is one of the strongest natural positions in the whole of Europe,’” and this sentiment would play heavily in the battle that was coming.[6]
The Allies had broken through the Volturno Line and went up against the Gustav Line as of Autumn 1943. This too, albeit just in the east, would be breached by the 1st Canadian Division threatening to roll up the German defensive line. The doggedness of the defenders and the onset of the gale force winds and near blizzard conditions by the end of December 1943, had ground the Allied advance to Rome to a halt. The only viable path left for the Allies rested along Highway 6 in the west that ran through the Liri Valley, and its southern entrance was dominated by Monte Cassino that lorded above.
The pace and toll that the fighting had taken on the Allied troops was beyond compare in their push north from Salerno to Cassino. The warm and temperate late summer weather had been replaced by sub-freezing temperatures at night and driving snow and ice during the daytime that made travel in any form miserable if not impossible.
“Our troops were living in almost inconceivable misery,” wrote famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle. “Thousands of men had not been dry for weeks. They lived like men of prehistoric times.”[7]
It had taken the Allies over 14 weeks to fight through just 50 miles between Naples and Cassino and at a very high cost of over 16,000 casualties.[8]
By the end of 1943, the Allied advance was stalled. Though various German defensive lines had been broken, Kesselring’s skillful deployment of his limited reserves had plugged the major gaps at the right time. Alexander and the other commanders understood that the route to Rome lay through the German controlled pass at Cassino which was the literal gateway to the Italian capital. The problem was that German artillery, along with carefully placed landmines and controlled overlapping fields of fire, made any forward progress tactically impossible. They had to take some of the pressure off from the Gustav Line so the Allies could force their way through.
To draw German forces away from the Gustav Line, a plan was hatched to land Allied troops just 35 miles south of Rome in a small sandy harbour called Anzio.
Dubbed Operation Shingle, the force consisted of the U.S. VI Corps, the British 1st Infantry Division, the 46th Royal Tank Regiment and the 2nd Special Service Brigade, under Major General John P. Lucas. Undersized for the task, the force had the unenviable task of taking on the German 14th Panzer Corps.
Operation Shingle launched on Jan. 22, 1944 with light German resistance, which allowed the invasion force to move over 36,000 troops and 3,000 vehicles ashore by the end of the day. However, a swift German response by Kesselring within days, saw over 40,000 troops from five divisions of the 14th and 10th armies surround Lucas and his men on their beachhead, where they would remain effectively bottled up until the Allied breakthrough in May 1944. Despite the setbacks, Shingle was successful in that it diverted tens of thousands of additional German troops Germans from Cassino.
With Operation Shingle about to launch, the attack to open the way to Rome would begin on Jan. 17. The first of what would be four battles started with the forced crossing of the Gariagliano River by the British X Corps and the U.S. II Corps. The two forces smashed into the German defences held by the 94th Infantry Division and it soon became apparent to the German commander, the talented and wily General der Panzertruppe (Panzer General) Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin (1891-1963), that “the whole of the main defence line of the attacked infantry division was lost, but that I could hope to halt a breakthrough if he [Kesselring] put both divisions [reserves] immediately at my disposal.”[9]
Kesselring agreed and provided Etterlin with the highly mobile 29th and 89th Panzer-Grenadier Divisions that allowed Etterlin to launch a counterattack and stop a potential breakthrough by the Allies. It’s important to note here that the failure by the Allies to have supplied immediate reserve support and a more aggressive posture in their initial crossing could very well have broken through the German lines, thus opening the way to Rome. The hesitation however allowed the Germans the time to bring up reserves and check the potential breakthrough.
The rest of the first battle for Monte Cassino was a patchwork of assaults all down the sector line with the U.S. 36th Division hitting the center the night of Jan. 20, but German mines, well dug-in tanks, and near pinpoint accurate artillery fire made every inch murderous and costly with the 36th Division alone losing thousands killed within 48 hours.
Days later on Jan 24, the U.S. II Corps along with French colonial troops of the 3rd Algerian Division attacked over the Rapido River with the intent of working their way around the German positions to gain the high from which to hit them. The Americans took over a week of intense fighting to push the Germans back and gain some traction in the mountains, with fighting so intense that a member of the Japanese-American or Nisei 100th Battalion described one exchange of grenades between them and the Germans “like a game of ball.”[10]
The French Algerians further north made good in achieving their objective of Monte Cifalco and its view of Allied supply lines, but their momentum was brought to a standstill when their request for additional troops was denied by Clark. These minor successes helped to build some momentum for the U.S. 34th Division and elements from the 36th Division that had slogged their way up the craggy mountain side, under incessant and withering German fire. The Germans had made the most of their months in preparing the ground, having laid mines and countless boobytraps through the passable ravines and access points of the mountain side, making passage a literal and exhausting nightmare for the American’s.
By Feb. 11, after multiple assaults on the German positions on Monastery Hill and Cassino itself, the first battle for Monte Cassino was over with the Germans holding the summit. Now within hundreds of yards of the abbey but fiercely defended by German paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division, the Allied attacks up the slopes had been repeatedly beaten back, with many Allied planners recognizing that the accurate and deadly German artillery fire was being directed from the abbey itself. Something would have to be done about that.
The request to bomb the abbey came from Brigadier Harry Dimoline on Feb. 11 as he was tasked with leading the elite troops of the 4th Indian Division, the 2nd New Zealand Division and the British 78th Battleaxe Division to take Monte Cassino itself. Dimoline saw the destruction of ancient building as a necessary to the taking of the mountain. The Germans argued vociferously that the structure was “so conspicuous a landmark [that it] would be quite unsuitable as an observation post’” and was unoccupied by troops.[11] Their argument fell on deaf ears as in the end, the monastery could not be separated from the objective of taking the hill as they were one in the same both tactically and strategically.
At 9:45 a.m. on Feb. 15 Allied planes dropped leaflets to the monks in the abbey instructing them to leave immediately the days before, the bombing began.[12] Over 200 U.S. heavy and medium bombs, in conjunction with fighter-bombers and artillery batteries rained hundreds of tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs on the mountaintop utterly laying waste to the monastery. The annihilation was so spectacular that a German officer at Monte Cassino described it “’as if the mountain had disintegrated, shaken by a giant hand.’”[13]
Ironically, the monastery’s destruction had the opposite effect; it now provided numerous places for the defending Germans to occupy that were previously unavailable, thus allowing them to beat back with heavy losses, repeated attacks by Dimonlines troops. Ironically, not one German soldier was killed during the bombardment, which brought widespread condemnation from friend and foe alike the world over. Debate over the utility of the bombing continues.
The third battle for the territory, called Operation Dickens, began with a three-hour bombardment on March 15 that was followed by an assault by the II New Zealand Corps.[14] Progress was finally being made toward both the ruins and high ground of the monastery and the town of Cassino below, with the capture of the tactically important Castle Hill along with some others by the Indian Gurkha troops while the New Zealand troops were making slow progress in their Stalingrad-like fighting among the ruins of Cassino itself. After 10 days of continuous fighting among the rubble of the abbey and the town below, with progress being measured in feet, the Allied assaults sputtered out until they were halted by Alexander on March 24. The respite was welcomed by the German 1st Parachute Division defenders as well, as they were near their breaking point, having held the ground tenaciously under horrific fire with many of their units being under-strength.
The fourth and final push to take Cassino began on May 11 and was codenamed Operation Diadem. Alexander used the intervening six weeks since the third battle of Cassino to retrain and rest his men, but unlike the previous attempts, to augment and build up a large enough force to break the Gustav Line outright. Assembling a total force of over seven and half extra divisions that included 1,600 guns, 2,000 tanks, and 3,000 aircraft, Alexander’s force would hit the defending Germans and their 57 battalions along a 20-mile front simultaneously.[15] Alexander now felt confident that he had the numerical advantage to carry both the abbey and the town.
The assault was preceded by a 1,600-gun bombardment against all known German defensive and artillery positions. The enormity of the artillery barrage was such that one British soldier remarked that it was “awe-inspiring…The entire sky as far as the eye could see erupted in light and sounds as the guns fired”[16]
The effect of the shelling did its job allowing the Allies up and down the local front to make significant gains against their beleaguered German foes. The sheer weight of numbers combined with the ferocity and coordinated shelling stunned the German defenders, who began to buckle and give way, one position at a time beginning May 13.
With Allied tanks streaming through and pressing in from nearly all sides, especially the Polish II Corps that had been doggedly fighting their way up to Monte Cassino for months, Kesselring gave the order for the German withdrawal from Monte Cassino on May 17.
The defenders made their way back over the mountain passes toward the defenses of the Hitler Line, taking fire from the Allies a good portion of it. The battered yet proud Polish II Corps made its way to the ruined summit of the monastery and raised their national flag. The iconic and devastated monastery and the town below had finally been taken after a four-month battle that cost the Allies close to 120,000 total casualties and the Germans nearly 130,000.[17]
Following the fall of Monte Cassino, the German defenders carried out a fighting withdrawal back to the Hitler Line in anticipation of the Allied advance. The sheer numbers of men and equipment by the Allies appeared to be endless in the eyes of the resource-strapped Germans, who were woefully undermanned in the face of such a juggernaut. Alexander would press this numerical advantage now, with the elements of the Eighth and Fifth Army advancing up the Liri valley, and the Poles and Canadians making way for Rome after having collapsed the remnants of the Gustav Line.
At the same time as the Polish II Corps and the 5th Canadian Division were breaking through on May 23, the besieged Anglo-British force that had been trapped at Anzio launched a multi-pronged assault that broke their German 14th Army adversaries and thus effected their breakout. Allied forces were now streaming toward the prize of Rome with the Germans retreating in front of them.
The Allies raced toward Rome by May 25 with the German 10th Army in full retreat, presenting an opportunity to cut off and trap the fugitives before they could make good their escape. The U.S. VI Corps under Major General Lucian Truscott (1895-1965) was close to trapping the enemy units when he was ordered by Clark to change his direction toward Rome instead, thus effectively allowing the bulk of the German 10th Army to escape and fight another day. This inexplicable course of events was strongly contested then and is still voraciously debated to this day. Short of wanting to be first to Rome ahead of the British, Clark’s decision was faulty at best and a dereliction of duty at worst in allowing the 10th Army to complete his retreat, when it could have and should have, been blocked and then defeated. This decision would haunt Clark for the rest of his life.
The campaign for Monte Cassino is at its core, a tale of lessons not learned from the First World War. The entire affair was conducted with the artless application of brute force reminiscent of so many offensives on the Great War’s Western Front. Muddled objectives such as at Anzio, repeated and sloppily coordinated assaults against well entrenched positions and the decimation of a religious and culturally significant building in the monastery for no tactical gain, is what came to represent the Allied approach in the campaign to take Monte Cassino.
The affront was exponentially worse in Clark’s bizarre decision to reroute Truscott’s men away from the escaping German 10th Army that were on a course to cut them off. This decision alone flew in the face of the basic tenets of field leadership and command to not let an enemy escape when you have the means to prevent it. By taking out the German 10th Army, the Allies would have removed a key enemy asset from the theatre of operations, thus depriving them of resources that would drag on the fighting.
As to the entire campaign, if Alexander and Clark had targeted smaller objectives in increments, rather than in broad strokes, they would have been able to have concentrated enough decisive force to have achieved them, instead of getting repeatedly bogged down in strung out pushing matches with the Germans. Force concentration, targeted and incremental objectives, combined with a more aggressive posture by the commanders (such as Clark) would have carried the entire campaign in a shorter time frame and likely with less casualties.
For the Germans, the biggest challenge was that of limited resources, a situation made all the worse as men and materiel were diverted to France in anticipation of an Allied invasion there. Though on the defensive the entire time with limited available reserves to exploit tactical opportunities, the Germans under Kesselring and Etterlin were able to masterfully leverage the topography and geography. This forced the Allies to pay dearly for every foot of territory gained, as the Germans had weaponized the very ground that was needed to move armor from flooding the flats, to booby-trapping the passes. Effectively, the Germans made the best with what they had, even in the rubble of the bombed-out monastery.
The relentless wearing down of Monte Cassino, namely the bombing of the cultural icon of the monastery, was controversial; the plodding and disorganized campaign also drew criticism. Although it took months for the Allies to dislodge the Germans from the mountaintop bastion, the fall of Monte Cassino broke the back of the nigh impregnable Gustav Line and opened the way to the prize of the Eternal City and in turn, the eventual fall of greater Italy.
Michael Stroud is a military historian with a passion for travel, having visited such iconic sites as Napoleon’s Tomb, the Palace of Versailles, the Colosseum, Pompeii, Gettysburg, and a host of others. He is currently writing a book on England’s rise as a naval power during the Tudor period. Michael lives in Coldwater, Michigan with his wife Kellie. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
Notes
[1] Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 415.
[2] Ibid., 415.
[3] Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004), 12.
[4] Ibid., 22.
[5] Ibid., 18.
[6] Nigel de Lee, “Moral Ambiguities in the Bombing of Monte Cassino.” Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 2005):130.
[7] Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004), 38.
[8] Ibid., 39.
[9] Fridolin von Senger Etterlin, “The Battles of Cassino,” Royal United States Institution 103 no.610 (1958): 210, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071845809433546.
[10] The Rohwer outpost, (McGehee, AR), Sep. 23, 1944. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84025150/1944-09-23/ed-1/.
[11] Nigel de Lee, “Moral Ambiguities in the Bombing of Monte Cassino,” Journal of Military Ethics, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 2005):131, https://doi-org.ezproxy2.apus.edu/10.15027570510030860.
[12] Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004), 171.
[13] Ibid., 172.
[14] David M. Toczek, “Battle for Monte Cassino: World War II,” World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society, ABC-CLIO, 2022, accessed April 21, 2022. https://worldatwar2-abc-clio-com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/Search/Display/758167.
[15] Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2004), 274.
[16] Ibid., 293.
[17] David M. Toczek, “Battle for Monte Cassino: World War II,” World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society, ABC-CLIO, 2022, accessed April 21, 2022. https://worldatwar2-abc-clio-com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/Search/Display/758167.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Etterlin, Fridolin von Senger. “The Battles of Cassino.” Royal United States Institution 103, no. 610 (1958): 208-214. https://doi-org.ezproxy2.apus.edu/10.1080/03071845809433546.
The Rohwer outpost. (McGehee, AR), Sep. 23, 1944. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84025150/1944-09-23/ed-1/.
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Toczek, David M. “Battle for Monte Cassino: World War II.” World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society, ABC-CLIO, 2022. Accessed April 10, 2022. https://worldatwar2-abc-clio-com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/Search/Display/758167.
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