Matthew Parker: Monte Cassino

Reviewed by SIR ANTHONY O'REILLY

The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still

And I remember things I'd best forget.


- Siegfried Sassoon

Napoleon said, Italy is like a boot; it should be entered from the top. Why the fundamental simplicity of this statement was ignored by the Allies in 1943 and 1944, is one of the reasons that almost 250,000 Allied and German soldiers lie buried in Italy, in the mountains and ravines around Monte Cassino and the infamous and superbly defended Gustav Line.

If you gaze at the map of Italy, you will see that to enter it with an army via Naples and move up through the mountains to Rome, is a well-nigh impossible task.

This route had not been trodden for 1500 years - since Belisarius in AD 536. Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants from Carthage rather than risk the potential horrors.

But the rapid triumphs in Africa and Tunisia, where a quarter of a million German and Italian troops surrendered, and the swift conquest of Sicily made the planners believe that victory would be easy and led inexorably to the imperfect landings at Anzio and Salerno, which almost ended in disaster.

But this is to get ahead of oneself, and the Battle of Monte Cassino as depicted in Matthew Parker's book is one of the true epics of infantry war in World War II.

In my mind's eye, it ranks only behind Stalingrad, and not by much.

The killing grounds of Monte Cassino, despite overwhelming Allied air superiority, took almost five months to take and ensured that the fall of Rome, planned for the end of 1943, came only a few short weeks before the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

As in all wars, there are villains and heroes.

The theory of unintended consequence suggests that when the Roosevelt-Churchill conference at Casablanca after the North Africa Torch landings of 1942 and 1943 laid down the principles of unconditional surrender, it thereby, almost inadvertently ensured that Germany would fight to the end.

This led inexorably to a clear division of opinion between those who wanted to go straight from Britain to Berlin, as did the Americans under George Marshall, and those who, like Churchill (and to a degree, Field Marshal Alan Brooke), believed that Italy and the Balkans represented the soft underbelly of Europe.

Behind all this was an orchestrated chorus of derision and exhortation from an increasingly confident Stalin saying that the Allies must open a second front in the West to help to beat the Germans in 1943/44.

It is, perhaps, worth reflecting on what was happening in Europe in the days before the pivotal and, in the end, meaningless battle of Monte Cassino.

The North African landings at Casablanca and Algiers went well for the Americans. Nominal Vichy French resistance had been easily overcome.

But the farm boys from Iowa and Nebraska and the untutored nascent army of the United States had not yet met the battle-hardened veterans of Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps.

They first clashed in Tunisia at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, and the result was a rout which caused the American general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to write to his son suggesting that he might lose his command.

"It is possible that a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion," he wrote.

"It will not break my heart and it should not cause you any mental anguish ... Modern war is a very complicated business, and governments are forced to treat individuals as pawns.

One year later, he was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt and General George C. Marshall as the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe and was the ultimate architect of the historic Normandy landings and the successful conclusion of the war. Thus can defeat and victory be so close.

Marshall had a fine estimate of Dwight Eisenhower's ability, as Eisenhower had worked for him at the United States Staff College. He was a good planner and, more important, a collegial leader.

In the festering inter-Allied jealousies of the next 24 months, that was to prove a decisive quality.

Rommel departed from Tunisia after the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, leaving the Germans under the command of General von Arnim.

The combined strength of the increasingly numerous American army and the 8th Army advancing from the East finally caused the mass German and Italian surrender of 250,000 men in Tunisia.

And by conquering Sicily, it made the Mediterranean safe again for Allied shipping, to and from India, and provided air bases for the Allied advances in the Balkans and in Italy.

This fast-moving chain of events produced the surprising decision to attack Naples and Salerno, and to march up to Rome through the ancient Via Casilina, now known as Route 6. But this required the Allies to fight their way through mountainous territory in the grip of the coldest winter in a decade.

The weather nullified the enormous advantage in tanks, material, and air power that the Allies had assembled. It was said that one mule was better than four tanks, and the incredible stupidity of the planners and the dazed valour of the ordinary infantryman form the central theme of a gripping story of incompetence, courage, cowardice and almost every other human emotion that war can excite.

One of the most important things to remember about Christmas 1943 was that the sides that faced each other at Monte Cassino and the heavily fortified Gustav Line came from substantially different backgrounds.

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between was that the average German saw military service as a service to country and tradition.

Many of them saw the military, and the Wehrmacht in particular, as the direct descendants of the events of 1918 and 1919 in which the German Army collapsed after the Ludendorff Offensive of March 1918 and the Kaiser was removed in November of that year.

There was a feeling, a culture, much nurtured by Hitler, that the Army had been betrayed by forces and politicians at home, and that the present war was to set to rights the notion of a German Volk that extended beyond the borders of the truncated Germany and of the armistice of 1919.

Military service was seen by many as a re-statement of Germany's right to be a leader in
the path to the restatement of what the Fatherland meant.

Contrast this with the armies against them. The Allies came from unmilitary societies. The main protagonists had hastily raised armies in the face of the aggression of Japan and Germany, and in the early stages of the war, of the ever-worsening plight of Soviet Russia.

At least 10 nations fought at Monte Cassino - from the Gurkhas, a professional fighting force, to the Indians, South Africans, Poles, British, Irish, Americans and importantly, the New Zealanders.

There is the story of a rather starchy British General visiting the New Zealand Division.

He said to General Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand forces: "Your chaps don't salute, do they?" Freyberg replied: "You should try waving at them. They always wave back."

Perhaps the most dramatic intervention was the French under the control of General Juin, commanding with French officers the second Moroccan and third Algerian armies, including the dreaded Goumier Irregulars from North Africa.

It would be fair to say that in the forthcoming battle, and attacking from the south and the east, the splendid valour of the thrust by the French and their troops redeemed the reputation of the French Army and made it perhaps the most effective fighting force - together with the Poles and New Zealanders - in the battle for Monte Cassino.

The book is full of wonderful anecdotes of the varied responses by troops of all nations to mobilisation, Army rules, command procedures, indeed, that whole new world that was completely alien to them until 1941.

And the story is about how the dreadful and cataclysmic experience of Monte Cassino marked them for life. How they fought and died in the unspeakable cold in the sharp ravines and gullies against superbly entrenched German fire can only make your heart ache.

Many of the American troops were weekend soldiers of the old National Guard with cursory training and variable leadership.

The 36th (Texas) and 34th (Red Bull) Divisions of the United States Army had never experienced withering fire and unspeakable cold in their brief and abrasive war.

They were to learn in the most appalling fashion of the almost total unassailability of the enemy in the flooded, marshy flatlands of the Liri Valley and of the extraordinary toll that the Rapido River would take upon their crossing.

There were in all, four battles at Monte Cassino. The first three were failures. Each time the Allies moved forward, the Germans counter-attacked with incredible ferocity.

The fourth battle took place in May 1944.

Perhaps the most attention-getting event of the entire battle was the bombing into oblivion of the Benedictine monastery.

This building, which had stood sentinel over the lonely passes for almost 1500 years, was obliterated on Tuesday, February 15, 1944, by the American Air Force.

The 142 B-17 Flying Fortresses, 47 twin-engined Mitchells, and 40 twin-engined Marauders reduced this icon of western civilisation to rubble because it was stated that it was occupied by German forces who were using it to direct their fire on Allied positions.

Whether or not this was true, the fillip to the morale of Allied troops was enormous, and in a curious postscript to the bombing, it may have persuaded Field Marshal Kesselring to spare Rome, Venice and the many other places of great historical distinction in Italy over the next 24 months.

From a military point of view, it had mixed implications.

It allowed the Germans to use the destruction of the monastery in their propaganda and also gave them an easily fortified bunker to anchor the Gustav Line guarded by the 13th Parachute Division.

It would be another three months before the heights of Monte Cassino saw a Polish flag flying atop this edifice. Many would die before that flag flew, and yet the final moments have a ring of anticlimax about them.

By May 17, the following conversations took place between Field Marshal Kesselring and his 10th Army commander, von Vietinghoff.

Kesselring: I consider withdrawal to the Senger position necessary.

Vietinghoff: Then it will be necessary to begin the withdrawal north of the Liri. [Allied] tanks have broken through here.

Kesselring: Then we have to give up Cassino.

Vietinghoff: Yes.

Thus, in a curious, rather Germanic way, the First Parachute Regiment, defenders of the monastery for five months under such appalling conditions, did not surrender, but simply retired.

And so ended, almost without a shot being fired at the very end, the bloodiest battle of World War II - a battle supreme in futility, symbolic in its resolution on both sides, and utterly obscure in its objectives.

In a vainglorious and controversial move, General Mark Clark, on whom historians have been extraordinarily and justifiably harsh, diverted 5th Army troops away from the retreating German 10th Army so his men could be the first to enter Rome.

The judgment of historians on the Italian campaign in general, and on the battle in and around the Gustav Line and Monte Cassino has been unsympathetic, and controversy will surround the objectives and the achievements of this epic encounter.

There are those who declare it showed the Russians that the Allies would open a second front. There were those who claimed that it tied down important German divisions in Italy, after the collapse of Mussolini, denying their essential presence in Normandy for the landings in June 1944.

But as the writer says, with the exception of the successful deceptions at the beginning of the fourth battle of Monte Cassino, and the redemptive battles of the French Expeditionary Force under General Juin, there is little positive in the campaign that can justify the waste of men and materials.

Italy could have been cut in two, north of Rome, by a determined land assault and a Normandy-like attack.

The Anvil landings in August of 1944 in southern France were a further poor choice which took vital divisions away from the Italian front.

The departure of the 5th American Army to France frustrated the hopes of Alexander and Churchill to reach the Ljubljana Gap and take Vienna before the Russians.

Instead, the Allies were held at the Gothic Line, another series of mountain fortresses in Northern Italy, until the end of the war.

I put down the book with a feeling of fatigue and a feeling of dismay and disappointment.

Billy Vincent, a hero of mine in the creation of the Ireland Funds, fought with the Inniskillings and was wounded twice in those gallant battles up through the spine of Italy.

Was it, I asked myself, all in vain? Could we have simply tied down the German land superiority with air power, while preparing for Normandy?

The answer is probably yes, and many gallant men would have survived if it had happened that way.

* Hodder, $69.99