Chapter 40: Mar 1944 Heavy Fighting at Monte Cassino

“One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox-Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be-that I puzzle over time.”

― William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

The German army used the advantages of terrain and natural defensive chokepoints when they selected Monte Cassino as their pivotal line of defense against the advancing allied forces moving north to sweep them out of the entire country of Italy. I remember with great clarity the funniest cartoon ever published in Stars and Stripes was “Willie” and “Joe” sitting in the muddy bomb crater and Willie was telling Joe that “G-2” wanted to know at the other end of the walkie-talkie “From whence cometh the direction of fire?”

Of course the entire background was a crazy patchwork quilt of intersecting artillery, mortar and small arms fire that made it difficult to determine who was shooting at whom.

It reminded me of a time in Southeast Asia when I hunkered down in a flooded rice paddy looking up at a sky filled with tracers all around me in every direction trying their best to bring down a med-evac chopper that was flying a rescue mission against orders to fly at night.

The chaos of a live combat zone is like no other place in the entirety of God’s creation. It is more like a replica of Hell in Dante’s Inferno with only one rule and that was to survive.

Basic Infantry tactics will preach the necessity of having a least a 7 to 1 advantage in combat power to take a well-fortified position defended by “true believers” with plenty of ammo and a will to win.

The well-trained German Wehrmacht knew that principle and that is why they elected to simply go around the Maginot Line and not attempt to defeat it. In a certain sense, that that what MacArthur knew when he bypassed heavily defended islands in the Pacific with the knowledge that without the ability to move from their defensive positions the Japanese were not a threat to his lines of logistical supply or communication.

With all that in perspective, Monte Cassino was the exception to the rule.

Nestled serenely on top of a strategic mountaintop on the main route between Naples and Rome the abbey on Monte Cassino was founded by Saint Benedict in 529AD. It is one of the oldest religious sites in Europe. Strangely, as was true of most Christian sites of worship, the abbey was built over a pagan Roman site dedicated to the worship of Apollo. As generations passed, the monastery was recognized as a familiar center of academics, writing, art and culture.

The abbey was destroyed by Longobards in the late sixth century and was rebuilt even finer than the original.

It was captured by an invasion of the Saracens in the ninth century but was again rebuilt and lasted until it was destroyed by a natural disaster in the fourteenth century.

In the latter stages of World War II, the Allies moved up from the south of Italy with the intent to push the Nazis out of Italy. The allies believed that the monastery was being used by the Germans as an observation post and they were losing high numbers of troops by the constant bombardment. Eventually, they decided to level the entire complex and take it by force. It turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war with high losses on the sides of the allies.

After World War II, the monastery was rebuilt and the religious treasures that had been removed to the Vatican as a precaution were returned for viewing by the faithful.

During the battle to take the top of the mountain, the monastery was completely destroyed and unknown to the allies, the Germans entrenched a large force of paratroopers in the rubble setting up a trap for the surrounding allies. The assault lasted a long time and at the end, over fifty thousand allied troops were killed in action with many more wounded or missing in action. The Germans melted away and were long gone by the time the allies finally reached the top of the mountain top. The allies had won the battle but at a high cost in casualties. After Monte Cassino, the roads north were much easier to advance on and the Germans withdrew with great skill to establish defensive lines to protect the fatherland.