In the winter of 1943 General
Albert Kesselring withdrew his forces
to what became known as the Gustav Line on the
Italian peninsula south of Rome. Organized along the Garigliano and
Rapido rivers it included Monte Cassino, a hilltop site of a sixth-century
Benedictine monastery. Defended by 15 German divisions the line was
fortified with gun pits, concrete bunkers, turreted machine-gun emplacements,
barbed-wire and minefields. In December 1943, the Allied suffered
heavy loses while trying to capture Monte Cassino.
General
Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander
in Italy, ordered a new Cassino offensive
combined with an amphibious operation
at Anzio, a small port on the west coast
of Italy. The main objective of the operation was to cut the communication
lines of the German 10th Army and force withdrawal from the Gustav
Line.
On 12th
February the exhausted US Army
at Cassino were replaced by the New Zealand
Corps. Alexander now decided to use these fresh troops in another
attempt to capture Cassino. General Bernard
Freyberg, who was in charge of the infantry attack, asked for
the monastery be bombed. Despite claims by troops
on the front-line that no fire had come from the monastery, General
Harold Alexander
agreed and it was destroyed by the United
States Air Force on 15th February, 1944.
Once the monastery had
been bombed, the German Army moved into the ruins. As Basil
Liddell Hart pointed out later in his book
The Other Side of the Hill the bombing "turned out
entirely to the tactical benefit of the Germans. For after that they
felt free to occupy the ruins, and the rubble provided mud better
defensive cover than the Monastery would have been before its destruction.
As anyone with experience of street-fighting knows, it is only when
buildings are demolished that they are converted from mousetraps into
bastions of defence."
After the bombing the Germans
were able to halt several attempts to capture Monte Cassino. It was
not until troops led by General Wladyslaw
Anders (Polish Corps) and General Alphonse
Juin (French Corps) that the monastery was taken on 18th May,
1944.
(1)
Basil Liddell Hart, The Other Side
of the Hill (1948)
An historical postscript can now be added to the much discussed question
of the destruction of the historic Benedictine Monastery on Monte
Cassino as a preliminary step in the Allied offensive there in February.
The task was carried out by a large force of American bombers and
supporting artillery. According to the announcements of the Allied
Command at the time this destruction was ordered because the Monastery,
which dominated the approaches to the town, had been "occupied
and fortified" by the Germans. These statements were repeated
in Field-Marshal Sir H. Maitland Wilson's report published in 1946
- which seemed strange in view of earlier testimony from the Vatican
and the Abbot himself that the Germans had avoided trespassing on
the Monastery, despite the tactical disadvantage which this involved
for them.
The irony of the bombing
was, as both Senger and Vietinghoff remarked, that it turned out entirely
to the tactical benefit of the Germans. For after that they felt free
to occupy the ruins, and the rubble provided mud better defensive
cover than the Monastery would have been before its destruction. As
anyone with experience of street-fighting knows, it is only when buildings
are demolished that they are converted from mouse-traps into bastions
of defence. Batteries posted and concealed in the ruins were able
to enfilade and break up the subsequent British attempts to drive
through to the town of Cassino.
(2)
General
Harold Alexander
was responsible for the controversial decision
to bomb Monte Cassino.
The battle for Cassino-or
rather the series of battles for Cassino - began on 17 January 1944,
when X Corps attacked across the Garigliano. On 20 January, United
States II Corps attacked across the Rapido, but this blow failed and
X Corps, after meeting with some initial success, were checked by
heavy counter-attacks. One more attack began on 16 February, and it
was this assault that was preceded by the destruction of the monastery
by bombing and artillery fire. But Cassino town and the monastery
were not to be captured until 18 May, when the Poles raised the red
and white standard with the white eagle over the ruins of the monastery.
Till the February bombardment,
the great Benedictine monastery had been spared deliberately, to our
detriment. Whether the Germans took advantage of its deep cellars
for shelter and its high windows for observation I do not know; but
it was obvious that this huge and massive building offered the defenders
considerable protection from hostile fire, merely by their sheltering
under its walls. As Winston Churchill has observed, the enemy fortifications
were hardly separate from the building itself.
Was the destruction of
the monastery a military necessity? Was it morally wrong to destroy
it?
The answer to the first
question is 'yes'. It was necessary more for the effect it would have
on the morale of the attackers than for purely material reasons.
The answer to the second
question is this: when soldiers are fighting for a just cause and
are prepared to suffer death and mutilation in the process, bricks
and mortar, no matter how venerable, cannot be allowed to weigh against
human lives. Every good commander must consider the morale and feelings
of his fighting men, and, what is equally important, the fighting
men must know that their whole existence is in the hands of a man
in whom they have complete confidence. Thus the commanding general
must make it absolutely clear to his troops that they go into action
under the most favourable conditions he has the power to order.
In the context of the Cassino
battle, how could a structure which dominated the fighting field be
allowed to stand? The monastery had to be destroyed. Withal, everything
was done to save the lives of the monks and their treasures: ample
warning was given of the bombing.
The great Benedictine
monastery, from which a magnificent view of the surrounding country
can be gained, has been completely rebuilt in cut stone. Both outside
and in, it has been restored to its former condition, even down to
the marble work and interior decoration.
The bombs of the Allied
air forces had left nothing of the building standing except part of
one of the outer walls - all else was a heap of rubble. Yet amidst
this appalling destruction St. Benedict's tomb, in the centre of the
monastery, went utterly unscathed.
After the capture and liberation
of Rome I was able to tell the late Pope of its survival. He was deeply
moved. He assured me, moreover, that he well understood the military
necessity for the bombing and the inevitable destruction of the monastery.
(3)
General Fridolin
von Senger fought under
Albert
Kesselring at Monte Cassino.
Field-Marshal Kesselring had given express orders that no German soldier
should enter the Monastery, so as to avoid giving the Allies any pretext
for bombing or shelling it. I cannot testify personally that this
decision was communicated to the Allies but I am sure that the Vatican
found means to do so, since it was so directly interested in the fate
of Monte Cassino. Not only did Field-Marshal Kesselring prohibit German
soldiers from entering the Monastery, but be also placed a guard at
the entrance gate to ensure that his orders were carried out.
(4)
John Slessor, Commander in Chief of RAF
Mediterranean and Middle East, believed it was wrong to bomb Monte
Cassino and wrote to Charles
Portal about it on 16th April, 1944.
Another lesson which I
think has been, not learned perhaps, but confirmed in recent fighting
in Italy is that the immediate battlefield is not the place to use
the bomber, even the fighter-bomber. I have made many bad shots in
the past, but one thing I have always said (and have in the past year
or two often been twitted for having said) is that the bomber is not
a battlefield weapon.
(5)
The
Manchester Guardian (19th May, 1945)
Here is a scene of utter desolation such as only this war can produce.
It is nearing noon and the last Germans left this relic of a tortured
town some few hours ago. They were prisoners. Their last stronghold
- the Continental Hotel - had gone up with a bang a little while before
that. It was the final retreating blow that the Germans in Cassino
struck.
There were fewer than thirty
prisoners taken in Cassino itself. Our men felt bitter about that.
"This is the first time I have ever been able to stand outside
in the open air," said one of them, "and now I have only
seen ten Germans."
He had come into the open
air to stand bolt upright for the first time this morning. He had
come from a dug-out that was in the rubble of a battered house where
day was dark as night, and where only in the hours of darkness you
dared to crawl out so that the next section to hold this post might
crawl in.
A little behind us is "The
Crypt." Its rightful ecclesiastical name - for it is below the
chapel of a convent - remained relevant in the cruel circumstances
of war. It had had ninety-nine direct hits on it from German shells
up to the arrival of the British troops who took over about ten days
ago. Since then it has received fifteen direct hits.
They tell one that nothing
less than a direct hit from a 1,000lb bomb would penetrate the crypt.
That is some measure of the protection which the Germans enjoyed last
March when the Allied Air Forces bombed this town in the greatest
strength ever put on a target of comparable size.
The crypt inside and outside
might pass for any front-line soldier's picture of a dig-out. Its
dangers were supremely the dangers of the front line itself. One British
sergeant whose head was visible in daylight above its entrance for
less than a split second was killed. Enemy snipers never left this
spot uncovered. So it was all through Cassino - ceaseless, vigilant
watching, with every opportunity seized by both sides to strike down
whoever could be seen to move.
Much of this town is built
flush with the rock of the hillside up which winds the road to the
monastery on Monte Cassino. so much is this the case that to-day,
in its bare remnants of shattered walls, Cassino looks just as if
it were mainly a series of caves in the hillside.
Castle Hill, rising sheer
within the town on its north side, stands like a steep crag, its pinnacle
a jagged rock now unrecognisable as buildings. The castle itself had
remained in our hands since the latter part of March. Below it the
ruins of houses were in the hands of the Germans. Thus our own troops
on the top of Castle Hill were just above the Germans, who in turn
were only about fifty yards from another line of our troops in the
opposite direction, towards the centre of the town and the River Rapido.
This was a typical example of how our own positions and the enemy's
in the town were close upon each other in a series of loosely formed
lines, almost intermingling.
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