The Day of Battle (77 page)

An officer in the 4th Indian Division wrote in his battalion log, “Someone said, ‘Flying Fortresses,’ then followed the whistle, swish and blast as the first flights struck against the monastery.” To a B-17 pilot peering down from his cockpit, “the mountain seemed to gust upward like a volcano.” As the initial bombs struck the abbey roof, dust spurting from the windows reminded a 34th Division lieutenant of “smoke coming out of a man’s ears.”

They were the first of 250 bombers—B-17s, B-25s, B-26s—that by day’s end would dump nearly six hundred tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Monte Cassino. Hundreds of artillery rounds joined the bombardment, including enormous shells from 240mm and 8-inch howitzers. In the Rapido Valley, a stand of poplar trees that had been sawed three-quarters through were now pushed over to give gunners a clear field of fire.

Soldiers on both sides of the hill watched spellbound as a caldron of smoke and flame boiled from the hilltop. “Scores of us—Yanks, British, Indians and Kiwis—line the ridge, looking at the destruction through glasses,” an American ambulance driver noted in his diary. “Three lieutenants jump up and down with excitement every time a rack of bombs breaks over the hill.” The sight was “gigantically stimulating…comparable to seeing the early Christians being eaten by lions,” a Royal Artillery gunner wrote. “We all started cheering wildly and hugging each other. Here we are, cheering the destruction of one of the great monuments of Christendom.” The reporter Martha Gellhorn found herself braying “like all the other fools,” while her colleague Frank Gervasi heard someone murmur, “Beautiful precision.” Maoris and Kiwis preparing to storm the Cassino rail station bellowed, “Shovel it on!” and “Give the fuckers hell!”

Hell they got. The leaflet barrage the previous evening had terrified the abbey’s refugees—their numbers were estimated at between 800 and 2,500—but confused attempts to contact German troops about safe passage down Monte Cassino had failed. Some refugees suspected the monks of counterfeiting the warning leaflets as a ruse to clear the abbey of riffraff.

Abbot Diamare planned to evacuate the abbey in his own time, on Wednesday morning. His monks had been distracted by the death from fever of a young brother, whose corpse, dressed in a robe and laid in a coffin he himself had built from bed planks, was given to God in the little chapel of St. Anne. This morning they had observed the liturgy of the hours as usual in the abbey’s deepest cells, and were on their knees before a painted Madonna, singing “Beseech Christ on Our Behalf,” when the first stupendous shudder shook the building. Explosion followed explosion, the corridors filled with choking dust, smoke, and shattered masonry. The abbot offered absolution to each monk. They stuffed their ears with cotton
wadding against the roar of the bombs and the screams of women and children overhead.

By two
P.M
. the abbey was a smoldering memory. Thirteen hundred bombs and another twelve hundred high-explosive incendiaries had smashed the cloisters, shearing off courtyard palms and decapitating the statue of St. Benedict. The grand staircase lay in ruins. Drifts of rubble fifteen feet high filled the basilica aisles, where frescoes, an ancient organ, and choir stalls carved by Neapolitan artisans were reduced to flinders. Protected in their subterranean vaults, the monks forced a passage upstairs through the wreckage to find scores of dead refugees—including many cut down by artillery fire as they fled outside—and those still alive “crazy with terror,” in one monk’s description. “Parents abandoned their shrieking children and fled to safety,” according to a German account. “Sons fled, leaving their aged parents to their fate. One woman had both her feet blown off.”

No mortal would ever know how many died. Estimates ranged from more than one hundred to more than four hundred; the official British history put the figure at “three or four hundred.” After the war, 148 skulls would be found in the debris, with others no doubt pulverized. “Some of the bodies were found in small rooms in which they had suffocated, such as an old man who had tried to protect a child with his body,” wrote Herbert Bloch, a Harvard classics scholar and author of
Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages.
The attitudes of the dead reminded archaeologists of Pompeii.

Alexander’s headquarters asserted that two hundred Germans were seen fleeing the abbey ruins, a ludicrous claim. Shortly after noon, Senger tore himself away from the mesmerizing spectacle atop Monte Cassino to send Vietinghoff the message that damage was extensive and that “numerous civilian refugees are in the abbey.” Under orders from Berlin, grenadiers searched the grounds soon after the bombing ceased; they found the abbey’s outer walls battered but not breached at ground level. As Clark had foretold, Senger promptly ordered his troops to burrow into the rubble. Machine guns nested in the masonry, artillery observers perched on the broken ramparts, and a field kitchen opened in Benedict’s cell.

Not until dawn on Thursday did Abbot Diamare lead the remnants of his flock out of the ruins. Forty monks and refugees emerged from the abbey’s arched entryway, still intact with the inscription
PAX
carved in the stone lintel above the great oak door. A monk holding a large wooden crucifix led the procession down the serpentine road from one hairpin curve to another. A paralyzed boy rode on a monk’s shoulders, and the old woman without feet was carried on a ladder until the burden grew too great and she was laid on the mountainside to die. Down they trudged, past yawning craters gouged in the roadbed and the rocky knob of Monte
Venere, now called Hangman’s Hill because the wrecked funicular tower resembled a gibbet. Down, down the procession wound toward the seething valley, as the old abbot and his monks mumbled the rosary in contemplation of God’s deepest mysteries, the joyful and the luminous, the glorious and the sorrowful.

The 4th Indian Division had expected Operation
AVENGER
to begin Wednesday afternoon, and only fifteen minutes before the bomber fleet appeared overhead on Tuesday morning did frontline troops learn that the attack had been accelerated to exploit the fair weather. Unable to retreat to better cover from their forward holes, two dozen Indian troops were injured in the bombardment, many by flying masonry. “They told the monks, and they told the enemy, but they didn’t tell us,” an enraged Royal Sussex commander said.

From that point, nothing was right except the courage, again. Hours passed without a follow-on assault. Freyberg’s tactical incompetence in failing to couple the bombardment with a prompt attack by swarming infantrymen was aggravated by the loss of the 4th Indian’s capable commander, Major General Tuker, whom malaria and rheumatoid arthritis had laid low. His replacement, Brigadier H. W. Dimoline, an artilleryman with little infantry experience, was “far out of his depth,” another senior officer later complained. “There did not appear to be a glimmer of intelligent leadership anywhere from division up.”

Not until Tuesday night did the attack begin, and then with but a single company sent to seize Point 593, that troublesome knuckle a mile behind the now ruined abbey. German machine guns and mortars killed or wounded half the men before they covered fifty yards. Another attack on Wednesday night by a full battalion collapsed when enemy defenders happened to fire three green flares, which by foul luck mimicked the Royal Sussex signal to withdraw. Early on Friday morning, February 18, Gurkhas assaulted the abbey directly, but booby traps, grenades, a dense thicket of throat-high thorns, and sleeting machine-gun fire drove them back. Dozens of dead Gurkhas would later be found with their legs trussed in tripwires.

In the town below, Maori riflemen at dawn on Friday routed grenadiers from the Cassino train station and roundhouse. But nine thousand Kiwi smoke shells fired to obscure those gains also hid German infiltrators, who counterattacked late in the afternoon to win back the lost rail yard. Supply columns trying to slip through the Rapido bottoms at night found the enemy on the frowning heights more omniscient than ever. “A star shell went up, followed by another,” a 4th Indian signaler wrote. “As we had expected, Jerry had become suspicious and soon a string of flares lit the whole valley
with an eerie blue light.” Of two hundred mules clopping toward the front lines, twenty won through.
AVENGER
petered out after nearly six hundred 4th Indian casualties and more than two hundred New Zealanders killed or wounded. Understrength, uncoordinated, and unimaginative, the attack “could not hold any surprise,” Senger later wrote. “There was nothing new in it.” Obliterating the abbey “brought no military advantage of any kind,” the British official history concluded, and—as the U.S. Army’s own history added—gained “nothing beyond destruction, indignation, sorrow, and regret.”

Efforts to justify the bombing began even before the smoke had blown clear of Monte Cassino. Military authorities pressured the OSS, without success, for evidence that German troops had occupied the abbey. In a cable to London, Field Marshal Wilson wrote, “Suggest that we should confine our statement to the fact that military authorities on the spot have irrefutable evidence that the Cassino abbey was part of the main German defensive line.” Long after the war, the U.S. Army claimed that no civilian bodies had been found in the abbey. Assuming that Rome would soon become a battleground, Allied propagandists began a campaign to blame Germany, in hopes of regaining the moral high ground and of pressuring Berlin to eschew scorched-earth tactics in the capital.

Yet Senger and Kesselring had already stolen a march. As Abbot Diamare worked his way down the hill on Thursday morning, a German staff car picked him up and drove him to the XIV Panzer Corps headquarters, where he spent the night. The next day, with movie cameras rolling and a German radio reporter present, Senger staged an interview.

“Everything was done on the part of the German armed forces,” Senger said, “in order to give the opponent no military ground for attacking the monastery.”

“General, I can only confirm this,” the abbot said. “Until the moment of the destruction of the Monte Cassino abbey there was within the area of the abbey neither a German soldier, nor any German weapon, nor any German military installation.”

Senger nodded. “It came to my attention much too late that leaflets which gave notice of the bombing were dropped over the area of the monastery.”

“We simply did not believe that the English and Americans would attack the abbey,” Diamare said. “We laid out white clothes in order to say to them, do nothing to us…. They have destroyed the monastery and killed hundreds of innocent people.”

Senger leaned forward solicitiously. “Can I do anything more?”

“No, General. You have done everything.”

Berlin overplayed its hand by pressing the abbot to sign a more venomous statement. He refused, but the damage was done; posters of the ruined monastery and Diamare’s commentary appeared on Roman streets and in Vienna. A week after the bombing, the president of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia condemned the destruction as “an everlasting shame to our age and to our civilization”—as if the Second World War were anything less. The British military strategist J.F.C. Fuller later denounced the bombing “not so much a piece of vandalism as an act of sheer tactical stupidity,” confirmation that, “as in the years 1915–17, tactical imagination was petrified.”

The ruined abbey—“that tomb of miscalculation,” in one U.S. Army corporal’s phrase—quickly came to symbolize the grinding war of attrition that the Italian campaign had become. Fifth Army’s latest seven-mile advance had exhausted eight divisions and cost sixteen thousand casualties. Only “endless vistas of deadlock” seemed to loom ahead, as a New Zealand assessment put it. The search for scapegoats on the Cassino front also began: Marshall in a message to General Devers on February 18 suggested that Keyes and his division commanders “appear below [the] stern standard required…. Let nothing stand in the way of procuring leadership of the quality necessary.”

Public opinion in the United States seemed largely indifferent to the destruction. Twenty-seven months of total war had severed sentimental attachments to the Monte Cassinos of this world. A Gallup poll taken shortly after the bombing found that if military leaders believed it necessary to bomb historic religious buildings and shrines in Europe, 74 percent of Americans would approve and only 19 percent disapprove. The wolf had risen in the heart at home, too.

Yet as shell fire and the odd bombing sortie continued to carve away Monte Cassino’s crest, those entrenched in the Rapido flats could not help but feel that once again something had been lost in this dark epoch of loss. Even Major General Walker, whose 36th Division had been gutted on the Rapido in Cassino’s shadow, felt unease. “Whenever I am offered a liqueur glass of benedictine,” he wrote in his diary, “I shall recall with regret the needless destruction of the abbey.” Of course the deeper regret extended beyond ecclesiastical landmarks. War was whittling it all away: civility and moderation, youth and innocence, mountains and men.